Ancient of Days (30 page)

“It’s a costume,” Niedrach said. “Mr. Bynum found the victim this way. The head comes off.” He wove his way through rows of loungers and divans to the dais. There, gripping the orangutan head at the neck, he turned it—as if trying to unscrew a diving helmet from a diving suit. A moment later, he lifted the head clear and gestured at the startling human visage protruding from the costume’s neck hole.

It was Nancy Teavers. Her head shone like a large mottled egg. Either she or Craig had shaved off every lock of her hair. The spiky white coiffure she had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances had been a wig. Whatever the case then, tonight she was bald. Her eyes bulged. Bruises discolored her cheeks. Her lips were bloated. I still recognized her as the unhappy waitress who had decided to go west to make her fortune. Instead, she had gone to Craig Puddicombe, and Craig had turned her into a punkette, a babysitter for the kidnapped T. P., and an orangutan. What did this grotesque progression mean? Perhaps a bizarre homicidal performance-art parody of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.

“Do you remember his first call?” I asked Niedrach. “He claimed he didn’t do violence.”

“We all knew he was lying . . . to himself as much as to us.”

Adam, who’d gone forward, started to pick the doll out of the victim’s orangutan lap, but Le May caught his wrist. A Fulton County detective, he said, would have to bag the doll for forensic analysis. Fingerprints, Mr. Montaraz, fingerprints.

“It proves our Paulie is dead,” Adam said. “That’s the doll’s terrible meaning.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“That’s right,” Ryan Bynum said. “How could it mean that? You don’t believe in voodoo, do you?” Ignorant of the kidnapping, Bynum had jumped to the conclusion that Adam was surrendering to an atavistic Carib superstition.

My unofficial identification made, the Fulton County detectives shooed us out so they could finish their work. As we stood on the lawn, two men with a stretcher entered the building and reappeared a few moments later carrying the costumed Nancy. The ambulance at curbside took her in and departed with her without benefit of siren or flasher. After all, what was the hurry?

“It looks as if she was strangled,” Le May told us. “But it didn’t happen here. The only sign of struggle has to do with rearranging furniture. No breaking and entering, either. Puddicombe used somebody’s membership card, opened the back door from the inside, and dragged Nancy in from the rear drive.”

“I am so sorry for her,” Adam said.

We left the site in Le May’s Plymouth, and Niedrach told us that shortly before noon, just three or four hours after most newsstands and drugstores had begun selling the latest
Newsweek
, Craig had rented the orangutan suit from Atlanta Costume Company. A clerk there had given detectives a good description of the renter. Bearded. Young. Blue-eyed. He hadn’t been wearing painter’s coveralls, though, but toast-colored, pleated pants and a white T-shirt that had left his midriff bare.

He had claimed to be a student at Georgia Tech, wanting the costume for some kind of fraternity prank. He had paid a deposit in cash—rather than with a check and the supporting evidence of a student ID, but the address he had given as his parents’ seemed more than peculiar in retrospect: it was Adam and RuthClaire’s address on Hurt Street. His name he had given as Greg Burdette, and for that he had shown a current driver’s license with a photo of his own likeness. He had struck the clerk as an oddly somber type to be renting an orangutan costume, but she had rationalized this anomaly of bearing as an attempt to complete the rental with a deadpan savoir-faire. In fact, once he had left the front counter, she had burst out laughing at his successful act.

“Did she see what he was driving?” (My obsessive concern.)

“Unfortunately, no,” Niedrach confessed.

Adam said, “No one here should tell Miss RuthClaire what we saw at Meditation Center. Already, she has enough to cope with.”

I looked at Adam. I had no doubt that in his mind’s eye was a picture of that black doll upside-down in Nancy Teavers’s lap.

But back at the house, RuthClaire got the truth from Adam in five minutes. He could not lie to her, and she would not be put off with stalling tactics or verbal evasions.

“You didn’t think I could handle the news, is that it?”

“I wanted only to—”

“To keep it from me. That’s sweet. But I’m not a little girl. I’m an adult.”

Small and forlorn, Adam stood in shadow with his back to the beaverboard panel in the downstairs studio, his profile at once heroic and prehistorically feral.

“Nancy dead, strangled, dressed in a monkey suit, put on display in Ryan Bynum’s Meditation Center. But why? To horrify us? To put us on notice?” RuthClaire paced among her canvases.

