The wind billowed out the hem of his nightshirt, and he clapped his hands down against it, looking around him for the first time and thankful that he was wearing his shorts under the nightshirt. If a police cruiser were to appear …
Hurrying now, he tucked his finger into the hole in the concrete lid of the water meter box and pulled it off, laying it on the grass. The streetlamp barely illuminated the inside of the box, which was about a foot deep, the meter itself casting a shadow across the bottom of it. He knelt against the curb, wishing he had brought the flashlight. There was movement down there, all right, small dark things creeping through the tangled roots of the Bermuda grass that had grown up through the bottom of the box. Of course there could as easily be black widows down there as roaches.
He shuddered and straightened up, looking out at the street again. Surely there was a lonely roach out and about, happy to sacrifice itself for something like this. The ringing of bells grew louder suddenly, accompanied by a random jingling, as if a Christmas-decorated horse and carriage had just then rounded the corner. Two men, he saw now, had rounded the corner and were approaching from up the street, coming along hurriedly, jingling as they came. One of them strode along a little in front of the other, and passed just then beneath a streetlight. He was heavyset and balding and wore dark clothing and spectacles—the image of Mr. Pickwick. Walt realized with a shock of recognition that the man was a priest. The other man, for God’s sake, was the Reverend Bentley, the two of them out on some kind of joint mission, probably ferreting out sinners.
Walt was seized with the sudden desire to run. Here he was in the street, barefoot, wearing a nightshirt, hunting roaches with a tennis shoe. What would he tell them? That this had something to do with sex?
Bentley spotted him and waved, and just then, as they drew near to the driveway, the priest set into a sort of dance, a fantastic, one-legged caper, waving his umbrella in the air as if he were casting out demons and hopping toward Walt with a look of wild glee on his face, his spectacles leaping on the bridge of his nose. Walt stood dumbfounded. Of all the late-night lunacy, this took the cake.
Nora’s hopscotch! The old priest was simply hopscotching. Relieved, Walt shook Bentley’s hand. Bentley was as sober-looking as Mahoney was gleeful.
“This is Walt Stebbins,” Bentley said to the priest. “The man I’ve been telling you about. Stebbins, this is Father Mahoney, from the Holy Spirit.”
“My pleasure,” the priest said. He had a firm grip. Walt saw now that there were little clutches of bells clipped to both men’s belts.
“Mr. Stebbins once donated heavily to the lunch program,” Bentley said to Mahoney. “I think we can use him if we can get him off his high horse.”
Walt grinned at him. Use him? What the hell was the man talking about?
“I haven’t hopscotched in sixty years,” the priest said, breathing heavily. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on his shirt, then put them back on.
“We must look like a couple of crazy men to you.” Bentley squinted at Walt and jingled the bells.
“No,” Walt said, “not at all.” He held onto his nightshirt, fighting the wind. “I’m hardly in a position to …” He gestured with the shoe.
“We’re ringing bells,” Bentley said. “In the middle of the night. Do you know why?”
Walt shook his head. “I guess I don’t, really.”
“Because the bells at St. Anthony’s were sabotaged and Mr. Simms was murdered. That’s right, I said murdered. Does this come as any surprise to you?”
“Well, I had no idea….” Walt said. “I haven’t read anything …”
“Of course you haven’t read anything. And you won’t, either. Do you know why he was murdered?”
Walt shrugged.
“To silence the bells.” Bentley nodded hard at him. “Church bells, Mr. Stebbins, are abhorrent to the ears of fiends and demons. Drives them mad. The streets of European cities used to be patrolled by bellmen throughout the night. Back me up here, Mahoney.”
“The Reverend Bentley is correct,” the priest said. “These bells we carry are Benedictus bells, and with them we mean to drive the demons out of Old Towne. It’s an old tradition, really, very old. ‘Mercy secure you all, and keep the goblin from you while you sleep.’ That was the chant of the bellman.”
Just then a cockroach came up out of the water meter hole and sprinted out onto the curb. Walt lunged at it, slamming it flat with the sole of the tennis shoe. He felt the cold wind on his rear end, and so he pinned down the hem of the nightshirt with his free hand again. “Got him,” Wait said weakly, noticing that Bentley was frowning at him.
