Costume Not Included (9 page)

  "Certificates and licenses don't matter. You've been marked out by the Lord!"

  "I'm only the precursor. He's the prophet – at least, I think he is. If I can break the rules, surely he can."

  Letitia's voice roughened. It sounded to Denby like tears being fought to a standstill. "You mustn't say things like that."

  "Here," said the man, to the sound of more pouring, "have a little more. And let's look at it practically. Over the years, since he left home, how much have you been able to influence Chesney's behavior? Be honest."

  A sniffle. "He was always a hard-headed boy."

  "But you say she can get him to change his mind."

  "Only because she… you know."

  "Exactly," said Billy Lee. "So, if we win her over, we win him."

  Denby heard the sharp intake of breath, then the woman said, "Billy! That's so cold-hearted."

  "I was a labor lawyer before I was a preacher. You don't want to know some of the tricks I pulled."

  The phrase plucked at something inside Denby. The world must be full of people who didn't want to know things. Probably that was why there were so many things people didn't want to know about.

  He'd been distracted and almost missed it when the woman said something about the girl going to Hell and fighting the Devil for the nerd kid. Religious nuts, he thought. First, all this talk about prophets, and now the Devil makes an entrance. Though that didn't tally with the sense he had of the kid or of Melda. They didn't go to church, and the only thing special about Sunday was that it allowed the couple to spend a whole day bonking each other.

  But the woman's remark gave him another twinge of that funny feeling, almost like déjà vu, that kept eating at him. Again, he tried to reach for the elusive whateverit-was that floated tantalizingly at the edge of his consciousness, but again, as always, it fled out of reach.

  And now the preacher was talking to the woman in a bedroom voice, saying something about breaking the rules, and she was making sounds like those Denby had heard coming from overweight women in restaurants as they succumbed to the allure of the chocolate cheesecake. Then he heard the chair scrape again, and footsteps receding. The kitchen light went out and, moments later, an upstairs window brightened, then dimmed as curtains were pulled.

  Denby considered pointing the directional mike that way, but decided he wasn't interested in hearing two people well past middle age going at it. Especially not people who thought they were prophets or precursors, whatever the Hell that was. God only knew what they might shout at the moment of no return. He took off the earphones and detached the digital recorder, collapsed the mike's dish, then carried it all down and returned the equipment to where he had got it. As he was reclosing the trunk, he realized that he had left the night glasses on top of the wall and climbed back up to get them.

  He took one last look at the mansion, saw that the upstairs window was now dark, as were all the others – except for a single source of light from somewhere on the ground floor. It was tiny, seemed no more than a pinpoint, yet it shone as bright as the morning star. When Denby put the night glasses on it, the instrument's green circle lit up too bright to see.

  Denby had intuition – well-honed police intuition. He also had the instincts of a natural explorer; all good detectives did. But neither instinct nor intuition told him that the curiously bright mote of light had anything to do with Mr Spandex. In fact, the conversation between Hardacre and the kid's mother had pretty much been a bust as far as the case was concerned. He saw no connection between the muscle-bound freak in the costume and a couple of religious nutjobs, who seemed to think that Chesney Arnstruther, all one hundred and fifteen nerdish pounds of him, was some kind of Moses.

  And yet he did not get down off the roof of the ghost car. In a time when he was beset by indefinable feelings and peculiar psychic stirrings, he could now add a new one: he wanted to know what made the light. It occurred to him – as it would to any cop – that bright lights left on at night behind heavily shrouded windows, especially in remote location, often meant that someone was running a marijuana grow-op. But he didn't see Billy Lee as the weed-farmer type.

  Still, if he needed probable cause to step onto a property without a warrant and look through a window, he now had it. A moment later, he was over the wall and walking across the lawn toward the mansion.

 
 

 
 
 

Halfway across the lawn, Denby expected lights to come on, maybe the
whoop-whoop-whoop
of an alarm – surely the preacher had motion sensors? But nothing happened. He kept walking, the dew-wet grass soaking his shoes and pants cuffs. He knew he would be leaving a trail. Still, he didn't care. He wanted to know what made the light.

  It came through a chink in a curtain covering a ground-floor window, a chink too high for Denby to see through standing in the flower bed that ran along the base of the house's wall of closely mortared granite blocks. The lieutenant looked around, saw nothing in the darkness. But when he walked toward the rear of the house he almost fell over a wheelbarrow with a rake and shovel in it. He dumped the tools and wheeled the barrow back to the window, set it where it needed to be, and climbed up.

  He could just get his eye to the level of the chink in the curtains. The curtains themselves were about a foot back from the glass, the window being a bay set in the thick stone wall. He couldn't see much without putting his eye to the chink, and for that he'd first have to break the glass – and he was sure that wouldn't go unnoticed – but he was close enough to see some of the room beyond.

  It was a den or a study. He saw bookcases and armchairs and a big old-style desk. The latter was where the light was coming from, from something sitting on top of the green blotter. Denby squinted to dim the strength of the glare. He was expecting to see a halogen lamp; nothing else would have made such a bright light, except maybe a carbon-arc welder.

  But all he saw was a low oblong of bright white. When he squinted even harder, he became sure of two things: one, that he was looking at a stack of paper – he could see where some of the pages were unevenly stacked – and, two, that the glow was not reflected; the paper itself was lighting up the room.

  Now, what's that all about, the policeman thought? The answer came from memory: the preacher and his live-in girlfriend had wanted the nerd to read something, some text that had to do with the kid's being a prophet. Denby was no true believer. He didn't look through Billy Lee's window and see a miracle; he saw some kind of show-biz prop – how it was done he had no idea, and didn't care – that was part of some scam the televangelist was setting up.