“A puke-livered terror tactic,” Bilker said from the far side of the big room.

“Paulie’s dead already,” RuthClaire told us, ignoring the security guard. “Or else Craig plans to kill him this evening. We’ll find the body tomorrow.”

“That’s a defeatist look at the situation, ma’am,” Le May said.

“You think I
like
it? I don’t. It makes my heart swell up and my rib cage ache.”

“Mine, too,” Adam said—so simply that I was moved for both of them.

“It’s the waiting that’s killing me,” RuthClaire said. “Craig’s told us what he’s going to do, and we’re
still
waiting. We frail females—” putting her hand to her brow like Scarlett O’Hara—“are supposed to be able to bide our time, but how you go-git-’em macho fellas can take it is beyond me.”

“This such fella takes it very badly,” Adam said.

RuthClaire went to him, and they embraced. Then she turned to Caroline. “Come upstairs, Caroline. I want to lie down, but it would be nice to have somebody to talk to.”

The two women left. I sipped at a Scotch on the rocks that Bilker had made for me. I felt a hand on my arm. It belonged to Adam. Its grip on my biceps tightened inexorably. “You’ve had enough, Mister Paul.”

“I haven’t even had
one
. Sit down. Bilker’ll fix you right up.”

“Abraxas,” Adam said.

“What?”

“We should go to Abraxas. I, Mister Paul,
am
going there. Please come with me. It is what needs to be done.”

“What’s going on at Abraxas? Aren’t they closed on Mondays, like the High and most independent galleries? Besides, they’d all be closed by
now
.”

Adam said, “Nancy Teavers dead in Ryan Bynum’s church is a red flag waving. Interpret the signal. Where might Mr. Puddicombe next appear?”

“Abraxas?”

Bilker Moody had his hands in a stainless-steel basin full of suds and highball glasses. “Hell, yes,” he said. “
Hell, yes!
”

Niedrach and Le May were no longer with us. Back in the kitchen with Webb? Probably. “Tell Niedrach and the FBI men,” I urged Adam.

“I don’t think so. They are worthy gentlemen. I like them very much. But none of them has read the signals.”

“Tell them, then, for God’s sake!”

“This is my fight, Mister Paul. I am the cause of it all, basically. If you are not coming with me, promise to say no word to the special-agent gentlemen when I go.”

“And if I don’t promise?”

Adam eyed me speculatively. Then he gave me his fear grin, his lips drawn back to reveal his realigned but still dauntingly primitive teeth. “I will bite you, Mister Paul.” In the light from the cut-glass swag lamp at the end of the bar, Adam’s teeth winked at me like ancient scrimshawed ivory.

“You give me no choice,” I said.

“I’ll get my jacket and some heat,” Bilker said, wiping his hands on a towel. He exited the wet-bar booth and trotted off toward his converted pantry.

We told the agents we were going out for some fresh air and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. We’d bring back whatever they wanted—cream-filled, buttermilk, old-fashioned, they could choose.

“Make it quick,” Le May cautioned. “Mrs. Montaraz can take a call upstairs, but we’ll need your input after we’ve taped it. Going out’s risky. You could miss it.”

“Thirty minutes,” Adam said. “No more.”

We took my Mercedes because I did not feel competent to handle the hatchback with its elevated foot pedals or Bilker’s dented ’54 Chevy. I was driving, rather than Bilker, because Adam wanted Bilker to have his hands free. He was riding shotgun, a position of “great importance.” Now, though, it seemed funny to be driving so big and expensive an automobile as my Mercedes to a one-sided rendezvous with a murderer.

Adam directed me to park on Ralph McGill Boulevard about two blocks below the old school buildings housing the Abraxas art complex. We would have to walk the rest of the way, but Craig was not likely to shoot out my windshield or riddle a sheet of the car’s body metal with bullet holes.

It had begun to rain, lightly. An ocean of upside-down combers rumbled above the treetops. Traffic was nonexistent, and the three of us trudged uphill on the margin of the street. The plummeting runoff had not yet acquired volume or momentum, our shoes remained dry, and the cooling thunderstorm seemed an ally rather than an enemy.

“Dristle,” I said. “That’s what Livia George calls a rain like this.”

“Very good,” Adam replied.

