Welcome to Witchlandia

by Steven Popkes

  Dooley slitted his eyes. “Okay. Go with that.”

  “Let’s talk to Dulac.”

  “The Frenchman? He hated Wallace.”

  I nodded. “I know that. But he wasn’t the only person at PSI Wallace tried to convert. I bet Dulac knew other people who were more receptive. Maybe even some who were going to Rabbitt’s church.”

  Dooley shrugged. “We could open the church on Sunday and see who shows up.”

  “This is Friday. What do you want to do? Take the day off? How’s that going to help you make detective?”

  Dooley sighed. “There are some apartment buildings nearby. We could canvas them.”

  I just looked at him.

  He stood up. “Right. Let’s go find Dulac.”

  oOo

  Dooley called MacIlvey from the car. Dulac had gotten a construction restoration job in Back Bay. He gave us an address we could check.

  “How come MacIlvey would know the address where Dulac was working?”

  Dooley eyed the street and pulled out into traffic. “I don’t know. But it makes sense. If something happens to Dulac they need to have someone to call. Maybe Dulac has children somewhere that need to know where he is. Or maybe he has child support obligations and has to report where he’s working. Could be any number of reasons.”

  The address was on Bay State Road in the bowels of Boston University. Dulac was part of a crew gutting one of the brownstones.

  I was ready to go right inside but Dooley held me back. There was a bench next to the building. We sat and waited. After a minute, a man walked up with an extension cord slung over his arm.

  “Excuse me,” Dooley called out.

  The man stopped. “Yeah?”

  “Do you know Frankie Dulac?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you tell him Abraham Dooley and Katelin Loquess are down here? We need to talk to him. No problems or anything. Just need a little bit of his time.” Dooley smiled.

  The man looked Dooley up and down, then nodded and went inside.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  Dooley watched the light falling through the trees. “Think about it. Dulac’s from Quebec. Probably here illegally—I can’t imagine he has a green card or work visa. He’s getting catch as catch can work—which means he is likely getting paid under the table. If you’re paying a guy like that, you don’t want cops poking around. Any smell of trouble and the first thing you’re going to do is fire the guy. But if we sit down here, we ask one of his co-workers—not the boss.” He waved around. “Just enjoying the fall air. Not flashing any badges. We could be anybody. We could be social workers. We could be friends from the old country. We could be family. Not somebody the boss necessarily wants around but not a real threat either.”

  About ten minutes later, Dulac came down covered with plaster dust. He looked at us both for a minute. “I got to run a line in the basement. Come on down there if you want to talk.”

  We followed him inside and downstairs. He closed the door after us. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “We need your help,” I said. “Do you know anybody that Wallace won over when he was trying to convert people?”

  “Fuck, no. Asswipe never got anybody to go to church with him. Nobody I knew, anyway.”

  Dooley leaned forward smoothly. “We’re looking into the church carefully. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of membership roll or mailing list.”

  Dulac snorted. “Fuck right, if they recruited shithounds like Wallace. What the fuck you gonna do? Call him for donations?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “If you knew anybody that was taken in by Wallace, we would like to know. We could talk to them and then, through them, find other people in the congregation. We might find Wallace’s killer that way.”

  Dulac looked at me, then at Dooley. “Son of a whore called me a papist like it was something filthy. Fuck. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “I know.” I tried to speak soothingly. “But someone who kills a homeless man like Wallace might kill someone else. This time it might be someone you like.”

  Dulac stared at me with tiny dark eyes. “Yeah. It’s not like we get any fucking police protection.” He pointed at Dooley. “Get your little fucking notebook out. I don’t know where she lives but the little slut has an apartment or something near the church. Wallace talked about her once or twice. She was the church manager.”

  “Her name?” asked Dooley patiently.

