Parishioner (6 page)

“Small town just a little north of Ventura.”

He was racking up points against the impromptu investigation. A deacon from up north named Egbert. This was all he needed—almost.

“Why were you sitting in your car?” the cop asked, handing back the card.

“I just drove up, Officer. The information I had was that there was a house on every corner and that Ms. Martin lived in a brown one. As you can see, the only house here is blue. When I saw what I was faced with I took a moment out to pray that a brown home had been painted blue. I find that prayer often helps.”

The policeman moved half a step to his left and put his hand on the front hood of the classic car. Xavier stopped himself from smiling. He knew that the hood would be warm, proving his story with no real proof.

The cop stared a moment more. No self-respecting law enforcement officer trusted a man in greenish yellow shoes, but the pieces seemed to fit.

“Sorry for the trouble, Deacon Noland. You have a nice day now.”

Crossing the street as the black-and-white cruiser drove off, Xavier thought about Benol. She was the kind of woman he would bed, but only in a hotel. She’d go through the drawers, closets, and elsewhere if she had the run of his home. And at her place he would have felt vulnerable to attack. A woman like that, he thought, could never be trusted.

On the other hand, he knew that if he had the opportunity to be with her that he would take that chance.

As he walked up the stairs of the front porch, he asked himself again why he was there.

The woman who answered the doorbell was younger than Sedra had been when she bought and sold blond children two decades before. She was slight and blond herself, dark blond with green eyes. She was no more than five feet and probably didn’t top a hundred pounds. Her white skin was healthy, not like Lou Baer-Bond’s doughy hide. She smiled at Xavier.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for a woman named Sedra,” Xavier said easily, feeling once again the seductive seeming honesty of California.

“Sedra Landcombe?”

“That’s her.”

“What do you want with her?”

“I’m here for my cousin, Benol Richards. Twenty-three years ago she had some business dealings with Ms. Landcombe and a man named Welch. She—my cousin, that is—is looking for Welch and thinks that Ms. Landcombe might help.”

“What kind of business?” Even the young woman’s frown seemed friendly and inviting.

“I’m not completely sure. This Welch guy did the actual transactions. It might have been work for some kind of adoption agency.”

The frown deepened.

“And your name is?”

“Noland, Egbert Noland.”

“Why does your cousin want to speak to this man?”

“That’s a private matter that she hasn’t shared with me,” he lied. “But she’s a good woman. I can’t imagine that it’s anything too unpleasant.”

“Why didn’t she come herself?”

“Why are you asking so many questions?” Xavier said.

“Oh … excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude. My name is Doris Milne. I’m Sedra’s niece.”

“Benol is down in Miami. She called me from there and I agreed to look.”

“Come in, Mr. Noland.” Doris took a step backward, allowing Xavier to enter the foyer of the old house.

The walls were painted rose and the floor paved with golden tiles. There was a large healthy fern growing in one corner looming over a generously stuffed carmine chair.

“Have a seat, Mr. Noland,” Sedra Landcombe’s niece offered. “I’ll go see if my aunt can speak to you.”

An angry spasm wrenched through Xavier’s chest, reminding him again that he was a violent man, a killer without much remorse and less reason. He had often felt that it was this immediate willingness to fight and brutalize, more than any other trait, that made him a success in the old neighborhoods.

He reached out and touched the young woman’s shoulder. She turned her head to regard him.

“Thank you,” he said. “Make sure to tell her that it’s about someone involved in the adoption service.”

She smiled and went through a double-wide doorway toward her human-trafficker aunt.

Sitting up straight with his hands on his knees, Xavier went through his memory for the proper sermon.

We all have desires, inclinations, and compulsions
, Frank had once lectured.
This is our animal side, our innocence. But once we make these urges into reality we find that we are cast out. Why? Because we are animals but we are also human beings. These feelings that rise up in us are like the growl of a lion. We want and we take. But if you stand back a moment, if you learn to control the animal appetite in you, then the kingdom will open up and you will find deliverance
.

Frank never mentioned God or his relatives. He talked about concepts and consequences—every now and then offering a religious metaphor.

Xavier didn’t understand what Frank had done to him on that late Wednesday morning in the dark bar where he had, only minutes before, considered murdering a woman over something he might have confessed to.

My name is Frank
, he’d said,
and I think I can help you.…

“Mr. Noland?”

Xavier didn’t want to break away from the reverie. He enjoyed remembering, counting the moments that led to a completely unexpected deliverance.

“Yes?” Xavier said.

“My aunt will see you in the yard.”

Doris Milne led Xavier through a sunken living room that was furnished with gaudy golden-colored wood and blue fabric furniture. The floor was wooly brown shag surrounded by walls hung with more than a dozen oils depicting differing types of flowers. There were rose, cactus blooms, and bird-of-paradise—pansies, poppies, and a spray of purple orchids that seemed as if it might sway if a breeze came along.

