Solomon's Vineyard

by Jonathan Latimer

“The Prohibition Prophet,” McGee said loudly.

  The woman turned around. “Keep quiet,” she said to McGee. “This is a house of God.”

  “Madam, I am sorry if I have wounded you,” McGee said. “But I have a right to my opinion.”

  “Have you no respect for the dead?”

  “For certain dead, yes,” McGee said.

  The man behind me said “Shut up.” Other people were muttering. I heard someone say: “Throw him out.” We moved slowly along the carpet.

  My eyes had got used to the gloom. There was nothing in the big room except a coffin at the far end and an altar. There were candles on both the coffin and the altar. On the foot of the coffin were heaped all kinds of wreaths and flowers. While I watched a woman dropped a bunch of roses on the pile and went on. “Do you notice the stink?” McGee asked. I didn't answer. I was afraid McGee was going to get us in trouble. We went on a few more steps and men I got the stink. It was something! It was like the stink of a horse that's been dead two weeks. It made my nostrils close up. It killed the smell of the incense. I said “Whew!” and got a few dirty looks myself. McGee laughed.

  Now we were quite close to the coffin. It was set on a gold and marble table that was about three feet above the floor. The coffin was made of bronze and had leaves engraved all over it. It had a glass top. The table was bigger than the coffin and some of the flowers had fallen on it from the foot of the coffin. About ten dozen candles put a queer light over everything. I heard the woman in front begin to pant. She was looking down through the glass. “Keep moving, please.”

  I jumped, almost knocking over the man behind me. An Elder in a white robe was standing across from the coffin. He said again: “Keep moving, folks.” He had a deep voice. I tried to see him, but his face was in a shadow. I began to feel spooked.

  McGee had reached the head of the coffin. He looked inside, bending down until his nose was close to the glass, and then straightened up, nodding as though everything was all right. I don't know what he'd thought he might see. He walked on, and I was next. I held my breath and peered into the coffin.

  Solomon lay on red velvet, face up, blue-grey eyes staring up at me. The open eyes gave me a start. He had on a black robe and on one of his fingers was the biggest diamond I'd ever seen. He didn't look dead at all, except that his face was the colour of wax. The skin made a contrast with his inky black hair. He was a tall man, about six foot six, and he was thin. His face had hollows under the eyes and in the cheeks. He looked nasty and cruel. I could see one tooth back of the blue-white lips. “Keep moving, please,” said the Elder.

  I followed McGee out a side door. The sunlight hurt my eyes. I kept smelling the queer odour of incense and flowers and decay around the coffin. It was good to breathe in the fresh air again.

  “Well,” McGee asked; “what'd you think of it?”

  “It's something I won't forget quick.”

  We went down the stairs. “Take a look around?” McGee asked.

  “Sure.”

  We walked towards the largest of the brick buildings. McGee said that was the administration building. He pointed out the women's building.

  “That's where I saw the Grayson girl,” I said.

  Another of the buildings, McGee said, was for men. The last one was the nursery. It was only two stories high, but it was big.

  “Where do the children come from?” I asked.

  He led me towards the nursery. “Some of the women bring 'em,” he said. “And some have 'em while they're here.”

  “I thought this was a religious colony. How do they arrange it?”

  There were people walking around the grounds. McGee waited until a man and two women had passed by us.

  “Have you ever heard of the Walpurgis Night?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, that was a night when all the men and women went out into the woods. They stayed all night, drinking and making love and dancing. It didn't matter who you stayed with, it was all part of the ceremony.”

  “And they have those here?”

  He nodded. “Twice a year. One of them is the Ceremony of the Bride. Another is the Wine Festival. That, I have been told, is the wildest.”

  “Why don't they stop them? Don't they have to register the babies?”

  “That's where they're smart. After a woman is initiated into the order, they make her marry one of the men. Then any babies are legitimate, though often the woman never even sees her husband.”

  “Well, my God!” I said.

  I wondered how much McGee really knew. I couldn't tell. He talked as though he knew all about the Vineyard. Maybe he did.

  I said: “What is this Ceremony of the Bride?” McGee looked at me. “You've heard of it?”

  “The Grayson gal is to be the bride.” McGee's lantern jaw came open. “Who told you?”

  “She did.”

  “That's terrible!” I began to get alarmed. “Why?”

  He shook his head mournfully. He went over to a bench and sat down. He looked sick.

  “What happens to the bride? What's the ceremony?”

  “There is a festival one night. And the next night she spends in Solomon's mausoleum.”

  “The hell!”

  “She's supposed to be Solomon's bride.”

  “And then what?”

  “She holds a special place in the Vineyard. She doesn't have to work any more.”

  “How many Brides are there?” McGee looked queer. “None.”

  “None! Haven't they ever done it before?”

  “Yes. Every year since Solomon died.”

  “What happened to 'em?”

  “They died.”

  “Right there in the mausoleum?”

  “I don't know. At least their deaths weren't reported until much later.”

