Parishioner (15 page)

“So,” Xavier said as he drove the Fleetwood in heavy morning traffic down the coast highway, “how did those two thugs know to come to the house?”

“What?”

“Come on now, Doris. Two men came to the Culver City house to remove evidence and burn the place down. They even had a plastic body bag with them.”

“Did you kill them?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

“I … I knew somebody was coming but I didn’t call them.”

“You knew that they’d get rid of your aunt’s body.”

“She called them. She told me that they were going to do scorched earth on the house.”

“What about the body bag?”

“Isn’t that obvious? That was meant for me.”

“The note came from your hotel.”

“Auntie had a whole stack of that stationery. If you have the note you can see that it’s in her hand. Anyway, I don’t know how to write.”

“So you figured they’d take Sedra out with the bones. That way there’d be no evidence against you.”

“I didn’t know what would happen, not exactly. It was her plan.”

“But her death was definitely first-degree, premeditated murder.”

This time Doris merely nodded.

“You’re a very dangerous woman, Ms. Milne. And, you know, coming from me that’s saying something.”

“I did what I had to do,” she said in an odd tone.

“Did your aunt Sedra used to say that?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“How many of the children buried in the vault did you kill?” Xavier asked.

“None.”

“You sure?”

“I helped Sedra kill the two men and a woman, but the children were either sick or they got in trouble. One came to us with a broken arm and Sedra told me to kill her but I said no.”

“And what about the adults?”

“She’d tell me to drug them, then use the bat.”

“How old were you?”

“I was thirteen when we killed Mr. Moulton.”

“Who was he?”

“Him and Brayton used to bring babies together every few months or so, but then Mr. Moulton wanted to bring us kids on his own. He didn’t know that Brayton had a deal with the people Sedra used to find the kids’ homes. When Mr. Moulton brought us his first kid without Brayton, Sedra told him that they’d celebrate the new arrangement with a glass of wine. She told me that when he started talking funny, I should run out and hit him with the bat or he’d kill us all.”

“Why did you kill Sedra?”

“Because she was going to kill me. Because she said we were going to go away but I
knew I didn’t have a passport and she had always said that she couldn’t take me anywhere without a passport.”

“Do you feel guilty about killing her?”

Doris turned her head to regard her new acquaintance.

“No,” she said. “I’m scared to be alone. I don’t have a passport or anything.”

“Had you been thinking about killing Sedra before yesterday?”

“I thought about it. I thought that if she ever tried to kill me or anything that I’d have my bat. I used to practice hitting a tree in the backyard sometimes, and if she ever asked me why I’d just say that I wanted to be ready if she needed me to use it again.”

“Why did you worry about her hurting you? You said you thought she loved you.”

“When she’d drink she’d tell me she had done terrible things. She never said what exactly. She said that if I ever knew what she’d done, she’d have to kill me so that I would never say. She said that because I was an accomplice in what we did to those people she didn’t have to worry about that, but the other things …”

For a time after that they sat in silence. Doris turned away, then rolled down her window, allowing the smell of the sea to rush in. Unexpectedly the odor calmed Xavier. He hadn’t realized that he was getting riled listening to the crazy logic of the young woman’s life—not until the atmosphere of salt and sea wrapped around him.

Taking in long breaths, Xavier felt a wolfish smile form on his lips. This, he knew, was a kind of anticipation, the way he felt before he and Swan would go out and transact
business
.

“You bruised my chest,” Doris said, looking out her open window.

“Huh?”

“When you hit me at the house.”

“I was trying to break your jaw.”

“Are you going to have sex with me?”

“What?”

“Sex.”

“You keep asking me that,” he said.

“Men always want to have sex. Aunt Sedra told me so.”

“She also said that your parents were dead and that they didn’t want you back.”

“So?”

“She lied. Everything was a lie. That house, the adoptions, you needing a passport … Everything she told you was untrue. So if you want to know the truth, just think of what Sedra told you and the opposite is the right answer.”

Doris turned in her seat, bringing her left thigh up to lie flat on the emerald cushion. The skin flashed white beneath the green of her hem.

“I’m not wearing my panties.”

“Oh?”

“And I shaved my pussy so there’s only a razor line of hair pointing down at the clit. The hairs fan out like a feather.”

Suddenly Xavier yanked the steering wheel to the right. The Cadillac jerked and Doris yelped. Two cars behind honked long and loud but Ecks paid them no heed. He pulled off onto a slender shoulder perched twenty feet or so above the beach.

He turned like she had, pulling his right knee up, revealing a portion of his sheathed knife.

