The walls had been painted the color of an orange Popsicle in a cheerful attempt to brighten the hospital room. But the framed pictures of budding spring flowers were a bad joke on Deputy Travis, who lay dying. Yet he seemed to play the good sport. His mouth was set in a grimace of pain that passed for a bizarre smile.
His skin was sallow and filmed with sweat. The tubes in his nostrils tied him to an oxygen unit in the wall. More tubes were plugged into his body, running down from an IV pole where Riker counted six hanging plastic bags of fluids. The lead wires for the pacemaker were sutured to the man’s skin. His breathing was labored, and his erratic heartbeat was graphically displayed by three waveforms on a monitor screen. Cross-wired machines were gathered near the bed like consulting physicians in discussions of lights, beeps and lines.
The smell rising off the body was earthy and dank. Decay prevailed over the medicinal smells from the collection of bottles on the bedside table. Over the past thirty years, Riker had become something of an expert on the smell of death.
On the opposite side of the bed, a young man with a stethoscope and a white coat was talking in an arrogant, high-pitched Godspeak, explaining to the sheriff that this interview was against his professional advice. He had counseled Travis to cancel it. He was sworn to protect his patient at all cost, and his authority superseded the law’s. So he must insist that the sheriff collect his friend and go. Now. That was an order.
The sheriff moved closer to the doctor, who was a smaller man with narrower shoulders and no gun. Tom Jessop explained, in a somewhat larger voice, that the younger man had best back off. Now. That was a suggestion. Or they might need to roll Travis over to make room for the doctor on that hospital bed.
Riker watched the doctor’s face go slack and noted the general shakiness in the younger man’s stance – all the signs of a virgin mugging victim. The doctor glanced at his patient, reconsidered his oath and backed off to the far side of the room to slump against a friendly orange wall.
Riker checked Travis’s chart for recent doses of painkillers which might void his confession. Rules of evidence demanded lucidity. He also scanned the dates and times for a series of resuscitations by violent shocks from a crash cart. And now Riker wondered if the young doctor had ever read this chart. Above another physician’s signature was a shaky scrawl that must be Travis’s own hand. It said, ‘No more.’ And another doctor had signed her name after the words ‘no code,’ the instruction not to resuscitate one more time.
The sheriff leaned over the deputy’s bed and read from a card. “Travis, do you make this confession in the full knowledge that you are about to die?”
Travis looked up at the sheriff, stunned. He had clearly not expected this, despite the six times he had already died and his own written plea not to interfere with his next death. The deputy’s wide eyes had suddenly taken on the fixed and dulled aspect of a corpse, and so Riker was disturbed by the tears.
Tom Jessop repeated the question, and Travis slowly moved his head to indicate that he believed it now.
The sheriff’s face had no emotion as he crumpled the card in one fist, dispensing with formality. “Were you in that mob? Did you murder Cass Shelley?”
“I threw a rock at the dog. He was coming for me. I don’t even know where that rock came from. It was just in my hand, and the dog was coming for me.”
“You were there when she died.”
“I didn’t go there to hurt anybody. Cass was going to accuse me of – ”
His hand rose to make weak circles in the air. “It was all in the letter – the lab tests. She was gonna hang me with science. I knew it was a mistake, and I was gonna tell her that. I never hurt a kid in my life. And I didn’t want to hurt Cass. But Christ, you just whisper a thing like that in a small town – ” He stopped with a look of sudden pain.
An alarm went off, and a line on the monitor broke into jagged spikes. The doctor approached on cat’s feet, and the sheriff pushed him away without needing to touch him, only nodding him back to the wall.
Now a nurse appeared at the bedside. She was a large woman, dark and round. One pudgy hand held up a syringe and squirted fluid into the air. Now she bent over her patient to probe him for a likely vein among the bruises on his arm.
“What’s that?” Jessop demanded.
“Morphine for the pain,” she said, looking up at him as though he had just crawled out of a roach trap. And now her glare included the doctor at the wall in the same sentiment.
“You can’t give him that!” Jessop shouted at her, moving forward. “Drugs invalidate the – ”
“Fuck off,” said the nurse. And then she shot the needle home.
