The Fifth Script: The Lacey Lockington Series - Book One (21 page)

“I don’t think so.”

“Then
why
?”

“Well, for one thing, he was the
Morning Sentinel’s
chief attorney. For another, he came to Classic Investigations looking for help, apparently. There’s a loose thread hanging somewhere, Moose—there always is. Say, just for the hell of it, have Bugs Grayson run Fisher through the computer—that’s Gordon G. Fisher. Got it?”

Moose Katzenbach heaved his bulk from the straight-backed chair. “How about the telephone—I still don’t answer it?”

Lockington said, “Look, it’s unlikely, but if I need you, I’ll ring twice, hang up, ring twice, hang up, and ring again—pay no attention to anything else. Duke Denny would skin me alive if he called here and got Moose Katzenbach, the guy he’d just fired.”

Moose said, “I’m gonna give Curtin the finger.” He headed for the door, then held up, turning to Lockington. “Hey, if we bust this one, you think maybe Duke would take me back?”

“Moose, this has all the earmarks of a national interest item. If we bust it, you could wind up being interviewed by Carson.”

Moose grinned, slapping his knee. “God
damn
, Lacey, Helen would sure like that! Helen never misses Carson because once in a while he gets animals on the show.”

Lockington nodded. “More like five nights a week, wouldn’t you say?”

Chicago’s west suburban telephone directory had the listing—Wright, Rev. Abraham J., 2397 Scott Street, 455-7600.

The old Pontiac clanged into Franklin Park, rolling west on Grand Avenue, turning south on Scott Street, the roughest thoroughfare in the northern hemisphere, Lockington was certain. The building stood on the southeastern corner of the Scott and Fullerton Avenue intersection, a dilapidated, one-story, red-brick affair that’d once been a coffee and tea warehouse if Lockington’s dim memories of Franklin Park were serving him correctly. He pulled into the gravel parking lot, stopping there to kill the engine.

Lockington checked out the scene. There was a crude wooden cross, fashioned from 2x4’s, nailed lopsidedly over the entrance, and on the northern wall of the structure was an amateurishly-lettered black-on-white sign: FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST OUR GLORIUS AND CRUCIFRIED REDEEMER–REVEREND ABRAHAM J. WRIGHT, PASTOR AND TRESUROR. Lockington noted that TRESUROR had been underlined. He left his car to crunch across the gravel and try the door. It was locked. Then he spotted the buzzer and punched it a couple of times, waiting until the door swung groaningly inward, sounding very much like a medieval drawbridge being lowered, Lockington thought. Or raised. Lockington possessed no authoritative knowledge of medieval drawbridges. A tall, bony, scraggly-haired woman stood in the doorway, listing perceptibly to starboard, eyeing him up and down. She was either a young-looking older lady or an old-looking younger lady. She had a black eye, a swollen jaw, a lacerated upper lip, a few gaps in her mouth where teeth once were, and she was at least six months pregnant—and drunker than forty barrels of owl manure. “Yesh?” she lisped, experiencing difficulty with her balance.

Lockington shrugged a non-committal shrug, not prepared to go on record at such an early stage in the ballgame.

The woman grabbed the doorframe for support. “Look, oshifer,” she said, “thish whole thing all horbull mishtake—he never laid hand on me like I tole you on phone—whah happen wash am fall down goddam stairsh, sho you go way, okay?”

Lockington said, “Ma’am, I’m seeking an audience with Reverend Abraham J. Wright, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The hell he didn’t—Lockington had pulled more than his share of Chicago southside assignments.

“You not cop?” She fell forward, inflexible as a redwood, and Lockington crouched, catching her on a jutting shoulder, planting her in a more or less upright position. He said, “No, ma’am, I not cop.”

She nodded, stepping unsteadily aside to grant him entrance, closing and securing the door with fumbling hands before leading him through a deserted meeting area that would have handled approximately seventy-five people, the room furnished with unfinished backless wooden benches, a splintered piano, and a lectern that had once been a packing crate. Lettered on the front of the makeshift lectern were the words JESUS WANTS YOU FOR A SUNBEEM.

They proceeded down a long dim hallway that reeked of fried onions, his guide ricocheting from wall to wall like a ping-pong ball, and Lockington wondered if she’d gotten whacked in the mouth because she’d been drunk or if she’d gotten drunk because she’d been whacked in the mouth, deciding that it’d probably been one of those chicken-or-the-egg things, and that whichever had come first hadn’t been first by much.

