The Hour of the Cat Read Online Free

the up and up with me when you were a cop. One of the few.” He held his glass high in an unwavering grip. “To better times.”
    McGloin poured another round. The Professor began a recitation of murders that echoed the circumstances of the Babcock case: a familiar burrow of whiskey, history, and stories in which to bury his head. After a few minutes, Dunne took his leave and stepped outside. A green-and-white NYPD patrol car moved slowly up the street. Brannigan was in the passenger seat, head turned to the side studying a row of storefronts. For a moment Dunne imagined that the sight might be a mirage, a mental mix of McGloin’s 100-proof rotgut and undiluted sunlight. The instant he saw it wasn’t, he ducked around the corner onto Broome, into the small Italian church nestled unobtrusively in the middle of the block.
    The incense-sweetened church was packed with statues of saints. Most looked as though they were relatives of the little ladies in black who knelt before them fingering their rosary beads. Dunne walked halfway down the aisle, to a semi-darkened niche that held a statue of St. Anthony, who cradled the Christ child in one arm and held out a loaf of bread with the other. He crouched on the kneeler before the statue, took the change from his pocket, and dropped it in the offering box. He cringed at the racket it made. He lit a candle and listened for the tread of cops’ shoes on the linoleum floor. There was only the low rattle of rosary beads, murmur of Ave s.
    Pray for what?
    The repose of the soul of Mr. Babcock? Eternal damnation for his trigger-happy wife? An increase in marital infidelities among the well-to-do? The divorce business had suffered from the Depression along with everything else. Pray for a quick and not-so-happy death for Inspector Brannigan? God hears every prayer uttered with a sincere heart, his mother always told him. In the trenches, all the Catholic doughboys prayed or made some gesture of divine petition, rosaries around their necks, Miraculous Medals, holy cards in their helmets, prayer books in their pockets. Some filled canteens with holy water. They got hit the same as Protestants, Jews, and agnostics. Francis Sheehy was as devout as you could get, so quiet and kind no one mocked him when he knelt each night to say his prayers. He had his legs blown off and lay bleeding to death, in the same smoking hole as Major Donovan, crying, O shit, O shit! A prayer of sorts.
    Hail Mary , Dunne prayed. The words came automatically, without having to think about them. Full of grace . He prayed for his father. Big Mike Dunne, lungs full of phlegm, half a skeleton before he died. The Lord is with thee. And Francis Sheehy, late of East 11th Street, now a permanent resident of a military cemetery in France. Blessed art thou amongst women . His mother. Knocked down by a delivery wagon on Houston Street. Broke her leg. Died the next week from a blood clot. Maura, his sister, wherever she was. The fruit of thy womb. And Jack, his kid brother, dead from diphtheria within days of his mother. Now and at the hour of our death.
    St. Anthony sported a faintly sympathetic smile. It reminded Dunne of the kind a bartender (although not McGloin) might wear when he tried to look interested in a story he’s heard a thousand times before. “Blessed are they who cry in their beer for they shall be comforted.” How’d the Professor once put it? “The short and simple annals of the poor.” His line or someone else’s? Whose ever line it was, they were annals to avoid. Aunt Margaret took in Dunne and his sister Maura after their mother died. She already had eight of her own and a recently absconded husband, but she gave it a go. At first, Maura cried a lot but after a week or so she stopped. A week later she went silent as a mute. Nobody could get a word out of her. A month after that, she had her first fit. Rolled on the floor, eyes wide and fearful, pupils back so far,