  That was swell! I would look fine if the Grayson girl died. I asked: “When is this ceremony?”

  “In three days.”

  I thought, what a goddam case! I was about to ask some more questions when three of the Brothers came up to us. They looked unpleasant.

  One said: “We have asked you not to come to the Vineyard, Mr. McGee.”

  “This is a public day,” McGee said.

  “Yes, but we do not care to have you in the grounds.”

  “Are you going to put me out?”

  “If necessary, Mr. McGee.”

  McGee got oil the bench.

  “Let's go,” I said.

  “No.” McGee glared at the three Brothers. “I believe you are incorporated as a religious institution.”

  They stared at him, not answering.

  “You see,” McGee said triumphantly to me. “They don't know.” He turned to them. “I'll inform you. You are so incorporated. And the law reads that such incorporated property is open to those who wish to worship.”

  One of the Brothers had red hair. He said: “You are not here to worship.”

  More of the Brethren were collecting. A half a dozen were moving in on us. “Let's go,” I said.

  “You don't know whether in my heart I worship or not,” McGee said to the red-headed man.

  “You will please go.”

  Several of the Brothers moved close to McGee. “So much as touch a finger to me,” he said, “and I will bring suit.”

  “Will you leave?” the red-headed man asked grimly.

  “In my good time,” said McGee.

  More were coming. Suddenly I noticed one was the dark man I'd knocked out in the women's building the time I'd first seen Penelope Grayson. He recognized me at the same moment. He nudged the man next to him and whispered something, and they both scowled at me.

  “For God's sake,” I said to McGee, “let's go.”

  He was having a fine time. He bowed to the red-headed man. “I leave now, but only of my own free will.” He smiled at him. “Do you understand?”

  The man didn't reply. We went to the touring car, followed by my dark friend, the red-headed man and twenty other Brothers. The
line was still waiting on the mausoleum steps, and cars were still coming up the driveway. A lot of people were rubbering at us. We got in the car. McGee started the engine and waved to the Brothers. “Giddap,” he said, and we drove away.

  I turned back. The Brothers were still watching us. “They don't seem to care for you,” I said to McGee.

  “I don't care for them either,” McGee said, swinging the car on to the main highway. “Do you know what I once did?”

  “No.”

  “Well, the Vineyard doesn't own any of the places it operates. Never has. I came into some money, so I bought half a dozen of the places, thinking I could force the Vineyard out. I raised the rents a hundred per cent.”

  “Well?”

  “The Vineyard met the raise without a holler.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  McGEE let me off at the Arkady and I went down to the Turkish bath. I intended to steam out some brandy, but first I had to tend to my gut. It seemed to me I was hungry all the time now. I had the Finn send for a double tenderloin steak, french fries, two orders of sliced tomatoes, bread, coffee and half an apple pie. I read the paper while I waited.

  I got a laugh right away. A man hunt was going on in the county, and the man was Peter Jensen, of Fond du lac, Wisconsin. Me! What had happened was this: the cops discovered the car that crashed into Papas's cabin had been rented from the Drive-It by a Peter Jensen. He had reported it stolen, but this, the cops said, was a trick to throw them off the track. The theory now was the shooting at Papas's had been an attempted hold-up, with Jensen the brains behind it. The paper called him a mystery man.

  That was fine. I liked being a mystery man. It wasn't such a hell of a distinction, though. I'd never heard of a big police case that didn't have a mystery man or, better, a mystery woman. Usually she was a woman in a black veil. The cops had to have their romance. I got up and went to the toilet. I took the card identifying me as Peter Jensen out of my wallet and tore it up and dropped it in the water. Then I pulled the chain. “So long, Pete,” I said.

  I went back and looked at the paper again. The hood I'd killed had been identified as Piper Sommes. He had worked in one of the town's pool halls. The cops said he was one of the stick-up mob under Jensen. Nothing was said to link him with Pug Banta. Another body was identified as Joe Manno, one of Papas's waiters. They still had one corpse to go. A trace had been found of Gus Papas. A car with five Greeks in it had gassed up at a filling station in Cairo, Illinois. One of them was wounded. The attendant had reported the wounded man to the local sheriff. It was thought they were heading for Chicago.

  It was Papas, I decided. He was probably clearing out for good. Greeks never liked fighting. I wondered what had happened to Winnie and the two men. They'd probably decided to keep quiet. I had an idea one of the men had been cheating with Winnie. I read some more. I was reading Chief Piper's statement that Caryle Waterman had been killed accidentally during the stick-up, when a waiter came with my food. I put the paper down. Upstairs someone had figured there were two of us, and the waiter set two places on the rubbing table. That was all right with me. It meant I got twice as much bread and coffee.

  When I finished the pie I told the Finn to send the dishes up to the kitchen. I got undressed and took the paper and a towel into the steam room. I would steam for half an hour, and then I would take a rub and a cold shower. Then I'd go about my business. I wanted to do something about Oke Johnson. I felt guilty about him.

