Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  Chapter Twenty

  The vigil, this time, lasted a little better than two hours.

  Church bells commenced pealing, faint above the up-and-down babble of the wind, about eight-thirty. The Bartholomews had been up for an hour and a half by then; at least, seven was when the light had gone on in what I took to be their kitchen. The bells had been making their musical summons for nearly five minutes when the two of them came out through the rear door.

  He was dressed in a shiny dark blue suit that fit him like a sack, his tie drawn so tightly his wattles hung down in folds alongside the knot; she wore a black and white dress and a boxy hat with some kind of feather poking out of it. On their way to Sunday services. Both together, because as far as they knew they didn’t have any guests, so there was no reason they shouldn’t close the motel office for an hour or so.

  One hand tight on his wife’s arm, Ed Bartholomew helped her into their old Buick. She was a little unsteady on her feet—the muddy ground over there, or more likely a few belts of pre-sermon gin. I watched him fold himself stiffly behind the wheel, start the engine, let it warm up for a minute or so, then maneuver the car around the building and out onto Main Street. He was a good driver, not too fast, not too slow, with a sure touch on the wheel.

  I waited five more minutes, in case they’d forgotten something. When they didn’t come back I worked some of the stakeout kinks from my shoulders and back, put on socks and shoes—mostly dry now—and my coat, and went out into the cold morning. The rain had quit again for the time being, but still more was on the way: the smell and feel of wet clogged the air, and dark clouds swarmed overhead. I picked my way across the courtyard, around puddles that had grown and flowed together to form miniature lakes. The street out front was deserted now.

  Bartholomew had locked the rear door, but it was not much of a lock; even with my sore finger I had it picked in less than thirty seconds. Another five and I was inside.

  Kitchen, as I’d thought. Breakfast aromas lay heavy in the too-warm room—toast, sausages, fried eggs, coffee. Strong in there, too, was the juniper berry smell. Next to the sink, an empty orange juice carton and an empty Gordon’s bottle bore silent witness.

  There were three other rooms: living room, bedroom, bathroom. All were cramped and in need of tidying and a thorough dusting and sweeping. The bedroom was where I started, for no reason except a feeling that it was the right choice. And it was.

  On the nightstand between twin beds lay a well-used Gideon Bible; and on the wall above an oak dresser hung both a brass crucifix and a painting of a thorn-crowned Christ not unlike the one above the bed in cabin eleven. Symbols of faith, symbols of love. Directly underneath, in two of the dresser drawers, I found the symbols of hate.

  They were different in type from the ones in Ollie Ballard’s shack, but not different in kind. Computer-generated leaflets and pamphlets—desktop publishing of the worst kind. Recent issues of newspapers: The California Klan News, the Posse Comitatus’s Posse Noose Report, the White Aryan Resistance’s Aryan Vigil, the Christian National Emancipation League’s Sentinels of Light. Cheaply printed paperback books, two with swastikas and death heads on their covers: Warrant for Genocide, Hitler Was Right!, White Power—Dead Coons, and the inspiration and blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing atrocity, The Turner Diaries. Clipped articles and bumper-sticker-style slogans: “White People Built This Country—White People Are This Country.” “Niggers and Kikes Beware!” “Make a List of Your Enemies.” “Arm Yourselves Before It’s Too Late.” “The Only Way to Be Free of What Threatens You Is to Kill It—Learn to Kill Now!”

  Jesus above and death below. It made me feel cold again, and unclean, and sad and angry and a little awed. How do they reconcile it? I thought. Pictures of the Savior, crucifix, Bible on the nightstand, and garbage like this tucked away in drawers. Read a little from the Book of Genesis or the Book of Job, then read a little from White Power—Dead Coons. How in God’s name do they reconcile religion and sacrilege, brotherhood and genocide?

  Maybe they don’t, I thought then. Maybe the only way they can live with their contrary beliefs is to not even try. And maybe that’s why she swills gin, why he has the look of a reanimated corpse, why they live like this, why they did the things they did. Caught between two polar opposites, push-pull, for months and years until they were incapable of making any rational distinction; until they were self-indoctrinated to the point of paranoid schizophrenia. Now all they could do was respond to one set of stimuli or the other—love or hate, life or death, the Christian way or the racist way, but never one in relation to the other.