There was the feeling of corruption coming from every innocent detail of this large parlor. The Parishioner didn’t know whether this was because of the story he was given by Benol or a sixth sense he’d developed in a long career of bad men and women plying their trades without concern or remorse.

On the other side of the semisubmerged living room was a step up to a long sliding glass window. The transparent door was open, leading out to a brick-laid patio surrounded by tall cedars and set upon by dappled sunlight and shade bisected by bark and leaf.

In a metal chair that had been painted pink sat a small, elderly woman in a jade-and-wheat-colored dress. Her feet didn’t go all the way to the bricks. On the pink metal table next to her was a tall, slender glass filled with a bright green liquid that Xavier was sure had a high alcoholic content.

Hatless, her hair had been ruthlessly dyed an impossible black. Her face was neither round, oval, nor heart-shaped, but rather like a box with the corners smoothed by age. She was eighty, maybe more. Her dark eyes had all the awareness of a long life spent traveling on a one-lane highway with no exits and no end in sight.

“This is Mr. Noland,” Doris Milne said with bland deference.

The elderly white lady made an expression that was intended to be a smile.

“Hello, Mr. Knowles,” she said, gesturing at another metal chair on the opposite side from her. This seat was painted turquoise.

As Xavier moved forward Doris asked, “Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Noland?”

“What’s in the glass?”

“Lime rickey,” Sedra said with a real smile.

“I’ll take one of those if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” Sedra said for her niece. “Go make up another pitcher, hon. Use the good gin.”

And so Xavier sat under the shifting template of shadows and sun as Doris went off to mix the alcohol and Kool-Aid.

The predators gazed lazily across the expanse of the table both of them deeply honest and still insincere.

“You told Dodo that you were here about somebody named Ben?” Sedra asked.

“Benol. That’s a woman’s name.”

“Oh.”

“Do you remember her?”

“No. No. And I think I’d remember such a unique name.”

“She and her boyfriend, Brayton Starmon, sold you three blond male babies for forty-two thousand dollars twenty-three years ago.”

“Excuse me? What did you say?”

“I said that I’m working for John and Minnie Van Dam,” Xavier replied, using names from Benol’s confession. “They hired me to find their son, Michael, who was kidnapped from a private child-care home by Benol and Brayton.”

His voice was the hammer while the words were nails. Sedra gave almost no inkling of the pain or fear he inflicted, but Ecks was not fooled.

When the old woman’s left eye fluttered Xavier was sure of at least one part of his client’s story.

At that moment the cell phone in his breast pocket throbbed. A few seconds later Doris came out carrying a silver tray on which stood a large, sweaty tumbler filled with bright green fluid.

“Are you two getting along?” the niece asked.

“Like pigs in slop,” Xavier said.

“Excuse me?”

“Everything’s fine, Dodo,” Sedra said. “Leave us alone, would you, dear?”

“Are you okay?” Doris asked.

“Fine. Fine. I just want to speak privately to Mr. Knowles.”

“Noland,” Xavier corrected.

“Yes,” Sedra agreed.

“I’ll be in the den knitting,” Doris said, but she didn’t move.

“Go on,” her aunt urged. “I’ll be just fine.”

Niece and aunt exchanged glances.

Xavier took a sip of the green cocktail to show that he wasn’t bothered by their concern. The drink was sweet, tart, and very strong.

As he put the glass down on the table Doris was leaving once more and Sedra tried to smile again.

“I don’t know who you are,” the spinster said, “but I will not be threatened in my own house.”

“I’m looking for the boy,” Xavier said easily. “I don’t care about you or Benol or anybody else. The Van Dams hired me to do the work that the police failed to do.”

He considered taking another sip but decided against it. Drinking had its place but that wasn’t in the middle of a showdown between villains.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sedra said in a metered tone that seemed to be saying, or at least meaning, something else.

“All I have to do is give the police what I have,” he said. “Just give them your name and let the pieces fall where they will.”

Sedra opened her mouth but no words came out. A confused look came over her face. This artificial expression, added to the sound of a deep bass gong going off in Xavier’s head, tipped him to the unspoken narrative of his predicament.

He stood up suddenly and turned. Doris was standing there with a Louisville Slugger grasped in both hands.

“Hit him!” Sedra yelled.

Another deep vibration detonated behind Xavier’s eyes. He knew that he couldn’t avoid the young woman’s bat for too long and so he went on the offensive.

The bat arced down, glancing off the left side of his head.

“Hit him!” Sedra was screaming.

He was aiming for her jaw, but Xavier’s fist hit Doris over the heart. She grunted in a decidedly unfeminine manner and fell on her bottom.

When Xavier was stepping over her she grabbed at his ankle. If he hadn’t taken that sip her grip wouldn’t have fazed him. As it was he tripped, pulling away from her and staggering forward. He would have tumbled to the bricks if there weren’t a house there to catch his fall.