“It wasn’t like that,” Einstadt said. “You liked it. You remember taking my hand? You remember—”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t hurt me.”
Virgil said, “Whoa. Alma, I’ve heard enough here. You’ve got to let me have him. Believe me.”
“So you can put this all out in a trial? So we can all talk about it? You think I want to get up there and talk about it? I don’t. That’s why we’re having this here trial.”
She said to the girls: “And he did the same to you. Did you take his hand?”
The two girls shook their heads, and the older one, Edna, said, “I don’t remember so much when Father took me up, or Grandfather took me up, as when they took Helen up. I thought that all the awful things were coming to her now. I thought even that my night dreams would go away, because Helen would have them instead. I thought maybe they wouldn’t service me anymore. I prayed to the Lord Jesus that they wouldn’t come anymore, that they’d only service Helen.”
Helen said, “I got the night dreams from you, but not about Father and Grandfather. I had night dreams about Mr. Mueller, after you told me about going in the pool. But I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to go in the pool. Mr. Mueller would look at me during Spirit worship. I know what he was thinking. . . . At least I didn’t go in the pool.”
Alma said to Virgil, “After World of Spirit, some girls were taken in a pool to be serviced by the men who wanted to service them.”
“Is that what happened to Kelly Baker?” Virgil asked. “A pool?”
“No. That was . . . something different. Some of the girls went a little crazy, and they asked for it. Kathleen Spooner—what have you done with Kathleen Spooner?”
“She’s in custody. We ran a trap for her, and some of the other men,” Virgil said. “They went up to talk to Birdy and gave themselves away. We were recording everything. They left Kathleen behind to kill Birdy. Kathleen’s . . . agreed to help us.”
Einstadt said, “She’s made a deal? She’s the devil’s own daughter, Kathleen is. She’s worse than anyone here. She killed Jim Crocker—”
“We knew that,” Virgil said.
“And she would have killed anyone else who got close to her, if you gave her the chance. She had guns and she always wanted to use them.”
“Good for her,” Alma said. “She kept the worst of you away from her.”
Virgil: “What happened to Kelly Baker?”
Alma said, “She was like Kathleen Spooner—I got sidetracked there. Kathleen liked being serviced. So did Kelly. And she liked other things: we heard that she had whip marks on her legs. Father might know more details, but as I understand it, my dead brother, Junior, my husband, Jacob, Jim Crocker, and John Baker took her out to the Baker barn and had their own little pool. She choked on Jacob’s thing and they couldn’t get her to breathe again. They knew what would happen with the World of Law, so they took her car to town, and put her in the cemetery.”
“They washed her body before they did that,” Virgil said. “Was that some kind of religious death thing?”
Alma said, “They were talking about this DNA thing. They say they live outside the World of Law, but they know all about it. You think we got one hundred years of this thing, if Father is right, without keeping an eye on the World of Law?”
“Was Jim Crocker in on that? Keeping an eye on the law.”
“Of course he was,” Alma said. “He wasn’t any regular church member—you wouldn’t see him praying—but he was sure there when it came time to service the girls.”
“Your dead brother, Junior. Is he the one who was laid out in your father’s house?”
“He was. He was shot,” Alma said. “Everybody who was shot and killed was laid out, and the houses burned, because somebody said that the fires would get so hot that nobody could prove they was shot, and so the World of Law couldn’t take the farms away. The houses weren’t worth so much; it’s the land that’s worth a lot.”
Helen said, “I’m glad Junior’s dead.”
Edna: “So am I. I’d service him, but he was just mean. Mean, and he never washed.”
Virgil asked the girls: “How many men were you involved with . . . over the years?”
The younger one said, “I was only with family, because I wasn’t in the pool yet.”
The older one said, “I don’t know. Most of the men who were still in our part of the church. How many is that?”
Alma said, “Many.”
ALMA SAID, “We’re getting close to a verdict, seems to me. Mr. Flowers, you’ve been asking questions, but you haven’t been putting up a defense.” She said it as “dee-fence.”
Virgil said, “Miz Flood, I’ll tell you the honest-to-God truth, and that’s that I don’t care much about what happens to your father. I came out here to arrest him, and put him in jail for the rest of his natural life. And while I don’t believe in hell, I understand that you folks do, and I suspect that if there is, he’s going to be burning there forever after. So, from my point of view, your father’s taken care of. He might as well be dead.
“But if you kill him, you’re going to have to pay. If you—”
“I already killed Wally; I’m going to have to pay for that, anyway,” she said. “What are they going to do, make me pay twice?”
“It goes beyond that,” Virgil said. “You’re not only threatening to kill him, you’re dragging your daughters into it, by making them vote. And you think it’s not going to hurt them, growing up without parents, after everything that they’ve been through? Killing Wally, you’re going to have to pay for—but given what was going on, I’ve got to believe that a judge will let you out pretty quick. Plead temporary insanity—”
“It’s not temporary,” she said.
“Plead insanity. I think you’d get off, and given some time, you’d get out to see your children. Maybe even some grandchildren, someday. Edna and Helen will be taken care of by the state, and given treatment, and maybe, there’s a possibility that everything will work out for them. So the thing we’ve got to think about here, is not your father, but what happens to you and the girls.”
