Costume Not Included (8 page)

 

"Mother," Chesney said, "I've been unfair to you and to the Reverend Billy Lee."

  "Yes, you have," said Letitia, reminding Chesney that she never gave ground and never forgot a trespass, even if she was supposed to forgive them.

  "So I will go to his house, and I will read the book."

  "What book?" said Melda.

  "Nothing that concerns you," said Letitia.

  "Anything that concerns–" the young woman began, but then she allowed Chesney's gently raised hand to check her outburst.

  "Anything that concerns me," Chesney said, "concerns Melda. We are a couple."

  "She is not–" his mother began to explain, but when he raised his hand again, she scarcely paused before continuing, "not part of what you are called to do."

  "If she's not part of it," Chesney spoke before Melda's fuse had smoldered all the way to the inevitable explosion, "then I'm not part of it."

  "How dare you speak to your mother in that way?" said Letitia.

  Melda eased into the conversation, her tone deceptively mild. "Tell me, Mrs Arnstruther: you say Chesney is a prophet?"

  There was no warmth in the older woman's reply. "He is. I have seen the book. I have seen the angel of the Lord."

  "And does that make you the mother of a prophet?"

  "If that is what I am called to–"

  But Melda homed right in. "And do prophets' mothers usually outrank their sons?"

  Letitia froze. Melda had the good grace neither to move nor to let her face do anything that would call up associations with a running back's post-touchdown victory dance. There was silence around the dining table until Chesney said, "Then that settles it. Mother, I will read the book. Melda will read the book. And then we'll see."

  Instantly, he realized that his last four words had been quoting the Devil. And if his mother had come back at him, he would have told her that her bidding and Satan's were one and the same. But Letitia Arnstruther was looking a little like a champion boxer whose head was still reverberating from a haymaker that had come out of nowhere.

  Chesney thought he'd better save the news for the rematch.

• • • •

Lieutenant Denby scrunched his thin shoulders against the angle made by the car door and the driver's seat and watched the matronly woman get into the forty-oddyear-old Dodge DeSoto. He had routinely called in to dispatch to run the car's plate when it had parked in one of the visitor's slots outside the condo building where the nerd kid lived. When the tag had come back as belonging to a Letitia Arnstruther, the policeman had settled in to wait.

  He had already seen the girlfriend's beat up old Hyundai go down the ramp into the building's underground parking and knew that she would park in one of the two bays allotted to the kid's unit. The other one stayed empty; the kid didn't drive, had never even got a license. Denby had followed the girlfriend around for a couple of days, in case she was a go-between who would lead him to the guy in the costume. That was the term the lieutenant used when he thought of the Actionary, except when he thought of him as Mr Spandex – but the latter label always caused an odd tickling sensation in the back of the lieutenant's mind, as if he ought to remember something that he had forgotten. Something important.

  The Dodge started up. Whoever looked after the vintage car knew what they were doing, because the big old V8 engine purred as if it had just come out of a 1960s showroom. Denby watched it pull away from the curb like a 1930s ocean liner leaving the dock. He let it get a block ahead then started up the ghost car and followed.

  Letitia Arnstruther – had to be the mother; there were no other Arnstruthers in the state – lived in a well-established middle-class neighborhood a couple of miles from downtown. And if she was going home, Denby figured, she would have turned left onto Columbus Drive. Instead, she went straight through the lights and he had to juice it up a little to get across the intersection before the yellow turned to red.

  She got onto the parkway, and Denby dropped back until he was a good two hundred yards behind. Then, when the parkway met the interstate, she rolled up onto the overpass and took the on-ramp heading south.

  "Oh, ho," the lieutenant said to himself, "and where are we going tonight, mother dear?"

  She settled into the through-traffic lane and so did he, then he slowed down enough to let three cars overtake and get between him and the DeSoto. The old car's tail lights were unmistakable. He matched speed and waited to see where all this was taking him.

