Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “He phoned from College Park,” Webb said. “Not far from Hartsfield International.”

  “Then you can catch him,” I said. “You can send people down there to stake out the place and grab him.”

  Niedrach said, “If he were a complete dolt. But he isn’t. The number belongs to a pay phone in a public booth off Virginia Avenue. The College Park police checked it out, but Puddicombe hadn’t hung around long enough to say hello to them.”

  “Then what the hell good does knowing where he called from do us?” I asked. “He’s gone, and we don’t know where.”

  Investigator Webb, the agent with the Gus Grissom haircut, said, “We know he’s in Greater Atlanta. And we’ve got people in College Park asking questions of all the folks who might’ve seen Puddicombe using the booth. It’s on a sidewalk by a fast-food place, and the call came at a busy time in the afternoon. There’s a lead or two, Mr. Loyd. We expect something to break tonight.”

  “And just what is it you expect to break?”

  My question elicited embarrassed silence for an answer. No one in the Montaraz kitchen knew what to expect. Despite his Klan activities in Hothlepoya County, Craig was mostly an unknown quantity to these officers. The unpredictability of his behavior—the virulence of his racial and sexual hangups—could not fail to disturb us. My anxiety level was steadily mounting. That much I knew, but not a lot more.

  Taking pedantic care with his phrasing, Le May said, “Seeing first that the perpetrator is still out there and, second, that his whereabouts aren’t fully pinpointed, we thought it best to have the Montarazes obey his last demand.”

  “The bozo’s gettin’ ready to do something,” Bilker Moody said. “He’s just gettin’ everybody in place so the show can start. He likes theatrics, this guy does.”

  “A surprise,” Niedrach said speculatively. “A surprise.”

  Niedrach, Hammond, and Le May left the house to continue their investigative work elsewhere. Webb stayed to monitor the telephone and the recorder to which it was wired. Bilker and Adam went into the studio to play several tension-defusing games of Ping-Pong. Even in the kitchen, I heard the racket they made grunting, trading slams, and throwing their bodies across the table to return drop shots just over the net. RuthClaire, who might have been expected to want some time alone with Adam, approved their play. Just the simple act of spectating seemed to calm her nerves.

  I stayed in the kitchen with Webb—Ping-Pong is not my game—and asked him what leads they had.

  His mouth began to move even before any words came out. “Woman working at the fast-food place next to the phone booth. This gal says she saw a guy in a painter’s white coveralls go past the front window about the time our call was made. Bearded fellow. Young. She remembers because her boss had talked about repainting the divider lines in the parking lot. She wondered if the guy was there to do that. He must not’ve been, though, because there was only that one time he went by and the divider lines in the parking lot still haven’t been repainted.”

  “You think Craig’s wearing a painter’s coveralls?”

  “Her description of the fella sounds like Puddicombe.”

  “Did your witness happen to see what he was driving?”

  “Her position behind the counter didn’t let her, no.”

  “That’s one helluva lead. If he keeps his coveralls on and walks around the city everywhere he goes, you’ll nab him before the year’s out.”

  Webb smiled. “Touché.” His FBI affiliation had not gone to his head. Provincial rather than Prussian in his slacks-and-sports-jacket uniform, he had no trouble admitting that this investigation had him groping down one blind alley after another. His easy-going agreeability irritated me.

  So I wandered down the hall to Bilker’s pantry headquarters.

  If Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.

  A comforting thought. I entered the pantry and sat in front of the TV monitors on the plywood counter. Why hadn’t the FBI set up in here? Well, Bilker had denied them access. The pantry belonged to him, and he was responsible for security, just as they were for the investigation of Paulie’s kidnapping. One of Bilker’s screens, I noticed, featured a continuous panoramic display of Hurt Street, while another had its eye on the well-lit MARTA station on DeKalb Avenue.

  “Comfy, fella?”

  I looked over my shoulder. It was Bilker, his T-shirt three different shades of dark green and his face as red and shiny as a candy apple. His expression was malevolent. I hoped that he remembered Adam’s good opinion of me.

