Delp was shaking his head as if he just could not grasp anything I was saying. “Now you're going to tell me… that I killed Reggie and his wife?”
“There was no need. Regardless of how much trouble he'd been, you still had Eddie. Not that it takes you off the hook. As far as I'm concerned, you can take a fall for everything he did.”
“So,” Delp said with plenty of elegant snottiness. (If he was wounded he was doing a good job of hiding it.) “This Eddie Love killed the Riazs?”
“Yes, brutally. But save the `this Eddie' crap. You hired him, you set him motion. He isn't a stranger. The cops found twenty-nine silver dollars scattered around the Riazs' bodies.” I pulled a coin from my pocket; the one I'd swiped from the murder scene as the cops barged in. I held it up glinting in the studio light. “They missed this one,” I said. “The thirtieth piece of silver, paid to Judas for his betrayal of the Lord.” I flipped the coin, caught it, and pushed it back into my pocket.
“The only thing I wondered about was the Bible reference. Eddie had been leaving me biblical love notes at the scenes of each murder; Deuteronomy, `stone that person to death,' when he killed your wife, 2nd Thessalonians, `In flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus,' scratched into the mud when he murdered the Nikitin brothers. So I wasn't surprised when I saw the Bible near Reggie. But Judas' treachery was in the first four books of the New Testament; Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I expected any one of those four. But he left me with the end of Chapter 12 in the book of Romans.” I shrugged. “Oh, well, I can't know everything.”
Delp was studying the inside of his head; giving the question, it seemed, serious thought. Then a light went on in his eyes. It suddenly occurred to me that, though I hadn't meant to, I'd issued a challenge. “Could it have been the beginning of Chapter 13?” he asked, rising to it. Oddly, he didn't appear to do so with any glee or sense of triumph. He was merely questioning a fact.
I shrugged again. “It may have been.”
He nodded. “If some of what you have suggested were true, Blake, if Eddie Love, or anyone for that matter, thought he was righteous in what he was doing, then perhaps I can assist you. Romans, Chapter 13, verses 3 and 4, `For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.' ” He cleared his throat. Then he tried to stare right through me. “Regardless of who killed my wife, Mister Blake, or the Nikitins, or the Riaz couple, their deaths, though horrible, I'm sorry to say must ultimately be laid at their own feet. By your own account, Mister Blake, my wife was a harlot and died a harlot's death. The Nikitins, the Riazs, were wrong-headed betrayers.”
“You make me want to puke,” I said. It may have sounded like drama but, sisters and brothers, I swear, it was a plain fact. “Five murders, including your wife's. They are all on your head.”
“I assure you, Blake, they are not on my head. This story of yours is fanciful at the very least. But you've got it wrong.” The reverend rose to his full height. Now my indictment was over, seemingly unphased, from his towering position of power, he continued, “But, even if you were right, you might keep this in mind. Had the ram not appeared to Abraham by the grace of Almighty God, he would most assuredly have killed his beloved son, Isaac. Abraham was a great man of God. You can't prove this fantasy of yours because it didn't happen that way. Now, if you will excuse me, and even if you won't, I have people to minister to.”
“I will prove it,” I told him, “the whole ball of wax, when I find Eddie Love.”
Something flashed in Gina's eyes, concern, fear maybe, but it was gone as quickly as it came. She laid a hand on Delp's arm. He smiled his patented smile, the one I'd seen on a dozen crusade tapes. “Why don't you stay?” the reverend said. “Listen to the show, Blake. I'm presenting a message on the subject of humility. It might do you good.”
Delp turned and disappeared behind the door back into the studio recording booth. I stared after him, then turned to Gina. We locked eyes for a moment in a stare very different from that of the night before. Then, without a word, she turned and followed Delp. There was nothing left for me to say. The hallway seemed longer on my way out.
Chapter Twenty-eight
You'll remember that, the last time he and I talked, Detective Wenders had made it crystal clear that I'd better never pester Reverend Delp again. You also know I'd ignored him with relish. My goal, if you can call it that, had been to get something going, to aggravate Delp and his minions (two could play at that game) into doing, well, anything really, as long as it was ill-considered and hasty. Well, sisters and brothers, I missed it by that much. Instead, and you won't be surprised, I opened a can of whip-ass all over myself. (That was not a figure of speech.)
