The bishop was a tall old man, nearly as thin as Carpenter, with white hair brushed back in creamy waves and a face dark as hickory and falling away to the white shackle of his clerical collar. He rose from behind a mahogany desk, wearing a black cassock that swept to the floor and made him look like something not bound to the earth. The room was large and square and smelled of pipe tobacco and leather from the books on the built-in shelves. A large crucifix carved from a single block of wood hung on the wall behind the desk. Carpenter entered behind Ralph and closed the door.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Poteet,” said the bishop. “Please sit down.”
“Thank Ben Franklin.” But he settled into a deep leather chair that gripped his buttocks like a big hand in a soft glove. He kept his hat on.
“Have you been in an accident?”
“Just my face.”
The bishop lowered himself into the big swivel chair behind the desk, his back as straight as the crucifix.
“I’m grateful for this opportunity to thank you in person for your discretion this morning,” he said. “The Church has few enough friends this season. Are you by any chance Catholic?”
“Nope. Too much kneeling.”
The bishop nodded as if in agreement. “I’m very disappointed with Monsignor Breame. I’d hoped he would assume my post at the head of the diocese.”
“I guess he thought he found a better place to put his post.”
“Yes. Well, now I must begin the process all over again.”
“You bucking for cardinal?”
He smiled. “I suppose you’ve shown yourself worthy of some confidence. As a matter of fact, His Holiness did say something about the red hat in my presence during his visit here last month. Of course, it’s far from official.”
“I bet you got your plane ticket and everything.”
“Don’t interrupt His Excellency.”
“It’s all right, Carpenter. If I weren’t patient I’d hardly be a candidate.”
Ralph said, “Your right bower cashing in his chips in some hooker’s bed wouldn’t sit so good with Rome, I bet. I guess that’s why you tried to croak me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Carpy there didn’t do his homework. Thought I was Lyla’s pimp or something instead of her neighbor and that I shared her apartment. Which he rigged to blow up in my face, only it blew up in hers instead.”
“What is he talking about?”
“There was a fire after I left,” Carpenter said. “The woman was hurt. I heard it on the news.”
“Do you know anything about it?”
“Oh, Christ,” Ralph said. “Excuse my French.”
“The building is a firetrap, Your Excellency. Anything could have started it.”
“Cops found the arc switch.” Ralph crossed his legs, drawing a farting noise out of the leather. “I took pictures. They’re with a friend. You know how that goes.”
“Extortion, Mr. Poteet?”
“Let’s just call it blackmail. I ain’t dressed good enough for extortion.”
One corner of the desk supported a silver tray containing two long-stemmed glasses and a cut-crystal decanter half-filled with ruby liquid. The bishop removed the stopper and filled both glasses.
“This is a good port. I confess that the austere life allows me two mild vices. The other is tobacco.”
“What are we celebrating?” Ralph didn’t touch either glass.
“Your new appointment as chief of diocesan security. The position pays well and the hours are regular.”
Ralph had a sudden urge to rub his hands together. He resisted it. “Who do I answer to, Carpenter?”
“Carpenter works for me. The security chief works without supervision. You would have a separate office in the St. Balthazar rectory.”
“In return for which I come down with amnesia?”
“And entrust all related material to me, naturally.” The bishop sipped from his glass.
Ralph lifted his then. “What’s to stop me from becoming Shake ’n’ Bake like Lyla?”
“Neither Carpenter nor I had anything to do with that. You have a very dark view of religion.”
“Must be all them pictures I seen of eyes getting put out and Protestants burning at the stake.” He gulped off half his wine. It tasted bitter.
“Do you know Bibles, Mr. Poteet?”
“I knew my old man’s pretty good.”
The bishop laid a bony hand atop an ancient ornate Bible on the desk. Ralph thought he was about to swear his innocence. “This one belonged to St. Thomas. More, not Aquinas. I have a weakness for religious antiquities.”
“Thought you only had two vices.” Ralph’s fat lip was getting in the way of his speech.
