Candles made a smear of light at the end of a long room, lighting a black cross and the kneeling figures of twelve men. The men were in white and I figured they were the Elders. I smelled incense. A mumble of words came from the men; they were praying. They knelt in a half-circle around the cross, their backs towards me. I wondered where Penelope Grayson was.
After a while the men stopped praying and stood up. I got ready to carry the Princess away, but they went single file through a door near the cross. They were loaded down with food and bottles of wine and flowers. A current of air from the open door made the candles flicker, distorted the shadow of the cross on the wall. I heard chanting from the next room, and then I noticed something below the cross. It was a kind of a litter, but with short legs; and on it was a woman. A white cloth covered all her body except her head and her long blonde hair.
I walked through the darkness to her. It was Penelope Grayson. Her eyes were wide open, but the pupils were as big as horehound drops. Her face was peaceful. When I put my hand over her eyes she didn’t blink. She was full of dope.
They were still chanting in the next room. The voices of the Elders were deep. I tiptoed back and got the Princess. She muttered something and I hit her with the flashlight. I put her down by the litter and jerked off the white cloth. Penelope didn’t have such a bad figure. Maybe a little thin, but it had possibilities. There was rouge on her face and breasts. I stripped the Princess and took Penelope off the litter and put the Princess in her place. I pulled some pins out of the Princess’ hair so it hung down the way Penelope’s had.
The chanting stopped, and suddenly I got spooked. I threw the cloth over the Princess and picked up Penelope and the clothes and ran to the stairs. The girl didn’t weigh anything at all, and under my palms her skin was cold. She didn’t struggle. Maybe she thought it was part of the Ceremony. Outside the door, at the head of the stairs, I put the blouse and skirt on her. They were too big for her. Then I looked in the room.
The Elders were just coming back. They filed in, chanting again, and picked up the litter. They stood under the cross with the littter on their shoulders. Now one of them was singing alone.
I caught some of the words:
“She is the choice one of her that bore her.
The daughters saw her, and called her blessed;
Yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her.”
I didn’t know what the hell that meant. The Elders walked slowly with the litter into the other room. I pulled out my watch and turned the flashlight on it. It was quarter-past twelve. Grayson and the chief should be outside by now, but I didn’t go after them. Instead I crawled past the cross to the far door and looked through. I saw the big room where McGee and I had looked at Solomon’s casket. Four candelabra burned on the gold-leaf altar, and the Elders had set the litter down in front of them. I could see the gleam of the Princess’ blonde hair. The Elders were chanting:
“If she be a wall,
We will build upon her a turret of silver:
And if she be a door,
We will enclose her with boards of cedar.”
Then an Elder with a clear tenor voice sang:
“I am a wall, and my breasts like the towers thereof:
Then was I in his eyes as one that found peace.”
They turned and walked in pairs down the aisle to the big front door of the temple. The one with the clear tenor voice sang:
“Make haste, my beloved,
And be thou like to a roe or to a young hart
Upon the mountains of spices.”
Then the last two turned and swung the big door shut. I couldn’t hear them any more. I went a little further into the room and got that stink of decaying flesh. It was like the smell of a too-long-dead mule. I stepped to one side of the door, so the candles by the cross wouldn’t shine on my back, and waited.
All at once I felt hair rise on the back of my neck. I couldn’t see anything but candles burning in the big candelabra and the light sliding off the Princess’ hair, but I was plenty scared. Then I saw it, and I was more scared, even though I knew what was coming. The glass top of the coffin opened and a man sat up. He had on a white robe and above it his face looked blue-white, like fish skin. He got up and stepped out of the coffin. He was very tall; I guess six and a half feet, and very thin. He went to the altar and prayed, kneeling in front of the candles. Wind came through the room, making the candles waver, and he looked around.
I crouched in the shadow made by the door. He prayed again and then he took a long knife with a gold hilt off the altar. He went over to the litter, holding the knife against his chest. He pulled off the white cloth and raised the knife high above his head. I could see the golden colour of the Princess’ skin by his knees.
