Warren sipped more coffee.
Hanson looked at Leonard, said, “I’m with you. On the teeth and this guy too. You say you want him, so isn’t it about time you tell the rest of it? I know there’s more. I’ve stood for all the dicking around I’m gonna take.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “there’s more.”
I said, “Allow me, Leonard. I got something to add you don’t know about.”
“This have to do with where you were this morning?” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “OK, Doc. I think you see it the way it is. Let me run over your territory and fill it in some more. Say there’s this preacher, a real do-gooder in some ways, but you see, he comes from a background where his father was a religious nut too. Say the father wasn’t actually the father, but a stepfather. The stepfather married this woman with a child, and this woman’s child was a bastard. She was a prostitute, or at least a loose woman. The preacher, the stepfather, he thinks he can do right by her, show her the way of God. And perhaps, down deep, a whore is exactly what he’s looking for. With me so far?”
“We’re with you,” Hanson said.
“So he marries the woman, but he can’t reconcile the shame. He treats her badly. He treats the boy badly. He never lets them forget that she’s a slut and the boy’s a bastard, and that he’s doing them special as the right hand of the Lord. The woman gets pregnant again. The child is retarded. The preacher can’t stand it. He can’t accept his seed would produce such a child. Now he has two bastards, and one of them has the sense of a cement block. He gets it in his mind the woman’s gone back to her old ways, that she’d been with another man. Maybe she has, maybe she hasn’t. It doesn’t matter. The preacher broods, and one night something sets him off, and in a moment of anger he strikes and kills the woman.”
“And the stepson sees it,” Doc Warren said.
“Yeah. And let’s say the preacher knows the boy saw it, but instead of killing the boy, who’s already warped enough to think his father is God incarnate, he forces the child, or the child is willing, psychologically browbeat, however you want to put it . . . But say the boy goes along with the father to help get rid of the body. The father makes a religious ritual out of it. Perhaps to cover his guilt to the boy, to himself, both, or maybe he really believes that he’s done the righteous will of the Lord.
“Out of brutality, or convenience, the preacher cuts the woman up to fit in a cardboard box, wraps her body parts in a cloth and takes her to this abandoned house he knows about, wraps the body in chicken wire, to keep the animals out of it, probably in cloth too, like the others, buries her under the house. Later, she comes up missing, he says she ran off. She’s got a reputation to go with this possibility. What he was ashamed of before, now protects him. She was just a whore. She used a good man. She ran off and left him with two sons to raise, one of them retarded. See where I’m going?”
“This is guesswork, right?” Hanson said.
“Some of it,” I said. “And now it takes up where you left off, Doc. The boy is continuing to do that work in his own way, copying his stepfather’s pattern.”
“Why isn’t he killing women then?” Hanson said. “Me and Doc here, we dealt with a guy in Houston once, called himself the Houston Hacker. He had a thing against women, and women were all he killed, ’less someone got in the way. This kid sees his father kill a woman, why’s he killing kids? Wouldn’t he have a thing against women because his stepfather did, even if it was his mother?”
“That’s easy,” Doc Warren said. “He’s killing himself. He’s killing the nine- or ten-year-old fatherless, unwanted child that he was. Killing him in the righteous manner his stepfather killed his mother. He’s not associating the crime with women, he’s associating it with the evil of what she produced. A bastard. Himself. And somewhere, deep inside, he’s maybe killing himself because his existence is what turned the stepfather against the woman in the first place.”
“It has a nice ring to it,” Charlie said. “It sounds like bullshit to me, but it rings nicely. It’d sound better you had them teeth in, though, Doc.”
