King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  I grinned at him and didn’t answer.

  But he didn’t grin back.

  “You say you’re here because her brother’s your friend,” he said, “and I don’t doubt it’s true, because if it wasn’t you’d likely have had a better story to tell—but that doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t do some hellacious lot of damage without meaning to.”

  “Doctor . . . ”

  He flapped a restraining hand at me and went on. “The danger,” he said, “is that you could wind up with a permanent emotional dependent. And don’t laugh, or even smile, goddammit—anyone who thinks he’s immune to that kind of claim either hasn’t lived very long or hasn’t done much midnight thinking.”

  I grinned again anyway. “Like a country doctor who stays in practice when he could be living it up in comfortable retirement?” I inquired.

  He had the grace to wince. “You go to hell,” he said.

  “Race you to the coal chute . . . ”

  Angela finally roused enough to notice the scenery when we turned across the first switchback into the mountains.

  “You live up here?” she said, elbowing upright to get a better view as we rounded one of the low-altitude turns.

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “And only come down to rescue damsels in distress?”

  “Or to make money.”

  “Oh—yes. I guess that’s true, isn’t it? Dom told me . . . ”

  But we’d been over that ground before, and I didn’t have to look away from the road to see the expression of uncertainty that went with what must have been a somewhat hazy memory. And didn’t want to ride that train of thought.

  “The town was almost dead when we bought it,” I said.

  “We?”

  “Well—just me, at first. But that changed soon enough.”

  “Changed how?”

  “More people came. And helped me put it back in shape and lived there. So now they’re the owners, not me.”

  She thought about that for a while and then shook her head.

  “No,” she said.

  “No, what?”

  “No, they don’t own it. At least, not the same way you do.”

  “They—”

  “ . . . came after you’d already had the idea and put yourself on the line and got everything started.”

  “All the same, they were the ones who did most of the work.”

  “Uh-huh. But you’re still there, and—let me guess—you’re still calling the shots. Right? And when anyone has a problem, it still winds up in your lap.”

  “Well . . . ”

  She shook her head emphatically and looked back at the scenery.

  “Well me no wells, Preacher-Man,” she said. “And don’t try to bluff a bluffer—isn’t that the way they say it in the poker business? You forget, I’ve been there.”

  I hadn’t forgotten, but I shut up anyway and let her remind me. And herself.

  “Half the people in my own town,” she said, “make a good piece of their living working for the Palermo Winery, and I spend a lot of time and breath and effort getting them to think of it as a kind of cooperative enterprise. Their own. And the profits, when and if there are any to speak of, will be shared with the work force, not because I am such a hell of a sweet lady but because it is damn good business. But it’s not their name on the property deeds and it’s not their doors the sheriff will be posting the sale notices on if anything goes wrong—and it sure as hell wasn’t any of them who decided to put the winery back in business or spent half a year looking a parade of bankers in their no-credit eyes and trying to talk them out of enough high-interest money to make the whole thing possible.”

  She paused for a moment, remembering, while I kept my eyes front and my mouth clamped against the flow of words that wanted to spill out. Some forms of discipline are easier than others. Especially for a basically platitudinous son of a bitch like me.

  But the silence grew and I was about to break it anyway when she finally took me off the hook.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t think a halo would fit either one of us.”

  Which was true—and the perfect answer to any rebuttal I might have offered.

  She slept the rest of the way up the hill.

  Margery had accepted the sudden appearance of Dom Gianelli’s little sister without comment and bedded her down for an indefinite stay without questions. Which was good, because I didn’t have any answers.

  I had hoped to find them—or at any rate a clue or two—in San Francisco.

  But all I’d found was more questions and more complications, so the puddle-jumping commuter flight to Best Licks’s nearest airport seemed as good a time as any to try and work out a few priorities:

  It might be time to quit.

  Dom Gianelli had asked me to check out the situation in Glen Ellen, and I had done that. Angela was safe now, and barring accidents another week or two of rest and rehabilitation could be expected to put her in shape to take over the controls of her life again. What more could anyone ask?

  But that was pure moonshine.

  Dom Gianelli wouldn’t ask. And wouldn’t have to. I owed him, and even if I hadn’t, I would have done anything I thought would make his world warmer. Because it was what I wanted to do.

  Something dark and malevolent had tried to consume his sister, and it was still out there, waiting. Leave her alone, and it would be back. Besides, it had already swallowed her daughter. Alive.

  Angela Palermo might be a rag doll now, quiescent and slumberous, but the day would come when the brown-black eyes would be wide open again. And when they were, she would go looking for her little girl. With or without escort.

  So, all right.

  Time to quit when the sun goes down: Angela would go in style.

  But the first step could be a lulu, because—Suleiman’s information and caveats notwithstanding—it would have to be taken almost totally in the dark. No roadmap.

  Finding Gideon would be easy enough. The former child evangelist’s presence in the Los Angeles area was well documented; he had set up shop and tabernacle in the little town of South Bay City. And he seemed to be thriving there.

