Leather Maiden (13 page)

“I was dipping taco shells in hot grease,” Tabitha said, just so we'd know she wasn't a slacker.

“So I see some paper towels, and I get one for myself, one for Caroline. She takes it and wipes her eyes. She says, ‘The milk of human kindness. That's not hard, being kind. You know what's really hard?' And I said no. And she says, ‘Killing someone that hasn't done anything to you, and maybe even someone you like or love a little. All the better if they love you.' She thought killing them, not on the spur of the moment, but planning it, was best. Making it a surprise. She thought that was a sign of strength, and she wanted to be that strong. I knew right then I wanted us to get away from her for good.”

Jimmy's face had gone ashen and he was slumping in the chair. The gun was in his lap. He was no longer holding it.

“So after that, you cooled it with her?” I said.

“We'd see her at school,” Tabitha said. “And there she was all prim and proper and shiny and acting like she was just perfect. Last time I spoke with her I tried to just be friendly, you know. No hard feelings we weren't doing the exploring anymore, and she just smiled and touched my cheek, and all that smooth personality stuff melted away, and that face of hers, it was like, you know, like it was from someplace dark and weird. She said, ‘You're not forgotten.'”

“What did you think that meant?” I asked.

“How would you take that?” Tabitha said. “Especially after that little speech she gave Ernie.”

“Anybody else you can think of she hung with?”

“The girl on the video,” Tabitha said. “I saw them together at school. I don't know if they were any more than fuck buddies or not. I got the impression she was running a game on Ronnie, same way she did with your brother and everyone else.”

“Can you describe the Geek?” I asked. “Maybe more about the tattoos?”

“He had a kind of slinky way of moving,” Tabitha said. “Like maybe not all his bones were connected. He was big, but lean, and long-legged, and wore long sleeves no matter what the weather, and loose pants. Shaved his head. He had a squint, and all that silver in his teeth. Very pale skin; white as toilet paper. Usual jailhouse tattoos, done crude-like. The only one I really remember well was this blue one. Wasn't like the others, was professionally done, looked like fingers on the back of his neck. You know, like a dead hand was reaching up out of the collar of his shirt and grabbing him by the back of the neck.”

“What about Glug?”

“He had a kind of bad eye,” Ernie said. “I don't know it was dead or not, but it was discolored, milky blue. The other eye was brown.”

I nodded. “Anything else about Caroline you can think of?” I said. “Anything at all?”

Tabitha shrugged. “She liked to read. And she liked puzzles.”

“That's true,” Jimmy said, almost causing me to jump. “She loved mysteries, true crime books and puzzles.”

I thought: My hobbies are urban exploring, being peed on and hinting that I might be a murderous Satanist, reading mysteries and working puzzles in my spare time.

“She liked Edgar Allan Poe,” Tabitha said. “And this obscure poet and writer Jerzy Fitzgerald. She quoted him sometimes. Another thing she did, and I suppose it's related to the puzzle and mystery stuff she liked: She was always taking a souvenir when we went out, which is something we did too, but she wanted to leave something that showed we had been there. Some subtle clue. We'd slip into an office, and she'd turn someone's name plate around. Put, like, you know, a paper clip in their chair. One time she put a ballpoint pen up herself.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“Not the sharp end,” Tabitha said. “It was one of those fat pens, with a lid on it. She thought it was funny. I kept thinking, maybe even hoping, the cap would come off inside her. She put it back on the desk, placed the pen next to the guy's photograph of his wife and kids. She called it a statement.”

“That's one way of looking at it,” I said. “You think the Geek had anything to do with her going missing?”

Tabitha shrugged. “I wasn't surprised she disappeared, her and the Geek. I was relieved. That put them out of our hair.”

“Was the Geek on the DVDs?”

“Not on any we looked at,” Ernie said.

“Do you know where this Geek, Stitch, lived? Anything about them that you might not have told us?”

