In the end, he simply outlasts everyone.
When it becomes clear that Father Don isn’t going to change his stance or go away, the last protestors leave one night and never return.
I hadn’t seen Father Don since that night, but given that I was running short on clergy contacts, it seemed like a good time to look him up. A quick riffle through the phone book and I was talking to a volunteer at our Church of the Held Barricades from sixty-five.
“I’m sorry sir, there’s no-one here by that name. Father Beare is our priest.”
He sounded so young, I could picture the peach fuzz on his chin.
“I know he was there in the mid-sixties. There must be records of which church he moved to?”
“Umm, I wouldn’t know about where he moved to, sir. Uhh. Or when he moved. Sir.”
“Why do I get the feeling you just don’t want to tell me?”
“It’s not that, sir. Umm.”
“Isn’t it a sin to lie?” It looked like Stew Bayless still lurked under the surface.
“Yes it is, sir. Bearing false witness is a sin and only God can provide forgiveness. Oh, damn.”
His voice trailed away. I’m glad he got there by himself, because my next step was to threaten him and, to be honest, I don’t like doing that to folks who don’t deserve it.
Don’t tell anyone.
The volunteer’s next words were a whisper. I imagined him looking left and right.
“I’m not meant to tell you, sir. No-one here is meant to speak about Mr McIlhenny since he left. The last I heard, he had moved to Austin. That’s all I can say.”
“Mister? What about Father McIlhe—”
The line clicked and I was left with dead air.
I had to tear down the pile of phone books to get to the only Austin directory I had, two years old. Then, while moving back to sit down, I tripped over one of the new stacks I’d made and banged my right thigh against the corner of my desk. Damn.
The directory had three listings for McIlhenny, D. and I went down swinging with the first two.
I had the receiver wedged against my shoulder and was rubbing my leg, thinking about getting up to get a beer when the third answered.
“This is Don.”
I sat up straight and winced.
“Ow, hi. I’m looking for Don McIlhenny.”
“I’m Don McIlhenny.”
“Actually, I’m looking for Father Don McIlhenny.”
A chuckle. “You’re about ten years too late for that.” The voice flattened. “Who is this?”
“Rafferty,” I said. “Father McIlhenny might remember me as Officer Rafferty. It was a long time ago.”
“Officer Rafferty.” The line whistled with his breath. “I haven’t heard that name for a long time. I think I read about you saving that little girl, what, it must have been fifteen years ago?”
“It’s just Rafferty now. And I guess that means you are Father McIlhenny?”
“Were. I was Father, but like you, it’s just plain Don now. A long story and one I won’t bore you with. I had hoped we might meet again, so it’s good to hear from you. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Damn again. With him no longer a priest, I didn’t see how he could help me. But he was on the phone now, so, what the hell.
“Don, I’m looking for a girl who went missing at a Christian shindig down in your neck of the woods.”
“Let me guess …” He sighed. “Christ Alive!, right?”
“Yeah. You know anything about it?”
“A lot. I’ve spent the last four years trying to get the damned thing shut down. You can imagine my embarrassment when they stage the thing in my home town. Pissed me off, and good.”
I paused, trying to reconcile the person on the other end of the phone with the Father Don I knew years ago. It felt like I was bringing on an aneurysm so I gave up.
Don continued, oblivious to my near death experience.
“Still, I’m not sure what use my loathing of this event would be in helping you find this girl.”
“She was last seen there with a man. I don’t know where he’s from, and I only have a possible name to go on. I was hoping that something might ring a bell, but if you’re not wearing the dog collar anymore …”
If it was possible to hear a person’s eyes narrow in their voice, then I knew what Don’s facial expression was.
“How old is this girl?”
“Couple months shy of nineteen.”
“Who reported her missing?”
“Mom and Dad.”
“They’re not with her?”
“Nope. She went to Christ Alive! with her boyfriend. The family didn’t know anything about it.”
“The boyfriend missing too?”
“No. He came back by himself after discovering her fuc … uh, with another guy.”
“Rafferty. One of the things I’ve always believed is that words have no power other than what we choose to give them. She was fucking this other guy. Okay. How long has it been since anyone’s heard from her?”
“Almost two months.” Worked on getting back on track after hearing a priest say “fucking”.
“What’s this possible name you have?” Don asked.
“From the people I’ve spoken to, I think his name’s Darius.”
“Shit!”
A sigh chased the expletive down the wires.
“I’ll bet my left arm that it’s not Darius, it’s Dariell. With two elles. Dariell Thof.”
“So who is he?” I asked.
“He’s a nobody masquerading as a would-be priest, leading a pissant little commune like he’s God’s gift to …” Another sigh. “Anyway, just take it for the moment that he’s so fake not even his name is real.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah. He was born Jakob Friesen. The name he uses now, Dariell, is just one he took on for himself, along with his calling. But it’s not his real name. Anyway, that doesn’t matter, if he’s involved it can only be bad news.”
Could this case get any weirder?
“How do I find him?”
Don was working hard on his sighs.
