Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (6 page)

    
“Would
you like to go back inside?” he asked.

    
“No,”
said Endicott. “I want to tell the story and be done with it. They desecrated
the hall. To describe everything they did would itself be a blasphemy, but I
can tell you this: They painted the walls with occult signs. Signs to invoke
Satan to enter our sanctuary. No amount of whitewash will ever erase that
sacrilege. They polluted that sacred place with every kind of filth and
fornication. I can’t account for my daughter’s part in this, except to say that
she was under some kind of sorcery, God help her ....”

    
“Were
any photographs taken of the walls?” Raszer asked.

    
His
visitor gripped the railing. “The police . . . have them.”

    
“I’ll
check those out. Kids pick up these signs and symbols from the Internet. They
don’t necessarily know what they mean, or what effect they can have. Was there
anything else? Anything important?”

    
“Behind
the lectern, they wrote some words on the wall. I pray God they were not Katy’s
epitaph.”

    
“What
were the words?”

    
“Nothing
is true. Everything is permitted.”

    
Raszer
pursed his lips. After a moment he asked, “What was the upshot?”

    
“By the
time the crime was discovered, Ruthie was gone. Back to Taos, I suppose. Katy
confessed—not to me, but to another girl from the congregation—and then it all
came out. An assembly of the elders was convened to weigh on Katy’s disfellowship.
There is no harsher sanction. Disfellowship is living damnation. I recused
myself so that I could stand witness for my daughter, because I couldn’t accept
that the little girl I’d raised was beyond redemption. The Overseers granted me
a year to restore her to the fold. On her eighteenth birthday, Katy was taken
again into the hall. For a year, we were like . . . like Lazarus and Martha. My
Katy returned! And then, and then . . . ”

    
“She
backslid,” Raszer surmised. “The two boys, the ones you say assaulted Katy at
the rave . . . were they prosecuted for their part in the Kingdom Hall
vandalism?”

    
“To my
everlasting regret,” Endicott replied. “No. The elders thought it best to
handle them through the families, through our own church law. Had we left it to
the police, they might have been in a prison cell on that awful night.”

    
“About
that night,” Raszer said, “the night of Katy’s abduction. You said that Ruthie
and the boys had gotten Katy into drugs. The whole picture: the Lincoln
Continental, the business suits, the style of execution . . . is there any
evidence to suggest a drug deal gone bad? That Katy was taken as some kind of .
. . payment?”

    
“If she
was, and she is paying off their debt, I’m afraid she’s already damned.”

    
“Not if
she’s been taken beyond the range of her free will, Mr. Endicott. We like to
think our souls are sovereign, but I’ve seen strong people lose themselves in
the presence of power, and a girl like Katy, raised not to question authority—”

    
Raszer
stopped midsentence. Something was wrong.

    
Endicott
turned from the rail and stumbled forward, coughing up a throatful of mucus and
bile. Raszer offered an arm, but the man charged past, staggering down the
steps into the midst of the statuary. He stopped in front of the goddess
Cybele.

    
“Mr.
Endicott?” Raszer called out. “Silas?” He descended into the garden. The black
sky suddenly dropped a payload of nickel-size hailstones; they ricocheted like
bullets off the stone. Endicott stretched his fingers toward the goddess, then
withdrew. With her right hand, she offered a carved pomegranate,
indistinguishable in size and shape from an apple. In her cupped left palm,
Brigit had placed a little black “moon rock” Raszer had once bought for her at
the Griffith Observatory. It was the rock that held Endicott’s stare. He spun
around, his index finger raised, then fell like a tree, knocking Raszer off his
feet and pinning him to the wet ground.

    
After a
moment, Raszer gingerly rolled Silas Endicott onto his back. There was no
reflex, only the wheezing exhalation of foul breath as his lungs emptied. No
pulse, either. To all appearances, the old man had dropped stone dead.

    
BRIGIT HADN’T SCREAMED, but the sight of a corpse
in her father’s garden, especially one as formidable in death as Silas
Endicott’s, had to have marked her. Raszer watched for signs of delayed effect.
As he drove her to LAX the following morning to be returned to her mother’s
house, to school, to her “normal life in Connecticut, he decided to face the
matter head-on.

    
“I can
still remember seeing my first dead person,” he said. “How weird it was. It was
my grandpa, my mother’s dad. One minute he was there, alive, beside me and
somehow
inside
me, too. The next
minute he was gone, and there was an emptiness in me. That part of me that was
him had died.”

    
“Yeah,
but it wasn’t like that with Mr. Endicott,” she said.

    
“How do
you mean, honey?”

    
“It was
like he was already gone.”

    
“I think
I know what you mean,” said Raszer. “He was—”

    
“No,”
she said. “Not that.”

    
Raszer
gave his daughter a sidelong glance. “Not what, muffin?” He knew what she’d
meant, because he knew that
she’d
known what
he
meant, and that was the
way they had communicated almost from her infancy. He wanted to hear her say it
anyway. It was important, he thought, not to use telepathy as a substitute for
expression.

    
“Not
that he was sick and all,” she replied. “It was more like he was a ghost. Like
he actually died a long time ago.”

    
“I think
his people would have mentioned that detail when I called them at the Kingdom
Hall in Azusa.”

    
“Maybe,”
she said. “Or maybe they’re just used to it.”

    
“You
mean, like ‘Old Silas is up to his tricks again, haunting the streets of
Hollywood . . . searching for his lost Katy’?”

    
“Something
like that, yeah.”

    
She
wasn’t yet on the plane, and Raszer already missed her. He had to swallow hard.
He hated returning Brigit to his ex-wife, hated the sheltered life she was
going back to, hated the ache she left behind. Raszer’s daughter was also his
best friend.