“Listen here, girl. You need to understand something. Most men are walking down the street not thinkin’ nuthin’ special. Pizza they ate last night. The ache in their gut. Maybe they’re worried that they’re gonna get fired or found out. They see a young thing like you and they might think, ‘Hey, she’s pretty,’ and walk on. But you come up and start talkin’ about your panties, pussy, and clit and they will get a hard-on. They will. But not ’cause they want sex—it’s because you want them to want to have sex. That’s what your aunt taught you. She taught you how to be a whore.

“Whores make men want to have sex and then they get paid for givin’ it. Whores do that. The only woman I want to have sex with wants to have sex with me. If she don’t want it, I don’t want it. You understand that? It’s not a trade-off but a give-off.”

It was then that Xavier realized that Doris was trembling. He had lost his temper again. He had crossed the line that Father Frank had drawn for all the parishioners of his church.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting back against the Fleetwood’s door.

“A-a-about what?”

“I just got mad there. Instead of makin’ me want sex you got me mad. Pretty young woman like you should be all nervous about what’s under your dress and in a man’s pants. It should make you giggle and blush.”

Xavier turned back to the steering wheel, looked over his left shoulder, and pulled out into the crowded highway. A car or two honked briefly but there was no collision.

A few minutes later she said, “Sometimes Sedra made me be with men that hit me.”

“Do you remember Brayton bringing you three blond baby boys?” he replied.

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“It was a few weeks after Little Mr. Smith died. I remember that they were so cute, but I wouldn’t give them names because of how hurt I was over the baby dying.”

“What happened to the boys?”

“People came and took them.”

“All three together?”

“No. They each went with someone different.”

“Do you remember anything about the people they went with?”

“Can I come stay with you if I promise not to talk about sex?”

“What?”

“Hope said that you were taking me someplace to hide while you found out what to do about Aunt Sedra and the house.”

“No, baby. I mean … yeah, I am gonna take you someplace, but you can’t be with me. All the women stay with me got their panties on … at least at first. No, you can’t stay with me.”

“I have underwear in my bag.”

“Do you remember anything about who took those boys?”

“There was a nice couple. I think their name was Brown, something like that,” she said. “If I promise to be good can I stay with you?”

“No.”

“I don’t remember hardly anything else. I think one of the boys was taken by a man. He smelled like perfume and had a light suit. I remember all three boys were wrapped in these blue-and-brown-checkered blankets.”

“That’s good enough for now. It was a long time ago.”

“I really want to stay with you.”

“I know. But you don’t have much experience. You’d want to stay anywhere after Sedra’s. Where I’m going to take you is the perfect place for you to begin to learn all the things
you don’t know.”

The Hammer and Nail hardware store was on Santa Monica Boulevard in the middle of West Hollywood. Xavier found a parking place down the street and carried Doris’s pink suitcase as they walked in the front door.

“Hey, sailor,” a recorded male voice said suggestively when they set off the electric eye.

It was a normal hardware store dealing in metal fittings, power tools, and screws and nails of all types and sizes.

On the left side of the spacious room was the sales counter. Behind this stood a tall, powerfully built pink man whose lips were thick and roughly in the shape of a heart.

“Ecks,” the man said.

“George,” Xavier Rule replied.

“Who’s your friend?”

“This is Charlotte.” It was a name they agreed on a few minutes before parking. “Frank needs for her to lie low for a few days. And you shouldn’t tell anybody—especially no one from the congregation.”

“Okay. And you know she’ll certainly be safe in my house.”

“Charlotte, this is George Ben,” Xavier said. “You two have a lot in common—you both like men.”

“Girl, you look too cute in those polka dots,” George said, and for the first time Doris smiled without a self-conscious look in her eye.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Forgive her if she doesn’t know how to act, George. She’s led a very, very sheltered life.”

“In the closet, huh?” the big pink man said.

“Under a trapdoor at the back of the old coats,” Xavier said, “with a padlock on either side.”

“Don’t you worry, Charlotte. You and I will be best girlfriends.”

Doris’s eyes creased and Xavier had one of his rare laughs. He turned to leave but Doris
grabbed at his sleeve.

“George has my phone number,” the gangster said. “If you need something you can call me anytime.”

“I’ve never slept anywhere but Sedra’s house and the Federal,” she said.

“There’s a whole new world out there. And one thing’s for sure—no one will hurt you with George Ben on your side.”

“That’s a fact,” George said.

Doris looked between the two men, released Xavier’s sleeve tentatively, and brought her hands together.

“If you call me I’ll come,” Xavier promised before walking out the front door.

“Hey, sailor,” the recorded voice said.

