Parishioner (12 page)

Xavier’s disquiet receded between the private talk with Frank, the beautiful Brazilian, and having a purpose. He bought thirty small roses and wrote a note on the card. After that he went home and donned a dark blue coverall jumpsuit with the name
Fleet Florist
embroidered over the left-side pocket in yellow thread. It was one of the many
tools
he’d collected from garage sales in preparation for unexpected eventualities. He delivered the bouquet at one twenty-nine, went to his Edsel, and took off the overalls to reveal a yellow suit and olive shirt, and then went over to MacArthur Park, where he sat watching young (and not so young) lovers, brash teenagers, and retirees taking it all in like breaths of fresh air through an oxygen mask.

“Ecks?” Winter said answering his phone.

“How you doin’, kid?”

“Can’t sleep.”

“It’ll come. Don’t worry.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“That’ll come too, Win. There’s no rush.”

“They say on the news that the guy with the crowbar in his chest is expected to live.”

“Good for him.”

“But won’t he tell about you?” Winter Johnson asked.

“Probably not. He’s got enough trouble.”

“They didn’t say anything about the vault downstairs,” Winter was saying.

“No. I don’t expect they would. You shouldn’t say anything about it either, Win. Even if you turn me in, you should say that I went downstairs alone.”

“But then why didn’t I run?”

“Maybe you did,” Xavier postulated. “Maybe you stayed until I went downstairs and then you ran. That way you wouldn’t even have been there when I had the shoot-out. You could say that you were afraid that I’d kill you.”

“You wouldn’t, though, right, Ecks?”

“No, I would not.”

Xavier had brought with him the first of a condensed three-volume set of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. At their last scheduled private meeting Father Frank had suggested that he read for two hours every day on top of his correspondence college studies. On Sundays, when he remembered, he perused one of the major religious texts, but on other days he read history, sometimes philosophy. Most of what he read he did not understand, but Frank had said that it didn’t matter, that understanding was more like a surprise than a goal you could see or predict.

“Just keep on reading,” Frank had said, “and the truth will come up on you from the night side of your mind.”

At six forty-five Xavier went to a small coffee shop across the street from the park. Doris Milne was sitting at a table in the window wearing a tan dress that might have been made from canvas. Her bag was Crayola blue and her shoes maroon. She was a pretty woman, Xavier thought again, somewhere in her late twenties.

He went up to the counter and bought a double espresso before going to her small table. She hadn’t seen him come in.

“Hello,” he said, and she flinched.

“Mr. Noland.”

“Can I sit down?”

“You can do whatever you want,” she said. “You made that quite clear.”

Xavier smiled and pulled up a chair. He sat down and looked at her a moment or two.

“You’re very pretty,” he said.

“Sex? Is that what you want?”

The question surprised him, enlightenment coming with the mild shock.

“No. I mean—yes, I am a man, and the kind of man who likes to have sex—but not from you. What I need from you is information.”

“Or you turn me over to the police.”

“I might give them your name.”

“And if I do what you want?”

“Depending on what you say, I’ll leave you alone. I might even give you a name—one
that you could use.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I know that you killed Sedra. Probably bashed her in the head with the same baseball bat you tried to brain me with.”

The statement hit the girl like a slap across the face. Upon recovering she looked around the small café. There was no one right next to them, but Xavier agreed with her unspoken caution.

“Let’s go to a bench in the park,” he offered.

It was late spring and the sky held on to the light of day. They sat side by side on a red bench, their paper cups in hand. She sipped her chai latte, looking nervous. A muscular young white man zipped up on a unicycle and moved back and forth, trying to get Dodo’s attention. It was only when Ecks looked directly at him that he decided the flirtation might not have been worth the exertion.

As the unicyclist moved on, Doris Milne began to speak.

“That house is the only home I’ve ever known,” she said. “Sedra raised me there. She told me that she had found me abandoned on the front porch and decided out of the goodness of her heart to take me in. I was her niece and hand servant. Later I became her accomplice.”

“She bought you.”

“Probably. I used to beg her to tell me who my parents were, but sometimes she’d say that they didn’t love me and now and then she said that they died.”

“Did Brayton Starmon bring you to her?”

“I don’t know. I asked him one night but he wouldn’t say.”

“You knew him?”

“He brought babies for me to play with. I used to think that we were an adoption service, like you said. Until …”

The unicyclist whizzed up and then off again like a hummingbird wondering whether a spider’s web still blocked entrée to a flower filled with nectar.

“Until what?” Ecks asked.

A policeman stopped to look at the odd pair on the red bench.

Doris wasn’t actually crying but there was pain in her face, and her thin frame seemed contorted with agony.

