Malevolent (20 page)

Tim rose slowly to his feet and mentally shrugged off discovery. He went to the door and opened it.

“Jesus,” he said. “Don’t you have a phone?” He walked away, leaving his visitor standing in the doorway.

“Can I come in?” Griffin looked downright pitiful, standing out there awaiting an invitation.

Tim reclaimed his place on the living room floor. “Shut the door. About phoning first…don’t take it so personal.”

“I thought you were still mad at me about last night.”

Tim flapped a hand. “What last night? I was just pissed ’cuz Patty and I aren’t getting along, but what’s new? I’d offer you a beer, but it’s thirteen minutes till twelve. Beating noon, that’s the slippery slope to problem drinker.”

“I can wait thirteen minutes.” Griffin stepped delicately into the room and eased himself into a seat. “Nice couch,” he said, patting it.

“It’s a sofa.”

“Sofa, couch, what’s the difference?”

“I don’t know. Ask Patty. She gets pissed when I call it a couch. I think couches are what you watch TV and take naps on and drool all over. If you paid too much and you can’t ever sit on it, it’s a sofa. But enjoy it. She’s not here.”

“Then what’s a davenport?”

“Huh?

“In the family of couches and sofas.”

“No idea,” said Tim.

He watched Griffin take in the room, his eyes coming to rest on a framed photo from early in Patty and his relationship. They’d spent the day at Cedar Point in Sandusky. Tim wore a Cleveland Browns jersey and Patty was in a white cotton T-shirt that emphasized her sun-streaked hair and her tan. They both wore wide grins. As Tim told himself once again, it had been early in their relationship.

Nodding at the photo, Griffin said, “You won’t be insulted by this?”

“I can’t imagine how I’m going to answer that question.”

“No, I just mean, she’s really attractive. Patty.”

“I’ve never been so insulted in my life.”

“No, but…just saying. And happy. I never pictured her that happy. I mean…based on things that you’ve…whatever.”

Now Tim did feel vaguely insulted, but he didn’t know why, so he went back to work repacking the trunk.

“Can I ask you something else?” Griffin again, still more low-key than Tim was used to, but still relentless.

“Go ahead.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m hiding record albums and CDs in the last place Patty would think of looking. In her own steamer trunk. The TV sits on it, and it’s too heavy for her to move by herself. Besides, it holds the kind of shit she insists on keeping but never once gets the urge to look at. I mean…her seventh grade report card? How often you think that comes up in conversation?”

Griffin nodded solemnly. “I guess I’m more interested in why you’re hiding music there in the first place.”

Tim picked up the last clutch of CDs and inserted them into a niche he’d created by digging out a few reams of yellowing letters and unfashionably old fashion magazines. He briefly wondered if there was anything juicy in the old letters, none of which he’d written her, but he surprised himself with his respect for Patty’s privacy. Maybe he was turning into an acceptably decent human being after all.

He found another place for the letters, and then collected the magazines she’d never miss for stuffing deep into the kitchen wastebasket. He snapped the lid shut, set the TV back on top of it and positioned the set
 
carefully over its old dust marks.

“There,” he said, stepping back. “I’m really quite pleased with the results.”

“You were about to tell me—”

“The music. I bought this entire collection from an old man in Independence. It’s vintage stuff, absolutely beautiful. He only wanted three hundred bucks—a fraction of its true value. I could get more than that right now on eBay. Hey, it’s noon. Or near enough. Get you that beer?”

“And a sandwich to go with it?”

“Make your own.”

They carried the conversation into the kitchen where, amid a profusion of beer cans and bread loaves, mustard, mayo, pepperoni, cheese and deli meat, Tim explained Patty’s refusal to let him buy the music he needed, and his clandestine purchase.

“So you gotta tear the room apart every time you get a country music gig?”

“This is temporary. I’ll store them in my van or at the bar, but Charlotte doesn’t open till later and Patty’s got the van today ’cuz her car’s in the shop.”

