Clea's Moon

by Edward Wright

  He stopped, out of breath. After a moment, he sat back down. Brand’s eyes, still on him, had gone wide. His face, like a chameleon’s skin, seemed to have taken on the color of his robe. Neither one spoke for a long time. Then Brand cleared his throat, got up from his chair, and walked to the window, where he stood with his back to Horn.

  “This is very hard,” he said finally. “Would you mind asking me questions?”

  “Not at all. Glad to make it easier for you. How many in the group?”

  “Four.”

  “Names?”

  “I only knew one. That was Mister Bullard. He’s dead now, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Iris told me. In a way, that makes it easier to talk about all this, since he was always the leader, the organizer. Anyway, I worked for him at the hotel. We didn’t use names at the lodge, so the others were just faces to me.”

  “So your faces weren’t covered all the time?”

  “Just during picture-taking.”

  “How did you join?”

  “Mister Bullard asked me. I was surprised, once I met the others, because they were all well-to-do, and I was just a clerk. I think the only reason he was interested in me. . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Clea was the reason, wasn’t she?”

  Brand nodded, his back still to Horn. “She was such a beautiful little girl. Iris and I had brought her to some sort of company party, and Mister Bullard. . . well, he noticed her.”

  “How did he find out you. . .uh, you liked little girls?” Horn tasted sourness in his throat. Careful, he thought.

  “I don’t know, except that he was a brilliant man, and he had the ability to focus on people’s weaknesses, use them for either business or personal reasons. It may have been something I said. Somehow he just knew.”

  “Did he offer you money to bring her to the lodge?”

  Brand was silent so long that Horn thought he hadn’t heard the question. But he had. “Yes, God help me.”

  “And how many times did you take her there?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Four or five times.”

  “Who brought the other girls?”

  “Club. It was his job to bring the girls. ”

  “Who?”

  “Club. That was the name Mister Bullard gave him. I told you we didn’t use names at the lodge, but he gave each of us a nickname. He was Spade. I was Heart. The other man was Diamond.”

  “That’s very cute,” Horn said. “Just like four poker buddies. I suppose you were Heart because you were the sensitive one.” When he got no answer, he went on. “Now. Tell me what happened up there.”

  “All right.” Brand braced both hands against the window sill, as if his legs had suddenly weakened. “It was either just picture-taking, or sex with the girls while pictures were taken.”

  “And Clea—?”

  “No! The youngest girls were just for pictures. Actually, they were more for the benefit of myself and Diamond. We preferred the youngest, and basically all we wanted to do was look. I never touched Clea in a bad way, either there or at home. The other two, Mister Bullard and Club, wanted sex, but their girls were older, up to fifteen or so. Sometimes Club would bring two girls, one older and one younger, so we all—”

  “So no one would feel left out. Nothing worse than standing around while somebody else has a good time.”

  “Go ahead,” Brand said. “Ridicule me. Nothing you call me can be as bad as the names I call myself.”

  “Oh, I’m just getting started. Where did Club find the girls?”

  “He didn’t talk about it much. But after a while, I understood that he—or, actually, someone who worked for him—would go looking in poor neighborhoods, and they would pay off the mothers or fathers, and no one would complain.”

  Go ask Alphonse Doucette about that, Horn thought. He stared at Brand, chewing his lip. “The sex,” he said finally. “Even the older girls, they must have—”

  “They were drugged,” Brand said quickly, shifting his eyes over Horn’s shoulder, about where the crucifix would be. “Club always gave them something. In a drink, as soon as they arrived. He said some of them would barely remember what happened.”

  “But the littlest girls wouldn’t need drugs, would they?”

  “No. Most of them thought it was just some kind of game with a camera.”

  “Is that what it was to Clea? A game?”

  “Yes.” It was barely a whisper. “I asked her to help me keep it a secret from her mother, and she agreed, because that was part of the game.”

  Enough, Horn thought. Enough about her. Talk about something else.

  “Describe Club to me.”

  “Well, he was big. Not tall, but stocky, fleshy. And he had heavy features and heavy eyebrows. He always wore two big rings, one on each—”

  “All right,” Horn said. “I know him. What about Diamond?”

  “He was the photographer. He took all the pictures, and he was very good at it.”

  “Could he have been a professional photographer?”

  “I suppose so, but I always got the impression it was more of a hobby for him.”

  “Could he have been a book dealer?”

  “I really have no idea,” Brand said. “Mister Bullard said we weren’t to talk about personal things, and we didn’t. I do remember that he probably came from a longer distance than the rest of us, because he was often late. Oh. . . and that he smoked an odd kind of cigarette, one that smelled different than the ones I was used to. He offered me one once, but I didn’t like it.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Nice-looking, well-built. He was about my age. I was almost thirty then, and he was probably in his early thirties. The other two were much older. Because his interests and mine were. . . you know, similar, I probably spent more time talking with him. He seemed to know Mister Bullard better than the rest of us. I think he was probably single, because Mister Bullard would sometimes tease him, saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find a nice girl for you.’ ”

  “After Iris found the pictures. . . what did Bullard say when you decided to leave?”