Xavier liked Frank’s dark green Fleetwood almost as much as he did his pink, sea green, and chrome Edsel. Old classic cars delighted him. The only things he felt unambivalent passion for were gaudy clothes, fighting, and classic cars. He had tried to change but even that late morning, climbing over the mountain through the canyon, he found himself luxuriating in the driver’s seat and wanting to resurrect Sedra so that he could slap her face.

Down the canyon road, then a short jaunt on the freeway and Xavier found himself in Pasadena. It wasn’t long before he parked in front of a big house that looked like a miniature baronial estate on Galleon Drive.

Upon getting out of the car he paid momentary obeisance to the lovely eighty-two-degree Southern California day. The sky was blue and the fat palm tree in the Berbers’ front yard seemed lively enough to pull its shallow roots out of the soil and do a jig.

The lawn was so green that it looked painted, and the flat-faced violet flowers that grew on vines clinging to the trellis of the front porch gave the vague impression of laughing faces.

Southern California didn’t seem to be on the same planet that New York City inhabited. The days were longer and the nights shorter. People smiled more and cared less. And in Los Angeles there was more of a chance of you disappearing with no one noticing that you were gone—or remembering that you’d been there at all.

Xavier walked up the six white steps to the wide porch and advanced on the closed door.

“Can I help you?” a voice to his right said.

Ecks turned but all he saw were two wicker chairs facing the flowering trellis. They were old, weather-worn chairs fitted with faded cushions.… Slowly a shape came into view; an elderly man was seated in the nearest straw throne. He was so thin and wan that he blended into the washed-out fabric like a chameleon might subtly come to resemble branch and leaf.

“Mr. Berber?”

“Yes?”

The man leaned forward, coming fully into being before Xavier’s eyes. He had an oblong head, which was bald and marked by two liver spots. His glasses had perfectly round lenses way too large for his face, and his waxen smile had forgotten the humor that spawned it.

“My name is Arlen, Arlen Johns,” Xavier said. “I’m a deacon of the Interfaith Church of Redemption.”

The vapid smile broadened slightly, gaining no sincerity at all.

“A deacon?”

“I’ve come here on a church mission,” Xavier said. “You are Clay Berber, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Can I sit with you for a few moments?”

Berber was probably in his late sixties, but he might have been eighty by the way he held himself. The older man seemed to consider Xavier’s request in earnest, weighing all of the consequences of the pending decision.

“What is it that you want, Mr.…?”

“Johns.”

“What is it that you want, Mr. Johns?”

“Can I sit down?”

Once again the old skull cogitated. After deep consideration it nodded its assent.

Xavier lowered himself into the far seat, taking on, in his heart, the role of a church deacon.

He returned the old man’s cold smile.

“A woman came to us through an intermediary,” Xavier said. “Her name is Charlotte Moran.”

Maintaining his vagueness, Clay Berber nodded.

“She lived at the home of a woman named Sedra Landcombe twenty years and more ago,” Xavier continued. “While she was there she remembers that one night a man named Brayton Starmon brought three blond baby boys to Sedra’s home and left them there. In the days that followed people came to take the children. Money changed hands.”

The meaningless smile evaporated.

“Charlotte didn’t remember much, but she told us that she believed the children were wrapped in blue-and-brown-checkered blankets.”

“We got a deal on those covers,” Clay said. “Rose bought them from the main distributor in Tarzana.”

“Our church researcher found out that twenty-three years ago you had three babies kidnapped from a nursery you ran out of your home.”

“God knows we didn’t need the money,” the old man said to the flowering vine. “I was a machinist at McDonnell Douglas and made more than enough. But Rose just wanted something to do. She loved children. She loved Benol, but that child was a bad seed, bad seed.”

“Do you think that those babies Charlotte saw were the ones stolen from your house?” Xavier asked.

“Why haven’t you gone to the police, Mr. Johns?” The dreamy distance of his bearing was suddenly gone.

“We didn’t have any kind of corroboration, Mr. Berber. It was just a young woman talking about a child’s spotty memory. But now that you have identified those blankets we can go to the police. We can get them to track down this Sedra Landcombe.”

Clay was trembling in his chair.

“It’s getting cold out here,” he said, shocked not by the weather but by memories he’d rather have gone undisturbed.

“Is your wife still alive, sir?”

“What?”

“Your wife. Is she still alive?”

“Alive?”

“Yes.”

“She’s alive,” he said, as if the state were somehow conditional.

“May I speak with her?”

“Speak? To Rose?”

“Yes. I’d like to know if she remembers anything else.”

