Baptism for the Dead

by R. R. Irvine

  “He told me he was there to sell documents to Varney. Would you know anything about that?”

  “A year ago that bastard was running a shoestring operation. Now he suddenly has money to burn. He has to be screwing it out of somebody, that’s for sure. Probably the church.”

  Traveler hadn’t expected that kind of candor, not from one of the chosen people. “What do you know about the Church of Zion Reborn?”

  “Enough to want it burned to the ground.” Horne chuckled nastily. “If they had a goddamned church.”

  Traveler stared at the cop. Horne wouldn’t be the only one with that kind of attitude. In this town the police department would be full of officers who thought of themselves as modern-day Avenging Angels, spiritual descendants of Brigham Young’s nineteenth-century vigilantes. The same kind who were responsible for the Mountain Meadow Massacre.

  Traveler started to rise. Horne waved him back into the seat, then closed his eyes and vigorously rubbed his forehead. “A word of advice. I don’t want you getting into trouble. My father said your old man was an expert at that. Like father, like son, eh?”

  Traveler folded his arms and waited.

  Horne went on. “I heard you put some guy in the hospital down south. The wrong guy, some say. Others say you just plain like to hurt people. It doesn’t much matter who.”

  “No complaint was ever filed.”

  “Sure, because you paid the bills.” He shrugged. “That’s what I heard, anyway. I also hear the guy you flattened was one of many standing in line to bang your girl.”

  Traveler held himself perfectly still, saying nothing.

  “From what I hear, your father was the same kind of hothead. Broke a few bones in his time, too.” The cop smiled. “I figure you’ve decided to take up where your old man left off.”

  “My father is retired.”

  “I don’t think there’s enough work in this town for one private eye named Moroni Traveler,” he said. “Let alone two.”

  8

  ONLY A dozen steps from the police building Traveler felt lost in time. Snow was falling so heavily it was like a curtain shutting off past and future, leaving him with only a cold white present.

  Shivering, he pulled the flimsy collar up around his ears and ran for the parking lot. Inside the car, he revved the engine hoping to encourage the heater. It blew enough but produced no heat, only a noxious smell. His damp clothes didn’t help the atmosphere either.

  That settled it. Despite the fact that he was aching to get his hands on Reuben Dixon again, Traveler decided to go home. Besides, Martha Varney had been missing for a long time now. With luck another few hours wouldn’t make any difference. And with more luck the city’s snowplows would have the streets cleared by morning.

  Or so he thought until he started driving. Nighttime visibility, limited to a few yards when he started out, got worse as he drove toward the higher elevation of the avenues. Drifts were already more than a foot deep in places. Tree limbs, overloaded with snow trapped in their spring leaves, littered the streets.

  On top of everything else, the tire chains were shaking what life was left right out of his Ford. By the time he parked in front of the house on First Avenue an hour later, he had the sensation that he’d driven across the state instead of the four miles from downtown.

  The house, with adobe walls two feet thick, was a relic from pioneer times. At the moment it looked like an igloo with green shutters.

  Traveler felt like a snowman by the time he made it to the front door. His father, Moroni Sr., who preferred to be called Martin, met him at the door. “Mad Bill called and warned me you’d be late.”

  Traveler stomped his feet, which was a mistake because that started them tingling with chilblains. “How did he know that?”

  “He said you were involved in church business. Is that true?”

  “Fix me a hot drink while I get undressed. Then we’ll talk.”

  Traveler kicked off his shoes and realized that he couldn’t feel his toes. To bring them back to life, he began rubbing his feet along the carpet as he made his way toward his bedroom, the same one he’d had as a child. It stood at the end of a long hall, past a wide spot with a southern window known as the sun porch.

  His room, separated from the rest of the house like an afterthought, still contained his childhood furniture, early American replicas from the forties.

  “I’m not a sentimental man,” his father explained when Traveler had returned six months ago. “It just seemed a waste to buy new things.”

  To which Traveler merely nodded. Anything more would have embarrassed both of them.

  As usual the bedroom was cold, since hot air had such a long way to come from the basement furnace. Traveler quickly shed his clothes, leaving them on the linoleum where they fell. The flooring, simulated wood to go along with real knotty-pine walls, still contained the burn marks where he’d experimented with cigarettes as a youngster. He and his best friend at the time, Will Tanner, had gone through an entire pack in one day, with Will squinting over his shoulder after each puff expecting to see an angry Mormon God.

