The one house was older but dark blue, not brown as Benol had remembered. However, paint was inexpensive and its reapplication necessary under the constant glare of sunlight on the Southern California desert landscape.
Twenty-three years. What was he doing there? Why had Father Frank set him on this path?
The rapping on his window testified to his distraction. Back in the day, in Harlem, no one could have come up on him unawares like that.
The white policeman had tapped the glass with his nightstick.
Xavier smiled out of reflex as the cop moved his hand and fingers in a circular motion, indicating that he wanted the window to come down. The displaced Harlemite complied.
“Afternoon, Officer.”
“Step out of the car, please.”
The pistol was in a hidden pouch under the driver’s seat, and so Xavier felt comfortable getting up and out of his vintage car. To the left stood the young policeman’s partner, a milk chocolate black man with steady eyes and no hint of humor.
“License,” the white cop said.
They stopped him because he was a black man sitting in a parked car at an intersection where he obviously did not belong. Once he emerged there was even more fuel for their suspicions—much more. The brown shirt and lime suit were bad enough, but his shoes were the color of mottled grapefruits—there were very few professions that wore this uniform, and most of those were illegal.
Xavier handed over his California license and smiled.
The black cop scowled while the white one read.
Rule noticed that there was an angry pimple on the left side of the white policeman’s neck. Half the diameter of a dime, it had a yellowish eye that seemed about to explode.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Noland?”
“Deacon.”
“Say what?”
“Deacon Noland of the Interfaith Church of Redemption.” He plucked a blue business card from his breast pocket and handed it to the policeman.
All ninety-six parishioners were deacons. They were given cards with the private line of the church across the bottom. During business hours, and at most other times, there was a secretary named Clyde Pewtersworth who would happily answer any questions about the cardholder.
Xavier smiled. The only legal profession that allowed him to dress like he did in the old days was deacon. He could see that thought come up in the policeman’s eyes.
“What are you doing here … sir?”
“On a mission. One of our members’ father is sick and he’s been asking for his sister—a Miss Sedra Martin. He remembered that she lived in a house at this crossroads here. I’ve come to see if I could find her and let her know about her brother’s condition.”
“Seabreeze City,” the policeman said. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
“Small town just a little north of Ventura.”
He was racking up points against the impromptu investigation. A deacon from up north named Egbert. This was all he needed—almost.
“Why were you sitting in your car?” the cop asked, handing back the card.
“I just drove up, Officer. The information I had was that there was a house on every corner and that Ms. Martin lived in a brown one. As you can see, the only house here is blue. When I saw what I was faced with I took a moment out to pray that a brown home had been painted blue. I find that prayer often helps.”
The policeman moved half a step to his left and put his hand on the front hood of the classic car. Xavier stopped himself from smiling. He knew that the hood would be warm, proving his story with no real proof.
The cop stared a moment more. No self-respecting law enforcement officer trusted a man in greenish yellow shoes, but the pieces seemed to fit.
“Sorry for the trouble, Deacon Noland. You have a nice day now.”
Crossing the street as the black-and-white cruiser drove off, Xavier thought about Benol. She was the kind of woman he would bed, but only in a hotel. She’d go through the drawers, closets, and elsewhere if she had the run of his home. And at her place he would have felt vulnerable to attack. A woman like that, he thought, could never be trusted.
On the other hand, he knew that if he had the opportunity to be with her that he would take that chance.
As he walked up the stairs of the front porch, he asked himself again why he was there.
The woman who answered the doorbell was younger than Sedra had been when she bought and sold blond children two decades before. She was slight and blond herself, dark blond with green eyes. She was no more than five feet and probably didn’t top a hundred pounds. Her white skin was healthy, not like Lou Baer-Bond’s doughy hide. She smiled at Xavier.
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for a woman named Sedra,” Xavier said easily, feeling once again the seductive seeming honesty of California.
“Sedra Landcombe?”
“That’s her.”
“What do you want with her?”
“I’m here for my cousin, Benol Richards. Twenty-three years ago she had some business dealings with Ms. Landcombe and a man named Welch. She—my cousin, that is—is looking for Welch and thinks that Ms. Landcombe might help.”
“What kind of business?” Even the young woman’s frown seemed friendly and inviting.
“I’m not completely sure. This Welch guy did the actual transactions. It might have been work for some kind of adoption agency.”
The frown deepened.
“And your name is?”
“Noland, Egbert Noland.”
“Why does your cousin want to speak to this man?”
“That’s a private matter that she hasn’t shared with me,” he lied. “But she’s a good woman. I can’t imagine that it’s anything too unpleasant.”
“Why didn’t she come herself?”
“Why are you asking so many questions?” Xavier said.
“Oh … excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude. My name is Doris Milne. I’m Sedra’s niece.”
“Benol is down in Miami. She called me from there and I agreed to look.”
“Come in, Mr. Noland.” Doris took a step backward, allowing Xavier to enter the foyer of the old house.