Riker gave the sheriff points for recognizing the voice of ultimate authority in this room, and for having the grace to know when to quit. The man kept his silence for all the minutes it took the nurse to satisfy herself that the drug was doing its work on her patient and destroying a prime piece of evidence.
Riker marked the nurse as a class act when she refrained from spitting on the doctor as she majestically sailed out of the room.
Travis’s face was relaxed. His mouth sagged open and his words came slowly. “Then the rocks were flying, and the dog was coming for me.”
“Tell me about the letter.”
“That’s all I know about the letter.”
“Who else was there?”
“Ira’s father. Then I had a rock in my hand, but I never picked one up from the ground till after I threw that first one at the dog. I never – ”
“Who else? Was Babe Laurie there?”
Travis nodded.
“You saw him throwing rocks?”
“No. He could’ve, I guess. I was busy with the dog.”
“Malcolm and Fred Laurie?”
“Not Malcolm. Fred was there, and I did see him chucking rocks. Malcolm had walked off before Jack Wooley threw the first one. I picked up more rocks to hit the dog. He was still coming at me.”
“Forget that dog. What about Alma Furgueson?”
He was drifting for a moment. The sheriff grabbed his shoulder to call him back, and then Travis nodded.
Riker leaned in and asked softly, “Did Babe Laurie ever threaten you? Did he have anything to do with your heart attack? Were you in a fight with him the day he died?”
“I had nothing to do with that. I never killed a living thing in my life. I stoned the dog, but the dog lived.”
“What brought on the heart attack?” asked Riker.
“I was out at the Shelley house to pick up Good Dog and take him to the vet. Henry Roth always helps me with that, but he wasn’t there yet. And the dog was jumping up and beating his head into the window glass. Then I had the pain in my chest. I was driving back to town, when I saw her walking in the road.”
“Mallory?” asked Riker.
“Kathy,” said Travis. “She looked just like her mother. Then I felt like I’d been stabbed by lightning, and I ran the car off the road. Kathy saved my life. She should’ve let me die.”
“You got that right,” said the sheriff. “Why did that mob murder Kathy’s mother?”
“I don’t know. It was me Cass was after. But it was a mistake – I swear to God. She barged into the meeting and said – ” His hands were rising, flailing about.
“What meeting?”
“But I’d never hurt a kid. I don’t know why she – ”
“I don’t think that mob assembled to save your sorry ass from a charge of child abuse. I want the truth, Travis!”
“You might as well go ask the dog.” Travis’s eyes closed.
The sheriff reached down and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Don’t you die on me, you son of a bitch!” He shook the deputy’s thin body with real violence. “Why did they murder Cass?” He was yelling to be heard above the scream of the monitor alarm.
The question went unanswered. The monitor’s flat line and loud noise said that it was now wired up to a corpse, and the other machines agreed that the heart was no longer beating. The doctor stepped to the bedside. He flipped all the switches to the off positions and cut the feed on the oxygen line. Then he looked at his wristwatch and penned a note on the chart, marking the exact time when the technology died.
Charles slowed the car just beyond the gas station. Mallory turned to the rear window. “The car is stopping. It’s not a tail. Gun the engine, Charles.” She kept the gas station in sight for another few minutes as they barreled down the road and joined the highway.
All around them, sugarcane stalks were moving with the wind, rippling like water on the surface of a vast green sea. The car sped toward an unnatural structure on the horizon; it bore the logo of a chemical company. Waves of stalks lapped up against this skeletal monster of towering dark steel pipes and girders, a specter from the future, a taste of world’s end. White smoke plumed from the stacks and joined up with the wind. Charles knew the whiteness was deception. What was smoking into the air was not something Augusta’s birds should be breathing. He better understood her ruthless ambition to give them sanctuary.
It was a good fight.
He pulled off the highway and onto a side road marked with the hospital sign. “What makes you think they’d keep the records this long? Don’t most hospitals toss them after ten years or so?”
