Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  The blood was quickly draining from Silas Endicott’s face. Raszer telegraphed a look of concern to Monica and, after a beat, pushed back from the table.

  “Let’s get some air, Mr. Endicott,” he said, standing. “Bring your tea. I have a deck out back. Covered.” He came around the table and took Endicott’s arm, and this time, the proud man did not refuse the assistance. “Brij,” he called to his daughter as they reached the door. “How about you and Monica heat up that minestrone? Maybe our guest would like something warm.”

  They had been on the deck for fifteen minutes before Raszer returned to the subject of Katy Endicott. They stood at the rail, at first in silence, then talking about the ceaseless rain, the local flora, and finally about Silas Endicott’s faith. About the Witnesses’ rejection of the Trinity, their strange insistence that Christ had been put to death, not on a cross, but on a single upright beam known as a stauros. About the sect’s proscription against the mixing of blood, and hence its members’ refusal of blood transfusions, even in critical circumstances. Raszer was curious about all these things, and considered them as important to the case as forensic evidence. Endicott addressed his queries without the slightest hint of doubt, and all the while could not take his eyes off the bare-breasted, wild-eyed statuary in Raszer’s garden.

  Brigit came out, bearing a tray with two steaming mugs of homemade minestrone. Endicott declined, but Raszer spooned into his with relish. His appetite, dormant for weeks, had returned with the prospect of a mission. After keeping a respectful silence while Raszer ate, Endicott posed a question of his own, though it had more the tone of a challenge.

  “And you, Mr. Raszer,” he asked, “are you a man of faith?”

  Raszer set his mug on the rail and lit a cigarette. “If you’re asking whether or not I believe in God,” he said, directing a bluish stream of smoke toward Aphrodite, “the short answer is yes.”

  “Do you believe in the power of Christ to lift mankind from its sin?”

  “I believe that if men followed Christ’s example, sin wouldn’t be an issue.”

  “Then why,” Endicott pressed, sweeping his arm out over the garden, “do you surround yourself with pagan idols?”

  “Because, Mr. Endicott, every one of these images is a testament to man’s itch for the divine. And by the way,” he added, aiming a finger east, “I think the Virgin over there in the eggplant patch might take offense at your, uh, characterization.”

  “And this ‘itch’ is something you can scratch with just any stick?”

  “No, sir. Although I do think that faith of any stripe—even misplaced faith—opens doors that are closed to the faithless. That’s why I tread lightly on people’s beliefs. I only step hard when risk exceeds benefit.” Raszer rested his forearms on the rail and watched the smoke carried skyward on the updraft. “I’ve been thinking on this for a while, and there are just four tests I hold any church to.”

  Endicott folded his hands. “May I hear them?”

  “It shouldn’t charge admission. It shouldn’t ask you to give up anything but your vanity. It shouldn’t substitute one authoritarian regime for another.”

  “And the fourth test?”

  “That’s the hardest,” said Raszer. “I haven’t found a church that can pass it yet—not when it comes down to the bone. If anything were ever to happen to my own daughter, Mr. Endicott, I’d want my church to tell me why I should keep living.”

  Moments passed, with only the drumming of the rain to mark time. Raszer’s cigarette burned down to the flesh between his fingers, and he didn’t budge. The blue jay reappeared with a new beakful of straw, and Silas Endicott spoke his piece.

  “If you think you can help me find my Katy, Mr. Raszer, I’d like to hire you.”

  “Okay,” said Raszer, flicking away the cigarette. “Good. I assume you won’t mind my talking to the police, and to the boy who witnessed her abduction.”

  “Of course not. But I’m not sure what more you’ll learn.”

  “I’d like to speak with the parents of Katy’s assailants. And with the other elders of the church.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Raszer. I—”

  “Tell me, Mr. Endicott: You said Katy was a pious girl. But she was also nineteen. Was there a point—before all this happened, before the rave—maybe even some years back, when she started to question the faith . . . and your authority?”

  Endicott drew a labored breath. “I guess it happened longer ago than I like to admit. She was led astray.” He shuddered again, and a pungent odor came off him. “Katy has a sister. Ruthie. A girl I can’t accept as seed of my seed; her mother’s girl. When Constance, my wife, left, Ruthie went with her. But, like all malignancies, she returned in time. Wanted Katy to go live in Taos. That’s where they’d . . . settled.”

  “And Katy was drawn to her?”

  “Like a moth to a flame. She’d just turned seventeen. The age of Eve. Katy was strong, but not strong enough. Ruthie wouldn’t leave her be. She’d moved into a trailer up in Burro Canyon with a couple of apostate boys. Older boys. They were there that night. They were the ones who . . . ” He grimaced. “May their black souls never rest.”

  “Ruthie’s trailer mates were Katy’s assailants?” Raszer asked, making no effort to conceal his surprise. Endicott offered only a grunt. “So . . . how long did all this—”

  “For a summer,” said Endicott. “At first, it was just Ruthie, showing up on the porch with her face pierced and her stomach bare, like some sweet sickness Katy couldn’t help but succumb to. I chased her away, banished her, but it didn’t stop. Next time she showed up, Henry Lee was with her.”