  “He knew he had nothing to fear from me. I was just an ordinary man who happened to have a pretty little daughter. He asked me to give him the photos I’d been keeping, to make sure no one else ever saw them. And he reminded me to never talk about any of this. Except for what I told the priest, I kept the promise. Until today.”

  Horn stood up. “You were right to tell me. Sometimes keeping a secret is harder than telling it.” I need to get out of this room and get some air, he thought. I can’t keep my hands off him much longer. He started for the door.

  “I told you more than I ever told the priest,” he heard Brand mutter. “I told you everything except. . . .”

  “Except what?” Horn stopped at the door, turned.

  “Except about that last time, that last night. The night it all changed for me. It wasn’t Iris who made me leave the group, you see. She just happened to find the pictures. I was ready to leave.”

  Horn stood staring down at the back of the hood. He could barely hear the voice.

  “We had taken pictures of Clea and another girl,” the man said softly. The words came out in a rush now, unstoppable, almost like a confession. “There was supposed to be an older girl there that night, but instead another small one was delivered. A little Mexican girl, about ten, I think. So we took pictures of both of them, and afterward Diamond and I went out into the main room for a smoke, and Mister Bullard was in the kitchen fixing a drink, when. . . when I heard Clea scream. We all ran toward the bedroom. Club was in there with both of them, on the bed. . .” Brand began coughing, as if the words wouldn’t come up into the air. “He was—”

  Horn gr
abbed him from behind, lifted him from the chair, spun him around, and pinned him against the wall, his fists knotted in the folds of the robe. The other man’s hands fluttered in front of him, his eyes on the floor.

  “Did he?” Horn demanded, shaking him. “Did he?”

  “Not Clea,” Brand said, the word almost lost in the cloth. “He was raping the other girl. She was unconscious; I think he may have hit her. We pulled him off. He was crazy, cursing us. But Mister Bullard got him under control. He began lecturing him, in that quiet voice, about our rules.”

  “Rules?”

  “About how only the girls thirteen and older were there for sex,” Brand went on in a reasonable tone. “About how we couldn’t risk injuring the younger girls. Injuring them. . . or worse. And that without rules, we were no better than anybody else.”

  “No better than. . . .” Horn repeated the words in a monotone, releasing Brand from his grip, allowing the other man to sag down against the wall. He turned, looking almost blindly for the door.

  “All the time, Clea was screaming,” Brand said softly, “but not like the kind of screams you usually hear.” His eyes came up, and there was no focus in them. The voice sounded far away. “It was almost like a baby crying.”

  “She was a baby,” Horn said. He opened the door and walked outside, breathing deeply in the thin air. He looked around for a few seconds as if lost. Then he strode to the bell tower and went inside, where he found the thick, knotted bell pull. He reached up and grabbed a knot, heaved downward. The rope descended slowly, and at first nothing happened, but then the bell high above clanged once. He pulled again, putting all his weight on it, letting the rope carry him up, then drop him as the bell clanged again, the sound echoing in the tower. He worked the rope for a full minute until the tones of the bell sounded steadily over the grounds of the monastery. When he stopped, out of breath, he turned to see dozens of monks standing in a loose semicircle outside the building, regarding him. The abbot was there, his face troubled.

  “Brother Wendell has a confession to make,” Horn yelled to them. He saw Brand leaning in the doorway, about to emerge from the room, his face white. Horn went to his car, got in, and started the engine. “You may have to encourage him, but he knows confession is good for his soul. It’s something about his daughter.”

  He drove too fast down the mountain road, the Ford’s well-worn tires occasionally skidding in the dirt and gravel. Sierra Lane would probably have handled that a little differently. It was afternoon, and shadows were gathering in the tall pines. The woods looked like a perfect place for children to play. When they were boys, he and Lamar would have loved a setting like this for their games, he thought as he wrestled with the wheel. They would cast themselves as frontiersmen, explorers, Indian scouts, whooping and hollering among the tree trunks and boulders.

  But then again, he thought, these were deep woods, with steep drop-offs. Before long it would be dark and increasingly treacherous, and little children could get lost in there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Horn sat out in front of Maggie’s place, a glass of her bourbon in his hand, listening idly to the sounds from the kitchen, Maggie and the two girls bantering. Even Clea sounded happy.

  Up there on the mountain, high above the fault in the earth, he had briefly entered a place his father would have known from the old texts, a place where evil and human life intersect. It frightened and saddened him, so he could only wonder at its effect on Clea. How much of it could she remember today? He heard her laugh at one of Maggie’s jokes, and the laugh sounded like someone who had emerged from a dark place, looked around, and decided to be part of things again, part of cooking and laughing and all the rest. Maybe, he thought—and it felt like a prayer—maybe she’s out of there for good.

  He thought about the mysterious Diamond and wondered why he felt it was so important to uncover the man’s identity. Hadn’t he already answered most of the important questions? Bonsigniore had had Scotty killed to keep him quiet. He still wanted the photos and would eventually figure out who had them. Still left unanswered was the precise nature of Clea’s relationship with Bonsigniore’s henchman, Del Vitti, but that would surely be cleared up in time.

