by C I Dennis
“Her dog,” I said.
Goody looked displeased. The three women said nothing. “This is for her security, Vince. I don’t want people knowing where she is. If somebody told you, we’ll have to move her.”
“Why?”
“She’s at risk,” Goody said. “I told you that this would take some explaining.”
“You mean because she’s a junkie?”
He took a few moments to collect himself before he spoke, which is a characteristic of the wealthy and powerful, and also of some of the more calculating criminal-types that I’d met over the years. They choose their words carefully.
“Cindy told me that you’d been shot in the head, but it obviously hasn’t affected your abilities.”
“The porn mag, in your foyer,” I said. “Page twenty-three. Find a pretty girl, fuck her up on heroin or crack, and get some pictures. Is that a sideline of yours?”
The color rushed to Clement Goody’s face. It was almost worth the hours that I’d had to wait before grilling him. “The magazine was a gift from Grace,” he said. “The photographs were taken in London, the summer before last, when she was studying there, and yes, she had a drug problem. The NCLS found her, and I took her on personally. We saved her.”
“NCLS?”
“The New Commitment and Love Society of Jesus Christ. We are the Lord’s servants, helping young women in need.”
“Everyone at this table was a junkie, as you call us,” Cindy Charbonneau said. If Goody had appeared displeased before, Cindy stared across the table like she was about to hurl a plate of food at me. “The Love Society is the only reason that I’m not dead, and the same is true for my sister. So don’t fucking jump to conclusions, OK?”
“You can tell her grandmother that she’s safe, Vince,” Goody said. “I’m sure you want to get home to Florida.”
“Why does she have a gun in her car? And a wad of cash?”
“That came from me. Protection.”
“Protection from what?”
“Who told you she was here?”
“Her dog,” I said. “He smelled her scent on my trousers.”
“Is that the truth?” Goody asked. “I need to know. Someone else didn’t tell you?”
“Yes, it’s the truth,” I said.
He looked relieved. “She’s had death threats,” he said. “She won’t tell us from whom, but she’s terrified. We took her in two weeks ago, and she can stay here as long as she needs to. She used to come over from the college with Karen a couple times a week, so she’s comfortable here. She participated in the shows.”
“Shows?”
He took a sip of his water. “Do you know what the cure for heroin addiction is, Vince? You’re a former policeman. You’ve seen addiction.”
Seen it and done it, I thought. I’d had a fling with oxycodone several years back. Modern pharmacology had made it easy to ruin your life. “I know a little about it, yes. There are different treatments. Different approaches.”
“Love,” Clement Goody said. He leaned forward, his face reflecting the candlelight. “Nothing else works. Not permanently. You have to commit yourself to the unconditional love of Jesus Christ, both giving it and receiving it.”
“Religion works for some people.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” His voice had now risen to the volume of a preacher addressing his flock. “You commit with your whole self. Your soul and your flesh. You give your body up unto the Lord, just like his Son did for us. You take communion of one another. Love, sex, forgiveness, and the strength to go on without the drugs. All wrapped up in one package. That’s what we do here. Believe me, I’ve known a lot of addicts too, and this is the only thing that works every time.”
“Praise Jesus!” Lila said, and I suddenly felt like I was in one of those European films where everyone is bonkers except for the narrator. Did he just say sex? Was I really getting a mini-sermon from a bare-chested seventy-year-old in a Rumpelstiltskin outfit?
“Forgive me, Vince,” Goody said. “Here I am, talking religion at the supper table. I just wanted to explain that Grace is in our care. She’ll be safe now. I trust you about the dog. You can tell her grandmother that she’s all right, but keep her whereabouts confidential.”
“Did you tell John Pallmeister about the death threats?”
“Who?”
“The State Police investigator you spoke with today.”
“No, I didn’t. And please don’t.”
“Why not? They can trace these things and find the person.”
“I don’t trust the police.”
“Clement, you and I are going to make a deal. I’ll keep that information to myself, but I want to see Grace Hebert right now, and then I’ll leave.”
“Not yet,” Lila said. “Thursday is our dance night.”
“No,” Karen said. “Donald is dead. We can’t do this.”
Clement Goody raised his palms into the air. “We will demonstrate our love for Donald Lussen,” he said. “Donald was one of us, and this evening we will celebrate his life.”
“Clement—” Karen began.
The older man interrupted her. “Y’all finish your meal,” he said. “It’s show time.”
*
I was the sole occupant of a twelve-seat theater that Clement Goody had built underneath the addition to his house. The seats were softly padded armchairs with side tables to hold refreshments: mine was a snifter of Armagnac that Goody had served me, despite my protests, before he and the girls had disappeared backstage. Soft music played through speakers in the ceiling while I waited for the heavy, plush curtain to open. The mini-theater was dark except for the faint glow that came from a line of gold-painted scallop shells along the walls.
The lights went out, the music came up, and the curtains parted.
