Parishioner (26 page)

“Did you?”

“No. Aunt Sedra would never tell me anything like that.”

“Then why didn’t he go to the cops?”

Doris moved to the stool and climbed up on it. Xavier tried not to think of what they could do with her in that position.

“I seduced him,” she said, almost as if in sympathy with the gangster’s thoughts. “He was a virgin and I taught him the things I knew. For three years he thought he was in love with me. Maybe he really was.”

“And Sedra never knew?”

Doris shook her head. “I had this big blue candle that I’d put in the upstairs hall window if she was home or coming back soon. If I put the candle up he’d try again the next day—if he could.”

Their eyes locked again. Doris sat up straighter, and Ecks’s erection grew taut.

He felt a muscle twitching in his right shoulder. This shudder traveled through his body, transforming into emotion. New Ecks was suddenly there in his head. It was like an overlay, a template that altered him and his desire. His breathing slowed of its own accord and the sexual tension ebbed.

“Why didn’t you come straight here from Sedra’s?” he asked.

“I didn’t know where he was and … and … We broke up a while ago. He found a girl his own age and wanted to get away from me. We hadn’t talked in a long time.”

Ecks glanced at the body. It was as if he were seeing it for the first time.

“You know how this looks, right?”

“What?”

“You tried to kill me, you killed Sedra, drugged George Ben, and now this boy Hank is dead and you’re the only one here.”

Doris’s brows furrowed but her eyes opened wider.

“But … but … but …”

“Look,” Ecks said. “I’m not the cops and I don’t work for them. All I’m sayin’ is everywhere there’s a body or there might be a body, there you are too.”

“I killed Aunt Sedra but that was because she was going to kill me.”

“Where’s your purse?”

“Why?”

“Just where is it?”

“I’ll go get it.” She hopped off the stool and moved toward the doorway.

“I’ll go with you.”

At the front of the store, beneath the cash register, was the big blue bag she’d carried into the coffee shop at their first rendezvous.

“Here it is,” she said, reaching for the purse.

But Xavier was faster. He stooped down quickly and picked up the blue sack.

“What are you doing?” Doris asked. “That’s supposed to be private.”

Ignoring her, he pulled out a dingy orange wallet and a chrome-plated pistol. He also noted that there was a lot of change tinkling around the bottom of the bag—that and a stack of hundred-dollar bills held together by a slender rubber band.

He sniffed the barrel of the pistol, checked the clip, and pocketed it. Then he flipped through the stack of money. Ten thousand dollars, more or less.

“This money come out of the register?” he asked. “That and the change?”

“He would have wanted me to have it.”

“A lot of money to be lying around a low-rent shop like this.”

“I found the hundred-dollar bills in a drawer in the back. The small bills and change came out of the register.”

“This little pistol hasn’t been fired,” he said. “You got another gun?”

“No. I took that one from George’s dresser drawer.”

“Why?”

“Because maybe I’ll have to kill myself.”

Ecks stopped to ponder these words. They seemed plain and straightforward, the kind of statement that only a young woman kept from society for an entire lifetime could make.

“Who killed Henry?” Ecks asked.

“I don’t know. Can I have my gun back?”

“No. It belongs to George.”

“I have to be able to protect myself.”

“I thought you needed the gun for suicide.”

“Hank was in trouble,” she said. “He … A man came to him asking about his parents. He seemed to know that Hank was adopted. At least, he suspected it.”

“And when did you find all this out?”

“When I called him. He asked me if I ever heard of Mr. Jocelyn.”

“Did you?”

“Not that name, but a man who looked a lot like Hank described him had come around Aunt Sedra’s a few weeks ago. They talked privately but he definitely wanted information.”

“What was that man’s name?”

“Ansel Edwards. He said he was a lawyer.”

Xavier was a crook but not the kind who made complex plans or took on difficult heists. Now and then a mastermind would hire him as muscle on a big job where four or more men executed a military-like operation. It was usually good money but he never bothered himself with the finer details. A soldier does what he’s told and puts his trust in the commander.

He never planned a big job, but he did know what it was like to be in the middle of one.

“Was Sedra an independent agent?” Ecks asked Dodo.

“What do you mean?”

“Did somebody pull her strings?”

“Like a puppet?”

“Somebody who would give her orders, who when they called she always did what they said.”

“Mr. Martindale,” Doris said in a kind of reverie. “He only came by the house twice. Once when I was eight. I think that someone wanted to buy me. Aunt Sedra said that she needed me to help her. She was really serious, but I got the feeling that if he said I had to go, Sedra would have sent me.”

“What was the second time?”

Doris, for the first time, blushed.

“Hank back there was your friend, right?” Ecks said.

She nodded.

“Don’t you want the one who killed him to pay for it?”

She looked up with a confused expression on her face. It was as if she had never considered the concept of revenge.

Life for her, Ecks realized then, was a simple matter of survival.

“The second time was just after my fourteenth birthday. He brought a man to the house who didn’t speak English and smelled like onions. The man took me downstairs next to the vault and tied me up. He beat me for a long time with a strap and then he cut my clothes off with a knife and fucked my butt while I was still tied up. He didn’t use a condom or anything.