Bilker halted at the top of the hill. An elm-lined row of clapboard houses curved downhill to our left. In the dark, we could see Atlanta’s skyline, traffic lights reflecting on wet pavement between Abraxas and the city. The old school building loomed in the rain like an insane asylum from a florid gothic novel. Its studio annex perched on the downslope of the ill-kept property as if it might soon slide away, like a stilt-supported house on the California coast. Brooding. Medieval. (Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe would have loved the place.)

“No security?” Bilker said. “At a gallery?”

“The third-floor galleries are between shows,” Adam said. “So the studio wing is tightly locked.”

“Locked-schmocked. Folks will pick locks. This place needs round-the-clock security. Needs some lights on it, too.”

“Needs its grass mowed,” I said.

“No money for a guard,” Adam said. “No money for lights.”

I remembered that on my first trip to Abraxas, David Blau had griped about the current administration’s miserly treatment of the arts. Of course, Blau and his staff members could, and did, initiate money-raising projects of their own, but funding a security force had always taken a back seat to strong financial support for major new shows and deserving artists. For the two weeks of the Kander-Montaraz-Haitian exhibit, Blau had in fact hired a full-time security guard, but no one served that function tonight because there was nothing noteworthy to protect.

Adam said we must enter from the back. We crossed an asphalt drive that dead-ended forty or fifty feet farther on, and crept into the shadow of the print shop next to the school. We advanced single-file through soggy leaves and grass, hung a left at the end of the print shop, and wound up staring into the rear half of the facility’s car park. Trees closed off the back of the lot. Power-company spools and strange varieties of metallic trash showed in the gaps among the trees as mysterious lumps and silhouettes. Tonight, unlike in February, the trees’ branches were weighted with summer foliage, and the mist dripping through the leaves made the asphalt echo as if it were a basement drying room with dozens of frilly black-green dresses on its lines. We entered the shelter of a covered rampway leading directly to the main building’s rear entrance. From this ramp, we saw the whole parking lot and, straight across from us, the studio wing enclosing the lot on that side. Near the building’s door sat the only vehicle in the lot, a red GM pickup with its tailgate lowered. Whoever had parked it had placed an extension ladder in its loadbed so that the ladder cleared the rampway’s corrugated roof and leaned against the wall about twenty feet above the covered door.

“He’s here,” I said. “The bastard’s actually here.”

Adam shushed me. He told Bilker and me to stay under cover while he tried to determine exactly how Craig had entered Abraxas. Adam would go because he was less likely to be seen than Bilker or I. So, bending his back almost parallel to the asphalt, he did a graceful Groucho Marx slither that carried him to a crouching position behind the GM. He tilted his head to gaze up into the rain at the ladder and the wall. Then he Groucho Marx’d his way back to us and said that Craig had apparently climbed to the full extension of the ladder and then thrown a rope with a grappling hook into the barnlike window on the building’s third floor. This window belonged to a vacant supply room across an interior corridor from the curator’s office. The grappling hook was still caught on the sill, the rope from it dangling down a foot or two below the top of the ladder. Craig probably did not intend to use it again, though, because he could far more easily come down the stairs and let himself out the back than risk the slippery rope and the slippery ladder by which he had gained entry.

“We ought to call the house,” I said. “Tell Niedrach.”

“No. Up there, Mister Paul, I am going now.” Adam took a key from his trouser pocket and gave it to Bilker. “Go inside and guard the stairs so that, by them, the villain does not make successful his getaway.”

“What am
I
supposed to do?”

“Following me up is okay and probably silenter than taking stairs. Or wait down here. I am happier, though, should you come.”

“Why?”

“Morale support: To subdue young Puddicombe may take two of us—someone to bludger him, someone to rescue Tiny Paul.”

“Then you’d better let me do it,” Bilker said.

“I fear you’re too heavy,” Adam said. “Paul is much lighter.” He looked me over a tad grimly. “By comparison.”

I was scared. Neither Adam nor I had a firearm. Bilker would have the Ruger, of course, but he would be standing in the downstairs corridor waiting for Craig to come to him. Craig might not choose to do so. He’d have a weapon or two of his own, and if Adam and I bumbled into him in the galleries, he would not hesitate to cut us down. More important, if he had rappeled up the wall after climbing the first third of the way on his extension ladder, could we expect him to have T. P.? Our chances of retrieving the child alive dwindled by the moment. I think even Adam knew that.