  “Sandra. Sandra fucking Kohl.”

  oOo

  I managed to keep it together. I smiled at Dulac. I smiled at Dooley and said, “I’m going outside for a minute.” I stood up. I went outside. I unstrapped my stick, sat on it and executed a perfect vertical rise to the top of the tallest building on the Boston University campus. There, standing in the shadow of some devious structure shaped like an immense golf ball, I landed.

  Then the shakes began.

  Was every fucking person I had ever known trying to make me lose my mind? Every element of this case, every thread, every clue led straight to me. Now, Sandy Fucking Kohl? My college roommate? The blue-eyed menace?

  Who else was going to show up? My fucking brother? My fucking father? My deceased mother? Arnie? His wife Mattie? His daughter Anita?

  I pulled out my cell. My shaking hands made it difficult to find Arnie’s number—would he even be home now? Maybe not. No answer—just voice mail. I called my brother. No answer. Voice mail. Maybe they were all in Boston. I called Mattie.

  “Hello?” came the warm voice over the phone.

  “Mattie! You’re there!”

  “Katelin? Is that you?”

  “Yes! Are you at home?”

  “Of course I’m at home. You called here, didn’t you? Radio phone doesn’t even make it to the driveway.”

  I sat down on the gravel. I felt like weeping. “I’m glad you’re there. Where’s Arnie?”

  “At work, of course. We aren’t rich enough to retire yet.”

  “And Anita?”

  “Katelin, is something wrong?”

  “Where’s Anita?”

  Gently now. “She’s at college—”

  “Where?”

  “Washington University. You know that.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  In an ominous voice like thunder. “She sure as hell better be with all the money we’re paying. You’re scaring me, Katelin. Tell me what’s going on.”

  And I told her, everything, going back and forth, telling about this case, how I felt awful about Sean leaving. How terribly inevitable it finally became between me and David. How Dooley was shaping up to mean more to me than a partner but at the moment less than a friend, how I thought I wanted someone as a friend up here. Someone different from everybody else I knew. How I missed Missouri and that maybe coming up here was a mistake but now I didn’t think I could ever go home.

  All the while, Mattie soothed me, asked questions, laughed gently sometimes, sniffled others.

  Finally, Mattie said, “Well, what are you going to do now?”

  “Finish the case, I guess.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt you’ll figure that out. You’re a smart girl. But you’ve some bridge repair work due in your life. With that boy Sean. With David—though it may be too late for that and he’ll need more than just a little talking to. Paying to bug your apartment indeed.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he intended.”

  “I said bridge repair work and there’s some there with that boy. But there might be some demolition there, too, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I do, Mattie.” I grinned into the phone. “I’ll have to do something about both of them.”

  “And honey?” Mattie said softly. “You’ve been apart from your family way too long. There’s some bridge building you need to do there, too.”

  I felt tears coming again. “I know.”

  “Are you listening to me now, honey? I’m serious. Family got to take you in when you have
nowhere else to go. Rough as they are, they’d take you in a heartbeat. You know that. You owe them for that.”

  “I know, Mattie.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  We spoke a little more and then I hung up. I stared at the phone for a moment. I wasn’t ready to call my father or brothers. Not yet. But there was someone I owed a call to that could not wait. I called Sean.

  It went to voice mail of course, but I didn’t think much of that. He should have finished the Long Walk by now. If he was flying he wouldn’t be answering. But even so, he might not want to talk to me. I didn’t know if I wanted to get back together or not. But I sure didn’t want it to end like it did with discarded pieces all over the landscape. Like me and David.

  I couldn’t say any of that into a voice mail message.

  “Hi,” I said, feeling awkward. “It’s me, Katelin. You said you were coming back to Boston to close on your condo. We said we’d get together and talk about things. We didn’t set a time. Let me know. I’d still like to get together. “I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Then, “I’m sorry I didn’t treat you very well.”

  Which was the long and the short of it, really. I’d never treated Sean well. Never gave him a chance.

  My phone beeped. Two text messages. One was from Dooley: Where the hell are you? The other was from Sean: Got your message. Be in town Wednesday. Bernoulli’s, 7pm.