The woman raised her hand, halting Lockington’s advance, this immediately prior to her opening a door and reeling into a room where she fell flat on her face. From the hallway Lockington could see a stout gray-haired man of some fifty years who sat behind a desk, peering through thick-lensed spectacles. He wore a red sweatshirt on which was emblazoned ABRAHAM J. WRIGHT MINISTRIES, INC., and he smiled at Lockington, saying, “A good mornin’ to y’all, brother!”

Lockington entered the office, stepping carefully over the untwitching woman on the floor. He said, “Likewise.” He scanned the room in search of a place to sit, settling for a stack of telephone books. He said, “You’re Reverend Abraham J. Wright?”

“The same, brother, the very same!” He reached to shake Lockington’s hand and Lockington observed that his knuckles were skinned and bruised. Reverend Abraham J. Wright smiled expansively. “Now, brother, y’all juss gonna hafta ’scuse the good Sister Lucy Penrod—Sister Lucy Penrod done receivin’ the Holy Ghost and there juss ain’t no predictin’ the behavior of them as is privileged to host His Divine Presence!”

Lockington nodded. “Yeah, I notice that for openers, the Holy Ghost kicked the good Sister Lucy Penrod’s front teeth out.”

The Reverend Abraham J. Wright cleared his throat, checking a desk calendar. “Wall, brother, since y’all the gentleman interested in the comin’ of the anti-Christ—”

Lockington said, “Uhh-h-h, well, Reverend Wright, there seems to be some misunderstanding here, because—”

“Ain’t no misunderstandin’, brother, no
how
—the anti-Christ ain’t made his appearance yet, but he gonna git here, yes-siree, he gonna come in with a
bang
! He gonna be accepted worldwide as the rat man at the rat time, and, brother, thass when the manure gonna hit the windmill, thass when—”

Lockington said, “Yes, this is extremely interesting, but the reason I’m here is to inquire about—”

The woman on the floor moaned, heaving herself to sitting position. She looked bewilderedly around the room, rolled her eyes, said “Shit!” and collapsed, spread-eagled on her back.

The Reverend Abraham J. Wright said, “Oh, glory, the Holy Ghost rilly doin’ a number on the good Sister Lucy Penrod this mornin’—she sho’ nuff in ecstasy!”

Lockington didn’t say anything, a policy that had paid handsome dividends from time to time.

The Reverend Abraham J. Wright said, “The Lord be praised! When that roll is called up yonder, the good Sister Lucy Penrod gonna
be
there!”

Lockington said, “At this rate, she may be there to
call
it. Reverend, I’ve been given to understand that you’re familiar with the conservative element in these United States—I’m talking about extremist right-wing groups.”

Reverend Wright said, “Yes, wall, y’see, brother, y’all gittin’ rat back to where the possum pooped in the pea-patch! Thass ezackly how the anti-Christ is gonna look to this here whole gullible world—he gonna look conservative, he gonna look
rat-wing
, he gonna look good, brother, I mean
good
! He gonna look
so
good that the people gonna fall all over theyselves elevatin’ him to the pinnacle of world govinment, because by that there time, the people gonna have had enough of this here liberal stuff, the Godlessness, the indecriminit sex, the drugs, the filthy movies, the lack of respeck for the aged, and all these here Communist-inspired false—”

Lockington cut in on him. “Reverend, tell me, have you ever heard of an organization known as ‘LAON’?”

Wright squinted at Lockington. “‘LAON’? Whassit all about?”

“‘LAON’ stands for ‘Law and Order Now.’ It’s a radical faction, possibly given to violence, or so I’ve been told.”

Wright frowned, opening a desk drawer to produce a sheaf of papers, thumbing his way slowly through it, then repeating the process before glancing up, shaking his head. “Ain’t no such outfit listed here, brother.”

“Well, it’s probably very small—”

“Don’t make no never-mind how small it is—this here ‘LAON’ could be holdin’ its conventions in a
phone booth
, and it’d still be on this here list! Y’see, I happens to be a student of such affairs on account thass where the anti-Christ gonna come from! He gonna pop outten the ranks of one of these here far-right movements, and I gonna be layin’ in the tall weeds fer that rascal! Brother, y’all talkin’ to the man what gonna alter the course of Biblical prophecy, you juss stick aroun’ an’ watch!”

Lockington studied the Reverend Abraham J. Wright. Behind the thick-lensed spectacles his eyes glittered, and there was spittle foam on his lower lip. Lockington said, “Well, thank you for your time and patience, Reverend.”