A light came on in the motor home, and the curtains were pushed aside. Aunt Jinx looked out at them, and Walt waved the tennis shoe at her as naturally as he could, as if he were just going about the usual business. Father Mahoney nodded politely. She shut the curtain again and the light went off.
“I don’t suppose we’d better wake up Henry?” Bentley said to Walt.
“Better not to,” Walt said. “He turns in early.” He nudged the smashed roach with his foot in order to loosen it from the concrete. The light was still on upstairs, and he could see a shadow move in front of the window, so it was good odds that Ivy was still awake.
“We’ll tackle him tomorrow,” Bentley said.
“Good,” Walt said. “It’s getting pretty late.”
“What about you?” Bentley asked. “Are you willing to do your part?”
“Sure,” Walt told him. “I guess so. What part?”
“We’re going to run the Devil out of town. Can we count you in?”
“I could contribute something, I guess.”
“Oh, we’re not asking for money,” Mahoney said. “We’re looking for recruits.”
Walt blinked at them. He had gone through this once before with Bentley. “I don’t know …” he said.
“Of course you don’t know,” Bentley told him. “Why should you know? I’m going to tell you something now. Can you stand to hear it?”
Walt nodded, feeling a drop of rain hit the top of his head. He was damned if he’d drown to hear it.
“It was me that burglarized your garage.”
“You?” Walt asked. And of course it was true. Everything was clear to him. Obviously Bentley had gone over the fence, then circled back around the block to where Walt had run into him.
“That’s right. And by golly I’d burglarize it again if I had to. And I might, too, unless you make up your mind to come in on our side.”
“Why?” Walt asked. He knew the answer to his question even as he asked it. Of course Bentley wanted the jar. Everyone wanted the jar. Well, it belonged to Walt now, and everyone could go whistle for it.
And then he remembered—Uncle Henry had made him pitch it into the Dumpster.
“I was looking for something,” Bentley said. “I have certain … certain sources. There’s a thing that’s come into the country, into the neighborhood, encased in a jar, boxed up in painted tin. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t deal in jars very much,” Walt said evasively. “I got a case of snow globes—flamingo globes, actually, filled with water. You know the kind of thing—glitter, a palm tree.”
Bentley waved the idea away. “Don’t meddle with me, son. There’s no time for it now.”
“Why didn’t you just ask me about this jar?” Walt said. “Why break in?”
“Do you believe in the Devil?”
“I’m not sure what you …”
“Of course you’re not sure. That’s why I didn’t ask you about it.”
He was serious! Well, so was Walt. It was his garage, and by heaven it was his jar, too. Like to call it … “Who killed Mr. Simms?” Walt asked abruptly. “Do you know?”
Bentley looked at him for a moment, as if calculating, then said, “We think we do. We believe it to be Robert Argyle, the financeer.”
“Well, that’s hasty,” Mahoney said. “We don�
��t know any such thing.”
“He was an old friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Bentley asked.
“Years ago,” Walt said, turning this whole thing over in his mind.
“Well let me give you a tip, straight from the horse,” Bentley said. “He’ll kill you too. Don’t think he won’t.”
Walt realized that the shoulders of his nightshirt were wet. The rain was coming down in a mist, but harder by the moment.
“Keep a weather eye out,” Bentley said. “We’ve got work to do. We can’t stand here talking. If you find this jar, be very careful with it. Treat it like an unexploded bomb.”
“Take these,” the priest said, disconnecting the bells from his belt and handing them to Walt. “Hang them up on the porch, like wind chimes.”
Walt took them. What the hell—it couldn’t hurt.
A car turned the corner just then, from the Chapman Avenue end of the street, two hundred feet away. Its high beams were on, and Walt automatically turned his eyes away. The car accelerated suddenly, angling in toward the curb, straight at them, and Walt could see nothing but the blinding glow of its headlamps. He backpedaled, up onto the curb, felt a hand clutch the back of his nightshirt and yank him sideways. He sprawled onto his hands and knees, throwing the tennis shoe, and at the same time heard a heavy thud and squeal as the car sideswiped the curbside palm tree, then bounced down onto the road again and sped away.