The walls were painted rose and the floor paved with golden tiles. There was a large healthy fern growing in one corner looming over a generously stuffed carmine chair.
“Have a seat, Mr. Noland,” Sedra Landcombe’s niece offered. “I’ll go see if my aunt can speak to you.”
An angry spasm wrenched through Xavier’s chest, reminding him again that he was a violent man, a killer without much remorse and less reason. He had often felt that it was this immediate willingness to fight and brutalize, more than any other trait, that made him a success in the old neighborhoods.
He reached out and touched the young woman’s shoulder. She turned her head to regard him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Make sure to tell her that it’s about someone involved in the adoption service.”
She smiled and went through a double-wide doorway toward her human-trafficker aunt.
Sitting up straight with his hands on his knees, Xavier went through his memory for the proper sermon.
We all have desires, inclinations, and compulsions, Frank had once lectured. This is our animal side, our innocence. But once we make these urges into reality we find that we are cast out. Why? Because we are animals but we are also human beings. These feelings that rise up in us are like the growl of a lion. We want and we take. But if you stand back a moment, if you learn to control the animal appetite in you, then the kingdom will open up and you will find deliverance.
Frank never mentioned God or his relatives. He talked about concepts and consequences—every now and then offering a religious metaphor.
Xavier didn’t understand what Frank had done to him on that late Wednesday morning in the dark bar where he had, only minutes before, considered murdering a woman over something he might have confessed to.
My name is Frank, he’d said, and I t
hink I can help you.…
“Mr. Noland?”
Xavier didn’t want to break away from the reverie. He enjoyed remembering, counting the moments that led to a completely unexpected deliverance.
“Yes?” Xavier said.
“My aunt will see you in the yard.”
Doris Milne led Xavier through a sunken living room that was furnished with gaudy golden-colored wood and blue fabric furniture. The floor was wooly brown shag surrounded by walls hung with more than a dozen oils depicting differing types of flowers. There were rose, cactus blooms, and bird-of-paradise—pansies, poppies, and a spray of purple orchids that seemed as if it might sway if a breeze came along.
There was the feeling of corruption coming from every innocent detail of this large parlor. The Parishioner didn’t know whether this was because of the story he was given by Benol or a sixth sense he’d developed in a long career of bad men and women plying their trades without concern or remorse.
On the other side of the semisubmerged living room was a step up to a long sliding glass window. The transparent door was open, leading out to a brick-laid patio surrounded by tall cedars and set upon by dappled sunlight and shade bisected by bark and leaf.
In a metal chair that had been painted pink sat a small, elderly woman in a jade-and-wheat-colored dress. Her feet didn’t go all the way to the bricks. On the pink metal table next to her was a tall, slender glass filled with a bright green liquid that Xavier was sure had a high alcoholic content.
Hatless, her hair had been ruthlessly dyed an impossible black. Her face was neither round, oval, nor heart-shaped, but rather like a box with the corners smoothed by age. She was eighty, maybe more. Her dark eyes had all the awareness of a long life spent traveling on a one-lane highway with no exits and no end in sight.
“This is Mr. Noland,” Doris Milne said with bland deference.
The elderly white lady made an expression that was intended to be a smile.
“Hello, Mr. Knowles,” she said, gesturing at another metal chair on the opposite side from her. This seat was painted turquoise.
As Xavier moved forward Doris asked, “Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Noland?”
“What’s in the glass?”
“Lime rickey,” Sedra said with a real smile.
“I’ll take one of those if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” Sedra said for her niece. “Go make up another pitcher, hon. Use the good gin.”
And so Xavier sat under the shifting template of shadows and sun as Doris went off to mix the alcohol and Kool-Aid.
The predators gazed lazily across the expanse of the table both of them deeply honest and still insincere.
“You told Dodo that you were here about somebody named Ben?” Sedra asked.
“Benol. That’s a woman’s name.”
“Oh.”
“Do you remember her?”
“No. No. And I think I’d remember such a unique name.”
“She and her boyfriend, Brayton Starmon, sold you three blond male babies for forty-two thousand dollars twenty-three years ago.”
“Excuse me? What did you say?”
“I said that I’m working for John and Minnie Van Dam,” Xavier replied, using names from Benol’s confession. “They hired me to find their son, Michael, who was kidnapped from a private child-care home by Benol and Brayton.”
His voice was the hammer while the words were nails. Sedra gave almost no inkling of the pain or fear he inflicted, but Ecks was not fooled.
When the old woman’s left eye fluttered Xavier was sure of at least one part of his client’s story.
At that moment the cell phone in his breast pocket throbbed. A few seconds later Doris came out carrying a silver tray on which stood a large, sweaty tumbler filled with bright green fluid.
“Are you two getting along?” the niece asked.
“Like pigs in slop,” Xavier said.
“Excuse me?”
“Everything’s fine, Dodo,” Sedra said. “Leave us alone, would you, dear?”
“Are you okay?” Doris asked.
“Fine. Fine. I just want to speak privately to Mr. Knowles.”
“Noland,” Xavier corrected.
