Malevolent (17 page)

Patty perked her ears, but caught no response. She was annoyed at the high-pitched chatter of the women in the tiny kitchen with her, but at least they’d made no attempt to include her.

When the conversation outside the doorway resumed, it was Vincent again. “Don’t look so shocked. I have to admit to holding that suspicion for awhile now. No witnesses, no suspects, and I’d bet no forensic evidence. Now she’s got this fantasy going about my having spoken with her when I haven’t. Quite frankly, she’d be my first suspect if I learned that someone from my congregation had delusions of sexual violence.”

“Honey, I don’t think you could dress up that vegetable tray any better than you’ve already done it,” chirped a voice from behind her. Sara Lamplighter, shattering Patty’s concentration like dropped crystal. The glass tray twitched, and black olives rolled to the floor, bouncing merrily at her feet.

“Oops,” Sara said cheerfully. “Must have startl—are you all right, dear?”

Patty nodded, not trusting her voice. She hadn’t known how tightly wound she’d become as she spied on the policewoman whom she’d not long ago suspected of conspiring to kill her. Conspiring with the man she planned to share her life with.

“You poor girl, you’re so pale,” said the husky woman. “We all miss Travis, so don’t be ashamed of your feelings. That’s why we’re here tonight, to make some sense of it together. One big family is what we are. Now what did you say your name was, honey?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The gunmetal-gray binoculars held to his face turned the movements of the three people into a mimed performance which he followed like a silent ballet.

First, the lanky man leaves the church with the tall woman with the sexy hips. When he notices the smaller woman about to step into a sweet midseventies muscle car parked at the curb, the lanky man calls out to her. He has words with her on the sidewalk in front of her car, while the woman with the sexy hips walks on, alone. He steps away from his conversation with the tiny woman with the car and calls out to the taller woman. She ignores him, keeps walking, her back stiff and stride hard.

This woman, she earns the most attention of the man with the binoculars. He focuses in tightly on the long hair swinging behind her, her shapely ass and womanly hips, the confident way she attacks the pavement with sharp, determined footsteps. The way her legs gobble pavement, it’s obvious she’s angry. So is the lanky man, now. He shakes his head as the tall woman continues down the sidewalk without him. Then he watches the petite woman roar away in her muscle car.

Now he’s got no one, the lanky man. Others spill out of the church behind him, mostly in pairs, but he stands alone out there. He turns, and then turns again, as though he’ll find an answer in some direction of the compass.

The binoculars have grown heavy on the bridge of the man’s nose, his upper cheeks clammy. And now he notices that the lanky man is staring at him.

“Jesus!”

Griffin jerked the field glasses away from his face. He blushed as he realized how exposed he’d been in his fluorescent-lit store with its wall of glass.

Now, without any visual aid, he could see Tim crossing Broadview Road and striding through the sparsely occupied parking lot of AfterHours Video.

“How’d it go?” Griffin asked cheerfully when the buzzer sounded and Tim walked in.

“How’d what go?”

“Nothing. Your evening. Your life. However you choose to answer the question.”

“By the way,” said Tim, “I’ll bet the white oval indentations on your cheeks match the binoculars you left sitting on the counter. You’re not exactly invisible at night in this birdcage of a store.”

Together, they stared at Griffin’s gunmetal-gray binoculars. They’d belonged to John Solloway. He’d also left behind a smoking pipe, and Griffin had never seen his old man use either item.

Tim glanced at the black curtain.

“No customers,” said Griffin.

Tim stabbed a thumb at the door behind him. “Guess that gives you plenty of time to track the comings and goings of those church people.” Obviously not in a great mood.

Griffin frowned. “You a cop, or just working for one?”

“Actually, I’m just like you, Griffin–curious,” said Tim as he moved into the room, picked up a returned DVD from the counter and dropped it back down. “Curious to know what you find so interesting that you keep binoculars trained on the church.”

Griffin looked out at the black world beyond his plate-glass window. Watched it throb with intermittent color as his sign swathed the parking lot pavement with jerky splashes of hot pink.

He said, “It’s not like we haven’t discussed this, Tim. I thought we both agreed that the church is at the center of whatever’s going on. Next thing I know, you’re practically a member. You and the woman cop who’s trying to throw my ass in jail.”

“Not true.”

Griffin sighed. He didn’t want to fight. He’d spent his life avoiding confrontation. “I just thought you were going to talk to me before doing anything, that’s all.”

Tim had told him earlier about the suicide and memorial service, but had mentioned no plans to attend it. And certainly nothing had been said about the woman cop tagging along, the bitch who wanted Griffin showering with men for the next ten to twenty years.

Tim slapped a palm on the counter, making Griffin twitch. “You’re pissed at me because I was with Melinda?”

“Melinda.” Griffin chuckled, but wasn’t feeling it. “You’re on a first-name basis, man. Were you ever going to tell me you were with her tonight if I hadn’t seen it for myself?”

“I wasn’t
with
her. She—”

The door buzzer sounded, and this time both men jumped.

He was in trouble, Griffin thought, if business was so slow that the presence of customers could startle him. Three young boys slid in, early teens, and he knew he was going to have to shoo them away from the black curtain.

Tim moved into his line of vision. “It’s a moot point, Griffin. She’s filling out paperwork to try to get a social services visit to Germaine Marberry. She thinks the lady’s not quite all there. You’re off the hook.”

Griffin pulled a ticklish mustache bristle out of a nostril as he watched the three boys make their selection and bring it to the counter. A harmless Touchstone comedy.