“Not anymore. Computers solved the storage problem.” The hospital was in sight now, a bland building of straight lines. “Augusta’s favorite cashier at the Levee Market has a part-time job scanning the old hardcopy into a data bank. If she’d only worked a little faster, I could’ve lifted everything I wanted from my laptop.”
He slowed down and pointed out the sheriff’s car parked near the entrance. “We could come back later.”
“No, I need this stuff now. Don’t worry about it, Charles. They won’t ask questions. You told Riker you wanted to visit Alma, didn’t you?”
“But what about you?”
He didn’t hold out much hope for this disguise of hers. She would have seemed less out of place on horseback in another century. The long black duster was wide in the shoulders and covered most of her body, stopping short of the riding boots and a bit of the blue jeans. The black hat was also an antique, short in the crown but wide enough in the brim to resemble a cowboy hat. Beneath the hat a black scarf covered every strand of her hair. The incongruous aviator sunglasses made her look even more dangerous. He thought the costume was actually more revealing of her character than disguising of person.
“Seriously, Mallory? You don’t think Jessop and Riker will notice you the second you walk in the door?” Could a bright red fire engine be less conspicuous in the hospital lobby?
“I’m going in through a basement window.”
Oh, of course. He had forgotten who he was dealing with. Any fool could go in by the front door. He pulled into the visitors’ parking lot and rolled along the side of the building. “Just stop me when you see a window you like.”
“It’s the last one at the rear.” Mallory consulted his wristwatch. It was safely past the hour when the clerk went off shift. “Augusta says this woman always complains about the view from the back end of the parking lot. Pull up here. And park the car close by.” She handed him a piece of paper. “And get this prescription filled at the pharmacy. It’s for Augusta.”
He stared down at the paper in his hand. “This has my name on it as the prescribing physician.”
“Well, you’re a doctor.”
“I’m a Ph.D. not a medical doctor.”
“You are now. I gave you a New Orleans physician’s number. You’ll be on the pharmacy computer. Don’t worry about it.”
She crept out of the car, and he gave her cover while she opened the basement window. He had expected her to whip out an elaborate tool kit with delicate lockpicks. Instead, she opted for expediency and used a rock.
Riker changed his mind about going outside for a smoke. Charles Butler had just entered the lobby, bearing a huge bouquet of brilliant flowers. Though he usually attracted some attention for his size and height, he walked through the crowded area without turning a head. In the aftermath of a highway accident, people in hospital garb were moving with urgent purpose. The civilians were haranguing the personnel at the front desk, and others sat, worried and waiting, filling all the chairs and couches scattered about the lobby. All around the giant in blue jeans, people were preoccupied with matters of life and death.
Only Riker noticed Charles approaching the pharmacy window and handing a piece of paper over the counter. The gray-haired pharmacist looked at the paper, nodded and held up five fingers, to say this transaction wouldn’t take much time.
Charles had only walked a few steps away from the counter, when he was roughly shouldered by a speeding nurse, who bounced off of him. Riker could read the body language of Charles rushing to apologize for what she had done to him. The nurse gently touched one of the exotic blooms in Charles’s bouquet and nodded. Now she pointed down the hall where Charles would find Alma Furgueson’s room and her visitor, the sheriff.
Riker had begged off that interview. He hadn’t wanted to see the sheriff’s interrogation style applied to the woman who had crawled from the cemetery on her hands and knees.
He felt around in his pockets for cigarettes and matches as he walked outside. Charles’s Mercedes was nowhere in sight. He strolled around the side of the building and spotted the silver car at the back of the lot, though there were a dozen spaces close to the front door.
Now that was interesting.
He walked toward the car, but stopped when he came to the window with the broken pane of glass. It put him off for a moment because this was not her style. Well, maybe the brat had been in a hurry.
He turned to the metal doors under the sign for the service entrance. They should open onto a freight elevator. He tried door pulls – locked tight and no signs of a pick. She had definitely gone through the window. She probably wanted to avoid meeting staff in the basement halls.
He tested the door of Charles’s car. Not locked. Good. He had never hot-wired a Mercedes before, but it shouldn’t be much of a challenge.