  The TV monitor came to my rescue. “Look.” I pointed. “Somebody’s coming.”

  In fact, two cars were pulling up in front of the house: a late-model Plymouth glinting indigo in the actinic glare of the MARTA lamps and, right behind it, a blue VW beetle of older vintage. Caroline Hanna climbed gingerly out of the Volkswagen; then, as if they had taken a moment to settle a minor disagreement, Le May and Niedrach hatched from opposite doors of the Plymouth. All three people started up the walk to the house together, and another monitor picked them up.

  “Whyn’t you go greet your sweetie ’fore I yank this here chair out from under your tail?”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Only by coincidence had Caroline and the agents arrived at the same time. She was surprised to see me, even more surprised to see Adam. She had come to provide RuthClaire with female companionship for the rest of the evening. But face to face with me again, Caroline was shy. She hoped to let her entire greeting consist of a friendly pat on my arm, but I pulled her to me and brushed her forehead with my lips. Niedrach interrupted to say that he and Le May had to talk to me in private, and Adam led Caroline into the studio.

  “What is it?” I asked the investigators.

  “We want you to come with us,” Le May said.

  “Where? What for?”

  Adam returned as if to eavesdrop on the rest of our talk. Le May hesitated, afraid to proceed in front of the habiline, and my stomach clenched.

  “You must tell me, too,” Adam said. “I am deserving to hear.”

  Niedrach nodded. “We want to see if Mr. Loyd can make an identification for us.”

  “What kind of identification?” I asked.

  “Take a ride with us,” Niedrach said. “We’ll show you.”

  “I am going, too,” Adam declared.

  Le May started to protest, but Niedrach shook his head. So, after telling the others we’d be back shortly, the four of us went out into the muggy summer evening under smog-blurred stars and got into the FBI agent’s Plymouth. A mosquito was trapped in the back seat with Adam and me, and we listened to its faint but annoying whine until the habiline jerked his head and snapped his mouth shut on the insect. He settled back into his seat. Helplessly, I stared at him.

  “Forgive me, Mister Paul. I am edgy this night.”

  Le May spoke into a hand-held mike from under the dash. “We’re on our way.”

  Static answered.

  At the bottom of Hurt Street, Le May turned right on Waverly, part of a historic enclave dense with trees and Victorian houses in various stages of decay or renovation. From Waverly, we wound onto the southwest-to-northeast diagonal of Euclid Avenue, eventually creeping uphill past a row of shops to the brightness of Little Five Points. We crossed Moreland and dipped away from the bustle of the Points into a neighborhood of shabby clapboard bungalows and red-brick apartment buildings from the 1940s. I had no idea where we were going, but Adam seemed to.

  “The Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” Niedrach replied. “How did you know?”

  “Here, for many Sundays and a few troubled weekdays, Miss RuthClaire and I took our church before my surgery. I liked it. It had no rigid doctrines and welcomed anyone who had a spiritual hungriness.”

  Presently, then, Le May let the Plymouth coast to rest behind a Fulton County police car and an ambulance parked beside the Little Five Points Unaff
iliated Meditation Center. A host of people stood on the narrow front lawn. The blue-and-white flasher on the squad car picked these people out of the darkness, again and again. The door to the Meditation Center—once, I could tell, a single-story brick house like many other houses here—stood open. The stained-glass fanlight above the door was illuminated from behind by a cruel electric glare. Obviously, the police had been here a while.

  Niedrach told Adam and me that when we entered the building, we would see just what the Meditation Center director, Ryan Bynum, had found upon entering its sanctuary at 8:47 P.M. for a routine check of the premises. The policemen working this crime had restored the scene to the physical conditions that had greeted Bynum.

  Le May had already threaded his way through some of the teen-age gawkers on the lawn. He beckoned us after. Adam and I reluctantly obeyed. One of the young people, recognizing Adam, came forward with a copy of Newsweek and asked him to autograph its cover. Strutting uncertainly, the kid looked scarcely more than fourteen.

  “You’re impeding a murder investigation,” Niedrach told him.

