Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (7 page)

“Big pretty gal, brunette?”

“Redhead, last I saw.”

“Sure, I seen a redhead get off the bus,” the bald man said. “Week or so back. Lady with hair enough to keep her butt warm, she’d drove down in a Ford, thirty-one or -two, picked up the redhead. The two of ’em stood there, squeezing the other and bawling like President Roosevelt died.”

Emma Vidal, Hickey thought. He said thanks, fired up his Chevy, and drove the half mile to the end of the road and the Castle Crag Motor Hotel, a fifty-yard-long stone building with arched windows and shingle roof.

The woman who checked him in wore a wedding ring big as a cupcake. About forty, tall and lithe, with shoulder-length dark hair, opal earrings, keen hazel eyes, impeccable makeup and hairdo, like a city girl who’d just returned from the beauty salon.

Hickey paid, filled out a card, and was set to ask about Venus when the phone rang and the woman—Fay Giles, according to the nameplate on the desk—began talking heatedly with somebody about water rights on a certain ranch. Hickey found his own way to the room. It was spacious enough and furnished with the best of the Sears catalog. Even an alarm clock. He set it for 2:00
P.M.
, which would give him a couple hours of sleep and leave a couple more of daylight, and collapsed.

***

After whacking the alarm clock, he shaved, slapped on cologne, changed his underwear and shirt, and walked to the office. Fay Giles was sitting on the desk, manicuring her toenails. When he and a blast of cold wind teamed to sling open the door, she spun to sit correctly and primped her legs together, blushing as though he’d caught her trying on naughty underwear.

“I should’ve rung the bell?”

“Please. Do you need something?” She had a husky, smoker’s voice.

“Sure. Whatever advice you can give me about the
Nezah
Society.”

She paled and crinkled her roundish, delicate face. “Are you in real estate?”

“Why, you selling?”

“Look, mister, if you’re fronting for the Tucker women, if you’re planning to buy up more of Dunsmuir or the Shasta Highlands tract, I call my attorney, he calls the sheriff, and the sheriff calls you a fraud. Ever seen Alcatraz?”

“I hear you,” Hickey said. “Tell me, if I were fronting for the Tuckers, why would I ask you about the
Nezahs?
”

“Maybe you’re a sharp one.”

“You said Tucker women. Meaning Venus and who?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m looking for Cynthia Tucker, Venus’ younger daughter. You know her?”

“Venus and I don’t go to the same tea parties, mister. All I’ve got to say about their society is, the closer you get, the more it stinks. What I see is a land-grab operation and a breeding farm.”

“Breeding farm? What’re they breeding?”

“Go look for yourself.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He walked out, thinking that every little town must have its Fay Giles, who’d moved there to escape some person or city she’d watched go wrong. Usually she’d be the town’s staunchest defender, while the natives sat on the fences and observed, not so sure the place was worth defending.

At the end of the gravel road, a dirt trail ran to the left, beginning a spiral climb up the mountainside. It looked cleared and plowed since the last snow, but it got slicker and darker as it tunneled through overhanging trees before opening into a glen. A meadow of snow, patches of dead grass, pools of iced, swampy water, surrounded by fir and aspen trees. The light was gray and shimmery. Hickey imagined giant bats and witches. The trail ended at a stone wall with an iron gate and a carved wood sign.
BLACK FOREST LODGE.

Hickey parked in the middle of the trail. On either side he would’ve gotten stuck in snow or slush. He stood a moment at the gate, surveying the place. It looked like a motor court designed by a pre-Renaissance German. Surrounded by the stone wall were eight buildings, each the size of a single garage, built from mortared slabs of granite. The slabs were so large you wondered who could’ve lifted them. A labor only giants could’ve performed. Like Stonehenge or Egypt’s pyramids. Each building was a miniature castle, with a turret and several tiny windows about head-high to the center on a basketball team. The meadow lay in a wedge of the mountain that rose steeply on three sides. You had to crook your neck to see the only visible strip of sky, which the sun wouldn’t take more than three hours to cross, allowing the place about as much honest daylight as winter solstice gave Alaska. The lodge was entirely in shadow, though the sky was steel blue, not a cloud except the one that haloed Mount Shasta, all of which you could see from where Hickey stood. Commanding the whole northern view, Shasta looked like a glacier creeping south to flatten California.

The gate was unchained. Hickey pushed it open, got into his car, and drove through. An elderly man in khakis and a black woolen coat, and two children barely old enough to walk, stood beside the first building eyeing him. As he approached, the man took both kids by their hands and towed them across the compound toward a glass building, apparently a hothouse. Through the steamy glass he made out the shadows of seven people besides the ones who’d just entered. Hickey parked next to the only car, a grimy ten-year-old Ford. He glanced in the window in case the registration was visible. It might belong to Emma Vidal.