“I don’t care much what happens to me,” Edna said. “The World of Spirit is coming to an end, and I don’t know if I can live in the World of Law.”
“You’ll fit right in,” Virgil lied. “You’ll be amazed. You’re young enough that in a few years, with treatment, this life will be like a bad dream.”
Alma said, “Pretty smart. Taking that path, I mean. Saying it’s not about Father, it’s about us. You’re a smart fella, Mr. Flowers.”
“I got more, if you want it,” Virgil said. “You’ve been reading the Bible, I know, the New Testament and the Old Testament, and they both have a lot to say about killing, and it’s not good. If you hope . . . if you have a soul, killing won’t do it any good.”
“Do I have a soul?” Alma asked.
“I believe you do,” Virgil said.
“Of course you do,” Einstadt said. “Maybe you think what happened here was wrong, I can see you believing that. But you do have a soul, Alma. It may be a pitiful thing, covered with bloodstains from poor Rooney here, but it’s still alive; it can still be saved. You can’t shoot your own father.”
“Sure I can,” she said. “I just pull the trigger.”
“Don’t do it,” Virgil said.
ALMA SAID to Edna: “So what do you have to say? Guilty or not guilty?”
The young girl looked straight at her grandfather and said, “It’s not only what you made us do to you, all the men want that; it’s what you made us do to each other, after Helen got old enough. And that wasn’t Spirit. That was you wanting it to be like pictures on the Internet. That was not right and you should burn in hell for that.”
“I’m your grandfather,” Einstadt said. “You remember the toys you got for Christmas? Where did those come from? You remember when we built the swings?”
“This is pathetic,” Alma said. “Edna, say what you think.”
>
“Oh, he’s guilty,” she said. “But I leave it up to you, Mother. Mr. Flowers might be right. It might hurt us more than it hurts Grandfather.”
“Listen to your daughter, Miz Flood,” Virgil said. “She’s a smart one.”
Alma said to Helen, “What do you think?”
Helen looked at her grandfather and said, “You hurt me really bad. I think you liked hurting me, after that first time, when you found out how much it hurt. I think you’re a rotten old man who never thought of anything but himself.”
“You never told me any of this,” Einstadt said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought—”
“You thought we liked it?” Alma said.
“I don’t know.” He looked away.
Helen said, “But I think the same as Edna—that Mr. Flowers might be right. I think I would like to get to live with you, Mother, after all this is done, and maybe the World of Law will let you get away with Rooney, because of what he did, but I don’t know if they’ll let you shoot two. Two seems like a lot more than one.”
“Guilty or not?”
“He’s guilty. We all know he’s guilty. I don’t even know why we have to have a trial. But should we shoot him? I don’t know about that. Maybe we should listen to Mr. Flowers.”
ALMA SAID to Virgil, “You made an impression on the girls, anyway. But you haven’t said one word in Father’s defense. You want to say that word now?”
Virgil shook his head. “Miz Flood, I think just like Edna. He is guilty, I believe, but let the law take care of it for you.”
Alma said, “I’m a child of the World of Spirit, Mr. Flowers, and I don’t pay too much attention to the World of Law. My father was right about that: the World of Law is crazy. We see it on the television, and we know how crazy it is—people go around killing other people, and nothing happens to them; people stealing money so big that you could buy all the farms in this whole country for the money they steal, and nothing happens. That’s crazy. I don’t give two bits for your World of Law.”
“Miz Flood—”
“Don’t ‘Miz Flood’ me, Mr. Flowers. Either say your defense, or give up.”
“I don’t have a defense,” he said. “But don’t do this to yourself.”
Einstadt said, “For God’s sakes, Alma, don’t be crazy. Put up the gun and let’s go with Flowers.”
As she turned back to Einstadt, Virgil, who’d had his feet flat on the floor, slowly pulled them back, got his toes cocked: given a half-second distraction, he might be able to knock the shotgun sideways. Most people thought of shotguns as being infallible at short distances, as though the shot goes out in a wide screen. In fact, at the distance that separated Alma and her father, the spread would only be a couple of inches across, or maybe three or four at the most. If he could knock it just a bit sideways . . .
He said, “Miz Flood . . . I do have one more thing to say....”
She off-paced him again. As Virgil was getting ready to fling himself at her, leaning forward, cocked, ready, she said, “Father. I always wanted to do this.”
And she pulled the trigger, with the same tremendous blast as the one that killed Rooney, and Virgil flung himself from the chair and knocked the shotgun sideways, and then wrestled it away from her.
Too late for Einstadt: the shot had hit him in the stomach and lower chest, and though he was still alive, he wouldn’t be for long, with a hole that you could put a fist into.
Einstadt was trying to speak, but couldn’t, and Virgil yelled at the radio, “Get somebody in here, I’ve got the gun,” and at that instant, Jenkins burst in, and then stopped. “Holy shit.”
