‘What all that preacher talk about?’ said Mouncey.
‘It’s Scripture,’ said Wayne as he rejoined us. ‘That first line’s something Jesus said, and the other about dying is from the Old Testament. The sword part’s from Genesis.’
‘How you know that?’ said Mouncey.
‘Used to teach Sunday School. Here, let me shoot that, Lou.’
‘Suppose this has anything to do with our case?’ asked Ridout, watching Wayne prep the letter.
‘Naw,’ said Mouncey. ‘This about the Lindberg case, darlin’.’
THIRTY-TWO
The next day LA was standing by the bookcase in my office flipping through some of the old Highway Patrol journals that came to the office unordered, and stayed there by the year unread, when Ridout and Mouncey showed up to report on what they’d learned about the possibility Gold might have engineered her own death.
Consulting his notes, Ridout said, ‘My end, I didn’t find anybody who ever heard Gold talk about killing herself, she didn’t buy any insurance, no big debts. Her internist and her ob-gyn both say as far as they know she didn’t have any life-threatening disease. Swung by for another chat with the husband. He says nope, she never said anything about killing herself and if I knew her I’d know that was never gonna happen.’
‘I could’ve told you that,’ LA said without looking up from the five-year-old article about police pensions she was skimming.
Ridout eyed her. ‘So how come you didn’t, doc?’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘Oh.’ He cleared his throat and continued. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘still no findable connection with any of the kind of guys we’ve been talking about that she might’ve hired to do her in.’ He shrugged. ‘In other news, Wayne says to tell you there’s no match on the gum you got from Jamison’s place and what we picked up at the scene.’
‘How about the other people in Gold’s office?’ I said.
‘I’d say we got zip on that one. Secretary’s a twenty-one-year-old lawyer’s daughter named Jessica Destin who belongs to a riding club and takes accounting classes at night, which is where she was the night Gold got it. She just replaced the old secretary, a church lady with a dying husband, name’s Earlene Cutchell. The counsellor’s a Margaret Ailesworth, been with the practice about four months. She’s almost retirement age, plays bridge with some other old ladies or goes birdwatching with her husband John in her free time. Played bridge, then went out with a few of the other players for coffee. That broke up a couple hours later, putting her on the road too late to be nailing anybody up in a tree. No indication she knows anybody that might’ve done it for her. The psych associate who worked for Gold is a guy named Peregrine Espy, and no, I ain’t shittin’ you, so don’t even ask. He’s a flaky gay kid who probably weighs one-twenty with rocks in his pockets and is into TV shows about old crockery and dancing. Seemed worried mostly about where he’s gonna find another job. Home with Mom on that fateful night, watching Antiques Roadshow, no connections with Gold outside the office, no involvement with extremist groups, no sheet on him or Mom, yada yada yada. Jackie Milner, Jamison’s ex, didn’t have much to say except she’s pretty happy with her life now and Dr Gold was probably right about the marriage being a horse with a broke leg – said after the first week or so she wouldn’t have taken Andy back even if she could’ve had him. Hated Gold in a quiet kind of way, but her day planner stays pretty full with her job and the kids and the guy she’s dating now, real-estate developer named Chuck Aiken. Background on both of them pretty much dittoes Ailesworth and Espy. My take, put ’em all in a bag, shake ’em up real good with some flour and you still got nothing to fry.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And stop looking so damn cheerful about it. M, have you got anything?’
Leaning forward to set her Sprite on the edge of my desk, she found the notebook page she wanted and tapped it with a long purple nail. ‘First off, Pendergrass’s ex, like you ast for. Name Laura, she a cosmetologist, live in Houston. Say Pendergrass a sure enough asshole, anything sit down to pee, he got to nail it. Don’t know about no group sex or butt-whuppin’ or any that other stuff, but come to him, nothing gone surprise her. Said let her know if she be any help lockin’ his sorry ass up.’
Another dry hole. ‘Moving right along,’ I said.
‘Next thing, her shrink. Name Runnels. He a Oreo.’
