Pious Deception

by Susan Dunlap

  “Well, you saw the Jeep window. They didn’t exactly invite me to stay. But they did answer some questions—”

  “What’d you ask them?”

  “About the cemetery mostly.”

  “The old man, he still alive?”

  “He was then, but he didn’t sound good.”

  “Didn’t you see him? I mean, you are a doctor, right? It’d be reasonable for you to see him.”

  She shrugged, then asked again, “Are the villagers threatening you?”

  Bud put down his sandwich. “There’s always some monkey wrench in the works with a project like this. Usually, it’s the delivery schedule; whatever you need most doesn’t get delivered. Or it’s union hassles. But this time things were racing right along. No problems setting up meetings, no hassles getting deliveries. In the beginning I assumed that the village would be a source of labor. It would be good money for them. But I’ll tell you, those guys in the village, they just don’t want to work. They farm a little and they sit on their porches, or inside the houses, to be accurate. They can’t even get it up to plant a tree to shade them.”

  “They said you were destroying the area.”

  Warren smacked a fist against the chair back. “Damn! I might as well have talked to the walls there. I told old man McKinley that I would take this hole here, this hole that White Bone Copper just walked away from, and I’d turn it back to what it was. I showed him my papers from Environmental Protection. You can’t get a better record with them than I have. E.P. saw the plans for this place and they applauded me. I told McKinley, this place is going to look better than it has in thirty years. Did no good.”

  “Have they been vandalizing?”

  “Stuff’s been missing, small stuff. Could be them, could be someone else.”

  “Someone specific?”

  “Well …”

  “Zekk?”

  Warren hesitated. “I don’t have proof. But the stuff that goes is wheelbarrows, air conditioners, things he could stick in the back of his van and fence when he sells the pottery. But”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. Zekk’s around a lot, but maybe he’s just bored.”

  “Why do you still let him on the site?”

  “I hate to banish him. The guards keep an eye on him. Isolated like this, you get to know everyone, and you take what company you can get. And besides he’s got a collection of porn tapes you wouldn’t believe. Like an outlet. Hundreds. Keeps the guys here at night.”

  “So the occasional wheelbarrow is worth it?”

  “You bet.”

  “And, presumably, Zekk isn’t complaining about the noise like the villagers are. And even so, the villagers still share their water with you.”

  “Have no choice, Kiernan. I get my allotment from the church land. That’s one good thing. I don’t have to deal with the McKinleys at all.”

  “But the church gets its water from the McKinleys. They have an informal agreement, right? So they could turn off the tap any time if they wanted you out of here badly enough.”

  Warren shrugged. “I’d say that proves my point.”

  She finished her sandwich and took a long, slow drink of beer, thinking of Joe Zekk. Zekk, who had had McKinley’s will. Zekk, who called Philip Vanderhooven in Maui. Who cheated the villagers and got $200 a month from Austin Vanderhooven. She put the can down. “Bud. What did Joe Zekk do before he came out here?”

  “Bummed around. The guy’s not a powerhouse. He’d be happy down there in the village if they had electricity. Well, and bars and women.”

  “Bummed around? In the U.S.? Overseas?”

  “I think he worked tramp steamers.”

  “A sailor? Someone familiar with knots.”

  “Yeah. Why are you—? Oh, knots.” He nodded.

  Kiernan finished the beer. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  He leaned his head forward over his arms. His dark hair hung. Tan dust still coated the top, and the occasional gray hair, kinkier than the dark ones, stood out. “I don’t know,” he said, looking up. “I can’t picture Joe Zekk hanging Vanderhooven. The guy was his friend. And yet …”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, this probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes?”

  “I went up to the main road to meet Elias the night Austin was killed. Since I was up there, I stopped at Joe’s to change movies. He wasn’t home. And after Elias left, he still wasn’t home.”

  33

  THE KHAKI-COLORED SKY muddied the outlines of Joe Zekk’s castle-house. It blurred into the dome at end of the mesa and the rocky peninsula of land that overhung the valley.

