“No bull.”
“For what?”
He made an exaggerated shrug. “It’s IA, what do you think?”
“No. I don’t buy it,” she said.
“Then don’t. Maybe he is clean, but I’m telling you he’s got his neck on the stump and they’re sharpening the ax.”
“Not maybe. Montrose is clean.” She made a left onto 85th. A block and a half ahead, she could see a cross on the church roof. In the distance, across the Hudson, the apartments and cliffs were pinking from the rising sun. Nikki switched off her headlights as she crossed West End Avenue.
“Who knows?” said Feller. “You get rank, maybe you’ll be in position to take over the precinct if he goes down.”
“He is not going down. Montrose is under pressure, but he’s straight as they come.”
“If you say.”
“I say. He’s unassailable.”
As Nikki got out in front of the rectory, she wished she had made the drive alone. No, what she wished was that Feller had just asked her for drinks, or bowling, or for sex. Any one of those, she would rather have dealt with.
She reached for the bell, but before she could press it, she saw a small head through the stained glass window in the door and it opened, revealing a minute woman in her late sixties.
Nikki referred to her notes from the RTCC message. “Good morning, are you Lydia Borelli?”
“Yes, and you’re with the police, I can tell.”
After they showed ID and introduced themselves, Nikki said, “And it was you who called about Father Graf?”
“Oh, I’ve been worried sick. Come in, please.” The housekeeper’s lips were quaking and her hands fluttered nervously. She missed the doorknob on her first attempt to pull the door closed. “Did you find him? Is he all right?”
“Mrs. Borelli, do you have a recent photo I could look at?”
“Of Father? Well, I’m sure somewhere . . . I know.”
She led them over thick rugs that muted their footfalls through the living room and into the pastor’s adjoining study. On the shelves of the built-in above the desk several photos in glass frames were perched between books and knickknacks. The housekeeper took one down, swiping her finger along the top of the frame to dust it before she handed it over. “This is from last summer.”
Heat and Detective Feller stood beside each other to examine it. The shot was taken at some sort of protest rally and showed a priest and three Hispanic protesters, with arms linked, leading a march behind a banner. Father Graf’s face, frozen in mid-recitation of a chant, was definitely the same as the one on the corpse at Pleasure Bound.
The housekeeper took the news stoically, blessing herself with the sign of the cross and then lowering her head in silent prayer. When she was done, blood vessels showed through her temples and tears streamed down her cheeks. There were tissues on the end table near the couch. Nikki offered her the box and she took some.
“How did it happen?” she asked, staring down at the tissues in her hands.
Fragile as the woman appeared, Heat thought better of giving her the details at that moment about the priest’s death in a BDSM torture and humiliation dungeon. “We’re still investigating that.”
Then she looked up. “Did he suffer?”
Detective Feller squinted at Nikki and turned away to hide his face, suddenly making himself busy replacing the photo on the shelf.
“We’ll have more details after the coroner’s report,” answered Nikki, hoping her dodge was artful enough to be bought. “We know this is a loss for you, but in a while, not just now, we’re going to need to ask you a few questions to help us.”
“Certainly, anything you need.”
“What would be helpful now, Mrs. Borelli, is if we could look through the rectory. You know, search through his papers, his bedroom.”
“His closet,” said Feller.
Nikki moved forward. “We want to look for anything that would help us find out who did this.”
The housekeeper gave her a puzzled look. “Again?”