  “Four letters,” the kid snarled. “Just his goddamn first name.”

  Distractedly, Adam signed the magazine, printing ADAM beneath the image of his naked feet. The kid grumbled thanks and moved back into the crowd loitering nearby.

  “He’s going to sell it to a speculator for two hundred or so bucks,” Niedrach said.

  Adam shrugged.

  In the church’s foyer, a man with a gold teardrop in his left ear lobe hugged Adam possessively. Tall but graceful, he had to stoop to do so. I knew without being introduced that this was Ryan Bynum, the Center’s director.

  “Good to see you again, Adam,” Bynum said. “You’ve been away too long.”

  Adam said, “I am not here to rejoin, but—”

  “You can talk! My God, it’s a miracle, Adam!”

  “—to accompany Mister Paul. These agents think he may be able to identify the victim.”

  Bynum was beside himself over Adam’s ability to speak, but, upon receiving a condensed version of the events that had brought it about, began to discuss tonight’s untoward happenings: “Some churches get firebombed. Some get defaced with graffiti. But ours draws a more creative, more neurotic, kind of vandal.” Bynum was sidling along the foyer wall so that we could squeeze past him into the living-room-sized sanctuary. “Whoever did it, well, he ought to be a member. He needs us. If not us, then serious, serious therapy.”

  The sanctuary, or main meditation room, was brightly lit—a departure from the way Bynum had found it only an hour ago, a departure from the aqueous gloom into which members had to tiptoe when they wanted to meditate or commune. Because of the lights, we could look across the sanctuary to the dais under a huge bronze mandala and see exactly what Niedrach and Le May wanted us to see, namely, the murder victim, who reposed in a leather lounger that someone had wrestled onto the dais so that it sat there like a laid-back throne.

  Adam and I exchanged puzzled looks because a shaggy, orangish-red orangutan sprawled in the lounger. The creature wore a set of headphones, but its posture betrayed its lifelessness. Upside-down in its lap was a naked plastic doll: a black baby doll for a black child. It had fallen across the orangutan’s lap so that its head was wedged between one shaggy thigh and the lounger’s leather armrest.

  “It’s a costume,” Niedrach said. “Mr. Bynum found the victim this way. The head comes off.” He wove his way through rows of loungers and divans to the dais. There, gripping the orangutan head at the neck, he turned it—as if trying to unscrew a diving helmet from a diving suit. A moment later, he lifted the head clear and gestured at the startling human visage protruding from the costume’s neck hole.

  It was Nancy Teavers. Her head shone like a large mottled egg. Either she or Craig had shaved off every lock of her hair. The spiky white coiffure she had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances had been a wig. Whatever the case then, tonight she was bald. Her eyes bulged. Bruises discolored her cheeks. Her lips were bloated. I still recognized her as the unhappy waitress who had decided to go west to make her fortune. Instead, she had gone to Craig Puddicombe, and Craig had turned her into a punkette, a babysitter for the kidnapped T. P., and an orangutan. What did this grotesque progression mean? Perhaps a bizarre homicidal performance-art parody of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.

  “Do you remember his first call?” I asked Niedrach. “He claimed he didn’t do violence.”

  “We all knew he was lying . . . to himself as much as to us.”

  Adam, who’d gone forward, started to pick the doll out of the victim’s orangutan lap, but Le May caught his wrist. A Fulton County detective, he said, would have to bag the doll for forensic analysis. Fingerprints, Mr. Montaraz, fingerprints.

  “It proves our Paulie is dead,” Adam said. “That’s the doll’s terrible meaning.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Ryan Bynum said. “How could it mean that? You don’t believe in voodoo, do you?” Ignorant of the kidnapping, Bynum had jumped to the conclusion that Adam was surrendering to an atavistic Carib superstition.

  My unofficial identification made, the Fulton County detectives shooed us out so they could finish their work. As we stood on the lawn, two men with a stretcher entered the building and reappeared a few moments later carrying the costumed Nancy. The ambulance at curbside took her in and departed with her without benefit of siren or flasher. After all, what was the hurry?

