Parishioner (25 page)

Ecks stayed after Cylla had gone. When he went to the toilet he saw the battered face in the mirror. The image reminded him of Panther Rule when he was in the police station for beating a man over a word.

Thirty-seven minutes later Winter showed up at the coffee shop.

“Ecks.”

“Have a seat, Win. You hungry?”

“I’m always hungry.”

“You are?”

“Yeah, that’s because I drive up to sixteen hours a day but don’t ever eat in the car. That’s my rule.”

“Why’s that?”

“I knew this dude once would eat them fancy bagged cookies in his ride. He et ’em day and night—and then one day he got roaches.”

“In his car?”

“Oh, yeah. Client was sittin’ in the back seat lookin’ over some business papers and one’a them light brown ones skittered right across the page.”

“Damn. What happened?”

“They fired the driver. But you know that’s not why I don’t eat in the car. Naw, man. I just don’t even wanna think that something I do attracts vermin.”

A single piano note sounded.

Ecks remembered the bugs that he’d seen on dead men and women all over the city of New York. This thought reminded him of Cylla’s words. Maybe she was right. Maybe he belonged in a primal tribe of ex-cannibals that had learned to control their appetites.

“… as it is I have my car fumigated every six months,” Winter was saying.

Ecks was surprised that he’d drifted off. He’d need a good night’s sleep before the swelling inside his head went down.

“What you need, brother?” Winter asked.

“A ride to my car.”

On the drive over Winter and Ecks talked about ice hockey. Winter loved the game.

“There’s not two black players to rub together on any ice hockey team,” Ecks said when Winter made his claim.

The single piano note chimed for the fifth time.

“Don’t matter to me, man. I’m not no racist. I just love the ice.”

A mile from the office building that housed Wicker Enterprises, driving his beloved Edsel, Ecks finally called the automated answering service on his phone.

“You’re looking for Lenny O,” Fannie, the broad-shouldered receptionist from Wicker Enterprises, said on the answering service. “He works for Zebra Film-Arts. They do business in a warehouse in Burbank.”

“Thank you,” Ecks said to the lifeless recording.

Then he drove home to sleep for fourteen hours.

He woke up in the early afternoon to the barely audible thrum of traffic coming in through the windowpane, walls, ceiling, and floor. This monotonous hum cocooned the battered gangster. Under this protective shield of sound Ecks felt safe enough to ponder. He was thinking that he’d accomplished the task given him by the patriarch of the church.

The Old Ecks was finished but the new man came to awareness on the path the old him had been traveling.

He made French-press coffee and beat two eggs together with two tablespoons of whole-wheat flour and some milk. He cooked the fat crepe in a griddle on his hot plate, thinking all the while about Benol and Dodo Milne, about dead children who had certainly attracted insects as they decomposed.

The swelling on his face had gone down except for a slight protuberance on the left temple where Lon had stomped the knot made by Doris Milne and her bat. The cut would leave a barely noticeable scar.

New Ecks decided that there was nothing to do but wait. So he called Bud White to see how his paper delivery service was going.

“It’s really good,” the ex-wrestler told his colleague. “That Damien, Carlo, and Angelique could run the whole thing by themselves. It’s like I’m just along for the ride.”

There was an essay he had to write for his American history course. He decided to compose a thousand words on the accommodation democracies had to make for the practice of slavery.

Democracy
, he wrote
, is not a static system. It is indefinable except at the present moment where it exists to one degree or another. The Athenians had democracy and slavery.…

That was when the cell phone played its little riff.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Noland?”

“Doris, Doris,” he sang. “Where are you, Doris?”

“That sounds like the beginning of a nursery rhyme.”

“But instead it’s X-rated. George said that you drugged his drink and put him to bed.”

“That’s about the only way I could get him to bed,” she said lightly.

“You nearly killed me doing the same thing.”

“I’m sorry about that. I really am. Aunt Sedra made me do it.”

“What do you need, Doris?”

“Can you come get me? I have this, um, uh, problem.”

