“Did Dr. Valley ever mention somebody named William Kenecky to you?” I asked, catching Garth’s curt nod of approval out of the corner of my eye.
“Kenecky? You mean the crazy television preacher who’s on the run from the tax people?”
“That’s him.”
Zelaskowich thought about it, shook his head. “No, Craig never mentioned him to me. But now that you bring it up, it occurs to me that a lot of the nonsense Craig used to spout sounds like the nonsense Kenecky spouted. Maybe that’s where Craig got his silly notions from. I still can’t understand how somebody who’s been to college—and earned a doctorate, no less—could believe such ignorant, vicious stuff. It’s very sad.”
But not nearly as sad as what somebody—maybe William Kenecky—was doing to a little girl named Vicky Brown. “Was Valley really incompetent as well as obnoxious?”
“He became so, yes. I think his belief that the world was going to end about the day after tomorrow finally sort of infected his brain. Obviously, he’s one of the world’s leading experts on orchids; if he weren’t, he wouldn’t have been our curator. However, in the last few months he simply let his work go. In fact, he was warned about it; and he was so bold—or stupid—as to say that it didn’t matter if all his orchids died because Jesus was on His way. Can you imagine?”
“Religious zealotry can do strange things to people,” I said as I glanced at Garth, who smiled thinly and raised his eyebrows ever so slightly.
Zelaskowich nodded. “Indeed. In any case, Craig had been steadily neglecting his work for some time, but in somewhat subtle ways. However, after the Customs Service interfered with the importation of the rain forest soil, he became positively unhinged. Then the administration had to let him go. You’d have expected him to be upset, but he really wasn’t. In fact, he told me that it was almost a relief not to be distracted by work while he was waiting for Jesus to come, and that now we’d see he was right about the imminent end of the world and the rising of demons.” The botanist paused, shook his head sadly. “Poor Craig. On his last day I came across him in one of the gardens. He was down on his hands and knees, rocking back and forth, babbling absolute nonsense in a very loud voice. He seemed almost hysterical. In fact, I think there’s a name for that sort of thing.”
“There is,” I said. “It’s called glossolalia—‘speaking in tongues.’”
3.
Dr. Craig Valley’s three-story town house was on East Sixty-third Street, half a block away from one of the shifting, ephemeral boundaries so common to New York City, where architecture, patterns of street activity, planted things, and commercial activity abruptly changed to become an entirely different “neighborhood.” The neighborhood in the next block was considerably seedier, with dirtier buildings plastered with advertisements for rock concerts, no trees, and dirtier sidewalks. Judging from the condition of Valley’s town house, with the flaking paint on its window frames and its facade of crumbling brick, it looked as if this onetime curator of orchids at the New York Botanical Garden was existing on the borderline in more ways than one.
The man who answered the door was five feet five or six and overweight—except for his face, which had a pinched look about it, with a narrow nose flanked by watery, pale gray eyes that glinted with suspicion, and thin, pursed lips. His red hair was thinning, and there was a rash on his chin and cheeks, as if he might recently have shaved off a beard.
“What is it?” he asked in a high-pitched voice laced with equal parts of hostility and suspicion.
Made slightly uneasy by my brother’s stony expression, which would certainly have made me hostile and suspicious, I flashed my most disarming, winning smile. “Dr. Valley?”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“Our names are Frederickson, Dr. Valley. We’re private investigators working on a matter of considerable urgency, and we’d very much appreciate a few moments of your time.”
Valley exercised his neck muscles by first looking down at me, then up at Garth, then down to me again. “I’ve heard of you two,” he said in a voice that was close to a hiss. Back up to Garth. “You were the false messiah—the leader of that pitiable cult who called themselves Garth’s People.”
“I wasn’t any messiah, Dr. Valley, false or otherwise,” my brother said in a flat voice that betrayed no emotion. “Like my brother said, we’d like to ask you a few questions, and then we’ll be on our way.”
“What is it you want to know? I can’t imagine how anything I know could be of any use to private investigators.”
The lack of emotion in my brother’s expression and tone told me that he was, in fact, feeling more than a tad impatient, and was in no mood for small talk; naturally, that would have to be my department. Still smiling, I said: “We’d like to ask you a few questions about a company called Nuvironment. We understand that you used to do some consulting work for them.”
Valley frowned, and his thin lips pinched together even more. “Who told you that?”
“May we come in?”
“Certainly not, Frederickson. My time is very valuable, and even if I wished to give you some of it, I wouldn’t speak to you about my professional contacts or activities.”
“Then we’ll get right to the point,” I said curtly, dispensing with my smile, which had been starting to hurt me anyway. “Did you arrange to import one hundred tons of Amazon rain forest soil for Nuvironment?”
