If a man wanted to bleed for me I let him bleed, she once said in cell fourteen during Expressions. If he felt unworthy I relieved him of the burden of grace.
Now she lived in a mountain aerie raising long-haired sheep and looking after the grandchildren of a man she’d destroyed. She had a young lover named Colt Chapman and washed his feet every night before leading him to their bed.
“Hello, Ecks,” Iridia said. “Have a seat.”
Han Burkholter, the baby-faced bank robber, shifted over to make room for Xavier. Han had a deep tan and wore bright-colored beach shorts with a purple T-shirt. Iridia dressed in wraparound robes of silk that were composed of two sheets, one sea green and the other a buttery yellow. Xavier’s church wear was, as always, a black suit and a red shirt, black tie, and blunt-toed black leather shoes.
He nodded to the bank robber and stepped in next to Iridia, one body away from Benol.
“How’s it going?” Iridia asked.
“You lookin’ good today, Sister Ire.”
“Yes,” she said, never one for false modesty.
“How’s Chapman?”
“He’s taking taxidermy classes down in LA.”
“That’s strange.”
“Chapman likes to hunt … animals,” she said with a sharp smile. “I was talking to your friend. She seems very nice.”
Benol was staring at the man she knew as Noland; he could feel the intensity of her gaze.
“I’m sorry, Ire, but I have to talk to Ms. Jones for a few minutes.”
Xavier rose and Benol did too. He led her away from the gathering to a stairway carved into the thick white wall. Together they climbed to the top of the rampart, fenced in by a seven-foot clear plastic barrier that overlooked the ocean.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Xavier said when they were standing next to the glasslike wall. “I’m a newspaper deliveryman nowadays. I don’t know how to do what you and Frank want.”
He expected some disappointment in her mien, at least that. But Benol simply looked at him, listening closely to his words even after they had been spoken. There were two freckles under her right eye, and her skin up close looked like blended rose and yellow-gold. Her irises were medium brown but deep, and her hair was curly with two dreads, one on the left side above the ear and another coming down the front on the right. These worry braids made Xavier think that Richards didn’t always wear her Sunday dress.
“Do you have children?” Benol asked after long consideration.
Xavier winced and immediately regretted it, like a boxer having just shown a weak spot in an early round.
He considered answering but worried that he was outmatched.
“You could at least talk to me,” Benol said.
“I can’t do it.”
“Do you have a child?”
Her name was Dorothy and she came from a respected Harlem clan. She had light brown skin with dark golden hair and eyes that were the color of walnut shell. Xavier met her at a party where he had delivered the cocaine. They fell into a passion that they both hoped would deliver them. But after the baby, Roderick, was born they went into different orbits contained within the same four walls.
He couldn’t remember the name of the woman he had spent the night with. Maybe he never knew her name. But when Dorothy confronted him the next morning, he beat her with an electric cord—that memory was etched on his mind: the welts on her light skin, the emptiness of their apartment when he returned after three nights of drinking and whoring.
The past is gone, Father Frank said at least once a month. You can’t let go because it is already gone. You have to look forward, for an opening that will allow the illusion of the past to fade.
“You’re no newspaper boy, Mr. Rule,” Benol said when he failed to answer her question. “I need help and Father Frank brought me to you.”
Not for the first time Xavier regretted his conversion to the white stone church on the hill. Before Frank and the assembly of sinners he was his own man for better and worse. No one ever defied his wishes except by force. And even then they could break his bones but not his will. They could lock him in a dark cell, refuse him water or a toilet, but Xavier had always hung tough and been his own man. Always.
“Tell me about your crime, Ms. Richards.”
“You can call me Bennie,” she said. “All my friends do.”
“We aren’t friends yet.”
She accepted the rebuke with a slight nod.
“I was living at my uncle Clay Berber’s house in Pasadena,” she said, falling right into a story that had been told many times. “His wife, Rose, ran a child-care center there. I was fifteen, in high school, and I guess I was a little wild.”
“You guess?”
“I was. You know we did drugs and had sex a lot. I went to adult parties because I looked old enough for the men there. That’s where I met Brayton.”
“Who’s that?”
“Frank didn’t tell you anything about me?” she asked.
“I want to hear it from you.”
“He was a thief and the lover of this older lady—Beatrix Darvonia. I met him at a party my girlfriend brought me to, and he told me all about how he was a burglar. He said that he only went with Beatrix to meet her rich Pasadena friends and rob them. He said that she even knew about it but that he was so good to her in the bed that she didn’t know how to stop.”
“And what about you?” Xavier asked.
“I didn’t wanna stop either. Brayton would bring me right up in Beatrix’s house and sleep with me in the guest room. And sometimes he’d take me out on his burglaries. I loved him like Mary Magdalene loved Jesus. His hair was black with this shock of white right over his forehead.”
The sneer on Benol’s face held a passion that Xavier could feel.
“And what did he offer you?”
The amber-colored woman’s body shook involuntarily and she was brought back to the rampart.
