A Matter of Time Read online

  “He’s in the can, ain’t he?”

  “Sure. But for how long? Judge’ll probably release him on his own recognizance.”

  They had brought Donalson in for a double murder. He was an enforcer for one of the drug gangs, had been on bond awaiting trial on two previous murder charges when they had grabbed him. One case had gone more than a year without disposition. It was the sort of thing that made them wonder why they bothered.

  “The paperwork’s current,” said Cash. “Won’t be anything more till the prosecuting attorney asks for it.”

  “Okay, you want to chase some crackpot time machine notion, go to it. Just keep in touch, huh?”

  John disappeared before the lieutenant changed his mind. Once he was gone, Railsback exposed a bit of his normally hidden human side. “You feeling better now, Norm? Maybe if you get into something really zany like this...?”

  “Yeah, Hank. I think we got it worked out now. It hit Annie pretty hard, though.”

  “I heard she wants to sponsor one of the families.”

  “We’ve talked about it.” From there they let it slide into shop talk. Railsback had lost his idealism in the trenches of the Us-and-Them War of their business. He had worked his way up from patrolman, and patrolmen often became disillusioned early. They began seeing their lives in terms of cops against the world. Sometimes the people they protected became indistinguishable from the predators. An Alamo psychology developed. Guys who understood what was happening to them usually got out. The others stayed in and exacerbated the profession’s bad image.

  After fifteen minutes Railsback wandered off. Cash wondered if he were having family trouble again. He had seemed distracted. He did not socialize much on the outside. No one really knew the private Railsback, though it had long been apparent that he and his wife lived in a state of armed truce, which explained why he often worked a double shift. The one time Cash had met Marylin Railsback he had come away wondering what Hank had ever seen in her. The ways of love were as strange as those of the Lord.

  What with keeping up on the daily casualty list and not making much headway with parish records, John didn’t find anything for a week. Cash’s own workload, which now included covering for Harald where he could, gave him no time to get involved. And on his own time he had private problems. Annie kept fussing about taking in a Vietnamese family. For reasons known only to herself, Annie had asked for a police official. Cash wasn’t sure he would be able to handle that. Some of them, surely, had earned their reputations.

  But John eventually came rolling in. “I’ve got it: a sister. Twelve years younger than O’Brien, but she’s still around. All his other relatives have moved or died. What took so long was, she was married, then her old man got blown away in World War Two, then she went into a convent. Lot of name changes.”

  “Which one?”

  “Saint Joseph of Carondelet.”

  “Hell, that’s right over on Minnesota.”

  “Yeah. Thought you’d want to go along.”

  “Damned right. So let’s hit it.”

  They slid out while Railsback was on the phone home, arguing. That didn’t bode well for their return.

  “Think we ought to take her down to the morgue and spring it on her?” John asked while on the way.

  “What for?”

  “To look at the corpse.”

  “You mean they still got it?”

  “Yeah. I checked this morning. Since nobody ever claimed it, they just sort of forgot it. Sloppy, leaving a stiff laying around the meat locker like that.”

  “Isn’t that against the law, or something? I mean, there’d have to be all kinds of screw-ups. Should’ve been an inquest, should’ve —”

  “Probably. Anyway, they’re talking about doing something with it now that I reminded them.”

  “That’s the weirdest thing about this guy. Everybody’s in a rush to get rid of him, if only by forgetting. Even us. Look how long we let it go. It’s like he don’t belong and everybody can feel it just enough to want to ignore him. How’d you stop them this time?”

  “Told them I thought we’d found a relative.”

  “John...”

  “So I fibbed. Just wanted to see what she thought.”

  “This is an old lady, John, a nun. Maybe it’s too rough....”

  Sister Mary Joseph was no aged but delicate flower. A glance was enough to show them that she was a tough old bird. Had to be. She was a first-grade teacher with twenty years service in the witch’s cauldron walled by children, parents, and superiors in the archdiocese.

  “Sister Mary Joseph? Norman Cash.”

  “You’re the policemen?”