Riker forgot the urge for a cigarette and returned to the hospital lobby. A young woman was entering the door next to the pharmacy window. A few minutes later, the old man with the glasses was heading down the hall marked by a sign for the cafeteria.
Riker walked up to the window, gave the young woman Charles Butler’s name and asked her when the prescription would be ready.
“Oh, you’re in luck. He finished that one before he went to lunch.” She slid the bag over the counter. “That’ll be thirty dollars and twenty-five cents, Dr. Butler.”
Riker paid her and opened the bag. Doctor Butler? He read the labels for drugs which were all too familiar. One he recognized as an anti-inflammatory. The second bottle was antibiotics. And the Percodan would kill the pain.
He strolled over to the basement door as an orderly parked a wheelchair by the wall a few steps away. And now the rest of the plan fell into place as the orderly disappeared into the men’s room.
Riker opened the basement door and surveyed the deserted stairwell. He rolled the wheelchair through the doorway and down the stairs. The lower floor was a labyrinth with no helpful signs, and no elevator in sight. He knew he was facing east as he rolled the chair down a corridor which turned a corner and sent him south. He reoriented himself with every turn, hunting for the room to match the window with the broken glass. This section of the basement was pin-drop quiet, deserted in the lunch hour.
He settled on a door at the end of a long hall. On his way toward it, he passed the freight elevator which would open onto the service entrance in the parking lot. This was just too good to be true, and he flirted with the idea that God was on his side in this plan to batter a woman, to knock her senseless and carry her away.
He parked the wheelchair in front of the door at the end of the hall. Hunkering down, he used both hands to block the overhead bulb from the wide crack at the threshold. No light shone through from the room beyond. He pulled out a handkerchief and unscrewed the bare bulb over the door so the light from the hallway wouldn’t give him away in silhouette. Beneath the doorknob was a standard lock, nothing formidable. He applied all his strength to a twist of the knob to force the flimsy lock. The door opened quietly.
The long room was almost black. There was hardly any light from the rectangle of the broken window in the far wall. While his eyes adjusted, he was guided by the small penlight in Mallory’s hand.
She was completely absorbed in the contents of an open file drawer. He made out the dim shape of a desk lamp to her right. One of his hands went out to the lamp switch, and with the other, he grabbed Mallory by the shoulder and spun her around. And then there was light, but he was more startled than she was.
“Well, if it isn’t Jesse James,” he said, staring at the wide-brim hat shading her eyes. Her coat was laid open and now he could see the gun belt. “You got your geography mixed up, kid. This is the Deep South, not the Old West.”
Her face turned up and now he met her eyes. She was blinking in the light and wincing with real pain, her fingers working frantically to pry his hand from her shoulder. As his hand dropped away, the pain in her face lessened. He pulled the coat back and felt the bulk of the bandage beneath her blouse.
“Ah, Mallory, you took a bullet, didn’t you?”
She shook him off, saying nothing, only showing him she was not all that happy to see him again. He held up the pharmacy bag. “Dr. Butler’s prescriptions? I thought this crap looked familiar. Now what’s going on, kid?”
She took the pharmacy bag from his hand and checked the contents, as though she thought he might have stolen something. He knew she was stalling for time, hunting for a good lie.
“I’m looking for missing lab work my mother ordered on a patient. Any blood work would have been done here.”
That could be true. Mallory sometimes told the truth just to confuse him. Sheets of blue papers protruded from the oversized pockets of her long black coat. “What’ve you got?”
She ignored the question as she slid open another file drawer and continued her pilfering. It was awkward work, for she would not turn her back on him, and thumbed the files from the side of the open drawer. Now that she was on her guard, he had no hope of taking her by surprise, and he couldn’t rush her with the file drawer blocking him. “How’ve you been, Riker? You look like hell.”
“So? I saw the mug shot of you in the gingham jailhouse uniform. Now that was terminally cute.”
No reaction; she was deaf and blind to him.
Well, it took better bait than that to get a rise out of Mallory. “The FBI found your footprints in a classified system, kid. That’s a federal rap, real jail time.” Now he had her.