  “Henry Lee?” Raszer asked.

  Endicott passed over the query. “Katy ran out before I could stop her. Came home late. Drunk. I took her before the Overseers that Sunday. They renounced Ruthie and sanctioned Katy. We tried to build a wall around her . . . ”

  “And that made the forbidden fruit even more tempting,” Raszer said.

  “Katy never argued, never raised her voice against me. But I knew her faith was gone. Ruthie’d punched holes in it. She came around one night with both boys. Henry Lee, and that . . . that miscreant. It was a Friday in August. I’d gone out to minister to one of our families and left Katy alone. The four of them went off on two motorcycles, got high on cheap wine and pills, and broke into the Kingdom Hall.”

  The wind from the northeast, the very wind that crests the San Gabriels above Azusa and careens down through boulder-strewn arroyos into the L.A. Basin, had begun to drive the rain onto the deck. Raszer would have cursed but for his new client.

  “Would you like to go back inside?” he asked.

  “No,” said Endicott. “I want to tell the story and be done with it. They desecrated the hall. To describe everything they did would itself be a blasphemy, but I can tell you this: They painted the walls with occult signs. Signs to invoke Satan to enter our sanctuary. No amount of whitewash will ever erase that sacrilege. They polluted that sacred place with every kind of filth and fornication. I can’t account for my daughter’s part in this, except to say that she was under some kind of sorcery, God help her ....”

  “Were any photographs taken of the walls?” Raszer asked.

  His visitor gripped the railing. “The police . . . have them.”

  “I’ll check those out. Kids pick up these signs and symbols from the Internet. They don’t necessarily know what they mean, or what effect they can have. Was there anything else? Anything important?”

  “Behind the lectern, they wrote some words on the wall. I pray God they were not Katy’s epitaph.”

  “What were the words?”

  “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

  Raszer pursed his lips. After a moment he asked, “What was the upshot?”

  “By the time the crime was discovered, Ruthie was gone. Back to Taos, I suppose. Katy confessed—not to me, but to another girl from the congregation—and then it all came out. An assembly of the el
ders was convened to weigh on Katy’s disfellowship. There is no harsher sanction. Disfellowship is living damnation. I recused myself so that I could stand witness for my daughter, because I couldn’t accept that the little girl I’d raised was beyond redemption. The Overseers granted me a year to restore her to the fold. On her eighteenth birthday, Katy was taken again into the hall. For a year, we were like . . . like Lazarus and Martha. My Katy returned! And then, and then . . . ”

  “She backslid,” Raszer surmised. “The two boys, the ones you say assaulted Katy at the rave . . . were they prosecuted for their part in the Kingdom Hall vandalism?”

  “To my everlasting regret,” Endicott replied. “No. The elders thought it best to handle them through the families, through our own church law. Had we left it to the police, they might have been in a prison cell on that awful night.”

  “About that night,” Raszer said, “the night of Katy’s abduction. You said that Ruthie and the boys had gotten Katy into drugs. The whole picture: the Lincoln Continental, the business suits, the style of execution . . . is there any evidence to suggest a drug deal gone bad? That Katy was taken as some kind of . . . payment?”

  “If she was, and she is paying off their debt, I’m afraid she’s already damned.”

  “Not if she’s been taken beyond the range of her free will, Mr. Endicott. We like to think our souls are sovereign, but I’ve seen strong people lose themselves in the presence of power, and a girl like Katy, raised not to question authority—”

  Raszer stopped midsentence. Something was wrong.

  Endicott turned from the rail and stumbled forward, coughing up a throatful of mucus and bile. Raszer offered an arm, but the man charged past, staggering down the steps into the midst of the statuary. He stopped in front of the goddess Cybele.

  “Mr. Endicott?” Raszer called out. “Silas?” He descended into the garden. The black sky suddenly dropped a payload of nickel-size hailstones; they ricocheted like bullets off the stone. Endicott stretched his fingers toward the goddess, then withdrew. With her right hand, she offered a carved pomegranate, indistinguishable in size and shape from an apple. In her cupped left palm, Brigit had placed a little black “moon rock” Raszer had once bought for her at the Griffith Observatory. It was the rock that held Endicott’s stare. He spun around, his index finger raised, then fell like a tree, knocking Raszer off his feet and pinning him to the wet ground.

  After a moment, Raszer gingerly rolled Silas Endicott onto his back. There was no reflex, only the wheezing exhalation of foul breath as his lungs emptied. No pulse, either. To all appearances, the old man had dropped stone dead.

  THREE

  BRIGIT HADN’T SCREAMED, but the sight of a corpse in her father’s garden, especially one as formidable in death as Silas Endicott’s, had to have marked her. Raszer watched for signs of delayed effect. As he drove her to LAX the following morning to be returned to her mother’s house, to school, to her “normal life in Connecticut, he decided to face the matter head-on.

