Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  The DeSoto cruised south and just under the speed limit for almost three hours. Denby was a veteran of the police stake-out and had known enough to bring along an empty bottle as well as a thermos full of coffee. Filling the bottle while cruising down the interstate was tricky, but he hadn't spilled any urine on his pants and he was calm and comfortable as he followed Letitia Arnstruther up the off-ramp and along a few country roads until she turned in at the gates of a walled estate.

  There was no number or name to identify the place, and Denby didn't even remember seeing a road sign naming the long stretch of winding blacktop he'd followed the DeSoto along to get there. But the ghost car was equipped with a global positioning system that could fill in the gaps in his knowledge. It took only a couple of minutes before his transmission of his coordinates back to Police Central could be rolled over to the State Police liaison office and the word sent back from dispatch that he was outside the mansion of the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre: former lawyer, former novelist, and currently a major figure in the world of televangelist hucksterism.

  "Now that's a surprise," Denby told himself. He had parked a little ways along the road from the estate's gates, under some trees. By climbing on top of the ghost car he could see over the estate wall. He trained a pair of night-vision glasses on the front of the big house; there was the Dodge, looking like it was right where it belonged, parked behind a high-end Mercedes on a circular driveway. The woman presumably was inside the house.

  If this had been normal working hours, Denby might have called his contact – or, rather, Mayor Greeley's contact – at the phone company, and arranged for an open-mike landline tap. But it was past ten at night. Instead, he climbed down off the car roof, opened the trunk, and fished around in a welter of surveillance equipment – some of which had not come from department stores, but from military and other government sources. When he'd been briefed on what he had been issued and how to make it work, Denby had asked where some of it came from. He'd been told he didn't want to know.

  Now, rigging a long-distance sound-amplifying dish microphone on an adjustable stand on top of the estate's enclosing wall, Denby was not sure whether or not he wanted to know exactly what he was mixed up in. On the one hand – and it was a very full hand – there was Chief Hoople's straight-out offer of a captaincy if he did his job to the satisfaction of the old bulls downtown. Unstated, but clearly implied, was the corollary: if he didn't make good on this case, his career was over. He'd be transferred to traffic and kept busy checking on overparked vehicles in the bad parts of town until he got the message and quit.

  Denby had never been "one of the boys" – he had earned his promotions from patrolman through detective to lieutenant the old-fashioned way: by catching bad guys. But he had also learned early that keeping your nose clean at Police Central sometimes meant that when some kid whose dad was one of the Twenty blew over the limit on a DUI stop, you didn't cuff him and throw him in the drunk tank; you took his keys, gave him a telling off, then drove him home. That kind of thing was the worst that Denby had ever had to bend rules, except for the night he'd found a guy from the mayor's office getting extremely well-acquainted with one of the girls from Marie's place – in the front seat of an official car right behind City Hall – he had just told the couple to take it upstairs to the office and lock the doors.

  But a captaincy would not have been enough to make him do what he was willing to do to solve the Mr Spandex riddle. There was something more to this case, something that dug at Lieutenant Denby from inside. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he had this nagging sense that, somehow, he had been played for a sucker. Somebody, somewhere back in the weeds, was disrespecting him; was putting one over on him.

  And that was not acceptable to Denby. He was not a bad cop, nor was he a perfect cop, but he was all cop when it really counted, and he had this unshakable feeling – it was as if a voice were whispering it in his ear – that somebody needed to be brought to recognize that fundamental truth. He was pretty sure the somebody was the guy in the costume, and he was determined to do whatever he needed to do to make his point.

  Well, maybe not whatever it takes, he thought to himself as he adjusted the remote mike's earphones over his head. He wouldn't ice the guy over it. But any means short of murder or arson, he was willing to take a look at it.

  He pointed the mike at one of the downstairs windows. The parabolic dish would pick up and amplify vibrations that shook the glass from inside the house, even the tiny vibrations caused by human voices in normal conversation. He turned up the gain on the mike's amplifier, but heard only a murmur. Somebody was talking to somebody, but Denby was listening at the wrong window.

  He swung the mike to cover the next oblong of light, and now the voices were clearer: a man's and a woman's. There was an overlay of other sounds, a motor running – maybe a blender, or a refrigerator if it was right against the window – but he clicked the switch on the digital recorder attached to the eavesdropping system. There were guys in the crime lab that could filter out the extraneous noise, if need be.

  Then he heard the man's voice say, "Just let me finish making my energy drink – hand me the ginkgo biloba, would you? Then we'll talk." That was followed by a few seconds of even louder motor noise – definitely a blender, Denby thought – and then, clear as digitalization could make it, the man saying, "So, what did he say?"

  "I was never so insulted in all my life," said the woman. "That young hussy, poking her nose–"

  "Letty, dear," the man interrupted, "what did he say? Will he read it?"

  "Yes."

  "Good."

