Parishioner (16 page)

“Can I look in your bag, Rose?”

“Abara abba.”

“No,” he said patiently, “in your bag.”

He gestured toward the openmouthed leather sack with its big arching handles. It had once been brown but had faded and whitened until it was mouse colored, tawny, and cracked.

“Hello?” Rose Berber said.

“Bag?”

“Ooo la la?”

“Oui oui.”

Rose grinned at some faint memory of language. Xavier touched the nearest handle of her bag and she froze. He touched her hardened, weathered hand and she grabbed his thumb with the strength of a powerful infant.

Using his free hand Xavier reached into the bag, grabbed onto the papers inside, and secreted them under his jacket. All of this was driven by intuition. He felt the old woman’s secrets, smelled them on her dress and in the dirt around her crate.

He stood up quickly, pulling his thumb from her grasp.

“Osh barning, barning,” she lamented, and Xavier wondered if maybe there was some kind of sublime meaning to her nonsense.

He didn’t ponder this riddle but walked out of the tree room into the wilderness yard where Clay Berber waited.

“I told you she couldn’t talk,” the old man said.

“She does nothing but talk, brother. What you meant to say is that we don’t understand.”

While walking down the front pathway from the Berber residence, Xavier felt like he used to when leaving the scene of a crime he’d just committed; furtive and vulnerable, angry and even a little bit giddy.

Clay was standing on the topmost white step of his home, watching as Xavier unlocked the door of the Fleetwood.

At that moment a tortured scream came from behind the house. Clay turned and, hobbling in the pantomime of a run, headed through the front door. Xavier slid behind the steering wheel, turned the key, and drove off before his crime could be discovered and avenged.

On the rooftop parking lot three blocks from his Flower Street apartment, Xavier brought out the thick tattered sheaf of papers he stole from the wilderness woman and her sad, fading husband. There were newspaper and magazine articles about the kidnappings. There was a picture of Benol at the age of twelve or thirteen that looked something like her—but not enough for an ID. There was a letter from a police detective, Simon Lowe, stating that, though the investigation would never be closed, the police had come to a dead end in finding their niece or the babies she’d taken.

Xavier sifted through the articles, reading a bit of one and then passing on to another. He already knew the names of the children’s parents; Benol’s document had provided all that. He thought that he knew more than anything Rose Berber could have collected until a postcard dropped from the stack onto the seat next to him.

There was an alligator attacking a blue heron on the photo face. The bird was just rising up from a lake, its whitish blue-gray wings struggling against the air. The alligator had clamped onto its left claw, however, and was pulling the beautiful bird down into murky green darkness.

On the other side of the card the postal stamp said
Tampa, Florida
, and was dated February 9, 1993—five years after the kidnappings.

The card was most probably addressed to Clay Berber but what was the threat? Benol had moved to Florida; she admitted that herself. “B” had signed the postcard.

Xavier walked the long way ’round to his apartment building, considering what the postcard meant. The papers felt hot in his hand and so when he passed the neighborhood post office he went in and sent an express mail package, containing the papers he stole, to Father Frank and Sister Hope. He sent everything but the postcard.

That done, he headed for his building, thinking that this would be a nice evening for peppermint schnapps and Charles Dickens.

He took the stairs two at a time while recalling the old days, when he was often going up
or down the back way to keep out of sight from the cops. Technically he was still on the run, but he didn’t see his life like that anymore. Now he was a new man in a new life, far removed, invisible, and free—to serve.

He stopped at his own door, a sixth or maybe seventh sense warning him of something, something.

But Ecks was not the kind of criminal who was controlled by fear. He felt the pangs of terror, lived under the reign of threat, but he only ever took a step backward so that he could attack from a better position; that fact, as his alcoholic father often said, was both his creed and his breed.

So when he opened the door and saw the big man sitting at his yellow table, he felt mild surprise but not fear. The men in suits flanking the inside of his front door were no revelation either. He didn’t back up because he could hear the footsteps behind him in the hallway.

Xavier walked into the center of the small room and stared.

“Mr. Noland?” the seated man, who was obviously in charge, asked. He had an accent: French, not French Canadian.

Xavier had never met a French cop before.

“And you are?”

“Detective Andre Tourneau.” He wore a darkish tan trench coat with buttoned flaps on the shoulders and a sash hanging down to the floor. He was a big man but not necessarily fat. Ecks wondered at the violence that might reside behind his small green eyes.

“Cops?” Xavier asked, moving his head to take in all of his company.

“Have a seat, Mr. Noland,” Tourneau offered. It was almost as if the apartment were Tourneau’s office and Xavier was the unwilling guest.

Ecks lowered himself onto one of his hardwood chairs and leaned back onto the two back legs. A glance out the window told him that his Edsel had been returned, parked as it was behind his newspaper delivery truck.

Xavier then peered at his surprise visitor. He would have called himself a white man, though his skin was light olive. His hair was like a weathered brown roof atop a country cottage. Tourneau was in his fifties but exuded the vitality of an animal in the wild. Either he had good genes or he paid close attention to his physical health.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Tourneau asked.

