Pious Deception (27 page)

“What are you saying—Austin was committed, or just too embarrassed to quit?”

“Austin and me, we were on the same wavelength. We stayed up half the night more nights than not, talking, trying to make sense out of that ridiculous system. I finally got out. But Austin kept assuming that there was a nugget of truth buried under the doctrine.” Zekk snorted. “See, Austin figured if he just worked hard enough, dug deep enough, he would find
the
secret.”

Kiernan shivered. She knew that obsession only too well. “And did he?”

“It was ridiculous. He was one of the brightest guys I knew. He had advantages I would have killed for—whoops, wrong choice of word, huh?” He let out a high-pitched laugh.

Kiernan grimaced.

“The point I’m making,” Zekk hurried on, “is that I knew him in the first year of seminary. I talked to him two weeks ago. And in all those years nothing had changed. He was still the same green kid looking for the same nugget of truth. Oh, he’d stripped off a lot of layers, he compartmentalized a lot of bullshit, like the pastor stuff. He really hated that. He couldn’t get into these people whining about their problems with their second cars and their teenagers smoking dope or getting knocked up. He realized that he was wasting his time with that. I could have told him. I did, in fact, that first year. He just couldn’t see it then. It took him all this time to realize it. That’s why this house. First he figured if he could just get away and spend time talking to the one person he could trust. Hey, don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing. Go on.”

Zekk downed the rest of his drink. “Yeah, well,” he said tentatively, “Austin still had access to family money.”

“No vow of poverty for him, huh?” Kiernan asked, anxious to nurture his nascent trust.

He leaned forward. “There are ways around them. Money wasn’t an issue. And he got a good deal on building this place.”

“From Sylvia Necri?”

“Yeah. He used to come out here every other week, on Monday and Tuesday, his days off. He’d want to talk sometimes about the
Humanae Vitae,
you know, the papal encyclical from nineteen sixty-eight. Or he was caught up in what is the difference between the assent of faith in the new canon law and the
obsequium religiosum
of the mind in regard to the authoritative teachings of the pope.” Zekk shoved a pile of papers off the table, looked under them, then pushed another. They slid silently onto a pile of sweat gear on the floor. He eyed his empty glass accusingly. “Damn.” To Kiernan he said, “You want a beer?”

“No.”

He shrugged and leaned back against the sofa cushions, apparently unwilling to walk to the kitchen. After a moment he yanked another pile closer to him and rooted through it, coming up with another tiny bottle of rye. “Ah. Now this is better.” He downed half and poured the rest. “Well, time may have stood still for Austin, but it hadn’t for me. I’d stopped worrying about that garbage years ago. He must have figured that I’d be just like I was when I left seminary, as if I’d been stuck on a shelf all those years, just waiting for him to pull me off, wind me up, and have me cock an ear for him.”

“When he realized you’d changed, did he ask you to leave?”

“Leave!” He flopped back possessively into the sofa corner. “Who else was he going to get to live out here in the middle of nowhere, with a pack of lunatics at the bottom of the gorge down there?”

“In Rattlesnake?”

“Yeah, who else would have the time to haul their pots around and see what tacky tourist shop would pass them off as Indian. You see their stuff? It’s junk, not that that would keep it from selling. You wouldn’t believe the crap tourists cart home.” He laughed. “Sometimes I wonder what people in Minneapolis think of Arizona. They look at what their friends bring home: the lopsided pots and the sandbox-quality sand paintings; and they must figure the Valley of the Sun is desert-to-desert kitsch.”

Kiernan laughed. Despite all that had been said about Joe Zekk, she was finding him not wholely unlikeable. “So why did you handle their pottery then?”

“Money. They need it. I need it. More to the point, that was part of the deal with Austin. He wanted them to have the income.”

“To be dependent on him for it?”

Zekk shrugged. “Put whatever meaning you want on it.”

“They say you cheat them.”

Zekk jolted forward. “Cheat them! Hey, they’re paying for first-class acting here. They should see my performance when I bring their stuff into a store. I earn my money.”