She smashed the pharmacy bag into her coat pocket. “I did not leave tracks in that computer. Those bastards have been trying to nail me for years.” She slammed the file drawer. “But they can’t prove illegal access – no way. If they can’t prove it, I didn’t do it.”
“Oh, yeah?” He pointed to her left shoulder where the wound was. “That was pretty careless, wasn’t it? But we’ll let the bullet hole slide, okay? The sheriff used your pocket watch to backtrack Markowitz. That was another screwup, kid, not ditching the watch with the rest of your ID. And then I saw the broken window – not your usual neat style. Was it your idea to park Charles’s car close enough to flag it for me? Oh, yeah, I can believe you got sloppy. I think the FBI does have something on you, maybe enough to prosecute.”
That put a small dent in her facade. The smallest doubt was all he needed to work with. “The feds send their compliments, and they want whatever you got on the New Church. You don’t give them what they want – they flood this burg with agents, and your own little scheme goes up in smoke.”
“They’re running a bluff. They don’t have enough probable cause to flood a Dayborn phone booth with agents.”
He leaned one arm on the file cabinet, testing the waters. She didn’t move away from him. “Mallory, they did me a favor. They held back your prints and they’re not looking to prosecute the computer break-in. Now I owe them one. You know this game.”
“You can tell them the New Church isn’t planning to overthrow the government. There are no assault weapons, no explosives, nothing bigger than a squirrel rifle. So they really have no excuse to blow up the town.”
“I need a little more than that.”
“The feds have a twenty-year-old file on the New Church. It may have dawned on them that it’s all bullshit.” She spoke to the open drawer as she pulled back file holders, stopping now and then to take one out for a closer look. “They had a profile on Babe Laurie as a brilliant and dangerous cult leader. Maybe they just found out he was the town idiot. If they did, they read it in his obituary. You wouldn’t believe how much the FBI paid for bogus information. I’m sure they tried to get better data from Internal Revenue, but IRS would never let them near an ongoing investigation.”
He knew Mallory couldn’t string that many words together without telling at least one lie. So there was no IRS investigation.
And now she was putting some distance between them, drifting away from the file cabinet.
“Okay, kid, tell me what IRS has.” Yeah, tell me a story.
“I can’t do that without admitting I was in another classified computer. Like you said, Riker – that’s a federal rap. Real jail time.”
“So? I’m gonna rat on you?” The distance between them was growing in tiny increments. He took one step toward her, and she brushed aside the long black duster to settle one hand on her right hip, exposing the gun. He recognized this as Mallory’s idea of being subtle.
You wouldn’t shoot me, would you, kid? Aloud, he said, “Give me something I can take back to the feds.”
“It’s a tax fraud scam. Babe Laurie’s brother is liquidating New Church assets into a financial holding pen. It’s all set up to feed into a foreign account.”
“So we’re talking big-time embezzlement?”
“It gets better. Malcolm is planning to skip out on the family. He just did a deal on all the lower bayou property. Sold it out from underneath his own relatives. They’ll be homeless and on the dole at the end of the month.”
“So that’s why you had to come back now. You didn’t want the locals to scatter till you nailed everyone in that mob.”
And now – time out for a little heartache.
She was coldly regarding him as a stranger, armed and dangerous. Was she seeing the same thing in his own eyes? Of course she was.
“So you figure Babe Laurie was in on the scam?”
“No,” she said. “Babe was a fool. Malcolm would’ve been crazy to tell him anything.”
“Suppose Babe found out about it? Good reason for Malcolm to do away with his little brother.” Tell me someone else could have done this murder. I’ll believe in you – even if I don’t believe you.
“Malcolm didn’t do it,” she said. “He wouldn’t do anything to call attention to himself right now. Neither will IRS. But when he tries to leave the country, they’ll arrest him for tax fraud, embezzlement and flight to avoid prosecution. If the feds spook Malcolm and mess up that operation, IRS will turn them into roadkill.”
He moved toward her, and that was a mistake. She backed up and planted her feet wide to make a stand. He didn’t believe she would draw the gun on him just yet; he’d done nothing to provoke that.