    
“Well,”
he said, exiting at Sepulveda for the airport, “it’s an intriguing idea. And I
don’t dismiss the notion that a man’s passion can outlive his body. But we did
see the paramedics carry him out, didn’t we?”

    
“Yeah, I
guess we did,” she said, squinting in imitation of her father. “But still—”

    
“I know.
That’s what I was trying to say before. Death doesn’t make sense. The thing
that makes us alive can’t just all of a sudden go away, can it?”

    
“Do you
think Mr. Endicott was a good man, Daddy?”

    
Raszer
sighed unconsciously. He was turning onto the Departures ramp. “I think . . .
he was as good a man as someone who’s been in a box all his life can be. Maybe
didn’t quite see the whole picture. ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds.’”

    
“Who
said that?” she asked.

    
“Emerson,
I think.”

    
She
repeated the sentence soundlessly, then announced, “I don’t ever want a
hobgoblin in
my
mind, Daddy.”

    
Raszer
laughed and reached over to yank her hair as they entered the parking
structure. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, honey. Anyhow, I do
believe that Mr. Endicott loved his daughter, and that’s good enough for me.”

    
“Are you
going to find her, Daddy?”

    
“Well,
I’m going to see about that this afternoon. I’m going to speak with the other
men at his church, and see what they want me to do.”

    
“I hope
you do, Daddy.”

    
Before
they left the car, Brigit opened his glove compartment and fished around until
she found his Swiss Army knife, the one with the corkscrew and the awl and the
scissors, and then she snipped off half an inch of hair and gave it to him. It
was some-thing she did each time she left, and each time, he put it into his
wallet.

    
“Daddy?”

    
“Uh-huh?”

    
“If
you’d died when I was little, or if I had . . . would we still be having these
talks?”

    
“I know
we would, baby,” he said. “You’re my cosmic muffin.”

Raszer was due at the Kingdom Hall in Azusa at one
o’clock, but before that, he had an appointment in Hollywood with one of the
women who, along with Monica and a few others located in various parts of the
world, formed his psychic shield. His work required such a profound and
potentially risky displacement of personality that he felt secure only by
letting each of them know where he might be headed—only when they laid their
hands on him in affirmation of his true name. Technically, Hildegarde Schoeppe
was his shrink, but she was more than that, and he was anxious to get her read
on his present state of readiness to take on an assignment. He’d not been
feeling especially fit lately.

    
The
drive from LAX back into town was distinguished by just one thing, which
occurred only at this time of year or in the rare event of a Santa Ana
condition. At a certain point along the northbound Harbor Freeway, if the
clouds had lifted and the smog had flown, the San Gabriel Mountains rose up,
bushy and wild and capped with the virgin snow that was L.A.’s only natural water
source (not counting the current deluge). They were all the more epic for their
nearness to a big city, and when they appeared, Raszer’s spirit soared up to
the ragged summits and returned as clean as freshly laundered white linen.
Today, however, he was not to be graced. The downpour had stopped for just long
enough to ease his worries about Brigit’s flight, but was now back with renewed
intensity. He couldn’t even make out the Hollywood Hills. And so he exited the
101 at Gower and headed up Beachwood Canyon Drive in a surly mood, more than
ready for Hildegarde’s ministrations.

    
Beachwood
Canyon was L.A.’s richest redoubt of Hollywoodland history, and maybe its
best-kept secret. Other enclaves in the hills had their own cloistered charms,
but only Beachwood remained as the mad barons of old Hollywood had designed it.
The notorious Madame Blavatsky, nineteenth-century doyenne of the occult arts,
had built her Xanadu there, as had Charlie Chaplin, and no less a connoisseur
of the transcendent than Aldous Huxley had chosen to end his years in a home
beneath the H
ollywood
sign, his bloodstream surging with a farewell dose of pharmaceutical LSD.

    
The
whole length of Beachwood Drive was the town at its most alluring, alchemical
and absurd. The flats at the bottom, where it spilled onto Franklin Avenue,
were still resolutely tawdry, despite the city’s recent cleanup campaign.
Shopping-cart people and saucer-eyed waifs shared the sidewalk with aged
B-movie actresses who, when they ventured out, still wore red lipstick and
dressed like vamps. A few blocks up, you saw them as they had been, coming out
of stilt-legged apartment buildings with names like the Casbah or La Paloma,
late for their auditions: would-be starlets with ironed hair and a willingness
to ruin their reputations in order to make them. It was on a cul-de-sac just
off Beachwood that Jack Warner was rumored to have kept a “dormitory” for his
studio’s stable of nubile talent. Nearby were the allegedly haunted barracks in
which the blacklisted Hollywood Ten had held their clandestine meetings.

    
The
style of the architecture was equal parts Barcelona, Tangier, and Mitteleuropa,
and with the steep ascent, the houses became grander and stranger, though not
ostentatious. Raszer’s pulse still throbbed with the climb, for this causeway
of eager flesh and yearning spirit, leading to nowhere but the neverland of Old
Mulholland Drive, was his Hollywood, a place as indecipherable as a code in
cuneiform.

    
Hildegarde
leased office space in an ersatz Tudor building adjacent to the Annie Besant
Lodge, a tiny, whitewashed chapel dedicated to the memory of old Hollywood’s
patron theosophist. She claimed that her proximity to the shrine was conducive
to the sort of therapy she offered, which was basically Jungian depth psychology
with a pinch of mandrake root and eye of newt. She greeted Raszer with a hug
and a once-over.