Parishioner (38 page)

“Your friend Winter is a delight,” Benicia Torres was saying on the ride back to her apartment on Venice Boulevard.

“What did you think of Cindy?”

“Every time she looked at you her nostrils flared.”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“Winter’s a good friend, isn’t he?” Benicia asked Ecks.

“My best friend died two days ago.”

“I’m sorry. What happened?”

“Cancer. That and hard livin’.”

“Are you going to the funeral?”

“No,” Ecks murmured, “I’m not.”

When Benicia heard the pain in that answer she said, “Do my nostrils flare when I look at you, Mr. Noland?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They should.”

“Your nose don’t even know me, girl.”

“That’s the first thing you’ve ever said that’s completely wrong.”

“Is this it?” Ecks asked as he pulled up next to a complex of little cottages. The brown bungalows were arranged in no particular order, like a child’s building blocks forgotten after a day of play.

“It wasn’t only him getting wounded that made my father decide to leave Rio.”

“No?” Ecks felt a quivering in his chest.

“I was young but I was wild too. I’d never stay in school. I would jump out of my window at bedtime and spend the night in the streets.”

“What your old man do?”

“He beat me with a strap until …”

“Until what?”

Benicia peered with her brilliant eyes at Ecks. “Until one night he beat me and the whole time I looked up at him like I’m looking at you. I didn’t cry or make a sound.”

“Damn, girl.”

“Do I frighten you, Egbert?” She laughed.

“So that’s why he put you in a trunk and brought you here?”

“He really was shot. When I heard about it I ran to the hospital and sat by his side for six
days. I held his hand and talked to him. And when he woke up I was sitting there wearing a straw hat that he bought me on a Sunday after church. I asked him to stop being a cop and he said that he would if I went to school and made something of myself.”

Xavier took her hand and said, “Call me Ecks, all right?”

“Do I scare you, Ecks?”

“Like I told you before, scared is scared of me.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“Will I have to use my strap?”

“I promise not to cry.”

Ecks left Benicia sleeping in the morning. He turned on his cell phone on the freeway headed downtown.

“Hey, Brother Ecks,” Winter Johnson had said in the middle of the night. “I had a great time with you and your girl. That Bennie is really beautiful. Cindy just couldn’t stop talkin’ ’bout you. She said that you reminded her of this gangster uncle she used to have from back Baltimore. If I didn’t know better I’d be jealous.”

“Ecks,” said Guillermo Soto on the next message. “I received some pretty damning videos this morning. It shows two men being murdered by men known to the department. This evidence was delivered by a man named Adama. He’s a Syrian businessman who rented out a house in Coldwater Canyon to a film company that was doing some kind of
Candid Camera
show. The killers and their victims had made some kind of mistake and got themselves on tape. Just thought I’d give you the heads-up.”

Taking the freeway off-ramp at La Brea, Ecks made his way up to Olympic and parked in a nearby lot. He set himself down at a bus stop across the street from D-Right Drugstore and took out a book, a new biography of a man named Simon Weisenthal, known as the Nazi Hunter and feared by those who hoped to get away.

Ecks had read a book review on the life history and felt a kinship to the subject. Ecks was a man who lived at the border of civilized life, an exile who made his camp between two lands, neither of which could ever be his home. Ecks was the victim who bit back, the forgotten corpse that came alive and dug his way out of an unmarked grave.

Ecks was very interested in the daily life and the subterfuge of Weisenthal’s existence, but that day, with the book open in front of him, he didn’t read a word. Instead his eyes were glued to an inconspicuous doorway that had no lettering or even a number attached.

In the hours that passed, the displaced New Yorker thought about his old life and the new one, about Swan the smiling killer and Panther Rule the inescapable patriarch. Whenever his mind drifted by the memory of his father, Frank came up. He wondered what Frank had to do with Panther. They were nothing alike, the white-haired minister and the black tower of rage. And yet …

And yet there was something.

He felt as if he’d been battered and jumbled down a long stretch of whitewater and had just been vomited out onto a placid, extremely large lake. The water below him was smooth and reflective like a mirror, and the silence from the surrounding woodlands spoke of danger.

Xavier smiled and sat back on the fiberglass bench. And at just that moment his lumpy, gray-clad quarry came out of the nondescript door.

The man walked with purpose down Olympic across from where Ecks followed. He went into a fast-food joint called Chili’s Fries and Taquitos.

Ecks went to the crosswalk, waited on the light, and crossed the street leisurely. He leaned up against the wall outside the door, waiting patiently. Panther and Frank, Simon and the placid lake all faded away in the face of the job to be done.

Eight minutes later Lou Baer-Bond came out of the pink-and-yellow door of the restaurant with a bag in one hand and a quart cup of soda in the other. There was a lit cigarette between his lips.

“Lou.”