The pale gray eyes went wide with shock, and the thin lips parted as his jaw dropped slightly to reveal uneven, gray teeth that looked as if they might have been color coordinated with his eyes. He recovered, quickly stepped back and started to close the door—only to find his effort frustrated by Garth’s very large right foot. Garth casually put his hand on the door and pushed, effortlessly forcing Craig Valley back into what turned out to be a wood-paneled vestibule decorated with what I considered to be rather tacky religious art. I stepped in first and Garth followed, closing the door behind him.
“You have no right to come in here!” Valley squeaked, continuing to back away until he banged up against the side of the archway that framed the entrance to his living room. His face was deeply flushed, making the rash on his chin and cheeks stand out like chalk dust. “I’ll call the police!”
“A good idea,” Garth said brusquely as he brushed past the cringing Craig Valley and entered the living room.
I walked up to stand in the archway beside Valley, watched as Garth picked up the receiver of a telephone on a small desk across the room, held it out.
“You want me to dial them for you, Valley?” Garth continued casually.
“What is wrong with you people?!” Valley shouted near my left ear. His voice was growing even higher pitched, and was now close to soprano range.
“You mentioned something about calling the police,” I said, stepping away and rubbing my left ear. “Garth is just trying to oblige you. When they arrive, we can all sit down and chat about a possibly illegal shipment of an agricultural commodity that you arranged for Nuvironment. I certainly hope you acquired the necessary permits, Valley. I also hope you have whatever money was promised to you, because my bet is that your bosses are going to be very unhappy to be caught with dirty hands, if you will. Now, Garth and I really don’t give a damn about all that dirt, or the bugs in it, so you might be better off just answering our questions. What do you think, Dr. Valley?”
The blood slowly drained from the botanist’s face, leaving his flesh with a pasty, grayish hue. His mouth kept opening and closing, but no sound came out, and his head kept swiveling back and forth between Garth and me, his watery eyes wide with shock—and, I was certain, fear.
“How could you know?” he finally managed to say in a small voice that cracked. “How on earth could you possibly know?”
I motioned for Garth to put down the phone, and he did; then I motioned for Valley to sit down on the sagging couch in his living room, and he did. His movements were stiff and awkward, as if he were drunk.
/> “We’re really not interested in getting you into trouble, Dr. Valley,” I said as I went into the living room and sat down on a footstool in front of the couch. I glanced over my shoulder at Garth, who had moved to the fireplace and was leaning on the mantel. His face was impassive, but he was gazing intently into the red-haired botanist’s face. “All we want is some information, and we have a very good and important reason for wanting it. Nobody will be told that we got the information from you.” I paused as Valley suddenly leaned forward, clasped his hands together, and bowed his head. At first I thought he might be sick, and it was a few moments before I realized that he was praying. “Are you all right, Dr. Valley?”
There was no reply. I again glanced at Garth, who simply nodded as an indication that I should go on.
“We already know that Nuvironment’s sole business is conducting research into the feasibility of constructing self-contained environments called biospheres,” I continued quietly, speaking to the top of the man’s head. “Bringing in that soil means that they’re ready to construct at least an experimental prototype, most probably on a site somewhere around here. I repeat: we’re not interested in getting you into trouble. But we already know that you tried to get the soil for them while you were working at the Botanical Garden; we know all about how the Customs Service stopped the plan, and about the personal and professional difficulties you suffered soon afterward; we know that the soil is now in this country. Before, Garth and I weren’t sure that you’d been involved in importing it; after your little outburst in the foyer, we are sure. Now, sir, we need to know where that soil was dumped, and we need to know right now—this minute. The truth of the matter is—”
Suddenly Craig Valley’s head snapped up and his right arm shot out so that his trembling index finger was only inches from my chest. The veins and cords in his neck stood out and writhed like worms beneath his skin, and his watery gray eyes gleamed with rage, hatred—and madness.
“You’ll know the truth before long, nonbeliever!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs, thoroughly startling me so that I almost fell backward off the footstool. “‘And there went out another horse that was red!’ Soon you and your brother will see the second beast!”
I braced myself on the stool and waited for more, but Valley had apparently finished saying his piece. He glared at me for a few moments with his madness-glazed eyes, then abruptly slumped into a corner of the sofa, covered his face with his hands, and began to tremble violently. And then he began to pray again—or chant, or something; his voice was steadily rising in pitch and volume, but I couldn’t make out anything he was saying.
Garth abruptly strode across the room, grabbed a handful of Valley’s shirt, and pulled him up into a sitting position. End of prayer. Valley gasped, then made a mewling sound deep in his throat, like the cry of a startled animal.
“Pull yourself together and do your praying later,” my brother said in a low, even voice. “The reason we need to know where the soil was dumped is because there’s a little girl somewhere around there who’s being sexually abused. Considering the fact that some guy could be giving her a bad time at this very moment, Mongo and I really don’t have any time for you and your bullshit.” Garth paused, and smiled thinly without any warmth whatsoever. “It’s almost Christmas, pal, so how about getting into the spirit of the season and giving a little kid a break? I’ll take it as a nice gesture if you do, and then I’ll refrain from breaking your arm. If you don’t want to be opening presents with one hand, the next words out of your mouth had better be in a language Mongo and I can understand. Now where the fuck is Nuvironment storing that dirt?”
