She dropped Chesney off at his office then drove home, changed into her blue uniform and sneakers and went on to Sugar 'n' Spice, the beauty salon where she did manicures. Her first client wasn't due until nine-thirty, so she arrived with five minutes to spare. But as she approached the front door, the policeman who had followed Chesney down the funnel into Hell got out of an unmarked car and stepped into her way.
"Ms McCann?" he said, showing her a wallet with a badge and ID, "Lieutenant Denby. I'd like to ask you a few questions."
"What about?"
"That book you're going to read."
Melda was an intelligent young woman and knew it. In a fairer world, she knew she would be running some big outfit or winning major court cases, instead of polishing the nails of women, some of whom didn't have much more brains than God gave a labrador retriever. So she was smart enough to know that the man with the badge was also smart, and that he had come at her with a question that she hadn't expected, and – worst of all – that he had seen in her face a reaction that meant there was no point trying to play dumb.
"How'd you know about that?" she said.
Of course, he was a cop and he had the advantage, so he said, "How about I ask the questions, you give the answers?"
"Okay," she said, "I don't know anything about the book except what my boyfriend's mom told me: the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre has written it the way some angel told him to, and it says that my boyfriend is like a prophet out of the Bible."
"Is he?"
"Chesney doesn't think so. It's all the reverend's idea."
"What do you think?"
"I think it isn't police business," she said. "Doesn't this come under freedom of religion, or something?"
"It comes under something," said Denby. "What do you know about the guy in the spandex suit, goes around busting up dope dealers and auto-theft rings?"
If he'd asked that question first, Melda thought, he might have caught her off-guard. But the sudden switch of topic didn't faze her. She'd been ready with an answer to that question for weeks.
"He saved me from some muggers."
"And then he saved you from a guy named Todd Milewski."
"It was on TV." She saw him waiting for her to say something else and decided to oblige. "So you must also know that he said he'd call, but he never did."
"Never?"
"What are you, desperate? Not enough crime in the city, you've got to go around checking on people's private lives?"
Denby's smile put Melda in mind of a cat that thinks it has cornered a mouse. "What would you know about how much crime there is, Ms McCann? Or isn't?"
"My boyfriend is an actuary for an insurance company," she said. "It's what he talks about."
The lieutenant took out a notepad, flipped it open and looked at something there. "Your boyfriend is Chesney Arnstruther."
It wasn't a question, so Melda made no response.
Denby wasn't fazed. "What does he know about the spandex guy?"
"Why don't you ask him?" Melda thought that might have been the wrong answer. She looked at her watch and said, "I'm gonna be late for work."
"Sure," said the policeman. "How about we continue this after you've read the book?"
But Melda was balanced now. "How about after you read it?" she said, and opened the door to Sugar 'n' Spice.
Denby wasn't too unhappy with the McCann interview. She hadn't told him anything he didn't know, but she had confirmed his intuition that she knew more than she was telling. Plus, he read her for one of those people who feel that their intelligence is underrated and who welcome opportunities to demonstrate their mental worth. He decided he would circle back to her in a few days.
But right now he was pulling up outside the tenement where the Belknapps waged the fifty-year war they called their marriage. It was a tumbledown heap of warped siding and peeling paint, with no lock on the front door, no elevator, and no shortage of the urineand-boiled-cabbage odor that was standard issue in this neighborhood. On the second-floor landing a well-fed brown rat gave him a who-you-looking-at stare.
Doris Belknapp opened the door to their apartment, adding a fug of stale sweat and cigarette smoke to the smell in the hallway. She didn't want to talk about the intruder, but Ralph did, and pushed her aside so the lieutenant could enter. The old man was excited. Denby smelled liquor on his breath, but Belknapp wasn't drunk – at least not this early in the day. There was an open fifth of off-brand bourbon, mostly full, on the scarred kitchen counter; the old lush had probably been just getting started when the lieutenant knocked on the door.
"A time traveler?" the policeman asked, when the man had told his tale. They were sitting at the kitchen table. The old woman had gone into the bedroom and closed the door.
"It's what he said." Ralph's moist eyes were big, the whites stained yellow where they weren't veined in red. "Come from the future to stop me…" He broke off, his decrepit face forming that expression that cops recognize as: Oops, I almost said too much.
"To stop you from what?"
"Nothin'."
"Come on. What were you gonna do?"
The old man's tongue moved his dentures around in his mouth but he said nothing.
"Listen," said Denby, "whatever you were going to do, did you actually do it?"
"Well, no."
"Not even after the guy left?"
"Nuh-uh."
"Then you got nothing to worry about."
Belknapp mulled this over. Denby didn't give him any leisure. "Look," he said, "calling in a false police report is an offense. I could haul you in right now." He saw the man's eyes go to the bottle on the counter, and added, "That's right, you don't get to take the booze."