“To give me a citizenship award of some kind?”

“You were seen running—staggering, actually—from a home in Culver City yesterday. The next day that domicile was found to be a crime scene.”

“Oh? And who is the criminal?”

Tourneau smiled.

Xavier took a look at the four standing cops who were now crowding his small studio. They were all suited, tall, and of almost every race the city had to offer.

The Rainbow Squad
, Ecks thought, and then he smiled at the phrase.

“Something funny?” Tourneau asked.

“No,” Ecks said to the cop. “I went to Mrs. Landcombe’s house to ask her about a friend of mine, an Albert Timmerman, who lived in Seaside. Albert knew her in his younger days. When he was dying he asked me to tell her about his passing. All he remembered was her first name and the corner where her house was. I went there and she offered me a drink. The next thing I knew the room was spinning and someone tried to hit me with a baseball bat. I ran out the door, down a long street, and smack-dab into a moving car.”

“Did Timmerman die?”

“Yes. Heart attack. He’s buried in the graveyard in Seaside. That’s a little town just north of Seabreeze City.”

The detective stared for a moment, two. He was digesting the information, moving it around behind his beady eyes like puzzle pieces that had multiple resolutions—but only one true answer.

“Why didn’t you give this information to Captain Soto?” Tourneau asked.

“At first I didn’t remember. I didn’t know anything when I woke up in that hospital bed. Not a damn thing. The blow to the head added to whatever drugs they gave me. It’s only been coming back in snatches.”

“Maybe you decided to go back to Mrs. Landcombe’s home and confront her,” Tourneau offered.

“Look, man,” Ecks said with an edge to his voice. “I’m not gonna argue with you or suppose this or that. I didn’t go back to that house or commit any kinda crime. You wanna arrest me and take me to jail … okay, I’ll go. I’m not gonna fight you either.”

“That’s a good decision,” Tourneau said, and Ecks realized that he was facing someone
who was very much like him—violent and proud.

Xavier held out his hands, palms up and steady, saying, “Handcuffs?”

He stared into the detective’s green beads, letting him know that in a dark alley, with no one else around, the fight would be on.

“How did a high-ranking captain like Soto get your case?” the displaced Frenchman asked.

“Say what?” Xavier put his dark hands on the bright yellow table, palms down.

“You understand.”

“I understand the question, but I have no idea what happened after that car hit me. I woke up and your brother in blue was standin’ over me. I sure in hell didn’t call him, and I have no idea how the LAPD dispatches its police.”

“Why did Landcombe try to kill you?”

“I don’t know that she did. Maybe she just wanted to knock me out.”

“This isn’t your first police interview, is it, Mr. Noland?”

“Black men talk to cops all the time, Detective. I don’t know what it’s like in the country you come from, but here in America there’s a great intimacy between black men and officers of the law, not much friendliness but close, still and all.”

Tourneau raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide for a moment. The possibility for normal-size eyes was a surprise to Ecks.

“You haven’t asked about the crime committed at Landcombe’s home,” the Frenchman noted.

“I don’t care. I’m finished with that woman.”

“Did you see a young woman there? White, blond?”

“No. Must have been somebody, though, because I was lookin’ at Sedra when the baseball bat hit me.”

“How did you know it was a bat?”

“I grabbed the suckah and pulled it away from my attacker. You know I got a hard head, man. I ran for the door with the bat in my hand and dropped it before goin’ outside, or maybe I let it go on the lawn—I really don’t remember. Either way, I didn’t get a good look at who hit me. And if I did I forgot. But you could understand that.”

The policeman smiled. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He sat back and laced his
hands together, elbows placed at a wide angle on the table. After assuming this pose he pursed his lips.

“You have no verifiable explanation for your visit to Landcombe’s home,” he said. “This Albert Timmerman is dead. So is Sedra Landcombe.”

“Oh? How’d she die?”

“Bludgeon, maybe a baseball bat. It was quite gruesome.”

“Got my fingerprints on it? Is that why you’re here?”

The detective smiled again, enjoying the back-and-forth.

“Are you busy right now, Mr. Noland?”

“Just talkin’ to you and your friends.”

“Would you like to accompany us to a place where we can settle this issue?”

“What issue?”

“We know you were at the Landcombe residence once,” he said. “Some of my associates think you may have been there at yet another time.”

“What kind of place?” Xavier asked.

“A place of goodwill.” Tourneau smiled again. Ecks liked this smile.

“Sure. Why not?”

He rose from the chair and the two business-suited cops, one black and the other Asian, who were standing at the inside of the door came up quickly, each grabbing an arm.

Ecks held his arms down straight and stiff so that the men had great difficulty trying to get his wrists close enough together for the handcuffs. After a moment of strain Tourneau’s smile broadened.

“Release your arms,” the black cop warned.

“Let him alone, Mr. Jason,” Tourneau said. “After all, he’s not under arrest. Not yet.”