Goody was the first act, clad in the leather get-up. He held up two translucent globes, illuminated from within by colored LEDs and attached to his wrists by a length of rope. He began to whirl them around in circles in the near-darkness of the theater, and the effect was amazing. He had chosen a thumping, bass-heavy electronic piece as the soundtrack, which added to the intensity of the performance. Goody could make the globes spin over his head and under his legs, crisscross each other, and change colors while he pranced over the floor. I had followed him into the home theater in no mood for entertainment, but this was impressive, and it explained the bizarre leather outfit: Goody was a showman, and these were his gig clothes.
He concluded his act with a standing backflip while still spinning the globes. I couldn’t help but clap my hands when he landed it. The piece ended and the theater went dark again; the only sound was my solitary applause. The house lights turned on, and Goody came out from backstage and took the armchair beside me.
“Impressive,” I said. “What are those?”
“They’re called Pod Poi. I use the flaming kind when we’re outdoors. Cubes dipped in kerosene.” He took a sip of his water, and the lights went down again as more pulsating electronic music came on the sound system.
This time the stage was bare except for thin spears of blue light from above. I heard a hissing noise as a puff of artificial fog drifted across the floor of the performance area. One by one, four women entered from backstage, each dressed in a shimmering silver bodysuit and wrapped in long scarves that floated behind. They began to dance, using the scarves to trail circles and patterns around each other. The women wore black masks, but I could recognize Cindy, Karen, and Lila from their shapes. The fourth girl was a brunette, with an ease of movement that made the room feel elegant. It was Grace, and the young woman lived up to her name: she was the most effortless dancer that I had ever seen.
Goody leaned over. “I deliver on my promises,” he said.
“She’s amazing.”
“Do you want her?”
“Pardon me?”
He grinned. “Do you want to make love to her?”
“No,” I said. And now I got it.
I had been invited to a sex party, just like Clement Goody’s housecleaner had described to everyone in Johnson.
“She’s yours for the asking,” he said, and he leaned back into his chair. “You can choose any of them, Vince. They need your love. You’re helping them stay clean. It’s God’s will.”
God’s will? That would be a one-eighty from what the nuns had drummed into me in my childhood years. God didn’t have anything to do with girlie shows that I knew of, and I didn’t want to be part of anyone’s drug-rehab-sex-fantasy world, nor was I a likely candidate anyway. I was a middle-aged, semi-disabled P.I. with a penchant for screwing up my personal life, and this freak show suddenly had a flashing neon sign above the stage that was saying: Get The Hell Out Of Here.
“I have to go,” I said.
“The door is locked,” Goody said. The light from the stage illuminated his face, which looked tired. The grin was gone. “You can leave when we’re finished. Please don’t be rude.”
My cop brain kicked in: OK, I’m locked in here, what are the options? Do I strong-arm him? Put him in a headlock until he opens the door? Would there be another door backstage? Or am I being paranoid, and the guy is just a garden-variety pervert, and when the show is over I’ll just head down the driveway and go home like a good boy?
The music swelled in intensity. One by one the dancers disappeared backstage and then reappeared with the scarves but minus the bodysuits or any other clothing. Their movements became more erotic, and their hands caressed each other as they executed dance steps that you would not see on Lawrence Welk. Each of the women approached us and gave us a personal display, which motivated Goody to get up from his chair and gyrate while I stayed where I was and watched. It might have been stimulating, but I felt like a lab rat. I don’t like being locked in. Clement began to shed his own clothing, and I took that as my cue.
I walked to the back of the room and tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Goody had lied, although he had kept his promise to show me that Grace Hebert was in his house. I looked back toward the stage where the five of them were dancing to the pounding music, and I realized that I had completed my assignment. I had found Grace, and I would report back to Mrs. Tomaselli, although I had no idea what I would tell her.
*
The Hummer barreled down the driveway so fast that I had to leap into the tall grass to get out of the way. Had I pissed off Clement Goody so much that he was trying to run me over?
I’d made it halfway down the hill to get back to my rental car and my dog, whose bladder would by now be the size of a weather balloon. It took another five minutes of walking after the Hummer had buzzed me, but when I reached the car and opened the door to let Chan out, he was gone. No dog, no bag of kibble, no water bowl. Holy crap. I checked behind the seat for the .44 magnum revolver. Also gone. At least I had transferred the money to my wallet.
For the second time tonight I considered my options. There weren’t any, other than to drive up to the house, interrupt whatever merriment might be going on, and kick some ass until I found out what had just happened, and why. Or, I could call it a night, flop into some local motel, and kick some ass for breakfast. Either way, I was in a foul mood, and Goody had to be the cause of it. I was ready to take one of his little swinging rope lights and wrap it around his neck.
I started the car and prepared to drive back to the house, but as soon as I turned the headlights on I knew what had happened, because a message had been scrawled on the windshield in red lipstick:
I don’t want to be found.
Grace Hebert had been driving the Hummer. She’d stopped at my car before I got down the driveway, and grabbed the gun and the dog. I had spooked her, and she had flown. Why?
Meanwhile, I had figured something else out: Grace was the one who had hit me on the head at Prospect Rock. She had been at Goody’s while the rest of the crew was away, and she had access to the Hummer. Lussen must have tipped her off, and my rental car with New York plates would have been easy to spot.
