“You called?”
“I told her that I was a secretary for a lawyer and that Brayton had been named in an uncle’s will.”
“Did she say anything about the police?”
“No. She said that the last thing she heard was that he changed his name to Robert Welcher and bought part interest in a restaurant-bar called Temple Pie. It’s down in Venice.”
“Like apple pie?”
“Yes. I looked up the address and wrote it down.” She took a slip of paper from her purse and placed it on the table.
“Did you go there?”
“No. I mean, I thought about it, but since you said you’d help I thought it would be better if a man went to talk with him.”
“Temple Pie?”
“Yes.”
“I went to see that woman you told me about—Sedra.” It was Ecks’s turn to be provocative.
“What did she tell you? Did you find out where the boys went?”
“She tried to kill me.”
“She must be near eighty. How could she even fire a gun?”
“Poisoned drink and a baseball bat.”
“Oh, yeah, I can see the bump on your head. Obviously she didn’t succeed. Did you find the boys?”
“No.”
“We should go talk to her again. She knows what she did with them.”
“Why?” Xavier asked.
“Why what?”
“Why do you need to know?”
Benol shifted in her chair. There was heat to the movement.
“Two decades late and a million dollars short but I have to do what’s right,” she said. “I ripped those boys from their families. I have to try to bring them back together.”
Her sincerity was as perfect as her dress.
Xavier was back in the stairwell of his mind, reeling as if there were a hundred floors above him … and a thousand below.
“She’s dead,” he said.
“What? How?”
“She got me close enough to Death so I could tell you what his breath smells like. I barely got away from her, and by the time I got back there she was dead.”
Real grief showed itself in Benol’s face.
“Dead?” she said.
“Completely.”
“That’s terrible. It wasn’t because of you, was it?”
“She was an evil woman and got what she gave, that’s all.”
“I’m so sorry for her,” Benol said, turning her head as she spoke. She was looking out of the window into the alley. “I feel like all of it is my fault.”
There it was, the chance for him to comfort her. He could have spoken kind words or even knelt down next to her chair, putting an arm around her shoulder. Then maybe a kiss and a hug, a heartfelt murmur of, It’s okay.
“If they knock you down,” he said instead, “you just got to pick yourself up or get kicked in the head.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she murmured with just the right amount of reserve.
“Got to,” Xavier said as he rose from his chair. “You drivin’?”
Benol shook her head and looked up at him, confusion blending in with the sorrow.
“You better go home, girl. You want me to call you a car?”
“I don’t know if I can be alone,” she said.
“Do you know anybody? Someone you can stay with?”
“Can’t I stay here for a while?”
“I have to look for your lost boys, Ms. Richards. No time to hold hands or rest.”
Benol took in a deep breath and then exhaled. She did this again and smiled.
“I understand,” she said. “Do you have a driver you use?”
“A service. They’re right down the block. If you go downstairs they’ll be there in just a bit.”
She stood too and held out a hand.
When he took this offering she said, “You’re very kind, Mr. Noland. Very kind.”
Another opportunity for a kiss … missed.
When Benol was out the door Ecks called Winter and explained the situation.
“Take her where she wants,” Rule told his friend. “Don’t let on that you know me.”
“Okay, Ecks.”
“I don’t think that there’ll be any trouble, but don’t get out of the car. I mean, if she asks you to come in or anything you tell her that you got another pickup.”
“Got it.”
“You sure now?”
“Oh, yeah, man. Dead sure.”
“Hello?” she said, answering the phone after the third ring.
“Benicia?”
“Yes?”
“This is Egbert Noland, the man you gave your number to at the restaurant this morning.”
“Oh. You called.”
“You surprised?”
“Kind of. You know I … I never really do things like that. I mean … give my number to men I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said softly, “I’m glad you broke the rule this time. I wanted to ask you for your number but it didn’t seem right. I try not to make people feel uncomfortable.”
“You were sweet. People usually look right through those that serve them.”
“Anyway,” he said, wondering a little at the structure of her sentence, “I know this is a little awkward, but I’m going to this restaurant, Temple Pie, over in Venice this evening and I thought you might want to get a drink or maybe something to eat. I mean … we could meet down there so it wouldn’t have to seem like it was a date or anything.”
In the silence of her thought Xavier wondered about his motives.
He’s an intelligent child but he doesn’t use his mind with purpose, Miss Logan had said to his mother at the sixth-grade parent-teacher conference. He does things by sense or instinct. And even though he’s right often enough, he’ll never progress unless he begins to wonder why.
“It’s the place over on Lincoln?” Benicia asked. She was using her phone or a computer to look it up.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s it.”
“I guess we could meet,” she said. “I haven’t planned dinner yet. What time?”
“Seven thirty?”
“Um …” She hummed, one last chance to say no … “Okay.”