Garth had certainly gotten Valley’s attention; the man’s pale gray eyes were wide—but they now mirrored as much shock as alarm or madness. “What you say is impossible,” he said to Garth in a hoarse, croaking voice. “It’s impossible.”
“What’s impossible?” I asked. “Are you saying Nuvironment doesn’t have the dirt, or are you denying that you helped them bring it into this country?”
Valley’s response was to wag his head repeatedly. His mouth with its thin lips opened and closed, but the only sound he managed to produce was a kind of whimper. He resembled nothing so much as a very ugly beached fish that had been brought up from some very deep, lightless layer of a poisonous ocean.
“No, I don’t think that’s what he means,” Garth said, his voice soft and oddly distant. My brother’s matter-of-fact tone and lack of visible expression were beginning to make me feel decidedly uneasy. I’d learned that with Garth, since his poisoning with nitrophenylpentadienal and his eventual recovery, it was best to read his emotional and behavioral traffic signals in reverse from the way they would be read with most other people. “I do think he means that what I said was happening to the girl is impossible.” He paused, tightened his grip on the botanist’s shirt ever so slightly. “If you don’t want to talk about one kind of dirt, pal, then we’ll talk about another. Tell us where the good Reverend William Kenecky is holed up.”
Craig Valley finally found his voice—and it sounded haunted. “It’s impossible. The reverend is a man of God; he would never do such a thing.”
Garth yanked Valley to his feet, ripping the man’s shirt. My brother let go of the tattered fabric, wrapped his fingers around the other man’s throat. “He’s repeatedly raping a girl by the name of Vicky Brown, Valley—and I assume you know who she is too. Jesus Christ, man, if you care anything about children, or even just this child, tell us where to find Kenecky and the girl. Where is Nuvironment storing the dirt?”
“God, I’m going to be sick,” the botanist groaned, and put a hand over his mouth as he retched dryly. “Please let me go to the bathroom.”
Garth released his grip as I rose from the footstool and stepped away. Valley staggered across the living room and through another archway into the dining room. Garth and I followed, watched as he entered a bathroom adjacent to the kitchen at the rear of the town house, slammed the door shut behind him. A few seconds later there was the sound of water running.
“Damn, Garth,” I said, my heart starting to pound with excitement. “He damn well knows where the girl is. We’re going to find her.”
“I’d say so,” Garth replied flatly as he stared at the closed door.
A minute went by, then two. The running water could clearly be heard, but there was no sound of retching. “He’s had enough sick leave,” I said tightly. “Let’s go get him.”
“Right.”
We were almost to the door when we both stopped suddenly, virtually paralyzed for an instant by the sounds that came from the other side of the closed door. The voice was clearly Craig Valley’s, but there was something inhuman, animal-like, in the eerie, ululating howls that were a mixture of shrieking and thick-syllabled words I knew instinctively were not a part of any language spoken on earth.
Garth hit the door with his shoulder, smashing it off its frame and inward at almost the precise moment that the howling turned into a wet, wordless, gurgling sound. Blood sprayed and spurted over our faces and clothing. I gazed past Garth in horror at the figure slumped backward on the toilet seat over the water bowl, and knew that there was going to be no saving Vicky Brown this day, because there was going to be no saving Dr. Craig Valley.
Valley had really done a job on himself. One edge of a double-edged razor blade was embedded in the index and middle fingers of each of Valley’s hands, the result of the force he had exerted to punch two holes in the carotid arteries in his neck, one on each side of his jugular. He’d certainly known what he was doing when he’d decided to leave this vale of tears, for there was no way a team of surgeons, much less my brother and me, could have found a way to stop up those spurting holes before his life leaked out of him. There was a last spasm of heartbeats, causing more blood to spray over us, the floor, walls, and ceiling, and then he was dead.
With trembling hands, I wiped at the warm, sticky blood covering my face, but only managed to smear it. And
then the air in the bathroom was suddenly filled with the thick, green odor of feces as Valley’s sphincter let loose and his bowels emptied; brown stains began to darken the legs of his slacks. I wanted to look away, and couldn’t; I was transfixed with horror, strangely fascinated by the fact that a man could actually will himself to use his bare hands to punch holes in his neck with razor blades. He was a man who’d been in a very big hurry to die, and he’d certainly taken care of business.
Garth was also taking care of business. If I hadn’t been so shaken by the horror of what Craig Valley had done to himself, I’d probably have seen the blood-coated, cordless telephone that had dropped onto the carpeted floor beside Valley’s left foot. But it was Garth who had seen it first, and now he rudely kicked the head botanist’s foot to one side, picked up the telephone and examined it. Then he held it out for me to examine its face.
The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone Page 33