The private detective turned, opening his eyes wide. Ecks wondered whether the dick would drop his trove of fast food to grab for a gun or run.

“Hey,” Baer-Bond said, his cigarette quivering madly. “Egbert, right? What you doin’ here?”

“We need to talk, Lou.”

“Uh-huh, okay. Let’s go up to my office.”

“No, man. I’ve been comin’ down with this case of office-o-phobia. You know? The fear of a gun under the desk. I was thinkin’ maybe that bus stop bench across the street.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh, yes, you do. Just as sure as you were standing out in the receiving hall in the courthouse yesterday. Waiting for Lester.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Baer-Bond said. He swiveled his shoulders to point in a trajectory beyond Ecks and his accusations.

“Jocelyn and Martindale are on their way to jail, man.”

“What?”

“They jumped the gun and killed two guys name of Jesse and Link.”

“You seem to be very well informed for a second cousin.”

“They would have killed you too, Lou,” Ecks continued. “I guess there’s lots of money on the line.”

“Benol put you into this?”

“I drive my own car.”

“What do you want?”

“Ever since I was a young man I’ve been looking for my platinum parachute. Enough money all at once so that I could retire and take my ass down to where they have never seen even one solitary snowflake.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You know why I didn’t want to go up to your place, Lou?”

“Scared?”

“Right on the first try. I’m scared’a gettin’ shot in the chest and in the eye.”

The private detective’s moods were subtle and deep. The look in his jaundiced eye was response to a mortal threat.

“Let’s go across the street,” he said.

“So what is it you want from me?” Lou Baer-Bond asked.

Ecks pondered the question honestly. Benol had asked, and Frank had asked for her, that Ecks find the three boys who had been kidnapped before they could form coherent sentences. He had accomplished that end. Not one child had gone unscathed, but the Parishioner had done what was asked of him. What
was
he doing at that bus stop with the killer? What did he care about the reasons why?

“I want the keys to the kingdom,” Ecks said without considering too closely the words he uttered.

“Chick and Jerry really out of this now?”

“They ain’t dead. So they still know what they know. But their knowledge is from the inside lookin’ out.” Ecks knew that the greatest poets were also the greatest criminals. Poetry was hatched in prisons and under the sway of a lifelong desire for revenge.

“Why should I listen to you?” Baer-Bond asked.

“One reason is that I already saved your life. Because you know you just about the only hook left that the cops could hang their hat on. And you the one with the blazin’ gun. You the one Jocelyn and Martindale will blame.”

The detective looked up and around the street, suddenly afraid what might be laying for him. His right eye tightened and he lit up another menthol. His left wrist bumped against the tip of his nose and he wondered, honestly, to himself.

“There’s money to be made,” Ecks said. It was more than just a suggestion. “Money can cross borders and grease the right palms. You got enough money and whatever Jerry and Chick say will be nuthin’ more than some words behind a locked door.”

“Problem is,” Lou said simply, “that they’re the ones that know how to make the connections. How tight is the jam they’re in?”

“Tight as a born-again virgin on her wedding night.”

“What exactly are we talking about, Mr. Noland?”

“Double homicide caught on tape with audio.”

“Legal tap?”

“We ain’t talkin’ about a millionaire’s son, Lou. These are lifetime criminals standin’ in front of a hole in the ground. So if you know somethin’ maybe we can pool our resources and both come out on top’a the shit.”

Again Baer-Bond wondered. He had been expecting to eat chili-cheese fries and fried tortillas swimming in watery guacamole sauce, but now he was facing a man of the wrong color whom he didn’t know and couldn’t trust.

“Why you think I’m in it with these dudes?” he asked.

“Not only are you in it,” Ecks said, “you killed twice as many as either one of them. A bullet through the eye and another in the chest. One at the surf shop down in Venice and the other on Marietta Circle three nights past.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“I don’t have to. Between Chick and Jerry, the cops, and an anonymous phone call, the only thing you’ll need is a lawyer and a whole Sunday full of prayer.”

The quart cup of soda was sweating on the plastic bench while Lou Baer-Bond bit his lip and scowled, looking for a way back to his heart-attack brunch.

“You bein’ straight with me?” he asked, expecting a lie to decipher.

“What do you think, man?”

“How do you know all this shit?”

“I got eyes in my ears, brother. I got a nose in every finger.”

“How much money you think Chick and Jerry were after?”

“I didn’t stay in school too long, but I believe that the number takes up the high range of six places, maybe seven.”

“Damn. Thing is like this, man. I mean, is that Benol girl really your cousin?”

“No. And even if she was, this is money here, real money.”

“So how do you know her?”

“I’ve been known, in a past life, to handle rough trade. She come to a minister and he asked me to help her out. I came to see you. I looked here and there and came up with what I already told you. Either Benol was lyin’ to me or she’s just too stupid to know what she was sittin’ on. Either way she’s out of it now.”