  Naked, Traveler hurried into the shower, running hot water until the bathroom warmed with steam. Then he plunged under the spray, dancing in and out to keep from being boiled. When he’d warmed up enough to relax, he added cold water to the flow. Only then did he stand directly under the spray and soak.

  Finally, he reached for the soap and began washing himself. By the time he got to his toes, feeling was beginning to return.

  The musty shower smell, the cold concrete floor chilling his bare feet, his own anxieties, all served to trigger a flood of memory. He was a child again, hiding in that same shower, because it was the farthest he could get from his parents’ room without actually leaving the house. Usually, with the bathroom door closed, the distance was enough to reduce their arguments to unintelligible sounds. But not this time.

  Even now, with so much time elapsed, he could recall everything, how he pulled a blanket from his bed and dragged it into the shower, wrapping it around himself as he huddled in the corner, praying that shower spiders wouldn’t drop down his neck.

  Finally, in desperation he had covered his head but that only muffled the words. He could still understand what was being said.

  / wish it wasn’t true, but he’s not my son. His father’s voice.

  I named him after you, from his mother.

  A woman’s kind of conscience money, no doubt.

  You left me alone.

  I went to war.

  Soldiers, his mother laughed. It’s all right for them to screw everything in sight.

  I didn’t.

  Then I made up for both of us, didn’t I?

  The hot water ran out. Shivering again, Traveler stepped from the shower and rubbed himself warm.

  When he walked into the living room a few minutes later, wearing flannel pajamas and a heavy terry-cloth robe, his father was already standing in front of the fireplace holding two cups of steaming coffee.

  “You were a long time,” he said.

  “I was cold.”

  “I heard you talking to yourself.”

  Traveler didn’t remember giving voice to his thoughts. “What did I say?”

  With exaggerated nonchalance his father concentrated on his coffee. After a prolonged silence he said, “I read somewhere that environment is more important than heredity. Experts consider everything outside the egg cell as environment, you understand.”

  Traveler grunted. The coffee burned his tongue.

  “Damn near anybody can make themselves a family,” his father went on. “It’s what happens after that counts.”

  Traveler did something he hadn’t done in years. He hugged his father, squeezing until the old boy gasped, “Let me go, for Christ’s sake.”

  The moment Traveler released him, Martin stepped back. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were still growing.” He stood on tiptoe to make himself taller. “But they tell me it’s
us old people who are shrinking.”

  Traveler grinned. At times like this he knew that whatever he was, both good and bad, he owed to Martin. Likes and dislikes, even prejudices, all had been absorbed over the years. But there was more to his inheritance than that, practical things that Martin had taught him. How to cut a pocket from an old pair of trousers and use it as a money pouch pinned inside your waistband. Or how to disarm a man.

  “We’re very much alike,” Traveler said. And yet so different, he thought. But heredity or not, I am your son.

  Physically they were opposites. Martin was short, five feet six inches before age took its toll. Traveler was six three the last time he checked.

  On a good day Martin weighed a hundred and forty pounds. Traveler tried to keep his weight at two hundred, though he’d played football nearer two forty. He’d gone as high as two fifty when he joined the Los Angeles Police Department after retiring from professional football. On the force he thought bulk would be on his side. Instead, his size had attracted every macho asshole who wanted to prove a point.

  For a long time neither of them spoke. The silence was broken only when a log settled in the grate, causing sparks to shower against the fireplace screen like angry insects.

  Absently his father brushed the seat of his pants. Then he ran his feet back and forth over the carpet in front of the hearth as if stamping out embers. “I never like to go to sleep until a fire’s out,” he said.

  “I’ll wait up with you,” Traveler answered as he eased himself into a reclining chair that squeaked as it unfolded.

  On the mantel behind Martin stood family photographs spanning forty years. They had been arranged chronologically from left to right. The oldest, a wedding picture of Martin and Kary, was enshrined in a silver frame. Next to it, overpowered by a heavy oak frame, was Martin as a young man. He was wearing his army uniform from World War II, a subject that had been taboo for years.

  In fact, Traveler couldn’t recall his father ever speaking about the war, though his mother had made a few choice comments on rare occasions. “Your father was a goddamned hero. That’s hard for a woman to live with, I can tell you. It always made me feel guilty.”