Walt scrambled to his feet and helped Mahoney up. “Thanks,” he said breathlessly.
The priest nodded. “Which of them was it?” he asked Bentley.
The preacher shook his head. “I couldn’t see. Car’s probably stolen. Anyway, it didn’t have any plates. It’s the same one we saw earlier, though—I know that much. I don’t think it’s Argyle. I think it’s Nelson.”
“What on earth was that?” Aunt Jinx asked, coming around the back of the motor home now, dressed in a robe and wearing a pair of fuzzy bedroom slippers. She held a newspaper over her head to block the rain.
“Drunk driver,” Bentley said. “Looked like he fell asleep at the wheel.” He winked at Walt and then widened his eyes, as if this attempted murder were a nice illustration of what he’d just been talking about.
“Is everyone all right, then?” Jinx asked. “We’re fine,” Walt said. “No harm done.” “Then go to bed,” she said. “It’s too late for all this powwow, drunks or no drunks.” She turned around and hurried away then, and Walt heard the motor home door click shut.
“I’ll stop by tomorrow,” Bentley said meaningfully to Walt.
“Hang those bells up on the porch,” Mahoney said. “Let the wind work on them.”
The two men turned and hurried away, jingling toward the corner, and Walt grabbed the tennis shoe, then pinched up the flattened roach and dumped it into the shoe. On his way back into the house he hung the bells on a loop of bare wisteria vine. Right now he would take all this lunacy at face value. Whatever else Bentley might be, he wasn’t a liar. He believed, at least, that Argyle had murdered Simms for some kind of diabolical purpose. And with this car business … Something was going on—perhaps something deeper and darker than Walt had thought.
On a sudden impulse he laid the shoe on the porch, turned around, and stepped down onto the driveway, tiptoeing past the motor home as quickly and silently as he could and then cutting across the street fast. Bentley and the priest were nowhere to be seen in the opposite direction; they’d turned the corner, maybe heading up toward Argyle’s in order to use the bells against him. Walt shaded his face from the rain, ducking into the alley and opening the chain-link gate that cordoned off the Dumpster. He yanked a couple of trashbags out of the way, leaning over the edge of the bin, balancing there, the sodden nightshirt clinging to his legs, the scent of gin rising up around him like spilled perfume.
39
WALT RAKED LEAVES on the front lawn. It was just past noon, and the weather had cleared up some, although there was more rain forecast. It was going to be a wet Christmas. And a strange one.
It seemed to Walt that last night’s adventure out on the sidewalk might have been a fabulous dream: the streetlight under a black sky, Father Mahoney hopscotching toward him down the dark sidewalk, Bentley with all his wild talk about murder and demons, the mysterious car with the license plates removed. The little cluster of bells that he’d hung from the wisteria was gone, vanished in the night, as if all of it, bells included, were a figment—all of it except the return of the thing in the jar, which was in his possession once again.
Throwing it away had clearly been a bad idea after all. Argyle wanted it. Bentley and Mahoney wanted it. So who was Walt Stebbins to be hasty with the thing? And right now it looked to him as if throwing it out was every bit as hasty as … what? Using it, maybe. Whatever that really consisted of. He wasn’t entirely sure yet, not authentically so.
The bluebird was buried in the ground now, beneath one of the stepping-stones that led back to the garden shed. Henry knew about the tackle box, and that compromised it as a hiding place. Not that Walt didn’t trust Henry, who, after all, thought that the jar was still in the Dumpster, but there were too many strange forces at work in the neighborhood to be careless. As an extra precaution, he had dropped the Sprouse Reitz parakeet into a pint-size Mason jar, filled the bottle with gin, and put it into the bluebird’s tin box, then put the fake into the tackle box. If anyone broke in and stole it now—Argyle or Bentley—they could have it with his compliments.
