Goddamn you, Harry-where are you?
Frustrated, Broker scanned the neighborhood. Just the still foliage of the trees and the shadows on the deserted streets. Harry probably wasn’t on foot. .
Moving now toward the car. What about Annie Mortenson? She had been lying about helping Harry. . But by the time he reached the car, he’d decided he needed more help than Annie could provide. Annie didn’t really know Harry.
Harry had only wrecked Annie’s car. But he’d wrecked Gloria Russell’s marriage.
Ten minutes later, Broker was inside the government center, taking the elevator to the third floor. The receptionist, who had been hostile to him earlier, saw him coming, and her expression froze. Her eyes went wide, then filmed over, unfocused.
Broker had seen this response before, as a young operator in MACV-SOG doing fast ugly missions with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units. He remembered sweeping into Vietnamese hamlets, the villagers numbing their faces into empty smiles. Their eyes had escaped inward as fear bred the hope they could make themselves invisible.
When he slowed to take a good look at her, it struck him that she was a low-rent version of Gloria Russell. The same gym-rat tan. The same muscle tone. The same shortish hair, only hers was dishwater blond.
He continued down the hall and into Gloria’s office.
A slender guy in a blue shirt and tie was talking to her. He had a sheaf of manila folders in his hand.
“Sorry, but I got to talk to Gloria,” Broker said.
“Is this. .?” the guy said.
“Yeah, this is Broker,” Gloria said.
“I can come back.” The guy turned and left the room.
Gloria pushed a Washington County edition of the Pioneer Press across her desk. “You see the paper?” she said.
Broker shook his head.
She handed it to him and said, “The story stripped down the right side.”
Broker scanned the headline: “Priest Found Dead in Stillwater Mission Church.” Under Sally Erbeck’s byline, the lead sentence read: “Foul play has not been ruled out in the death of Father Victor Moros.”
“The gossip jumped buildings this morning. Now I know why you want to deal Tardee up; he saw a woman in a Saints jacket go into the church about the time the priest died,” Gloria said. “You could have told me yesterday.”
“I just talked to Harry,” Broker said, evading her remark.
Gloria tensed visibly. “How is he?”
“Drunk. He has these two forward gears when he’s drinking. One is lucid. The other is. .”
“I know, dangerously crazy.”
“So, can we talk straight?”
“Sure, Lymon filled me in. The priest was murdered in his confessional. He had a St. Nicholas medallion in his mouth.”
“And?”
“And. . you’ve determined that the priest was not a pedophile. So somebody is playing games with the Saint’s calling card.”
“You know what Harry says?”
Gloria raised one hand in the stiff, dismissive gesture Gena Rowlands made famous in A Woman Under the Influence. “By all means, lay it on me.”
“Harry says the Saint is back with bad target information. He says somebody in-house has been retrieving his notes from the computer trash and has put together an erroneous list of child abusers.”
Gloria was careful not to bristle too much. “Ah, Jesus. I’ll make it simple for you. Harry Cantrell is brilliant but erratic. He had quite a juggling act going, but now he’s dropped his balls, as it were. Now he’s grabbing at straws. I know the man. We, ah, had a thing. .”
“I heard.”
“I broke it off. Hell hath no fury like an old macho scorned.”
“He’s teasing me on the telephone. He won’t give me a name.”
Gloria cocked her head. “Okay, let me tell you about Harry. Do you know how we initially got onto Dolman?”
Broker shook his head.
“Sometimes cops go out to schools and talk to teachers about reporting child abuse, what to look for, stuff like that. So a year ago last spring Harry goes out to Timberry Trails Elementary and talks to the staff.
“There’s this one paraprofessional who’s got this chest like a shelf, right? This dish. So after he gives his talk, Harry starts putting the moves on her. Naturally, being the snake that he is, he uses the elements in his talk as an entree.
“And this lady has a pile of these storybooks at her desk that kindergartners have written about themselves, and Harry is paging through them as he’s doing his thing. The kids draw self-portraits on the front of the books and write their names. The teachers help them with the text. And he comes across this book that looks different from the others. Instead of a happy smiley face, the face is all colored in. So he holds it up and asks, ‘What’s this?’
“And the lady answers, ‘Oh, that’s Tommy Horrigan; he always draws himself with his back turned.’ Harry opens the book and reads things Tommy has written, ‘The leaves are coming back’ or ‘Mommy plants tulips.’ He sees that Tommy does not put himself in his story.
“So Harry asks to meet Tommy Horrigan, and the rest is history.” Gloria shook her head. “Harry starts out trying to get laid and winds up detecting the trail of a child abuser.”
Broker looked her square in the eye. “And you started out with Harry, building a case against Dolman. And you wound up getting laid.”
Gloria pursed her lips, looked at the wall, and said, “You know, it really bothered me that a guy that old, with such lousy personal politics, could be so damn. .” She mugged a smile, turned back to Broker, and said, “Is this what you came for?”
“You asked to have Harry taken off the case,” Broker said.
“Had to. When I took on Dolman, my marriage was on life support. The thing I had with Harry basically pulled the plug. But it was interfering with the work.”
“Enter Lymon,” Broker said.
Gloria leaned forward. “Don’t get distracted by the boy-girl and the racism. Bottom line: Harry has it worked around in his head that if he had stayed on the case Dolman would have been convicted.”
Broker studied her. She came across as bright, candid, and brave; plus sinewy in her armless blouse and raven crew cut. She looked as if she belonged on the front of a Patagonia catalog, scaling a sheer rock face. Gloria Russell conquers El Capitan over a long lunch.
“Do you know what it was like, losing that case?” Gloria said. “I was so mad at first that I stormed out of the chambers. But then I realized I had to go back. .”
She drew herself up, and Broker watched it come, a memory like electrodes clipping onto her body, sending electric current up the corded muscles of her neck, into her face, and burning in her eyes.
“Because. . I left that little boy in there alone watching Dolman grinning and pumping the hand of his attorney.”
She shook her head violently. “And we said we’d never leave him alone. We always said we’d be there to protect him.”
Gloria was tough. Gloria didn’t cry. She kept talking in a dead, level voice. But her body cried. It was like looking at a statue of grief and seeing the unmoving bronze eyes trying to water.
“We had to go back and explain to Tommy and his parents. How do you explain that to a six-year-old? Here we told him that we were going to protect him. . Christ, do you have any idea what we put that kid through? The physical examinations-our doctor, the defense’s doctor. .”
And Broker watched her dissociate with the moment and retreat into a private limbo. Gloria spoke as if to Tommy Horrigan. “We told you we’d get the guy who did those things to you. But we didn’t get him. We didn’t do our jobs good enough, and he got away.”
In a purely visceral way Broker now understood why John had brought him in. Nobody who’d been close to the thing wanted to pick up this particular live wire.
“Worst day of my life,” Gloria said.
Gloria caught herself and looked across her desk. “I don’t have to be here carrying water in county, you know. I could be almost a partner by now in a legal money factory in St. Paul or Minneapolis, driving a Beamer, working seventy hours a week, and taking files on stressed-out vacations to wherever. I chose not to do that because I believe there’s more to life than making money. And I believe in being involved in this system out of self-interest, to protect all of us from people who will take the law into their own hands.”
“So Harry gets your vote for Saint,” Broker said.
An expression of painfully acquired revelation came over Gloria’s face. She said, “Just as I’m sure I get his. But Saint is much too kind a word. The next time you see Harry, take a good look at him. He’s the face of the mob.”