  People magazine had devoted three whole paragraphs on him and his in one of its typical short-attention-span reports on the cults and crazies of southern California.

  Gideon wasn’t trying to hide. But getting inside his private crazy space might be another matter entirely. And as for getting someone out . . .

  I wondered how far Angela might be willing—or able—to go in confronting the man who had already taken her once to the heart of darkness and threatened to make it her permanent address.

  And who might be willing to help.

  Which brought me back to Suleiman: His sister had met Gideon, too. The pseudo-black diamond merchant was a collectible in his own right, a main-chance lunatic of infinite luster clear. One of a kind. But he was also a realist, and smart enough to know when he was out of his depth. Which I suspected just about everyone might be when it came to Gideon.

  Suleiman was stymied, and he knew it.

  With Perdita Soames in emotional bondage to the Temple of the Eternal Flame, and her husband apparently acting under some kind of compulsion, Suleiman had become a minority stockholder in his own peculiar business enterprise. Frustrating, no doubt. But would that be enough to ensure cooperation in a rescue mission?

  Chancy. But still worth considering.

  Final item: Sergeant Pete Palermo’s illicit fortune. It was the dirtiest kind of dirty money, and Sunday moralists might be able to draw a smirky little lesson from the use to which the proceeds of the former Green Beret’s illicit narcotics operations had been put. Dirty money for dirty business. Right.

  But I had given up that kind of judgment call a long, long time ago. The money—or the diamonds, since some of the loot was still presumably in that form—was like the chips in a poker game, counters useful for keeping score and a handy toke for the dealer. But morally neutra
l even if I still thought I knew something about morality. Which I do not.

  Pete Palermo might or might not have had a right to it.

  But Pete Palermo was dead and the war was over and the world that had produced them both and used them and obliterated them in season was not even a memory for most of the generation now approaching voting age.

  The Green Beret sergeant’s long-hidden millions were a holdover, unswept debris, from that time. Like B-52 bombers. And peace symbols. And body counts. And the Weathermen. And secret invasions. And draft-card burnings.

  And Best Licks.

  And me.

  Angela Palermo was Pete’s widow and Dom’s sister; if she wanted the damn money I would get it for her if I could, never mind the reasons and rationalizations. No one had a better right. She had paid her dues. And even if she didn’t want it, I sure wasn’t leaving it around for the likes of Gideon.

  Morality is one thing.

  But insanity is another, and no one in his right mind puts a loaded weapon in the hands of a homicidal cretin. Or a perverted genius.

  Margery had sent Babe Olsen to fetch me from the airport, so the ride up the hill was silent. A mortar round at Hue had left Babe short on conversation: burst both eardrums and amputated his tongue. But he was a natural born mechanic and a freehand bulldozer operator of genius, and Master Masuda said his grasp of haiku was remarkable for an Occidental.

  It seemed to satisfy his need for communication.

  All the same, I was more than ready for some talk by the time we arrived at Best Licks, and that was just as well because Margery had a few thousand well-chosen words to offer and she started saying them as soon as we were alone in my office.

  “Who the hell is Gideon,” she demanded, “and what did he do to that girl?”

  I started to tell her, but she cut me off after a sentence or two.

  “Skip the biography,” she said with uncharacteristic brusque-ness, “and tell me why I spent last night comforting a terrified three-year-old child who happens to be approaching her thirty-fifth birthday.”

  So, I did my best.

  Margery heard me out this time without comment, the dark and beautiful lines of her face gradually reassembling themselves into their accustomed aspect of serene power. But the heat of her wa filled the room—and that alone was enough to tell me all I had to know. Margery is usually as readable as a stone.

  I kept it short, and by the time I was done she was back under control.

  “Nice man,” she said. “My mother’s people would have known how to deal with him.”

  I nodded solemnly. Margery’s mother was a Hopi Indian, whose ancestors developed a technique of flaying malefactors alive; removing the entire epidermis and then driving the victim into the desert to get full benefit of the sun during the long hours before death.

  “But we don’t do things like that nowadays,” I said. “Uncivilized.”

  Margery hesitated, but finally decided to concede the point. “Okay, then,” she said. “So, kill him quick—and let me watch.”

  I didn’t say no.

  My office is arranged for convenience, and its amenities include a quart-size mason jar of the very best triple-run blockader whiskey, a prime source of comfort that is replenished from time to time as necessary by the sheriff of our county, who is a man of fine perceptions and clear understanding. I glanced toward it now with the thought of pouring us a finger or two to take the hard corners off the conversation we were about to have. But rejected the notion at once.

  Margery is no shy violet. If she’d needed a belt, she’d have taken one.

  “How long,” I said, “do you think it will take to put her back in working order?”

  The words were deliberately insensitive and they earned me a double-barreled glance that would probably have been a punch in the nose if we hadn’t been friends for a long time.

  “Damn you, Preacher!”

  I favored her with my very best and brightest country-boy smile—and almost got the punch anyway. The right arm certainly tensed. After a moment, though, it relaxed and so did she.