  I was sweating now and my stomach had begun to churn up bile. I wanted out of this place, into the cold, clean air outside. But not until I had the rest of what I’d come for.

  The bedroom held nothing more for me. Neither did the living room. In a closet off the kitchen I found a pump shotgun, a Winchester .30-30, and a pre-World War II Savage with iron sights. All three weapons were loaded, and in there with them were at least a hundred additional rounds of ammunition for each—as if the Bartholomews were expecting a siege. “Arm Yourselves Before It’s Too Late.” “The Only Way to Be Free of What Threatens You Is to Kill It—Learn to Kill Now!” Yeah. A siege was exactly what they were expecting.

  I hunted for a handgun. No handgun. But there had to be at least one somewhere on the premises . . . the right one. They would not have gotten rid of it, not people like them, not under any circumstances. Waste not, want not, when you’re learning how to kill.

  I located it out front, in a drawer under the office counter—a .32 Iver Johnson revolver, clean and oiled and fully loaded. The evidence I’d found in cabin eleven said that the murder gun had to be a .32 or a small-bore .38. Not much doubt that this was it.

  Without touching the revolver, I shut the drawer and continued my search. The pocket of a fleece-lined jacket hanging from a hook on the kitchen wall yielded one more piece of hard evidence—two pieces, actually. Greyhound bus ticket stubs, both stamped with dates thirteen days earlier, one from Eureka to Redding and the other from Redding to Susanville.

  When I finished examining the stubs, I returned them to the jacket pocket. If Bartholomew hadn’t gotten rid of them in the past two weeks, he wouldn’t think to do it when he got home from church; it was likely he’d forgotten he still had them. The stubs would be much more damning if the authorities found them just as I had.

  Done.

  I opened the back door, didn’t see anybody in the courtyard, reset the lock, and stepped outside. But I was wrong about the area being deserted—wrong twice, going in and now coming out. I hadn’t advanced more than a few paces when a familiar voice said, “You hold it right there,” and froze me in mid-stride.

  Art Maxe.

  Standing ten feet away, at the corner by the covered woodpile, with a deer rifle pointed at my head.

  I was damned tired of being confronted by people brandishing guns. But there wasn’t much I could do about it in this case other than what I’d done on the previous instances—try to talk myself out of harm’s way. The .38 might still have been in the car for all the chance I had of defending myself with it. I kept my hands down at my sides—I couldn’t have gotten the left one up very high anyhow as sore as my shoulder was—and stood waiting to see what Maxe would do.

  He took a couple of strides in my direction. “What the hell you been up to in there?”

  “What do you think I’ve been up to?”

  “I saw you break in from down the road. Good thing I keep this rifle in my truck. What’d you steal?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The hell. You took something, got it on you. County cops’ll find it, by God.”

  So it wasn’t in his head to shoot me. Maybe I was wrong about him, the extent of his involvement—maybe. “Go ahead and call Captain Fassbinder,” I said. “I was just about to do it myself.”

  “Sure you were.”

  “Plain truth. I found what I was after.”<
br />
  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “All the evidence Fassbinder will need.”

  “Evidence? What evidence?”

  “That the Bartholomews murdered Allison McDowell and Rob Brompton two weeks ago last night.”

  The rifle’s muzzle dipped a few inches; he stared at me as if I’d suddenly changed shape, sprouted tentacles and eyestalks. “You’re crazy as a barn owl,” he said.

  “We both know I’m not.”

  “Ed Bartholomew? Ruth? I’ve known them thirty years . . . they wouldn’t kill nobody.”

  “One of them did. Or both together.”

  “Why? Chrissake, why would they?”

  “Because Rob Brompton was black. Because they’re the kind of racists who believe the only way to be free of what threatens them is to kill it.”

  Maxe shook his head, more in confusion than negation. “They’re mixed up with the Sentinels? Ed and Ruth?”

  “Sentinels, Christian National Emancipation League, Posse Comitatus—name the hate group, and they belong to it. But not you, huh, Maxe?”