“Why me?”

“You’re the only person I know.”

The address was a block east of the promenade of Venice Beach. It was a surf shop, and there
was a
Closed
sign in the window. Upon seeing this placard both Eckses, old and new, girded themselves for bad news.

He knocked on the glass door and someone peeked out through the blinds. A moment later the door opened onto a large, shadowy room.

Hand on his pistol, Ecks went in as Doris closed the door behind him and then turned on a light. She was wearing a frilly pink dress with red trim around the high collar. The New Yorker was surprised by his burgeoning erection. There was no other symptom of physical attraction, but neither was there any question about his erotic state of mind.

Doris stared into Ecks’s eyes a moment, long enough for the rest of his systems to begin to respond. Her solemn gaze and soft skin slipped past his defenses. If he were a day younger he might have thought he was falling in love.

“I didn’t mean to hurt Mr. Ben,” she said. “I only needed to get him to fall asleep. I had to get away.”

“Why? What did you need to do?”

She looked down and to the side.

“Doris,” Ecks said. “Answer me.”

“He’s in there.”

She pointed down a long aisle of brightly colored surfboards standing like dominoes waiting to be knocked down. These fiberglass fins, held in place by rough wooden slots, led to a small doorway covered by a dark blue blanket in place of a door.

When Ecks put his hand on the bare flesh of her upper arm Doris flinched. She moved toward him but he was already pushing her away, toward the back of the shop.

She allowed herself to be guided until they reached the blanket—there she dug her heels in.

“What’s wrong?” Ecks asked, his voice thick with both ephemeral trepidation and deep-seated lust.

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

Doris pushed aside the makeshift curtain that had been rudely nailed to the unpainted plywood above the entryway. This led to a workshop where injured surfboards went to be patched, smoothed, and waxed. There was a high workbench surrounded by several boards in
need of work held by padded vises, leaning against the walls, or just lying on the granite floor.

The young blond man with the bullet through his right eye lay on his back over a sky-blue-and-cranberry board. His mouth was open slightly, as if he had been saying something just before being shot.

The sight of the body only increased Ecks’s sexual distress. His hand closed around the young woman’s biceps.

“Hank Marcus,” Ecks said.

This jerked Doris’s head around. “You know him?”

“I know that he was one of those three boys Sedra sold back in ’eighty-eight.”

“I got here yesterday,” Doris said. “I called Henry from George’s phone and he gave me directions.”

“And you killed him?”

“No … no. He was already dead when I got here.”

“I don’t understand,” Ecks said. “How did you two know each other?”

“Aunt Sedra would go out in the afternoon ever since I was little. She’d go shopping or maybe to a movie. Sometimes I went with her, but more often she wanted to go alone. When I was younger I wasn’t supposed to go out or even answer the door when she was gone. But I got so lonely that sometimes if someone rang the bell I’d go answer. I mean, I would just send whoever it was away, but at least I got to talk to them for a minute or two. Aunt Sedra would have been mad but I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t just tell somebody that she wasn’t in.”

“You were telling me about Hank,” Ecks reminded her.

“Oh. Yes. One day this fifteen-year-old boy came to the door. Henry. Hank.”

“Out of the blue?”

“Huh?” Doris, said crinkling her nose in confusion.

“How did he know to come to your door?”

“His mother had a diary, and after she died Hank found it. It said that he was adopted and that Sedra was the one who they got him from. The entry was very specific. It had our address and everything.

“I knew right away it was him because of the little freckle on his ear. I remembered that from when I took care of them. I used to kiss that freckle and make him laugh.”

Xavier was trying to control his breathing by taking air in slowly, through his nose.

“He started asking questions,” Doris continued. “I knew what it was like to want to know who your parents were. I told him that I thought he was stolen and that Sedra had sold him to his parents. He wanted to go to the police but I said that all of us—his adopted parents, me, and Sedra—would go to jail. He still wanted to go but I begged him to wait for a week and then come back. I told him that I’d try to find out who his real parents were.”