He said, “It’s not like we haven’t discussed this, Tim. I thought we both agreed that the church is at the center of whatever’s going on. Next thing I know, you’re practically a member. You and the woman cop who’s trying to throw my ass in jail.”
“Not true.”
Griffin sighed. He didn’t want to fight. He’d spent his life avoiding confrontation. “I just thought you were going to talk to me before doing anything, that’s all.”
Tim had told him earlier about the suicide and memorial service, but had mentioned no plans to attend it. And certainly nothing had been said about the woman cop tagging along, the bitch who wanted Griffin showering with men for the next ten to twenty years.
Tim slapped a palm on the counter, making Griffin twitch. “You’re pissed at me because I was with Melinda?”
“Melinda.” Griffin chuckled, but wasn’t feeling it. “You’re on a first-name basis, man. Were you ever going to tell me you were with her tonight if I hadn’t seen it for myself?”
“I wasn’t with her. She—”
The door buzzer sounded, and this time both men jumped.
He was in trouble, Griffin thought, if business was so slow that the presence of customers could startle him. Three young boys slid in, early teens, and he knew he was going to have to shoo them away from the black curtain.
Tim moved into his line of vision. “It’s a moot point, Griffin. She’s filling out paperwork to try to get a social services visit to Germaine Marberry. She thinks the lady’s not quite all there. You’re off the hook.”
Griffin pulled a ticklish mustache bristle out of a nostril as he watched the three boys make their selection and bring it to the counter. A harmless Touchstone comedy.
After he’d taken a membership card and bagged the rental and the three had left his store, they watched the kids mount bikes they’d padlocked near the big window and coast out of sight. “The cops think I’m a rapist and I think three polite kids are up to no good. Is it the world today, or just me?”
“You’re not listening, dude. It’s all over.”
“Is it?” Griffin ran a hand across his bristly face. “You telling me you haven’t even considered the possibility that you’ve got someone running around here like that wacko from Waco? Some devious preacher man who’s got a spinster crying rape and another guy blowing his brains out. You never thought about that?”
Tim shook his head. “Melinda doesn’t believe Vincent Applegate is that kind of minister, and neither do I. He looks normal, sounds normal.”
Melinda again, Griffin thought. “Fine. There’s nothing going on. All a bloody coincidence, and there are plenty of ways to explain the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t DVD trick and the disappearing blonde behind my curtain.”
Both men nervously eyed the adult room as Griffin said this.
“I didn’t tell her about that,” Tim grumped. “Last thing I needed was for her to think I’m crazy.”
“Which is what you think of me?”
Tim took another glance at the TV, currently off, and at the still curtain. “Let’s just forget it, okay? Forget everything and assume we got it all wrong.”
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“I mean—fuck it,” Tim snapped. “Forget it.”
“Works for me,” Griffin said after a moment, but he didn’t mean it.
There’d been something very special about their dark, shared secret. It reminded him of years ago, when he was twelve or so. He and his best friend at the time found bones in a crawlspace and spent one delightful summer seeking the murderer. Obviously there’d been nothing to it, old rodent bones or whatever, and they’d been old enough to know the truth when they got rational about things. But it was adventure they’d been on the prowl for, not mind-numbing cold logic.
Now Griffin smiled sadly at the flat realities of this sorry excuse for real-life adventure. He was a chronically unattached male who owned, with the mom he lived with, an anachronistic and failing video store.
Now he flashed a full grin. “Fine,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around, big guy.”
Tim’s face was set, his dark eyes smudged with emotions that Griffin read as edginess, anger, guilt, relief. Mostly relief.
Griffin held out a hand, but Tim refused it. “What’s that?” he said. “Good-bye? I’ll see you around, dude?” Tim grinned to show how ludicrous he found a good-bye handshake to be, but the grin didn’t reach all the way up to his eyes.
“Yeah, whatever,” Griffin said with a false but hearty laugh.