  Horn’s priorities were clear: Keep Clea safe, and find a way to make Bonsigniore pay for Scotty’s death. Horn didn’t know if Diamond could help bring this about or even if the man was still alive. But he was the last missing piece in a puzzle that Horn had first confronted that night with Scotty in his father’s office. Horn had to find him.

  A good-looking, well-dressed man who would have been around thirty back then. With his contacts, Arthur Bullard doubtless had known countless men such as that. One of the photos in Bullard’s office had shown him with his hunting club, a couple of dozen men standing in a grove of trees with their weapons. Easily half the men in the picture might have fit that description. Even Paul Fairbrass, Iris’ respectable new husband, fit it himself and could have crossed paths, social or professional, with Bullard. But Horn quickly rejected the idea. It would be too fantastic to imagine that Iris could have unknowingly married two men capable of molesting her daughter. Hell, thought Horn, Wendell could even have been describing Scotty, if you think about it.

  He paused. What about Scotty? Did that make any sense? Of course not. After all, he had shown Horn the photos, had condemned his own father for them. If Scotty had been part of it all, why would he be the one to reveal it? And how could Helen Bullard have known about her husband’s secret life and not have known about her son’s?

  And yet. . . Scotty’s words came back to him: I wanted him to be proud of me. Horn had no trouble understanding how a man could hate his father and at the same time hunger for his recognition. How much did Scotty want that acknowledgment, and what would he have done to obtain it? Recalling the photo Scotty’s mother had presented to him during his visit, Horn grudgingly admitted to himself that his old friend had been reasonably proficient with a camera.

  It was because of Scotty that Horn had gone to Geiger’s bookstore. Was it because Scotty had suspected he might find something there, or had he known it for sure? That night Scotty faced him over his father’s desktop, littered with photos, was he only condemning Arthur Bullard or himself as well? Was that night the beginning of a confession, an elaborate game in which Scotty hoped John Ray would guess the truth? And wouldn’t this secret knowledge, this shared experience between father and son, have given Vincent Bonsigniore an even greater reason for sending an assassin after the son of Arthur Bullard—to retrieve the photos and silence the one who was betraying him?

  No. Horn pushed the thought back down into his unconscious, ashamed of giving it a place in his mind. Not Scotty. The idea was too far-fetched. He knew him too well. No, he would still put his money on Calvin St. George, the man who dealt in dirty pictures, who displayed a photo of a small girl in his shop like a trophy, the man who lied when he told Horn he didn’t recognize one of the pictures from Bullard’s collection. You’re my favorite, Horn said to St. George silently. And we’re going to talk again.

  Another concern pressed in on him. He knew it was time for Clea to go home. His talk with Iris had finally convinced him that Clea faced no obvious threat from either of her parents, and he had run out of excuses for keeping her. Still, he hesitated. She seemed to be enjoying herself here, emerging from the fright of seeing Anthony Del Vitti dead, relaxing for the first time in quite a while. He knew she wanted to stay. For his part, the longer he stayed with her, the better his chance of getting her to open up about why she had left home. Finally, he admitted that it was good simply to have her around, helping him learn to be a father again, even if only for a few days.

  But how much longer could he keep her before her parents learned where she was?

  He heard Clea’s voice. “Hey, your corn bread looks ready,” she said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  As he w
ent inside, Maggie opened the oven and took out the corn bread Horn had made. She had put together a pot of chili, and they sat down to dinner. As they ate, Addie entertained the others with stories of looking for work as a model at some of the big department stores.

  “I was in the restaurant at Bullocks Wilshire at noon the other day when Marlene Dietrich came in,” Addie said. “Her chauffeur was carrying her hat boxes and all the things she’d bought. She was wearing a man’s suit and a man’s shirt and high heels,” she went on breathlessly. “She walked to her table. The whole place just stopped.”

  “Marlene Dietrich,” Maggie said, a faraway look on her face. “She’s so glamorous. Those cheekbones.”

  “She ain’t got nothing you ain’t got, old girl,” Horn told her, digging into his chili. She punched his arm lightly.

  Addie did a wicked impression of a certain department store executive informing her casually that there were occasional demands for lingerie models. If she could stop by the store that evening, he went on, they could determine if she was suitable for the job.

  “And did you go?” Clea asked.

  “Sure I went,” Addie said. “Turned out there wasn’t exactly the job he described, but you might say I got my foot in the door of the company. Or another part of me.”

  There was a small, awkward silence, and Maggie shot him a wry look that said, Listen to her, will you? As Horn looked at the other three faces around the table, he was struck by the differences. Clea was still a girl—a little awkward but coming out of it, her beauty not quite ready to blossom, her open gaze shrouded by her secrets. Maggie’s once-vibrant looks were still visible but had receded into something more calm and internal, more identified with the whole woman than just the face. Addie’s beauty was like a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers, its aroma on the wind. But as with Clea, there was something subtly sad about her too, as if one were watching a speeded-up film of the life of a flower. She burns almost too hot, he thought.