I turned and crawled through the door. Behind me I heard a sound, as though somebody had slapped a wall with a wet towel, and then a moan, but, brother, I never once looked back. I got up and ran past the black cross and got Penelope Grayson and carried her down the stairs. She struggled a little; I guess she knew something was wrong. I propped her against the wall in the basement and shuffled through the dark towards the outside door.
Suddenly something, almost like a big hand against my chest, stopped me, and I knew then what I had to do before I got the others. I guess I had been going to do it all the time or I wouldn’t have taken the key to the storeroom. I unlocked the padlock and lit a match and put the diamonds and the twenty-six grand of the Vineyard’s money back where they had come from. I thought about the rest of the money, but I couldn’t do anything about it, and by the time I’d got the padlock closed again I was feeling a little better. I was never cut out for a thief, I guess.
I crossed the basement and went outside. When my eyes got used to the moonlight I saw them. They were waiting by a tree in back of the temple. I recognized Chief Piper and Grayson. About five detectives were there, too.
“We thought you weren’t coming,” the chief said.
Grayson asked: “Where’s Penelope?”
“She’s safe.”
“Where?” he growled.
I spoke to the chief. “You got the place covered?”
“Yeah. There’s a dozen men around.”
“Good.”
I led them to the temple’s basement door. I saw a man standing by the front of the temple; one of the chief’s men. We left one of our detectives at the back door.
“Grab anybody that tries to come in,” I told him.
“Okay.”
We went into the basement. I punched on the flashlight. We went across to the other door. I nudged Grayson.
“Here she is,” I whispered.
I flashed the light on the spot where I’d left her. All I could see was the brick wall and the cement floor. Brother, my heart stood still, as the song says.
Grayson said: “What the hell is this?”
I swung the flashlight around the basement. On the other side I caught a movement. I went that way. She was moving with her face to the brick wall, feeling it with her hand; looking, I guess, for a place to get out.
“Penelope!” Grayson called.
“Shut up,” I said.
We went over to her. Grayson took her arm and turned her around. Her eyes didn’t look quite so bad. There was a trace of surprise in them.
“Where …?” she began.
Grayson said: “Penelope, don’t you know me?”
We left a detective with her. I led the chief and Grayson and the three other dicks to the inside door and up the stairs. I opened the upper door. The first room looked just as I’d left it, candles still burning in front of the cross.
“Come on,” I whispered.
We tiptoed across the room to the door. The Princess was lying on the litter in front of the altar, the white cloth in a pile at her feet. I couldn’t see the tall man. We went over to the altar. I heard Grayson’s breath rush through his nose. The Princess’ left breast was smeared with blood.
“That
’s where Penelope would have been,” I told Grayson.
I looked for the gold dagger, but it wasn’t on the altar. The others were staring down at the Princess.
“God! What a babe!” one of the detectives whispered.
A deep voice said: “Who desecrates my temple?”
The tall man was coming towards the altar from a corner of the room. He had the dagger in his hand and his eyes were a bright blue, almost as though they were lit up from the inside. He came slowly, his long legs stiff, as though he wasn’t used to walking. His face, below the wild eyes, was grim.
“It’s Solomon!” Chief Piper said.
The man kept coming. He raised the dagger holding it in his clenched fist. I saw blood on the blade. Chief Piper screamed, the way a rabbit does when it’s being killed, and turned and ran. I felt like running, too. Solomon took two more slow steps and then four of us cut loose at him. The flash of powder blinded me; the reports echoed crazily, hurt my ears. Solomon staggered, as though someone had pushed him, and then, hunched over, ran towards his coffin. We all fired at him, making a noise like a Tommy-gun going full blast, but he reached the coffin and fell headlong inside. I guess that was where he wanted to be.
We stood with our guns, looking at the coffin.
Chief Piper came back from where he had run to, his face chalk white, his eyes too big for his head. He asked: “Is he dead, boys?”
We walked over to the coffin, keeping the pistols in our hands. Solomon lay on his side. Blood made the robe red in a dozen places, and there was a mess of blood where the lower part of his jaw had been shot away. The gold knife was still in his fist.