  There it is, I thought. You can make up any story you want about something like that.

  oOo

  I called Dooley and told him I’d meet him back at the station. The air was crisp and I wasn’t quite ready to be inside.

  I stepped off the BU roof and dropped fifty feet to get up some momentum. Then, I pulled out and shot over the Pike, Brookline Ave and Fenway Park. I ripped through a dozen snap rolls until I was dizzy, then pulled up the nose and flew straight up into the sun.

  Time to live a little.

  Dooley was waiting for me at my desk when I came down the stairs. He watched as I sat down across from him.

  “So, what’s the plan?”

  “Who’s Sandra Kohl?”

  “My roommate from college.”

  Dooley shook his head. “You should have told me—”

  “I didn’t know. Last I heard, she got her Ph.D. and moved out west. Something to do with electron microscopy.”

  “West where? Missouri?”

  “Colorado, I think. Maybe California. I forget.”

  “You haven’t—”

  “Seen her. Talked to her. Or had any communications with her whatsoever in four years.”

  “Jesus. Who the hell else is coming out of the woodwork? Your father? Your mother?”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Do you think a little thing like that would stop her?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You know? With my mom, maybe not.”

  Dooley called the station from his car and got Sandy’s address. It wasn’t far from Rabbitt’s church—no surprise there. We drove over. It was a nice little brownstone with a roof garden. I stifled a sudden urge to fly up and look it over.

  Dooley knocked on the door.

  The zombie equivalent of my college roommate answered the door.

  Sandy had been beautiful. A curvaceous, blue-eyed wonder whose very appearance had sheer physical impact on anyone that saw her. She had been tall and there wasn’t a man alive with the willpower to keep his eyes above her neck for more than five minutes.

  This woman was bulbous, round rolls of skin crowding her wrists and elbows. Her head seem to grow organically from a mushrooming pad of fat swelling between her shoulders. She smelled of sweet acetone and solvent, indicating some deep metabolic disorder I couldn’t even begin to understand. But I could still see Sandy’s eyes and cheekbones buried deeply in the buttery flesh.

  She looked at us, one to the other, for several seconds, not immediately registering me or the badge in Dooley’s hand.

  “Detectives Dooley and Loquess. Are you Sandra Kohl?”

  She nodded. “Loquess?” Then she saw me. “Katelin!” she squealed and enveloped me in a soft aldehyde embrace. “Is it really you?”

  “Yes,” I said, awkwardly patting her back.

  “Come in! Please come in.”

  “Do werewolves kill you when they invite you into their house?” Dooley whispered to me as we walked inside.

  “That’s vampires and you invite them in. Not the other way around.”

  The room was dark and the air heavy with some deep and abiding stink, a mix of incense and decaying onions.

  “I’d heard you lived here now.” Sandy sat on an old threadbare sofa partially covered by an ancient cotton print. I could see half the face of Jesus peeking over the back. “Please. Sit down.”

  “Ms. Kohl—” Dooley began.

  “Oh, call me Sandy. Are you with the police department, Katelin?”

  “Yes.” I found it hard to breathe.

  “I’m not at all surprised.” She set her hands on her knees. “You were always hanging out with that security guard. And working for the police department back in Columbia.”

  “Ms. Kohl—” Dooley began again.

  “Sandy,” she said shortly, sudden steel in her voice.

  “We’re looking for Pastor Rabbitt. We were told you might know something about his church.” Dooley glanced over at me. Jump in any time.

  She calmed down at once. “What do you mean?”

  “We understand you take care of the books.”

  “No,” Sandy said distinctly. “Only Pastor Rabbitt took care of the money.”

  “We’re not interested in the money,” I said hurriedly, trying to warn Dooley off with my eyes. “We need a list of the members of the congregation.”

  “Why?”

  I glanced down, trying to look sad. “You remember William Wallace?”

  She smiled. “Oh, yes. He had a beautiful singing voice.”