A woman stepped out of the second building across the compound. Tall and erect. Wearing a man’s work shirt over a gingham dress almost to the ground. She took large, graceful strides that made her appear light-footed even in the hiking boots. She had a mane of glossy black hair, peach-colored skin, and a smile that kept growing as she neared Hickey. From ten feet away she looked warm and serene. It wasn’t until she got close enough to shake his hand that he read a kind of mournful skittishness in her eyes and noticed her protruding belly.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully. “I’m Katherine.”

“Tom Hickey. A friend of Cynthia Tucker.”

The smile froze in place. For an instant her jaw quivered, before she recovered and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

“My pleasure. Cynthia around?”

“I’m afraid she left yesterday.”

“Hmmm. Venus here?”

“No, she and the master left yesterday also.”

“A regular exodus,” Hickey said. “Emma Vidal leave, too?”

The smile withered. She stared at her boots as if they’d suddenly pinched her. “Would you like a cup of cider?”

Hickey nodded and followed her across the compound to the second building. Inside was steamy hot and dim. Fire crackled in a wood stove in one corner. There were three pallet beds, a long plank table and benches, handmade of pine, a bookcase of stacked bricks and boards, dozens of books. Hickey noticed the
Tao Te Ching
of Lao-Tzu. A collection of Coleridge’s essays. Madame Blavatsky’s
Secret Doctrine
and
Isis Unveiled
. From an icebox, Katherine pulled a gallon jug. She poured cider into a pan that had hung alongside others from the wall above the icebox, set it on the stove.

She sat on the bench across the table from Hickey. “As I said, Cynthia left yesterday, with her sister. Did you drive up from San Diego?”

“Yep.”

“They might’ve passed you on the road. Too bad.”

“Venus, the master, Miss Vidal—you expect any of them back soon?”

Katherine’s head jerked as if an invisible hand had slapped her. “The master and Venus will be gone several weeks on a speaking tour.” She folded her hands and whispered, “Emma has gone to the Almighty.”

For all Hickey knew, to these folks the Almighty could be a guy with a turban who told fortunes in Reno. “Dead?”

She nodded. “In an avalanche, on the Holy Mountain. Last Saturday, the day of Cynthia’s communion. The master and Emma had shown her to the temple at the center of the world, where she would seek audience with the Ancient Masters. Our master and our Emma got swept into a culvert when a snowpack broke free. Our master barely escaped.”

Hickey conjured an image that fitted what he’d learned of Emma Vidal. Long-haired, attractive, generous. He leaned back, watched flecks of soot rise toward the ceiling, and grieved for a minute, while a scheme of answers came to him. Suppose the relapse of Henry Tucker had stirred in Cynthia the need to make peace with her mother, for whom she decided to join the
Nezahs
. She would’ve returned to San Diego in a week like she’d promised Clyde, except for the avalanche. In grief, she could’ve failed to call McGraw or Rudy’s. The picture and note—suppose she’d drawn and written them herself. Maybe they were scenes from a nightmare of hers. She might’ve brought the gun, a small one that could be concealed, because she worried they’d leave her alone on the mountain, and she wanted the gun to scare off wolves. All that could be, Hickey thought but didn’t believe.

“Cynthia and Emma Vidal, they were close?”

“Like mother and daughter.”

Hickey nodded. “Venus mind that?”

“Oh, I think not. Venus is much more than just a mother. Do you know her?”

“Nope.”

“You’d love her. She’s everything female. Patience, endurance, charity, serenity.”

“Cynthia take it hard? The avalanche?”

Katherine’s lips parted, then shut several times, and her eyes flicked around while, Hickey figured, she sorted through the truth, deciding which parts to tell. “We held the burial on Monday. Cynthia became hysterical. She had to be restrained and finally…sedated. After a few days, though, by yesterday morning, she seemed to have accepted the loss.”

“Drugged, you say?”

“Sedated.”

“There’s a doctor here, or did you call one in?”

Katherine’s eyes furled as if he’d made her a rude proposal.

“I’d like to have a word with the doctor,” Hickey said. “About Cynthia.”

“The master is our doctor. He practiced medicine in India. If you wish to try and reach him by phone, I can give you their itinerary.”

“Yeah,” Hickey said. “Please.”

She went to the bookshelves, thumbed through a stack of papers, then noticed the cider boiling. She poured them each a cup, delivered them to the table, got paper, pencil, and notepad from the bookcase, and sat next to Hickey.