“After that I hated Mr. Martindale but he never came back again. Aunt Sedra put cream on the welts and that weekend she took me to Disneyland. I’d never seen anything like it. It was wonderful.”

“What was this Martindale like?”

It took a moment for Doris to abandon the spectacle of the theme park, but finally she said, “He was tall and handsome. His face was very nice except for his eyes looked like an animal’s eyes, you know—wild.”

“White guy?” Ecks asked.

Doris nodded.

“But he wasn’t the one who talked to Sedra and Henry?” Ecks added.

“No. I told you. His name was Ansel Edwards and maybe Mr. Jocelyn. He was tall and white too, but not so good-looking. His eyes were a funny color.”

“Did Sedra call Martindale after the lawyer was there?”

“I don’t know. She had the phone locked up in her room.”

Xavier hopped up on the counter to sit and think. The quick gesture startled Doris, but after a moment she settled down again.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“The real question is, what am I going to do with you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You, young lady, are the perfect definition of what they call a loose cannon. At any minute you might explode or crash through some wall. Everywhere you go somebody dies or almost dies. I need you in one place just to be sure.”

“I don’t want to be locked away in somebody’s house again,” she said with sudden conviction.

“No, you don’t. But, baby, if the cops get you you’ll be locked away in a cell for the rest of your life. You murdered Sedra. There’s no other way to look at that. Your fingerprints are all over that house. Probably on the murder weapon. And it might be, if I don’t find different, that I will be the one to turn you over. But right now I’m tryin’ to help. I could take you back to the church. You don’t have to stay inside. You can pitch a tent and sleep in the courtyard for all I care. I just need to know how to get to you.”

“For how long?”

“Things are happening pretty quickly. Couple’a weeks should tell me what I need.”

“What about that Father Frank?” Doris asked.

“What about him?”

“He scares me.”

“Wow. I never heard anybody say that they were scared of Frank. Nobody. But you don’t have to worry, girl. Sister Hope will take care of you. You like her, right?”

Doris nodded but Xavier hardly noticed.

Billy Palmerri had been a getaway driver in his previous life. Driving was his passion. As a pimply-faced strawberry-blond kid in Tennessee he competed in back-road races for a living. He was the best until he lost control one day and plowed into a crowd of hillbilly spectators. Seven people died and Billy was sought by both the police and angry, revenge-fueled relatives of the victims.

He made his way to Reno and joined a crew that executed heists all over the United States. Robbery, mayhem, and murder were facts of life for Billy. He had three wives in as many states and somewhere around eighteen children—counting those born out of wedlock.

He was a midlevel bad man—completely unrepentant. He didn’t think one way or the other about his acts.

Billy’s mother, Barbara Palmerri, had moved to Selma to live with Charlene, the sister of her third husband, Israel Lundberg. Barbara had developed congestive heart disease and was
soon to die.

Billy had a job to do and so was a week late coming to see his mother. She was pale and weak in a chiffon pink bed. Her entire life she’d been a plump woman, but that day she was waiflike, child-size upon the huge mattress.

“Baby, I never did right by you,” Barbara whispered. Through a force of will she rose up and kissed her son’s temple. “I never taught you to be a good man, but I want you to promise me that you will learn how to do that on your own after I’m gone.”

“How do I do that, Mama?” the son asked.

“Just get in that old jalopy of yours and drive until you find the right spot.”

Billy’s mother died without uttering another word. He sat by her side until the sun had gone down, as he had developed the habit of waiting for dark to make a move.

When he walked out of Charlene Lundberg’s front door gunfire erupted from at least three sources. Billy was hit in the arm, leg, and chest. Though sorely wounded, he was still able to move. He went through the house, across the backyard, and over a fence into an alley. There he had secreted a second car, the perfect wheelman’s backup.

He made it out of Alabama into Mississippi, where he happened upon a good-hearted store owner who knew a colored nurse who looked after men of her own race whom white doctors would not see. Out of charity, and the promise of two thousand dollars from Billy, the nurse took him in.

It was the fever that changed the wheelman. In his hallucinatory state he remembered every crime he’d committed. Through it all his mother was at his side shaking her head, blaming herself for her son’s selfish deeds.

The colored nurse, whose name was Samantha Smith, brought a white man to Billy’s side. That was Father Frank, fifteen years before he’d relocated to the California coast.

“You been going the wrong way on the autobahn, William,” Frank had said. “What you need to do is make a U-turn and head for the hills.”

That was thirty-two years before Billy pulled up to the closed surf shop at around eight that evening. He still had a full head of strawberry-blond hair and the frame of a twenty-year-old racer. But Billy had traveled a million miles from that day on what he thought was his deathbed with Frank holding his hand.

“I need me a map,” he had said in Expressions, “ ’cause I got no sense of direction. But
once you tell me my destination I’ll get there through hell or high water.”

“This is Doris, Billy,” Xavier said to the fifty-seven-year-old driver. “Frank wants her to take up residence at the church for a week or two.”

“Pleased to meet ya, ma’am,” Billy said.

“Hi,” she replied nervously.

“Billy will get you there safe and sound. You can try every trick in the book, but the only thing he will do is deliver you to Sister Hope. Ain’t that right, Billy?”

“Frank as my witness,” the racer vowed.