Costume Not Included (13 page)

  On the other hand, Hardacre's show was seen by millions – really, she had no idea of the ratings, but it must be a lot of people if he stayed on the air – and being seen on TV was how you became a celebrity. Maybe she should do some research to see how other prophets ranked in the fame sweepstakes.

  Chesney had gone to sleep with a hand resting on her tummy. She put her own over his and thought about what he'd said about being happy just to be a crimefighter. And, she had to admit, to have her in his life. Then she thought about some of the celebrities whose escapades she'd followed on TV or in the tabloids. Were they happy having their private parts photographed getting out of limos and their private doings spread across the pages of magazines?

  She was sure that Hardacre wanted to use Chesney and didn't care how it made him feel. Was she falling under the same spell? The question kept her awake while he slept contentedly beside her. She listened to his deep, regular breathing and thought, what's wrong with what we've got?

 

Lieutenant Denby came into work at seven in the morning. The four bank robbers' rap sheets were on his desk, as he had requested before heading home the night before. So was a blue slip of paper – a message from the chief's office: John Edgar Hoople wanted to see him forthwith. The lieutenant slipped the blue paper under the four files, and turned to the first robber's criminal history. He read the summary, then went through the other three in rapid succession. They told him everything he needed to know, particularly that there were federal warrants out on all of them.

  He picked up the phone and called the patrol sergeant. "Did we tell the feebs yet about the four orphans we found on the doorstep last night?"

  Conyers said, "Somehow, in all the confusion, nobody made that call."

  "Good," said Denby. "Give me an hour."

  "Speaking of feebs, J. Edgar Hoohah's looking for you. He came in special early."

  "We must have a bad line. I can't make out what you're saying."

  "Watch yourself, loot," said the sergeant.

  Denby made another call, this one to the sergeant who oversaw the holding cells. He waited five minutes, then went down one floor to the interview rooms. Behind the door to room number three, a heavy-set, balding man who needed a shave put down the paper cup from which he had been drinking coffee and stared straight ahead across the table. Denby sat down in the man's line of vision and studied him for a while.

  The suspect's name was Boden. According to the Police Central computer, he had spent his adult life pointing guns at people and relieving them of valuable objects: jewelry, furs, in one instance a shipment of gold coins, but mostly it had been bundles of currency found lying around in bank vaults. He'd done time twice, never snitched to get a reduced sentence; in fact, he was still serving the last three-to-ten he'd been handed, having escaped from a state penitentiary in Louisiana, presumably with the help of a bribable warden.

  Denby had brought no files with him, not even a notepad. He finished studying the man and said, "I'm not going to interrogate you. The only thing we could get you for is possession of stolen property and illegally parking in the yellow zone outside. Besides, the feds will be here soon to take you off our hands."

  Boden took another sip of the coffee. Denby noticed a tremor in the man's hands. "So," he said, "what's the point?"

  "How'd you get here?" The lieutenant could tell from the flicker in the bank robber's gaze that Boden knew he wasn't asking what route they'd taken, coming up from New Orleans, where they'd hit three banks last week. But the man said nothing.

  "Listen," Denby said, "this is off the record. I'm not taking notes, there's no recorder running, you can see there are no cameras and no two-way mirror."

  Boden looked around, then back at the lieutenant. A series of expressions crossed his jowly face as he wrestled with something in his head. Finally, he said, "Just you and me?"

  "Scout's honor."

  Boden drained the coffee and crumpled the cup, threw it into a corner. "I gotta tell somebody," he said.

  "I know the feeling," Denby said. "There has been some weird shit happening around here, and you just stepped in it."

  The bank robber's face went still as he consulted his memory. "We were gassing up at the Texaco," he said. "I go into the store to get some smokes and take a leak. When I come back, Schultzy is paying at the pump with a debit card."

  Denby didn't ask whose card it was. He wouldn't be seeing Schultz before the feebs came. "Go on," he said.

  "So it's my turn to ride shotgun. I get into the van, shut the door, and all of a sudden we're not there anymore."