The scene was reminiscent of one of the floggings you see in the old pirate movies; at least it felt that way. I leaned against my office wall, arms extended to each side of the window, while an irate mountain of a police lieutenant stood behind lashing me with his acid tongue. Don't get me wrong, it didn't hurt all that bad. I was used up, worn out, and didn't care enough to feel any pain. But with his halitosis, I would just as soon he'd used a cat-o-nine tails. So, while Wenders hurled legal threats (peppered with verbal abuse), I took it without reply, watching out the glass as evening came on.
Willie Banks, finally out of the can on bail, was in my parking lot with the hood of his beat-up Mustang raised. He was trying with all of his might, his heart, and what little bit of brain he had, to get the thing started. (So far his luck had been about equal with mine.) The show he was putting on wasn't ready for the Goodman Theatre, but it was more entertaining than the badge-carrying banshee screaming behind me. Then, because even God likes special effects, the Mustang's engine fired. Willie raced from under the hood, leapt into the front seat like a crazed Nadia Comăneci, and mashed the parked car's accelerator. His engine growled while I thanked the heavens under my breath. He would finally get that piece of shit away from my building. The tremendous cloud of gray-black smoke filling my parking lot almost, but not quite, matched the smoke coming from Wenders' ears and filling my office. “You're not even listening to me!”
I turned from the window and Willie's parking lot performance to the show the police detective was putting on on the other side of my desk. “What did you say?”
“Are you kiddin' me? Do you think I'm talkin' to myself?” Wenders was red as a beet. “I said, I specifically told you to leave Delp and his people alone. Did you listen? NO. You raced right out and accused the man of murder; libeled him right to his face.”
“Slandered,” I said. “Libel is written. You mean slandered.”
“It ain't fuckin' funny anymore, Blake. The police department, city hall, all the heavens from God on down are ready to fall on you at once and you're crackin' wise like we're at a stag party. You just can't see it. Blind people got better sight than you. There is more concrete evidence says you committed these murders than there is pointing to Delp. And no matter how many times I warn you to lay off, you won't lay off. Why?”
Completely fed up and out of things to say, I told him. I mean, I really told him. Why not? Nothing else had made a dent. So I just said it, right out, “I'll tell you, Frank. It's because of the visions I've been having.”
Wenders looked at me like I'd whacked him on the forehead with a two-by-four. “What?” That was it; the best question he could come up with. He was dumb-stunned.
For myself, I had no reason to stop there. So I gave it to him, the whole silly-assed truth. “Ever since this caper started,” I said. “I've been experiencing visions, full color, 4-D, interactive movies in my head.” Wenders started to wave it away, but I wouldn't let him. “Honest to God visions,�
� I insisted, “of each of the deaths in this case. In those visions, I've not only seen, I've experienced each of the murders from the point of view of the victim. I've been bashed over the head, burned alive, shot, had my throat slit, been hung, just as if I'd been there. And that isn't all. Sometimes they talk to me, the victims. I haven't figured out how to talk back, they don't seem to hear me and we don't carry on a conversation, but they look at me and ask me for help. Rocio Riaz even directed me to the scene of her murder, eh after she was dead. Each time it's more real, each time it's clearer than it was the time before. Something…” Like an anxious Sicilian mother, my hands flew from my temples to God. “Something out there is sending messages to me. I don't know what it is. It can't be clairvoyance,” I told him. “That's French for clear vision, I looked it up. But it can't be that because I can't even spell clairvoyance; which, I don't mind telling you, made looking it up a bitch. It could be ESP. I've never had ESP, but I can at least spell that.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Certain persons and things,” I went on, as if he hadn't spoken, “lend power to this. When I touch them I get… whatever it is I'm getting. I'm not saying these things, these people (and there have been several) are causing it, but they're somehow connected. So what can I do but follow the connections? I'm the first to admit this seems a little out there but it all started with me sitting in a tree so where could it go but out there? Believe me, I know how much you love facts, and I know there isn't much here that's concrete. But each vision, I think, leads me closer to the identity of the killer and…”
“Fine!” Wenders hollered, shutting me off. (You should have been there. The tone and volume could have closed the valve on the Hoover Dam.) “I warned you,” he said, still yelling, “you stupid son of a bitch. Clown. Laugh yourself silly while they strap you onto that gurney with a priest reading the Last Rites. I don't give a fuck anymore. You buttered your bread, now you can just lay in it!”