“That’s great. I’ll see you then, Miss Torres,” he said.
“See you then, Mr. Noland.”
Xavier Rule sat down at his yellow table, exhausted as if he had actually been walking up stairs for hours on end. He didn’t trust Benol, but Frank was the one who asked him to do this job. He was no closer to finding the lost boys than he had been sitting in the pews and seeing Benol for the first time—at a distance. His notion of manhood had been put into question by the shy and skittish Winter Johnson.
And he had killed a man without hesitation.
Killed a man.
For the first time in his life Ecks felt the world of his mind and body come to a halt, a complete stop. The light brown man he slaughtered was like a wall suddenly erected in an aimless path. Xavier didn’t even know the corpse’s name or origins. He had no feeling toward him or satisfaction at his passing.
This, he knew, was what was wrong. No one should be able to kill without feeling. And so he looked into himself for the emotion that allowed him to take the life of the nameless gunsel and so many others. But his memories and even emotions were just like old dry pages in a book written in a foreign tongue. There were no illustrations, no familiar lettering. Like Sedra’s obsessive red journal, his life was gibberish.
But even this thought failed to raise passion in Xavier’s breast. It was as if his soul were captured in a feline’s body, imbued with instincts that had no reference to guilt.
He was guilty. He knew this and it tormented him, but not from the inside, not where it counted.
His cell phone played Monk.
Xavier slapped his hands together and then slapped his own face.
The phone kept playing.
He took the little receiver from his jacket pocket and saw that it was one of t
he phones that Clyde Pewtersworth used.
“Hello.”
“You sound odd, Brother Ecks.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I got the journal decoded.”
“The whole thing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Even for you that’s a stretch, man.”
“Not really. I used the key you gave me and then the characters she wrote. I took a dozen variations of each character and read them into Charlie Mothers’s decoding program. Then I scanned the journal into the system with Sister Hope’s help and now the whole thing is translated into English.”
“How many pages?”
“Eighty-two.”
“Dates?”
“That’s what separates the entries.”
“Put it in an attachment and send it to me.”
“You got it, Brother Ecks. Be there in less than two minutes.”
“And, Clyde,” Ecks said quickly, before the church operator could hang up.
“What?”
“Thank you, man.”
“Oh. Sure. You’re welcome.”
Xavier looked up Robert Welcher in his online directory but found nothing. He also looked up Beatrix Darvonia under various spellings. To his surprise he found the number.
“Hello?” a woman’s pleasant voice answered.
“Ms. Darvonia?”
“Yes?”
“This is Randolph Drake from Winston, Naybob, and Goines. We’re representing the estate of Laura Simmons, born Laura Welch.”
“Does this have to do with Brayton’s inheritance …?”
Ecks went through with the charade of the interview. He got the name Welcher, as Benol had done. He was surprised that Benol had not lied to him. In his experience, at least up until the time he met Father Frank, almost everybody lied as a matter of course.
The text attachment that Clyde sent was a dense block of lettering with no spaces at all. Ecks scrolled through the document until he finally came upon the right month and year. From there he scrutinized the lines more carefully until coming to April 27, 1988. On that date Sedra Landcombe had penned a solitary entry:
Three baby boys. All blond. All blue eyed. The chubby one goes to the Marcuses for $31,500. The happy one discounted to the Lehmans for $28,000. And the one with the dimples to Verify for $35,000. Adoption papers acquired for the legitimate adoptions.
Xavier felt a cramp in his left cheek and realized that he was grimacing. While rubbing the muscles at the hinge of his jaw with one hand he used the thumb of the other to dial a number. He pressed send and waited. There was no ring, no sound at all. After maybe twelve seconds the silent call was answered.
“Brother Ecks?”
“Frank.”
“Something wrong?”
“I need to use church resources and we haven’t talked about that. I mean, I asked Clyde to put Cylla on notice in case I get popped, but now I’m going to need real labor.”
“Whatever you need, brother,” Frank said. “How’s my car?”
“In a parking garage. It’s the structure on the east side of the street three blocks north of my apartment. In the Jiffy parking lot. Ticket is in the driver’s-side sun visor, keys under the passenger’s-side carpet.”
“What do you need, Brother Ecks?”
The Parishioner gave his requests and then repeated them. Frank said he’d see to their execution.
“I’ll send someone for the car,” the minister said. “Call me if you want anything else—anytime.”
Temple Pie was a small bar that served food as an afterthought. It had six tables and eighteen bar stools, most of the clientele was either on a stool or standing near enough to place their drinks on the broad mahogany bar.
Ecks arrived exactly on time but Benicia was already sitting at a table. She wore an orange sundress and black-and-yellow zebra-striped pumps. There was a glass goblet of white wine, set down without a coaster, in front of her.
Benicia was the only person sitting in the dining area of the establishment. Ecks figured that a chair meant you had to buy food. And the young crowd was in too much of a hurry to waste time with menus, knives, and forks.
