King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  Angela had started snoring again.

  By early afternoon the smell was gone and some of the clutter had been moved out of the way.

  Basic linens were back on the bed, and I went to the living room with the idea of moving Sleeping Beauty in there but stopped short when I caught sight of myself in a mirror.

  No wonder she’d passed out.

  I’d gone to Glen Ellen knowing there was a good chance that any problems Dom’s sister had might be directly traceable to her contact with Gideon Goode—and had come to her door wearing what must have been, for her, the quintessential bogeyman getup.

  Preacher-black suits and string ties had been a part of the meticulous stage costuming of the eerie little child evangelist I remembered.

  Only natural, if he’d gone back to the trade, to dress the part as he understood it . . .

  (And was my excuse any better?)

  No time to go shopping for a new wardrobe now, and none of the closets had contained anything that looked like men’s clothing. But I’d seen a faded purple sweat shirt, and I detoured into what I took to be a spare bedroom to change into it before going back to pick up the lady of the house.

  As I’d expected, the jostling of being moved roused the sleeper.

  Her eyes opened and tried to focus on me. But I could tell it was hard work for her, and even harder when she tried to decide who I might be.

  “Yuh . . . ” she said.

  I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile and edged through the hall doorway, continuing the crabwise movement through the door to her bedroom.

  “Yuh . . . who?” she managed on a second try.

  “Friend of Dom’s,” I said. “We knew each other in the army. He’s worried about you. Asked me to come see if you were all right.”

  The heavy-lidded eyes blinked twice, trying to take all that in and make sense of it, but in the end the only part that seemed to register was the name.

  “Dom?” she said. “Dominic?”

  “Dominic Gianelli,” I said, nodding and smiling to show I considered her a bright and apt pupil. “Your brother. My friend.”

  She blinked again, and seemed to accept the identification.

  “Friend,” she said.

  “That’s right. Friend.”

  But I was talking to myself again. The lids had closed once more over the brown eyes, and her breathing was deep and regular by the time I had her comfortably positioned in the bed, with the covers drawn neatly under the chin.

  No snoring, though.

  I decided it might be a good sign.

  This time she stayed asleep for nearly five hours, and by the time she woke the house was almost livable.

  And it nearly went for nothing.

  I was at work in the living room, running a vacuum over the rug, when the sound of shattering glassware brought me into the kitchen just in time to catch a good solid paragraph of blasphemy that would have done credit to a China Sea stoker. I’d have applauded and asked for an encore—such vocabulary is as rare as the imagination needed to use it—but there were more immediate problems.

  Angela’s outburst had been prompted by inability to unscrew the top of a fresh container of red wine. The bottle had fallen to the floor unbroken, but a row of glasses I’d just taken from the dishwasher had been less fortunate. Now the chatelaine of Villa Palermo had dropped to her knees among the shards and was groping for the recalcitrant jug with more resolve than coordination.

  It was the wrong time to argue, so I didn’t.

  “Wha . . .?”

  Her preoccupation with the wine had been total, and my move in scooping her up out of harm’s way seemed to come as a complete surprise—which was just as well. Angela Palermo was stronger than she looked, and she used every available ounce of power now in an effort to break my face.

  “Muh-fugguh!”

  The first swing missed, but the second didn’t, and my right ear began to sound a high, sustained note.

  All right, then. The hell with it . . .

  I clipped her neatly with the edge of my hand on the nerve bundle at the nexus of neck and shoulder, and her third swing—this time with claw-hooked fingers aimed at the eye I don’t have—flattened and collapsed in midcurve. Properly applied, pressure on that center gives no pain; the limb on that side simply goes numb and stays that way for a little while, so it took Angela a moment or two to realize something was wrong. And a little longer to decide what it might be.

  Then her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m . . . sorry.” she said in a small and frightened voice I hadn’t heard before. “I’m sorry. I’ll be good. Please don’t hurt me.”

  I put her back on the bed and she lay there without moving, eyes huge and depthless now. Looking at me.

  “Please don’t hurt me.” she repeated, and I smiled.

  “No one is going to hurt you,” I said.

  The black eyes thought it over. “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  The eyes looked at me for another moment or two, and then crinkled closed as tears rolled down the cheeks in opposite directions.

  “Promise,” she said again.

  I started to answer, but didn’t. She’d had sleep and she’d had reassurance—well, as much as I could offer for the moment, anyway—despite the monumental hangover I knew had to be warping her world all out of shape, I needed to talk to her now. And the conversation had to be with a grown-up, not with the little-girl version of her that was asking me to promise I wouldn’t spank her for breaking the glasses or trying to get into the wine.

  So I stood still and held my peace, and finally she risked another look.

  There’s really no such thing as the “poker face” nonplayers talk about. A successful professional’s face remains as mobile and reactive at the poker table as in any other human activity. But it is under control—total, knowing control—or he doesn’t last long. So the face I let Angela see when her eyes crept open again was carefully selected, tuned to contact and human compassion without bathos.

  She studied it for a moment in silence.

  “Dom?” she said then. “You know Dominic?”