  "But, Billy, he wants her to read it, too."

  There was a silence, then the preacher said, "Well, maybe that's not too bad."

  "She has him twisted around her little finger! And you know how she keeps him there!"

  "He's a grown man, Letty. There was bound to be a woman in his life someday."

  "It's sinful!"

  A chair scraped against a tiled floor. "Here, sit down and have some of this." A clink of glasses, the sound of liquid pouring. "It'll make you feel better."

  The mike was sensitive enough to pick up the sounds of swallowing, lip-smacking and at least one sigh. Then the woman picked up where she had left off. "It's a sin. They're not married."

  "Neither are we, Letty. I said the words, but we've no license, no marriage certificate. In fact, under the law, you're probably still married common-law to whatsisname."

  "Certificates and licenses don't matter. You've been marked out by the Lord!"

  "I'm only the precursor. He's the prophet – at least, I think he is. If I can break the rules, surely he can."

  Letitia's voice roughened. It sounded to Denby like tears being fought to a standstill. "You mustn't say things like that."

  "Here," said the man, to the sound of more pouring, "have a little more. And let's look at it practically. Over the years, since he left home, how much have you been able to influence Chesney's behavior? Be honest."

  A sniffle. "He was always a hard-headed boy."

  "But you say she can get him to change his mind."

  "Only because she… you know."

  "Exactly," said Billy Lee. "So, if we win her over, we win him."

  Denby heard the sharp intake of breath, then the woman said, "Billy! That's so cold-hearted."

  "I was a labor lawyer before I was a preacher. You don't want to know some of the tricks I pulled."

  The phrase plucked at something inside Denby. The world must be full of people who didn't want to know things. Probably that was why there were so many things people didn't want to know about.

  He'd been distracted and almost missed it when the woman said something about the girl going to Hell and fighting the Devil for the nerd kid. Religious nuts, he thought. First, all this talk about prophets, and now the Devil makes an entrance. Though that didn't tally with the sense he had of the kid or of Melda. They didn't go to church, and the only thing special about S
unday was that it allowed the couple to spend a whole day bonking each other.

  But the woman's remark gave him another twinge of that funny feeling, almost like déjà vu, that kept eating at him. Again, he tried to reach for the elusive whateverit-was that floated tantalizingly at the edge of his consciousness, but again, as always, it fled out of reach.

  And now the preacher was talking to the woman in a bedroom voice, saying something about breaking the rules, and she was making sounds like those Denby had heard coming from overweight women in restaurants as they succumbed to the allure of the chocolate cheesecake. Then he heard the chair scrape again, and footsteps receding. The kitchen light went out and, moments later, an upstairs window brightened, then dimmed as curtains were pulled.

  Denby considered pointing the directional mike that way, but decided he wasn't interested in hearing two people well past middle age going at it. Especially not people who thought they were prophets or precursors, whatever the Hell that was. God only knew what they might shout at the moment of no return. He took off the earphones and detached the digital recorder, collapsed the mike's dish, then carried it all down and returned the equipment to where he had got it. As he was reclosing the trunk, he realized that he had left the night glasses on top of the wall and climbed back up to get them.

  He took one last look at the mansion, saw that the upstairs window was now dark, as were all the others – except for a single source of light from somewhere on the ground floor. It was tiny, seemed no more than a pinpoint, yet it shone as bright as the morning star. When Denby put the night glasses on it, the instrument's green circle lit up too bright to see.

  Denby had intuition – well-honed police intuition. He also had the instincts of a natural explorer; all good detectives did. But neither instinct nor intuition told him that the curiously bright mote of light had anything to do with Mr Spandex. In fact, the conversation between Hardacre and the kid's mother had pretty much been a bust as far as the case was concerned. He saw no connection between the muscle-bound freak in the costume and a couple of religious nutjobs, who seemed to think that Chesney Arnstruther, all one hundred and fifteen nerdish pounds of him, was some kind of Moses.

  And yet he did not get down off the roof of the ghost car. In a time when he was beset by indefinable feelings and peculiar psychic stirrings, he could now add a new one: he wanted to know what made the light. It occurred to him – as it would to any cop – that bright lights left on at night behind heavily shrouded windows, especially in remote location, often meant that someone was running a marijuana grow-op. But he didn't see Billy Lee as the weed-farmer type.

  Still, if he needed probable cause to step onto a property without a warrant and look through a window, he now had it. A moment later, he was over the wall and walking across the lawn toward the mansion.

  FOUR

  Halfway across the lawn, Denby expected lights to come on, maybe the whoop-whoop-whoop of an alarm – surely the preacher had motion sensors? But nothing happened. He kept walking, the dew-wet grass soaking his shoes and pants cuffs. He knew he would be leaving a trail. Still, he didn't care. He wanted to know what made the light.