He stirred, sipped, and watched while she copied the itinerary and handed it to him. “The master, would he be the guy a fellow in town called the nigra?”

The cherry but haggard smile she’d worn at first reappeared. “Yes. They wouldn’t know the difference. The master is half Indian, half British.”

“He’s got a name?”

“Pravinshandra Chapman. What else did the townies have to say about us?”

“That you’re a bunch of loons.”

“Did you believe them?”

“I took their opinion under advisement.”

“Would you like to know about our beliefs?”

“Make it quick,” Hickey said. “A long time ago I got weaned off religion. A kind of Theosophist, is that what you are?”

“Do you know the teachings of Madame Blavatsky?”

“As much as I care to. No offense. I like you, so far, and you can believe the universe is a grapefruit, it’s all the same to me. I’ve got a phobia, is all, like some people can’t abide spiders. One thing, though. The townies say you folk believe there are goblins in the mountain. That right?”

She grinned, finished her cider, put the mug down, and clapped her hands. “Goblins, they said? Oh my. No, you see, we believe there are spirits everywhere. The ether is composed of spirit beings. We can go no place, imagine no place, where we wouldn’t be surrounded, and inhabited, by spirit beings. I’m sure there are spirits inside the mountain. That there are creatures of the flesh, immortals, inside the mountain, is Indian lore.”

As she concluded, another young woman entered, a stringy-haired blonde in men’s overalls and a logger’s jacket, looking flushed and sweaty as if she’d just escaped from a Turkish bath, wearing gardener’s gloves. Hickey didn’t notice her belly until she leaned her arm on Katherine’s shoulder and he saw her in profile. Katherine introduced her as Rosemary.

“Come summer,” Hickey said, “you ladies are gonna need a big pile of diapers.”

Rosemary chuckled. “Yes sir. Four of us are due this winter or spring.”

“Coincidence?”

“Well, each of us came here soon after they sent our husbands overseas, if that’s what you mean. It’s a safe place to raise our babies for the duration, isn’t it?” She wiped her brow, pardoned herself, and trudged to a mattress, flopped onto her back and lay cradling her belly. Katherine gave Hickey a weary smile of dismissal.

As she walked him to his car, he looked around, spotted the outlines of two people in the hothouse. Out of eight residents, at least, only two had been curious enough to approach him. Reclusive or afraid? he wondered. He scanned the place one time, looking for insights. All he noticed were three smoking chimneys and a little boy who dashed across the compound and fell smack on his face in the snow.

Hickey skidded his Chevy down the mountain, asking himself whether to leave for home that evening or do what his nature advised: stick around, snoop a little more into the death of Emma Vidal, maybe uncover some dirt about these
Nezah
. If this master or Venus were, say, usurping the bank accounts of their followers and using the money to buy up Dunsmuir, or taking in unwed pregnant gals and peddling the babies—in Hickey’s eyes, a religious charlatan might pull any wicked ruse—he could pass the evidence to Fay Giles, who’d use it to hang them.

But Cynthia’d returned to San Diego. Where Hickey had a daughter with the blues, a restless wife, a business to run. If he left the Cuban on his own too long, Rudy’s kitchen might be sporting craps tables and roulette wheels, like the Havana casino where Castillo’d learned his trade.

A phone call would tell him if the girl had returned safely. Once that got settled, it was best to presume what he’d supposed earlier—Cynthia had come up here to make peace with her mama, get religion, shoot wolves.

Otherwise, he might ask himself, if somebody who doesn’t normally pack a gun buys one, loads it, then goes on a sudden trip—if at her destination, somebody dies, might one and one equal a murder?

Chapter Seven

Once he got away from the Black Forest Lodge and made up his mind to go home, when he put aside the puzzles—about the Tuckers, the Bitch, the death of Emma Vidal, why Venus and the
Nezahs
would scheme to buy up Dunsmuir—he realized the more and quicker miles he crammed between Tom Hickey and a gang of believers, the better. Leaving the Black Forest, he felt as if he’d scurried out of a hole in which he’d got infested by parasites.

The curious part of him wanted to gab with Fay Giles, ask if she’d heard about the avalanche, get her a little riled about the
Nezahs
, buy her a drink or two, and see what spilled out of her delicate mouth. The remainder of him, weary and apprehensive, was relieved to find her gone, the office locked. He slipped a ten into the key drop, packed his things, and left the motel.