  “Me? You still think I’m into that shit?”

  “Not if you keep denying it.”

  “Damn right I deny it. I told you, I don’t belong to no organizations. Sure, I went to one of the meetings out at the Sentinels’ camp, see what they were all about. But I didn’t like what I heard. Still don’t. I never went back.”

  “So you don’t know about Frank Hicks and Ollie Ballard?”

  “Know what about ’em? You saying they’re Sentinels too?”

  “Sentinels, and thick as thieves with the Bartholomews. The two of them jumped me Friday night, and when that didn’t work, they tried again yesterday afternoon.”

  “You mean they tried to kill you?”

  “Not the first time. Just put me out of commission. They were waiting in one of the other cabins when I got back here from Susanville—had to be inside a cabin because it was raining and their clothes smelled dry and felt dry. The Bartholomews set it up. How else would Hicks and Ballard get a key to an empty cabin?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “The Bartholomews worked the setup yesterday, too, with a phony phone call. Those two pit bulls of Ballard’s would have taken me out permanently if I hadn’t seen through the trap.”

  Another headshake. Maxe was no mental giant; his faculties were overloaded, his confusion too plain to be anything but genuine.

  “It happened, Maxe, everything I’ve told you. Believe it—the parts you don’t already know about.”

  “What parts? Listen, I didn’t have nothing to do with anything like that. I was home Friday and yesterday afternoon. Ask my wife, she’ll tell you—”

  “All right, so you weren’t involved in the attempts against me. Or directly involved with the murders. But there’s still the matter of Allison’s MG. You had to be in on that, no mistake.”

  “Bullshit. What’re you talkin’ about now?”

  “You lied to the law and to me about Allison and Rob picking up her car Sunday morning. They couldn’t have picked it up—they were already dead by then. Why’d you lie if you had nothing to do with getting the MG out of Creekside and over to Eureka?”

  “Eureka? What’s this about Eureka?”

  “Why’d you lie, Maxe?”

  “Ed . . . he come down to the garage that morning. Asked if their car was ready, said if it was he’d take it back to the motel. Said the kids was still in bed and he wanted to get rid of ’em and if he brought their car right up to the door, that’d tell them they wasn’t wanted.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? He never lied to me before.”

  “Why’d he say he wanted to be rid of them?”

  “Him and Ruth didn’t like the idea of a white girl and a black man sleeping together in one of their cabins. Said he wouldn’t’ve put ’em up if he’d known the boy was a nigger. Said he didn’t find it out until just that morning or he’d have sent ’em packing sooner. . . .” Maxe wet his lips. Then, explosively, “Shit!”

  “So you let Bartholomew have the MG. What’d he say then?”

  “Then?”

  “To convince you to lie about who picked it up.”

  “Said he didn’t want anybody to know he was fetching their car for them, didn’t want anybody saying Ed Bartholomew fetched for a nigger and his white whore.”

  “Those were the words he used?”

  “Exact words.”

  “And you didn’t know he was a racist?”

  “All right, maybe I did. But not about him and Ruth belonging to the Sentinels or those other groups. Anyhow, he put it to me as a favor—not telling about him fetching the MG. I didn’t see no harm in it. Why should I? So I said all right, if anybody asked I’d say the kids come and got it themselves.” Maxe wiped mist off his face with the back of his free hand. The rifle hung slackly in his other hand, its muzzle now aimed at the ground between us. “Ed drove the MG all the way to Eureka, is that it?”

  “That same day sometime. Abandoned it there to make it look like that was where Allison and Rob disappeared. On Monday he took a bus from Eureka to Redding and another from Redding to Susanville; I found the ticket stubs inside. His wife must have picked him up in Susanville. She drives, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Maxe said. “Not too far, way she drinks, but Susanville . . . yeah.” His head waggled again loosely, like a bulb atop a broken plant stem. “I still can’t hardly believe . . . What’d they do to them kids? I mean, how’d they—?”

  “Shot them.”

  “Where?”

  “Cabin eleven. Same one I’ve been staying in.”

  “How you know that? How you know they used a gun?”

  “Come over there with me and I’ll show you.”