The rest of Zekk’s statements may have been questionable—certainly they merited more thought—but this one Kiernan took whole. From the looks of the pottery she had seen on John McKinley’s mantelpiece, if Zekk moved any of it he was a master salesman. She shifted her weight, resting an elbow on the sofa back. The air cooled the underside of her arm. “Austin had something the old man down there had given him. The old man is hanging on, waiting to get it back.”

Zekk laughed. “Lady, there’s nothing down there anyone would want. Have you looked down there?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I haven’t been down there in a year. Not since I caught one of them peeking in the windows and sent him head-long down that road of theirs.”

“Maybe they got something since.”

“No way. When it rains that road’s a mud puddle. And they’d shoot at a stranger before he could bring them anything. It’s not a place UPS delivers.” He grinned and checked Kiernan’s face for a corresponding reaction. When he saw it, he seemed genuinely pleased. “Austin went down every time he was here. And he never came back up with anything.”

“Maybe McKinley gave him the item when you were away.”

He shook his head. “I was always here when Austin was due. You see what a godforsaken place this is? I go days without seeing another human face. If it weren’t for the process works up the road, I’d have lost my mind ages ago.”

Kiernan nodded, feeling a stab of sympathy. Was this, she wondered, what mothers of chronically unwashed teenagers felt? “And, Joe, without the works, you’d have missed out on a good bit of trade.” She glanced toward the cassettes on the bookcase next to the television.

“Hey, none of your bus—”

Kiernan sat forward. “It’s all my business. Your best shot is with me. You’re savvy enough to know that. You can refuse to tell me, of course, but if you don’t have a real clear explanation of your income and your time, it might end up as the sheriff’s business. How much?”

He hesitated. It was clear he was hiding something. The question was, did that something concern the tapes, or was it another secret he was guarding? The widening of his eyes indicated he’d made his decision. “Three hundred a month.”

“Three hundred, that’s peanuts. You’ve got a captive audience out here.”

Zekk flushed. “Hey, I know that. They’d take one every night if I’d let them. Hell, two or three a night. But you don’t do business that way. You’ve got to think of the future. I don’t want the guys getting bored in a couple months and pressuring Warren for something different. Not different movies, but buses to town or live entertainment. Then I’d be cooked. So I dole out those tapes. Good business.”

Kiernan smiled. Joe Zekk the porno and pottery entrepreneur.

“Point is,” he continued, “that when Austin came up here, I hung around. His coming was a big event for me. Even after he built his monastery.”

“Monastery?”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I called it. The dome outside. He used it like a play monastery.”

Kiernan’s breath quickened. “Because that’s what he really wanted, right? To be in a monastery?”

Zekk dug his toe under a tan T-shirt on the floor and kicked it into the middle of the room. “If he could have done it by his own rules, yeah. He wasn’t likely to put up with monastic bullshit anymore than he was doing with pastoral bullshit. So here he had his very own monastery two days a week.”

“Where he entertained his old girlfriend?”

Zekk’s eyes shot open. He reached for the glass, knocked it over. Half of the liquor sloshed out. “Well … hell, whatever he did there was his business.”

Could Zekk be refusing to rat on his friend? If so, the much-maligned Zekk’s loyalty to his friend was greater than anyone else’s. “Joe, I don’t believe you didn’t know what went on down there. The place is two hundred yards away.”

He interlaced his fingers and pressed his knuckles together, like stunted hands in prayer. “Hey, I wasn’t Austin’s keeper. He hardly bothered to talk to me when he got here. He just went down there. If I knocked on his gate down there he got pissed. You’d think I was going to contaminate the place. He never let me inside the gate. Me, or anyone else. Whatever he was doing down there he really got into it. Eyes all sunk into his head. He got a call once here and I went to get him. He looked like something from the psych ward. Wouldn’t take the call either.” His hands were shaking.

“Who was it from?”

Zekk shrugged. “It was late. I have my own way of passing time.” His hands relaxed and he began twiddling his thumbs. But the stiff deliberateness of the movement betrayed him.

“Joe, can you tell me where you were Tuesday night? I know you weren’t here all evening, till late.”

“Figure it out yourself.”

Kiernan leaned forward. “Joe, I am trying to help you. You don’t understand how much trouble you’re in. And you know no one’s going to help you but me.”

Without actually moving he seemed to draw slightly closer.

Kiernan softened her voice. “You’re admitting that you have no alibi for the night Austin was killed?”

