Parishioner (28 page)

Benol had come through the front door, so she wasn’t working in the hotel.

In the middle of that thought the chrome-and-green doors of the center elevator slid open. Benol, wearing a close-fitting black muslin dress and white pumps, walked out.

She had made herself beautiful.

She strode right up to Ecks and looked down on him.

“It was the driver, right?” she asked.

“How are you, Bennie?”

“So now we’re friends?”

“I found two of the boys you’re looking for.”

The woman’s eyes became like a feline predator’s orbs, dazzled by the bait he dangled. She moved to sit next to him, her round bottom pressed up against his hard thigh.

“Which ones?” she whispered.

Only the suggestion of a scent rose from her—a fragrance applied so lightly that it might not have been there at all. It was as if a perfumed woman had passed this way hours before and all that was left was this hint of an essence unknown.

“I don’t know the real names,” Ecks said. “I mean, I don’t know which is which, but I do know that one of them is Henry Marcus. He owns a surfboard shop down near the boardwalk in Venice. His adopted mother died and the father moved to Hawaii.”

Ecks was looking into Benol’s brown eyes, trying his best to subdue his suspicions.

She was good, but he could see clearly the impatience twitching at the corners of her mouth.

“Um,” she said. “What’s the address of the shop?”

He rattled it off. It wasn’t until he finished that she remembered to take a yellow pencil and a small blue pad from her red clutch purse.

He repeated the address and then waited.

“What’s the other?” she asked.

“Lester Lehman,” he said. “He’s in San Quentin.”

He had to hold back the whisper of a smile that wanted to flit across his lips. The glitter
of anticipation in Benol’s eyes dimmed as she tried to maintain the equilibrium of interest.

“Lehman,” she said, reaching for the name. “Wasn’t he the one who murdered his parents?”

“Yeah. Maybe your crime saved his blood family from slaughter.”

“That’s not funny, Mr. Noland. It could have just as well driven him crazy.”

“Glass half-empty,” Ecks opined.

“Is that all?” Benol said when it seemed as if Ecks had finished.

“Two in just a few days,” he replied. “After twenty-three years I’d say that was pretty damn good.”

“Of course it is,” Benol said, looking away as she spoke. “Of course. It’s just that I was hoping to have all three.”

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why do you have to find these young men? I know I keep on asking you that, but they’re grown now. What good can you do by dredging up the pain you caused? Who knows? The other two boys might have had happy lives.”

“It’s just the right thing to do, that’s all. It’s time for me to make up for what I’ve done.”

“Join the Peace Corps then,” the Parishioner said. “Adopt three young boys and make sure they have every opportunity. Do something positive.”

“This is what I’ve decided to do.” She was still very close to him. “Do you … do you have any clue to where the third boy is?”

Ecks smiled. “I got a P.O. box in the Beverly Hills branch. I sent him a note asking him to meet me tomorrow at four. We’ll see if he shows up.”

“So you
have
found him?” Benol’s tone was accusatory.

“I found a name. Oscar Phillips. The person I sent the note to might very well not be him.”

“Where are you supposed to meet?”

“Just be patient, Bennie. I’ll tell you if he’s our boy.”

“I’d like to come with you,” she said, laying a hand on his knee.

“It’s best if I go alone. I mean, this is the job Frank asked me to do.”

Benol realized that she was pressing too hard. Removing her hand from his knee, she
took a deep breath and considered a moment, or maybe, Ecks thought, she was pretending to consider.

“It seems as if you’re spending more time investigating me than looking for the boys,” she said.

“Not at all. I just found out where the car service let you off. Then I came here to report to you. Nothing sinister in that.”

“I’m not pulling a fast one,” Benol offered. “I’m just trying to help out.”

“I believe you,” Ecks said, trying hard not to be influenced by her proximity. “I mean, why else would Frank put us together?”

Benol had no answer for this. Ecks was not asking for one.

“Where are you meeting this Oscar?”

Xavier wondered about the woman. Did she have a habit of shooting her victims in the eye? Was she merely trying to do what was right? Or was it something in between those two unlikely poles? She was pressing very hard for someone contemplating murder. But maybe her desire to kill outweighed any notion of self-preservation.

“I need to go there alone,” he repeated.

“Fine.”

“But if you agree not to go, why do you need to know where I’m meeting him?”

“This is very important to me,” she said, “extremely so. I feel that finding the boys will make up for so much that I’ve done wrong.”

She sounded sincere. But Ecks had learned at an early age that actions were all that mattered.

“You ever hear of the Nut Hut?” he said.

Benol shook her head, watching him intently.

“It’s in the old Farmers’ Market up on Third and Fairfax. It’s this place that sells every kind of nut in the world almost. Run by this bald-headed dude name of Toy.”

“Troy?”

“No. Like a child’s plaything.”

“That’s strange.”

“If you face the counter of the Nut Hut,” Ecks continued, “there’s three round tables over to the right. Those are Toy’s tables and only his customers are allowed to sit there. I told Oscar
to buy some African groundnuts and sit down there at four tomorrow.”