Sue Lynn and the tattooed cook still worked The Outpost. Friday night, the place was jammed with females, kids, and men old enough to escape the military, a few boys probably exempted as farm workers. Everybody except Sue Lynn wore a hat. Hickey took his off.

While he was waiting for a spot at the counter, he bartered with the cook, finally gave him three dollars to use the phone. Violet Weiss answered, chatted a minute, then got Leo out of his bath.

“Catch any wild geese, Tom?”

“Meaning she’s back in town.”

“Yep. Now, what was the cause of you sending me to Laurel Tucker? Some lousy joke?”

“Why’s that?”

“The dame’s a hellhound. The captain and me, we walk up to her door figuring to use the warrant, bust in, and snoop around. But there she is, glaring like a banshee. I tell her we’re looking for Cynthia. The lingo she used to say ‘get lost’ polluted my ears. Now, Thrapp, being a cop, takes offense and waves the warrant around. She attacks us, breathing fire, swinging with both claws. Thrapp and I scamper out of there. He’s ready to call in reinforcements, but I convince him we consult you first.”

Hickey sent his partner back to the tub, chuckled with relief as he walked to the stool that had opened at the counter. He sat down and lit his pipe. When Sue Lynn appeared, he ordered chicken fried steak and a glass of their hardest liquor. She gave him a Schlitz and a water glass half full of bourbon whose label he didn’t want to see.

After Sue Lynn plopped ice cream onto three slabs of apple pie and delivered them to a bearded fellow who was picking his teeth, she returned to Hickey, leaned close, face in her hands, elbows on the counter, and let him tell her what he’d seen at the Black Forest Lodge. All he admitted seeing up close was two pregnant women, nice enough, who believed in a screwy religion that imagined spirits—not goblins—lived inside Mount Shasta, and who claimed they both had husbands gone to war.

“Shoo, everybody gets pregnant says that.”

She whisked up his glass and went to fetch him more bourbon. Hickey took a swallow, sighed gratefully. “Say, the ladies told me about an avalanche on Mount Shasta, last Saturday.”

Sue Lynn pursed her lips and frowned. “I ain’t heard about no avalanche this winter.”

“Hmmm.”

“They tell you what Netsock means?”

“It’s one of the
Sefirot
on the Tree of Life.”

“I’ll be darned. What kind of tree’s that?”

“Looks something like a mulberry.”

The cook whistled, she served Hickey’s dinner, then a couple tables emptied and refilled. Still busy when Hickey walked out, Sue Lynn blew him a kiss and stood forlornly watching him leave.

A sheriff’s car was parked in front of a log building across the street, a hundred yards up the hill. Hickey would’ve gone there, asked the sheriff about the avalanche, except he didn’t care to arouse any suspicions that might lead to incriminating Cynthia Moon. Not yet.

As he drove into the Trinity Alps, he wished he’d remembered to buy chains. The sky was black and jagged as a field of lava stones. Each time he rounded a turn he got shaken by wind or a snow flurry. He gripped the wheel tight and kept reviewing lines he remembered from Cynthia’s book, wondering if Miss V and the Bitch could be the same person, Emma Vidal—if she’d clobbered Henry Tucker with a Remington typewriter, maybe delivered the final insult when she returned his ring, and in payment got a bullet in the head.

His nerves began to thaw and his mind to light on more pleasant topics as soon as he’d crossed the summit, out of the shadow of the Holy Mountain.

***

Near Stockton, he found a hot bath and a lumpy bed in a highway motor court. Thick fog poured through the window Hickey’d left open because he couldn’t sleep in a stuffy room. The wall heater switch didn’t work. He curled up under three blankets and his overcoat.

Feeling small and endangered, he remembered long ago. When he lay curled like this on a four-poster bed. A door clicked open and a shadow entered, wearing a black dress and veil. Its arms were out, feeling its way. Hickey shivered, rolled over, pressed his face and belly into the mattress.

“Tom?”

He squeezed his arms tighter to his sides and pinched his mouth and eyes closed. The creature knelt and lifted the covers off him. Its cold bony hands started kneading his shoulders. One, then the other tracked down his spine and veered out to his waist. Fingers, splayed like the legs of a spider, crawled over his hips, down his thighs to his feet, then crossed over and started up his legs on the inside. Hickey’s guts boiled. He socked the bed and cussed, rolled and tossed until the room began spinning and whirlpooled him down into sleep.

***

Almost noon, the room air was still icy. Another hot bath sounded fine, but it was either that or breakfast, or risk not making San Diego in time to catch Cynthia at Rudy’s that night. He dressed and shaved, crossed the parking lot to the Blue Ribbon truck stop, a converted barn. He got steak and cornflakes and filled his thermos.