  The switchback road down to Rattlesnake was empty. The village itself looked the way it had when Kiernan had first seen it: deserted. There were McKinleys down there, of course, but they were not bursting out of their houses for another shot at the Jeep. Not yet. Still, she didn’t kid herself that her arrival would go unnoticed.

  A green panel truck stood by Joe Zekk’s front door. She parked next to it, took a drink of water, pulled her shirt free where it had become stuck to her back, and headed to the house. The quicker she could deal with Zekk and get away from Rattlesnake, the better.

  She knocked and waited. In California the change from blue to overcast sky signaled a decrease in temperature; here it meant merely a qualitative change, like stepping from a barbecue into a steamer. She was about to knock again when she heard slow, heavy footsteps approach.

  Unlike the McKinleys below, the man who opened the door was no behemoth; he was just out of shape. He wasn’t fat—yet. But there was an unhealthy roundness to him, to his cherub cheeks, his squishy arms, and the abdominal flesh that pushed against his teal polo shirt and blue deck pants. Looking at him, Kiernan realized that at some level she had been picturing a leftover hippie. But this man’s short dark hair was swept stylishly back from his face and stood stiffly in place. His porcine face was remarkably pasty for a desert dweller, and the lines that crossed his forehead and ran down under the mounds of his cheeks gave him the appearance not of maturity but rather of a dissolute adolescent.

  “Are you Joe Zekk?” she asked.

  He nodded, eyeing her appraisingly.

  “I’m investigating Austin’s death. Can we talk inside?”

  Zekk leaned back against the doorframe and continued his survey of her body. An adolescent smirk played at the corners of his mouth. She’d seen that look before, the look of the bully assuring himself he could handle this small woman. From experience she knew he’d need to be set straight, fast. “Zekk, Austin Vanderhooven has been killed, and you are in a very bad position. ‘Deadbeat’ is the kindest word I’ve heard to describe you. Somebody strung up your friend, and everyone involved in this case would be delighted to hear that that somebody was you.”

  Zekk’s fleshy face stiffened. He glanced nervously at the room behind him, then at the bedroom.

  Had he already discovered the McKinley will was gone? Or did he have a weapon she had missed in her earlier search? “You have a gun in there? Forget it. Half of Phoenix knows I was headed up here today.”

  Zekk took a step back.

  Keeping an eye on him, Kiernan moved inside, grateful for the icy air, and made her way through the litter to the sofa. Dislodging a blue striped jacket, she sat. Joe Zekk flopped down on the far end of the sofa and landed on a pair of gray sweat pants and a brown slipper. He made no move to pull them out. She felt sure he no longer noticed the pervading stench of old soda, old food, old God-knows-what. He looked so much like a rebellious adolescent it was hard to remember he was over thirty.

  Using the most parental tone she could muster, Kiernan said, “Let’s start with the two hundred dollars a month Austin Vanderhooven was giving you—”

  “What? Two hundred dollars?”

  “Don’t lie about something that’s so easily traced. Now why was he paying you?”

  She could almost see him mentally regrouping. Hardening her voice, she said, “Elias Necri report
ed the money, Philip Vanderhooven knows about it. What did you have on Austin?”

  “It wasn’t blackmail!” He sighed, glanced hopelessly at the bedroom door, and said, “Okay, I’ll tell you about it, but let me get a drink first.” He grabbed a brown-ringed old-fashioned glass from the table, shoved a pile of Hustler magazines to the floor, and excavated a one-serving bottle of rye. He emptied it into the glass and drank slowly, eyes half-closed in thought. “He paid me to be the caretaker; he wanted someone he could trust here.”

  Kiernan laughed. “No one has called you trustworthy.”

  Zekk shrugged, but the movement looked forced. The flesh at the corners of his mouth quivered.

  She had hurt his feelings! The man really was an adolescent. “Okay, start from the beginning. You were in seminary with Austin.”