"Okay, I'll tell you. First, pass it over." The old man took hold of the bottle, upended it and drank off two serious gulps. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, "He said he come from the future to stop me from killin' Doris."
"And were you going to kill her?"
The moist eyes looked away. "I didn' meanta."
"How were you going to do it?"
"That knife, there." Denby went to the counter and picked up the big chef's knife. Belknapp saw the pause as an opportunity to take another hit from the bottle. "He just showed up out of nowhere and grabbed my arm."
"You mean, he just appeared out of thin air?"
"Yeah. One second I'm sittin' there, then I pick up the knife and go to… well, you know, and pop! he's standin' right beside me, grabbin' hold."
"No way he snuck in?"
"No way."
"And then he said he came from the future?"
"That's what he said. To stop me killin' Doris." He drank some more. "And he snapped the knife in half, but when Doris bitched at him, he fixed it."
"Fixed it?" Denby examined the carbon-steel blade. It looked perfect to him. "How?"
"Dunno. One second it's in two pieces, the next it's good as new."
The lieutenant tapped the point of the blade against the counter, the steel making a ting sound. "And then he left?"
"Uh huh."
"How?"
"He just disappeared."
"Any noise, puff of smoke? Anything that might have been a distraction while he snuck out?"
"Nuthin' like that. One second he's there–"
"I get it." Denby took out his notepad, jotted down a couple of points. "Did he say anything else?"
"Like what?"
"Like why it was so important to keep you from doing Doris?"
The old man shook his head and took another pull from the bottle while he thought about it. "Nope. Seemed important to him, though."
Driving back to Police Central, Denby turned the story over in his mind. On first appraisal, time travel was no more likely a scenario for the Mr Spandex than any of the other explanations that had crossed his mind since the guy had made his first appearance at a mob-run chop shop, leaving a gaggle of well-known-to-police hoodlums tied up in batches, surrounded by stolen luxury cars the
y'd been loading onto semi-trailers.
The prevailing view in the squad room had been drugs: specifically, some military-grade hallucinogen that the guy had got his hands on. He'd douse the area with an aerosol application, then move in while the criminals were in gaga-land. But there were two problems with that hypothesis: one, the guy didn't wear any kind of breathing gear – in fact the only parts of him that weren't covered were his mouth and nostrils; and two, he'd been captured on a security camera, moving at superhuman speed and throwing people around with the strength of a carnival strongman.
"If he really is a time traveler," Denby said to the windscreen while he waited for a traffic light to change, "that would explain why we can't find him when he's not working. He comes, he does his thing, then he goes back to hang out with Buck Rogers in the twenty-third century."
The big question, though, was why? Why would somebody in the future be concerned about crime in a Midwest city in the early twenty-first century? What possible difference could it make to the future if Ralph Belknapp had filleted Doris? Or if some manicurist got relieved of her purse in the park? Especially to a future so far advanced that they'd had time to think up time travel and work the bugs out of it?
They'd called the kid a prophet, and he had taken that as the blather of people who took their religion straight and overproof. But Hardacre was the very image of a phony TV preacher, just about the last guy Denby would expect to drink cultish kool-aid. Maybe, the policeman thought, the kid was some other kind of prophet. He was an actuary, who spent his working day making predictions of the future based on statistics and formulas. What if Chesney Arnstruther had made, or was about to make, some mathematical breakthrough that would change the world? Something to do with crime and criminals – maybe predicting who would do what?
The guy in the costume comes back from the future. Okay, Denby thought, let's say that's for real. Mr Spandex busts criminals – dopesters, car thieves, muggers, Ralph Belknapp. He shook his head at the last thought, but pressed on. What's he after? Is he a scientist collecting samples? Are criminals so rare in the future that he has to round up a few and study them?
It was an unproductive line of inquiry, but right now it was the only one Denby had. And now his mind went back to Hardacre's house and the glowing stack of paper on the desk. What if it wasn't a prop? What if it was an object from the future? And what if reading it would explain everything?
He could never get a warrant to search the preacher's house. Besides, it was way out of his jurisdiction. He'd have to convince the sheriff's department in the county where Hardacre lived. He imagined how that conversation would go. On the other hand, there might be a political connection between the Twenty and whoever ran the show down south. Maybe there was a pliable sheriff and a judge who was in someone's pocket – more and more elected judgeships were being contested these days, and campaigns cost money.
But before he went to Commissioner Hanshaw and Mayor Greeley with the kind of tale that was unwinding in his head, he had better get his facts straight. The main library was not far from Police Central. Denby parked at the curb and went in, took out his first library card since high school, and asked a librarian to help him find whatever they had on time travel.
The woman looked up from the computerized catalog. "The real thing? Or science fiction?"