“I would call it more of an obsession. My colleagues think my ambition is motivated by power, or piety, if they are charitable. Neither assumption is correct. When I think of the Vatican, its glorious age and awesome history, of enjoying access daily to Constantinople’s manuscripts, the pallet where Hadrian the First laid his head, the Sistine ceiling—”
“Careful there, Reverend. You’re getting drool on the Gideon.”
Bishop Steelcase lifted his hand in a gesture almost of benediction. “Do you accept the position?”
“Trouble with church offices is they all smell like galoshes. Tell you what: you put me on retainer, say a couple of thousand a month, and I keep the pictures.”
“That won’t do. They must be part of the package.”
“Well, you’re shit out of luck. ’Scuse my Flen—French.” The air in the room was thickening. He could scarcely breathe through his sore nose.
“Your Excellency?”
“Not yet, Carpenter.”
Ralph’s grin seemed to spill all over his face. He dumped the rest of his wine into it. “Don’t feel too bad, Parson. You ain’t the first Holy Joe somebody’s had over the altar.” His vision was blurring. He was beginning to think there was something to that business about not mixing the grape with the grain.
“The crucifix on that wall is said to have hung in Charlemagne’s palace at Constantinople,” the bishop was saying. “In any case, the experts I had examine it agree that it dates back at least as far as the tenth century. Are you all right, Mr. Poteet? I fear my collection is putting you to sleep.”
Ralph could no longer see the crucifix. Both the bishop and Carpenter were shimmering shadows. He leaned forward to return his glass to the tray and kept going, to the floor.
He thought, shit, I bet this means no job neither.
Chapter 8
He awoke feeling pretty much the way he did most mornings, with his head throbbing and a tongue the size of a ham. His eyes were painted shut.
When he got them open, he thought he’d lost the sight in his good eye. Then, as the pupil let in light from a corner streetlamp, he saw the dashboard in front of him and realized that night had fallen and he was sitting on the passenger’s side of the red Riviera. Then he felt a tug and a chill and looked down to see that his pants were down around his ankles. Something in three sweaters and a man’s felt hat was on the floor trying to work them off over his shoes.
“Hey.”
The brim of the hat came up. Under it was a face fashioned from dirty clay, vaguely female, with large nostrils, eyes shot pink, and six amber teeth in a black hole of mouth. Gray hair straggled down on either side. Ralph smelled half-digested gin.
“I figured you was dead,” said the creature.
“Well, I ain’t.”
“You sure? I seen dead cats get up and walk away ’cause nobody told them.”
“Not between bottles you didn’t. You want to let go of my pants?”
“You don’t need pants if you’re dead.”
“Old lady, you don’t neither.”
She sat back on her heels. “Well, why’d you park here if you ain’t dead? This ain’t no place to be alive in.”
“What place is it?”
“Mount Elliott Cemetery.”
“Jesus. You sure it ain’t Farmington Hills?”
She cackled. It sounded like someone pulling nails. “Well, now, I guess it might be at that. And this here’s beef Wellington for supper.” She pulled a dead rat out of a sweater pocket and dangled it by its tail.
“You going to eat that?” He shrank from it.
“I’ll let you have a bite if you’ll give me them pants.”
He bent down to pull them up. Blackness overtook him and he grabbed the dash to keep from rapping his head against it. The glove compartment popped open. The old woman lunged for the flat pint bottle that came sliding out, but he caught it first. He unscrewed the cap and took a long pull. As the heat climbed his belly, he thought about Neal English expecting his call at eight o’clock and peered at his wrist in the moonlight. It was bare.
“Gimme my watch.”
“Ain’t got no watch.” The old woman’s face became a caricature of craft.
He held out the bottle. When she grasped at it, he hung on. She shrugged, mounted an excavation inside her clothes, and came up with Ralph’s Timex.
“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Only it don’t keep time for shit.” She held it against her breasts.
Ralph proffered the bottle again. “One swallow.”