  “Uhm. This’s Detective Harald. John Junior. His dad was a competitor. Episcopalian.”

  “Why’d you want to see me?”

  “Just to ask a few questions.”

  She seemed puzzled. “About what? Will it take long? I have classes....”

  “This man?” Cash handed her the picture of the corpse, the same one that had gotten a reaction from Miss Groloch.

  She frowned. Her breath jerked inward. One hand went to her mouth, then made the sign of the cross.

  “Sister?”

  “He looks like my brother Jack. But it can’t be. Can it? He died in 1921.”

  “Disappeared,” Harald corrected. He presented the picture from the file.

  “Fiala Groloch. The heathen foreigner.” This time she made a sign against the evil eye, then reddened when Harald and Cash looked puzzled. Cash had never seen an embarrassed nun.

  “Sorry. There was a lot of animosity. Would you explain now?”

  Cash took it, kept it simple, did no editorializing. “We’re playing a long shot. Hoping this man might be your brother’s son or grandson.”

  John added, “We hoped you’d be willing to view the corpse. To let us know if you think that’s possible.”

  “Well, I suppose. Sister Celestine won’t mind an extra hour with the children.” She smiled a delightfully wicked little smile.

  Cash couldn’t help observing, “I think you’d like my wife’s aunt, Sister Dolorosa. She’s a Benedictine. At a convent in northwestern Pennsylvania.”

  “Oh? Well, I’d better tell Mother Superior. Be right back.”

  Sister Mary Joseph returned while John was on the phone to the morgue. “I’ve always had a feeling this would come back on us. Fiala Groloch should’ve been burned for witchcraft.”

  Cash didn’t respond verbally, but his surprise was obvious.

  “I know. That’s not charitable. Not Christian. But if Satan ever sent his emissary, Fiala Groloch’s it.”

  “That much bitterness? After all these years?”

  “Oh, it’s not Jack. I was too young to understand at the time, but he was the devil’s disciple himself. He probably deserved whatever he got. Did you meet her? I hear she’s still there. And strong as ever.”

  “We did. She seemed like a nice old lady.”

  “Old? I wonder how old she really is.”

  “About eighty-five, I guess. She only looked about sixty, though.”

  “At least she’s aged some.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When it happened... whatever happened with Jack... she looked about forty....”

  “Early thirties, I heard, but you’re the only one I’ve talked to who knew her then.”

  “About forty. And even then there wasn’t anybody who remembered when she didn’t live there. Her house was built when that part of the city belonged to the private estate of a Mary Tyler. When I was a child, the old folks said it’d been built right after the Civil War.”

  “I figured the eighteen eighties, just guessing.”

  “My grandparents came over in eighty-three. She and the house were there then, and had been for a long time. My grandmother told me she’d heard that there’d been a man who was supposed to be Fiala’s father. He disappeared too, I guess. Miss Groloch told people he went back to the old country. Nobody e
ver heard which one it was. She used to get out and around in those days. Didn’t lock herself in till after Jack disappeared.”

  “The name sounds like eastern European.” He wasn’t really hearing the sister. That Miss Groloch might be 130, or even older, seemed so ridiculous that her words just floated across his consciousness like unsinkable ice. His only reaction was to make a note to tell John to check the tax and building records on the Groloch house.

  Harald returned. “Okay. All set, Norm. Got to hit it now, though. The morgue people are spooked about having the stiff around so long.”

  “Sister?”

  “I’m ready.”

  During the trip downtown Cash tried to draw the woman out on her feelings toward Miss Groloch. He failed. She retreated into a shell not at all in keeping with the warmth and spirit she had shown earlier.

  Sister Mary Joseph made the sign of the cross again when the attendant rolled the corpse out. Several times. Cash feared she would faint.

  But she got a grip on herself. “Do you have his clothes?”