Then he watched his friend walk out of the store without a backward glance.
As Tim was swallowed by the black-and-hot-pink night, the blonde behind the black curtain tittered softly.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“She’s the one,” Laney said in a dead whisper.
She was pointing to a shadowy figure on the sidewalk ahead of them under the dubious lighting of an occasional streetlamp and a splinter moon.
“I can’t,” he pleaded. “I know her.”
His wife shushed him. “She’ll hear you.”
He pondered how it happened that Laney could address him in normal tones when, at the same time, she was always ordering him to keep his voice down. “I’m telling you, I can’t do it,” he whispered.
“I don’t remember such moral constraints last time.”
He craned his neck into the night, hopeful for someone else out, someone to make her change her plans. He spotted only a middle-aged woman in a tank top that was proving to be a poor style decision. She was on her porch, lethargically dangling a water hose into a petunia bed below her.
Turning to Laney, he said, “I keep telling you, what happened before was an accident.”
He let out a hiccup of a sob as something sailed past him in the street.
“A little high-strung this evening, aren’t we?” she teased as three preteen boys whizzed by on bikes, one with a plastic bag dangling from his handlebars.
She skipped several steps ahead before twirling to execute a clumsy pirouette. “There are no accidents,” she told him merrily. “For instance, you hated me”— she swiveled her hips in a lewd grind—“and I ended up dead.”
Now it was his turn to shush her, but she just laughed. He looked for anyone who might have heard her unwise comment, but saw no one. Just the attractive young woman walking ahead of them, and he saw with a sinking sensation that the distance between them had closed.
Less than a hundred yards away now.
His steps had unconsciously quickened to match the pace of his dead wife. Something squirmed in his gut and he made an effort to slow down. To try, anyway. His heart was fluttering and he could feel his balls tighten.
“You’re remembering it, aren’t you?” said Laney, still skipping ahead of him like a little girl.
“Nothing to remember,” he muttered. “I’d been drinking.”
“Shut up, or you’ll…”
…give us away. That might be how she’d meant to finish the thought, but it was too late and he was glad. The young woman ahead of them had heard their prattle, and now she spun to confront whoever was back there. The nervous look on her face dissolved in seconds as she got a closer look, all of them momentarily under streetlamps.
She offered a tentative wave, the sort of thing you do when you don’t really know someone well, but well enough that ignoring them is out of the question. He waved back. Now came the awkward part. Do you stop to walk with this person you don’t really know better than to nod at, or walk on as though snubbing them?
Snub, snub us, he silently commanded.
Fortunately, she did.
“Oh, you stud, you,” Laney giggled. “You really know how to draw ’em in.”
“She barely knows me.”
“Still, I think if you run to catch up, she’ll wait. It’s the polite thing to do. What do you think?”
It was repulsive, that’s what he thought. So why was he quickening his pace to a trot?
&
nbsp; “See? I told you you’d enjoy yourself.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
There. He admitted it. That was half the battle.
And the girl up ahead heard them and, sure enough, did the polite thing. Stopped. And waited.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A man had been spotted lurking about his ex-wife’s home on Tampa Avenue, despite restraining order.
Four hookers had been beaten up near West 25th over the last forty-eight hours, apparently the handiwork of dueling pimps. Whore wars, the guys she worked with were calling it. Hilarious.
Thirty minutes ago, a hysterical Hispanic woman had been picked up on West 44th for cutting up her lover. She told arresting officers that he’d tried to kill her but that she loved him madly. Madly being the operative word.
Ah, Sex Crimes.
Those were just three of the warm files back on her desk, so why had she wasted a couple hours at the memorial service for a man who’d died an unsuspicious death? And what was she now doing, burning up even more valuable time at the front door of a highly disturbed woman who’d almost certainly faked a rape charge?
Melinda had plenty of time to ponder those imponderables while standing outside of the Marberry residence. She’d knocked, she’d rung the bell, she’d all but shimmied up a rainspout, but the freak-house inhabitants did nothing but huddle in the pitch-dark within and talk about her.
