Parishioner (20 page)

“Mostly?”

They kissed with moderate heat next to her red Saab. She touched his chest and looked into his eyes, saying silently that he was welcome to follow her home if he wanted.

“I’ll call you soon,” he said.

She smiled and got into her car.

He watched her taillights until they had blended in with the traffic around them and then turned his attention to his cell phone.

Information had Sam Sprain living on 6 Marietta Circle. MapQuest told him that the address was walking distance from the restaurant-bar. After finding the quarry, Ecks turned his phone off.

Number six was a small house hemmed in by two nonresidential buildings. In the dim light, colors were not able to reach their full potential. It stood high behind a wire fence and had white and possibly red flowers cascading from the elevated porch. The house was either yellow or white and definitely looked like a woman’s domicile. There was a light on, on the second floor of the two-story structure, and also weak porch light glittering above the front door. The only access to the circle was through Marietta Alley. Xavier stood in the shadows of the mouth of the alley watching and waiting—for what he was not sure.

There was no life in the cul-de-sac. No music playing or dutiful husbands taking out the trash. There were seven houses and the two buildings that flanked Sprain’s place. It wasn’t like New York, where life was always spilling out of doors and windows into the street.

But Xavier didn’t mind. He was wondering about the answer to Benicia’s question. Why did he suddenly feel something about someone? It wasn’t love or lust, sex or the desire to make babies. It wasn’t even a deep connection. No. He had come to an understanding about himself and the blockade of his emotional life had fallen unexpectedly without fanfare, like an explosion in outer space. When he looked up that morning Benicia was standing there. Kismet.

He waited in shadow for long minutes, thinking about his heartbeat and the last time he remembered feeling that physical palpitation—that is, when he wasn’t running for his life. It was
indicative of a transition from invulnerability to something mortal and frail: like Superman under the spell of one of the more exotic Kryptonites—but with weakness also came the unexpected feeling of euphoria.

When he pulled open the gate to the wire fence it gave off a weak metallic whine. A dog in one of the houses started barking angrily. Xavier thought that the canine waited all day to hear that particular sound. It was the squeak of danger and he would warn the world.

The front door was ajar.

Xavier pressed the doorbell with the knuckle joint of his index finger; it sounded and the dog doubled the ferocity of its warning.

No answer but the dog.

He pressed the bell again. There were three chimes: short, long, short. Almost a tune.

Xavier waited a moment more, donned a thin pair of the medical gloves he’d appropriated at the hospital, and pushed the door inward. Even then Ecks remained cautious. He realized that the man standing at the door was not the new man in his mind. He was still the tough-minded gangster from the old neighborhood when it came to breaking and entering, smashing and beating, shooting and stabbing, wounding and killing. The new Ecks was something cradled in his mind: an infant who was not yet ready to come out into the world.

He closed the door and turned on a light. There was a jumbled living room on his right, a staircase to the left, and a small utility kitchen straight ahead. The rooms were so small that Ecks had the feeling of entering the cabin of a harbor tugboat.

The brocaded cushions of the pink-and-red sofa had been thrown to the floor. The matching chair had been turned over; it lay there with its gauze bottom torn out. China had shattered and the carpet was rolled up and now slumped into a corner, bent over and teetering like an unconscious drunk.

And there was still the light up above.

Ecks took a moment to consider leaving. He imagined himself walking down the stairs and into the circle, through the alley and back to his Edsel. Oddly the pink-green-and-chrome classic made him wonder whether Frank’s car was still in the lot. This tangent told the Parishioner that it was not yet time to leave.

The second floor was divided into two rooms. On the right was a bedroom and to the left a bathroom that seemed too large for the place.

The mattress of the bed had been thrown off so that it teetered over the side of the box spring. All the drawers of the walnut bureau had been pulled out and dumped on the pine floor. The freestanding closet door was ripped off its hinges. Clothes were scattered everywhere. A bone shoe lay on its side at the edge of the slumped-over mattress, the sole was worn and pitted.

The large bathroom didn’t even have a medicine cabinet. Nothing was out of place, because there was nothing to move. Ecks sat on the edge of the iron tub, waiting for inspiration.

The dog had stopped its barking. The only sound now was the steady drip from the bathtub spigot onto the greenish, corroded copper-collared drain.

Ecks considered calling Benicia. Her kiss had been soft and promising, the look in her eye and her hand on his chest undeniable. She would ask him over if called right now.

He knew that this thought was somehow inappropriate, that New Ecks should not be thinking about a woman he was interested in while searching through the wreck of a man’s life.

Where was the other shoe?

Lifting the mattress Ecks revealed the corpse. Brayton Richard Starmon Welch Welcher Robert Samuel Sprain lay on his side, a bullet through the right eye and another in his chest. He was wearing a charcoal suit and a light gray shirt. The orange-and-brown tie was knotted perfectly, even in death. There wasn’t much blood; no time to bleed.

Death had been kind to the kidnapper and thief. It had taken him quickly.

Half an hour later Ecks was ready to leave. There was no wallet left behind, not even any lint from the new suit pockets. The Parishioner almost left it at that when he decided to take off the man’s shoes. This revealed nothing, but once Ecks had gone that far he couldn’t turn back and so peeled off the corpse’s argyle socks. The right sock was empty and the left one too.

He left the shoeless, sockless cadaver with its pockets turned out. On the way back to his car he threw the gloves in a public trash can. Driving back to his home he tuned the radio to an oldies station that was playing an uninterrupted hour of comic songs from the fifties and sixties. He listened to “Alley Oop,” “Mr. Custer,” “Monster Mash,” “Tie Me Kangaroo Down,” “Lost in the Jungle,” and many others.