“Hi,” he said, pulling up the dark walnut chair opposite the off-duty waitress.
“Hi.” She smiled, expressing only a hint of uncertainty.
They shared a moment of silence.
“Kind of like a one-eyed date,” he said.
The wall behind the woman had a couple dozen photographs in thin black frames, behind real glass. There were pictures of movie stars and others enjoying the ambience of the dive.
“One-eyed?” she asked.
“Well,” Ecks offered, “it’s not really a blind date because we set it up ourselves. But it’s not like we know anything about each other either.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t a date?” she said half-playfully.
“Are you going to eat?” a man asked. It was their waiter. He wore black slacks and a red shirt open at the throat and begging for a tie.
“I am,” Ecks said. “Can I see the menu?”
“It’s on the chalkboard on the wall,” the thirty-something, taciturn white man said. His hair was thinning and with it his patience for service.
Xavier turned his attention to the wall again. He perused the photographs while pretending to read the menu. One particular shot held his attention.
But instead of commenting he turned to his date. “You see anything you like?”
“The Caesar salad looks good,” Benicia said. “Can I have that without the anchovies?”
Ecks glanced at the waiter. The man in red and black grimaced and moved his head to show he understood.
“Isn’t that Robert Welcher?” Ecks asked then.
“Who?”
“That man,” Ecks said, gesturing toward a frame with only one subject: a man wearing a white jacket with salt-and-pepper hair, except for the forelock—which was all white, just the way Benol had said it was.
“No. That’s, um, I think it’s Sam Sprain. He’s one of the owners. At least, he was.”
“He sold out?”
“Something like that. He comes in now and again. Lives around here, I think.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. What would you like to eat, sir?”
“Cheeseburger looks good. You say that’s Sprain like an ankle sprain?”
“I never had to write it down. You want fries or salad?”
“Both.”
“It only comes with one.”
“So charge me extra.”
The waiter showed his irritation with an unconscious twitch of his nose and then went away to place their order. A man at the bar was trying to balance a beer stein on his bald head.
“I bet this place gets loud later on,” Ecks said to Benicia.
“That was very smooth,” she said.
“You like the way I order food?”
“Are you a policeman?”
“Why would you ask that?” Xavier said.
“My father was a cop in Rio,” she said. “A detective. He used to take me with him sometimes, to talk to people. It was against the rules, but he wasn’t much for rules.”
“I thought that’s what separated policemen from crooks, the rules.”
“No.”
“No? How’s that?”
“It’s the same reason that God made snakes the way they are.”
“Which is?” Ecks found himself having unexpected fun.
“When the rat goes down into his hole the snake is designed to go after. He makes his body into the crooked road the rat travels.”
“Sounds worse than the rat.”
“It is—if you’re a rat.”
“Your father still a cop?”
“He got shot,” she said, shaking her head solemnly.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“Does that have something to do with snakes too?”
&n
bsp; “He was involved in a shoot-out. He killed four bank robbers and got shot four times. He’s a superstitious man and thought the parity meant something. So he retired and came up here to live with his sister’s family.”
“And your mother?”
“She died when my brother and I were very small.”
The food came and the bar got rowdy, as predicted. Ecks and Benicia ate and laughed and had to raise their voices to be heard above the din but didn’t seem to care.
At one point he asked her, “How does an immigrant from Brazil know the word parity?”
“If she studies chemistry at UCLA she has to.”
Two men started shouting at each other a little after nine. It seemed as if they were about to come to blows. The bouncer, a big black man, took them by their arms and shoved them out the door.
“You didn’t seem bothered about the fight,” Ecks said to Benicia after the tableau was over.
“They were just posturing,” she said.
“You know, I’m having a really nice time with you, girl.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am. I mean, you’re nice and everything, but I’m not the kind of guy that usually has a nice time.”
“Why not?”
“Where I come from there’s not a lot of leeway. You’re always looking up ahead to see what’s coming next.”
“Hard life,” she said. Xavier couldn’t tell whether there was sympathy or a sneer behind the words.
“Just life.”
“And what’s different tonight?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. I think maybe … maybe it’s just that time.”
“Time for what?”
“I’m gonna go up to the bar and settle our bill,” Xavier said. He stood up.
“Does that mean you’re not going to answer my question?” Benicia’s eyes actually glittered with mirth.
“Oh, no, no. I’m going to answer it, all right. But not tonight. Tonight I’m going to walk you to your car and see you off safely. Then, in a day or two, I’m going to call you and ask you on a full date with two eyes and everything. Then I’ll tell you whatever you want to know—mostly.”
“Mostly?”
They kissed with moderate heat next to her red Saab. She touched his chest and looked into his eyes, saying silently that he was welcome to follow her home if he wanted.
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