He shrugged.

Pointedly looking at the shelves of tapes, she said, “You didn’t have money when you got here. You’ve got thousands of dollars in video here. Where’s your money coming from?”

“There’s the pottery—” He sounded as if he was making up excuses for not doing his homework.

“What about Philip Vanderhooven? You called him in Maui. What are you selling him?”

“How’d you know—”

“What’d you offer him?”

His thumbs rotated faster, snapping at the web between thumb and forefinger. “Look, I told you Austin was getting screwy. I figured his father should know.”

“You figured his father would pay you to keep tabs on him.”

“Well, so? I’ve got to live.”

“How much, Joe?”

He stared at his hands. “Another two hundred.”

“Still not enough. Who else are you getting it from?”

“No one! I got the tapes discount.”

Kiernan eyed the shelves of them. “Okay, so you bought them in bulk. Where’d you get the money for that?”

“Austin. Austin paid me five thousand in the beginning.”

“Five thousand! For what?”

Joe grinned, clearly delighted at her surprise. His hands flopped on his lap. “Background,” he said.

“On …?” She smiled encouragingly.

“The villagers. Look, it’s nothing sinister. He had a tricky situation with them.”

“About nineteen thirty-eight, huh?”

“Yeah. How’d you …? You’d think the sheriff was hounding them, or all those dead Sheltons were threatening to climb out of their graves and get revenge, the way they act. Hard as hell to get them to talk about the shoot-out.”

She could feel her shoulders tightening in anticipation. “But they did tell you, right, Joe?”

He grinned and held up his glass proudly. “Me and my friend here.”

She leaned forward. “Tell me.”

He drank. “Can’t really blame it on the Church. It’s their own stupid fault, them down there, the McKinleys. They’re Catholic. The Sheltons, they’re the ones in the cemetery, they were some kind of fringe Catholic, but not the real thing. Now, I know I never got the real straight story from McKinley, but the gist of what I got and figured out was that something happened between John McKinley, the old man down there, and some Shelton, and they got to fighting. The whole thing turned into a feud, and then they pretty much formed two camps down there, small as the town is. There was a shoot-out, and the McKinleys won. And after that, mind you, after that the McKinleys started to rationalize and believe they killed off the Sheltons because they weren’t legit, Catholicly speaking.”

“The graveyard is full of Sheltons, but only a couple of McKinleys died that year. It doesn’t sound like a very fair fight.”

He laughed. “Didn’t say it was. John McKinley was no fool. He got himself help.”

“How?”

“He said he was smart.”

“Who helped him?”

Zekk leaned back and let a smile stretch across his face. “Took me a long time to weasel that out of him. You know where John McKinley got the money to buy the guns that killed all those Sheltons in the graveyard down there? I’ll tell you. He got it from the Roman Catholic Church.”

Kiernan whistled. Joe Zekk looked so delighted with himself that he was almost appealing.

Kiernan said, “And that’s what Austin Vanderhooven paid you to find out.”

“Yeah. And I loved it. Jesus, you should have seen Austin’s face when I told him. I’d have done it for free just to see that look.”

“Once Austin found out about the Church’s role in the killings, what did he do about it?”

Zekk’s grin spread across his face. “Not a damned thing.”

I
T WAS NEARLY 3:30
P.M. The drive from Joe Zekk’s place up to the main road, then on a few miles east, past the turnoff to the Warren Works, and onto the deeply rutted dirt road to Hohokam Lodge had taken forty-five minutes so far. For Beth Landau, three quarters of an hour would make rather a pleasant anticipatory interlude on the way to a rendezvous, Kiernan thought. Just enough time to tickle herself with thoughts of Austin Vanderhooven slipping out of his cassock. Kiernan laughed. The man wouldn’t have come to the mountains in full regalia. There in his dome he would have looked like any other reasonably well-built blond unzipping his jeans.

Kiernan left the air-conditioning off and opened the window. The air was muggy, but the breeze made it almost bearable. Khaki-brown clouds covered the sun and blended into the horizon. She felt as if she were driving into the open end of a manila envelope. The wind sputtered streams of dirt across the hardtop, the dust smacked her face, but the thick spikes of cacti and the round squat cholla stood firm.