Parishioner (8 page)

“How’s it goin’, Win?” Xavier asked his friend on the ride from the midtown hospital back to Culver City.

“Met a girl named Cindy on Monday last,” the young man said with a smile. “Took her to dinner, a movie, and then a dance from Tuesday through Thursday. She works in a department store and is taking fashion classes at Santa Monica College. She came over Friday night. I made her pancakes the next morning.”

He stopped talking as they entered the on-ramp to the freeway.

“And?” Xavier asked after a few minutes of silence.

“And what?”

“What happened with Cindy?”

“Oh. That was a real nice week. Her kisses tasted like bottled water and she had this wiggle when I hugged her that made me go wild. But don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t only sex. One night there, before we even got to the bed, we talked until the sun came up. I don’t even remember what we said. It was just … just … perfect.”

Winter was an able driver. He weaved through the six lanes of heavy traffic as if his Pontiac were the only car on the road. He was smiling again, remembering.

“How’d it go with Cindy on Saturday afternoon?” the hard man from back east asked softly.

“She got a call on her cell phone. You know I hate them damn things. Makes it like you can’t evah get away from nuthin’. I got one but I turn it off when I’m with company. Anyway … she went out on the porch and talked about fifteen minutes or so. When she came back she asked could she plug it in. Talk so hot and heavy that she ran outta juice, I guess. She didn’t smile no more after that. When I asked her if she wanted to get some dinner she said that she had to go home. I thought maybe we could try some day next week and she said, ‘We’ll see.’ ”

“Who was on the phone with her?”

“The week before we met her boyfriend of two years said that he needed some space. Space’s name was Laurel Timmons. Cindy met me and I made her forget Braxton. But then Laurel flitted off and Braxton wanted Cindy back. She said that time with me was great but when she heard his voice she knew she couldn’t stay away. I drove her home and that was that.”

“So why you still smiling, Win?”

“Me?” he said, seemingly unaware of his own happiness. “I guess it’s because I had the best week that girl could give. I had her wiggle and peck, her dreams about a future. That was enough for me and more than Braxton could ever have. And just when I was beginnin’ to feel kinda desolate you called me up and said you needed some help. Man, I figure that if the almighty Ecks needs help then I ain’t got nuthin’ to complain about.”

Ecks sat back in his seat and they remained quiet for the rest of the ride.

Twenty minutes later Winter pulled his classic car up behind the Edsel and parked.

Snorting, Xavier glanced over at the house where he almost died.

Winter said nothing.

“I’m going to make a call,” Xavier said. “Could you wait a few minutes?”

“As many as you need.”

The phone rang nine times before he answered.

“Church services, Clyde Pewtersworth speaking.”

“Hey, Clyde, Xavier Rule here.”

“Mr. Rule.”

The congregation used real names with the church staff; that, Father Frank said, was a matter of trust.

“How come you put Guilly and Lance on me, man? You know what they’re like.”

“You needed help and they were available.” Clyde was not loquacious. He said what was necessary, rarely a syllable more.

“Who told you you could even call them?” Xavier asked.

The momentary silence made Xavier smile. It was rare to get a leg up over the switchboard operator.

“Frank told me to help you in any way possible.”

“Really?”

“What do you need, Mr. Rule?”

“I might need a lawyer before this night is through. Cylla Pride in town?”

Another pause on the other end of the line.

“What shall I tell her the charges are to be?”

“Nothing nearly as bad as what she’s done. Just breaking and entering, maybe some burglary if I see something shiny.”

“Call me if you have a problem,” Clyde said. “I’ll make sure you two are connected.”

“You go on, Win,” Xavier said, standing in the street next to his friend’s car.

“At least try and start your car first.”

“No. I’m gonna stay around here for a while.”

“For what?”

“Business.”

“Let me help you, brother.”

“This is no car wash, Win. This is what the bastards on Wall Street call ‘outside the box.’ ”

“I know. I knew that when you threw that dude up against the wall and put your forearm across his throat. I saw in his eyes the kinda business you in. But you know, brother, I’m California born and raised. We follow the sun out here … wherever it go.”

“Okay. It’s your funeral. First let me get a couple of things from my car.”

The front porch was partially hidden by vines of pink roses grown over crosshatched wooden trellises. Xavier knocked and then rang. When there was no answer the duo moved to the left, broke through the hidden side trellis, and went down to a path that led around the side of the house.