“Mallory, it’s not like I think you’d leave me hanging out in the breeze with the feds, but is any of this IRS crap true?”
Was she smiling? He could barely make out her face, though her lower body remained in the dim circle of light from the small desk lamp.
“IRS does have an open file on the New Church,” she said. “And they are running audits.”
Her head turned to the door. He stepped to one side and neatly blocked that exit. And now he realized she had just confirmed the impending betrayal.
It was a strain to keep his voice casual. “So IRS is suspicious. So what? They suspect everybody. But they’re not really planning an arrest, are they?”
“After you report back, the FBI will ask IRS about the investigation ” Her voice was machinelike, no trace of stress. “IRS will say they’re not running one – force of habit. But IRS keeps tabs on every organization so the feds will figure that’s a lie, and then they’ll believe an arrest is in the works. Ten minutes after the feds clear the room, IRS will start a criminal investigation. They’ll bank an arrest warrant on Malcolm against the audit findings.” She was retreating into deeper shadows. “So the truth is just a little bit out of order, okay?”
He moved on her before he could lose the light on her gun belt.
“That’s close enough, Riker.”
At no time in his life was he more aware of the heavy weight in his shoulder holster. The lamp was behind him now, and he was only a dark shape to her. His hand moved slowly inside his coat, reaching for the gun. If he could only show her the gun, Mallory might not draw on him. She might bow to the laws of ballistics which dictate that a drawn gun is faster.
If she drew first, he was a dead man. Sentiment would not get between Mallory and what she wanted most – payback for a murdered mother.
“Mallory, the sheriff’s got his motive. He knows Babe Laurie was in that mob. He can build a case against you.”
Her hand was rising, stopping short of the revolver on her belt, hesitating in the air – waiting.
He was touching his gun now. He eased it out of the holster, working slow, no sudden movements to make her draw. She was so much younger, years faster; he would have to cheat to beat her, and he was counting on the dark to give him an edge. The only light shone on her. “I know what you’re planning. All those people. You can’t do it, Mallory.”
“We’re done, Riker.” Her gun hand flashed out.
“Kathy!” he yelled in a pure reflex, forgetting he held a weapon, trying to get to the child he knew, before this strange woman could kill him.
The basement was plunged into blackness. Mallory’s hand had found the fuse box. She had only killed the light. Seconds later, Riker was alone in the room.
Charles’s thoughts were with the old king of the world when he looked down at his bouquet, another apology of flowers. When he entered Alma Furgueson’s hospital room, the sheriff was gone and another visitor was sitting by her bed. The large proprietress of Jane’s Cafe was mashing delicate wildflowers between her thick fingers as she arranged them in the water glass on the bedside table.
“Hello, again,” said Jane. It was the warm welcome of an old friend, though they had never even spoken to one another. “I heard you were back in town. So you come to visit with Alma. Well, isn’t that nice.” She bent down to the woman on the bed and reiterated this, as if Alma had no eyes and they were not trained on the enormous man looming over her.
“Say hello to your visitor, Alma.” Jane took the flowers from his hand and began to arrange this larger bouquet in the water pitcher, brutally snapping the long elegant stalks to better fit the short length of glass, bruising every petal as she forced them into the narrow container. The overflow of water spilled out on the table, smearing the ink on Alma’s only get-well card, which was signed by Jane.
“I’m so sorry about all this, Miss Furgueson.” He pulled up a chair and sat on the other side of her bed. “I know it had something to do with the angel in the – ”
“Oh, no it didn’t,” said Jane, answering for Alma. “She does this at least once a year. She’s pixilated, you know. Now you just call her Alma – everyone does.”
Charles began again, speaking to Alma. “I was in the cemetery when you – ”
“Wasn’t that a sight?” said Jane. “I guess everyone in town’s been up there. But angel or no angel, Alma was due for another round of slashing and bleeding.”
And now Charles looked down to the bandaged wrists. Older scars protruded from the line of the white bandages. It was true then; this was a ritual with Alma. That assuaged his guilt only a little. Suppose she had died?