I said: “Dead as a mackerel.”
The stink was terrible. I looked around the coffin, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. It reminded me again of the Kansas City stockyards.
“What the hell was his idea?” the chief said. “Living in a temple for five years. In a coffin.”
Grayson said: “He was a necrophile.”
I didn’t know what that meant, and I don’t think the chief did either, but it shut him up. One of the detectives began to nose around the altar. I got the white cloth and threw it over the Princess. Grayson went downstairs to Penelope. There was a sound of voices outside the temple, and I went to the door and peeked out. About thirty Elders and Brothers had gathered by the steps, but the chief’s men were keeping them back. I suppose they had heard the shooting. The cop by the altar called me, and I went back.
“What is it?”
He put his shoulder against the wall back of the altar and a door swung open. I went in behind him and the chief. Our flashlights showed a small room with a couple of tiny windows near the ceiling. There was a bed, a chair, a bookcase with some books and a dresser. In the dresser the detective found some black robes, sandals, and a rifle with a silencer.
“Remember a guy named Johnson?” I asked the chief.
“The one who was murdered?”
I nodded. “That’s the gun that killed him.”
We went out into the big room again, the cop carrying the silenced rifle. The chief said: “I think you got some explaining to do.”
“Not here,” I said. “Bodies always give me goose pimples.”
After we’d left Penelope at St. Anne’s Hospital, we went to an all-night bar. Over a whisky and a steak sandwich I made things as clear as I thought I ought. I told Grayson and the chief I’d found from the records that McGee was the Vineyard’s business manager. Pug Banta had killed him, I said, because McGee was trying to get rid of him. I showed them the Legion button I’d found in the temple basement.
“I figured Oke Johnson was killed,” I said, “by someone who didn’t like him nosing around the temple.”
And when I found from Jeliff, the butcher, that he was sending old meat to the Vineyard, I said, I had a pretty good idea Solomon was still alive. “What else would they want decayed meat for but to make a stink?” And if Solomon was alive he’d want to keep it a secret, even if he had to kill Johnson.
“Then old Solomon was still behind everything?” the chief asked.
“Sure.”
“How the hell did he get his food?”
“I suppose a couple of the Elders fed him. They probably didn’t know whether he was really dead or alive.”
“He was sure crazy,” the chief said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Particularly as he’d got things fixed up so he’d have only one woman a year.” I cut off a chunk of steak. “And a dead one at that.”
While Grayson told the chief how he’d happened to hire me and Oke Johnson and then went on to some of the things I’d told him at the Arkady, I ate steak and thought about what I’d done. Usually Justice was supposed to be a tall dame in a white robe, but in Paulton, I decided, if the citizens ever stuck a statue of Justice on the court-house steps, it would have to be a fat, red-faced guy with a scar on his belly.
That was a laugh, but a funny thing: I’d always played on the Justice team. Even now. Nobobdy could deny that Banta, the Princess and even McGee had it coming. I felt sorry for Caryle Waterman, but it was his own fault. And I had saved Penelope Grayson. I tried to think how I might have got her out in some other way, but I couldn’t. It was a case, as the saying goes, of fighting fire with fire.
Grayson turned to me from the chief and asked: “Would Penelope actually have been the Bride if that poor woman hadn’t …?”
I said: “Yeah.”
Chief Piper scowled at me. “That brings up the one thing I don’t understand.”
I drank the rest of my whisky. “What?”
“Why’d the Princess take Miss Grayson’s place?”
They both stared at me. “Oh,” I said; “She just … just wanted to help out.”
“Didn’t she know Solomon … uh … and killed the Bride?”
“Neither of us knew that,” I said earnestly. “Otherwise she’d never done it.” I took a bite of steak “I’d never have let her. The Princess … well, I went for her in a big way.”
Grayson said: “You don’t seem exactly stricken with grief.”
“Well,” I said, “being a detective toughens a fellow up, Mr. Grayson.”
THE END
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The Fifth Grave Page 16