Alma leaned forward, putting her face in front of her father’s clouding eyes, and said, “You’re on your way to hell, Father. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime. I hope not, but maybe I will. In the meantime, I hope you burn like a sausage on a griddle.”
Einstadt might have heard some of it—his eyes flicked with the words—but he didn’t hear the griddle part, because at some point between “on your way to hell” and “sausage,” he died.
JENKINS SAID to Virgil, “We recorded it. Some of it was a little dim.” He picked up the taped radio and pulled the tape off, clicked it, and said, “Gene, keep most of the people out of here. We’ve got a crime scene.”
Schickel came back: “Copy that.”
Jenkins said to Alma, “Miz Flood, I’m sorry for your troubles. I truly am. And I gotta tell you, I would have pulled the trigger. If you want to call me up in court, I’ll tell them that. I think you did the right thing.”
She looked up at him and said, “So you don’t agree with Mr. Flowers, that it was about us? Me and the girls?”
“I have a different view of it,” Jenkins said. “If you’d seen that old sonofabitch living in prison, getting three meals a day and hanging out with his pals, you would have wondered where the justice was. Well, you know where it is now.” He put out a hand to her. “Come on along. I’ll take you and the girls into town.”
24
Virgil lay between Coakley’s long legs, with his head on her tummy, and she lazily scratched his scalp with her nails, and she said, “I keep thinking, one more day and it’ll be back to normal.”
Virgil said, “Yeah.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I had four more media interviews today, but I’m going to give them up. I’ll do People, but I’ll be damned if I’m going on National Outrage, or whatever it is.”
“Good decision,” Virgil said. He found his sex life tended to be enhanced if he let her ramble for a while; in the meantime, he observed, she had the most consistently clean belly button he’d ever encountered.
“The attorney general’s office is complaining about our record-keeping,” Coakley said. “Their lead attorney got really snarky about the evidence stream, and I said, ‘We had seven dead and nine wounded people and a hundred abused kids and nobody knows how many more from the past, and you’re worried that I didn’t use the right paper clips?’ She’s like twenty-nine.”
“Paper clips?” Virgil asked. He was now re-contemplating her laser job, and wondering why it had resulted in a pubic trapezoid (a four-sided polygon having exactly one pair of parallel sides, the parallel sides being referred to as the bases, or, in Coakley’s case, the top and bottom, and being composed of short reddish-blond hair; the sum of the angles being 360 degrees).
“Of course, the paper clips aren’t important now, but a year from now they might be, when all the trials get going,” Coakley said. “I’ve told the commission that I need to hire a couple of retired attorneys to come in and do the paperwork. The AG’s office will handle all the actual victim interviews, the regional public defender will take all the defense stuff, so what I need to do, is organize the arrest-level records. Starting now. Forget the interviews.”
“Sounds right.” The question being, Virgil thought, Why a trapezoid? Why not a regular triangle, say, or a rhombus? Or something baroque, with curves?
“But then,” Coakley asked, “how do you say no to the Today show?”
“Dunno,” Virgil muttered.
“You know what? I’m the one who put the M16 on the wall behind the desk. I had John do it, right before the interview,” she said. “I didn’t want any of this ‘Housewife-sheriff makes big fuss.’ That reporter from the Times kept wanting to talk about baking bread and raising children as a single working mother. I kept telling her, ‘Hey, I’m the sheriff. I carry a gun. I shoot at people.’ And she was like, ‘Do you grow your own rosemary?’ I think it was the first time she’d ever been out of New York City. I wanted to apologize for not making artisanal goat cheese in my spare time.”
Virgil said, “Mmm, artisanal goat cheese.”
That made her laugh, and she scratched again, which Virgil thought was pretty erotic. She said, “You know what I like about you, Virgil?”
“Whazat?”
“You really listen to me. So many guys don’t really listen to women.”
A WEEK HAD GON
E BY since the chaos of the shoot-outs, the first arrests, the fires, the sequestering of children from World of Spirit families. The church situation was more complicated than Virgil had known it to be—there were World of Spirit families that did not participate in the church’s sexual activities, and those families usually met for services separate from the branch of the church led by the late Emmett Einstadt. Those families had known of the child abuse, though, and so were not entirely out of the woods.
The commissioner of Public Safety, Rose Marie Roux, and Virgil’s boss, Lucas Davenport, had come down the next day, and Roux had offered priority service with the BCA labs on any evidence collected during the follow-up. Teams were going through the burned houses, based on the report from Virgil and Schickel on the immolation of Junior Einstadt. Only a few bone fragments were found, and only one, a piece of jawbone, had anything that looked like a bullet hole. The whole question of proving the dead men’s participation in the assault on the Rouse place was up in the air.
The governor, sounding as though he’d had one too many manhattans, called Virgil late one night and asked, “Is it possible for you to stay out of trouble for one year in a row? I mean, the whole goddamned state’s embarrassed by this. It’s almost like we’re Massachusetts, or something.”
“Well, hell, Governor, if you can’t spin it better than that—”
“I can spin it better than that—this proves our system works, that we’re ever-vigilant when it comes to child welfare, et cetera. Hey—are you pimping me?”
Bad Blood Page 30