‘A what?’
LA said, ‘Black on the outside, white on the inside.’
‘Co-rect,’ Mouncey said. ‘Got the tweeds and the pipe and the Porsche, belong to the country club, golf trophies on the shelf – he got the whole possum-trot goin’ on. Probably a Republican to boot.’
‘Ain’t all doctors Republicans?’ said Ridout with a glance at LA.
‘What did you get out of him?’ I said.
‘He not too happy talking to me at first so I tell him that be fine, he right, best we do it by the numbers, I be back in thirty minutes with a subpoena for him and all them files he got, bring along the U-Haul, prolly no need shuttin’ down his practice more’n a month or two while we go through ev’thing with him, he figure out something to tell the medical board when they come sniffin’ around, and maybe I get to meet all them Dateline folks up in here doin’ they interviews. He rethink it a little and pretty soon he see his way clear to help me out. Say the doc been seeing him a year and a half, mostly for drugs. Say she got a “mixed personality disorder”.’
I looked at LA. ‘Earn your salt,’ I said.
She said, ‘He didn’t mean they were actually mixed – it’s more like stacked. He was saying she had more than one personality disorder, or more likely traits from more than one. Did he say what they were?’
‘Uh huh. “Paranoid and antisocial with narcissistic traits.” Also say she agitated. Now and then he give her some Oxy and whatnot for that.’
‘Nothing about depression?’
She shook her head. ‘Ast him if she be the kind to kill herself. Say that about the last thing he be lookin’ for.’
‘He say anything else?’
‘Tole me she got no friends, don’t trust nobody, use people, see the world divided up between predators and prey, naturally she prefer to be on the predator side. Seem like we talkin’ about hawks and rabbits there.’
‘Ugly picture,’ said Ridout.
‘It get better,’ said Mouncey. ‘Doctor Oreo say she got “sexual compulsions”.’
‘Such as?’
‘In addition to she SM all the way, she “polymorphous perverse” too.’
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘She gets it on with anybody,’ LA said. ‘Male, female, old, young, somewhere else in the food chain – wouldn’t matter much to her.’
‘You got it,’ said Mouncey. ‘She a equal-opportunity ho.’
‘That fit with the Welsh code?’
LA nodded.
‘Must be easier to get dates that way,’ I said.
‘Best part, the doc like pee parties. Call it the golden shower.’
‘Holy shit,’ said Ridout.
‘You not listenin’,’ said Mouncey. ‘We talkin’ whiz here.’
‘Who whizzes on who?’
‘Don’t know, darlin’. Might be you want to research it a little deeper.’
‘What about the coke?’ I said.
‘Look like she snorting about a eight-ball a day. Don’t run it or smoke it. Her connection that lawyer Feigel, like you say, Lou. He Jewish too, by the way.’
‘Sayin’ he’s next on the cross?’ asked Ridout.
‘Cain’t never tell,’ said Mouncey. ‘Top of all that, I got something else might be good.’
‘Do tell.’
‘Talkin’ to that snitch down on the stroll, got the disease make him bark and cuss all the time – ’
‘Tourette’s?’ LA said.
‘Yatzee,’ Mouncey said. ‘Too-rets.’
I’d run into the guy myself. He worked at a car wash, knew a lot of people in the life and l
iked to think of himself as a spy.
‘So anyway, we talkin’ little this, little that, he telling me about some kinda scam they running out the fed prison, getting stuff on other people’s credit cards and what-have-you, then he off about some old white guy they got out there used to be a math professor or something. But he a preacher too. Name Jaston Keets. Say he real smart, he some kind of guru for them fat honkies dress up like soldiers, run around in the woods.’
‘But he’s been on the inside for a while?’ I said, wondering where this was going.
‘Went up six years ago. He one them Sword of the Lord guys had they camp on top the mountain, takin’ potshots at the feebs when they come round.’
‘Lummus’s group,’ I said, feeling the beginnings of a small mental buzz. ‘Hey, didn’t those guys have some kind of sign up at their compound, a logo or something?’