“No idea where they lived. But the Geek had a weird accent, like it was Southern and Northern both…I mean, he mixed words, phrases. Had a kind of eloquent way of speaking, mixed it with thug's talk. Always seemed to have some kind of plan going the rest of us didn't know about.”

“That's an odd feeling to have,” I said.

“Might not be anything to it,” Ernie said. “But I felt that way.”

“Can you tell me any more about Ronnie?” I said.

“Not really,” Tabitha said. “We knew her through school. She seemed nice. Like we said, we think Caroline duped her too. She went home.”

“Went home?”

“Dropped out, went home. Least I think she did. That's what I heard.”

“All right,” I said, “some of the coincidence is down. Let me ask this. You went and you got the DVDs, but you say you didn't know they were there. That sounds like too much.”

“She mentioned she was making them,” Ernie said. “So I knew there were DVDs.”

“Why do you think she told you?” I asked.

“I think it was part of her chance taking,” Ernie said. “The Geek, when she told us that, he said something like, ‘You wouldn't want to mention that to anyone.' There's a part of me that thinks it was all some kind of game, like he was just wanting us to screw with those DVDs, or say something about them.”

“Do you think Caroline was planning to blackmail all along?” I asked.

“She never said that,” Ernie said. “She just said she had a way to make some people pay, so I think she might have had plans like that. It's where we got the idea.”

“Where were the DVDs?”

“The big Baptist church,” Ernie said. “It has a big gold dome on top. You probably know it.”

“No shit?” Jimmy said. “North Baptist Church?”

“No shit,” he said.

“What led you there?” I said.

“That's where Caroline went to church,” he said.

“Church,” Jimmy said. “She never went to church.”

“That you knew of,” Tabitha said. “That was part of her game, jacking everyone around. She went all right. And you want to know why?”

“Of course we do,” I said.

Tabitha turned theatrical, gave us a long pause and leaned forward, said, “She fucked the preacher. Reverend Gus Dinkins.”

Everything Dad had told me about Dinkins and his League popped into my head.

Ernie continued: “She saw him on TV. Has a Sunday show. He's not as big-time, rolling in the money as some of the God Squad, but for this town he's rich, and it's from milking people with his bullshit.”

“Well,” Tabitha said, and her voice took on a confessional tone, “he is good-looking, and he used to play football at the university. He quit because he didn't like the idea of showering in mixed showers.”

“I never heard that,” Jimmy said.

“And you never will…openly. But he told Caroline that. Pillow talk. She admired that about him. He was always talking about sin, and about how sinners who cheated on their wives, fornicated without the benefit of marriage, and those mixing races would go to hell.”

“But he did all that, except for the mixing races part,” Jimmy said.

“He thinks he's doing God's work,” Tabitha said, “and because of that, it's okay that he does it. That's what he told her, or at least that's what she told me. I don't know why she confided in me, but she did. And in Ernie. Like we were saying, I think she liked playing it on the edge, liked to see where our loyalties were.”

“And Caroline was all right with this guy?” Jimmy asked.

“She was a racist,” Ernie said. “And big-time.”

“I never heard her say anything like that,” Jimmy said.

“Did you discuss race?” Tabitha asked.

Jimmy took a moment to collect his thoughts.

“No,” Jimmy said. “It never came up.”

“That's because something else came up,” Ernie said.

I looked at Jimmy. He was blushing, but I didn't think it had anything to do with Ernie's comment. I think he was embarrassed about how he had been played.

“She probably would have lied had you discussed race, because she had a good idea where you stood,” Tabitha said. “But, Caroline, she said the N word a lot. She called black people nappy-headed and burr-heads. Especially when she was with Stitch.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“She told me she fucked him,” Tabitha said. “I got the impression he might really mean something to her. Maybe not so much as a lover, but as a mentor. You should be glad she's gone.”

“I don't know she cared for Dinkins at all,” Ernie said. “That's how she played things. Made people think she cared. I think Dinkins was just another chump to her.”

“Okay,” I said, “but how did the DVDs end up in the church? Last time I ask, and then I let Jimmy pistol-whip the shit out of the both of you.”