  "Not there?"

  "Not at the gas bar. I mean, it just happened, zip. I'm looking out the windshield and there's no pumps, no lights, nothing. There's like this desert – rocks, dirt, cracks in the ground – but no sun. But it ain't night. You can just see some gray light in the sky, which is all clouded over."

  The bank robber swallowed and looked inside his head again. "But not nice clouds," he said, "not fluffy white. These were black and yellowy and just, like, streaming across the sky. Cause there was a wind. I could hear it blowing, throwin' grit against the window, and it was a stinking wind. It started to come through the vents, and it was like… dead things. Old, dead things, all rotted and dried out."

  He stopped, his gaze turned inward. Denby said, "Did you see anybody out there?"

  Boden came back to the room. "Oh, you better believe it. This guy in a body suit, with a mask on. He had a brush and a bucket of paint and he was painting the side of the van."

  "You get a good look at him?"

  The man nodded. "He was grinning like an idiot. He was saying something, but I couldn't hear him over the wind. Then he steps back and
wham!
The desert disappears and we're slamming down into the ground outside the cop shop."

  "Describe the idiot." Boden did and Denby listened. It was Mr Spandex, all right.

  "You know something about this?" Boden said. "Schultzy said there was something on the news a while back about some clown playing Batman."

  "Yeah," said the policeman. "We don't know who he is, or what he's up to."

  Boden shivered. It was only a little shiver, but in a hardcase like him, Denby thought, the smallest shiver was equal to an ordinary citizen's full-blown fit of the staggering fearfuls. "I tell you one thing for free," the bank robber said, "I don't ever want to see that idiot grin again. Or that place he lives in."

  "You figure he lives in that desert?"

  "He looked to be right at home." Boden's shoulder jerked once. "It was a hell of a place," he said.

  Denby got up. "Thanks," he said. The other man's eyes followed him and the policeman saw something else there. "What?" he said.

  "You're interested in the guy? Personally?"

  "Very personally," Denby said.

  Boden looked at his hands, clasped together on the table. "Cause I never snitched, you know. Not once."

  "I know. It's in your file." He waited, and when nothing more came, he said, "This is not really a cops-and-robbers situation. We don't know what in hell we're dealing with."

  Boden made up his mind. "Okay," he said, "you do something for me, I'll do something for you."

  "Do what?"

  "Call my lawyer in Minneapolis. Tell him what's going on."

  Denby smiled. "You mean so he can tell whoever's watching your stuff up there to get it hidden before the FBI comes waving a warrant."

  Boden shrugged.

  The lieutenant said, "In return for what?"

  "Something I figure you don't got. Something you'd like to have."

  "About Batman?"

  "Yeah."

  Denby didn't have to think it over very long. Recovering loot was way down on the scale of priorities. It just went to insurance companies anyway, and lately he had found that he didn't care much for insurance companies, not after meeting the Paxtons. "Okay," he said.

  "Got a cell phone?"

  The policeman handed over his personal phone. Boden punched in some digits and after a moment said, "Scorched Earth," then closed the phone to end the call.

  "Okay," said Denby. "Your turn."

  "Check Schultzy's phone," the bank robber said. "He took a picture."

 

There was no heel-cooling time for Denby at J. Edgar Hoople's office. The chief of police's hatchet-faced secretary showed him right in. The boss had been working himself up, the lieutenant could see: the square-jawed face was red and even though it was well before noon, there was a smell of Scotch in the air.

  "Where the hell have you been?" he started out at full volume, one hand indicating the phone on his desk. Denby could see damp finger marks on the handset, slowly drying. "I've got the mayor and the commissioner chewing my ass over this bank robber shit, and you're nowhere to be found!"

  The lieutenant didn't bother answering the question he was asked, because he believed he had an answer to the one that counted. "I think I've got a line on the guy," he said, "Where he comes from."

  Hoople wound down fast. "Tell me."

  "It's hard to believe."

