One of Our Own Page 20

  “Have you talked to the cardinal archbishop?” Sister Margaret Mary asked.

  “I’ve been avoiding it,” Father Alvarez said. “He’s going to blow his top, and we both know it. I just don’t know who he’s going to blow his top at.”

  “All right.” Sister Margaret Mary’s head hurt. First things first. Everything had a practical dimension. Concentrate on that. “Sister Peter,” she said, “round up everybody except Sister Margery. Go over to the church and stand in front of the front door, or just inside the front door in the vestibule. You want to form a barrier they won’t want to move. Put Sister Marie Bernadette out front and center. She’s strong as an ox, but she looks ninety-two. They’re not going to want video of some ICE idiot manhandling her. And we want video. We want the news stations. Father, really, you need to call them and maybe set up a press conference. We need—”

  The sounds outside were unmistakable. There were two heavy vehicles moving too fast. Then there were doors opening and closing. There were no sirens. Sister Margaret Mary didn’t know if that made things better or worse.

  “Go,” she told Sister Peter. “They don’t need a warrant to enter the church. It’s open to everyone twenty-four/seven.”

  Sister Peter took off, down the front steps and up the street to the convent. Sister Margaret Mary and Father Alvarez went out to see what was going on. The ICE people were wearing bright yellow vests, the kind of yellow that would glow in the glare of headlights if it were dark. There had to be fifteen of them.

  Fifteen people to arrest one middle-aged man. Sister Margaret Mary did remember Tomas Domingues. He didn’t have the strength to beat up a puppy.

  “I’m going down to hold the fort at the church,” Father Alvarez said, taking off.

  Sister Margaret Mary watched him go, her head full of all those practicalities: sheets, blankets, pillows, cot, food, water.

  The ICE people had come in vans, but they were white vans, and they had logos on them.

  The plain black van parked up near the church, the one that looked exactly like the one from the night Marta Warkowski was dumped in that garbage bag, seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

  THREE

  1

  The big black van belonged in St. Rose’s Parish, not to the parish itself, but to the Glendower Arms, where Tomas Domingues worked. Gregor saw it as soon as he and Morabito and Horowitz rounded the corner on their way to “check things out.” It was Horowitz who wanted to “check things out,” and Horowitz who was unhappy with the entire situation.

  “The way this thing stacks up is crazy,” he kept saying as the three of them walked along. “We’ve got real bad guys in these neighborhoods. We’ve even got real bad guys who are here illegally. They’re never the ones being hunted down by ICE and hiding in church basements.”

  “I don’t see why a church ought to be a sanctuary,” Morabito said. “Aren’t we supposed to have separation of church and state? Or maybe we just have separation of church and state when churches are doing stuff you don’t like.”

  Horowitz ignored him. “The guys who come here and do everything right are the targets. They get jobs. They settle down. They raise families. And there they are, right out in the open where ICE can find them on a second’s notice.”

  This time the street in front of St. Catherine’s Church was not empty, in spite of all the law enforcement everywhere. Men and women were out on the doorsteps and the sidewalks, watching. Nuns were lined up in front of the church’s front doors. Gregor broke away from the two detectives and went directly to the van. He wasn’t great at identifying vehicles, but it looked to be the very same make and model as the one in the police garage. It even had Jersey plates.

  “It looks like the same one, doesn’t it?” Sister Margaret Mary said, appearing at his elbow. “I asked around, though, and it’s not. It’s the one Tomas uses for the Glendower Arms. The priest from St. Rose’s drove it over here with Tomas in the back, because it doesn’t have any windows. That way, no one could see him if they passed an ICE vehicle.”

  “Is the Glendower Arms owned by Alder Properties?”

  Sister Margaret Mary nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Maybe all the Alder Properties buildings have one of these vans. Except, if they do, I don’t know why I haven’t seen one before.”

  The man who came up to them now was huge; tall and fat. Gregor had the impression he’d seen the man before, and then nailed it—it was Juan Morales, who had been in the hall on the morning they found Miguel Hernandez’s body. Juan Morales, who had been Hernandez’s handyman or second-in-command or something similar.

  “The vans are kept in the garages,” Morales said politely. “Unless we need them for work. To bring things in or take them out.”

  “Things like what?” Gregor asked.

  Juan Morales got that look on his face that Gregor had learned to interpret as: I don’t speak a word of English. This was not a look restricted to speakers of Spanish. Gregor had known a wide range of Armenian immigrants who had that look down flat.

  Besides, Gregor thought, he’d been asking a stupid question. The reason you didn’t want windows was to make sure nobody could see inside, and the reason you didn’t want anybody to see inside was because what you were transporting was people.

  “So,” Gregor said. “How many of these vans are there around here? One for each of the buildings?”

  “No,” Juan Morales said. “We have one for all the buildings. We have a garage to put it in. We don’t need more than that in one barrio.”

  “And your one, is it in your garage right now?”

  Juan Morales shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t been to look at it. I haven’t needed it.”

  “Are you going to need it? Are you taking over as super from Miguel Hernandez?”