  I sat on the wooden bench and tried to find something in the paper about Oke. I couldn't. The Papas job had made the shooting unimportant. I read a statement by the DA saying he was going to clean up the county. There was another statement by the mayor. And another by the Governor. The lid was off. I hadn't done so badly. It was a break, getting Caryle Waterman killed. On an inside page I saw a picture of the burned cabin. There wasn't anything left but the foundation and the stone fireplace.

  It was hard to read because the steam blurred the print. I put the paper down and sat without looking at anything much. The steam was so thick I couldn't see the opposite wall, anyway. Waves of it kept rising from the pipes, warm and smelling of menthol. Sweat ran off my face and chest, tickling my skin. I wondered if I was losing weight. I thought about Ginger, wondering how she would look in the steam room. I thought about her long legs and high breasts. I didn't get much of a buzz from it. The Princess had fixed that. I wouldn't have gotten a buzz from George White's chorus.

  I tried to think about business. I had two days to get the Grayson girl. I wondered why McGee didn't come through. A lawyer usually knew of a way to do anything. I wiped my face with the towel and then I got a handful of salt out of the box and gave myself a rub down with it. The salt stung, but it cleaned my skin. I was still sweating. I began to relax. The mendiol made the steam feel good in my lungs. The worst was the Ceremony of the Bride. It sounded theatrical, but everything sounded that way at the Vineyard. Still, I didn't like the idea of there being no surviving brides. What if the brides just disappeared after the ceremony? Were sent away, or something? That didn't sound possible. People don't disappear. They write to their families, or send for clothes, or draw out money in banks. But if they died, like McGee said, how could the Vineyard keep it a secret?

  I asked that last question, but it was just a formality. I knew almost anything could be kept a secret at the Vineyard. Religious cults were the hardest nuts of all to crack.

  Look at Father-, for instance. The Government's been trying for years to find out where he gets the dough to ride in Rolls-Royces and buy estates on the Hudson, but he doesn't even bother to file an income tax. It wouldn't be too tough for the Vineyard to get rid of a girl a year. They could say she had gone away and nobody would be wiser, just so the body didn't turn up.

  It was all probably phony; girls didn't get killed that way, but it scared me. It would be the end if Penelope Grayson disappeared. I could see myself explaining to Grayson that I thought she was dead, but I didn't know where the body was. He would like that! I was in a tough spot with a lot of very strange people, and I had three days to get out of it. I began to think about how it would be to live in Mexico. I had nearly four grand. That would last for a while. The trouble was, they didn't have many redheads in Mexico.

  Someone opened the door. I felt the steam move with the draught. I couldn't see across the room. “Craven?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn't recognize the voice. It wasn't the Finn. The door closed and the mist didn't drift any more. I couldn't see anything through the steam.

  “God damn you, Craven,” the voice said. “You killed my sister.”

  I rolled off the bench to the floor. The pistol made kind of a plop and lead flattened against the tile wall over me. Brother, that was one time I was plenty scared. I couldn't think who was shooting at me, or what he was talking about. I didn't know anybody's sister. I crawled towards the shower booth that people used to wash off the salt. He fired again. Now I could barely see something dark through the steam, but I knew he couldn't see as much of me. My skin was closer to the colour of the steam, especially right now. I said: “Get back or I'll shoot.”

  “Don't kid me.”

  He started forward. I picked up the wooden box of salt and threw it at him. It caught him high up and he went back out of sight against the door. I heard him hit the door. I got to my feet and started to rush him and my feet slipped on the wet floor. I hit my jaw a hell of a crack on the table. I hurt my knees and elbows. I crawled to the shower booth. He fired twice. Neither shot came near me. I crawled into the stall, expecting a shot in the backside.

  I was glad to get in that stall. It was a funny feeling, being naked and fighting a man with a gun. I didn't like it. I felt the bullets would hurt more, naked. I ran my hands around the stall and found a bar of soap and a back brush. They made a really fine pair of weapons. I couldn't see the guy. He was quiet now, waiting for me to move. He'd shot four times. That left two or three bullets. That was nothing to be ch
eerful about. It would only take one to knock me off.

  I peeped around a corner of the stall. The steam was so thick I couldn't see him. I wondered if the Finn had heard the shots. I wondered if the steam in the room had muffled them. Then I saw him I He was coming slowly towards me. He didn't know where I was, but he was going to get up close for his last shots. I watched him come, seeing his clothes through the steam.

  I waited a second, and then I shook the shower curtain. He fired twice; I felt the curtain twitch as the bullets went through it. I knelt and groaned a couple of times, made a gasping noise in my throat, and then held my breath. He was a sucker. He came right up to the curtain. I reached out and jerked his legs. The pistol went off as he fell. He lit hard, and I crawled up and wrestled away the pistol. He didn't have much fight, but I socked him twice with the pistol. He lay still on the floor.