Wenders stormed out the door past Lisa, standing behind her desk, and out of the office. I guess the truth wasn't really what he was after. I trailed slowly behind him, as the lieutenant slammed the outer door, motor-boating my lips in resignation. I turned from where Wenders had been to where Lisa was. There I got two surprises; one, she wasn't eating anything and, two, she looked painfully puzzled as she turned off her answering machine.
“What's that look for,” I asked. “You're not letting Wenders bother you after all this time?”
“Huh, no,” she said, strangely deep in thought. “Blake.”
“Yeah?”
“I just came back from the bathroom…”
“I don't need to know that,” I told her. “I've got an idiotic small-robber using his junk car to asphyxiate mosquitoes in my parking lot. I've got a cement-headed cop mixing his metaphors right here in my office. I've got God's very own messenger on earth trying to kill…”
“Damn it, Blake, will you listen!”
Again, yelling? And swearing? And from my secretary? I stared a question and, for once, Lisa appeared completely in earnest.
“I just came back from the bathroom,” she repeated, “and this was on the answering machine.”
She pressed the Play button. The machine clicked. The tape began to turn.
“Blay-ke,” it hissed in a whisper; evil, oily, and leaving a slick in its wake as it slithered from the machine. “Blay-ke,” it said again. Lisa shivered and, I admit, I did too. “This is…” The caller interrupted himself with a breathy cackle right out of hell, then finished, “This is Rev'rend Delp.”
I shook my head, not even entertaining the idea. “That isn't Delp.”
The voice came again. “So much dam-mage have ya done to the kangdom of Gawd, Blay-ke, and the foundations of mah ministry.” He laughed again with less energy but more cruelty. “So much needed to be cleansed.” The caller wasn't fooling anyone, and didn't sound as if he was even trying. His western drawl was unmistakable and recognition hit like a hammer.
“That's Eddie Love.”
The tape continued to turn. “There is,” Love said, “but one har-let left in the fam'ly. Yer har-let. Once she's paid for her inick-qui-teez, and you have paid for yers, all shall be ri-aght.” The phone was cradled and the connection broken. The tape stopped and went into reverse as the machine reset itself. There had been no evil laugh at the end but perhaps there should have been. Whatever his cryptic message had meant, it didn't sound like Love was kidding.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Lisa asked. “There is one harlot left? Your harlot? What's that supposed to mean?”
The machine clicked off. The reels in my head were just beginning to spin. “Come on,” I told Lisa. “You're coming with me.”
She hesitated. That was something I wasn't used to and it caught me by surprise. Then it dawned, Love's creepy message had scared the hell out of her. Worse, it had made her angry. Confession of an aging private detective, it hadn't done much to boost my spirits either.
“Come on,” I repeated, just as forcefully but a tad more supportively. “I need you.” We were, after all, in this together. I already had my suit coat on. She grabbed a jacket and we headed out the door.
Willie was still screwing the pooch outside, his Mustang running in its own special way. A cloud of blue-black smoke billowed through the parking lot and we had no choice but to run through it to get to my car. “Hey, Blake,” he shouted through his nose.
I ignored him and told Lisa to get in the Jag.
“Willie's calling you.”
I ignored that too.
We took off at a scream out of the lot. I saw Willie watching after us in the rear view mirror, then the cloud enveloped him and he disappeared from sight.