  It came through a chink in a curtain covering a ground-floor window, a chink too high for Denby to see through standing in the flower bed that ran along the base of the house's wall of closely mortared granite blocks. The lieutenant looked around, saw nothing in the darkness. But when he walked toward the rear of the house he almost fell over a wheelbarrow with a rake and shovel in it. He dumped the tools and wheeled the barrow back to the window, set it where it needed to be, and climbed up.

  He could just get his eye to the level of the chink in the curtains. The curtains themselves were about a foot back from the glass, the window being a bay set in the thick stone wall. He couldn't see much without putting his eye to the chink, and for that he'd first have to break the glass – and he was sure that wouldn't go unnoticed – but he was close enough to see some of the room beyond.

  It was a den or a study. He saw bookcases and armchairs and a big old-style desk. The latter was where the light was coming from, from something sitting on top of the green blotter. Denby squinted to dim the strength of the glare. He was expecting to see a halogen lamp; nothing else would have made such a bright light, except maybe a carbon-arc welder.

  But all he saw was a low oblong of bright white. When he squinted even harder, he became sure of two things: one, that he was looking at a stack of paper – he could see where some of the pages were unevenly stacked – and, two, that the glow was not reflected; the paper itself was lighting up the room.

  Now, what's that all about, the policeman thought? The answer came from memory: the preacher and his live-in girlfriend had wanted the nerd to read something, some text that had to do with the kid's being a prophet. Denby was no true believer. He didn't look through Billy Lee's window and see a miracle; he saw some kind of show-biz prop – how it was done he had no idea, and didn't care – that was part of some scam the televangelist was setting up.

  He climbed down from the wheelbarrow and returned it whence he had found it, then retraced his steps back to the wall. It was a hard scrabble to get over to the outside again and he tore his pants leg doing it. But as he made his way back to the interstate and headed north to the city, he kept thinking about the glowing block of paper. Somehow, it was going to be the key that turned the lock and opened the door on Mr Spandex.

  He hadn't figured out yet how that would happen, but his cop's instincts and cop's intuition told him it would.

  Some distance away – or just nearby, depending on how you measured these things – Satan said to one of his aides, "The policeman's tempter, send him an 'attaboy' and tell him to keep up the good work." Then the Devil rubbed his hands in the manner that was his habit when things were going the way he liked them.

  "Lieutenant," said the dispatcher, "you said you were to be notified the moment a call like this came in."

  Denby yawned and looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was just after two in the morning. He'd been in bed less than an hour, after driving all the way back from Hardacre's mansion.

  "All right," he said, reaching for the notepad he kept beside the bed, "I'm up. Tell me."

  "Name is Belknapp, Ralph and Doris, old couple. Both like to hit the jug, then they start hitting each other. Patrol has been to their place three times the past two years, domestic. First time, the old man gets frisky, they take him in for a night in the cooler. Other two occasions, they quieted down once our guys showed up."

  "What happened this time?"

  Denby listened, made notes, asked a couple of questions, got the address. There was no point in going over there now; the Belknapps would be well in the bag, if not passed out. He'd check them in the morning, find out what all the nonsense was about the knife.

  Melda made poached eggs for breakfast and they ate like a married couple starting the day together. She liked the feel of it. She was thinking it was maybe time she should move in here. It would save her a lot on rent, even if they split what Chesney was paying here, and it would be… nice to keep doing this. Besides, she was convinced now that this man was worth keeping, but he was going to need some full-time managing.

  "Sweetie," she said, and saw him look up the way he still did when she called him that, like a neglected puppy that suddenly realizes it's going to get a treat.

  "Yes?"

  "About the book."

  The happy puppy faded from Chesney's face. "Yes?"

  "It bothers you, doesn't it?"

  He looked down at his eggs. "Yes."

  "Not a pool of light."

  "Exactly."

  "But you said you'd read it."

  Chesney sighed.

  "Tell you what," she said, "how about if I sort of… look after this for you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  She leaned across the table, took his hand. "You've got enough to worry about, with the new job and all the crimefighting. Maybe I could h
elp with this thing. You said you wanted me to read the book, anyway."

  It was clearly a new idea to Chesney. She realized that no one had ever offered to take over a part of his life and "look after it" for him. He'd been left to stumble through murk and darkness from one all-too-infrequent pool of light to another, coping as best he could.

  "I still have to read the book," he said. "I said I would do it."

  "That's all right, sweetie. You read the book, but when it comes to what to do after, you just let me do the worrying for both of us."

  He blinked at her. "You can do that?"

  "I handled your mother, didn't I?"

  She dropped Chesney off at his office then drove home, changed into her blue uniform and sneakers and went on to Sugar 'n' Spice, the beauty salon where she did manicures. Her first client wasn't due until nine-thirty, so she arrived with five minutes to spare. But as she approached the front door, the policeman who had followed Chesney down the funnel into Hell got out of an unmarked car and stepped into her way.