  “I can still remember seeing my first dead person,” he said. “How weird it was. It was my grandpa, my mother’s dad. One minute he was there, alive, beside me and somehow inside me, too. The next minute he was gone, and there was an emptiness in me. That part of me that was him had died.”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t like that with Mr. Endicott,” she said.

  “How do you mean, honey?”

  “It was like he was already gone.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” said Raszer. “He was—”

  “No,” she said. “Not that.”

  Raszer gave his daughter a sidelong glance. “Not what, muffin?” He knew what she’d meant, because he knew that she’d known what he meant, and that was the way they had communicated almost from her infancy. He wanted to hear her say it anyway. It was important, he thought, not to use telepathy as a substitute for expression.

  “Not that he was sick and all,” she replied. “It was more like he was a ghost. Like he actually died a long time ago.”

  “I think his people would have mentioned that detail when I called them at the Kingdom Hall in Azusa.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe they’re just used to it.”

  “You mean, like ‘Old Silas is up to his tricks again, haunting the streets of Hollywood . . . searching for his lost Katy’?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  She wasn’t yet on the plane, and Raszer already missed her. He had to swallow hard. He hated returning Brigit to his ex-wife, hated the sheltered life she was going back to, hated the ache she left behind. Raszer’s daughter was also his best friend.

  “Well,” he said, exiting at Sepulveda for the airport, “it’s an intriguing idea. And I don’t dismiss the notion that a man’s passion can outlive his body. But we did see the paramedics carry him out, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, I guess we did,” she said, squinting in imitation of her father. “But still—”

  “I know. That’s what I was trying to say before. Death doesn’t make sense. The thing that makes us alive can’t just all of a sudden go away, can it?”

  “Do you think Mr. Endicott was a good man, Daddy?”

  Raszer sighed unconsciously. He was turning onto the Departures ramp. “I think . . . he was as good a man as someone who’s been in a box all his life can be. Maybe didn’t quite see the whole picture. ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’”

  “Who said that?” she asked.

  “Emerson, I think.”

  She repeated the sentence soundlessly, then announced, “I don’t ever want a hobgoblin in my mind, Daddy.”

  Raszer laughed and reached over to yank her hair as they entered the parking structure. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, honey. Anyhow, I do believe that Mr. Endicott loved his daughter, and that’s good enough for me.”

  “Are you going to find her, Daddy?”

  “Well, I’m going to see about that this afternoon. I’m going to speak with the other men at his church, and see what they want me to do.”

  “I hope you do, Daddy.”

  Before they left the car, Brigit opened his glove compartment and fished around until she found his Swiss Army knife, the one with the corkscrew and the awl and the scissors, and then she snipped off half an inch of hair and gave it to him. It was some-thing she did each time she left, and each time, he put it into his wallet.

  “Daddy?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “If you’d died when I was little, or if I had . . . would we still be having these talks?”

  “I know we would, baby,” he said. “You’re my cosmic muffin.”

  Raszer was due at the Kingdom Hall in Azusa at one o’clock, but before that, he had an appointment in Hollywood with one of the women who, along with Monica and a few others located in various parts of the world, formed his psychic shield. His work required such a profound and potentially risky displacement of personality that he felt secure only by letting each of them know where he might be headed—only when they laid their hands on him in affirmation of his true name. Technically, Hildegarde Schoeppe was his shrink, but she was more than that, and he was anxious to get her read on his present state of readiness to take on an assignment. He’d not been feeling especially fit lately.

  The drive from LAX back into town was distinguished by just one thing, which occurred only at this time of year or in the rare event of a Santa Ana condition. At a certain point along the northbound Harbor Freeway, if the clouds had lifted and the smog had flown, the San Gabriel Mountains rose up, bushy and wild and capped with the virgin snow that was L.A.’s only natural water source (not counting the current deluge). They were all the more epic for their nearness to a big city, and when they appeared, Raszer’s spirit soared up to the ragged summits and returned as clean as freshly laundered white linen. Today, however, he was not to be graced. The downpour had stopped for just long enough to ease his worries about Brigit’s flight, but was now back wit
h renewed intensity. He couldn’t even make out the Hollywood Hills. And so he exited the 101 at Gower and headed up Beachwood Canyon Drive in a surly mood, more than ready for Hildegarde’s ministrations.

  Beachwood Canyon was L.A.’s richest redoubt of Hollywoodland history, and maybe its best-kept secret. Other enclaves in the hills had their own cloistered charms, but only Beachwood remained as the mad barons of old Hollywood had designed it. The notorious Madame Blavatsky, nineteenth-century doyenne of the occult arts, had built her Xanadu there, as had Charlie Chaplin, and no less a connoisseur of the transcendent than Aldous Huxley had chosen to end his years in a home beneath the Hollywood sign, his bloodstream surging with a farewell dose of pharmaceutical LSD.