After he’d taken a membership card and bagged the rental and the three had left his store, they watched the kids mount bikes they’d padlocked near the big window and coast out of sight. “The cops think I’m a rapist and I think three polite kids are up to no good. Is it the world today, or just me?”

“You’re not listening, dude. It’s all over.”

“Is it?” Griffin ran a hand across his bristly face. “You telling me you haven’t even considered the possibility that you’ve got someone running around here like that wacko from Waco? Some devious preacher man who’s got a spinster crying rape and another guy blowing his brains out. You never thought about that?”

Tim shook his head. “Melinda doesn’t believe Vincent Applegate is that kind of minister, and neither do I. He looks normal, sounds normal.”

Melinda again
, Griffin thought. “Fine. There’s nothing going on. All a bloody coincidence, and there are plenty of ways to explain the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t DVD trick and the disappearing blonde behind my curtain.”

Both men nervously eyed the adult room as Griffin said this.

“I didn’t tell her about
that
,” Tim grumped. “Last thing I needed was for her to think I’m crazy.”

“Which is what you think of me?”

Tim took another glance at the TV, currently off, and at the still curtain. “Let’s just forget it, okay? Forget everything and assume we got it all wrong.”

“What do you mean, wrong?”

“I mean—fuck it,” Tim snapped. “Forget it.”

“Works for me,” Griffin said after a moment, but he didn’t mean it.

There’d been something very special about their dark, shared secret. It reminded him of years ago, when he was twelve or so. He and his best friend at the time found bones in a crawlspace and spent one delightful summer seeking the murderer. Obviously there’d been nothing to it, old rodent bones or whatever, and they’d been old enough to know the truth when they got rational about things. But it was adventure they’d been on the prowl for, not mind-numbing cold logic.

Now Griffin smiled sadly at the flat realities of this sorry excuse for real-life adventure. He was a chronically unattached male who owned, with the mom he lived with, an anachronistic and failing video store.

Now he flashed a full grin. “Fine,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around, big guy.”

Tim’s face was set, his dark eyes smudged with emotions that Griffin read as edginess, anger, guilt, relief. Mostly relief.

Griffin held out a hand, but Tim refused it. “What’s that?” he said. “Good-bye? I’ll see you around, dude?” Tim grinned to show how ludicrous he found a good-bye handshake to be, but the grin didn’t reach all the way up to his eyes.

“Yeah, whatever,” Griffin said with a false but hearty laugh.

Then he watched his friend walk out of the store without a backward glance.

As Tim was swallowed by the black-and-hot-pink night, the blonde behind the black curtain tittered softly.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“She’s the one,” Laney said in a dead whisper.

She was pointing to a shadowy figure on the sidewalk ahead of them under the dubious lighting of an occasional streetlamp and a splinter moon.

“I can’t,” he pleaded. “I
know
her.”

His wife shushed him. “She’ll hear you.”

He pondered how it happened that Laney could address him in normal tones when, at the same time, she was always ordering him to keep his voice down. “I’m telling you, I can’t do it,” he whispered.

“I don’t remember such moral constraints last time.”

He craned his neck into the night, hopeful for someone else out, someone to make her change her plans. He spotted only a middle-aged woman in a tank top that was proving to be a poor style decision. She was on her porch, lethargically dangling a water hose into a petunia bed below her.

Turning to Laney, he said, “I keep telling you, what happened before was an accident.”

He let out a hiccup of a sob as something sailed past him in the street.

“A little high-strung this evening, aren’t we?” she teased as three preteen boys whizzed by on bikes, one with a plastic bag dangling from his handlebars.

She skipped several steps ahead before twirling to execute a clumsy pirouette. “There are no accidents,” she told him merrily. “For instance, you hated me”— she swiveled her hips in a lewd grind—“and I ended up dead.”

Now it was his turn to shush her, but she just laughed. He looked for anyone who might have heard her unwise comment, but saw no one. Just the attractive young woman walking ahead of them, and he saw with a sinking sensation that the distance between them had closed.

Less than a hundred yards away now.

His steps had unconsciously quickened to match the pace of his dead wife. Something squirmed in his gut and he made an effort to slow down. To try, anyway. His heart was fluttering and he could feel his balls tighten.

“You’re remembering it, aren’t you?” said Laney, still skipping ahead of him like a little girl.

“Nothing to remember,” he muttered. “I’d been drinking.”

“Shut up, or you’ll…”

…give us away
. That might be how she’d meant to finish the thought, but it was too late and he was glad. The young woman ahead of them had heard their prattle, and now she spun to confront whoever was back there. The nervous look on her face dissolved in seconds as she got a closer look, all of them momentarily under streetlamps.

She offered a tentative wave, the sort of thing you do when you don’t really know someone well, but well enough that ignoring them is out of the question. He waved back. Now came the awkward part. Do you stop to walk with this person you don’t really know better than to nod at, or walk on as though snubbing them?

Snub, snub us
, he silently commanded.

Fortunately, she did.

“Oh, you stud, you,” Laney giggled. “You really know how to draw ’em in.”

“She barely knows me.”

“Still, I think if you run to catch up, she’ll wait. It’s the polite thing to do. What do you think?”

It was repulsive, that’s what he thought. So why was he quickening his pace to a trot?

“See? I told you you’d enjoy yourself.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

There. He admitted it. That was half the battle.

And the girl up ahead heard them and, sure enough, did the polite thing. Stopped. And waited.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A man had been spotted lurking about his ex-wife’s home on Tampa Avenue, despite restraining order.

Four hookers had been beaten up near West 25th over the last forty-eight hours, apparently the handiwork of dueling pimps. Whore wars, the guys she worked with were calling it. Hilarious.