She gave him the watch then and took the bottle in both hands. He held on while she tilted it. The bourbon spilled over her chin and down inside her sweaters. He wrenched it free, started to lift it again to his lips, looked at the neck, and gave it to her. In seconds she and the bottle were gone out the open door on the driver’s side.
He put on the watch and turned its face into the light. It read 8:37. “Shit.” He pulled up his pants carefully, noticing as he did so that two of the pockets were turned out, slid over behind the wheel, and slammed the door. The key was in the ignition. He started the motor and turned on the lights. In front of him a large headstone sprang into view reading FUCHT. He swung the car out into Mt. Elliott Street. It was one of Detroit’s worst blocks, home to street gangs, crack peddlers, and prostitutes, a far cry from Bishop Steelcase’s study. Even Carpenter must have stepped lively after driving Ralph all that way.
Ralph’s thoughts were still fuzzy. Whatever the bishop had slipped him, it must have been in the hollow stem of his glass before it was filled, because Ralph had been watching him too closely during the pouring and had waited until the bishop drank from his own glass before committing himself. He didn’t know what they had thought to accomplish by drugging him, but he wished he knew what the stuff was called, because it had restored his memory. He now knew every place he’d been the night before. As it turned out, he’d had a great time.
He drove several blocks before he found a telephone that looked safe, inside the entrance of a drugstore that was offering a ten percent rebate on condoms and pantyhose. He parked the Riviera where he could keep an eye on it and called Neal’s office. When there was no answer he got his home number from Information.
“Hello?”
“Neal, this is Ralph.”
“Go away.”
“Quit kidding around. You didn’t send that stuff to the cops yet, did you?”
“What stuff?”
“The film, for chrissake!”
“Oh, that. No, I still got it.”
“Jesus, that’s a relief. How come?”
“How come what?”
“If you didn’t hear from me by eight you were supposed to send the film to the cops. What stopped you?”
“You didn’t say that.”
“I didn’t figure I had to. That’s the whole reason I had you hold it, in case someone wanted to croak me.”
“You don’t sound croaked.”
“That ain’t the point! What’s the good of having somebody hold the evidence if he don’t do like he’s supposed to?”
“You get the money?”
“I got doped.”
“The bishop slipped you a mickey?”
“There I was, guzzling wine and talking about Charlemagne, and the next thing I know a bag lady’s taking off my pants in the cemetery.”
“Just like in the public-service announcements.”
“Listen, if you don’t hear from me in twenty-four hours, stick that film in an envelope and send it to a guy named O’Leary at police headquarters. He’s with Arson.”
“When do I get my cut?”
“Neal, if it comes to you sending O’Leary that film, I’ll be too dead to give it to you.”
“Hell, I can’t lose.” The line clicked and buzzed.
Ralph hung up, turned to leave, then remembered Vinnie. The landlord had given him until that night to decide whether to cut him in on his action, then he was going to the cops. Ralph dialed the adult bookstore, then Vinnie’s apartment. He let both phones ring eighteen times before giving up.
Vinnie never left the building and rarely ventured above the ground floor. Where could he be?
“The cophouse.” Ralph hurried out of the drugstore and spun the Riviera’s wheels.
Vinnie didn’t own a car—had never learned to drive, in fact, and was too cheap to ride in taxis. Buses didn’t run at night. If he was on his way to Detroit Police Headquarters on Beaubien, Ralph would see him on the street. He took that route to his building.
None of the pedestrians he spotted on the way had Vinnie’s bald head or cartoony walk. Ralph thought he saw him once, but it turned out to be an inflatable doll someone had leaned against a pile of garbage bags on John R. The streets were full of bums with bladder-control problems—Christmas was too far away for them to be called “the homeless”—and youths looking for telephone booths to vandalize. The bad element stayed indoors during brisk weather.
The bookstore was dark, with the Closed sign in the window over Harry Reems’s crotch. Ralph pulled into the space where Carpenter’s station wagon had been early that morning and bounded into the foyer next door. The security buzzer hadn’t worked since Nixon.
