Fury and the Power (34 page)

The official explanation from the Pope's spokesman was that one of the visiting Americans had suffered a fatal seizure, and the sight of the unfortunate victim writhing on the floor had greatly upset a group of mentally challenged children who happened to be passing by the papal library at the time. Thus the screams that were heard.

The alleged seizure victim was not identified, pending notification of next of kin.

C
harmaine, although her curiosity wasn't exactly at fever pitch, brought up the newspaper clippings after they'd completed their dinner selections at Spago. Gruvver was still relishing every fortunate roll of the dice that had enabled him to leave the craps table with twenty-six hundred in folding cash.

"You don't happen to know anybody who was visiting the Pope in Rome yesterday, do you, Lewis?"

"Huh-uh. Why?"

"Oh, when I was borrowin' that fifty from your wallet, couldn't help noticin' your little newspaper articles about the head Buddhist from Thailand who is in Los Angeles, and the poor man who died during his audience with the Pope."

"Oh, yeah," Gruvver said, somewhat guardedly.

"So I just wondered why you were interested in them, that's all. More detective work?
Le travail du agent
?"

"Well, the Buddhist Patriarch and the Pope his own-self fit in with what I've been thinking since we closed out the Jimmy Nixon case, particularly that so-called
disturbance
reported at the Vatican yesterday."

Charmaine waited attentively, hands folded under her chin, wondering if she was supposed to guess where his mental processes and nosing around had taken him the past couple of days. Charmaine had occupied her afternoon changing her hairstyle to something smarter, vampish, a big blade of hair down swept over part of her face, the incognito look. Gruvver avoided the tough-love expression in the single brown eye that was revealed to him.

"Sooner-later you're gonna tell me," she said. It wasn't an ultimatum but he knew she was serious. "I'm first-rate, Gruvver-man; don't you go treatin' me like second place in your life, or I won't be there for long." That was the ultimatum; Charmaine let him absorb it. "Now then. Yesterday you had me go out there to the Grayle Theatre with you where I did a number on that nice PR lady they have there, pretend I was writin' an article on the Magic Man for the Atlanta J-C. It upsets me to tell a lie, Lewis, but I was helping you. You said."

"You're a bona fide journalist; that's no lie."

"What I am is campus correspondent for the paper, and once in a blue moon I get a couple paragraphs into the
Constitution
."

"Better things are just ahead," Gruvver said with an attempt at a flattering smile.

A young black man with small eyes, a shorn skull, and powerful sloping shoulders was making his way through the dining room, escorted by ex-pug bodyguards, flashy consorts, and some elegant quail. Complete strangers looked up, smiled, called him Champ. Diamonds glittered in his cruel mouth.

A waiter poured red wine for Gruvver and, without hesitation, a glass for Charmaine.

"Anyway," she said to Gruvver, "thanks to me you got that list you wanted, Lucky Ticket holders to his shows for the past three years. It's a long list, and you were up to three this morning studyin' it."

"Was it that late?" Gruvver said, suppressing a yawn.

"Now suppose you tell me what's important about that list?"

"It's a weird fucking story, and I probably don't know half of it yet."

"Lewis, your mouth," Charmaine said, glancing at the diners nearest them in the packed restaurant, hoping none of them had overheard. In the time they had been going together, Charmaine felt she had made good progress in two vital areas:
 
toning down his vocabulary and improving his taste in neckwear.

"Sorry. But too many things add up already, and it's gettin' scarier."

"
You're
scared?" she said with a nervous shrug of her bare shoulders, flicker of lamplight in her widening eyes. Still, she was fascinated. "Of what? The magician?"