“We don't really know,” Ernie said. “We aren't shitting you on that. We chose the church because Caroline talked about the Reverend. I guess we saw it as some kind of interloping against her, especially since she and Stitch were gone. We found the DVDs by accident. But it's not such a coincidence. We knew her, she knew Dinkins, and she talked about the church and we liked to urban explore. It all just came together.”

Jimmy said, “How many history teachers were on the videos?”

Ernie looked at Jimmy. “All the men on the left side of the front office.”

“The goddamn whore,” Jimmy said.

“Is the preacher on any of the DVDs?” I asked.

“He's not,” Ernie said. “Unless he's on one of those we didn't get.”

“So you decided to blackmail?” I said.

“It was easy for us to sneak notes into the teachers' boxes,” Ernie said. “We're up there all the time. They brought money. All of them. You were supposed to be the last. Though we been thinking about going back, getting the rest of the DVDs.”

“And where is this money you got?” I asked.

“We have it hid,” Ernie said.

“All of these guys, were they ten-thousand-dollar pops?” I asked.

“Mostly,” Ernie said.

“That's a lot of college money,” I said.

“I thought I could pay for college and get a good car and pay off some credit cards,” Tabitha said. “It wasn't like we were stealing.”

“No,” I said. “It's exactly like stealing. You thought you were going to end up farting through silk. You ought to give it back some way or another. I'm not going to be the one to make you, but you ought to.”

Neither Tabitha nor Ernie said anything to that.

“Where in the church were these DVDs?” I asked.

“The attic,” Tabitha said. “Behind the Christmas ornaments.”

I smiled at that. I said, “Tell me how you got in the church, what your method was.”

“Who cares?” Jimmy said.

I ignored him, said, “Tell me.”

“You can't go in from the front,” Ernie said. “There are lots of lights. The parking lot is well lit up, and so are the front and the sides of the church, bright as a floor show. There's a little stretch of trees behind it, and a creek. You got to come down the creek, go up from the rear. And you still got to be careful. There are lights back there, but no one is going to see you if you don't stand around, and they aren't as bright. That's where they ought to really be bright, but they aren't. There's an angle where you can be seen from the highway, but only if you stand around. You get to the back steps, there's a stone banister on either side, and all you got to do is duck down.”

“How'd you go up the back way?” I asked Ernie.

“We left our car in the little park behind the fire station. You can walk down to the creek from there. There's a big culvert, and you can get inside of it and go along until it empties out on some gravel. There's a little run cut there so the excess water trails off into the woods. Some parts of the year, it wouldn't be a good trip. Water would be rushing through too high and too fast. You come out, you go to the back door of the church, change shoes, go in the back way.”

“Change shoes?”

“Yeah,” Ernie said. “The idea is for them to never know, or at least not be certain, anyone was ever there. No tracks. No clues. Except for the stuff like Caroline did, the paper clip, that kind of crazy bullshit, but nothing that will lead anyone to you. The back door church lock is pie. All you got to do is stick a credit card in between the door and lock, and that moves it, then you lift up and it'll open. They got this fancy, expensive church, and it has locks a blind, two-fingered retard could open.”

“Describe where the DVDs were,” I said. “In a little detail.”

Ernie looked at me curiously, then slowly he began to explain.

“There's a stage up front. There's a big purple curtain and another stage behind that. It's elevated. I guess it's for the choir. You go back there behind the curtain, there's a little run of stairs and they go up to a landing. It has a rail on it and it looks down on the second stage, the one in the back. If you go along the landing, you find another stairway on the other side, and that one zigzags and makes the platform above. It goes around in a circle inside the dome, and there are three little rooms off the landing. Going up there I felt like that guy in that play, the
Phantom of the Opera.
It was the center room where we found the DVDs, back by the wall under a window, next to the Christmas decorations. There's a baby Jesus manger, a plastic lamb and a Christmas tree in a box, you know, an artificial one.”