“What about the page of Psalms in the kid porn mags?” Doc Warren said. “You’re suggesting this isn’t a sex crime, but one of religious psychosis, so what’s with that?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the whole thing has turned sexual for him. Somehow he’s cleansing himself of that sinful preoccupation by getting rid of his magazines and destroying their power with a page of the Psalms. Like a cross in a vampire’s grave. I really don’t know. But here’s another piece of the puzzle. The retarded child grew up to be only slightly smaller than the Empire State Building. He does what his brother tells him. He helps him do this thing he does. And they do it every summer, last week of August. Which is, probably, about the same time of year the first murder occurred, the mother’s murder, and coincidently it’s a great time of opportunity for our man. It’s the week the East Side carnival comes to town, something our man helps sponsor.”
“I’ll be damned,” Leonard said.
“Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Hanson said. “Who the hell is it?”
“A fella I went to visit this morning,” I said. “The guy who killed Illium Moon, and would have tried to kill Chester Pine if Chester hadn’t died first. A preacher’s son. The preacher’s son. A preacher himself. Reverend Fitzgerald of the First Primitive Baptist Church.”
36.
Space suits in daylight. Red worms in flashlight, writhing and twisting in dark, odoriferous lard. . . .
That night I lay in bed and remembered all that. It was not conducive to sleep.
I got up and went into the kitchen for a drink and saw Leonard had not made the couch into a bed. He was sitting on it watching television. The screen jumped with snow and rattled with static.
The movie he was watching was coming from a long ways, and the cheap rabbit ears weren’t picking it up too well. I could see it clear enough to make out noble German shepherds crawling on their bellies toward some nasty space aliens. I recognized the movie. I Married a Monster from Outer Space. It had scared me when I was a kid. I doubted any monster movie would scare me again.
I forgot the drink of water and went over to the couch and sat down by Leonard. He didn’t look at me. I saw in the reflected light of the television screen that he had tears in his eyes.
I turned my attention to the TV set. The aliens were catching hell now, both from German shepherds and good-old American citizens who weren’t going to stand for no space aliens messin’ with their women.
I said, “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Uncle Chester?”
“Yeah.”
We sat until the end of the movie and then another one started up. This one was about a guy that got some kind of radiation on him and grew incredibly big and had to wear a loin-cloth.
Leonard said, “What about you and Florida?”
“What about us?”
“That bad?”
“She just wants to be friends. I don’t know how you fags work, but a gal wants to be your friend after you’ve been fucking her, it usually means she doesn’t want to be anything to you but gone.”
“I’m usually the one wants to be friends. I used to want a relationship. These days, the shit I’ve been through, except when I have a hard-on, celibacy seems acceptable and preferable. You, on the other hand, don’t feel that way. If ever there was a guy wanted to be married and have two kids and a dog in the yard, it’s you.”
“Call me transparent.”
The big guy on the screen was starting to have some serious trouble with the U.S. Army. They were blasting the shit out of him.
“This murder case,” Leonard said, “how do you think we did?”
“It’s not over, but I think we did all right. Hanson believes he solves this case he’ll be in for a promotion. Him and Charlie both.”
“Charlie don’t think that. Told me he’s put in ap
plications at burger joints, claims he’s one hell of a cook.”
“What Charlie is, is full of shit.”
“Hap, what if we’re wrong, and it ain’t Fitzgerald?”
“It’s him. And his brother too, though I don’t know you can count T.J. as knowing what he’s doing. He’s like a fuckin’ golem. Just does what he’s told.”
“We got so much circumstantial evidence, Hanson could get a warrant. Look around the church and Fitzgerald’s house. That might be better than this plan of nabbing the Reverend at the carnival with a kid in hand. Whatcha want to bet Hanson gets a warrant, looks hard enough, he’ll find some dead kid’s underwear with the Reverend’s cum in ’em?”
“But if he doesn’t, then the motherfucker’s tipped off and he can get real careful. Hanson plays it his way, he just might nab him. Fitzgerald puts his hands on a kid, kidnaps him, then Hanson’s got something to work with, a righteous reason to bring the bastard in. Then, with a little luck, the rest of it will come out.”
“We’re out of this now, right?”