“I understand you’re a member of the New Church,” he said in a game attempt at making conversation with the woman on the bed.
“Well, everyone in Owltown belongs to New Church,” said Jane. “I did try to talk Alma out of that. She was a staunch Catholic, you know. It was pure insanity to deed her house over to the New Church.” She made a distasteful moue as she spat out the last two words, and for a moment, Charles thought she might spit on the floor.
Alma was staring at him. He couldn’t fathom her expression. Was she frightened or glad of a visitor? Again, he looked down at the history of mental illness in the old scars above her bandaged wrists.
“Would you like me to go?” he asked Alma.
“Certainly not,” said Jane.
Alma’s eyes never left his face. When he smiled at her, she smiled back. Well, lunatics liked him. That was his curse in life. There was something about his foolish smile that made them believe he was one of their number.
He covered Alma’s hand with his own. “Perhaps you should be resting.”
“Now don’t you worry about her,” said Jane. “She’s only a little peaked because the sheriff was in here upsetting her with a lot of questions about a meeting. ‘What about that meeting?’ he yells, like she’s deaf or something. And poor Alma turned white as a sheet. But she’s all right now.”
“What sort of meeting?” He spoke to Jane this time.
“Oh, nothing special,” said Alma. “Just a business meeting for the board members. And I told him that. We were talking about repairs on the tent and budgets for the mail order catalogues. And then Cass walked in.”
Now Jane chimed in. “Alma bought herself a place on the governing board of the New Church when she deeded over her house.”
Charles looked at Alma. “What was Cass Shelley doing at that meeting?”
Alma looked to the glass and pitcher, both filled with flowers. “Jane, could you get me some water?”
When Jane had gone off in search of flowerless water, Alma touched his arm. “Jane says you’re real tight with Malcolm.”
“We met in her cafe. I don’t – ”
“And I saw you in the front row at the memorial service the other night. You were in the chair with the velvet rope.” Now she clutched his wrist, her nails dug into his skin and she smiled with fever-bright eyes. “I never told the sheriff anything about the letter.”
The letter again. What had Ira said about the letter? “You mean the blue letter?”
“Yes, it was blue.” And now she smiled, very pleased with him, as if he had passed a test of sorts. “Tom Jessop’s not a believer, you know, not one of us. He knew I was there when Cass died, but he didn’t understand the importance of her ascendance into heaven. Now she’s come back to take me away. You know, Cass always wanted to do that. She would get all her legal papers together, and then Jane – Oh, doesn’t Jane love a good fight. Jane would get a legal-aid man out of New Orleans to say that there was no cause to take me anywhere. But now Cass is back, and this time she will bear me away.”
Yes, Alma was quite insane. And someone should send her away, but he thought that was unlikely. Every notch cut into her wrists represented a lost opportunity to get her the help she needed. He could see her future now. One day she would get it right, and she would die alone. What a friend she had in Jane.
“What do you remember about the meeting?”
“Cass came in as we were talking about mending the tent for the next road show. She was real angry. Her office had been robbed. I know the sheriff was out of town, but I don’t know what she expected us to do about it. And she was waving that letter. Now she said that it was stolen, but there it was in her hand.”
“Could it have been a copy?”
“It could have been. Now that would make more sense, wouldn’t it?”
“Do you know what was in the letter?”
“Yes, of course I do. She wanted to take me away. I told you that.”
“All right – the meeting. Did that have anything to do with the stoning?”
“No, that was God’s work. The stones came out of the sky like rain and one fell into my hand. Not hard, mind you, but it just settled there in my hand. I took it home with me, and I keep it under my bed. It was so quiet between the fall of one stone and another.”
Alma’s voice was shrill now, and her eyes were very bright. “Cass didn’t scream or anything. That was part of the miracle. You wouldn’t think a woman could die in silence while her body was being broken that way. It was a test. But she understood what was happening to her.”
Alma clutched his arm with one hand and raked the other through her hair. “And the rocks only rained on Cass. It was a miracle the way she died.” Tears were streaming down her face and her voice was louder, almost shouting. “And now she’s back, going about His work. She’s come for me. I was afraid once, but no more. It’s my time of atonement for all my sins.” She looked to the ceiling, and screamed. “I’m so sorry! I have offended Thee!”