Highway 99 was slow, forty-five mph tops, and he had to stay alert to go that fast, with cars backed up at traffic signals appearing like spooks out of the fog and northbound produce trucks squeezing the white line, littering the highway with Imperial Valley tomatoes, lettuce, alfalfa. He’d crossed the Merced River before the fog lifted, freeing him to drive on instinct and ponder things, to confront monsters the nightmare had loosed, ones he should’ve killed twenty-five years ago.

He saw his mother in a chair stitching him a pair of trousers. All day she’d perch there, straight and prim in a flowery dress, her knees together, both feet on the floor. She worked as a seamstress for the actress Mary Pickford. Every pattern she cut and sewed by hand.

When Hickey came home from school, sandlot baseball or shining shoes on Hollywood Boulevard, a cookie or bowl of strawberries from her garden would be waiting. First, though, he was required to kiss her forehead or suffer through her lecture about ingratitude being abhorrent to God. Then she made him sit beside her while she stroked his hair with her bony fingers and read to him. “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-All.”

Maybe he’d could’ve understood, even believed, if she’d gotten her wretched hand off him and if she hadn’t worn a look that enraged him, the one declaring that he was a dunce, while she knew everything.

By his ninth year, at nights he’d lie dreaming of the north, of forests where she couldn’t find him, where he could fish, carve a bow and arrow, or wash dishes or shine boots in a logging camp. Every week he saved a couple dollars, buried them in a can under a rock up the hill from their cottage on Gramercy Place. He bought a heavy woolen coat for three dollars from a rich kid, two flannel blankets from a rummage sale. He carved the knots off a long manzanita branch for a walking stick, bindle staff, and club to whack robbers.

A couple months before his tenth birthday, the date he’d settled upon to run away, he started worrying about Florence. She was three years younger. He couldn’t leave her alone with the saint. He pictured Florence and himself huddled over campfires beside wild-eyed hoboes with hooks where their hands used to be. He heard Florence whimpering. What if she starved or got mauled by a bear? Finally he decided not to run. In that moment, his fear of their mother was transformed into hatred—once he understood she’d backed him into a corner. It was fight, or get chewed up and swallowed.

The next year, when he started growing hair all over, when his voice began to squawk and girls suddenly appeared more precious than exasperating, he bought a hasp and padlock for the bathroom door, borrowed tools from a neighbor. When she got home and found him locked in there, she rattled the door and yelled. He told her to scram. Faintheartedly, she called him a devil, as he lay there cupping his groin in both hands, smiling. Never again would she bathe him or stand watching him on the toilet, waiting to scrub him raw, to make him clean as God demanded.

For seven hours through the San Joaquin Valley, the litanies of Christian Science pulsed through his brain like the lyrics to inane, catchy songs.

At times he went goosefleshed and tasted bile, from remembering Mom’s hands as they bathed, massaged, or petted him. Once he socked the dashboard and gashed a knuckle, recalling how many times she’d caught him with an erection and pinched it to death with her fingernails.

He hadn’t seen the saint since 1933 when he quit the LAPD and moved to San Diego. In ten years they’d only spoken a few stiff minutes on the phone around Christmas. The last two summers, Florence had invited him to send Elizabeth to stay a week with her and their mother and Florence’s husband Bob, a gentle man who owned a factory that made airplane propellers. Florence offered to take Elizabeth shopping at Bullock’s in Long Beach, buy her a new wardrobe in the latest Hollywood styles, which the old woman could tailor to fit perfectly.

“Yeah,” Hickey said, “she can smooth the material over Elizabeth’s breasts and hips, down her legs, cooing about how lovely she is, like she used to do with Mary Pickford.”

“Tom, she’s seventy-four. She’s not the same.”

“Hey, Flo, you put Mother in the nuthouse where she belongs, then I’ll send Elizabeth.”

The last few miles before Griffith Park, he thought about taking Glendale to Hollywood Boulevard, going west, then right on Highland up to Florence’s place, seeing for himself if the saint had truly gotten as frail and mild as his sister claimed. If he could forgive her, it would please Elizabeth, and Florence. Even Madeline would be proud of him.

The trouble was, the old woman would never understand what she’d done to him. She’d still believe she’d raised him to holiness. No question she blamed only him, his father, and the devil for his being a spiteful, negligent son. Nobody that pure, who conversed with God daily, a practitioner and healer who lived for good works and righteousness, had to blame herself for anything.

Unless she begged his forgiveness, which she’d never do, there was only one way to settle the account. And Hickey preferred not to kill his mother.