The brick patio was dark but the Parishioner could feel his way around.

“Here.” Xavier handed his friend one of six pairs of latex gloves he took from the hallway outside of his hospital room. “Put these on.”

Using the tiny hand-pressure flashlight on his key chain, Xavier could see that the sliding
glass door was closed. After a couple of little shoves he knew that it was locked. He then took the twelve-inch tire iron he retrieved from the car and wedged it in the lock mechanism of the door.

“Hold up, Ecks,” Winter said. “They probably got an alarm system on a nice house like this one here.”

“No, brother.” Xavier savored the short phrase a moment and then continued. “We in my neighborhood now. People like me and the folks live here don’t have alarm systems. We use semiautomatics and dynamite, Dobermans and ice hooks—but never no alarms.”

Xavier wrenched the short, thick tire iron and the lock cracked. The door didn’t come open because there were two other places where internal bolts had been thrown. He loosened them up and the glass door, which didn’t fracture at all, slid open.

Upon entering the sunken living room, Xavier sought out a wall switch that turned on the overhead chandelier. It was a gaudy light fixture made from amber-colored crystals and real amber beads.

“Hey, man!” Winter complained.

“What?”

“People might see that light from the street.”

“So?”

“What if they told somebody they were out of town or somethin’?”

“They don’t know their neighbors.”

“Are these friends’a yours?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then how you know who they know?”

“Like I said, Win, we in my neck’a the woods. I understand these people like a California surfer knows his wave.”

They went from room to room of the two-story home, Xavier looking for anything suspicious and Winter just gazing around nervously.

The freezer in the kitchen was filled with TV dinners, and the refrigerator held nothing but condiments and a moldy loaf of white bread.

The back porch was stacked with cardboard boxes that were empty and seemed to be quite old, covered with dust and inhabited by spiders.

They found a tiny bedroom next to the porch. It was spare, almost a cell. There was a single-mattress bed and a simple oak bureau with three drawers. There were no clothes in the closet or the drawers. The only trash in the blue plastic wastebasket was an empty tampon carton. This single clue told Ecks that this room had recently been tenanted by Doris Milne. There were no pictures on the night table or hanging from the wall. There were no holes from nails that might have been used to hold frames, nor any blemishes or discolorations from posters a young woman could have taped up.

In contrast, Sedra’s bedroom took up at least half of the second floor. It was carpeted with real animal hide, probably deer, and contained a bed that was at least a hundred inches in width covered by a fire-engine red silk down comforter. The drapes went from ceiling to floor and were velvet, the color of gold, if gold could rot.

The wall-wide closet was stuffed with hanging dresses and coats, pantsuits and scarves from over the decades. Perpendicular to the closet stood a highly wrought, curved chest of drawers covered by an ivory veneer. Xavier pulled out each of the eighteen drawers, dumped whatever was in them on the hide floor, and checked all the sides for possible secrets. Two-thirds of the way through his thorough search he found a red fabric-bound journal taped to the back of a drawer that had been filled with staples, a stapler, dried-out rubber bands, and large rolls of black electrical wiring tape.

The journal was the size of a mass-market paperback book, at least a hundred and fifty pages. The paper was of a higher quality—acid free and heavy. Two-thirds of these pages were covered with minuscule writing. Most of the scribbling did not comprise normal lettering but character symbols like punctuation, dollar signs, and mathematical indicators. These symbols appeared without spaces. Sometimes a character would be half-size on the upper portion of where a full-size representation might be. Nearly the entire book was filled with this meaningless jabber, about forty lines to a side. No breaks, spaces, or paragraphs appeared anywhere. Now and again there was a change in the tone of the ink, but it was always blue. If Sedra and her niece hadn’t tried to murder him he might have thought that this was the meaningless, obsessive scribbling of a madwoman.

He pocketed the journal and continued his way through the drawers.

“Hey, Ecks,” Win said.

He was standing in the doorway. Xavier hadn’t even realized that the young man had
wandered off.

“What?”

“You got to come see somethin’, man.”

In a pantry off the kitchen was a door. This door opened upon a down stairway.

“A basement,” Xavier said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“How long you been in LA, Ecks?”

“A few years.”

“Not long enough to learn that nobody has a basement or cellar out here.”

“Oh, yeah?”