“Just go,” she’d heard someone whisper. “You have to let her in.”
A male voice, it had prickled Melinda’s skin. Only the television, she convinced herself. Or the radio, an announcer whose soothing, late-night tones just happened to sound a little like Vincent Applegate. That’s all.
Come on, she’d just left the minister and a few stragglers. Just a couple minutes ago she’d witnessed that uncomfortable scene between Tim Brentwood and his girlfriend after he’d stopped Melinda to talk. He’d wanted to know what she’d felt about the church and its congregation, but Melinda hadn’t gotten a word in before the girlfriend had come out, and it had become immediately apparent that there was something heavy between the two of them.
Anyway, Vincent and his wife (something terse going on there too) had still been saying their good-byes to their congregation when Melinda got out of Dodge in her Dodge Charger. It would have been all but impossible for him to have left his wife and raced ahead to the Marberry place, even if he’d had reason to do so.
So Melinda stood there, smiling at her paranoia as she listened to the whispers, and absently ran a hand across her tender right breast. From inside, she finally heard footsteps.
Coming toward her.
Metal groaned as a dead bolt was released. A metal bolt got dragged across a chain-mount channel and a key was twisted in a lock while Melinda cleared her throat and rehearsed her lines. My, it took a long time to unlock that door.
It finally rasped open, slowly, with all of the melodrama of a bad thriller. Germaine Marberry stood there, blinked into the night. “Yes?” she said. “What is it now?”
On previous visits, Melinda had judged the woman to possess a potential for attractiveness. She was tall and slender, her features fine and skin possessing the smoothness of a woman unfamiliar with smoke, drink, late hours or harsh sun. It was only her drab style of dress and lack of makeup or self-esteem that detracted from what nature had tried to give her.
Tonight, however, Germaine Marberry’s problems went much deeper. Her mouth was slack and eyes empty smudges in a face that had grown too taut. Her firm, angry posture was gone, replaced with the hunch of the unwell.
Melinda’s prepared comments were gone, as well. She said, “Ms. Marberry, I think you should come with me to a hospital.”
The cat sprang from nowhere and sank its teeth into the back of Melinda’s hand.
For a moment, that’s all that happened. Time slowed as Melinda examined with almost detached curiosity the long black cat still dangling from her hand. Germaine watched too, her slack expression disturbed only by an upward tilt of her eyebrows and a hand that fluttered near her throat. Even the cat seemed to do little more than see what was going to happen next.
To Melinda, in those first few disorienting seconds, the animal hanging from her flesh reminded her of a car-chasing little dog who’d actually caught one. Now what? It seemed to say.
“No, Battle, no!”
The shrieking woman-child came from deep within the house, a tennis racket in hand which she swung wildly, sending a table lamp reeling and cat-soiled newspapers skittering across the floor in the stirred-up breeze. Light danced over the walls as the lamp debated whether or not to topple.
Melinda Dillon, now well aware of the pain communicating loud and clear between the torn hand and her brain’s nerve center, thought, Oh God, no, not the light. She couldn’t bear the thought of facing this house, those people, the cats, in the dark.
But the lamp held its ground, and so did the cat, at least until the mentally disabled woman with the tennis racket served up a clumsy but effective forehand that sent it packing.
“Goddamn Battle,” the woman muttered.
“Wasn’t Battle,” Germaine said, voice weary. It looked as though she’d been snoozing in the easy chair still imprinted with her form. “It was Bandit. I get them confused sometimes too, Dolly.”
She sounded more than merely tired. She leaned against a wall, her lids half closed.
Melinda stared at the back of her hand where three red trickles crawled toward her wrist. “I’ve got to…where’s your bathroom?” Amazing herself at how calm she sounded.