The look on Benol’s face was one of breathless anticipation.

“I don’t want you going there, girl,” Ecks said.

“I won’t.”

“It don’t look like that.”

“You’ll call me when you find out?”

“Oh, yeah. I will most definitely call. But you know, the chances are slim that I’d get three aces in three days.”

“I believe you will.”

On the ride back to Flower Street, Xavier wondered again what he was doing. He didn’t care about pornographers or kidnapped children, murdered ex-addict surfers or a repentant kidnapper. He owed Frank something … of that he was quite certain. The man had taught him that he could see the world differently. Frank had shown Ecks a whole new way of thinking and then he asked this favor.…

“Hello,” Benicia Torres said, answering her phone at ten seventeen that evening.

“I’m sorry to be calling you so late,” Ecks said.

“What time …? Oh, that’s okay. I was studying.”

“I wanted to call earlier but I had these people to meet.”

“About newspapers?”

“What? No. I belong to a church and they do outreach, kind of like local missionary work. I’m helping this woman find some people she lost touch with. That’s why I was asking that waiter those questions at Temple Pie.”

“Church?”

“You sound like you don’t believe me.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Noland, but you don’t seem like you go to church, or deliver newspapers,
or even that you’re named Egbert.” There was humor in her tone—but with an edge.

“I can show you my driver’s license, and I even have my deacon’s card. I could take you out on my route if you want.”

“What time do you make deliveries?”

“I pick up my kids at around four in the morning.”

“Hm,” she speculated.

“But before you make that commitment why don’t we have dinner tomorrow. I know this great Chinese place downtown. It’s called Yellow River … on Grand.”

“That sounds nice,” she said with very little, if any, hesitation.

“Eight?”

“Okay.”

“Should I pick you up?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Great,” Ecks said, and he meant it.

Ecks went to bed soon after calling Benicia but sleep was nowhere at hand. He lay there in his single bed and listened to the uneven rumble of traffic that ebbed and flowed with no predictability. For the first time in the three years that he’d lived there, these erratic waves of sound distracted him from rest.

His gums ached and an old wound pricked at his ribs. He remembered killing a man from across the hall who had beaten his wife every other week for two years. She cried at his funeral, wailed.

At three twenty-seven he climbed out of bed and took out one of three throwaway cell phones given him by Clyde Pewtersworth. Ecks entered a number he’d written down two years earlier. This number had been placed in a personal ad in a weekly Jewish newspaper from Hoboken, New Jersey.

The ad read,
Red Slatkin Needs to See Chaim Berman
, and left a phone number with the Utah area code 801.

The phone rang three times before the answer.

“Yeah?”

“Swan?”

“Ecks?”

“How’s it goin’, brother?”

“You still alive, huh, niggah?”

“I’ll be around when there’s only rats and cockroaches left.”

Swan performed his deep laugh. This was punctuated by a rolling, wet cough.

“You sure to outlive me, man.”

“You okay?”

“If lung cancer and two bum legs is okay then I’m in the catbird’s seat.”

“Damn. Can I do anything?”

“You wanna gimme a lung?”

Ecks hesitated and Swan said, “Don’t worry, brother; I got so much metasizing goin’ on that I’d need a whole family of donors to make my shit right. What’s up wit’ you? You stayin’ outta jail?”

“Been goin’ to church lately.”

“Found religion?”

“More like religion found me.”

“That must be some serious shit—Ecks Rule up in God’s house. I bet they ain’t seen nuthin’ like that since Lucifer stormed the walls of heaven.”

“You know the Bible, Swan?”

“Lady takin’ care’a me push my wheelchair to church once a week or so. I listen to them the way we used to hear our lawyers.…” Swan stopped for a long, deeply troubling cough. “You keep thinkin’ that maybe they got some special circumstances or might would cut a deal. But you know, man, I’m glad you called. You my only friend, Ecks. Only one … I got a daughter up in the Bronx name of Susan Karl. That’s Karl with a K. She nineteen and alone in the world now. Wild child like her need to be looked after. I’d really appreciate it if you do what you could for her.”

“Sure I will,” Ecks said quickly and certainly as he had in the old days.

“Yeah.” Swan let the word drag out over many bars. “That’s good, man. You know I could die now, because everybody from Harlem to Brownsville know that Ecks Rule’s word is
his bond.”

They talked for a while longer—about the old days and the few people they knew who had turned up in the news. Many were dead, the rest wounded or imprisoned—or both. Neither one asked where the other was living.

Ecks realized somewhere in the middle of the twenty-minute conversation that this was a new—and a last—phase of their friendship: that soon Swan would die and a part of Ecks would pass on with him.

Toward the end of their exchange Swan’s speech slurred and his sentences wandered one into the other, like sleepwalkers making their way down a common corridor. “I better be goin’,” Swan said at last, “before I stop makin’ sense altogether.”