  “All right,” she said. “Define your terms. Back in working order for what, and how soon?”

  “In shape to face Gideon,” I said. “And I need her at once. Yesterday. The day before.”

  She shook her head. Emphatically.

  “You talk,” she said, “like the original man with a paper asshole.”

  Margery acquired her electronics expertise while serving two tours in the Marine Corps, and the context still shows up from time to time.

  “Semper Fi,” I said.

  But she wasn’t having any.

  “Look,” she said in the too-calm tone she used to reason with idiots, “I spent maybe twenty-four hours with this lady; you spent nearly a week. How come I know she’ll never—ever—be ready to handle anything pertaining to that mind-bending mother, and you don’t?”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “Preacher . . . !”

  “She’s got to, Margery,” I said. “Or spend the rest of her life hiding, here or somewhere else, and wondering what her life would have been like if she’d had the chance to live it.”

  So finally, we got down to cases. Margery said her houseguest had been rational enough, to the point of being able to make an occasional joke and offer to help with housework, until nightfall.

  But then the shades came down.

  “At first,” she said, “I thought it was just fatigue. She’d been traveling all day, after all, and you’d told me enough to let me know she wasn’t in red-hot physical condition. So, I suggested early to bed.”

  “And lived to regret it.”

  “Bingo. I’d just settled down to one of my better dreams—the one where I get to drop water bombs on Jerry Falwell and it makes his undershorts shrink—when the first scream jerked me back to Best Licks.”

  “Some scream.”

  “A minor effort, judged in the context of subsequent achievement. She had time to get off three more before I remembered I wasn’t alone in the house and put down the shotgun. By the time I got into the next room, she was in the middle of the floor . . . naked and curled up in a tight little fetal ball, but still putting out the decibels.”

  “So of course, you woke her.”

  “Tried. And failed. The eyes were wide open but they weren’t seeing me, and whatever kind of movie was playing inside there should have been rated double-X.”

  “You mean pornographic?”

  “I mean sick times six. The screams finally stopped after I got her sitting upright but changing the sound to words was no big help. As near as I could tell, she was playing through some kind of scene I could pretty much follow but couldn’t really imagine. And I thought I’d heard just about everything.”

  She paused for breath and I used the time to check my own memories of Angela’s personal Nachtmusik.

  Nope. This was something new.

  “When it turned into words,” I said, “did she mention any names?”

  “Just one. Gideon.”

  “Nobody else?”

  “He seemed to be enough. There was one time—oh, maybe half an hour after it started—when she pulled herself up and the eyes seemed to focus and she said, ‘No. That’s disgusting. I won’t!’ and I thought maybe she was coming out of it. But a moment later she was trying to turn into a fetus again and this little-girl voice said, ‘No—please don’t make me do that,’ and she began to cry . . . ”

  Margery stopped talking suddenly, and for the second time that day I found myself in the unaccustomed position of being able to sense and examine my tough-minded secretary’s usually impenetrable aura. It was a real convincer.

  It must have been a long night. Margery is not easily impressed.

  “Look, Preacher,” she said when she was finally ready to speak again, “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, and in general I don’t suppose I want to. But if it involves putting her anywhere near that man, I think I want
to take back what I said before. Let the crazy son of a bitch go. Let someone else kill him. Hell, let him live, even! But don’t—do not—ask that child to help.”

  It was a clear and reasoned request from a person I respect. A plea from one not accustomed to pleading, and it deserved a clear and reasoned reply. Probably in the affirmative.

  But I didn’t give her one. And the answer didn’t come from me.

  Either the years are beginning to rob me of those sensory telltales that have enabled me to stay alive this long, or I am simply becoming careless. Bad either way, because I hadn’t heard any doors open or any footsteps, either, and the unheralded introduction of a new voice from the hallway behind my chair offered a shock to the foundations of reality.

  As did the words themselves.

  “I’m not a child, goddammit,” Angela Palermo said. “And if anyone gets to kill the Reverend Gideon Goode, it is going to be me!”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  His true appetite is for the very life essence—for the hearts and minds—of those who hear him; for their willing acceptance of his creed . . .

  THIRTEEN

  But Angela hadn’t come there to startle us. Or to talk about Gideon, either.

  The phone at the Palermo Winery in Glen Ellen was equipped to forward calls and the number we’d entered before driving up the hill was Margery’s.

  The call that had wakened her was from Sacramento.

  “It was the VA hospital, for me,” Angela said. “Dom is dead.”

  Comforting the bereaved is supposed to be a part of a minister’s job. I’ve done the work as necessary in my time.

  But the news from Sacramento was something else, and after the initial exchanges of banalities it was anybody’s guess about who was comforting whom. Angela was his sister. I was only a friend. But Dominic Gianelli was a loss neither of us could afford, and Margery wisely left us to work out the order of things between ourselves.

  “He died alone,” Angela said. “All alone, there in that place where they send you to keep you out of sight after they’ve used you up in one of the wars that they don’t even have the guts to call wars anymore.”