  He was pretty sure the girlfriend was not playing intermediary. She went to work and back, went shopping when she needed to, and spent most of her free time with the kid – and at the kid's apartment, which was bigger than hers and up high enough that street noise wasn't a nuisance, the way it was in her ground-floor suite. Arnstruther had only been over to her place once since Denby had started keeping tabs on McCann, and their conversation had not been useful.

  What he had overheard had been more than a little surprising, the lieutenant would have admitted – if he'd had anyone to talk to about this assignment, which he didn't because what he was doing was way over the line and would have got him canned if he hadn't had coverage from the highest levels of the department and City Hall. Denby was using completely illegal surveillance methods, including having the phone company turn Melda McCann's landline handset into a permanent open mike. Not only was every call she made or received intercepted and recorded, but so was every conversation – in fact, every sound – that happened within twenty feet of the phone.

  The phone was right next to the girlfriend's bed, so the loudest and clearest signals had come from the couple's most intimate encounters. That was where the "more than a little surprising" part of the surveillance came in; apparently, either Melda McCann had undiscovered acting talents of Academy Award-winning quality, or Chesney Arnstruther was an absolute master of the female fiddle. Denby had listened to the tape twice and had come around to thinking that the kid had more going for him than showed on the surface.

  It was only after the connubial concerto in question that the policeman had heard any mention of Mr Spandex. When their heavy breathing had moderated, Melda had brought up what she called "the endorsement question." The kid had said, "Not now, Melda."

  She had said he ought to be thinking about his opportunities, and he'd said, "That's not what the Actionary is all about."

  She hadn't wanted to let it drop, but apparently he'd done something that had made her moan softly. By the time another opportunity for conversation had come around, they were too exhausted to make good on it.

  So Denby figured that the girlfriend knew about the guy in the costume, but not everything about him. And she wasn't the go-between. The lieutenant was sure he would know more about who knew what about whom if he could also get an open-mike phone tap on the kid's landline, but even though the phone company had put their best techies on the job – after swearing them to secrecy on pain of losing their positions and any hope of working in the industry again – the only signal they ever got from within the Arnstruther apartment sounded like a series of deep-belly belches that would have hands down taken the prize at any frat house burp-off contest.

  The DeSoto cruised south and just under the speed limit for almost three hours. Denby was a veteran of the police stake-out and had known enough to bring along an empty bottle as well as a thermos full of coffee. Filling the bottle while cruising down the interstate was tricky, but he hadn't spilled any urine on his pants and he was calm and comfortable as he followed Letitia Arnstruther up the off-ramp and along a few country roads until she turned in at the gates of a walled estate.

  There was no number or name to identify the place, and Denby didn't even remember seeing a road sign naming the long stretch of winding blacktop he'd followed the DeSoto along to get there. But the ghost car was equipped with a global positioning system that could fill in the gaps in his knowledge. It took only a couple of minutes before his transmission of his coordinates back to Police Central could be rolled over to the State Police liaison office and the word sent back from dispatch that he was outside the mansion of the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre: former lawyer, former novelist, and currently a major figure in the world of televangelist hucksterism.

  "Now that's a surprise," Denby told himself. He had parked a little ways along the road from the estate's gates, under some trees. By climbing on top of the ghost car he could see over the estate wall. He trained a pair of night-vision glasses on the front of the big house; there was the Dodge, looking like it was right where it belonged, parked behind a high-end Mercedes on a circular driveway. The woman presumably was inside the house.

  If this had been normal working hours, Denby might have called his contact – or, rather, Mayor Greeley's contact – at the phone company, and arranged for an open-mike landline tap. But it was past ten at night. Instead, he climbed down off the car roof, opened the trunk, and fished around in a welter of surveillance equipment – some of which had not come from department stores, but from military and other government sources. When he'd been briefed on what he had been issued and how to make it work, Denby had asked where some of it came from. He'd been told he didn't want to know.