Grace could have pushed me over the cliff on that spectacular autumn afternoon, but she didn’t, because she wasn’t a killer. She just wanted to get me off of her trail. She was a frightened young woman, and Clement Goody with all his money, his reassurances, and his religion couldn’t make the fear go away.
I had lost her again, and I was twice as worried as I had been before.
FRIDAY
I considered myself released from my promise to keep Grace’s whereabouts confidential, seeing how she was gone. I had spent the night in my car at the bottom of the driveway in case she came back, but she hadn’t, and if she was getting death threats the police needed to know. Lieutenant John Pallmeister answered his phone at six in the morning sounding wide awake.
“Where are you?” I asked him.
“At my desk. Where are you?”
“At the bottom of Clement Goody’s driveway, freezing. I camped out in my car.”
“Why?”
“Because Grace Hebert was in the house, but she took off. She has her dog and a .44 magnum with her.”
“What’s going on, Vince?”
“She’s been getting death threats,” I said. “Goody was hiding her at his place. He’s a wingnut, by the way. A rich one.”
“They’re the worst kind,” Pallmeister said. “He didn’t give up much about Lussen. He said they were acquainted because he supported the theater program at the college.”
“He has another professor living at his place. You might want to go up there again and squeeze them harder.”
“Yes, I might.”
“Do me a favor? Have your people look for the Hummer. I’ll email you the plate number. And I’d really like to see Grace Hebert’s phone records and location data.”
“I can get that,” the lieutenant said. “You want to stop by my office?”
“No, I’m going to hang out here and freeze for a while longer in case she comes back.”
“I’ll call you if we find out anything. And cheer up. It’s supposed to get into the forties today.”
“Oh, great,” I said. “I’ll put on my shorts.”
Stakeouts remind me of detention back in parochial school. There was nothing to do to keep me busy. I’d taken a break from my former knitting hobby, figuring that the wool was better off on the sheep. I didn’t have a book to read, I’d slept fitfully, wrapped in a blanket that I’d put down for Chan, and I needed a shower, a shave, a quart of hot coffee, and a couple dozen donuts if I was going to continue here. Maybe I could call the nearest bakery and arrange for an airdrop.
Four hours later, still no sign of Grace. I took off the blanket and started the car. I would return to my mother’s house, clean up, and regroup. Damn. If I had stayed the night at Clement Goody’s house I might now be in postcoital bliss under the sheets with one of the Charbonneau twins, peeling grapes to pop into each other’s mouth. But I was glad that I’d declined, and it wasn’t because I was being a prude. Sex complicates things. The biggest lie in the world is no strings attached, because intimacy is always a commitment. And that isn’t the Catholic in me talking; it’s from lessons learned the hard way.
I changed my plan when I saw Karen Charbonneau come careening through the open gate in her Jaguar. It was an older model but was still a nice ride for a college professor. She didn’t notice me, tucked back under the shade tree. She drove like she was late for something, and I guessed that it was work. Unshaven or not, I decided that I would get a coffee somewhere, drive over to the college, and drop in on her. She and I had enjoyed a good conversation before dinner, and during the so-called dancing part of the evening she had looked uncomfortable. I also knew that she’d once had a drug problem, and I wondered if that had been on her résumé at the college. Not that I was going to blackmail her, but there would be some implicit pressure just by showing up at her workplace. When someone’s life is at risk, I’m not above being a jerk.
*
Karen Charbonneau’s administrative assistan
t had been crying. She’d made no attempt to hide her emotions, and neither had the steady trickle of students who had come to the faculty offices to talk with anybody they could find in an attempt to process the tragedy of the day before. Donald Lussen’s murder had left shock waves that were still reverberating through the college. The campus was still under siege: reporters and camera operators were wandering the grounds, and I’d had to pass through a phalanx of state cops and Lamoille County deputies to get in. My first stop was Duffy Kovich’s office, but he wasn’t there. I’d wanted to get him up to speed and put him on the lookout for Grace.
Instead, I was now in the foyer of the drama department, waiting my turn to see the department head. Three students were in front of me, and the woman at the desk had told us that everyone was allotted ten minutes, so I had half an hour to kill. I spent it by nodding off in my chair until I was awakened by Karen Charbonneau’s gentle nudge on my shoulder.
“You must be chronically short on sleep,” she said. “You did this yesterday. Come into my office.”
“Sorry,” I said. I followed her into a space that was larger than Donald Lussen’s quarters and was furnished in a jumble of well-worn office gear that might have come from the Goodwill store. Stuff was scattered everywhere, and I had to move a stack of papers to sit down. Professor Charbonneau may have kept scrupulous care of her face and body, but her office looked like a teenager’s bedroom.
“You snore,” she said as she sat down at her desk.
“That’s why I left,” I said. “If I’d stayed, nobody would have gotten any sleep.”
“Clement said that he offered you—he—”
“He said that I could take any one of you to bed.”
“But you left.”
“I’m old school. Sorry.”
“No need to be,” she said. “Out of curiosity, who would you have chosen?”
Now that’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t question, and I wasn’t going to touch it. Besides, she was suddenly blushing, and I hadn’t expected that reaction from a woman who was certainly no ingénue. “I’ll take the fifth on that,” I said.