Boyfriend from Hell (7 page)

A student asked a question from the floor following the discussion. “It doesn’t help, does it, when you have the green-eyed-monster version of Satan? Not very persuasive for someone interested in reality, as I’d like to think I am.”

Richard replied, “You’re quite right. Images of Satan, the green eyes, the horns, the tail, they’re artists’ conceptions, evolved over time. They have no more validity than God being a man in a robe with a white beard. In the modern world we understand God can be a spirit.”

The journalist, an intense man in his forties, said, “These spirits, as you put it, Mr. Smith, God and Satan, do they float around?”

Richard countered, “I wouldn’t say ‘spirit’ in the movie sense, like something you see in some kind of shape or form. Let’s think of God as a force, and Satan as a counterforce. In the Bible, Lucifer—Satan, if you will—was a high-ranking angel.”

The moderator offered, “Many scholars and laypeople prefer to read the Bible as literature, not fact.”

Richard replied, “But people who
do
accept the Bible as a kind of truth do so with a leap of faith. You don’t need a leap of faith to recognize evil in history. What I ask us to consider here today is that some acts of evil might not be an intrinsic part of human nature, but the result of an outside force.”

“On that note, we’re going to bring the discussion to an end. …”

Ronnie smiled out of respect for the cool manner in which Richard comported himself. She didn’t believe a word he said, but thought he owned the stage.

Back in New York, Nancy and Bob were dining in. Bob had made the dinner, ironically, with a recipe Michael featured on his cooking show, roast pork and beans.

“I liked Michael,” Bob said. “Too bad it didn’t work out.”

“Ronnie and I were in Tower and they were featuring a new album and it was the very Rosetta Dupree. Ronnie sampled the album in the store and here’s the bad part, she sings great. A husky, great voice, and you could see Ronnie’s face fall. Plus she looked good on the album cover, really glamorous.”

“If that’s what he was looking for, glamorous. Ronnie’s so pretty. Maybe not glamorous, but smart and a terrific writer. Guys are bad news.”

“Am I supposed to say not
all
guys?”

“What’s she doing this weekend?”

“She’s in New Orleans with Richard Smith, who gave her a quote for her piece on the cult, and he took her out, and they got it on, and he disappeared on her for a while, business travel or something, and now he invited her down there.”

“Let’s Google him.”

They went to the computer and found the same material Ronnie originally located, the Web site on the book and a series of listings of lectures and articles on satanic cults.

“Looks like he’s smart. Not too much on him personally.”

“That seems to be the situation. All she knows, I think, is that he isn’t married, or so he says.”

Nancy was not going to get into the amazing-in-bed portion, which would lead to a discussion of just what
is
good in bed, and the next thing Bob would be circling around on how he stacked up and you didn’t go there.

“Let’s keep an eye out. I’m going to want to check this guy out if he’s a keeper,” Bob said.

“You know, it wasn’t like she was in a bad relationship with Michael. He was terrific for her, until the day he wasn’t.”

“Men
are
bad news.”

“Not
all
men, honey,” she says, on cue.

After the panel discussion, Ronnie met Richard in the lobby.

“That went very well for you.”

“Lively, wasn’t it?”

He did not suggest they go directly to the hotel for sex, which she would not have objected to; he offered a little walking tour of the pre-Katrina French Quarter, and they paused along the way to observe street performers on display for the tourist trade. He knew his way around the area and led them to a raffish bar for oysters and beer.

“Wonderful.”

“Just an appetizer. This is a great city. Never been here?”

“I’m not the world traveler you are. What is this cult you’ve been tracking down and how do you do that exactly?”

“A foundation grant. It’s a group that adapts Black Mass rituals out of the old satanic playbook combined with Mayan symbols.”

“And you do what?”

“Document it. Videos. Interviews.”

“You are a true believer, aren’t you? ‘Outside force.’ Really now.”

“Just throwing out ideas.”

“Throwing out ideas? Are you backing off?”

“Only a little. There’s no way to prove anything without that leap of faith.”

“Ideologically you’re turning out to be a good-looking Randall Cummings. Not that Randall Cummings isn’t good-looking. A better-looking Randall Cummings.”