  Harald spent a half hour hunting them up. Then the Sister merely glanced at them. She found a chair, sat, thought for several minutes. Finally, “You’ll think I’m crazy. And maybe I am. But that’s Jack. Those are the pants he was wearing the day he disappeared. I remember. I was sitting on the front steps with Colin Meara from upstairs. Jack gave me a dime and told us to get a soda before the old man heard about us holding hands on his own doorstep. He winked at Colin and went off whistling. He had his lucky tarn on, and his hands stuffed in his pockets. Sergeant, it’s him. How can that be?”

  Harald grinned like a Little Leaguer who had just pitched a no-hitter. Cash just sat down and put his face in his hands. “I don’t know, Sister. I don’t know. This thing’s getting crazier and crazier.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Scared to death, the coroner says.”

  “Is that possible? I mean...?”

  “It’s possible. Not common, but possible.”

  “But how’d he keep so long? They didn’t have freezers.”

  “He died March third. About 9:30 P.M.”

  “This March? That’s impossible.”

  “I know it. You know it. But that there Jack O’Brien don’t know it. Didn’t know it. He was barely cold when they found him. His body heat had melted the snow....”

  “But it’s impossible. Fifty-four years...”

  “I know. I know. I know.”

  John continued to grin — with worry beginning to nag around the edges as he recognized more and more improbabilities. Cash and the sister sat in an extended silence. Finally, she said, “I think you’d better take me back now.” To the puzzled attendant, who had been hovering about all along, “What do I have to do about the body? About arrangements?”

  She was convinced.

  Railsback was at his foulest when they returned. He looked, Cash thought, like a tornado about to pounce on a trailer park.

  “Cool it, Hank,” Cash said. “Sit down and shut up till we’re done. We just bought a time bomb.”

  Railsback recognized distress, was reasonable enough to realize a tantrum was inappropriate. “Talk to me,” he said.

  “We got a claimant for our John Doe. Guy’s sister. Positive ID. Absolutely no doubts. But...” And Cash gave him the buts.

  As was becoming more common, Railsback thought before he growled. But he growled anyway. “Norm, I don’t want anything to do with it. Get it out of here. There’s got to be some way we can dump it on somebody else....”

  “There’s still a murder file open.”

  Railsback pulled a bottle of pills from a drawer, gobbled a couple. “Who knows? You and Harald. Me. The sister. Anybody else? This hits the papers and TV, they’ll clobber us.”

  “Not today’s developments. I guess the wives are current through yesterday. Oh, and there was the attendant at the morgue, but he didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

  Railsback rubbed his forehead. He got headaches when the pressure was on. He was an ulcer man, too. He ate Valium like candy. “Too many. It’s going to leak somewhere. All right, you guys dug it up, you bury it. One way or another, you get out there and prove she’s a nut. Maybe we can’t find out who he is, but we damned sure better find out who he isn’t.”

  “How? “John asked.

  “I don’t care. It’s your problem. Use your imagination. Roust this Fiala Groloch. Way you describe her, she’s got trunks full of mementoes. Look for prints. Do whatever you have to, but do something.”

  VI

  On the Y Axis;

  Through 8 August 1964;

  The Chinese Puzzle

  A man named Huang Hua, whose true name was something else entirely, spent the years 1956-1973 in virtual self-imprisonment in a two-room office in a basement in Peking. He was a veteran of the Long March and the engineer of the POW defections during the Korean War.

  One room was living quarters. It contained his bed and toilet. The other contained cooking facilities and a small desk with a single telephone. Along one wall stood a bookcase containing numerous looseleaf notebooks of western manufacture, each filled with the tiny, precise characters of his pen, plus several hundred books, mostly in English. Along the base of another wall were cartons of office supplies, more than Huang could use in two lifetimes. He was a hoarder.

  Only four men knew why Huang had gone into hibernation: himself; the chairman; Lin Piao; Chou En-lai.

  In 1971 Lin would feel compelled to let the Muscovite revisionists in on the secret. Air Force fighters caught his aircraft over Mongolia on September 12.

  Huang’s telephone linked directly with a small underground establishment in Sinkiang. It was the only regular connection. Security was more strict than at the Lop Nor facility.