“It was my fault, Mr. Johns. I brought Benol into this house. She was the one kidnapped those boys. My younger brother married her mother when Bennie was only two. As soon as his lust was satisfied Edward left Benol’s mother. When his ex-wife died my brother was already a drunk. I took the girl in when the foster care services of Miami reached out to me. Worst mistake I ever made in my life. It was my fault that those children were stolen. Mine alone.”

“I’m a Christian,” Xavier said—it wasn’t really a lie. “I cast no stones or blame. I merely want to be of service.”

“You want to talk to Rose?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“You won’t get anything out of her.”

“I won’t lose anything either.”

Clay Berber smiled with real humor. The phrase, or maybe its simple structure, reminded him of a happier time.

“Well … help me up then.”

The house was open and barren. The first room they passed through contained only a gold-colored stuffed chair against a scarred wall that was sheathed in dulled, peeling wallpaper. The next room was larger, with no rugs on the dusty oak floor and a sofa sitting in the middle of the otherwise vacant space. The faint smell of garbage wafted through a doorway that probably led to the kitchen.

In the middle of the back wall of the living room was a black door that opened onto the shaggy overgrown yard.

The grounds behind the Berber home seemed to Rule like the edge of some vast wilderness. A
giant blue pine loomed over the house and front portion of the backyard. Tall grasses moved in the afternoon breeze, seeming to have almost animal mobility. Tropical-looking flowers with purple petals and triplet yellow stamens hung from a vine from which also depended the occasional egg-shaped golden fruit. These vines served as covering for the high redwood fencing. Unkempt, man-size bushes and overgrown weeds vied for space among the outer shadows of the tree. Down a path of white stone disks Clay led Xavier through this wasteland and to the other side, where a weeping willow sat behind a self-generated curtain of light green leaves.

There came the faint sound of a human voice from behind the blind of branches and tiny, razorlike leaves. It was the sound of continual meaningless mumbling. This voice was hoarse from overuse. Maybe a woman.

Clay stopped at the swaying barrier. He brought his left hand to his chin.

Xavier waited for the old man to build up courage. He was in no rush.

Finally Berber brought his hands together like a swimmer or a praying penitent and parted the hanging branches. Xavier followed him through, into shadows.

The soil underneath the willow was barren for lack of sunlight. It was cooler under there, and empty except for an old stocky white woman in an ankle-long colorless bag of a dress sitting on a wooden crate and talking, talking, talking.

“Ooo de bal into seem it been,” she said grinning happily. “Popo tom is far long at ti ti remo pie.”

She sat spread-legged on the low fruit crate talking and gesticulating, living in a world removed.

“She sleeps on the couch in the living room and comes out here every morning,” Clay said. “I bring her water and tuna fish sandwiches, sometimes tomato soup.”

Xavier noticed the water bottle standing beside the wooden seat. Next to that was a large leather purse with big looping handles.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Berber,” the highly specialized deacon said. “How are you today?”

The woman stopped babbling and seemed to notice the men for the first time.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Yes,” Xavier replied, “hello.”

She grinned broadly, showing her few remaining stumpy yellow teeth.

“Ooo ti do my.”

“He came to ask about those boys,” Clay Berber said. “The ones that Benol kidnapped.”

The snarl that came into Rose Berber’s face caused a physical reaction in Xavier, just as if he had encountered a feral beast in the backyard jungle. It was then that he noticed the odor of urine mixed in with the stronger scents of plant and soil.

Rose made her interpretation of a muffled roar and stood up.

Clay took a step backward.

“Why don’t you let me talk to Mrs. Berber alone for a moment?” Xavier said to the hapless husband.

“You heard her,” the old man answered. “She can’t talk at all.”

“Sometimes the words aren’t in the mouth and ear,” Xavier said, quoting from one of Father Frank’s sermons. “Sometimes hearts and minds communicate.”

Xavier hadn’t known exactly what Frank meant until meeting Rose Berber. But Clay understood immediately.

“I’ll just be a few feet away,” Clay said to his wife and their visitor.

When he passed through the wall of willow leaves Rose sat down on her crate again.

Xavier approached her and she looked up at him—her eyes filled with wonder. There was no fear there at all.

“Ooo ti.”

Xavier crouched down, bringing his head a few inches below hers and about a foot away. She took in a breath of anticipation and held it for a moment or two. When she exhaled the stagnant gust broke across Xavier’s face, but he didn’t flinch or move away. He’d been in New York’s filthiest back alleys and in the company of dead bodies and their gases. He’d smelled the rot of crack dens and heroin addicts’ beds. He’d breathed in the blood of his enemies.