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” he said. “Relax a little before dinner.”

She was ready.

The sex was an intermingling of what she remembered from the first time with him and fantasized since, leaving her searching for the word to describe the state of lovemaking with this man, deciding it was something out of a perfume ad, and the word she settled on was “ecstasy.”

They ate dinner at a small Creole restaurant he knew on a side street just off the French Quarter, a brilliant meal, seasoned with his observations about New Orleans, of the early days when the music of churches, spirituals, funeral marches, black brass bands came together in a new musical form that didn’t even have a name at first, and then it moved north to Chicago along with the migration of blacks northward, King Oliver looking out for the young Louis Armstrong, at first in New Orleans, then summoning him to play in the Creole Jazz Band in Chicago.

“Who are you? You do God and Satan and Louis Armstrong?”

“I tend to lecture. I apologize.”

“Where are you from originally?”

“I was born here. In New Orleans. I was an institutional child.”

“Your birth parents?”

“Haven’t a clue. The people who adopted me were working people. I wasn’t brought up to be religious. They weren’t into religion. My father was a carpenter, my mother a seamstress. They died in a fire, visiting her sister. I wasn’t there. I was sleeping over at a friend’s house.”

“That’s so sad. How old were you?”

“Ten. I went back into the system, was in four different foster homes through to the end of high school, then after high school I basically self-educated myself, worked at odd jobs, one was with a newspaper in Yankton and there was the cult nearby I wrote about. One thing led to another and I became this expert on satanism.”

“So when you said that thing about Cummings, about losing his wife affecting his ideology, it’s not a totally benign view of the world
you’re
carrying around.”

“Can you draw a line from my personal experience to what I believe? More likely, it’s that leap of faith.”

He was pensive; the waiter came for a dessert order and they allowed the somber mood to dissipate.

He wanted her to hear some jazz in a club he liked and they walked for fifteen minutes through twisting, narrow streets to a part of the city where no one else was walking. Muffled sounds of television sets played in apartments, dogs barked, and notably, cats were squealing in a back alley, an unpleasant reminder. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable on this eerie walk.

“Wouldn’t a cab have worked a little better?”

“Walking off the meal. Good for the digestion.”

“Is that what this is? Richard, are we lost?”

“I’m leading the way. A few minutes more.”

The buildings were shabbier the farther they walked, it was not even 10:00
P.M.
and they hadn’t seen anyone on the streets for several blocks, and as they turned the corner a half-dozen teenagers in baggy pants, their baseball caps turned around hip-hop style, came swaggering directly toward them, insolent, menacing. She squeezed Richard’s hand tightly. Nobody else was on the street, just the two of them and the teenagers drawing closer. He held her tightly by the hand and walked directly into the middle of the group, staring them down, meeting their insolence with his boldness. They parted and he led Ronnie through, around the corner, and the danger was over.

“Street stuff. A thousand stare downs when I was growing up.”

“That was dangerous, Richard. What are we doing here?”

“Going to hear some jazz.”

They walked another couple of blocks and a neon sign over a doorway announced,
BERRY’S JAZZ.
He registered no surprise, not a question in his mind that he would find it.

The group in the club was a piano, bass, guitar, and drums, a soft, elegant sound, different from the Dixieland that permeated most of the French Quarter. It took her a while to settle down and absorb the music, ill at ease from the walk there, wondering if he had placed her in danger with his nonchalance. On the other hand, he never gave off the least indication of any danger, and ultimately, there wasn’t a problem; they were listening to jazz, as promised.

With the flight down, the long day, the tension of the nightcap portion, she fell asleep shortly after getting into bed. He aroused her in the night and took her, and in the morning the sex seemed dreamlike.

When he informed her he wasn’t returning to New York with her, but going to Portland, Oregon, to interview a psychologist who specialized in deprogramming cult members, and then was going to conduct interviews with the people the psychologist treated, she was not surprised.

“Who is this for?” she asked.

“Same foundation as the Mexico work. After that there’s a seminar in San Diego. Wish I could be back in New York. Keep working and time will fly, you’ll see.”

