Ecks saw all this in the seemingly vacant blue eyes that had made Lester such a prize when he was a toddler.
“Why?” Lester asked after traveling the entire wrong-way path of his life up until that moment.
“Same as always,” Ecks opined. “What’s true for every soldier, cop, workingman, and thug—worth more dead than alive.”
“And so you come in here and wanna save me?”
“I don’t give a fuck about you, Les. Not one fart in a bean factory. Only reason I’m even tellin’ you what I know is that it’s the right thing to do. Like puttin’ a bullet in a stray dog’s head after a car accident—to end his sufferin’. I know you not gonna help me, man. But I had to be here and you asked why so I told you. After it’s over, Cylla here will give you the names of the three couples who might be your real parents. Maybe at least you’ll know why you did what you did. You couldn’t help yourself, brother. I mean, you just like some windup toy put on the tabletop and let go to run off the side.”
“Fuck you,” Lester said. It was almost a question.
“Naw, man. You the one got fucked in the ass by life. Messed you up so bad that you ain’t never at no time known where you was or why. I’m here to tell you about it. I’m the first person in your whole damn life told you the truth. Pay attention, young man. This ride will not go around for another pass.”
Lester Lehman sat back in his chair, easing up on the restraints that held him. He looked into his enemy’s eyes and saw the truth there. He wanted to ask a thousand questions that had been in his mind since he could remember. But he knew that the black man sitting in front of him didn’t care. The truth he shared was more like a bomb than a balm; like a hidden knife waiting on the prison yard—it was aimed at his heart.
“We’re going to take you down to the release room now, Mr. Lehman,” Cylla Pride said. “You’ve heard what my colleague had to say. Would you rather I stop this proceeding?”
“No … no. Let’s get on with it.”
The guards were summoned and Lester was released from his chair. His defiant demeanor was now more subdued, though he still glanced daggers at Ecks when he could. The seven of them traveled down a long wide corridor toward an elevator, which they took six floors down.
They got to a control room maintained by three uniformed sentries watching nine monitors and guarding a door that kept you a prisoner or set you free. A small group of business-suited officials had gathered near the metal door.
Ecks turned his head casually, studying the monitors. He just wanted to see who was out in the hall on the other side waiting for Lester. There might not be anyone there. Winter was in his car outside using his own video camera. It was a long shot, but this would be only the first in a series of attempts to find the man assigned to kill the lost children.
At his second pass Ecks saw the man who was responsible for at least two of the murders committed.
“Is the paperwork in order?” a smallish Hispanic man in a tan jacket asked Cylla.
“The papers have all been filed,” the deacon-lawyer replied.
She handed the little man an envelope, which he opened. He took out a folded sheet of paper and read it through—twice.
“This looks to be in order.”
“One moment,” a voice said from the elevator door.
This was a slender man with an exaggerated Adam’s apple. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a thin undertaker’s tie.
“There’s a holdback,” the emaciated man said. “Mr. Lehman attacked a man with a deadly weapon on prison grounds three months ago. The inquiry means that he must be held over in county jail until the courts here make a ruling.”
“What the fuck?” Lester said.
“Put him back,” the lean bureaucrat said. “He must be held over.”
Ecks didn’t talk to Cylla again that day. He made his way back up with the guards holding Lester and then quickly to the front of the courthouse. He was looking around for the killer but came up empty.
“Brother Ecks,” Winter called.
He was parked at the curb, waving from the window.
Ecks strolled over to his friend.
“I got the shots you wanted, man,” Winter said. “How’d you do?”
“All in all I can’t complain.”
“That’s good, right?”
“That girl you met,” Ecks said, “that Cindy Simpson.”
“What about her?”
“I met a girl too. Her name’s Benicia.”
“She fine?”
“You want to have a double date at Fisherman’s Grotto up there on the PCH?”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Your friend Winter is a delight,” Benicia Torres was saying on the ride back to her apartment on Venice Boulevard.
“What did you think of Cindy?”
“Every time she looked at you her nostrils flared.”
“I didn’t catch that.”
“Winter’s a good friend, isn’t he?” Benicia asked Ecks.
“My best friend died two days ago.”
“I’m sorry. What happened?”
“Cancer. That and hard livin’.”
“Are you going to the funeral?”
“No,” Ecks murmured, “I’m not.”
When Benicia heard the pain in that answer she said, “Do my nostrils flare when I look at you, Mr. Noland?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They should.”
“Your nose don’t even know me, girl.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve ever said that’s completely wrong.”
“Is this it?” Ecks asked as he pulled up next to a complex of little cottages. The brown bungalows were arranged in no particular order, like a child’s building blocks forgotten after a day of play.
“It wasn’t only him getting wounded that made my father decide to leave Rio.”
“No?” Ecks felt a quivering in his chest.
“I was young but I was wild too. I’d never stay in school. I would jump out of my window at bedtime and spend the night in the streets.”
“What your old man do?”
“He beat me with a strap until …”
“Until what?”