Tim cranked the stereo and they took seats at the dining room table. The discussion drifted to Travis Kendall’s suicide and what he’d learned about it from Patty and Detective Dillon. From that, they ended up on the previous night’s murder. Tim, not much of a devotee of radio, newspaper or Internet news, had heard nothing and was shocked at this latest development. But it didn’t begin to match his reaction to Griffin’s latest experience with the notorious
No Country for Old Men
DVD.

“Your mother saw nothing?” Tim said when the tale ended.

“She saw a porn film, but not one starring yours truly. That would be surprising enough, considering it was the same disk we saw several nights ago and the Cleveland police thoroughly examined. It wasn’t even the same feature, so to speak. This one, the angle and lighting were different. It looked way more…professional…than what we saw.”

Tim stared and chewed, let Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” wash over them from a pair of floor-standing speakers that could strip paint from walls at full volume.

“So where is the flick now?” Tim asked, not sure he wanted to know.

Griffin almost physically shuddered. “I thought about bringing it with me, but couldn’t. It’s in a million pieces and littering the Cuyahoga River.”

Tim was surprised at how good that made him feel. He was going to say as much when they were both interrupted by a series of thuds that seemed to shake the room.

“What the hell?” Griffin said, eyes wide.

“Mrs. Lascic. My landlady,” Tim muttered in explanation of her broomstick jabs at her ceiling and his floor. He reduced the volume while muttering curses at the woman.

Thoroughly out of sorts once more, he told Griffin how ridiculous he sounded with his accusations against the blank-faced DVD disk and whoever—or whatever—he was blaming for the strangeness in their lives. “What do you want to believe, man? That demons make videos?”

Griffin stared glumly at the floor. When he looked up he said, “I thought you’d want to help me get to the bottom of this. Why’re you so scared?”

Tim laughed. Nothing funny about any of it, but he had no more appropriate a reaction. Finally he snorted. “This is it, man. The substance of my wisdom—I don’t know what the hell’s going on, and I don’t care.”

His chair squeaked as he jerked to his feet, retrieved two more beers from the fridge and gave one up.

“You care,” said Griffin. “You just don’t like it when things get complicated.”

“Right. And—oh yeah—I don’t believe in demons.”

“Maybe you just haven’t found yours yet,” Griffin said softly.

“Huh?”

“Germaine Marberry’s is sex. Travis Kendall’s was job insecurity and Catholic guilt, I guess.”

Tim did an exaggerated double take and said, “Now what’re you talking about?”

Griffin cradled his beer on the tabletop in both hands and began to rotate it. They both studied his progress as if awaiting the moment when the aluminum can would sink into the wood like a drill bit. He stopped, but continued to inspect the table’s unmarred surface. “My demon is fear and resentment of women, no doubt brought on by my domineering though well-meaning mother. I’m also generally passive because I’m afraid of where my emotions might take me. Thanks, Dad.”

What was
this
? Tim, sitting across the table, hoped for the phone to ring or any damn thing to interrupt, but nothing helped out.

“I was pretty normal as a kid,” Griffin said. “Loud, active, got in the usual trouble. I liked to be liked. I was never the most popular kid in my group, but I did okay. Until I got older.”

As he paused for a beer break, Tim was thinking,
Here’s where he tells me he’s gay
.

“The truth is, I never outgrew that awkward stage with girls. So where I used to hang out with seven or eight guys, it became one or two as the others got girlfriends. And then…” He shrugged, let Tim figure it out.

“First, it’s a joke, you know?” he continued. “My friends would set me up with someone and I’d go out, but nothing took.” He glanced up sharply. “I’m not telling you I’m a virgin. I’m not gay either, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No way, man,” Tim murmured.

“I didn’t realize how big a part that anger played in my life…in my loneliness…until this morning. It all came out, this bit I’m not even going to get into, but with my mother and the movie and the feeling of control I felt she’s always held over me.”