“That gonna be twenty-five dollars, brother—the standard consultation fee,” Wright said.

Lockington shrugged, taking out his wallet to drop a twenty and a five on the desk-top.

“Brother, I got a special package offer what oughta int’rest y’all—fer another twenty-five you git one of these here Wright Ministries sweatshirts, red, blue or black, and y’all git yer soul saved at the same time! I gonna put y’all on that high road to Heaven, shoutin’, ‘Glory, Hallelujah, to the Lamb of Calvary!’”

Lockington got to his feet. He said, “Another time, perhaps.” He went out, stepping over the prostrate body of the good Sister Lucy Penrod. He drove back to Grand Avenue, turning east, listening to the tune he was humming, identifying it from his childhood church-going days. It would have made one helluva polka, Lockington thought.

Stunned and on short notice, Lockington hadn’t tried to locate her relatives. He’d simply claimed her body and made the best arrangements he’d been able to afford. There’d been a funeral service of a sort, conducted in a sleet storm by a preacher of a sort. Two mourners had stood at graveside—Lacey Lockington and Duke Denny. Denny had seen his ex-partner through the gut-wrenching ordeal, at his side every bitter inch of the way. Lockington had never gotten around to introducing Julie Masters to Denny, but he’d spoken often of her, and Duke had told him that he’d felt like he’d known her personally, so vividly had Lockington sketched the woman, her likes and dislikes, her needs, her idiosyncrasies, her hopes for the future that was to be cut so short as to amount to hardly any future at all.

They’d trudged through the cemetery in February’s slashing wind and Duke had said, “Want a drink, partner?”

Lockington had shaken his head. “Maybe next time, Duke—I gotta get my world glued back together. Thanks, anyway—thanks for
every
thing.”

Denny had squeezed Lockington’s arm. He’d said, “We’ll get this bastard, Lacey—whoever he is, wherever he is, he’ll surface one of these days, and we’ll nail him! Did Julie ever mention anybody—an ex-boy friend, maybe?”

“Just a guy named Herzog—he was somewhere in her past—prominent once, but that was over.”

“Are you
sure
it was over?”

“Positive.”

“
Why
are you positive?”

“Because she told me so.”

Denny had said, “I can’t argue with that, partner. Look, if you come across anything—if you get a lead, I’ll help you run it down.”

“I know that, Duke.” Lockington had turned away to hide the last of his tears. He’d driven slowly to his empty Barry Avenue apartment, leaving a bit of himself to be lowered into a hole in the ground.

Erika Elwood had been a client of Classic Investigations for approximately eighteen hours. She’d remained unassassinated and she’d been a ring-tailed tornado in bed, neither development being so much as remotely connected to Lockington’s acceptance of her case. In the first place, there’d been no call to defend her, and in the second place, Erika Elwood’s sexual proficiency could have been born only of arduous practice, beginning back about the time Erika had turned fourteen, Lockington figured. At the moment, Lacey Lockington rated as very little more than an easily-seduced plug-ugly bodyguard, but situations change, and in Chicago they change abruptly.

He reached his apartment shortly before noon. He checked his mailbox, discarded a circular having to do with Texas ruby red grapefruit, showered, changed clothing, and attempted to phone Duke Denny in Cleveland. Jack Slifka answered on the second ring, and Lockington said, “Hello, Jack, this is Lockington.”

“Lockington?”

“Lacey Lockington in Chicago—we’ve gone this route before.”

“Gotcha—you’re the guy who’s watching the store while Duke’s here in Cleveland, right.”

“Right.”

“And you wanta talk to Duke, right?”

“You’re on a roll, Jack.”

“Gotcha, Lockington! Well, old Duke’s downtown at his lawyer’s office—it got something to do with money.”

“There ain’t no other reason to be in a lawyer’s office, is there?”

“Gotcha! Hey, you’re one sharp article, Lockington!”

“I was given the distinct impression that Duke was going to get that matter straightened out yesterday afternoon.”

“Yeah, and Duke was given the distinct impression that you were gonna be someplace where he could call you last night!”

“He tried?”

“Hell, yes, a couple dozen times—at some tavern and at your apartment!”

“Yeah, well, sorry—something came up—something I should discuss with Duke.”

“Gotcha! I’ll have him call you the minute he comes in. You’re at the office?”

“Will be, in an hour, give or take—I’m out to lunch.”

“Gotcha! Be a good boy, Lockington.”