Parishioner

by Walter Mosley

  That particular Sunday he thought about a group of young thugs who called themselves the Easties. This gang wanted to take over the girls down around the Meatpacking District and make them hand over Xavier’s percentage.

  The Easties didn’t come from the Lower East Side, or East New York, and the girls of the Meatpacking District weren’t really girls. But Xavier and his main man Swan killed Tommy Tom and Juju Bean on a side street that smelled of rotting meat. The executions occurred at three in the morning so that all the late-night sex workers down there could see who was in charge.

  Juju Bean had called for his mother, before Swan, on Xavier’s order, had cut his throat.

  “Mother!” he shouted—not Mama or Mom.

  Ecks sat at his multipurpose kitchen table wondering what the execution of Juju Bean had to do with Benol. After an hour or so of trying to get the incongruous puzzle pieces into some proximity, he shook his head and went about his Sabbath routine.

  Sunday dinner was cornflakes and skim milk followed by a can of sardines in virgin olive oil topped with slices of raw onion and sweet balsamic vinegar. He ate slowly while paging through LA’s and New York’s Sunday papers.

  Xavier saw the manila folder sliding under his door but he didn’t go to see whether it was Benol through the viewer in the wall. Neither did he retrieve the file immediately. Instead he thought, once again, about Juju’s blood under his bone-colored shoes and Tommy Tom’s brains coming out of the bullet hole over his left eye.

  Neither he nor Swan was ever even questioned about those murders. The authorities were relieved that the Easties, who were a threat to civilians, had been kept at bay by the more conservative and predictable duo.

  The knock at the door, maybe forty-five minutes after the folder slid through, was a surprise. Xavier went to the wall eighteen inches to the right of the door and removed a paper calendar hanging there. Behind the calendar was a small screen connected to an invisible electric eye over the door.

  She was wearing a little black dress.

  “Hey, Ire,” Ecks said upon opening the door. He looked both ways but the dim hallway was empty.

  “Can I come in?” she asked. In her left hand she carried a small, test tube–like vase that contained a single iris.

  “Is this a visit?”

  When she didn’t answer he stepped aside and she walked past, going directly to his yellow table and placing the vase and its purple flower dead center.

  The table was set under the window that looked down on the dark alley. The sun had gone down but the sky was aglow with electric light shining from tall buildings just out of sight.

  Iridia and Xavier sat across from each other. He had served her sour mash whiskey and taken a Mexican beer for himself.

  “Are you doing a job for Frank?” she asked. “One of his special jobs?”

  “That’s a question you’d do better to ask him.”

  “I work for him now and then,” she said. “I’ve gone as far as Hong Kong and Mumbai.”

  Xavier sipped his beer and sniffed. He was bothered by her visiting so soon after his memories of murder. The scent of one seemed to rub off on the other.

  “I’ve never seen you not wearing robes,” he said.

  “You only know me as a church lady.”

  “I’ve seen you outside church.”

  Iridia smiled and let her head lean to the right as Father Frank often did.

  “Why haven’t you asked to have sex with me, Ecks?”

  “You got Chapman.”

  “That has nothing to do with us.”

  “Us?”

  “The congregation,” she said, “is like a hill clan. No matter what we do or how far we go, we always know the special smell of our sweat.”

  Again Ecks was reminded of the odor of rotted meat and the dead men.

  “What are you doing here, Ire?”

  “You were waiting for me after the service.”

  “I wanted your opinion. You gave it to me.”

  “You wanted more than that.”

  “You got Chapman.”

  Iridia smiled and reached across the table to touch his dark killer’s hand. He remained still. She stood and moved over to sit on his lap.

  “You need this, Ecks,” she said. “You need this if you’re going out to work for Frank for the first time.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She kissed his lips lightly.

  “You’re fairly new to the congregation,” she whispered. “Frank’s sermons are only the beginning. We are his Bible and he studies us like a religious scholar analyzing scriptures. But it’s not just that. When he sends us out it’s not only for the obvious. He’s also teaching us something, folding our pasts up into who we are becoming.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Ire.”

  “The first man I destroyed,” she said, undoing one button and slipping her hand in against the skin of his chest, “was a billionaire from Oregon. He was young and very innocent. When I was through with him he had killed a man in Seattle, and it took a big bite out of his father’s fortune to keep him from going to prison.

  “When Father Frank sent me to Hong Kong I had no idea that my first victim now traded in sex slaves. His demolition, as Frank says, had been complete, and it was my job to destroy him again.”

  “You saved the women,” Xavier said.

  “And children,” she added, “from a monster that I created.”

  She gave Xavier’s erect nipple a hard pinch.

  “So you’re telling me you believe we’re Frank’s living scriptures?” he managed to say.

  “Come fuck me, Ecks, and I’ll tell you more.”

  “I don’t want to have to hurt Chapman,” he said. This his last line of defense.

  “I gave him some of my special tea. He won’t wake until morning. By that time I’ll be sleeping peacefully by his side.”

  When Xavier woke at three in the morning she was already gone, but the words she’d shed in his ear were still there—loud and clear.