‘Uh huh,’ she said, producing a dog-eared leaflet denouncing America’s godless ways and the Jewish-black-immigrant-unChristian government’s “goon squads”, the kind of flyer that occasionally showed up on windshields in parking lots around southwest Arkansas and into northeast Texas and northwest Louisiana. I’d seen them without seeing them for years, but I sure as hell saw this now, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I said, ‘This logo – ’
‘Seen them little doodles you been drawing e’where,’ Mouncey said as I was pawing through my top drawer. Finally I found what I was looking for – a sticky note with my latest rendition of the baking soda figure I had been drawing, a flexed, muscular arm holding what I now realised was a short, thick sword. I held it next to the flyer. The two drawings were almost identical.
‘This where the plot get thick,’ Mouncey said. ‘Snitch say e’body call Keets the Chaplain.’
THIRTY-THREE
When I’d set up a meeting with Keets at the prison, LA said she wanted to come along.
‘Tell him I’m a secretary or something – maybe I can detect a clue,’ she said. ‘By stealth.’
‘Great idea,’ Zito said. ‘You still got your secret-agent licence, right?’
The only prints found on the ‘Capt Bonum’ letter and envelope belonged to Bertie and a couple of post office workers, and the envelope itself was the self-sticking type, meaning it didn’t need licking and therefore gave up no DNA. Something tying Keets to the letter would have been a good hole card for the interview, but even without that I thought we might get some use out of the letter when we talked to him.
When the day came, a skinny redheaded corrections officer led LA and me back to a dingy, low-ceilinged conference room that smelled like mice and looked even bleaker and more desperate than the prison in general. Except for a square, grey metal table and a few hard-used military-looking chairs, there was no furniture in the room, which was brightly lit by the kind of fluorescents that give human skin the colour of dead amphibians.
‘Homey,’ I said.
LA glanced around the room. ‘No place for a claustrophobic, but I guess we’ve seen worse.’
The heavy metal door fitted with a reinforced glass observation window opened and the redheaded guard brought Keets into the room. He was unshaven and looked seventy or so, outfitted in standard jailhouse-orange scrubs, ragged-out carpet slippers and thick horn-rimmed glasses over small blue eyes. He leaned on an aluminum quad-cane, a pale man, not really obese but heavy and soft from prison food, with oily, iron-grey hair lying in long discrete hanks across his shiny scalp.
‘Rap on the door if you need anything,’ said the guard. He gave his prisoner a final glance and let himself out.
I shook hands with Keets and introduced LA, saying, ‘This is Lee Rowe. She works with me.’
‘Why don’t we all sit down?’ he said. ‘These old shanks aren’t what they used to be.’
We took chairs on three sides of the table, LA briskly opening a steno pad and producing a stick pen, looking clerical and well-organised.
‘Forgive me, Ms Rowe, but I am something of a student of human taxonomy,’ Keets said. ‘You appear to me to be of partial northern Mediterranean extraction, possibly Greek. May I ask if that is so?’
LA, whose long-gone biological father, or sperm donor if you listened to Rachel, actually had been Greek, said, ‘I’m mostly who-knows-what.’
‘Ah, the Greeks,’ said Keets as if she had confirmed his speculation. ‘Among the most estimable of races until their eventual debasement. Of course with your height and noble features I would suspect yours must be the old, true blood of Pericles and Pythagoras.’ He watched her print the date neatly at the top of her page.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said neutrally, drawing a line under the date.
I said, ‘I appreciate your willingness to talk to us, Mr Keets. Or is it Reverend Keets?’
He smiled. ‘We both know you could have compelled me, at least to meet with you. And you may call me whatever you like.’
‘And we both know how long that would have taken and how little good it would have done.’
A nod of acknowledgement. ‘How can I serve you, Lieutenant?’