“You betcha.”
“Hap, not that I’m petty or anything, but I told you Uncle Chester wasn’t the one.”
“I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
“I’m a good judge of character.”
“I’m proof of that.”
Leonard was silent for a moment. “Well, even I fuck up now and then.”
* * *
The All Black Carnival came to the East Side on a hot morning that threatened storm. The storm lay in the west, dark as an army boot, and the heavens rattled with poisonous thunder.
Our fear was the storm blew in, the carnival might be canceled, and if that happened, Hanson’s plan was gone with the wind, and the Reverend would have to wait for another night. Strike somewhere unexpected.
Me and Leonard were out of it, but we couldn’t resist the temptation to drive over to the fairgrounds early that morning and watch the carnival trucks pull in behind the tall chain-link fence, observe the machineries of fun going up: the Tilt-a-Whirl, the coaster rides, the Slingshot, as well as rides I couldn’t put a name to.
I kept wondering how Fitzgerald was nabbing those kids and getting them away from there to commit murder. He was a high-profile individual. People on the East Side knew him well and weren’t likely to forget him walking off with some kid, but somehow, every year, he was grabbing a kid and taking him up to that death house.
How was he choosing his victim? Was the kid someone Fitzgerald had been watching, someone who’d been attending church activities? Someone Fitzgerald knew would be going to the carnival? Someone whose home life was a disaster, or someone who had no home life at all? Someone whose past would indicate anything could have happened? Someone like the little boy under Uncle Chester’s floor?
I tried to tell myself it wasn’t my problem now. It was Hanson’s. We drove back home.
About two in the afternoon, Leonard and I went over to MeMaw’s, and Hiram helped us finish up the porch. There wasn’t a lot left to do. About an hour’s work. It was very hot. The sky was clear and blue except in the west, and from those brooding clouds there came a kind of mugginess that was almost overwhelming, and I couldn’t get my mind off the on-coming night and the carnival and what might happen. I hit my thumb with the hammer three or four times, dropped boards and nails, and cussed enough Hiram had to ask me to stop.
“No offense, Hap,” Hiram said. “But I don’t talk that way, and don’t want that kind of talk around Mama. She might hear you.”
I apologized, truly embarrassed for making Hiram uncomfortable. I hoped MeMaw hadn’t heard me.
When we had driven the last nail, Hiram said, “Come on in. Mama’ll want y’all to have some ice tea.”
“I need it,” I said.
Hiram went inside, and Leonard and I promised to follow, after picking up a few nails and boards. When Hiram was out of sight, Leonard said, “I’m fucking ashamed of you, all that cussing.”
“Yeah, well, you can eat shit.”
Then we heard Hiram yell for us from inside the house.
“Hap! Leonard! Oh, God! Come here, quick!”
We rushed inside. MeMaw was slumped in a kitchen chair, almost falling off of it. There was a pool of urine in the seat of the chair, dripping on the floor. Her walker was turned over, as if she had let go of it in the act of trying to rise.
The stroke had come swift and silent, lethal as a black mamba. She was alive, but comatose. We stretched her out on the floor and packed a pillow behind her head and called the ambulance. They came quick, hauled her off to Memorial Hospital. We followed after, Hiram in his van, me and Leonard in my truck.
At the hospital, we sat with Hiram in the waiting room while the doctors did their work. Which wasn’t much. The bottom line was MeMaw was old and it didn’t look good. All they could do—all we could do—was wait.
When we got the word, me and Leonard went into ICU with Hiram and looked at MeMaw. She was wired up like a spaceman and seemed to be smaller and frailer than was humanly possible. I was somehow reminded of those pictures you see of Mexican mummies, the ones that have been exhumed and put on display because the relatives couldn’t afford to maintain the burial plot. I noted the liver spots on her hands. Why hadn’t I noticed them before? They looked like old pennies viewed through weak coffee.