“He said that the greatest theft was stealing babies and selling them on the black market. He said that all kindsa people wanted to buy children for all kindsa reasons. He said that if I could help him steal a child from my aunt and uncle, we could be rich and live in a town house in San Francisco.”
“I didn’t know that there was such a high price on black babies.”
“My aunt and uncle are white,” she said. “They’re on my stepfather’s side of the family. Brayton chose the children because they were all blonds with blue eyes.”
“So you stole three babies for him?”
“He did it. He came over one afternoon in a lemon van when my aunt left the kids with me and we drove over to this house in Culver City and gave them to an old woman. She paid us forty-two thousand dollars.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Brayton told me that the woman had rich clients,” Benol said, suddenly defensive.
“Do you remember the address?”
“That was twenty-three years ago.”
“What do you remember about the house?” Xavier asked.
Crooks make the best detectives, he had once told Father Frank. We have no police department, no nine-one-one. If something gets stolen or a loved one is attacked we have to solve the crime, track down the culprit, and arrive at our own justice. At that moment, with Benol Richards on the rampart, he regretted this claim.
“It was big and brown, two stories or maybe three, with a green yard that wrapped around both streets,” Benol said. “It was right there on a corner that had all four stoplights hanging together at the middle of the intersection. I remember that.”
“What was Brayton’s last name?”
“He called himself Starmon, Brayton Starmon, but his real name was Welch. I know because one night when he was sleeping I looked in a waterproof pouch he kept in this sack that he always had close by. He had his birth certificate in there and a picture of his mother, Martha Welch.”
Xavier turned his back to the ocean and leaned against the plastic barrier. In the
courtyard below he could see the villains he prayed with. They were talking and eating, drinking and meditating. Father Frank moved among them giving good tidings and asking after their lives. Xavier thought the church was like a prison that worked on the honor system. You were free to repent, but always as an inmate serving a life sentence, with Father Frank as both warden and confessor.
“Have you tried to find him?” Xavier asked.
“I tried the Internet and then hired this private detective,” she said, and then shrugged. “No Brayton anywhere.”
“You sure the woman was in Culver City? The one you sold the babies to.”
“Brayton did it.”
“Did you let him into your uncle’s house?”
She glared.
“Did you?”
She nodded ever so slightly.
“Did you go with him in the yellow van carrying at least one baby in your arms?”
“I was fifteen.”
“Are you sure the woman was in Culver City?” Xavier asked again.
“Yes. I don’t remember the street name, but it was on a corner and the cross street was called a boulevard.”
“See? Confession is not only good for the soul; it also helps your memory. Do you remember the old woman’s name?”
“Sedra, Bray called her Sedra.”
Hearing the endearment, the shortened form of Brayton’s name, Xavier had the sudden urge to slap the woman.
Whenever you feel the inclination to revert to your old ways, Frank had once advised the assembly, try to remember that there is a reason—and reason is the answer.
“Sedra what?”
“He never used her last name.”
Xavier had once kidnapped a child, a young girl who was the daughter of a competitor from East New York. This man, Lolly Centrell, controlled a distribution house that Rule wanted and so he took Lolly’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Bridgette, and let it be known that she would suffer before he killed her if Lolly didn’t pass control over to him.
Even now in this reverie Ecks didn’t know whether he would have hurt the girl or not. He didn’t have to worry, though. When Lolly refused to deal, Bridgette’s mother shot him in the head, solving Xavier’s problem and freeing Bridgette.
“What did you do after you sold the children?” Xavier asked.
“Bray took me to San Francisco and we lived in this house in the city that looked down on the bay. He took me to dinner and out dancing every night and showed me that I didn’t have the slightest idea what it was like to love a man. He would talk to me while we made love and it nearly drove me out of my mind.”
“And then?”
“Four, five months later he just didn’t come home. We were running low on money and he started burgling again. He went out one night to break into this camera store and didn’t come back.
“He’d been asking me to get a job at a day-care center. He said that we could grab some more children and sell them to Sedra. But even way back then I felt guilty about what I had done. I couldn’t even imagine doing it again.”
Benol was looking out over the ocean, grimacing at her semitransparent reflection in the clear plastic barrier.
“How do you live?” Xavier asked.
“You mean because of what I did?”
“No. How do you pay the rent?”
“I work.”
“At what?”
“I’m a receptionist for a talent company in Santa Monica.”
“How much they pay you for that?”
“Why?”
“Are you going to answer me or do I walk away right here, right now?”
“Thirteen dollars an hour,” she said. “That and overtime. I’m just doing it until I find those boys.”
“And why would you want to do that?”
“Because it was wrong.”
“It’s been wrong for twenty-three years. Why look for them now?”
“I came to stay at Theodora Martino’s shelter in South Miami. She had a storefront church and a shelter. One night I … I went to her office and told her what I’d done. She didn’t judge me or anything like that. She just said that I had to make amends. After a while I realized that she was right, that the only thing that mattered was to … to try and make up for what I did. I came here to put things right. I still know the names of the parents. I owe them something. When the detective didn’t work out, I called Theodora. That’s when she told me about Father Frank.”