  “You know he was murdered?”

  She looked down and pursed her lips. “Yes. I heard.”

  “We’re looking for the murderer.”

  “No.” Sandy shook her head defiantly. “No member of Pastor Rabbitt’s congregation could ever do such a thing!”

  “Of course not,” I said soothingly. “But they might know something we can use. Something that can point us to the killer.”

  Sandy nodded doubtfully. “Pastor Rabbitt did say to help you any way I can.”

  Dooley sat up straight. “He said help the police—”

  “Oh, no,” Sandy said. “He said help Katelin.”

  “When did he tell you this?”

  “Monday.” Sandy thought for a moment. “Yes. It was Monday.”

  Dooley pounced. “That’s the day Plante was killed. Did he say where he was? Can you reach him?”

  Sandy’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think he intended me to help you.”

  “Quiet, Dooley,” I said. Back to Sandy. “It’s important that we get in contact with him.”

  Sandy smiled. “You were always so serious, Katelin. You should lighten up.”

  “I know. Do you know how to put us in contact with him?”

  “I can give him your number if he calls. But he said he might not be able to call again for some time.” She laughed quietly. “You’re both so serious.”

  Dooley started to interrupt but I glanced at him and he shut up.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get back to what we said before. Do you have an address list of the congregation? Something we can use?”

  Sandy shook her head. “Nothing like that. After all, half the congregation doesn’t have a fixed address. I have a list of names and some contact information. I don’t know if it will be of much use—”

  “Just let us have what you can.”

  She nodded and went to the back of the apartment. I could feel the floor give as she moved.

  I followed her. I didn’t think she was going to run or anything but
I’d given up predicting anything about this case. “How are you feeling?”

  Sandy was rummaging around in a box of papers. “Oh, fine. Now that Pastor Rabbitt cured me of cancer.”

  “You had cancer?”

  She nodded. “Breast cancer. But he cured me. He laid his hands on me here and here.” She pointed to her breasts. “Now I’m all better.”

  “You’ve put on a little weight.”

  “Oh, yes. From when I was sick, but I’ll get over it.” She pulled out a few pages. “Here’s the contact information. The congregation wasn’t very big—only fifty or so. But Pastor Rabbitt always said you had to start small.” Sandy handed it to me.

  I ran my eyes over it quickly. I saw Sean’s name. And Sandy’s. But no one else I knew. Thank heaven for small blessings.

  Chapter 2.5: Monday, October 25

  That was Friday.

  We worked over the weekend—we even staked out the church. But somehow Rabbitt’s flight had worked its magic on the congregation. Only a few showed up and they knew nothing.

  We put a tap on Sandy’s phone. Nothing. Rabbitt didn’t call over the weekend, anyway. But we had hopes for the week. And we had hopes he was still in the area. All of the calls to Sandy last Monday were from pay phones local to the church: one at the Brigham, two at the VA Hospital. We didn’t know where he was now but at least he was nearby then. We questioned businesses around each phone but no one remembered seeing Wallace, Rabbitt or Plante.

  By Monday, though, Dooley and I had managed to trace down some of the congregation—harder work to do than talk about. Half the contacts were out of date. Those that were still valid—sisters, landladies, parents, shelters—often didn’t know where the candidate was, didn’t care or, in a couple of cases, didn’t want to know. One woman was surprised that the candidate was alive, much less that he had listed her as a contact. A couple of people said they didn’t know the candidate at all. We didn’t believe them but at this point it didn’t look worthwhile to trace them down.

  From the contact list, we found half a dozen candidates for interviews. From those we gained a more thorough timeline.

  Tim Rabbitt had started the Church of the Living Christ a decade before. Surprisingly, he’d attended Harvard Divinity School. He’d worked in social services for a few years, then started the church. We were able to find the two original donors—a couple of young Brahmins living up on Beacon Hill. But they had no new information for us. They hadn’t been connected with the church for years.