  He climbed down from the wheelbarrow and returned it whence he had found it, then retraced his steps back to the wall. It was a hard scrabble to get over to the outside again and he tore his pants leg doing it. But as he made his way back to the interstate and headed north to the city, he kept thinking about the glowing block of paper. Somehow, it was going to be the key that turned the lock and opened the door on Mr Spandex.

  He hadn't figured out yet how that would happen, but his cop's instincts and cop's intuition told him it would.

 

Some distance away – or just nearby, depending on how you measured these things – Satan said to one of his aides, "The policeman's tempter, send him an 'attaboy' and tell him to keep up the good work." Then the Devil rubbed his hands in the manner that was his habit when things were going the way he liked them.

 

"Lieutenant," said the dispatcher, "you said you were to be notified the moment a call like this came in."

  Denby yawned and looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was just after two in the morning. He'd been in bed less than an hour, after driving all the way back from Hardacre's mansion.

  "All right," he said, reaching for the notepad he kept beside the bed, "I'm up. Tell me."

  "Name is Belknapp, Ralph and Doris, old couple. Both like to hit the jug, then they start hitting each other. Patrol has been to their place three times the past two years, domestic. First time, the old man gets frisky, they take him in for a night in the cooler. Other two occasions, they quieted down once our guys showed up."

  "What happened this time?"

  Denby listened, made notes, asked a couple of questions, got the address. There was no point in going over there now; the Belknapps would be well in the bag, if not passed out. He'd check them in the morning, find out what all the nonsense was about the knife.

 

Melda made poached eggs for breakfast and they ate like a married couple starting the day together. She liked the feel of it. She was thinking it was maybe time she should move in here. It would save her a lot on rent, even if they split what Chesney was paying here, and it would be… nice to keep doing this. Besides, she was convinced now that this man was worth keeping, but he was going to need some full-time managing.

  "Sweetie," she said, and saw him look up the way he still did when she called him that, like a neglected puppy that suddenly realizes it's going to get a treat.

  "Yes?"

  "About the book."

  The happy puppy faded from Chesney's face. "Yes?"

  "It bothers you, doesn't it?"

  He looked down at his eggs. "Yes."

  "Not a pool of light."

  "Exactly."

  "But you said you'd read it."

  Chesney sighed.

  "Tell you what," she said, "how about if I sort of… look after this for you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  She leaned across the table, took his hand. "You've got enough to worry about, with the new job and all the crimefighting. Maybe I could help with this thing. You said you wanted me to read the book, anyway."

  It was clearly a new idea to Chesney. She realized that no one had ever offered to take over a part of his life and "look after it" for him. He'd been left to stumble through murk and darkness from one all-too-infrequent pool of light to another, coping as best he could.

  "I still have to read the book," he said. "I said I would do it."

  "That's all right, sweetie. You read the book, but when it comes to what to do after, you just let me do the worrying for both of us."

  He blinked at her. "You can do that?"

  "I handled your mother, didn't I?"

 

She dropped Chesney off at his office then drove home, changed into her blue uniform and sneakers and went on to Sugar 'n' Spice, the beauty salon where she did manicures. Her first client wasn't due until nine-thirty, so she arrived with five minutes to spare. But as she approached the front door, the policeman who had followed Chesney down the funnel into Hell got out of an unmarked car and stepped into her way.

  "Ms McCann?" he said, showing her a wallet with a badge and ID, "Lieutenant Denby. I'd like to ask you a few questions."

  "What about?"

  "That book you're going to read."

  Melda was an intelligent young woman and knew it. In a fairer world, she knew she would be running some big outfit or winning major court cases, instead of polishing the nails of women, some of whom didn't have much more brains than God gave a labrador retriever. So she was smart enough to know that the man with the badge was also smart, and that he had come at her with a question that she hadn't expected, and – worst of all – that he had seen in her face a reaction that meant there was no point trying to play dumb.

  "How'd you know about that?" she said.

  Of course, he was a cop and he had the advantage, so he said, "How about I ask the questions, you give the answers?"

  "Okay," she said, "I don't know anything about the book except what my boyfriend's mom told me: the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre has written it the way some angel told him to, and it says that my boyfriend is like a prophet out of the Bible."

  "Is he?"

  "Chesney doesn't think so. It's all the reverend's idea."

  "What do you think?"

  "I think it isn't police business," she said. "Doesn't this come under freedom of religion, or something?"

  "It comes under something," said Denby. "What do you know about the guy in the spandex suit, goes around busting up dope dealers and auto-theft rings?"

  If he'd asked that question first, Melda thought, he might have caught her off-guard. But the sudden switch of topic didn't faze her. She'd been ready with an answer to that question for weeks.

  "He saved me from some muggers."

  "And then he saved you from a guy named Todd Milewski."

  "It was on TV." She saw him waiting for her to say something else and decided to oblige. "So you must also know that he said he'd call, but he never did."

  "Never?"

  "What are you, desperate? Not enough crime in the city, you've got to go around checking on people's private lives?"

  Denby's smile put Melda in mind of a cat that thinks it has cornered a mouse. "What would you know about how much crime there is, Ms McCann? Or isn't?"

  "My boyfriend is an actuary for an insurance company," she said. "It's what he talks about."

  The lieutenant took out a notepad, flipped it open and looked at something there. "Your boyfriend is Chesney Arnstruther."

  It wasn't a question, so Melda made no response.

  Denby wasn't fazed. "What does he know about the spandex guy?"

  "Why don't you ask him?" Melda thought that might have been the wrong answer. She looked at her watch and said, "I'm gonna be late for work."

  "Sure," said the policeman. "How about we continue this after you've read the book?"

  But Melda was balanced now. "How about after you read it?" she said, and opened the door to Sugar 'n' Spice.