The door to Vinnie’s apartment was locked. Ralph knocked, waited, then slipped the lock with the celluloid window from his wallet that displayed a picture of Tom Wopat. The layout consisted of a bedroom, bathroom, and living room with kitchenette—sparsely furnished, almost antiseptically clean, and containing nothing that couldn’t appear in a Disney film. At work in the bookstore, Vinnie read Fu Manchu novels and played one-handed pinochle. The smart money in the building said he had never had his cork popped, nor wanted to. Vinnie’s wife was in California six months out of the year, making 16-mm films for the Battlefield Production Company and posing for those ballpoint pens that presented lessons in the female anatomy when turned upside down. Ralph could only guess at their relations when they shared the place.
No Vinnie.
Ralph drank a bottle of Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler he found in the refrigerator, helped himself to a cut-crystal salt shaker Vinnie would never miss, and sat down to think. The residue of the bishop’s wine made his thoughts come slowly and in ragged order, like a line of cars crossing a stop street. It wasn’t like Vinnie to go to the cops without hearing from Ralph first. It wasn’t like Vinnie to go to the cops, period; especially when there was money to be made by not going. Not doing something and getting paid for it was Landlords’ Heaven.
Wondering if he might be in Lyla Dane’s apartment figuring how to jack up the damages for the insurance company, Ralph mined himself out of the horsehair sofa, locked up (the building was full of thieves), and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The hallway smelled of smoke and firemen’s rubber boots.
No Vinnie there either. The door to the apartment, what was left of it, was closed, with a yellow seal taped across it reading POLICE CRIME SCENE—KEEP OUT.
Ralph went down to his floor. There was a chance Vinnie was waiting for him in his apartment. He wouldn’t even really need his passkey, thanks to Tyrell the fireman and his little chop for whores.
Ralph’s first thought when he opened the shattered door was that he hadn’t noticed how
messy his housekeeping had gotten lately. Then he saw the stuffing from the slashed sofa cushions among the broken, torn, and overturned bric-a-brac, and he mulled that over for a drug-induced minute. Very slowly he remembered finding his pockets turned out in Mt. Elliott Cemetery, and the way the disarranged contents of his glove compartment had spat out the pint of bourbon when the lid popped open. The bag lady wouldn’t have done all that without taking the bottle and his wallet.
Carpenter would have.
He knew then why he’d been drugged.
At that moment, a lucid Ralph would have started running and not stopped this side of Eight Mile Road. For all Carpenter’s resemblance to a Christian from the catacombs, he would not be likely to forgive being interrupted before finishing the job Vinnie had started. A befogged Ralph looked around for a weapon. He hadn’t seen his revolver since August, when it came back from the gunsmith’s shop with new grips after that time he’d caught it on an escalator railing at the Northland Hudson’s and almost shot off his right ham. He pulled the loose leg off the capsized coffee table, fisting it like a club, and charged into the bedroom. Inside the door he tripped, clawed for balance, and knocked himself cold with the makeshift bludgeon.
When he came around moments later, he was staring up at the burning bulb of one of the lamps he had adjusted to illuminate Monsignor Breame during the photo session that morning. It appeared to be glaring back with a cyclopean intensity, and for a moment (it must have been the company he was keeping) he thought that he had come to Judgment. He put a hand down to push himself into a sitting position, stuck it with the nail from the coffee table leg, sucked at the stigmata, and looked at Vinnie. Vinnie was what had tripped him.
The landlord was sprawled on his back on the floor in a cartoon attitude, arms and legs splayed and his sweatshirt ridden up to expose his round hairless belly. His round eyes were wide open, his mouth a perfect O with his tongue sticking out of it, his naked scalp throwing off light from the lamp. A green polyester tie with orange planets on it was knotted around his neck, the knot sunk deep in fat. It was Ralph’s lucky tie.
Peeper Page 5
