The Glitter Dome (14 page)

But Martin Welborn was one of those self-proclaimed fair-to-middling detectives who never constructed fences, and often lost his perspective, and now was in danger of losing his sense of humor as well. Which is why Al Mackey was so tense lately, and had a nearly irresistible urge to go to Marty's apartment and mix up his paprika and cinnamon, or maybe throw his socks into his underwear drawer just to see if Marty could handle it.

There was something else bothering Al Mackey: the obsessive stops at St. Vibiana's Cathedral damn near every time they went downtown to the police building. In more than twenty years Al Mackey had never had a partner want to visit a church. It was unnatural.

Martin Welborn knew he shouldn't stay long. Al would be anxious to get back to Hollywood. It was amazing how quickly time passed in St. Vibiana's Cathedral. He remembered attending mass here in the early reign of John XXIII, when he would have walked with a sickbed strapped to his back before missing mass. Before the vernacular masses, and guitar masses, and charismatic priests, and the groping and pawing at the end of these secularized services: “Let us offer each other the sign of peace!” When strangers turned with embarrassed or forlorn or beatific faces toward one another, depending upon their degree of intelligence, and shook hands. And Martin Welborn wanted to run away
.

How dare they intrude between him and his God? How dare these benighted priests fail to see that by emasculating the ritual and mystery and guilt, they castrated The Faith. All the Catholic Church ever had been was ritual and mystery and guilt. And that was Everything. That was Order. Who could wish for more from God or man? Perfect Order
.

It was time to go and he hadn't found it yet. He stood up to look over the second pew in front of him in the empty cathedral. Then he saw it. It had been left in a different pew today. This was the third visit he'd made this week. He'd even made a visit one evening after work. It was written in pencil on lined notebook paper. The hand that wrote the note was unsteady and light. The note said: “Never Fail Novena. Most Sacred Heart of Jesus be praised and glorified now and forever. Most Sacred Heart of Jesus pray for us. Mother of God, Mary most holy, pray for us. Good Saint Theresa pray for us. Saint Jude, help of the hopeless, pray for us. One Our Father, one Hail Mary, one Glory be. Nine days novena. Leave a copy each day at church. At end of nine days your prayer will be answered
.”

Martin Welborn read it twice, was tempted to say the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory be, but didn't. He hadn't said a prayer in a long time. He placed the note back on the pew where he found it and left the cathedral to join Al Mackey
.

Before he left, he had a fleeting memory of the old cardinal, now dead so many years. When he was a young policeman in uniform, before the total devastation wrought by Vatican II, he loved to attend the solemn high masses and hear the Gregorian choir. The old cardinal was a rock, but the legacy of Vatican II would have eventually killed him if age hadn't. Martin Welborn would never forget the majesty of the old man as he chanted the ancient Latin rite. Martin Welborn once got to kneel and kiss the old man's ring. The cardinal wore lovely crimson slippers
.

“You were in there twenty minutes this time,” Al Mackey said when Martin Welborn trotted down the steps of St. Vibiana's, dodging two sleeping winos who were about to be carried into the big blue drunk wagon which was making its rounds.

“Was I? I couldn't have been in there that long.”

“I'm telling you, Marty. Twenty minutes. What do you
do
in there?”

“Nothing. It's peaceful.”

“Do you pray or what?”

“Not hardly.”

“Then what do you
do
in there? Burgle the poor box? What?”

“I sit.”

Al Mackey shook his head and sighed and drove up Los Angeles Street onto the Hollywood Freeway. They rode quietly for a few minutes and Al Mackey said, “I don't know how to say this … You see, I think … Marty, I'd like to talk to you about something.”

“Of course, my son.” Martin Welborn smiled. He looked exceptionally tranquil. He always looked exceptionally tranquil lately. And that's what was making Al Mackey exceptionally nervous.

“We've been partners a long time, Marty. I got the right.”

“What right, Al?”

“I got the right to jam into your business.”

“Jam away.”

“I, uh, I have an opinion. I'm not pretending to be an expert, but I have an opinion. My opinion is that you oughtta go talk to somebody.”

“Somebody?”

“A doctor, maybe. Like that doctor we met on that Simpson case. He was a nice guy.”

“The psychiatrist?”

