Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  Tresidder closed the door and locked it, then went to the reception desk and dialed a number. "I've got a problem," he said to whoever answered, "same as that time with the girl at the Breaufields' New Years party." He listened for a moment then said, "By the service elevator in the underground parking lot." He listened and looked at his watch, then said, "Right."

  He hung up and went back to his office, the three invisible watchers following. He poured himself a serious Scotch, did not offer one to the young man in the chair, drank half of it in one swallow then said, "Tell it."

  Baccala told the tale, hesitantly at first, and in a low voice so that the lawyer had to order him to speak up. He'd met her at a party at his sister Maddie's house. Maddie had been afraid there would be a shortage of men and had browbeaten him into coming. But he was glad he'd come when he met Cathy Bannister, even though she hadn't responded to his overtures. He was smitten. He'd never felt such an itch for a woman before and he couldn't stop thinking about her, even though she didn't return his calls.

  Months went by, he finished law school, and was taken on as an articling student at Baiche, Lobeer, Tressider while he prepared to take the bar exam. Somewhere along the way, Maddie must have mentioned that fact to the woman of Baccala's stickiest dreams, because one day the phone rang and it was Cathy Bannister herself, inviting him to lunch at a little place where students hung out. And, he soon found, to a role as a stepping stone in her journalistic career.

  It was 2001 and the city's south side was the scene of major redevelopment projects. Four square blocks of derelict factories were coming down to be replaced by condo towers with commercial and retail space in the lower two floors – Chesney lived in one of the blocks. Streets were being repaved, sewers relaid, underground wiring and fiber-optic cables replacing the old overhead power and phone lines. All of this was attended by a brisk traffic in permits and licenses, easements and rezonings, plus a swirling paperstorm of contracts and subcontracts involving builders, demolition firms, trucking and cement outfits, all manner of suppliers, and nine different unions – and all of that was generating an even thicker blizzard of kickbacks, skims, sweeteners, backhanders, rake-offs and straightforward bribes.

  Most of those illicit transactions involved the Twenty, and, as customary, were coordinated through the law firm in which Seth Baccala had just become a fly on the wall. And Cathy Bannister wanted him to become her personal insect.

  "You could get me fired," was his first reaction, "and worse." He lowered his voice. "The Twenty are all over that thing."

  "That's why I'm interested," she said. She had been drinking a vanilla shake through a straw. Now she moved the fat tube in and out of her astonishingly well formed lips, and Seth Baccala felt a stirring in his groin. "I'll make it worth your while," she said.

  "How?"

  She moved her eyes and brows in a way that invited him to figure it out for himself. But Baccala asked her to spell it out, knowing as he did that the moment she made the offer plain, he was going to accept it.

  "But," he told Louis Tresidder, "the deal was that I'd show her the master tally of who got what, but she couldn't take it away or copy it. That way, the best she'd have would be some unconfirmable names and figures. Without confirmation, she'd never get anyone to run the story."

  "But she screwed you," the lawyer said. "Of course."

  "I didn't mean to kill her."

  "If she'd got out of here with that camera, somebody would have had to." He looked at his watch, said, "Come on."

  They went back to the file room. Nothing had changed. "At least there's no blood," Tressider said, examining the bruise on one temple. "Broke her neck." Then he said, "Get her ankles."

  They hauled the body through the door, then put it down so the lawyer could go back into the file room and recover the camera. He pocketed it and locked the door, said, "Right, service elevator."

  There was no room in the elevator for six, especially with one laid full-length on the floor and three on a floating disc. Xaphan took them down the shaft to the underground parking lot and out into the loading area before the two men had wrestled the corpse into position. They hovered to one side, listening to the car descend. At the other end of the basement the door to the exit ramp rolled up and an unmarked windowless van came into view. When it neared the loading area, it did a three-point turn to aim its rear doors at the service elevator just as the bell rang and the doors slid open.

  The van doors opened from within. A short, heavyshouldered man got out of the vehicle. "Come on," he said.

  Tresidder and Baccala lifted the body and carried it to the van. There was a sheet of heavy plastic on the floor of the cargo bay. With the stocky man's help, they laid their burden on the thick membrane and the newcomer swiftly and efficiently wrapped the corpse. Then he looked at the lawyer and said, "Him, too?"

  Baccala took a step backward but Tresidder shook his head. "Not this time," he said.

  The shorter man shrugged, slammed the doors of the van and went and got into the passenger seat. The driver had not moved. Now he put the vehicle into gear and headed for the exit ramp.

  "Follow them," Denby said.

  Chesney thought the captain seemed to have something blocking his throat. To Xaphan, he said, "Do as he says."

  The disk moved silently after the van, followed it up the ramp and out into the city night. As the vehicle picked up speed, so did everything else as the demon fast-forwarded them through the streets, over the river and out past the suburbs to where a remnant of a state forest still stood.