Denby started with the real thing, and soon realized that he didn't understand any of it. He went back to the desk and got a list of novels, and left the library shortly after with an armload of books.
The reading of the Book of Chesney was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Letitia wanted to drive up and collect her son, but the young man, operating from the pool of light provided by his girlfriend, was able to resist the forceful invitation. He and Melda would drive down in her venerable Hyundai sedan. The vehicle was probably not fit for lengthy excursions, but Chesney prevailed upon his assistant to rearrange some of its molecules – or whatever the demon did to make things happen – and immediately the Hyundai ceased its tendency to blow blue smoke upon start-up and to rattle alarmingly when Melda shifted gears. So mutually accommodating had the Xaphan-Chesney relationship become that neither one made even a pretense of searching for a connection between auto repair and fighting crime.
Chesney had never been on a long drive with anyone but his mother and was delighted to find that a road trip on a summer's day could be a genuinely pleasant experience. He even toyed with the idea that, once the present business was settled, he and Melda might take a vacation together in the Hyundai. They could eat in roadside cafes and sleep in motels, take photographs of scenery and historical markers. Travel might then become another pool of light, instead of the murky, penumbrous affair the young man remembered from his bus trip to the state college, when he had first escaped from his mother. Of course, he would let Melda organize the trip.
They reached the estate without incident, and without noticing the ghost car that had followed them from the city. The gate to the estate opened when Melda spoke into the grill, and they parked beside his mother's DeSoto and the Reverend Billy Lee's Mercedes. The preacher and Chesney's mother waited for them at the top of the front steps, and the young man could not help the shiver of apprehension that went through him when Letitia's basilisk gaze locked onto him. But when Melda took his arm and said, "We're fine, sweetie," the warmth of the sun returned and he walked on untrembling legs up the steps and into the mansion.
Hardacre acted the genial host, offering a light lunch on a tree-shaded patio walled on three sides, with the open side overlooking the terraced rear lawn and a tennis court. A catering firm had been engaged to prepare and serve sandwiches and beer and lemonade. Once everything was in place, the two functionaries departed.
"Good," said the preacher, as the sound of the gate closing itself came faintly to their ears, "now we can talk."
"I've seen you on TV," said Melda.
"And what did you think?" said Hardacre.
"You want me to be polite or honest?"
Chesney saw Letitia stiffen, but Hardacre put a hand on her arm. "Honest," he said, "We are, after all, almost family."
"When you used to tear people apart, I thought you were mean," Melda said. "Not that they didn't deserve it. It's just that you seemed to take a real pleasure in tearing them a new one."
"Very perceptive," said Hardacre. "I did enjoy it."
"Billy Lee," said Chesney's mother. "You were doing the Lord's work, chastising the sinner–"
"And having a Hell of a good time doing it," the preacher said. "And so, my dear, did you. Those letters you used to write! Don't tell me you didn't relish telling their recipients of the torments that awaited them."
"I was trying to save their mortal souls!"
"Indeed you were." Hardacre patted Letitia's arm while he winked at Melda. "And loving every minute of it. The copy of the one you sent to that fat idiot, Hall Bruster – Allbluster, you called him – did I tell you I framed it?"
"You're embarrassing me."
Hardacre quoted: "'When the Devil pries apart your overstuffed buttocks and spits on the glowing iron to make sure it's hot enough, then you'll squeal for mercy like a porker in the slaughterhouse chute. But it will be too late.' You know he wanted to sue me. Then he realized it would just bring me more viewers."
Chesney said, "Who is Hall Bruster?"
Hardacre blinked in surprise. The two women were used to the young man being unaware of persons and events that were common knowledge across the land.
"He's a pundit," Melda says. "Sees conspiracies everywhere. Thinks the UN is out to get us, and has Belgian troops secretly training to round up all the patriots." When she saw that the clues meant nothing to Chesney, she said. "Draws diagrams on a blackboard? Sometimes uses puppets? Used to say that all the drug addicts should be put in concentration camps until he was caught with forged prescriptions for painkillers?"
The last reference rang a faint chime for Chesney. "I think one of the guys was talking about it a
t poker night last year."
"He's really got it in for the reverend," Melda said. "You know he's been making fun of you – the precursor thing?"
"I know," said Hardacre. "He's in for a surprise."
"The way you say that," Melda said, "it doesn't sound too holy."
Hardacre gave the young woman a slight nod to concede the point. "There are still traces of the old Billy Lee, I admit it. But you do see that I'm trying to do something different? Something that matters?"
Melda sipped her beer while she thought about it. Then she wiped a little foam from her upper lip and said, "Being different is not the problem. It's telling the world that Chesney is some kind of prophet."
Costume Not Included: To Hell and Back, Book 2 Page 8