Neither woman seemed to have heard. Germaine remained propped, glassy-eyed, against a wall while her sister assumed a defensive pose, scowling at three more cats crouched at the foot of the stairs. Dolly took a slow step toward them and made a strange, guttural sound. The three cats disappeared, leaving a trail of threatening murmurs behind them.
Melinda wandered off without awaiting a response. She swiftly passed by the stairwell, vigilant for movement or glowing eyes. The odor of unwashed fur and overflowing litter boxes clung to the air.
She followed a narrow corridor along the side of the stairwell, followed it into the depths of the home. Attracted like a moth to a single feeble light source, she found herself standing outside a door where a nightstand lamp threw a little light on a bed and a still figure under bed sheets. The heavy brocade paper had been shredded from the walls in long strips. Melinda followed a tiny sound to a very pregnant calico chewing the paste from a slash of wallpaper dangling to the floor.
Melinda backed out of the room. She flicked on a hallway light to reveal more shredded wallpaper. A few framed photos had been knocked down, the glass shattered. They were a few of many lining the hallway walls, all featuring some combination of the three women of the house, and no others. She stepped delicately around the shards and found another door.
This was the right one. She dragged her hand across the wall in search of a switch and prepared herself as much as possible for another set of needle fangs. Found the switch and was rewarded with the bright glare of fluorescent tubes framing a medicine chest.
She turned a tap with an elbow to avoid contact with the moldy porcelain. The sink had a fuzzy gray film. Her nose wrinkled against the human waste odor hanging heavily in the air.
Even the water looked grimy as it splashed lukewarm over her torn hand to slip, pink with blood, down the drain. Her hand throbbed, but the cut wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. Melinda skidded a lump of soap over the flesh and let the water run until it ran clear. She dabbed the skin dry with a wad of toilet paper, relieved to have a series of tasks to complete to keep her mind from reviewing the cat’s attack and the figure in the bed.
She jumped, gasped, when a hand snaked in front of her.
“Band-Aid,” Dolly said. Her face was expressionless, the features oddly tilted. She stood there, gawking at Melinda, banging her tennis racket absently against her shins.
Mel
inda had remembered the impaired woman to be grotesquely overweight, but that wasn’t actually the case. Dolly was plump, but hardly obese.
She took the offered adhesive bandage, thanked the woman and applied it to her wound. “Dolly, your cat is dangerous,” she said quietly. “Are they all like that?”
Something flickered in her eyes. A light of recognition, a spark of intelligence and…something else. Fear? The mentally impaired woman opened her mouth, but a voice cut in from behind her in the hallway.
“Dolly, it’s bedtime.”
Germaine sounded like she was still trying to wake up. The way she leaned against the wall out there brought to mind the shattered photos just feet away. A person shambling along, leaning on the wall for support, could bring on such destruction.
“Nuh-uh,” Dolly cried. “The cats ain’t all right ’cuz Vincent says—”
“Dolly! Shut up and go to your room,” Germaine snapped.
The tone startled the handicapped woman to silence. Her eyes grew wide and she took off, wailing, down the hall. Melinda could hear her banging her tennis racket against both walls on her trek to banishment. A door slammed.
Melinda watched Germaine swaying slightly, still standing there right outside the bathroom door.
“What about Vincent?” She’d meant to interrogate the woman, browbeat the information from her, but Melinda found she could manage no more than a whispered plea.
Germaine was suddenly so close to her face that Melinda could see the blue vein throbbing in her forehead. Jutting her jaw so that her small teeth flashed, the woman said, “If you have a warrant, show it. If not, get the hell out of my house.”
Melinda backed up, hard against the porcelain sink. She could hear Germaine’s stomach growling, long and insistently. Feeling trapped in the smelly little room, Melinda forced herself to move forward, brushing the other woman back. She moved slowly out of the bathroom and back into the shadowy hall. Six pairs of eyes glittered at her from different heights of the stairwell she passed. She moved quickly to get out of leaping range.
Malevolent Page 13