  Now, rigging a long-distance sound-amplifying dish microphone on an adjustable stand on top of the estate's enclosing wall, Denby was not sure whether or not he wanted to know exactly what he was mixed up in. On the one hand – and it was a very full hand – there was Chief Hoople's straight-out offer of a captaincy if he did his job to the satisfaction of the old bulls downtown. Unstated, but clearly implied, was the corollary: if he didn't make good on this case, his career was over. He'd be transferred to traffic and kept busy checking on overparked vehicles in the bad parts of town until he got the message and quit.

  Denby had never been "one of the boys" – he had earned his promotions from patrolman through detective to lieutenant the old-fashioned way: by catching bad guys. But he had also learned early that keeping your nose clean at Police Central sometimes meant that when some kid whose dad was one of the Twenty blew over the limit on a DUI stop, you didn't cuff him and throw him in the drunk tank; you took his keys, gave him a telling off, then drove him home. That kind of thing was the worst that Denby had ever had to bend rules, except for the night he'd found a guy from the mayor's office getting extremely well-acquainted with one of the girls from Marie's place – in the front seat of an official car right behind City Hall – he had just told the couple to take it upstairs to the office and lock the doors.

  But a captaincy would not have been enough to make him do what he was willing to do to solve the Mr Spandex riddle. There was something more to this case, something that dug at Lieutenant Denby from inside. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he had this nagging sense that, somehow, he had been played for a sucker. Somebody, somewhere back in the weeds, was disrespecting him; was putting one over on him.

  And that was not acceptable to Denby. He was not a bad cop, nor was he a perfect cop, but he was all cop when it really counted, and he had this unshakable feeling – it was as if a voice were whispering it in his ear – that somebody needed to be brought to recognize that fundamental truth. He was pretty sure the somebody was the guy in the costume, and he was determined to do whatever he needed to do to make his point.

  Well, maybe not whatever it takes, he thought to himself as he adjusted the remote mike's earphones over his head. He wouldn't ice the guy over it. But any means short of murder or arson, he was willing to take a look at it.

  He pointed the mike at one of the downstairs windows. The parabolic dish would pick up and amplify vibrations that shook the glass from inside the house, even the tiny vibrations caused by human voices in normal conversation. He turned up the gain on the mike's amplifier, but heard only a murmur. Somebody was talking to somebody, but Denby was listening at the wrong window.

  He swung the mike to cover the next oblong of light, and now the voices were clearer: a man's and a woman's. There was an overlay of other sounds, a motor running – maybe a blender, or a refrigerator if it was right against the window – but he clicked the switch on the digital recorder attached to the eavesdropping system. There were guys in the crime lab that could filter out the extraneous noise, if need be.

  Then he heard the man's voice say, "Just let me finish making my energy drink – hand me the ginkgo biloba, would you? Then we'll talk." That was followed by a few seconds of even louder motor noise – definitely a blender, Denby thought – and then, clear as digitalization could make it, the man saying, "So, what did he say?"

  "I was never so insulted in all my life," said the woman. "That young hussy, poking her nose–"

  "Letty, dear," the man interrupted, "what did he say? Will he read it?"

  "Yes."

  "Good."

  "But, Billy, he wants her to read it, too."

  There was a silence, then the preacher said, "Well, maybe that's not too bad."

  "She has him twisted around her little finger! And you know how she keeps him there!"

  "He's a grown man, Letty. There was bound to be a woman in his life someday."

  "It's sinful!"

  A chair scraped against a tiled floor. "Here, sit down and have some of this." A clink of glasses, the sound of liquid pouring. "It'll make you feel better."

  The mike was sensitive enough to pick up the sounds of swallowing, lip-smacking and at least one sigh. Then the woman picked up where she had left off. "It's a sin. They're not married."

  "Neither are we, Letty. I said the words, but we've no license, no marriage certificate. In fact, under the law, you're probably still married common-law to whatsisname."