  “It looks as if she was strangled,” Le May told us. “But it didn’t happen here. The only sign of struggle has to do with rearranging furniture. No breaking and entering, either. Puddicombe used somebody’s membership card, opened the back door from the inside, and dragged Nancy in from the rear drive.”

  “I am so sorry for her,” Adam said.

  We left the site in Le May’s Plymouth, and Niedrach told us that shortly before noon, just three or four hours after most newsstands and drugstores had begun selling the latest Newsweek, Craig had rented the orangutan suit from Atlanta Costume Company. A clerk there had given detectives a good description of the renter. Bearded. Young. Blue-eyed. He hadn’t been wearing painter’s coveralls, though, but toast-colored, pleated pants and a white T-shirt that had left his midriff bare.

  He had claimed to be a student at Georgia Tech, wanting the costume for some kind of fraternity prank. He had paid a deposit in cash—rather than with a check and the supporting evidence of a student ID, but the address he had given as his parents’ seemed more than peculiar in retrospect: it was Adam and RuthClaire’s address on Hurt Street. His name he had given as Greg Burdette, and for that he had shown a current driver’s license with a photo of his own likeness. He had struck the clerk as an oddly somber type to be renting an orangutan costume, but she had rationalized this anomaly of bearing as an attempt to complete the rental with a deadpan savoir-faire. In fact, once he had left the front counter, she had burst out laughing at his successful act.

  “Did she see what he was driving?” (My obsessive concern.)

  “Unfortunately, no,” Niedrach confessed.

  Adam said, “No one here should tell Miss RuthClaire what we saw at Meditation Center. Already, she has enough to cope with.”

  I looked at Adam. I had no doubt that in his mind’s eye was a picture of that black doll upside-down in Nancy Teavers’s lap.

  But back at the house, RuthClaire got the truth from Adam in five minutes. He could not lie to her, and she would not be put off with stalling tactics or verbal evasions.

  “You didn’t think I could handle the news, is that it?”

  “I wanted only to—”

  “To keep it from me. That’s sweet. But I’m not a little girl. I’m an adult.”

  Small and forlorn, Adam stood in shadow with his back to the beaverboard panel in the downstairs studio, his profile at once heroic and prehistorically feral.

  “Nancy dead, strangled, dressed in a monkey suit, put on display in
Ryan Bynum’s Meditation Center. But why? To horrify us? To put us on notice?” RuthClaire paced among her canvases.

  “A puke-livered terror tactic,” Bilker said from the far side of the big room.

  “Paulie’s dead already,” RuthClaire told us, ignoring the security guard. “Or else Craig plans to kill him this evening. We’ll find the body tomorrow.”

  “That’s a defeatist look at the situation, ma’am,” Le May said.

  “You think I like it? I don’t. It makes my heart swell up and my rib cage ache.”

  “Mine, too,” Adam said—so simply that I was moved for both of them.

  “It’s the waiting that’s killing me,” RuthClaire said. “Craig’s told us what he’s going to do, and we’re still waiting. We frail females—” putting her hand to her brow like Scarlett O’Hara—“are supposed to be able to bide our time, but how you go-git-’em macho fellas can take it is beyond me.”

  “This such fella takes it very badly,” Adam said.

  RuthClaire went to him, and they embraced. Then she turned to Caroline. “Come upstairs, Caroline. I want to lie down, but it would be nice to have somebody to talk to.”

  The two women left. I sipped at a Scotch on the rocks that Bilker had made for me. I felt a hand on my arm. It belonged to Adam. Its grip on my biceps tightened inexorably. “You’ve had enough, Mister Paul.”

  “I haven’t even had one. Sit down. Bilker’ll fix you right up.”

  “Abraxas,” Adam said.

  “What?”

  “We should go to Abraxas. I, Mister Paul, am going there. Please come with me. It is what needs to be done.”

  “What’s going on at Abraxas? Aren’t they closed on Mondays, like the High and most independent galleries? Besides, they’d all be closed by now.”