Benicia peered with her brilliant eyes at Ecks. “Until one night he beat me and the whole time I looked up at him like I’m looking at you. I didn’t cry or make a sound.”
“Damn, girl.”
“Do I frighten you, Egbert?” She laughed.
“So that’s why he put you in a trunk and brought you here?”
“He really was shot. When I heard about it I ran to the hospital and sat by his side for six days. I held his hand and talked to him. And when he woke up I was sitting there wearing a straw hat that he bought me on a Sunday after church. I asked him to stop being a cop and he said that he would if I went to school and made something of myself.”
Xavier took her hand and said, “Call me Ecks, all right?”
“Do I scare you, Ecks?”
“Like I told you before, scared is scared of me.”
“Do you want to come in?”
“Will I have to use my strap?”
“I promise not to cry.”
Ecks left Benicia sleeping in the morning. He turned on his cell phone on the freeway headed downtown.
“Hey, Brother Ecks,” Winter Johnson had said in the middle of the night. “I had a great time with you and your girl. That Bennie is really beautiful. Cindy just couldn’t stop talkin’ ’bout you. She said that you reminded her of this gangster uncle she used to have from back Baltimore. If I didn’t know better I’d be jealous.”
“Ecks,” said Guillermo Soto on the next message. “I received some pretty damning videos this morning. It shows two men being murdered by men known to the department. This evidence was delivered by a man named Adama. He’s a Syrian businessman who rented out a house in Coldwater Canyon to a film company that was doing some kind of Candid Camera show. The killers and thei
r victims had made some kind of mistake and got themselves on tape. Just thought I’d give you the heads-up.”
Taking the freeway off-ramp at La Brea, Ecks made his way up to Olympic and parked in a nearby lot. He set himself down at a bus stop across the street from D-Right Drugstore and took out a book, a new biography of a man named Simon Weisenthal, known as the Nazi Hunter and feared by those who hoped to get away.
Ecks had read a book review on the life history and felt a kinship to the subject. Ecks was a man who lived at the border of civilized life, an exile who made his camp between two lands, neither of which could ever be his home. Ecks was the victim who bit back, the forgotten corpse that came alive and dug his way out of an unmarked grave.
Ecks was very interested in the daily life and the subterfuge of Weisenthal’s existence, but that day, with the book open in front of him, he didn’t read a word. Instead his eyes were glued to an inconspicuous doorway that had no lettering or even a number attached.
In the hours that passed, the displaced New Yorker thought about his old life and the new one, about Swan the smiling killer and Panther Rule the inescapable patriarch. Whenever his mind drifted by the memory of his father, Frank came up. He wondered what Frank had to do with Panther. They were nothing alike, the white-haired minister and the black tower of rage. And yet …
And yet there was something.
He felt as if he’d been battered and jumbled down a long stretch of whitewater and had just been vomited out onto a placid, extremely large lake. The water below him was smooth and reflective like a mirror, and the silence from the surrounding woodlands spoke of danger.
Xavier smiled and sat back on the fiberglass bench. And at just that moment his lumpy, gray-clad quarry came out of the nondescript door.
The man walked with purpose down Olympic across from where Ecks followed. He went into a fast-food joint called Chili’s Fries and Taquitos.
Ecks went to the crosswalk, waited on the light, and crossed the street leisurely. He leaned up against the wall outside the door, waiting patiently. Panther and Frank, Simon and the placid lake all faded away in the face of the job to be done.
Eight minutes later Lou Baer-Bond came out of the pink-and-yellow door of the restaurant with a bag in one hand and a quart cup of soda in the other. There was a lit cigarette between his lips.
“Lou.”
The private detective turned, opening his eyes wide. Ecks wondered whether the dick would drop his trove of fast food to grab for a gun or run.
“Hey,” Baer-Bond said, his cigarette quivering madly. “Egbert, right? What you doin’ here?”
“We need to talk, Lou.”
“Uh-huh, okay. Let’s go up to my office.”
“No, man. I’ve been comin’ down with this case of office-o-phobia. You know? The fear of a gun under the desk. I was thinkin’ maybe that bus stop bench across the street.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, yes, you do. Just as sure as you were standing out in the receiving hall in the courthouse yesterday. Waiting for Lester.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Baer-Bond said. He swiveled his shoulders to point in a trajectory beyond Ecks and his accusations.
“Jocelyn and Martindale are on their way to jail, man.”
“What?”
“They jumped the gun and killed two guys name of Jesse and Link.”
“You seem to be very well informed for a second cousin.”
“They would have killed you too, Lou,” Ecks continued. “I guess there’s lots of money on the line.”
“Benol put you into this?”
“I drive my own car.”
“What do you want?”
“Ever since I was a young man I’ve been looking for my platinum parachute. Enough money all at once so that I could retire and take my ass down to where they have never seen even one solitary snowflake.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“You know why I didn’t want to go up to your place, Lou?”
“Scared?”
“Right on the first try. I’m scared’a gettin’ shot in the chest and in the eye.”
The private detective’s moods were subtle and deep. The look in his jaundiced eye was response to a mortal threat.