  She told him about the missions Frank had orchestrated and the tolls paid by his parishioners.

  “So you think that I’m connected to Benol in some way?” Xavier asked in between their second and third ruts.

  “Not necessarily,” she cooed. “Sometimes the missions are metaphors for the missionaries.”

  Iridia knew how to get a man excited and keep him that way. In the dark of morning, while Xavier drove his truck down to pick up his young paper delivery staff, he still felt the physical sensations.

  “Why didn’t anybody else tell me about this?” he asked her as they drifted on the aftermath of passion, leaving the border of obsession.

  “Less humility and more humiliation keeps us quiet. Frank doesn’t give you a mission until he thinks you’re ready to face yourself. The Sunday sermons are like boot camp. But when he sends you out on a job, that’s a one-man war. And when a soldier comes home from battle she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  Forty-seven hundred newspapers filled the canvas-covered back of Xavier’s oversize pickup truck. Inside Damien, Carlo, and Angelique folded and wrapped, threw and carried the papers and special insert advertisements up and down the blocks of Xavier’s district. The kids were all fifteen years old, making thirty dollars a day. They worked from approximately four forty-five until eight fifteen, seven days a week.

  After dropping them off at their school, Xavier went to Lon’s Diner on Grand for breakfast and the first reading of Benol Richards’s file.

  He read the seven sheets of legal-size yellow, lined pages from front to back. There were no surprises: the names of the victims and their parents, the private detective, Lou Baer-Bond, and the places where the crimes occurred.

  The parents of the kidnapped boys were the Van Dams, the Tarvos, and the Charleses.

  While he read he remembered Iridia in his bed. There was a scent to her that he knew like his own sweat.

  “Did Frank send you here?” he asked
just before sleep.

  “He didn’t tell me or ask me to come,” she said. “But whether he sent me or not I can’t say.”

  “I don’t think you should come here anymore after this,” Xavier said.

  “I don’t think I’ll need to.”

  Lou Baer-Bond’s office was on Olympic a little east of La Brea. It was the last office down a drab hall on the third floor above a D-Right Drugstore.

  Ecks stopped at the door. Black lettering painted on the opaque, wire-laced glass read, Lou Baer-Bond, Discreet Private Investigations. Rule wondered at the use of the word discreet. It rhymed with sweet but had the feeling of decay to it.

  After a moment of empty contemplation he knocked.

  “Come on in,” a medium tenor called.

  It was a janitor’s closet with a desk instead of a sink, and a dirty window in place of a pegboard. Not enough room for a couple to practice a two-step waltz under a ceiling that was a foot too low for Xavier’s comfort.

  Behind the desk sat a white man who was in the process of turning gray. His hair was salt-and-pepper, and any élan that he was born with had drained out of his face and hands. Maybe fifty, maybe more, he looked up through light blue eyes wondering about the black man with the deep gash under his right cheekbone.

  “Yes?”

  “You the man on the door?”

  “Can I help you?”

  “I come here for my cousin,” Ecks said, falling into the speech pattern of an earlier life.

  “Why couldn’t he come himself?” Lou asked. His suit was loose and also gray but darker and more solid than his skin and eyes. This brought to Xavier’s mind a ghost trying hard to pass for human.

  “Can I sit?”

  “You plan to stay awhile?”

  “Benol Richards,” Xavier said, positioning the visitor’s chair.

  The seat was made from curved chrome piping around a stained red cushion. Rule was wearing a light lime suit and a chocolate brown shirt. He worried that the chair might impart some of its soil to his trousers but sat anyway.

  “That’s over,” Lou Baer-Bond said, maybe just a bit too quickly.

  Looking around the desktop, Xavier noted a pink ashtray in the form of a nude woman with its six crushed-out cigarette butts and a burned-out book of matches, a paper plate with a half-eaten chili-cheese dog, fries, and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol standing guard from the rear.

  “She didn’t believe that you gave her absolutely everything you had and wanted me to come by and get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Benol said that you told her that you didn’t find anything about Brayton.”

  “Yes. That’s what I said. That’s the truth.”

  The discreet truth, Xavier thought.

  “Understand me,” the Parishioner said. “I’m not blaming you. Maybe Bennie wasn’t completely truthful for her part.”

  “What’s your name?” the detective asked.

  “Noland.”

  “Noland what?”

  “Egbert Noland, but I go by my last name.”

  “And you say you’re Miss Richards’s cousin?”

  “Second cousin, once removed.”

  “How’d you get that crack under your eye, Noland?” Baer-Bond asked.

  Xavier wondered whether he was trying to show that he was a tough guy who wasn’t afraid of a scary-looking black man crowded into the janitor’s closet—with the door closed.

  “Brayton stole Benol’s car,” Xavier said. “She’s kind of a free spirit, you know. Moves around a lot. So the car is sometimes her bedroom, sometimes her safe-deposit box.”

  Xavier didn’t think that Lou meant to raise his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He might not even have been aware that he had done so.

  “She looked pretty solid,” the detective said.

  “Her car looks like a car.”

  “What are we talking about here, Egbert?”

  “I don’t know, Lou. That depends on what you got to say.”