He raked a pile of sodden leaves into an oversized plastic dustpan and dumped them into the barrel, and just then a horn tooted. It was the Reverend Bentley himself, just like he’d promised, pulling in at the curb, his face full of the same determination and urgency that Walt remembered from last night.
Walt waved at Bentley, who climbed out of the car and gestured at the motor home. Walt nodded. Henry was in. He had been out for a couple of hours that morning, but had come home an hour ago looking a little under the weather and had gone into the motor home and pulled the curtains. Whatever fires had been burning in him yesterday afternoon had dimmed considerably. Jinx was home, too, inside the house now, washing dishes.
The telephone rang, and Walt dropped the rake and went in through the screen door just as Uncle Henry appeared on the driveway, apparently having come out of the backyard. Jinx had already answered the phone. She handed Walt the receiver and went back to scrubbing dishes at the sink.
“Hello,” he said into the receiver.
For a moment there was no answer, and then a voice said, “Walt? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” Walt said, “who’s …” But then he recognized the voice. It was Jack, liquored up. Jack! How the hell you doing? I figured you might call yesterday, like you said. The kids aren’t here now.”
“I’ll be the goddamn judge of that,” Jack said.
“What’s wrong?” Walt said. “Something up?”
“Don’t give me any goddamn talk,” Jack said to him. “I got through to Darla this morning. No more happy crap, man. That was all bullshit the other night. Shinola. No one does me like this.”
“Like what?” Walt asked.
“Like you know goddamn well what. What I call this is kidnapping, plain and simple. You took a man’s children.”
‘ ‘What I call this is drunk on your ass, Jack. Nora and Eddie are Darla’s children, and she asked us to look after them.”
“I raised those kids, damn it. I paid their bills, and I know my rights.”
“You don’t have any rights, Jack, except the right to sober up. It’s just past noon, for God’s sake. Put the bottle down. Give it a rest. You’ll talk more sense when you’re sober.”
“There’s a few people I’m going to talk a hell of a lot of sense to,” Jack said. “Or else my lawyer will. What I want you to do is have Eddie and Nora ready to go. Whatever crap they brought along, have that ready, too. I’ll be around to pick ’em up.”
“Don’t waste your time, Jack. You can’t have them.”
>
“Look, fuck you and fuck whatever game you’re playing. They’re my kids. I’m the only father they ever had.”
“Then that’s a hell of a dirty shame.”
“What the hell do you know about it? You don’t have any kids. It takes a man to raise kids. I don’t know what the hell you are, living off your wife, out in the garage all day yanking the goddamn crank, but you don’t have any right to keep a man away from his kids. I want ’em now. If I have to bring a cop along I’ll do it.”
“Bring a cop, Jack. You’re drunk as a pig. I wouldn’t trust you with a box full of tin bugs.”
“You listen …” Jack started to say.
“Shut the hell up,” Walt said, his voice perfectly even. “I want to ask you something about being a man. Where the hell were you all day yesterday? You call up night before last worried about Nora and Eddie, but you don’t want to talk to them—you’ll call them tomorrow. But where the hell are you tomorrow? Sloshed. Isn’t that right? You’ve been living on pretzels and salted peanuts? Vitamin C out of the lime slice? I didn’t even bother to tell the kids you called, because I knew you wouldn’t call back. You’re a king-hell asshole, Jack. Maybe you get it naturally. Maybe it comes out of a bottle. I don’t give a damn either way. But you better get a handle on it. Because until you do, I swear to God I won’t let you near these children. What you’ll get if you come around here is a fist in the face.”
“You can’t …”
“And fuck you too.”
He hung up the phone without listening to another word. His hand was shaking and he could barely breathe. He’d lost it, gone right over the top. And now what had he done? Kidnapped the kids? Maybe Jack did have some kind of rights. You pay property taxes long enough on a house, and you own the house; did Jack own the kids in that same way? He realized that Jinx was looking at him wide-eyed.
“I’m sorry about the language,” he said, shaking his head. “That was Jack. He’s been drinking for a week now. Darla’s gone back east to get away from him. That’s why Ivy and I have the kids. I’ve got a real attitude about all of it.”
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