“I’ve got some ideas. Nothing conclusive, to be honest. But no matter where he is, if he’s got your girl, she’s in big trouble, my boy. Bigger than you or she knows.”
“Don, I need help here. Give me something I can use.”
“There’s too much to cover during a phone call. And I need to show you some of it. How soon can you get to Austin? We’ve got a lot to do if you want to save her.”
Chapter 8
Don and I agreed to meet on the weekend.
We would talk in the morning and then Hil and I could explore the city in the afternoon. Solving cases and messing about with Hilda; sounded like my perfect day.
I fired up a pipe, grabbed that beer, and thought about what Don had told me.
It could be that he was overwrought and melodramatic. That didn’t sound like the Don I knew when we were younger men, but time changes us all. I’d only know for sure when we met again.
What if he was right?
What danger could Kimberly be in? And how could it have got as bad as Don indicated?
Strait-laced girl, low risk factors, and while I didn’t follow the same doctrine, the commitment to her religion seemed genuine and unlikely to place her in danger.
What was I missing?
I grabbed another beer and puffed away.
Thought about Cricket Dawes. On her back in an apartment parking lot, drowning in her own blood. The philandering husband, Walter, puking on the expensive carpet in his home office. The body of Max Krandorff bleeding all over the floor of his own shop and his business partner floating face down in a Galveston ship channel.
Families broken and lives ruined for stupid reasons. What a waste.
I stopped myself thinking about old cases—those had been busted long before I got involved. Nothing I could do.
I’d get this one right.
An imag
e of Kimberly sucker-punched me behind the eyes.
Small room. Dark. Barren.
Kimberly in a dirty robe. Lying on a steel cot.
Tangled hair. Wet eyes. Snotty nose.
Lips moving without sound.
The image faded.
I blinked a couple of times and realized I’d been grinding my thumb into the bruise on my leg. I had no idea how long I’d been doing it.
And I couldn’t feel a thing.
I called Kathy-Lee to bring her up to date, and then wished I hadn’t.
My leg was throbbing, my ear was sore from the phone and I was craving another beer but I couldn’t reach the fridge without putting the receiver down. I vowed to reorganize the office next week to provide better efficiency in desperate moments like this.
“It’s been four days now, Mr Rafferty. I had hoped for better news,” Kathy-Lee said. It sounded like a huge effort for her to stay composed and that the facade might crack at any moment. I pictured her wedding ring being put through its paces.
“So did I, Mrs Troupe. At the time it seemed like Kimberly had run away with Brian and it would be a simple matter to find them. I spoke to Brian at home, and with the extra, uh, details he gave me, it’s clear that Kimberl—”
“Brian’s at home?” she screeched. “How long has he been back? Don’t they know how worried we’ve been? What did he do to Kimberly?”
“At this point, I’m satisfied that Brian is not involved. And the—”
“What did he say?”
“Mrs Troupe. Kathy-Lee.” I paused and her breathing slowed. “Brian has given me as much information as possible. I will find Kimberly, but there’s nothing more that he can say that will help.”
“Why didn’t his family call?”
I had a fleeting pang of sympathy for Kissinger trying to broker peace in Vietnam. Didn’t matter, he was still an asshole.
Kissinger, not Brian.
“It doesn’t matter, Kathy-Lee. What does matter is chasing down the leads I have. That’s why I’m going to Austin.”
“Are there people down there who can help you find her?” Flat voice.
She didn’t need to know that I was sitting on a big can of nada and was down to following a very thin, very old thread.
“Among others,” I said. “This means that the case is taking longer than I first thought, so …” I let my words trail off, aiming for sensitivity.
“Of course, Mr Rafferty,” she said, letting me know that I’d missed. “You’ll be paid. Do you think we care about the money? This is our daughter.”
She blew her nose.
“Kathy-Lee, has something happened that I need to know about?”
She paused, as if deciding whether I was worthy.
I stayed silent. Good move.
“God has spoken to me again.”
She paused again, no doubt waiting for me to finish my eye-rolling.
“He says she’s in a small, dark room, alone and frightened, wearing rags. She’s being stripped of her beauty, Mr Rafferty. My little girl’s color is fading.”
Her last line was a whisper.
“Please find her, Mr Rafferty. Find Kimberly.” I hung up the phone after I’d listened to the call-disconnected signal for a while. The back of my neck was cold and prickly.
I looked at the open window.
When I got up a moment later, to close the sash and turn off the lights, the flag on the building opposite hung limp and lifeless.
It was after midnight and I was still too keyed up to sleep so I sat out on the back porch with the stars and had another pipe and one more beer. My mind was full of Kathy-Lee’s words and, though I didn’t want to admit it, how similar they were to my image of Kimberly.
Fuck off, Rafferty. Are you saying you’ve had a psychic vision? C’mon. You don’t believe in that stuff.
That was true; I didn’t believe in that stuff.
I’d never seen any evidence, at all, of visions or voices or any such shit. Sure, a lot of people said they had a connection to a different realm, and even more people were willing to believe them—and part with hard-earned currency to prove it—but saying so doesn’t make it true.