  "I'm already believing that four bank robbers appear out of nowhere on our doorstep. Try me."

  "Look at this," Denby said. He flipped open his phone and showed the chief the photo he had forwarded from the bank robber's phone, which he had used in the evidence room while the sergeant there looked the other way.

  Hoople was silent, studying the image. "I see the guy," he said. "He looks like an asshole in a Halloween costume."

  "Look behind him," Denby said.

  "There's nothing," the chief said. "Desert, clouds."

  "Yeah," said Denby, "and I think I know why." The chief raised his eyebrows. "Because," the lieutenant said, "that's the future."

  Hoople's face started to show red again. "The future?"

  "The future," Denby said, "though I don't know how far. But the guy's a time traveler."

  "Get the fuck outta here!" said the chief of police.

  But Denby didn't. "I've got proof," he said, "a book from the future."

  "No shit?"

  "It's in my locker."

  "What does it say?"

  "I can't read it. Nobody can."

  Hoople reached for the phone. "Get me the commissioner," he said.

 

Chesney and Melda were getting ready to go to work when the phone rang. He picked it up, expecting from the caller ID display to hear his mother's voice, but it was Hardacre who said, "It's gone."

  "What's gone?"

  "The book."

  Chesney told Melda. "How did that happen?" she said.

  Hardacre didn't know. He and Letitia had not gone back into the study after the young couple had left. Chesney drove from his mind the image of what they had probably got up to instead; in one sense, he was having a hard time seeing his mother in the role of mistress, or even common-law wife; in another sense, he was seeing disturbing mental pictures of the implications whenever his mind was turned in that direction.

  He concentrated on the problem at hand. "Could the angel have come and collected it?" he said.

  Melda put in her thought. "Maybe God changed his mind?"

  "I don't think so, but I know how we can find out," the preacher said. "Call up your friend from downstairs. Ask him."

  "Yes," said Melda, when the young man looked to her for a response.

  "Hold on," Chesney said into the phone, then summoned the demon. Xaphan appeared instantly, puffing on a fresh Havana, full glass in hand. "Reverend Hardacre's book has been stolen," he said. "What can you tell us about it?"

  "Nuthin'."

  "Why not?"

  The demon drained the glass in one swallow and the tumbler winked out of existence. It held up one stubby digit. "First," it said, "cause the preacher's place is about eighty miles outta your jurisdiction. Second," it added a finger, "cause the boss said to stay out of it."

  "Out of what?"

  "Anything you get up to with that holy joe. It's outta line."

  "Go away," Chesney said, and the demon did.

  As the sulfur cleared, Melda said, "Something I didn't tell you about – Lieutenant Denby asked about the book."

  Chesney could hear Hardacre's voice through the phone, even though it was nowhere near his ear. "What?" He keyed the device to its speaker-phone setting.

  Melda said, "He came to the salon, asking me about the Actionary. The last thing he said was that he wanted to talk to me again, after I'd read the book."

  "When was this?" Hardacre said. She told him. "Have you checked your phone for a tap?" he asked Chesney.

  "There's no need. It's… protected. So is yours, when you're calling me here."

  There was a pause, then the preacher said, "The Devil was worried about the book. He got Denby to snatch it."

  Melda said, "I can't see Denby selling his soul."

  "There are other ways to get someone to do something he might ordinarily not do," said Hardacre, "and the Devil invented all of them."

  "I thought he was a straight cop," Chesney said.

  "He may think he is," the preacher said. "Remember what the road to Hell is paved with."

  "So what do we do?" said Melda.

  "Only thing we can do," said the voice from the speaker phone. "Wait and see."

 

Chesney was at his desk, vetting an analysis that had been prepared by three of the actuaries under his supervision: an examination of the effects on life expectancy of longterm unemployment. Given the current downturn in the economy and the consensus among economists that any recovery was likely to be slow in producing enough jobs to return the city to the employment levels it had known before the recession hit, a substantial number of Paxton Life and Casualty policy holders were out of work and liable to stay that way.