*
We were breaking every inner-city traffic law on the books, forcing pedestrians to eat our dust, and were still less than a third of the way from my office to our destination when the last thing in the world that I needed or wanted to happen happened. We had just passed between the concrete pillars and under the rusted girders of a section of El track when the shooting pain in my brain returned. There was a flash of light inside my eyes. I stomped for the brakes, hit the gas instead, and we did a loop de loop south of The Loop. We didn't flip taking the corner too fast but did go up on two wheels. The centrifugal force threw Lisa sideways in her seat and knocked her head against her window. It wasn't on purpose and it wasn't my fault, really, for the trouble I was having with my head too. See, while I was still physically behind the steering wheel of my Jag, I was also, suddenly and simultaneously, back in Katherine Delp's bedroom – in the middle of her murder.
I was lying face down on her pillow and, again, it was my head being smashed by the decorative garden rock. I screamed in the bedroom while, back in the real world, I let go of the wheel. I know I did because Lisa told me a few minutes later. Then she yelled for me to stop the car (I don't remember that either). She grabbed the steering wheel from me, slid over and half-under the dash to hit the brakes, and brought the racing car to an eventual stand-still. Sometime during the next few seconds Katherine's bedchamber disappeared. I can't describe any of it other than to say that the beating stopped and, though it felt shattered as a divorcee's heart, my head was intact and working.
My next genuine memory found me standing beside the parked Jaguar, my driver's door open and sticking out to the street like the tongue on a schoolyard brat. It was in no danger of being hit by passing traffic however, as the car was parked cock-eyed up on the sidewalk. Driving in the real world while riding a psychotic roller coaster in the murder world in my head, I had just missed taking out a parking meter. And I'd taken Lisa with me for the ride.
She was still in the car. While I collected my marbles, she caught her breath, released the wheel, slid back over, and jumped from the passenger's side to the grass hollering, demanding to know if I was 'All right!'. After all that, that was her question, was I all right? What a pair to draw to. The only good thing about the s
ituation was no one was paying us any attention; it was still Chicago.
“What's going on?” Lisa shouted. She was holding her head as she came round to my side of the car and only then did I remember she'd smacked it on the window of her door.
“I don't know what's going on,” I replied, holding my head too (for reasons of which you're aware). We were like two mystic monkeys creating our own pictorial maxim but, in our case, 'Everything we saw, heard, and spoke was evil.'
“We've got to get you to a doctor,” she said.
“I don't need a doctor,” I insisted. “There's nothing wrong with me. Not that we have time to fix now. We've got to get to Gina Bridges apartment.”
“Gina!” Lisa was indignant. “Is she the `one harlot' Eddie Love was talking about? Your harlot? Is that where we're going with our tires on fire?” There was acid in her voice and it wasn't coming from an upset stomach. It came straight from a surprisingly enraged heart. “There's something I've been waiting to tell you about Gina.” she said.
“Not now,” I barked. “We've got to go.”
“I'm not going another inch with you at the wheel.”
I couldn't blame her for that sentiment. I couldn't wait either. “All right. Then you drive.”
“Really,” Lisa asked, brightening instantly. “You're really going to let me drive your car?”
“Yes, really,” I said. “Let's go.” It had to have been beautiful; both of us holding our respective noggins, circling the car on the sidewalk like two idiots in orbit, me limping and unbalanced, she suddenly jubilant.
Now, picture it, me in the passenger's seat of my own dear Jaguar with Lisa behind the steering wheel. (That ought to give you some idea of how scrambled my brain was.) The sun was setting as we took off again, a brilliant red bleeding through the clouds above the city. Lisa described it to me later. I didn't see it myself because the pain had come again.
I was surrounded by the equally brilliant but flickering reds, oranges, and yellows created by, in, or for my mind. But I couldn't appreciate it. I was back in the Nikitin brothers' burning cabin. While my body was safe and sound, bucking in the bucket seat of my car, while Lisa raced through the Windy City traffic, my skin was blistering, my eyes stinging from the burn of imagined-but-real smoke. Then somewhere in the burning and popping lumber, I heard the brothers' screams followed by, yeah, the gunshot. A searing pain tore through my chest. By now you know the score and so did I, I'd been shot. I fell backwards, saw the heavy wooden beam above me give way and, as I was about to be crushed, found myself back in the passenger's seat of my car.
Corpses Say the Darndest Things: A Nod Blake Mystery Page 20