"Didn't say I was scared. The situation—the case—has a lot of weird elements. What I know beyond a doubt is, at least three young people, Jimmy bein' the youngest, attended Grayle's show and afterward got to spend time with him backstage. Weeks or months later they were responsible for two killings of prominent religious figures and an assault on another, the Dalai Lama, that didn't take his life. Method each time was the same—they bit like wolves or some other kind of large predator. Now, yesterday"—Gruvver joined his hands and leaned toward Charmaine, keeping his voice low—"there was that reported disturbance at the Vatican, and a man died. Today the Pope went about his business like any other day, held his regular Wednesday audience. So he must be okay. I don't know the name of the man who the Vatican Press Office says had that seizure, but I do know"—he leaned back and fished a folded sheet of paper from an inside coat pocket—"
four
of the sixteen people at yesterday's private audience with the Pope are on the Lucky Ticket holder list as well. Now that just can't be a coincidence." He unfolded the paper. "Their names were published yesterday in
L'Osservatore Romano,
if I'm sayin' that right; anyhow, it's the Vatican newspaper and I took this off their Internet site. The four are Max and Irene Hudlow of Denver, and Frank and Roberta Tubner from Santa Rosa, California."

Charmaine raised her wineglass, staring blankly at him. "Well, so?"

"I'm on the come line that the Pope was attacked yesterday by one of these sixteen people at their audience, and the Vatican has hushed it all up. Which of course they can easily do. If there were any 'mentally challenged' kids in the Apostolic Palace at the time, then that's what they saw, something would really give them cause to have screaming fits."

Charmaine ran a finger around the outer rim of her wineglass. "Lewis, when we get back to the hotel, I think I need to take your temperature."

"I'm runnin' hot, but it's not the flu, baby." He placed the folded papal audience list beside his plate, tapped it with a forefinger. "If it did happen, then all of these people saw it. But curial counselors at the Vatican, their own Catholic psychiatrists, maybe the Pope himself, will have briefed them to keep shut about what went down. Why? Because something diabolical, I'm thinking, was loose in a sacred place, and they don't ever want that kind of publicity."

"
Diabolique
? The
devil
?" Suddenly Charmaine was looking at Gruvver with the rounded eyes of an impressionable ten-year-old. There were Pentecostal preachers in her extended family, and from an early age she'd been subjected to visions of torment and hellfire the way other preschoolers absorbed the gentle morality tales of Dr. Seuss. Charmaine's present level of sophistication, Gruvver reminded himself, was largely physical. He waved away the spectre he'd called up.

"No need to go that far. But we both know spells can be worked on susceptible minds." Charmaine nodded. He tapped the audience list again. "When these people get back home, won't take me but two or three phone calls to confirm what really happened. I can smell a cover-up long distance like it was fresh dog poop on my shoe."

As he concluded that remark the antipasto arrived. Charmaine only picked at hers, looking, in a childlike manner, very worried. She glanced at him a couple of times before saying, "Magicians are kind of freaky, but that's got to be an act. Casting spells on innocent people—what reason would Lincoln Grayle have to do that?"

"Charmaine, I've dealt with criminal psychopaths most of my working life. They're all around us, matter of fact—" Charmaine was instantly uneasy again; he had to smile. "I don't mean here at Spago; but my point is you couldn't easily pick one out of a crowd. They put up a good front, all smiles, easy talkin', but they're all the time wonderin' what they can get out of you. Or how best to get rid of you, if it comes to that. Those people are devious, clever, and emotionally cold. What motivates the worst of them is strictly what they want, got to have, at a given moment. Then their compulsion lights them up like a pinball machine."

"So—if Grayle is one of
those
, and he's got it in for religion or religious figures like Pledger Lee Skeldon or the Pope, then he'll just keep on keepin' on? Is that why you cut out that little article about the Buddhist big shot checking in to the UCLA hospital?"

"Right. Because I'm wonderin', assume I had time enough to check out every name on the Lucky Ticket list, would I learn that one of them is a medical professional on staff or an employee of the hospital? Already programmed by Mr. Magic to do damage to a prominent religious, should the occasion arise? I researched a whole other list of potential victims around the world:
 
Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, the Eastern Orthodox Church."

"But what can you
do
, Lewis? Those lists don't prove anything."