What about hunches?
I’d always thought of my hunches as my gut processing things faster than my brain. Hilda had laughed and said it wouldn’t be hard for lots of things to move faster. She swore there were times she could hear the gears grinding.
Putting aside my beloved’s attempts at humor, all the hunches I’d ever had that were right—and there were plenty that weren’t—were aligned with a logical extrapolation of available facts, even if I hadn’t been able to connect them yet at the front of my brain.
In my line of work, I’d seen almost everything there is to see when it comes to my fellow human beings. I’d seen the horrible things they do to each other for the stupidest of reasons.
I’d seen the random, the improbable and the downright unfair.
Thorney, being in that cell, at that time, when the junkie was brought in. If just one of those elements had been different, would he still be alive today?
Would Edie still be alive if I hadn’t yelled at her in high school? Would Kate still be alive if—.
Stop it.
I told you I don’t like ifs.
And none of them would change a goddamn thing.
In the end, fair or not, improbable or not, everything’s explainable. Action. Reaction. Simple. Anything else is fantasy or rationalization, no matter what comforting outer skin you want to wrap it in. And I couldn’t afford to load myself down with fantasy no matter what I saw; there was a missing girl to be found, and I wasn’t going to do it by sitting around navel gazing and making “omm” noises.
Besides, I’ll take a loaded .38 over a holster of rationalization any day.
I knocked my pipe against the edge of the porch. The ashes winked as they tumbled into the flowerbed. I swigged the last of the beer, locked the rear door and headed to the bedroom. I stripped and slid into bed, trying not to wake Hilda. She stirred and pressed against me. As I drifted off to sleep while she resumed her soft snores, a random thought left shiny trails through my brain. I could hear its echo but couldn’t get close enough to grab it and throw it out.
What if I’m wrong?
“I want to hit something or shoot someone, Hil,” I said as I walked back into the bedroom. “All this paper shuffling and talking to people is getting on my nerves.”
She was lying down with her eyes closed as I set the breakfast stuff on the side table. By the time I’d walked around the bed and got in, she was awake, sitting up and making serious inroads into her Denver omelette.
After all these years, I still don’t know how she does that.
“Mmm, I can tell. You were a bit … aggressive … last night,” she said. I think that’s what it was. Her egg consumption hadn’t slowed.
I frowned.
“Hush woman. This is no time for a sexual performance appraisal.” She raised an eyebrow. “I think I’m getting soft, for chrissake.”
I looked over. She’d already finished breakfast, and reached for her coffee cup.
“You might as well trade me in for Alan Alda.”
“Not a chance, Rafferty. He’s thin and gangly, and you know that’s not a turn on, even if we would go for walks in the woods, discuss women’s rights and he’d read Germaine Greer to me and … well, maybe I could overlook the thin and gangly thing.”
She fished her morning cigarette out of a pack, lit up, and grabbed her cup of coffee again.
“I’m teasing honey, lest you take me seriously in your moment of new-found liberalism.”
I scowled. “That did it. No one calls me a liberal.”
“Atta boy. Knew you’d snap out of it.”
“I am getting antsy, though. This god and religious shit is getting to me. It’d be nice to have a straightforward case. You know: Girl goes missing. Rafferty finds girl. Girl returns home. Rafferty gets paid. Fade to black, rol
l credits. Easy. Simple.”
“You know what they say.” She blew smoke towards the open window. “If it was easy, anyone could do it.”
As she got out of bed, stubbed out her cigarette and walked to the bathroom, I was concentrating more on the delicate flexion of her calves and thighs and I lost track of what she was saying.
“Course if it’s too hard, you could hand it over to All-Tex Investigations and look for a job that’s more in keeping with your sensibilities. Maybe there’s an opening down at the Crystal Cave.” By the time I’d registered the words, she was in the shower with the water running, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown her chuckles.
“Okay,” I said, walking into the bathroom. “Ha ha …”
Her laughter drifted steamily over the shower screen.
I reached over and flushed the toilet.
Almost couldn’t hear her squealing when I got to the kitchen.
Chapter 9
I looked around Scott White’s office again to reassure myself I was in the right place.
In the time since I’d last been here, he’d changed the decor. Gone was the dark timber and the burnt orange feature wall, replaced by a new paint scheme. Muted gray and a weird version of peach. New furniture too. All low, long, black leather and chrome. New artwork on three walls, including what looked like a Lichtenstein behind his desk. And I was sure the Marantz stereo system and Pioneer speakers that dwarfed the far wall were new, too.
None of that surprised me. Scott was constantly updating everything he owned. A true slave to fashion—hell, he was the slave to fashion—no matter what it was, if it was more than two months old, it needed to go. And whenever he bought, he bought the best.
“Rafferty!” Scott boomed into the office. He boomed everywhere. The office, a gallery opening, across the street in rush hour traffic. Everywhere.
“How have you been Rafferty? Are you getting by?”
It was his oldest line, made funnier by his self-perception. I followed with my half of the well-rehearsed couplet.
False Gods Page 5