“There was this tiny little baby boy that Brayton brought to the house. He was so cute and loving.”

The policeman walked on.

“I called him Little Mr. Smith,” she said. “He was fine at first but then he got sick. There was something wrong with him. I told Aunt Sedra that we should take him to a doctor but she said that he just needed a little medicine and rest. He suffered for about a week and then one day Auntie came to my room and told me that he was dead. She said that I should bury him in the vault downstairs.

“But when I went to the nursery I could see the mark on his head. She had killed him … I knew it. I knew it even before I saw him.”

“How old were you?” Xavier asked.

“I don’t know, maybe five, six. I buried Little Mr. Smith and prayed for him every day since then. I don’t pray for the other ones, because I didn’t name them after that. I just fed them and changed their diapers like Auntie wanted. It’s like she said, ‘Love is only the bait for pain.’ ”

“You knew what she was up to,” Xavier said after a long silence.

Doris nodded.

“Why’d she keep you?”

“She said it was because she loved me.” There was a hint of hope in her voice.

“But you knew what was happening. There’s more than one body in that vault downstairs.”

“I used to ask her when she was going to retire so that we could move someplace where we wouldn’t have to do adoptions anymore. She would say that we couldn’t do that until I got a passport.”

“You could have called the police,” Xavier suggested.

“She kept the phone locked up.”

“There’s a lot of pay phones in the world.”

“I never left the house alone, except when Auntie took me someplace.”

“You didn’t go to school?”

Doris shook her head and Xavier wondered about the nickname—Dodo.

“You don’t know how to read?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then how did you know to meet me here?”

“I had the nice man at the desk, Mr. Connors, tell me what your note card said.”

We have to talk, Dodo
, the note read.
I don’t want to tell anyone else about you and your aunt but we have to talk. Meet me at the Bean Grinders coffee shop at 6:30 if you want to keep the authorities out of this
.

It was definitely a threat but there were no damning details. Maybe Mr. Connors would keep it quiet.

“But you knew what you were doing was wrong. I mean, even if you couldn’t read there was radio and the TV.”

“Auntie didn’t believe in the boob tube and she only had a record player. I learned how to sew and color.”

Xavier thought a moment more. He was trying to wrap his mind around a lifelong prisoner who had no way to imagine herself free.

“How did you know about the hotel?”

“Auntie would take me there sometimes to have sex with men,” she said simply. “They would bring me gifts and I would do the things Auntie taught me.”

“Damn,” the New York gangster said. “Goddamn.”

“Is that what you want?” Doris asked.

“What?”

“Sex? Auntie said that all men want is sex. That’s why they give girls gifts and kisses. They don’t care about the heart, only the sex.”

“Did you love your aunt?”

If Xavier had been watching Doris from afar he might have thought a sudden chill breeze had kicked up. The girl began to shiver. Her small hands clenched and her eyes filled with tears that refused to fall. Her left heel was pumping up and down.

He watched her go through this pantomime for two minutes or more before reaching out and taking her two fists into his left hand. Instantly she stopped shaking. She gasped, holding that breath like a practiced swimmer.

When she exhaled the words came out, gushing like waters from a dam.

“I could always tell from the tone of Auntie’s voice what she meant. The words didn’t always mean the same thing, but it was the sound of her voice that told me the story.

“If she said, ‘Let’s go have dinner at the Federal,’ it could be that she just wanted to go out. Sometimes I could tell that she wanted the company. But it might mean that there was a man who wanted to have sex with me. It was always the sound of her voice and not the words she said.

“After you got away …” Doris stopped talking for a moment. She looked up from her hands clasped in his. “We were going to kill you, you know.”

“Yeah,” Xavier said. “I got that idea.”

“You don’t care?”

“That’s what creatures do,” he said.

“After you got away Auntie said that it was bad. She said that you could hurt us and we had to move. I lived my whole life in that house and she said we would leave it behind. She told me to gather my gifts from the men and that she would pack her clothes. She said that I should bring everything down to the vault so that we could hide it in there until things died down and we could send people in to get our stuff.

“But I could tell by the sound of her words that she meant to kill me down there in the vault. There was always a sound that she had. It was the same sound when she told me that Little Mr. Smith was dead, or when we planned to kill the men that Brayton needed to get rid of.

“I told her I’d go down to my room, but instead I got the bat and snuck up into her bedroom. She was still in her slip. She didn’t hear me because her hearing was bad …”

“You don’t have to go on, baby,” Xavier said. “I know what you did.”

“I did love her. She was the only person I ever really knew. I broke the lock on her phone and called the taxi company to come bring me to the hotel. She has—had—an account with the Federal. All I had to do was say that she’d be coming that afternoon. She had already sent her travel bureau on ahead.”