The pattern had revealed itself. At this point he was not someone she would be able to count on for a consistent social life. She could count on him for the sex. Not for a Saturday night movie and hamburgers. Unless he happened to be in New York. Unless there wasn’t anyone else. Teasingly, or possibly more than a tease; insistently, she extracted his cell phone number, which she didn’t have, Richard warning her he used it for emergencies largely and didn’t always check his messages. E-mail was the best way to reach him. She had just slept with a man, again, who traveled, and who didn’t answer his phone.

Part of his deal was a car to the airport and they went to the airport together. The driver stopped at her departure area first. “Richard, a question. How many of me are there?”

“That’s too self-deprecating, Ronnie. There aren’t any more of you. I do move around a lot. It’s the nature of my work. I’ll be back in New York in about a week and a half. Call you first thing,” which he emphasized with a serious kiss on the lips.

Nancy was at Bob’s apartment. Ronnie unpacked from the weekend and went out to buy some ingredients to make an omelet for dinner, her mind drifting; the new article, Richard, the sex, the knowledge that he was not someone you would take home to your parents at this stage of the relationship, if it could indeed be called a relationship, assuming one had parents.

As she left the building she noticed at the alleyway, the same alleyway where the cats were tossed in her path, a man in a black raincoat, chinos, and sneakers, with a deerstalker hat, flaps down, lampblack on his face like a deranged commando. In an underhand motion he tossed something in her direction and darted into the alleyway.

“Hey, you!” she called out, and ran toward the alleyway. When she got there he was gone. She walked back to look on the ground to see what he had thrown. It was a two-inch porcelain death skull with hollow eyes.

I
N A CITY WHERE
violence often led the eleven o’clock local news, these harassments of Ronnie Delaney were insignificant. Ronnie read that in the faces of Detectives Santini and Gomez. She brought the death skull to the precinct and the desk sergeant referred her to the detectives. They took down the information at a desk and kept the object, carefully placing it in a glassine envelope.

“It’s Cummings again,” she said. “It had to be one of his people. Who else cares?”

“This is going to be very hard to prove,” Gomez said.

“If you could see your faces. Why should big-city detectives like us bother with this trivial little case? Why don’t we just wait for one of them to kill me and then you’ll have something to work with? Do you have a supervisor? Is this like the phone company where I get to say, I’d like to talk to your supervisor?”

“Absolutely,” Gomez said.

They withdrew and a few minutes later returned with a ramrod-straight man of six feet four in plainclothes, wearing a blue Dacron suit, white shirt, and blue tie; another cheerless fellow, and that was all right with her, if he turned out to be competent.

“Ms. Delaney—Lieutenant Ed Rourke. I’m in charge of the detective squad here.”

“I don’t know how much you’ve been told, but I’m being harassed. In a really scary way.”

“Yes, I know all about it. Can I see this latest object?”

Gomez handed him the envelope and Rourke held it up to the light.

“Almost like a Cracker Jacks toy,” Gomez said.

“That
is what’s troubling me, the way it’s being trivialized around here. I’m being threatened by unhappy people who worship Satan.”

“Did the man who menaced you, did he look like someone you might have seen when you were working on your article?” Rourke asked.

“He might have been at the church when I was there, I don’t remember seeing him. He looked like a lunatic. Black stuff under his eyes, on some lunatic mission. He might be a member via the Internet. He might be hired for all I know. It’s what I’d like you to find out and bring this stupid thing to an end.”

“If you’re going out of your house to do any shopping, local chores over the next few days, call this number.” He wrote it on a pad. “We’ll have a police car come by to give you protection. We can’t do it forever, but for a while.” He turned to the detectives. “Go back and talk to Cummings again. Tell him he’s a suspect, that he’s aiding and abetting. And we’ll go from there.”

“Thank you,” Ronnie said.

“Detectives Gomez and Santini are from homicide. They’ve been assigned to us on another matter, but because there was, possibly, a death threat here, they’re helping us out. You’ve got the best of the best, and when Detective Gomez says ‘Cracker Jacks,’ I understand what he means. It’s childish, really. Frightening, I grant you, but childish.”