  “Maybe,” the detective said. “Maybe Brayton has disposed of the vehicle. Maybe he’s cracked the safe.”

  “There’s a trick to the hiding place,” Xavier said, “and if he got rid of the car we’d like to know where he did that, and to whom it went.”

  “Whom? You’ve read a book, Mr. Noland.”

  “Yeah. Studied my letters in downtime. Now … do you have anything to say to me?”

  “I’ve already told your cousin …”

  Xavier stood up, pushing the red chair away with the backs of his knees.

  “But …” Baer-Bond said hastily. “But I might have abbreviated my report. Who’s to say that I didn’t come across a guy who knew a guy who heard something somewhere? Not enough to give as fact but more like a whisper or a hint.”

  “And why would you keep Benol in the dark when she was paying you?”

  “The lead didn’t go anywhere. I told your cousin that if she wanted to put me on a retainer I’d nose around. But I think she thought I was trying to play her. So she paid me my three hundred and I put the whole thing out of my mind.”

  Xavier was beginning to have fun. He liked sparring with the gray man behind the dented pine desk. It almost felt social.

  The Parishioner repositioned the chair, sat down again.

  “Okay, Lou, here’s what it is. Benol has had her car stolen by this Brayton guy. There’s some money involved.”

  “I don’t remember the particulars of the case off the top of my head,” the fleshy detective said. “There’s not much room in here, and so when I finish with a job I file it in my garage.”

  “You could look it over after work,” Ecks suggested.

  “And why would I bother?”

  “If you can prove to me that you have a lead on him, and if you give me that lead, I will pay you six hundred dollars and you can buy more cigarettes and chili dogs.”

  “What kind of lead?”

  “You know better than I do, man. Here’s my card. Call me if you think of something.”

  Xavier gave the PI a special card imprinted only with his cell phone number.

  “There’s no name on this card.”

  “You know my name already.”

  “I don’t think I’ll have anything for you.”

  “If you do there’s six hundred dollars in it.”

  The detective pursed his lips, again probably unconsciously.

  Marilee Pepper worked the sixth-floor research center at the main branch of the LA Public Library. Sixty years old, she was at the zenith of her abilities by Xavier’s estimation. Tall, six one, and white like antique ivory, she was all the way gray and serious about her work. Xavier had met her while researching jobs in the Los Angeles labor market. That was when he had just arrived in LA; seventy-two hours or so after he and Swan had slaughtered Marquis Bertrand.

  “Hello, Mr. Noland,” Marilee said. She even smiled, a little.

  “Ms. Pepper.”

  “It’s such a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Every day is beautiful in paradise.”

  They always shared the same words of greeting. It was like the delivery of passwords under cover of darkness during a bloody civil war.

  “How can I help you?” the librarian asked.

  Xavier didn’t know exactly where the schematics were stored or how to read them if he had. But Ms. Pepper could call up the right blueprints and maps that would reveal the corner where, twenty-three years ago, there was a suspended stoplight that worked at the intersection of two streets, at least one of which was a boulevard, in Culver City.

  “How’s Mr. Matthews?” Xavier asked, while Ms. Pepper studied the computer screen on the desk before her.

  The severe librarian had a soft spot.

  “He had to have an operation.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “A growth in his abdomen. They said that the only way to tell if it was benign or not was to get it out.”

  “How did he do?” the once heartless gangster asked.
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  Remember kindness and repeat it, Father Frank had preached. It doesn’t matter if it feels unnatural or forced. Goodness sets its own table.

  “He’s doing just fine. For the first week he tried like heck to scratch off the bandages but I’d hold him and we finally made it through. It was my first vacation from work in thirty-one years.”

  “That calico has nine lives and you are every one.”

  Marilee Pepper looked up gratefully. Her hard, white, and oval face was brightened by the glow of the computer screen and sentiment.

  “There are four possible intersections,” she said. “Twenty-three years ago four-way signals were in some use. I’ll print out the cross streets.”

  “I really appreciate this, Ms. Pepper.”

  “As do I,” she replied.

  Ecks tried two of the intersections before pulling up to the curb on Lancaster Avenue where it met Kasidis Boulevard.

  There was no individual house standing on the corner of the first two cross streets. If the baby trafficker’s home had been at any one of those intersections it was now rubble underneath an ugly, rectangular apartment building.

  He sat in his car by the curb wondering about architecture and the way planners named streets in Los Angeles County. Avenue and boulevard were big names for such small side streets. He couldn’t quite make out why there was a stoplight there at all. It must have been, he thought, management for the larger streets and people taking shortcuts through the neighborhood. Or maybe a child had been run over and a neighborhood group had pressured the local political machine.

  There was very little traffic at that time of day: little traffic, three gaudy apartment buildings, and a solitary house the lawn of which arched from one avenue onto the other boulevard.

  The stucco apartment buildings had all been built in the last twenty-three years; Xavier was pretty sure of that. They were cheap but not yet dilapidated, like so much of LA that was not Hollywood, Beverly Hills, or one of the other neighborhoods colonized by the rich and the pretenders to wealth.