  The van turned onto a dirt road and passed through a gate made by a four-inch pipe that was usually padlocked to a concrete post. They drove a half-mile or so into the woods and came to a clearing where a car waited. A flashlight blinked from the trees and the driver and the stocky man carried the body towards it.

  Two other men waited there, beneath a mature maple. They had already dug a grave and stood, leaning on their shovels. Without ceremony, Cathy Bannister's remains were tossed into the hole, and the shovels worked fast to cover her over.

  Denby, watching, said, "The driver is Petey Worrance. He was a wheelman for the mob, died of cancer a few years back. The muscle is Turk Something; he's still active – I've seen him around the cardrooms." He peered at the action by the grace. "I can't make out the guys with shovels."

  "Let him see them," Chesney said to Xaphan. His own night vision showed them clearly.

  One of the men was now scraping leaves and twigs over the disturbed earth. "Jesus!" said the captain, when he saw the man's face.

  "You know him?" Melda said.

  "He was only a senior inspector back then," Denby said. "No wonder he rose so fast." He swore quietly to himself then said, "That's J. Edgar Hoople. The chief of police."

  TEN

  Here is how Billy Lee Hardacre saw things.

  He had trained as a specialist in labor law and soon found out that he had the peculiar set of skills that made him a good mediator. By his early thirties, he was rich.

  It was then that he was bitten by the fiction bug: he began a new career as an author of fat-spined novels in which men and women of power intrigued against each other's interests and interfered with each other's bodies. His characters had unending appetites for sexual encounters and a predisposition to solve disputes with unrestrained violence. His books were hugely popular, and sold by the truckload through Wal-Mart and discount stores, making Billy Lee Hardacre even richer.

  Then, at the age of forty-seven, while writing his seventh novel, he was struck by an epiphany. The universe suddenly made sense to him: the world was actually a book being written by a deity; probably, he thought, to work out that most fundamental of questions – what was right, and what was wrong? There had been previous drafts, which explained why the holy scriptures were full of events that had never really happened. The story was open-ended, and depended – as good novels do – on the conflicting wills of the characters to drive the narrative forwarded.r />
  The revelation was a life-changing event: Billy Lee abandoned his literary career and enrolled in a seminary to pursue a doctorate in divinity. He expanded and amplified his revelation, but his ideas were not well received, however, and his doctoral thesis, in which he expounded the god-as-author theory, was rejected – even ridiculed. Unused to failure, Hardacre fell prey to emotions he had never before experienced: self-doubt, depression, anxiety.

  But he overcame these demons by transmuting them into righteous anger, then turned his resentment into the foundation for a third career, this time as a television preacher. His weekly cable program, The New New Tabernacle of the Air, was broadcast live at 11am every Sunday morning. For years, the program's format saw the preacher sitting at a desk, like a news anchor, trolling through the week's events and offering a commentary focused on the persons he deemed responsible for them. Those persons might be politicians of any ideological persuasion, movie stars, authors, professional athletes, academics, pundits, and even fellow men and women of the cloth – in fact, especially the most prominent whited sepulchers of his new-found field. One thing they had in common: they had all failed to live up to Billy Lee's standard of moral behavior.

  It had been Hardacre's practice to make one of the week's offenders the subject of a pointed, even barbed, sermon – a real balls-scorcher, was how one not-very religious journalist described a typical Hardacre screed. After fifteen minutes of verbal flaying and skewering, the TV screen would display a card with the target's mailing addresses so that Hardacre's legions of devoted fans – none more so than Letitia Arnstruther – could bury the week's victim in letters, and later, emails that detailed the reception the miscreant could expect when he, and sometimes she, eventually passed through the Gates of Hell.

  But then came the events surrounding Chesney Arnstruther, and from then on Billy Lee did not just believe that his rejected doctoral thesis was nothing less than the explanation for life, the universe and everything, as another novelist had put it. It was the literal truth and it offered the preacher a new way forward. The negotiations that ended the strike by Hell's demons, accidentally sparked off by Chesney's innocent summoning of a demon, put Hardacre in touch with a high-ranking member of the heavenly hierarchy.

  When the dust had settled over the infernal strike, Billy Lee called for the Throne to visit him again. He was not surprised when the being in white reappeared again; was Hardacre not, after all, one of the most significant figures in all of history? Was it not he, and he alone, who had unraveled the central secret of existence?

  The Throne came when he called, and together – though it was mostly Billy Lee's efforts – they wrote a new chapter for the divine story. It was to be called the Book of Chesney, but the young hero's role in it was more metaphorical than actual – essentially, it was Billy Lee Hardacre's take on how the world ought to be organized, with a surface gloss that reflected the preacher's understanding of how his views matched those of God.

  Billy Lee expected to release the book, with the prophet Chesney as its purported subject, and somehow bring about the next great change. Exactly how the process would work, he did not know. Yet he had faith that it would, and never once entertained the notion that his own considerable vanity was the main argument for his believing that he could, albeit with angelic assistance, change the world forever.