“Yeah. Somebody like that.”

“What would I tell a psychiatrist?”

“Goddamn it, Marty, I don't know!” Al Mackey had to hit the brakes as the freeway motorists slowed to ogle some poor bastard getting a speeding ticket. Better him than me!

“I wouldn't know either, Al,” Martin Welborn said serenely.

“Okay, you could start by telling him why you like to hang upside down like a freaking dead fish!”

“I have a sore back, Al. I've had a whiplash injury, remember?”

“Okay, then tell him why you go to church more than the Pope, why don't you?”

“It's peculiar to make occasional visits to a church? I told you I don't pray, if that's troubling you. I like the architecture. I wanted to be married there but we couldn't arrange it.”

“Okay, then talk to him about your marriage. Tell him how hard you took it when Paula walked out. Talk about how tough the separation has been for you.”

“Haven't both your divorces been tough on you, Al? Separation? Isn't it tough on everybody? Remorse. Guilt. Recriminations. Rather common, wouldn't you say?”

Al Mackey was losing patience with the stalled traffic and started blasting the horn. “Why don't you write a letter?” he yelled out the window at the car in front.

“Calm yourself, my lad,” Martin Welborn chuckled. “Maybe
you
should visit the good doctor.” Martin Welborn looked at an ancient Filipino with an aluminum walker, moving down Temple Street at a rate of six inches per step. “Imagine how it is to go back
up
,” he said.

Al Mackey took a deep breath, wiped his brow with his hand, and looked at the surprising amount of moisture he found there. Then he said, “Okay, Marty, I've got something you can discuss with the shrink. You can discuss the fact that your drinking glasses are lined up like a goddamn chess game. And your spice cabinet looks like three rows of checkers. And your socks and underwear and shirts look like you're waiting for the inspector general.”

“Is there something wrong with being neat?”

“You were never that neat.
Nobody
was ever that neat. You've just been getting a bit …
too
neat lately.”

“I'll try to be a little sloppier if it'll make you happier, Al,” Martin Welborn said good-naturedly.

“Oh, screw it!” Al Mackey said.

“Let's make another follow-up on Bonnie Lee Brewster, Al,” Martin Welborn said. “Just one more time.”

Just one more time. It had been just one more time at least once a week for the past three months. That was another thing he'd like Marty to talk to the shrink about, Bonnie Lee Brewster and these crazy “follow-ups” that Marty insisted on making to that psycho old woman, Auntie Rosa.

She lived up above Franklin Avenue in one of those spooky old houses that suited her style and business. Palm reading and crystal gazing and looking into one's
past
was legal enough in the city of Los Angeles and one could even get paid for it, but the second a psychic or medium took one step into the future and made a prediction for money, the medium or psychic would be wearing bracelets of steel instead of gold, and find herself charged with a bunco crime. Auntie Rosa broke the law from time to time, but the police had pretty much let her be since she had come in very handy on a few cases involving missing and murdered children. So far, she wasn't hitting the mark on ten-year-old Bonnie Lee Brewster, but she called Martin Welborn regularly. Sometimes she wept during the calls. It was right there, swimming in a mist over her bed, the figure of Bonnie Lee Brewster in a blue dress with white knee socks and a yellow Snoopy pin on her white collar. And no one told Auntie Rosa. The press didn't know because there was an incorrect clothing description broadcast on the police frequencies the day Bonnie Lee Brewster disappeared. The child had changed clothes and her mother didn't even know it for twenty-four hours. But Auntie Rosa called Hollywood Detectives and talked to Martin Welborn and
she
knew.

The little girl was last seen talking to a man two blocks from her home on Ivar Avenue. There was blood found near the alley. There was no ransom demand. Nothing. In the past Auntie Rosa had “found” the sodomized, butchered body of an eleven-year-old boy in a culvert near the Los Angeles River. On another occasion, she “heard” a five-year-old girl crying out for help in the attic of a stucco cottage in Eagle Rock. Auntie Rosa described the house and street so minutely that police found the house and the lunatic child chained in the attic by her parents.

So, even though cops are generally skeptics, not many laughed overtly at Auntie Rosa, and nobody was tossing her in the hoosegow for occasionally making a few bucks by looking into the future of the ladies of the neighborhood.