  Juan Morales shrugged again. “You never know what they’re going to do, those people. Maybe I’ll be the super. Maybe they’ll bring in one of their own.”

  “And you’re not one of their own?”

  Juan Morales looked around. “I was his right-hand man. That’s the term, sí? I was always the first one he went to. I was always the one he could count on.”

  “You should show the police that garage,” Gregor said. “Either the van they’ve got is the one that belongs there, or it isn’t. If it is, they’re going to want to make a search.”

  “This isn’t going to work,” Juan Morales said, looking back up the steps to the church doors. “I saw this on the television. White people, in that church. They don’t use tear gas on a bunch of white people.”

  “They’re not going to use tear gas here,” Sister Margaret Mary put in. “The cardinal archbishop is on his way. Nobody uses tear gas on the cardinal archbishop.”

  Juan Morales gave her a long look. Then he let out a stream of Spanish he obviously expected her to understand. Yet another van drove up in the street. This one disgorged a dozen uniformed men in riot gear. Juan Morales disappeared.

  “Well,” Sister Margaret Mary said.

  Morabito and Horowitz were standing on the far corner of the block. Gregor excused himself and went back to them, crossing through the lines of ICE officers and police and nuns. The mood of the people of the neighborhood was ugly. Gregor could feel the waves of anger coming at him from every side. Television camera crews were setting up all along the sidewalks, always looking for a good angle to catch the front doors to the church and the line of ICE officers. If Gregor had caught this scene out of context, he would have thought he was in a war zone.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Horowitz was telling Morabito as Gregor came up to them. “All this crap for one guy. It’s one guy.”

  “He could be armed to the teeth,” Morabito said. “Nobody knows what he’s going to do.”

  “He’s a janitor,” Horowitz said. “He’s got to be fifty years old.”

  “Whitey Bulger was eighty years old,” Morabito said.

  Over at the church doors, an ICE officer climbed the steps
and stopped in front of a very old nun. He tried to pass her. She didn’t move, and three other nuns moved closer to her. He put out his hands, grasped her on both shoulders, and moved her aside. By now, everybody in range had a phone out and was recording.

  Would they break down the doors of a church? Were those doors even locked? Weren’t Catholic churches supposed to stay open twenty-four/seven, for anybody who wanted to come in to pray? Javier liked this church. He especially liked the Lady Chapel, where there was a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  After the first ICE agent passed the old nun, two more followed him. They reached the great double doors and opened them without resistance. They had not been locked. One of the agents propped open one of the doors and went inside. The other two agents followed him. Then six more followed them.

  Out in the street, a limousine pulled up, plowing through all the rest of the traffic as if it wasn’t there. It didn’t park so much as just come to a stop across the entire width of the street. If there had been any vehicles moving, it would have blocked them. Nothing else was moving. The limousine’s back door opened. The cardinal archbishop climbed out, dressed in the full red regalia of his office, including the cape.

  “It’s not going to make any difference,” Morabito said, sounding immensely satisfied. “They’re going to get him and they’re going to send him back where he came from.”

  Marta Warkowski in a hospital bed. Cavanaugh Street on Easter Sunday. Bodegas with their ceilings hung with piñatas in the shape of donkeys.

  “Listen,” Gregor said. “I’m not sure who tried to kill Marta Warkowski, but I can tell you how she got into that garbage bag, and I can tell you who killed Hernandez.”

  2

  Javier saw the story about the “hostage situation” at St. Catherine’s Church on the news before dinner. Gregor came home to find him pacing back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, talking out loud in Spanish but not directing the words at anyone. His night was bad, tossing and turning, getting up to pace, sitting next to Pickles and talking in Spanish some more. Gregor didn’t think Pickles could understand Spanish any more than he could understand English, but, like Tommy Moradanyan, he seemed to understand Javier.

  By the next morning, when Bennis took her turn walking Pickles, Gregor had come to the conclusion that Javier understood more English than he was letting on. Maybe it was just passive vocabulary. Maybe he just understood more of what he heard than he was able to express in English words. What Gregor was sure of was that he was able to get the basics of what had happened with Tomas Domingues, and that he knew what ICE was.

  John Jackman called while Bennis was out, and got to the house before Bennis got back. Javier gave him a good looking over when he came to the kitchen table and grabbed a coffee cup.

  “Hi,” Jackman told him. Then he looked at Gregor. “I don’t think this kid likes me.”

  “I don’t think this kid knows you,” Gregor said, “and there was a lot on the news about the mess over at St. Catherine’s. In case you’ve heard about it.”

  “Everybody’s heard about it,” Jackman said. “Washington talked to Father Alvarez. He’d seen something about a church in Connecticut that kept an illegal immigrant for months and declared itself a sanctuary, and ICE put up with it. I think he was hoping that would happen here.”

  “And it didn’t.”

  Jackman snorted. “That church was in Connecticut. Congregation was rich as Midas and had a lot of Yale faculty. They had leverage. St. Catherine’s doesn’t have any. Neither does St. Rose’s. Even the cardinal archbishop couldn’t get through this bunch.”