“What have you done?” Jane pushed the door, open with one meaty elbow. Her hands were filled with a pitcher and a glass. “She’s not supposed to be upset. Maybe you’d better leave, Mr. Butler.” Behind Jane, a nurse’s voice seconded this opinion. When Charles stepped into the hallway, the door was slammed behind him.
Riker was leaning against a gurney, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Have a nice visit, Charles? Sounded like a prayer meeting. Is Alma worried about going to hell for what she did?”
“I’m not sure she did anything. Alma says she did have a rock in her hand, but she took it home with her. She’s not lucid, but I believe that much.”
“Did the rock just appear in her hand?”
“How did you know that? She thinks it fell from the sky.”
“The deputy had a similar story, and he wasn’t the least bit crazy.
“I don’t think Alma will stand up to any more questions, if you’re – ”
“I’m not here for that. I think you should wait till the sheriff leaves before you pick up the brat.”
“Pardon?”
“Cut the crap, Charles. I just gave Mallory the pills from the pharmacy. She was down in the basement stealing files. Do you know what those pills are for?”
“For Augusta.”
“That’s what Mallory told you?” Riker gave him a pity smile. “She’s got a gunshot wound in her shoulder, Charles. That’s what the pills are for. I have to get her out of here before she takes another bullet, and I need your help. I’ll tell the sheriff you’re giving me a lift back to town. We can load her into your car and just keep driving.”
A bullet wound? Charles shook his head in disbelief. It couldn’t be. How could she -
“Charles, you know she killed Babe Laurie.”
“No I don’t, and neither do you.”
“Well, let’s see what I got to work with here,” said Riker. “I got one dead mother killed by a mob. And that wacko religious cult fits nice with the mob concept, doesn’t it? According to the feds, Babe Laurie led that cult. And this bastard gets his ass murdered within an hour of Mallory hitting town. You wanna play connect-the-dots?”
“That’s enough, Riker.”
“Or maybe a fast round of blindman’s buff? I’ll wear the blindfold first, okay? I’ll pretend I can’t see her killing a man just because he stoned her mother to death.”
“Mallory wouldn’t use a rock.”
“Why not? That’s the way her mother died. You gotta admit the kid has an interesting sense of justice.”
“Put a lid on it, Riker.”
“The sheriff still has good memories of a tiny little girl who couldn’t even lift a gun. If she stays much longer, it’ll be too late – he’ll have her jacket from NYPD, maybe psych files too. Do you want that man to find out what Mallory’s really made of?”
“So you want to lure Mallory into the car, and – ”
“Yeah, I owe it to Lou Markowitz. He’d do the same if he was alive. Hell, the old man would toss her in the trunk and drive straight through till morning. I just want to keep his kid alive and out of prison. Help me, Charles. You want me to beg? Okay, I’m begging. Lou would be down on one knee if he was here.”
Of course Riker couldn’t do it without a trusted friend to betray her to lead her into the car, where Riker would be waiting.
“No.” Charles looked down the hall as Tom Jessop was walking toward them. “I think the sheriff’s ready to leave now. Goodbye, Riker.”
Riker turned to the sheriff and called out, “Two minutes.” The sheriff waved and walked off.
“Why don’t you sleep on it, Charles. We’ll talk again tomorrow. If I have to do this alone, I might have to hurt her, and I’d rather not do that.”
“I don’t believe you could hurt her. And I know you couldn’t force her to go with you, not by yourself. Did you ever try to take Mallory anywhere?”
“Yeah, I did,” said Riker. “Once I took her to the Bronx Zoo. She was eleven. The animals in the monkey house didn’t wanna play with her. I think the kid made them nervous – they wouldn’t come anywhere near the bars. She didn’t take rejection very well in those days. So the kid points to the monkeys, and she looks up at me and says, ‘Shoot ’em.‘ ”
“You’re making that up.”
“But you’re not sure, are you?”