Al Mackey couldn't stand the smell of the sniffling old hag. She smelled like fish and garlic and onions and cats. Al Mackey thought she must have a hundred cats, and he started his psychosomatic sneezing when they got within a block of the corny old house with all the theatrical trappings.

Martin Welborn was very respectful of Auntie Rosa and she was always glad to see them. She had a goiter hanging from her neck and limped painfully on thick wrapped legs. Auntie Rosa was ageless, and they were never certain whether or not she was a Caucasian. Al Mackey suspected she was some kind of Eurasian, but with a blue-black dye job and double face-lift it was hard to tell.

“You know, Sergeant Welborn,” the old woman said, when they sat down in the musty parlor, “I saw Bonnie very clearly Tuesday night. I cried myself to sleep. She was calling for me, my darling Bonnie.”

Auntie Rosa always referred to missing children as her darlings.

“That child's dead,” Al Mackey said. “There was blood.”

“She's not, Sergeant Mackey! Oh, she's not!” Auntie Rosa cried, and her head began a palsied bounce, a legacy of her last stroke. The goiter danced and bobbed.

“Now, now, Auntie Rosa, I agree with you,” Martin Welborn said. “I think Bonnie's alive somewhere.”

“She
is
, Sergeant Welborn! She's alive and she knows we're searching for her!”

As she said it a cat chased a kitten across Al Mackey's feet, making him shiver. Goddamn spooky old dame!

“Is she … being harmed, Auntie Rosa?” Martin Welborn asked quietly.

Then the old woman started to cry. She wheezed and sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I believe she's being harmed, Sergeant Welborn. She calls, but it's like a very strange siren's song. Like … like she
wants
us to come, but there's
danger
all around her. Like there's a breathing burning force that lurks. That waits for
us
, Sergeant Welborn!”

“That child's dead,” Al Mackey said, but they didn't seem to hear.

“Now, now, Auntie Rosa,” Martin Welborn said, when the old woman's palsy got so violent she started spilling her tea.

“The devil is a raging lion, Sergeant Welborn!”

“I don't know, Auntie Rosa,” Martin Welborn said soothingly, as he patted her liver-spotted hand. “I think he may just be a dumb little coyote.
If
he exists at all.”

“Oh, he's real, Sergeant Welborn. He's
real
!”

“Let's hope so,” Martin Welborn said, still patting the old woman's hand. “Life would be unbearable if we didn't have the devil, now wouldn't it?”

The old woman oozed a raspy wheeze of a laugh, and said, “You're absolutely right, Sergeant Welborn. Life would be
hell
without the devil.”

“If you hear or see anything, just
anything
of Bonnie Lee Brewster, you call me, Auntie Rosa. At the station or at home. Day or night. Anytime.”

“You're a fine boy, Sergeant Welborn,” Auntie Rosa said. The palsy diminished as the detectives rose to leave.

“Thanks, but I'm just a fair-to-middling detective. I need your help.”

“We'll find Bonnie, Sergeant Welborn,” Auntie Rosa said, her goiter buttery in the lamplight. “No … she'll find us!”

When they were driving back toward the station, Al Mackey said, “Anyplace else you'd like to go now, Marty? The ding ward at the Veterans' Hospital, maybe? Course even there we might not find anybody as nutty as Auntie Rosa to talk to. Maybe we should see an astrologer? How about we go on
The Gong Show?
”

“I'd like to go to the bowling alley parking lot one more time, Al. I want to pace it off. I want to talk to the employees.”

“The employees? They've been interviewed and reinterviewed. They closed early. They saw nothing, Marty. Nigel St. Claire didn't know bowling balls from elephant's nuts, for chrissake!”

“Okay, let's just pace off the parking lot. Let's just … get a
smell
of the area.”

And that's the kind of detective Marty had become, and that was exactly the
wrong
kind of detective to be, in Al Mackey's opinion. He said, “Marty, deductive thinkers solve crimes. You and Basil Rathbone always agreed on that. Mystics belong in dark bedrooms up in Laurel Canyon floating in homemade tanks of Jello with all those out-of-work actors looking for their life force. The only cop I know that solves crimes sniffing the air works with the airport detail and has four legs, a bushy tail, and bad breath.”