Gruvver's broad shoulders fell slightly, and he looked so frustrated Charmaine felt sorry for him.

"That's the tough part. The man is a solid Vegas citizen. Home-grown. Employs three hundred people in his various enterprises. If he's also programmin' zombies and sendin' them out to commit murder, he's two-for-four to this point, which must be a disappointment, but only one of his zombies is left to wail her tale. If she's coherent at all. I'd have to take a trip to India to find out. Probably Lise Ruppenthal is sittin' in a cell with fungus all over the walls and a leaky ceiling, wonderin' how the hell she came to be there in the first place."

"Do you want any more of this salad?" Charmaine asked him after a few moments, determined not to see him brood about his presumed inadequacies.

Gruvver sighed. "No, thanks, Charmaine."

"Were you plannin' to go back to the tables after we eat?"

"My philosophy is, once you walk away a winner, you're a sure loser if you go back the same night." And he added, whimsically, "Get behind me, Satan."

"Well, we still got two whole days left in Vegas town, so I guess my philosophy is, let's put away those lists and make the most of our time together. I bless you for bein' the man you are. But you can't solve all the troubles and miseries of the world, Lewis."

Gruvver finished the wine in his glass, then drank hers, which perked him up marginally. "If the Forum shops are still open," he said, "we might see after supper if we can get shed of some of this cash in my pocket, buy you something to match that sparkle in your eye."

He put the papers back into his coat pocket as two waiters arrived to serve their dinner. Meat loaf with port wine sauce for Gruvver; a lean veal chop with sage hollandaise for Charmaine.

It didn't seem to be a time to mention—if ever there was going to be a time—that one of the names on the Lucky Ticket list was that of Gruvver's half brother Cornell Crigler. The same Cornell who had said to Gruvver two nights ago that magic shows were not his thing. And that he had never seen Lincoln Grayle perform.

T
hey returned to their room at Bahia at a quarter past one, Charmaine wearing a Mexican silver necklace with her birthstone, an amethyst, as the centerpiece. They had taken in a late lounge act at Rio Suites before finally calling it a night.

A white clasp envelope, sealed, had been pushed under their door. Charmaine opened it while Gruvver, substantially lit and with a full bladder, occupied the bathroom.

When he came out in his boxer shorts Charmaine was sitting on the king-size bed reading the note that had come with two invitations to the reopening of the Lincoln Grayle Theatre on the upcoming Saturday night.

"It's from Lucy Meyers," Charmaine said. "The PR director for Grayle I sort of conned? This is so sweet of her, Lewis! But actually says here Mr. Grayle
himself
is invitin' us."

"You need to be back for classes on Friday."

"But, Lewis! We can afford to stay over one more day; you still have more than half the money you won at Caesars! What difference if I miss a couple classes, I'll still graduate summa."

Gruvver opened the opaque curtains over the windows and looked west through the dust-laden penumbra of Las Vegas to where the Lincoln Grayle Theatre glowed like a supernova on its dark mountain.

"You
are
dyin' to meet him, and you know it."

"In a professional capacity. Maybe I didn't exactly get across to you at dinner that the Magic Man is not good people. Ask yourself, why is he takin' a personal interest in us?"

"Well, because I can charm killer bees out of their hive, you always say." He looked around at her. She shrugged prettily, pleased with herself. "And I guess Lucy Meyers took a likin'."

"Uh-huh," Gruvver said doubtfully, facing the windows again. The night had chilled down; his breath ghosted the glass in front of him. He was divided between a desire to clear out of Vegas on schedule and his natural impulses as a detective to pursue the mystery that obsessed him to its source, although he knew that source probably was out of his depth as an investigator. He felt a little apprehensive, regretful now because he had involved the faithful and eager-to-please Charmaine in his quest.

As if aware that she was uppermost in his thoughts just then, Charmaine sprang off the bed, long arms going around his bare hunky torso, squeezing blood and adrenaline to his throbbing temples.