Not going to get into it.
Tim sincerely hoped he could hold Griffin to his word.

“The point is,” Griffin said after awhile, his face darkened, “I almost hurt her this morning, that’s how much anger I have in me. And that’s why the church sent me a sexy blonde. Because it’s found what troubles me most, and it knows how I react when troubled.”

Tim wasn’t sure how to respond to anyone whose idea of demonic torment was a sexy woman. After a moment he said, “What if I could prove your theory wrong?”

Griffin’s eyes lit up so that Tim knew he’d have to share the story of the voice he’d thought he’d heard coming from his speaker during the wedding gig. While it would reinforce some of Griffin’s ridiculous notions about what was going on, it should also convince him that there was nothing out there preying on human weakness. If that was the case, why would Tim hear orders to kill children? He had no opinions about the little ankle biters one way or the other.

But as he told it, his mind kept going back to the recorded rape he’d seen, then to Griffin’s own admission of a tendency toward violence and discomfort around women.

Once again, Tim wondered.

And wondered.

Chapter Thirty-Four

“I have no idea,” he said pleasantly. “Let’s see.” He breathed into his hands like a man without gloves fighting off winter. “If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that I beat my daughter to death because she was growing rebellious and disrespectful. You know how teenagers are.”

Melinda Dillon tried her best to show no reaction. She’d been briefed to hide feelings of shock, anger, outrage or disgust. She’d been warned by his doctors here at the Windmore Hills Psychiatric Detention Center that their patient got a certain thrill from the repulsion others inevitably felt toward him.

“He’s not a sociopath in the clinical sense of the word. He does, after all, feel a certain remorse for his actions,” Dr. Valdez had explained just before her meeting with the Reverend Melvin Frost.

“That might be helpful,” she’d replied.

Dr. Valdez had smiled sadly and, it seemed to Melinda, a little indulgently. “That’s not to say that he’ll cooperate. You see, he thinks that his actions cost him his humanity. Therefore, he feels that the horror and repugnance felt by others is his just punishment for the unspeakable crimes he committed. He’ll play with you, he’ll needle you and try to get you to hate him as much as he hates himself. He’s bright, devious and—in my opinion—unreachable.”

“But not psychotic,” she’d said.

If Dr. Valdez caught the sarcasm, his face didn’t show it. “Good luck,” he told her.

Good luck
.

Melvin Frost crossed one leg over another, folded his hands in his lap and said amiably, “Any more questions, Detective Dillon?”

She sat bolt upright in a white wicker rocking chair with a cushion in a bright zigzag pattern. The man across from her sat on a wicker love seat with matching fabric. A colorful, though threadbare rug under a wicker coffee table stood between them, and decorating magazines decorated the table. A wooden birdcage, untenanted, hung in a corner near a well-used piano. Except for the uniformed guard—or attendant or whatever they called security personnel in such a place—reading a newspaper in a glassed-in side room, she could have believed she was in the lobby of a worn, but appealing hotel in coastal Florida.

Melvin Frost was a slight man with a runner’s build—long legs, narrow waist and shoulders. His physique, along with his open gaze and brown hair, made him look too young to have had a teenager seven years ago. Only closer inspection put a little sag to his cheek and a little scalp pink showing through his mostly full hairline.

Melinda stared at the empty legal pad in her clipboard as she pondered which of her many questions she should ask next. The success of her forty-mile drive and the interview hinged on this unstable murderer telling her in strictly rational terms why he’d committed his heinous crimes. She might as well ask Germaine Marberry why she had so many cats.

Frost didn’t wait to be asked. “I saw doctor after doctor and was given tests that I can’t even recall right now. But I passed them.” The self-styled reverend looked at her with colorless eyes that momentarily twinkled. “When I say I passed, I guess I mean I failed. I proved myself to be mentally insane and ended up here.”