  He took another drink. Already the glass was nearly empty. He lifted his right ankle and set it on his knee. The teal bulge of his stomach protruded over the edge of his blue pants. “One of the big mistakes of my life, seminary. I don’t know what I thought I’d find there, but it sure wasn’t another year of catechism and a bunch of asshole rules and years of running errands for a flock of old duffers who think the world hasn’t changed since the first encyclical. It didn’t take me long to see what bullshit the whole business was.”

  “You left after the first year?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Austin? How come he stayed?”

  Zekk took a mouthful of rye and swished it noisily around his teeth. “It was different with Austin. He realized the bullshit, of course. Anyone’d do that. But the thing was, he just couldn’t believe that was all there was. See, Austin wasn’t like me. Now, I know what people think of me, what you think of me, what they thought of me in seminary. They figured I was lucky to have squeaked past the admissions board. But Austin, he was a star. He abandoned graduate school for the church. Star, scholar, it was written all over him. He was going places, and he was going to carry the good fathers with him. He was one of the ones who’d be sent for graduate courses to the North American College in Rome, maybe the Pontifical Gregorian University, maybe Academia Alfonsiana, who knows? Maybe he’d be the one to take charge of the Church’s investments, which would have been a damned sight more appreciated than any theological insights he might have come up with.” Zekk laughed, a whiny sound. “Besides, when Austin made his decision to enter seminary, he burned a lot of bridges. He couldn’t give it up without looking a fool.”

  “What are you saying—Austin was committed, or just too embarrassed to quit?”

  “Austin and me, we were on the same wavelength. We stayed up half the night more nights than not, talking, trying to make sense out of that ridiculous system. I finally got out. But Austin kept assuming that there was a nugget of truth buried under the doctrine.” Zekk snorted. “See, Austin figured if he just worked hard enough, dug deep enough, he would find the secret.”

  Kiernan shivered. She knew that obsession only too well. “And did he?”

  “It was ridiculous. He was one of the brightest guys I knew. He had advantages I would have killed for—whoops, wrong choice of word, huh?” He let out a high-pitched laugh.

  Kiernan grimaced.

  “The point I’m making,” Zekk hurried on, “is that I knew him in the first year of seminary. I talked to him two weeks ago. And in all those years nothing had changed. He was still the same green kid looking for the same nugget of truth. Oh, he’d stripped off a lot of layers, he compartmentalized a lot of bullshit, like the pastor stuff. He really hated that. He couldn’t get into these people whining about their problems with their second cars and their teenagers smoking dope or getting knocked up. He realized that he was wasting his time with that. I could have told him. I did, in fact, that first year. He just couldn’t see it then. It took him all this time to realize it. That’s why this house. First he figured if he could just get away and spend time talking to the one person he could trust. Hey, don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing. Go on.”

  Zekk downed the rest of his drink. “Yeah, well,” he said tentatively, “Austin still had access to family money.”

  “No vow of poverty for him, huh?” Kiernan asked, anxious to nurture his nascent trust.

  He leaned forward. “There are ways around them. Money wasn’t an issue. And he got a good deal on building this place.”

  “From Sylvia Necri?”

  “Yeah. He used to come out here every other week, on Monday and Tuesday, his days off. He’d want to talk sometimes about the Humanae Vitae, you know, the papal encyclical from nineteen sixty-eight. Or he was caught up in what is the difference between the assent of faith in the new canon law and the obsequium religiosum of the mind in regard to the authoritative teachings of the pope.” Zekk shoved a pile of papers off the table, looked under them, then pushed another. They slid silently onto a pile of sweat gear on the floor. He eyed his empty glass accusingly. “Damn.” To Kiernan he said, “You want a beer?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged and leaned back against the sofa cushions, apparently unwilling to walk to the kitchen. After a moment he yanked another pile closer to him and rooted through it, coming up with another tiny bottle of rye. “Ah. Now this is better.” He downed half and poured the rest. “Well, time may have stood still for Austin, but it hadn’t for me. I’d stopped worrying about that garbage years ago. He must have figured that I’d be just like I was when I left seminary, as if I’d been stuck on a shelf all those years, just waiting for him to pull me off, wind me up, and have me cock an ear for him.”