  “We’re friends. He was worried. Sent me to find out why you’d stopped writing.”

  More silence.

  And lingering suspicion.

  “You . . . know Gideon?”

  I’d been expecting the question, and made sure my face didn’t say anything it shouldn’t.

  “There was a child evangelist named Gideon Goode,” I said. “He grew up and quit the ministry and went to prison. For fraud, I think.”

  “No!”

  The reaction was definite, and as reflexive as a tapped knee.

  “He was a prisoner of faith,” she said in a voice that was suddenly both clear and intense. “The gentiles—the evil ones—they sent him to . . . to . . . ”

  The words had come in a rush, spilling and tripping over one another in a haste of rote memory lashed by terror. But they trailed away into nothingness when I didn’t offer visible reaction.

  “Gideon’s not here,” I said. “He’s gone and he’s not coming back. You don’t have to be afraid.”

  She listened and it was what she wanted to hear, but in the end it just wasn’t good enough. Without trying, I could touch her wa—feel the sudden airlessness of the room as she experienced it, and knew when her shallow breathing became insufficient to support consciousness. Saw the darkness closing in from the corners.

  “Liar!” she said, her voice rising through the octaves of terror. “Liar! He’s here. He’s right here in this house—in the next room, right now. I can hear him in there just like always. Singing. That goddam Sunday school song of his!”

  “Song?”

  “His song. Gideon’s! You hear it, you lying bastard. You do! Listen to him. Listen:

  “Brightly beams Our Father’s mercy

  “From His lighthouse evermore.

  “But to us He gives the keeping

  �
�Of the lights along the shore. . . . ”

  She seemed to know all the verses, but went back to sleep suddenly during the last chorus.

  I carried her back to the bed and then sat in the parlor for a long time, thinking bleak thoughts about loneliness and fear and the terrors that walk by night.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  But the damage that a knowing and deliberate charlatan can do is limited . . . by the very nature of his greed.

  SEVEN

  The only doctor in the phone book with a Glen Ellen address was someone named Jeremiah Cates, and he didn’t want to come to the Palermo place at first. But I persuaded him it was an emergency and held still for the slow up-and-down he gave me before crossing the threshold.

  “Well,” he said when it was done, “anyway you don’t look like one of ’em.”

  That could have meant anything, so I kept my mouth shut and let him go on if he wanted to. He did.

  “Been treating Palermos for nearly forty years,” he said as I led the way to the bedroom. “Delivered Petey—the one who got to be a Green Beret—right here in this house, the year I set up practice, and was there to catch his wife’s little girl when the time came. And all the other times between.”

  He stopped just outside the door and turned to face me.

  “But the last time I was out here I swore I wouldn’t come again,” he said. “And I’ll be frank to tell you it’s nothing but pure, rank curiosity got me back.”

  He stopped again, and this time I wanted to ask a question. But it could wait.

  “Angela’s in here,” I said, and opened the door to the room.

  The examination was brief and I wasn’t in the room for most of it, but the diagnosis was about what I’d expected.

  “Ethanol poisoning,” he said. “Advanced state, with full visual and auditory hallucinations. Partial kidney failure, with full shutdown a definite prospect in the near future unless something changes.”

  I nodded, waiting to see if there was more.

  But he only looked at me out of eyes that had seen it all. Twice.

  “What I heard,” he said when it became plain that I wasn’t going to talk, “I heard some skinny bastard in a black coat and string tie came asking questions and purt’ near ruint one of our stupider citizens who tried to lean on him.”

  I shook my head. “Sounds like a bad ’un,” I said.

  But he didn’t smile. “Did to me, too,” he said. “And I guess you could say it’s one reason why I’m here. To find out—”

  “If I’m one of Them,” I finished the thought for him, putting a capital on the final word.

  The ball was in my court again and I think I could have beaten him in a stare-down, and I was in the mood for it. But, reluctantly or otherwise, the man had come when he was needed and that deserved something better than eye games.

  “Angela’s brother is an old friend,” I said. “He asked me to see why she’d stopped writing. I found out, and phoned you.”

  The old eyes warmed a little, but there was still wariness in the depths. I thought I might know the reason.

  “And I never met Gideon Goode in my life,” I added.

  The eyes changed again and the shoulder relaxed.

  “Shit,” he said. “And here I was all ready to get you hurt!”

  Apparently I had said the right thing. While we were occupied inside, a kind of biball-and-boondocker-boots posse had formed outside the house and appeared reluctant to go away even after the doctor went out to talk to them.

  Glen Ellen seemed to protect its own.

  My opinion of the town went up several notches, and I said as much when the old man came back inside. But he only snorted as he dropped back into the chair facing me. And shook his head.

  “Pack of goddam kyoodles,” he said. “Small town crazies. Beating the crap out of you would have been the best fun they had all month, so I had the hell of a time getting them talked out of the notion. But not really bad people, taken all in all.”

  He settled himself like a man with something to say, and I kept my mouth shut to let him say it.

  But he started in a place I hadn’t expected.

  “Gideon,” he said, letting the word stand alone and looking at me.