  But, to give him credit, he put it all on the line. No more weekly pillorying of the venal and foolish – the whole tenor of his Sunday morning program changed. Instead of a rehearsing the week's excesses and pointing an accusatory finger, Hardacre gave his viewers a history lesson: How We Got Here, it was called, an idiosyncratic explanation of the course of human events since ancient times to modern and post-modern, with Billy Lee leaping from epoch to epoch, making unusual connections between events famous and obscure, between individuals and mass populations.

  The incidents and personalities mentioned changed from week to week, but a common theme remained: things had gotten pretty bad and looked to be on the verge of getting worse. But unlike other Jeremiahs of screen and pulpit, Billy Lee Hardacre, did not prophesy doom and damnation. He did not predict the destruction of the world, but its new beginning.

  Specifically, the preacher described himself as the precursor. He had come to prepare the way, he said, and if this description raised in his followers an association with the first-century fellow that the world remembered as John the Baptist, that was no accident. Hardacre proclaimed a prophet – yet to be named, because his wife's son kept balking at the assignment – would soon emerge from the wings to take history's center stage. And when that prophet came, all things would be made new.

  The preacher had genuinely thought that Chesney, guided by the Book of Chesney – that is, guided by Billy Lee Hardacre – would be that new linchpin of the ages. He had since come to accept that that vision had been in error; he might even have misunderstood the angel. Instead, the strange young man had turned out to be a kind of precursor in his own right. Chesney had delivered unto Billy Lee the genuine article: the actual, living, historical, flesh-and-blood Jesus of Nazareth, who had been the central character in another of the umpteen new drafts that God had written since starting with a simple tale of two innocents and an ogre in a garden.

  Hardacre would have felt better about Yeshua bar Yusuf, as the prophet named himself – they'd settled on Joshua Josephson for the purposes of The New New Tabernacle of the Air – if the man could have given him a clear idea of what he would say when the cameras turned his way. But whenever he was asked, Joshua would just shake his curly head and say, "I never did know what was going to come out. So much of it was in response to questions people put to me. I would wait for the spirit to move me. Which it always did."

  "The Holy Spirit?" Hardacre said, wanting to be clear.

  The prophet made a shooing motion with one hand. "Not like it was later," he said, "when the spirit was somehow reinterpreted as a fully fledged third person of the tripartite deity. When I was wandering the roads, preaching, that would have been outright blasphemy. Straight to the stoning pit." He smiled ruefully. "Same as if I'd said I was one third of a divine threesome." He mused over something for a moment, then said, "Where was I?"

  "Being moved by the Holy Spirit."

  "Ah, yes. In those days we thought of it as the breath of the Lord, that which was first breathed into Adam's clay and then breathed anew into every infant as it took its first inspiration at birth. And in that draft of the book, I suppose it was." He frowned and went on, "I don't know whose idea it was to make it over into a pigeon. That came after my… transformation."

  "But is it still in you?" said Hardacre. He dreaded the prospect of the final moment, after all these weeks of build-up, when he would introduce the awaited one then watch as the fellow stood under the lights and couldn't think of anything to say.

  "I think so. If not…" Joshua shrugged. "I'll tell them a story. That's what I always used to do, especially if some smarty-boots was trying to trick me into saying something that would get me taken up by the Sanhedrin or the Romans." He raised his eyes to the ceiling and went on, "Of course, eventually…"

  He sighed then a thought occurred. "You don't have anything like them, do you? I've no interest in going through all that again."

  "No. You can say whatever you want."

  "Good." The prophet dusted his hands together. "Well, then, just leave it to me. I did this for years. It's like riding an ass, you know – you never forget how."

  Sunday morning, Captain Denby summoned Lieutenant Grimshaw, the senior on-duty scene-of-crime officer, to his office and told him to gather up his team and whatever equipment they would need to exhume a body.

  "On whose authority?" said the SOC man.

  "Mine."

  Grimshaw had got where he was by being a team player, and he knew who was captain of the team he played on. "I need to check with the chief."

  "Do that," said Denby, "and you won't be in on what would have been the bigges
t case of your career."

  "Bigger than the Taxidermist?" Grimshaw had not been on duty that night and had missed out on the glory.

  "Way bigger." Denby lowered his voice to a conspiratorial murmur. "Cathy Bannister."

  The lieutenant dropped his own tone to a whisper. "You know where she is?"

  "I got a tip. Reliable."

  Denby waited while Grimshaw worked out the angles. If he called the chief of police, Hoople would probably tell him to stay clear. J. Edgar had his own scene-ofcrime favorite, Lieutenant Schreiber, assigned to the case. Schreiber had also got the Taxidermist, which had led to appearances on network news shows, describing the state of the bodies and the layout of the crime scene. If Grimshaw could get that kind of exposure, it could catapult him into his life goal: to retire after he put in his twenty and open a scene-of-crime consulting firm. Rich defendants, facing serious charges – movie stars who murdered their wives, politicians who got caught taking too wide a stance in airport washrooms – would pay huge fees for a specialist who could muddy the evidentiary waters.