  “When he realized you’d changed, did he ask you to leave?”

  “Leave!” He flopped back possessively into the sofa corner. “Who else was he going to get to live out here in the middle of nowhere, with a pack of lunatics at the bottom of the gorge down there?”

  “In Rattlesnake?”

  “Yeah, who else would have the time to haul their pots around and see what tacky tourist shop would pass them off as Indian. You see their stuff? It’s junk, not that that would keep it from selling. You wouldn’t believe the crap tourists cart home.” He laughed. “Sometimes I wonder what people in Minneapolis think of Arizona. They look at what their friends bring home: the lopsided pots and the sandbox-quality sand paintings; and they must figure the Valley of the Sun is desert-to-desert kitsch.”

  Kiernan laughed. Despite all that had been said about Joe Zekk, she was finding him not wholely unlikeable. “So why did you handle their pottery then?”

  “Money. They need it. I need it. More to the point, that was part of the deal with Austin. He wanted them to have the income.”

  “To be dependent on him for it?”

  Zekk shrugged. “Put whatever meaning you want on it.”

  “They say you cheat them.”

  Zekk jolted forward. “Cheat them! Hey, they’re paying for first-class acting here. They should see my performance when I bring their stuff into a store. I earn my money.”

  The rest of Zekk’s statements may have been questionable—certainly they merited more thought—but this one Kiernan took whole. From the looks of the pottery she had seen on John McKinley’s mantelpiece, if Zekk moved any of it he was a master salesman. She shifted her weight, resting an elbow on the sofa back. The air cooled the underside of her arm. “Austin had something the old man down there had given him. The old man is hanging on, waiting to get it back.”

  Zekk laughed. “Lady, there’s nothing down there anyone would want. Have you looked down there?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I haven’t been down there in a year. Not since I caught one of them peeking in the windows and sent him head-long down that road of theirs.”

  “Maybe they got something since.”

  “No way. When it rains that road’s a mud puddle. And they’d shoot at a stranger before he could bring them anything. It’s not a place UPS delivers.” He grinned and checked Kiernan’s face for a corresponding reaction. When he saw it, he seeme
d genuinely pleased. “Austin went down every time he was here. And he never came back up with anything.”

  “Maybe McKinley gave him the item when you were away.”

  He shook his head. “I was always here when Austin was due. You see what a godforsaken place this is? I go days without seeing another human face. If it weren’t for the process works up the road, I’d have lost my mind ages ago.”

  Kiernan nodded, feeling a stab of sympathy. Was this, she wondered, what mothers of chronically unwashed teenagers felt? “And, Joe, without the works, you’d have missed out on a good bit of trade.” She glanced toward the cassettes on the bookcase next to the television.

  “Hey, none of your bus—”

  Kiernan sat forward. “It’s all my business. Your best shot is with me. You’re savvy enough to know that. You can refuse to tell me, of course, but if you don’t have a real clear explanation of your income and your time, it might end up as the sheriff’s business. How much?”

  He hesitated. It was clear he was hiding something. The question was, did that something concern the tapes, or was it another secret he was guarding? The widening of his eyes indicated he’d made his decision. “Three hundred a month.”

  “Three hundred, that’s peanuts. You’ve got a captive audience out here.”

  Zekk flushed. “Hey, I know that. They’d take one every night if I’d let them. Hell, two or three a night. But you don’t do business that way. You’ve got to think of the future. I don’t want the guys getting bored in a couple months and pressuring Warren for something different. Not different movies, but buses to town or live entertainment. Then I’d be cooked. So I dole out those tapes. Good business.”

  Kiernan smiled. Joe Zekk the porno and pottery entrepreneur.

  “Point is,” he continued, “that when Austin came up here, I hung around. His coming was a big event for me. Even after he built his monastery.”

  “Monastery?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I called it. The dome outside. He used it like a play monastery.”