We stayed for a while, then Leonard said, “Hiram, we’ll check back. You need anything, just ask.”
“Yeah,” Hiram said. “Thanks. Man, I can’t believe this. I mean, I can. Her being old and all, but I can’t believe it either.”
“I know,” Leonard said.
“Need us to call relatives?” I asked.
“No,” Hiram said. “A few minutes, I’ll do that.”
We left Hiram sitting by MeMaw’s bedside, holding her hand.
37.
Late that afternoon, the storm in the west really started to boil, turned darker, and moved our way. We were sitting on the porch glider, watching it, when Hanson drove up.
He walked up on the porch with his cigar in his mouth. The end of it was dead, but I could tell it had recently been lit. There were ashes all over his cheap sports coat.
I said, “I thought you quit smoking.”
“I did,” he said, “and I just did again. Listen here, I wanted to tell you it’s going down. You deserve that much. It’s all over, I’ll tell you how it went.”
“We’d appreciate that,” Leonard said.
He nodded, turned, and looked toward the storm clouds. “Man,” he said.
“It’s moving slow,” Leonard said. “Things could still go all right, he makes his move soon enough.”
“Yeah, well,” Hanson said, “see you.”
He went out to his car, and I watched as he lit the cigar and took up smoking again before he drove away.
“Nice guy,” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thing I like best about him is he took my woman and he sucks on a nasty old cigar. Asshole.”
We watched the storm some more, then got in Leonard’s car and drove over to the First Primitive Baptist Church, telling each other all the way over we were just going to have a look.
We didn’t pull up out front of the place but parked a block down. There wasn’t much to see from there, but before we parked, we drove by once, and I was able to see that the bus and the Chevy were still in the yard. I also noted that a block up from the church, parked on the opposite side of the street, facing the wrong way, was what looked like an unmarked police car. I didn’t recognize the balding white guy behind the wheel, but he looked like a cop and he had his eyes on the church. I thought it was a good thing Fitzgerald wasn’t expecting anything. This guy was about as inconspicuous as a pink pig in overalls.
We drove on by and went around the block and came back the other way and parked. From where we sat we could see the church and we could see the cop car. Gradually we saw less of both. It turned dark and the storm clouds from the west turned it darker yet
.
After a while, lights came on inside the church, then outside of it, lighting up the driveway. An hour passed and cars began to pull up at the curb, and one, a tan Volkswagen, drove around back. Men and women and kids got out of the cars and walked up to the church, around the side of it, and out of sight.
Another fifteen minutes went by, and men and women came away from the church without their kids, got in their cars, and drove away. I thought about that. Parents bringing their kids to a safe place, the church. Leaving them with someone safe, the Reverend, assured in their hearts that their kids were off to have a good time.
And most likely they were. It wasn’t the loved kids the Reverend wanted, so just exactly what was the Reverend’s game? Figuring what he did want made my head hurt.
A minute or two later, the short bus came out from behind the church with its lights on. I could see the Reverend driving, glimpsed the shadowed forms of kids through the windows. The bus turned left and drove past the cop car and on down the street.
The cop car fired up quick and pulled around in the center of the street and went after the bus. Mr. Sneak. He might as well have been standing on a bucket, jerking his dick and singing a song.
Leonard cranked up and we followed after. Actually, neither we nor the cop had to be sneaky. The bus did what we expected it to do. It drove straight to the carnival, paused at the gate and went on into the fairgrounds. So far, things were going as expected.
Not having a special pass, we, along with the cop, parked outside of the fence, and walked up to the gate. When we got there, we were standing behind the cop. The guy at the gate, a black guy with a physique like the Pillsbury Dough Boy and black glasses with white tape on the nose bar, wouldn’t let the cop in because he didn’t have a dollar. The cop, a hard-boiled guy wearing what was once called a leisure suit, a style of clothing that went out of favor and production not long after the demise of the seventy-five-cent paperback, wanted to show him his badge and let that do.