Xavier wondered about the caramel woman in the blue dress—about her worry dreads and sudden repentance. The truth was rarely as neat as it seemed in words. But who was he to say? Frank was his spiritual guide and therefore had to be trusted.
“I want you to write down everything that you’ve done and that has to do with those children,” he said. “Brayton’s names, anything about this Sedra woman, the detective you hired … everything. Bring them to my place in LA.” He brought out an eel-skin wallet and produced a simple business card. “That’s my address and phone. I need it all before tomorrow morning. I go to sleep very early, so you don’t have to knock; just slide it under the door.”
“I don’t really want to write it down. I mean …”
“You trust this Theodora?”
“Yes.”
“And does she trust Frank?”
“Completely.”
“I will destroy the file when I’m through with it. You got my word on that.”
Xavier drove a restored Ford Edsel. It was salmon pink and lime green, edged in chrome. He leaned against the front hood in the parking lot and waited until Iridia came out. She saw him standing there and walked his way, her yellow and green silk robes hissing like the scale-over-scale rub of a coiling snake.
“Ecks,” she said, approaching him demurely.
“Ire.”
“Did you want something?”
“What did you think of Ms. Richards?” Xavier Rule asked.
She gazed into his eyes. Her skin was the color of red earth that had been lovingly smoothed and then burnished to a medium glow. Xavier knew that the longer he looked at her the more beautiful she would become—like some dispassionate Hindu deity that would take your soul from reflex without the slightest enmity. Over her shoulder he could see a fire red pickup truck pulling into the parking lot.
“She was guarded,” Iridia Gallo said. “If it was the old days I’d either let her alone or make sure that she was on my side.”
“She on the con?”
“Some of us are always working,” Iridia said with a brilliant smile. “It’s like being an alcoholic or under a nature bequeathed by God.”
The truck pulled up next to Xavier’s fancy two-toned-and-chrome car. A tall white man with big muscles under a red-and-cream-checkered shirt leaped out from the driver’s side.
Xavier and Iridia ignored him.
“You believe in God?” Xavier asked. His voice was neutral but there was sharpness to his eye.
“I didn’t before I met Frank.”
“You think Frank believes in God?”
“It doesn’t matter what he believes in.”
The powerful young man walked up and put his arm around the woman.
“Hey, Ecks,” Colt Chapman said.
“Why not?” Xavier asked Iridia.
“Niagara Falls doesn’t believe in electricity but those dynamos run twenty-four hours a day.”
“Chapman,” Xavier said in greeting. “Just getting a professional reading from your girlfriend.”
“We’re engaged,” the russet-haired white man said, trying his best to make the words sound like a threat.
Xavier smiled and said, “Congratulations.”
“Come on, baby,” Iridia said. “Let me take you home and rub your feet.”
“It’s only four,” Chapman said, his tanned face turning from the dark gangster.
“It was a good sermon,” the courtesan replied.
She climbed into the driver’s side and over to the passenger’s seat. Her young love
r followed, proving somehow the words of destiny that Father Frank drummed into the congregation week in and week out.
After the unlikely pair had driven off, Xavier wondered whether he should go back into the church and search out the pastor. He considered this action for long minutes, finally realizing that if Frank wanted to tell him something more, he would. The minister was not shy or half-assed.
Xavier lived in a small studio on Flower Street between Olympic and Ninth. The building was old and brown, seven stories, and out of place like an octogenarian that had outlived her family and now made do living among strangers. The elevator had stopped working years before but he didn’t mind. He liked the walk up to the top floor and didn’t know any of his neighbors. He had a hot plate and an aluminum sink, linoleum floors and a small window with a view of the alley where his thirty-year-old, wood-paneled delivery truck was parked. The door that led to his utility toilet, with its jury-rigged shower stall, was opposite his single bed.
Xavier had no television, BlackBerry, or electronic music player. He had a laptop computer that was mostly used for correspondence courses, a cell phone that could do a few tricks, and two custom-made Afghani handguns that could slip into any pocket and fire fourteen shots.
His license read, Egbert Noland, and there was a passport under the name Ryan Adonitello. He most often went by Ecks but never explained when asked where the nickname came from.
At Frank’s behest Ecks had enrolled in the Southern Minnesota Correspondence University studying religion and literature. He spent the first year online getting his GED, realized that he liked doing homework, and continued his studies with no clear intention of getting a degree.
He read books in his spare time, perused the LA and New York Times most mornings after delivering papers. Afternoons he meditated for an hour and then walked three miles to the YMCA, where he exercised, swam, and then worked out in the boxing gym.
That was his schedule six days a week, but on Sundays he limited himself to delivering newspapers, driving his Edsel up north to church, and then sitting on his straight-backed hardwood chair to think about the things he had done wrong. This he found much easier than forgetting.
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