Charisma by Orania Papazoglou Page B

shuffled. “What about you?” she said.
    “I’m fine.”
    “Maybe. But you just got in and you’re going out again.”
    “I’m feeling restless,” he told her.
    “I know that.” Another cough. Another shuffle. Another pause. “Forget I mentioned it,” she said. He heard her nails click against the intercom button as the line went dead.
    Outside, the weather that had been getting better was getting worse again. Pat stood up, put on his jacket, and went to the window to look at it. The sky was jammed shut with clouds again, and big snowflakes were drifting down, round white mats as big as drinks coasters. He ran his hand through his hair. He really was restless. He couldn’t stand the thought of not moving something.
    Andrea was sixty-three and fat as Oliver Hardy, the prototypical secretary of a man with a jealous wife. But he didn’t have a wife. He’d never had one. His brothers and sisters had all gone on to build families like the one they’d come from, but for some reason he’d never been able to connect. Even his lovers never lasted long. Women drifted in and out of his life like cases, rearranged his furniture, then disappeared. He couldn’t remember having wanted one to stay.
    He couldn’t remember what had started him on this train of thought, either. Like the memory of his mother, it had just hit him.
    He zipped his jacket shut and headed for the door. Once he got to work, he would be all right. He told himself to think about Theresa Cavello and Billy Hare.
    What he thought about instead was Dan Murphy’s sister, her black hair and the serious attentiveness of her face, the tense watchful stillness that surrounded her like a halo. Nuns were always like that, and they never stopped being nuns. It got into their skin and stained them.
    Stained them.
    He hated to admit it, but he was burning out.
2
    The problem with the New Haven morgue was that it wasn’t in a basement. Part of it was. Most of it—the offices, the tech rooms, the computers, and the files—was on a first floor of broad hallways and wide plate-glass windows. It didn’t even have the virtue of being dark. Walking down to Anton Klemmer’s office was like wandering through a particularly peppy grammar school.
    Anton Klemmer didn’t do much for Pat’s prejudices, either. By tradition, he should have been an old man with an immigrant’s accent, puttering around a shade-darkened room and cackling over skulls. In reality, he was young, and very American. His name was a sop his mother had thrown to her husband’s father. It had worked. Anton had grown up on Noble Street in West Haven, gone to a local public school and the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He’d led a perfectly normal life until medical school, when he’d marched into Johns Hopkins without a single loan to his name. His grandfather hadn’t left him much, but he’d left him enough.
    When Pat came in, Anton was sitting in a gray swivel chair, his feet up on his desk, his nose buried in a book whose cover read: Microscopic Spectography in Investigative Analysis. As always when he wasn’t doing an autopsy, he was dressed in part of a three-piece suit. The pants and vest were there, although the vest was unbuttoned and hanging open over his white shirt. The jacket was nowhere in evidence.
    Pat closed the door to the hallway, and Anton closed his book, not bothering to mark his place.
    “My secretary got a call from your secretary,” he said. “We should be in the Fortune 500.”
    “What’s the book for?” Pat asked him.
    Anton shrugged. “They send them to me. They want me to write blurbs. I never write blurbs, but sometimes I read the things.”
    “Is it any good?”
    “The guy who wrote it knows as much about criminal investigation as I do about cooking.” Anton threw the book on the desk. “So, what’s this all about? I gave you everything I had on Billy Hare, but you know how that kind of thing is. Nothing makes any difference.”
    “This isn’t