‘We’re here about the murder of a psychologist – ’
Keets shifted in his chair and leaned the cane against the table. ‘A Jewish woman psychologist, I believe,’ he said. ‘We’re not allowed use of the internet here, but we do have day-old newspapers and a certain amount of television access.’
‘You’re right about Dr Gold,’ I said. ‘And your name came up as someone who might have information that would help us.’
‘My name?’
‘Actually, what came up was a reference to “the Chaplain”.’
‘And it came up how?’
‘An anonymous tip to the hotline.’
‘Ah.’
‘I thought being as familiar as you are with the survivalist and Christian Identity groups might give you some insight that would help me figure out who killed Dr Gold. And why.’
Another smile. ‘Nicely put, Lieutenant. What you mean to say, I believe, is that you hope I might be able to finger someone for you.’
I turned to LA. ‘Ms Rowe, would you call that a – what’s the term?’
‘Semantic quibble, I believe.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So let me ask a different question: you acted as chaplain to the Sword of the Lord faction in Arkansas, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, proudly.’
‘And I understand you were a mathematician.’
‘I have taught mathematics, yes. It is, I believe, the purest of the many languages of God. But I am also an ordained minister of Christ.’
‘What denomination would that be?’
‘There can be only one true church.’
‘Are you still involved with the movement?’
‘Jaston Lawrence Keets, Chaplain, Army of the Sword of the Lord.’
‘No serial number?’
‘You are accustomed to command, Lieutenant?’
‘It’s not exactly everything it’s cracked up to be.’
‘Have you experienced combat?’
‘A few minutes at a time.’
‘Ah. Then you have taken human life?’
‘That’s not all it’s cracked up to be, either.’
‘But in principle you have no objection to killing when circumstances warrant?’
‘There’s not always a choice.’
‘Indeed. You are no doubt a good officer. By the way, do you, as they say, believe in our government’s wars, the ones they keep telling us are fought to preserve our freedom?’
‘Not enough to think that’s what they’re really about.’
‘But as a soldier you would have served as ordered?’
‘Yes.’
‘My wars were a long time ago. Look at me now – I have arthritis, diabetes, kidney disease. My liver’s no good any more. I have no family to return to if I leave here. Assuming I knew who executed your Zionist quack, what inducement do you imagine might cause me to inform on good soldiers for doing as they were ordered to do?’
>
‘Interesting way of looking at it. Do you think the killers were somebody’s soldiers, acting on orders?’
‘As it happens, no.’
‘Why not?’
‘I do not think those men, whoever they were, believed in anything beyond themselves.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The killing clearly was not exigent, nor did it strike effectively at the illegitimate occupation forces of Washington, either of which might have justified the effort and risk of such an undertaking. Of course I applaud the death of any Jew, but in this case the target was merely a symptom, one of millions. She was neither an important agent of the occupation nor an immediate threat. Her death was an empty gesture, serving only to bring unnecessary pressure on the liberation movement. I think your killers, Lieutenant, were ad hoc mercenaries.’
‘And none of your own?’
‘And none of my own.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said LA deferentially. ‘Would you mind telling us how you would have responded if you actually had ordered the killing?’
Keets looked at her a long moment. ‘That’s a remarkable question.’
LA waited politely.
‘I imagine I would have simply denied all knowledge of the situation and advised you to go to hell,’ he said.
I caught what may have been a faint smile from LA.
‘So you probably don’t think much of the NBA?’ I said.
He grunted dismissively. ‘Ten niggers leaping, and a partridge in a pear tree. If jumping makes civilisation, let’s elect a parliament of jackrabbits. No, sir, the hope of humanity on earth has never rested in any but white hands, and it never will.’
‘Mr Keets, do you know Benjamin Frix?’
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I do know that you are using the wrong tense for a reason, and that Mr Frix was recently found dead in the ashes of his home. No doubt that is regarded as a suspicious circumstance. For all I know, you are proceeding on the theory that there is some connection between his death and Gold’s. Are you prepared to tell me why you asked if I knew him?’
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘What can you tell me about this?’ I pushed a copy of the death threat across to him.