“Let’s go across the street,” he said.
“So what is it you want from me?” Lou Baer-Bond asked.
Ecks pondered the question honestly. Benol had asked, and Frank had asked for her, that Ecks find the three boys who had been kidnapped before they could form coherent sentences. He had accomplished that end. Not one child had gone unscathed, but the Parishioner had done what was asked of him. What was he doing at that bus stop with the killer? What did he care about the reasons why?
“I want the keys to the kingdom,” Ecks said without considering too closely the words he uttered.
“Chick and Jerry really out of this now?”
“They ain’t dead. So they still know what they know. But their knowledge is from the inside lookin’ out.” Ecks knew that the greatest poets were also the greatest criminals. Poetry was hatched in prisons and under the sway of a lifelong desire for revenge.
“Why should I listen to you?” Baer-Bond asked.
“One reason is that I already saved your life. Because you know you just about the only hook left that the cops could hang their hat on. And you the one with the blazin’ gun. You the one Jocelyn and Martindale will blame.”
The detective looked up and around the street, suddenly afraid what might be laying for him. His right eye tightened and he lit up another menthol. His left wrist bumped against the tip of his nose and he wondered, honestly, to himself.
“There’s money to be made,” Ecks said. It was more than just a suggestion. “Money can cross borders and grease the right palms. You got enough money and whatever Jerry and Chick say will be nuthin’ more than some words behind a locked door.”
“Problem is,” Lou said simply, “that they’re the ones that know how to make the connections. How tight is the jam they’re in?”
“Tight as a born-again virgin on her wedding night.”
“What exactly are we talking about, Mr. Noland?”
“Double homicide caught on tape with audio.”
“Legal tap?”
“We ain’t talkin’ about a millionaire’s son, Lou. These are lifetime criminals standin’ in front of a hole in the ground. So if you know somethin’ maybe we can pool our resources and both come out on top’a the shit.”
Again Baer-Bond wondered. He had been expecting to eat chili-cheese fries and fried tortillas swimming in watery guacamole sauce, but now he was facing a man of the wrong color whom he didn’t know and couldn’t trust.
“Why you think I’m in it with these dudes?” he asked.
“Not only are you in it,” Ecks said, “you killed twice as many as either one of them. A bullet through the eye and another in the chest. One at the surf shop down in Venice and the other on Marietta Circle three nights past.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“I don’t have to. Between Chick and Jerry, the cops, and an anonymous phone call, the only thing you’ll need is a lawyer and a whole Sunday full of prayer.”
The quart cup of soda was sweating on the plastic bench while Lou Baer-Bond bit his lip and scowled, looking for a way back to his heart-attack brunch.
“You bein’ straight with me?” he asked, expecting a lie to decipher.
“What do you think, man?”
“How do you know all this shit?”
“I got eyes in my ears, brother. I got a nose in every finger.”
“How much money you think Chick and Jerry were after?”
“I didn’t stay in school too long, but I believe that the number takes up the high range of six places, maybe seven.”
“Damn. Thing is like this, man. I mean, is that Benol girl really your cousin?”
“No. And even if she was, this is money here, real money.”
“So how do you know her?”
“I’ve been known, in a past life, to handle rough trade. She come to a minister and he asked me to help her out. I came to see you. I looked here and there and came up with what I already told you. Either Benol was lyin’ to me or she’s just too stupid to know what she was sittin’ on. Either way she’s out of it now.”
Lou was looking at Ecks as if the Parishioner’s words carried weight and form. He studied each one like a production line manager looking for flaws in his assemblers’ work.
“You got to understand, man,” Lou said, “I don’t know what it’s all about. I got information but not nearly enough to make the right connections. And if what you say about Chick and Jerry is true, then I need to get out. I need to get paid.”
Ecks could see the desperate man’s point.
“How much you lookin’ for, Lou?”
“Two hundred thousand sounds about right. With that I could get out to Australia.”
“I cain’t argue with that,” Ecks said. “If I get up near a million or more you deserve your dram. But the truth is, I’m broke and you got no reason to trust me. How do we work that into this payday of yours?”
Lou had gotten into the habit of looking over toward the door to his office building every thirty seconds or so.
“We should get away from here,” he said. “If the police come it’ll be over for both of us.”
Half an hour later the unlikely pair were seated in a booth at Loud’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire. Lou ordered a mocha coffee with whipped cream while Ecks had a black American blend.
“Just tell me one thing,” Ecks said to the detective.
“What?”
“What did Benol ask you to do—exactly?”
“All she wanted was for me to find that Brayton Starmon, who she said was born Brayton Welch.”
“Nothing else?”
“She said something about three boys that went missing twenty years ago. She said that she heard Starmon had information that would lead her to them.”
The walk up La Brea had been under the hot sun, and even though the heat hadn’t bothered Ecks, Lou was sweating like the soda cup he’d left on the bus stop bench. The detective was visibly relieved by the coolness of the café. Even Ecks found the air-conditioning restorative.
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