  Gregor poured coffee. “I take it it isn’t the mess at St. Catherine’s that brought you here.”

  “Of course not,” John said. “I got word you talked to Cary Alder. One-on-one. Face-to-face.”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “It’s like I told you before, John. I don’t know what you want out of me. To get the evidence you’re looking for to nail him for bringing in illegal aliens, you need the accountants the bureau has already got on this, and if they can’t find anything, I won’t be able to. As for Marta Warkowski and Miguel Hernandez…”

  “Yes?”

  Gregor pointed across the kitchen table to a large stack of papers. “More information from the Philadelphia police department,” he said. “Arrived right after dinner last night. For what it’s worth, Washington or no Washington, I don’t think Morabito and Horowitz want my help. They know the commissioner wants them to want my help. And they’re looking for a way to cover their asses in case of a screwup. But they think they can handle this themselves, and they probably can. I gave them my view of it yesterday. If they hadn’t figured it out for themselves before that, they would have in the next few days.”

  “And what was your view of it?”

  “Hernandez put Marta Warkowski in that garbage bag,” Gregor said. “He probably had the help of a man named Juan Morales, who serves as his second-in-command for the Alder Properties in that neighborhood. Hernandez had a few other assistants, so it could be one of them instead, but my guess would be Morales. I think they put her in the garbage bag thinking she was dead. Then they put the garbage bag in the van. Then they drove the van back to the neighborhood and put it in the garage.”

  “Back to the neighborhood?”

  “She can’t have been killed in St. Catherine’s Parish,” Gregor said. “Too many people would have noticed. Besides, Father Alvarez saw her leave the neighborhood after Mass, and Meera Agerwal saw her down near Alder Properties headquarters not an hour later. Cary Alder actually talked to her down there. So she wasn’t in the neighborhood.”

  “She was at Alder Properties headquarters?”

  “Right. I told Morabito and Horowitz to get a warrant to search those premises. Cary Alder’s office. The reception area. Pay special attention to the carpets. Anyway, they put her in a garbage bag thinking she was dead, then they put her in the van.”

  “And they got the van?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” Gregor said, “but there was another van just like it from St. Rose’s yesterday, and the Glendower Arms over there is another Alder property. I think every little clutch of Alder Properties probably has one.”

  “Then wouldn’t the van have been known in the neighborhood?”

  “Depends on what it was used for,” Gregor said. “If it did general errands, yes. But if it was just for special occasions, bringing in those undocumented workers, say, or maybe heavy equipment when it was necessary, then maybe not. And we know it wasn’t parked on the street until somebody wanted us to find it. There has to be a garage.”

  “I take it you sent out Horowitz and Morabito to find that, too.”

  “I did,” Gregor said. “I think they brought her, still thinking she was dead, back to the garage so they could work out what to do with the body. I don’t know what they decided. But I think they went up to Marta’s apartment and went looking through it. We didn’t find any identification on her. Maybe it was that. They went up there, they had some kind of fight, and Morales killed Hernandez.”

  “Then?”

  “Right then, while Marta was still parked in the van,” Gregor said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, getting rid of the body could have waited until the weather got better. But Morales killed him. Then he went to get the van and the body and get rid of them both as fast as he could. But the accident happened, so he couldn’t do either. Marta was on the street and he had to put the van away before he got picked up. So he did, and left it there, until he started to worry that the police would do a house-to-house and find it where it could be tied to him. I don’t think he’s very bright.”

  “It seems like a lot of trouble to go through to kill one middle-aged lady,” Jackman said. “Are you sure she wasn’t running drugs or something?”

  “She’s just untouchable, that’s all,” Gregor said. “The case manager at the hospital mentio
ned it to both me and the detectives. She always had enough money. The department got a search warrant and her records. Cary Alder didn’t bother to get a search warrant, but he had her checked into when he first started having trouble with her, too. She seems to have spent her entire working life putting one-tenth of her salary away every single paycheck without fail, in savings accounts and certificates of deposit in different banks. By the time she retired, she was up to putting away closer to thirty percent. No credit cards. No loans. No extravagances. It doesn’t sound like much, but if you do that for forty years, it adds up. So there was no way they could get rid of her. She could always afford increased rent. She could always afford lawyers to go to housing court. She could always cause trouble. And she caused a lot of trouble. And Cary Alder was sure that was going to call attention to Alder Properties and whatever the hell else they were doing.”

  “Funny,” Jackman said. “I don’t think it did. I mean, I don’t think it was anything Marta Warkowski did that put the Feds onto him. It wasn’t anything she did that put the Philadelphia Police Department on to him.”

  “Are you on to him?” Gregor asked.

  “They’re going to arrest him,” John Jackman said. “At least the Feds are.”

  “I think he knows,” Gregor said. He poured himself another cup of coffee. Javier was staring at the two of them, eating his way methodically through a slice of bacon. It was his fourth. Gregor poured him another glass of orange juice.

  “It was an interesting talk I had with him,” he said. “Interesting and very odd. I think he fully expects to be arrested. I think he’s doing absolutely nothing to stave it off. I think there’s something very, very odd going on here.”