“Yes,” Sedra agreed.
“I’ll be in the den knitting,” Doris said, but she didn’t move.
“Go on,” her aunt urged. “I’ll be just fine.”
Niece and aunt exchanged glances.
Xavier took a sip of the green cocktail to show that he wasn’t bothered by their concern. The drink was sweet, tart, and very strong.
As he put the glass down on the table Doris was leaving once more and Sedra tried to smile again.
“I don’t know who you are,” the spinster said, “but I will not be threatened in my own house.”
“I’m looking for the boy,” Xavier said easily. “I don’t care about you or Benol or anybody else. The Van Dams hired me to do the work that the police failed to do.”
He considered taking another sip but decided against it. Drinking had its place but that wasn’t in the middle of a showdown between villains.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sedra said in a metered tone that seemed to be saying, or at least meaning, something else.
“All I have to do is give the police what I have,” he said. “Just give them your name and let the pieces fall where they will.”
Sedra opened her mouth but no words came out. A confused look came over her face. This artificial expression, added to the sound of a deep bass gong going off in Xavier’s head, tipped him to the unspoken narrative of his predicament.
He stood up suddenly and turned. Doris was standing there with a Louisville Slugger grasped in both hands.
“Hit him!” Sedra yelled.
Another deep vibration detonated behind Xavier’s eyes. He knew that he couldn’t avoid the young woman’s bat for too long and so he went on the offensive.
The bat arced down, glancing off the left side of his head.
“Hit him!” Sedra was screaming.
He was aiming for her jaw, but Xavier’s fist hit Doris over the heart. She grunted in a decidedly unfeminine manner and fell on her bottom.
When Xavier was stepping over her she grabbed at his ankle. If he hadn’t taken that sip her grip wouldn’t have fazed him. As it was he tripped, pulling away from her and staggering forward. He would have tumbled to the bricks if there weren’t a house there to catch his fall.
Sedra was screaming without words now and the living room seemed even more menacing as he plunged ahead. He made it to the foyer and out the front door.
Ecks felt clumsy. It was as if his body had somehow duplicated itself while neglecting to double the motor skills. He’d become two men with four legs but still could move only one foot at a time.
“That wasn’t just no knockout powder,” the Ecks running behind himself said. “That girl was trying to kill us with that drink.”
The Parishioner almost turned around to catch a glimpse of himself muttering.
“Run, fool!” the voice shouted, strangely echoing the desperation in Sedra’s screams.
By then Xavier was in the front yard and on his way to the sidewalk. He knew that his car was somewhere near, but this intelligence was useless to him. He started running in one direction with all the strength his four spaghetti legs could muster. The world before his eyes was reduced to snatches of scenes like blurry snapshots taken from a speeding car—through a tinted window.
He was running, almost falling, going straight ahead, away from people who were trying to destroy him. Xavier didn’t bother with any logic more complex than this. He didn’t worry about arrest or the discovery of his past. There was no later if he didn’t run right now.
There arose a sound like music, like jazz … no, a car’s horn. There was a red light overhead, a hard shove, then someone, not Sedra or the other him, shouting. At that point gravity decided to take over and he fell, lan
ding on his shoulder, then rolling up into the air. Before he came down again, the burden of consciousness had lifted with something akin to sleep taking its place.
He woke up choking from a noxious gas that filled his sinuses.
The burning odor shot up his nose like a venomous snake writhing in and biting the inside of his head.
“What the fuck?” He rose up on a hospital bed flanked by two men and a woman.
She was a nurse, probably Korean, young, her hard black eyes disapproving. The Hispanic police captain in full uniform loomed from behind her, searching Xavier’s eyes for awareness and subterfuge. Next to the cop stood a short white man with very long fingers, dressed in a too blue suit.
Shaking his head in an attempt to dislodge the nasal viper, Xavier still had the wherewithal to wonder where his clothes were. He shopped for suits sometimes for months before he found just the right one. He was hoping that the accident hadn’t ripped the cloth too badly.
“I want to say again, Dr. Mendel, that this is not proper procedure,” the Korean nurse said in perfect California English.
“This is a special circumstance,” the policeman murmured. Ecks knew that this man rarely raised his voice.
Across the room a thin man with a manicured mustache and a thick mat of brown hair was sitting up in his hospital bed to watch the altercation.
A television set was on, tuned to a nostalgia channel playing a repeat episode of I Dream of Jeannie.
Xavier grunted. His head felt like a balloon filled with opposing gases.
“It’s quite all right, Nurse Kwan,” the white man in the blue suit said. “There’s no permanent damage and the police need information.”
“The use of smelling salts went out with leeches, Doctor,” the nurse insisted.
“If you believe that we’ve acted inappropriately, make a report,” the policeman said as he put a hand on her shoulder, pushing her gently from the vicinity of the bed.
“What are you doing?” Nurse Kwan protested.
“This is a witness to a crime,” the captain said patiently. “We have to ask him a few questions.”
“I have to check his blood pressure and vitals before—”
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