  Huang’s life and project reflected the Chinese character. He had failed in Korea. Certain that other chances would arise, he had kept his project going and growing. Not once did the policy-makers ask him to justify the expense or necessity. Tibetans, Indians, recalcitrant regionalists, old Nationalists, even a few Russians from the 1969 clashes on the Ussuri River, and Burmese from the border skirmishes there, came to his facility. He learned. He polished. He refined. He persevered.

  August 8, 1964, provided one of the great moments in his life. That was the day the Chairman himself phoned to give him the news about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

  All things came to the man who was patient.

  VII

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  Cash and Harald were in the station parking lot when John said, “We can’t prove a thing even if we do find prints that might’ve been O’Brien’s.”

  “Why?”

  “How do we prove they’re his? How do we date them? If they match the John Doe, all we prove is that he was in the house. Not when.”

  “Yeah. Well, shit. At least we’d have a reason to ask Miss Groloch some questions.”

  “If she cooperates. We haven’t got a warrant, you know.”

  “Whose side are you on, John?” Cash slammed the car door. “Can you see what the court would say if we applied?”

  But they went on in hopes she would cooperate. Carstairs had noted her willingness to do so several times. That had fed his suspicions.

  On the way Cash told Harald what Sister Mary Joseph had had to say about Miss Groloch. With a sigh, Harald replied, “I’ll dig through the records. This’s getting to be a lot of work for no return, Norm.”

  Miss Groloch, of course, was in, and remembered them. “Sergeant Cash. Detective Harald. Just in time you are. I just put some cookies out to cool. Tom!” she shouted toward the rear of the house. “You get down!” Cash could not see the cat. She explained, “On the table he will be getting now. We know each other well. Sit. Sit. The tea I will start.” She bustled toward the kitchen.

  Miss Groloch’s parlor had not changed since their previous visit. Cash began wondering about the economics of her life. Annie had said n
o one could remember her having left the house since the O’Brien incident. He and John had caught the mailman on the way in. The man claimed that all she ever got was junk mail. No personal letters, no Social Security checks.

  “What about tax forms?” Cash had asked.

  The man had not been on the route that long. But then he did remember that she sometimes received packages from a health food firm in New Jersey. He had seen nothing that might have been a tax refund or rebate check.

  At Lambert’s, the little market a block north, the manager had told Cash that his boy delivered twice a week, in small amounts. She always paid in cash, and always gave the boy a list for next time. Her tastes seemed a bit old-fashioned, but not as much as might be expected of a refugee still steeped in the last century.

  Cash wanted a look at her kitchen, to see if she had a refrigerator.

  A thousand questions piled up every time he thought about Miss Groloch. And he had barely scratched the surface. The questions came like those little metal puzzles you take apart, then can’t get back together, only in a chain a hundred puzzles long.

  “Now,” said Miss Groloch, the amenities performed, “What can I do for you this time?”

  Sometimes Harald had the tact of an alligator. He did it on purpose. “We’ve got a positive identification of our corpse: Jack O’Brien.”

  When you look into a kaleidoscope and turn the barrel, patterns shift. Sometimes, after the flicker, the change seems undetectable.

  That happened with Miss Groloch. She was pallid for an instant. Her teacup rattled against her saucer. Terror lightninged across her face. Then, so quickly her reaction seemed imaginary, she was the cool old lady again. “No. Seventy-five Jack O’Brien would be. The photograph you showed me, it was that of a boy.” Her pronunciation altered subtly, moving toward the European.

  “His sister identified him. She was so sure she claimed the body.”

  The woman seemed to wander off inside. The tomcat came and crouched nervously against her ankles. Finally, “The Leutnant Carstairs, he said you would never stop....”

  Cash tried to get a handle on the accent. German? Somehow, that didn’t seem quite right. His duties in 1945-46, as a sergeant attached to Major Wheeler of the Allied Military Government, had kept him hopping through the Anglo-American Zone. The accent, he was positive, wasn’t North German. Too soft. Nor did Bavarian or even Austrian seem quite right.