  “Gideon Goode.” I nodded, playing it by his rules. “Child evangelist. Con man. And, I gather, not exactly a beloved name in these parts. I’d like to hear more about that, if you’d care to expand on the subject. I said I never met him, and that’s the truth. But Dom Gianelli—Angela’s brother—mentioned the name. Said he’d been Pete Palermo’s prison cellmate. And Angela . . . ”

  The doctor’s expression soured and darkened.

  “Angela—Mrs. Palermo—thinks he’s still here in the house,” he said. “One of those auditory hallucinations I mentioned. I gather she talked to you about it, too?”

  “Heard him singing,” I said. “An old country-church hymn.”

  “ ‘Let the Lower Lights Be Burning.’ ” He nodded, looking like a man who wanted to spit and couldn’t find a corner. “Always kind of liked that song until he came to town, singing it or humming it under his breath day and night.”

  I wanted to know more about that.

  “What with one thing and another,” I said, “I have kind of got the impression Gideon didn’t make too many friends hereabouts.”

  The doctor snorted a good, hard snort. “If that’s your impression,” he said, “then you’ve got to understand why you got a few funny looks and maybe just a touch of hostility when you first arrived.”

  “The clothes?”

  “The clothes. Gideon—you say his last name is Good?”

  “With an e on the end. Yes.”

  “All right, then: Gideon Goode-with-an-e-on-the-end. He dressed that way. Black suit and string tie, like someone made up for a road company production of Elmer Gantry.”

  “And behaved like the title character?”

  Another snort. Louder. “Like that, and with no attempt to pretend otherwise.”

  “Angela . . .?”

  “Came to see her one Monday. Moved in that afternoon And stayed, sashaying around town like the lord of the manor and making sure she didn’t see nor talk to anyone else. Folks were scared of him—one or two local fools took the notion of choosing him and wound up the worse for it—and then they got kind of scared for her. Like maybe she’d been murdered or something.”

  “But she was alive.”

  “You could call it that.” The doctor took a deep breath and settled himself back in the chair across from me. His expression remained morose. “This Gideon Goode-with-an-e had come to town ragged-assed. Literally. The seat of those black pants of his was out in two places, and there was a rip in the sleeve of his coat, and he looked like he’d slept two nights on a manure pile.”

  “But all that changed.”

  “Changed damn quick. Less than a week after he moved into the Palermo house, he drove off in Angela’s car one morning and came back looking like the richest damn Come-to-Jesus in creation. New suit, new shoes, new hat—and a new haircut. Good one, like you’d get from one of those barbers call themselves hair stylists nowadays.”

  I nodded, wanting the flow to continue. “You think Angela staked him.”

  “Know damn well she did. Because she went right on doing it. No other place he could have got money; he sure God wasn’t working.”

  “Not even in the winery?”

  “Not that anyone ever knew about. And then more like him—black suits, snotty attitudes—started drifting into town from time to time, asking after the Palermo place . . . ”

  “They all stayed here?”

  “No.” The doctor shook his head with impressive certainty. “Not a one, not even one night. I know, because it got to be a kind of ritual. They’d come in the morning, spend the day out here, and then be trying to beg a ride back to Santa Rosa by nightfall.”

  For some reason that tickled me, and I guess it showed in my face. “Gideon w
ouldn’t even give them a ride?”

  The doctor grinned, too. “Some kind of religious principle, most likely,” he said. “I got mine, you go beg for your own, brother. No bed for the night. And no free rides. Not from him, the little piss ant—and not from anyone else hereabouts after the first few. A thing like that can get old in a hurry.”

  “I can see how it might.”

  “Damn sure did. And it went on that way, month in and month out, for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Ten months. Longer. Nearer a year.”

  “And then?”

  “And then one day he was gone . . . ”

  Gideon’s disappearance, the doctor said, did not automatically signal a reappearance of Angela Palermo. She remained secluded in the old house, leaving the telephone unanswered and ignoring callers who came to her door until old friends, suspecting that she might be ill or injured or worse, finally got the Sonoma County sheriff’s department to take a hand.

  A brace of deputies forced the lock on the back door. They found the house in disarray—and Angela Palermo on her knees.

  “Praying,” the doctor said.

  I think I was supposed to react to that, scowl or smile or applaud or something. The old man paused, eyes curious and expectant. But I disappointed him and after a moment he went on.

  “She had some kind of funny little shrine in there,” the doctor said, nodding his head in the direction of the side of the house I hadn’t explored as yet, “and was kind of moaning and swaying back and forth in front of it. Called me when they couldn’t get her to stop . . . ”

  I could imagine.

  And felt a tiny chill at the back of the neck. Religious hysteria can be an addiction stronger than heroin. And its cure can be worse than the disease.

  “Fought the three of us like an underfed wildcat until I gave her a shot, and then moved her to the hospital in Santa Rosa. Even then, it was a couple of days before she stopped trying to climb the walls, and then seemed to snap right out of it—enough to convince the headshrinker there that she was okay, and call a taxi to take her home, and tell me off pretty good about minding my own damn business.”