  I started away, not hurrying. Maxe stayed put for a few seconds and then fell into step beside me, still carrying the rifle muzzle downward in one hand.

  Inside the cabin I said, “Everything’s old in here—bed frame, dresser, TV, pictures on the walls. Everything except the mattress. That’s brand new.”

  “So what? Mattresses wear out.”

  “Wasn’t the case here. Bartholomew replaced the old one because it had bloodstains and bullet holes.”

  “Just guessing,” Maxe said. “Ain’t you?”

  “No. There’s something else that proves it. That picture of Christ over the bed . . . why was it hung off center that way, down so low?” I went over and lifted the picture down. It had been screwed to the wall, but I’d removed the screws earlier. I pointed and said, “That’s why.”

  He stared at the hole in the wall—the little round hole that had been hastily patched with wood putty but whose size and shape were still discernible. The little round hole that had been made by a .32-caliber bullet from the Bartholomews’ Iver Johnson revolver. I stared at it too, as I had at four A.M. and with the same thought in my mind: I’d spent three nights in this room, on the same bed if on a different mattress. The thought started my skin crawling again; I shook it out of my mind.

  “He dug the slug out before he patched it,” I said. “But the hole itself is enough. Added to the other evidence, it’s more than enough.”

  Maxe’s face was creased like a hound’s. “Just come over here in the night and blew them away?” he said with the same kind of awe I’d felt earlier in the Bartholomews’ bedroom. “Just like that?”

  “I don’t know for sure about that part of it. It might have been premeditated, or maybe something happened to set off one or both of them. We’ll find out later.”

  “And after it was done? What’d Ed do with the bodies?”

  “Hauled them away somewhere. Buried them. We’ll find that out later too.”

  There was the sound of a car in the courtyard, crunching through the wet gravel. Maxe turned into the open doorway. Past him I could see the old Buick splash over to the rear of the office building, come to a stop. When Ed Bartholomew got out and started aro
und to the passenger side, Maxe set off in a fast walk that quickened until he was almost running. I called, “Maxe, wait,” but he didn’t listen or stop. All I could do was to chase after him.

  Both Bartholomews were out of the car, standing on the passenger side, him with his hand on his wife’s arm, when Maxe reached them. They looked at him, at me coming up behind, at him again. There was nothing in Ed Bartholomew’s eyes, no emotion of any kind. If he was a closed book, Ruth Bartholomew was a wide-open one with a cracked binding: still unsteady on her feet, cheeks so pale the rouge on them was like daubs of crimson paint, eyes ablaze when they rested on me. She’d left all her love at the church. Now that she was home again, with her need for gin clawing at her, she had redonned her hate like a grotesque mask.

  Bartholomew said, “What you doing here with that rifle, Art? And with him?” as I came up. “What’s going on?”

  Maxe glanced at the rifle as if he’d forgotten he was carrying it. I thought he might blurt out the fact that I’d been prowling inside their home, but he didn’t. Nodding at me he said, “He thinks you done something to the college kids. Killed them, for Chrissake, over in number eleven.”

  It came out slap-hard, but neither of the Bartholomews reacted to it. There was not even a flicker of change in Ed Bartholomew’s stoic expression. His wife’s eyes seemed to get hotter, brighter—that was all. Neither of them said anything. The silence among the four of us was cold and dead, like night hush in a graveyard.

  “Well, Ed? You got anything to say?”

  Bartholomew said, “No, I ain’t,” and turned and tried to prod his wife into walking away with him. She resisted. She had something to say.

  “What’s the matter with you, Art Maxe?” she demanded. Shrill-voiced, like a harpy. “You turning against your own kind? You’re one of us, you’re a God-fearing white man. He’s an outsider and a nigger lover. What in the Lord’s name is wrong with you?”

  Maxe didn’t answer. He looked a little sick.

  Bartholomew pushed the woman this time, using his body, and got her swung around and moving toward the kitchen door. But she wasn’t done talking yet. She called out over her shoulder, “Don’t you listen to him. You’re one of us, you are, and don’t you ever forget it. We’re the same, Art Maxe—we’re birds of a feather!”