  In the beginning Traveler hadn’t understood what she had meant.

  Next came photos in cardboard holders. In one of them a bald-headed man stood next to a 1941 Cadillac. His face was slightly out of focus. To this day Traveler didn’t know the man’s name, though he suspected it might be his biological father.

  Whenever he’d asked about it, Martin had said, “That’s one thing you’ll have to speak to your mother about.”

  But all she would say was, “The man’s dead now. So what difference does it make?”

  “Is he part of our family?”

  A faraway look would come into her eyes.

  “Why do you keep him on the mantel then?” Traveler had persisted quite logically.

  His mother had gone to her grave without answering that question. One day, he promised himself, he’d take time out to investigate that face personally. The idea made him think about Penny Varney, who was conducting her own kind of search.

  The photograph on the far right showed Traveler as a senior linebacker at USC. The picture of him playing for Los Angeles had been removed after the accident.

  Martin slid one of the photos aside to make way for his empty coffee cup. “Did I tell you that Mad Bill called?”

  “The moment I came in the door.”

  “Was he right? Are you working for the church?”

  “For Willis Tanner, actually. But that amounts to the same thing.”

  “I knew that boy was going to cause trouble the moment his family moved in next door.” Martin snatched up his cup, glaring into it as if someone had stolen his last swallow. “Even after he became a deacon he was a wild kid. Did I ever tell you what I caught him doing behind the house?”

  “I was there, too, remember.”

  He snorted. “That’s right.” He waved his cup. “Let’s have a refill.”

  “No more coffee. It keeps me awake.”

  “Exactly. Stick to brandy. It’s better for you.”

  A cup in each hand, Martin disappeared into the kitchen. He returned almost immediately carrying glasses and a bottle. “You working for the church makes me want to get drunk.”

  “That’s two of us.”

  “As good a toast as any.” His father filled the glasses beyond discretion. “Here you are, my boy. I have a feeling you’re going to need it.”

  Traveler warily accepted the glass.

  “There’s something else I have to tell you,” his father said, downing his brandy and then coughing like a man who didn’t really have to. “There was another call for you.”

  His tone of voice made Traveler ask, “Claire?”

  Martin sighed. “She left a number.”

  That was something different. “Where is it?”

  “On the pad by the phone.”

  Traveler started to get up, but his father waved him back into the recliner. “She said it would be good only until eight.”

  Martin checked his watch. “It’s long past that now.” He caught his son’s reproving frown and added, “It was already too late by the time you got home.”

  “I’ll give it a try anyway.”

  His father reached out to him then, touching him lightly on the arm. The gesture was both shy and restraining. “Son, she’s got too many troubles of her own.”

  “Hindsight is a wonderful thing.”

  “I could have predicted the future for you when you first met her. But would you have listened?”

  Traveler shrugged.

  “Hell no. Nobody ever does. You know that.” Martin took up his wedding picture like a man handling high explosives. “Everyone has to make his own mistakes. Thank God you didn’t marry yours.”

  Traveler went to the phone, his father right behind him.

  “You’re not going after her, are you?”

  “I hope not.”

  He dialed the number on the pad. A man answered, shouting over background noise that sounded like jukebox music at a bar.

  “Is Claire Bennion there?”

  “Shit, fella, somebody ought to beat some sense into you, keeping a nice lady like that waiting all this time.”

  “Tell her it’s Moroni.”

  “There’s a fucking angel on the phone,” the man shouted before breaking into laughter. A chorus of bar voices joined his merrymaking.

  When it finally subsided Claire came on the line to ask breathlessly, “Is that you, Moroni?” She sounded as if she, too, had been laughing.

  “None other.” He forced himself to sound light-hearted.

  “Guess where I am?”

  “A bar.”

  “You really are a detective.”

  “Detective angel,” someone whooped in the background.

  “I need you,” she said.

  “You know where my father lives.”

  “Oh, no. You have to find me. You know that.”

  “I’ve given up.”

  “You’d come looking if someone were paying you.”

  “No one is.”

  “I’d pay you with love.”

  “It’s late. I’m tired.”

  “If you don’t find me this time, it will be too late.”

  “It’s already too late.”

  “You’ll have to live with the consequences if you don’t.”

  “What consequences, Claire?”

  “You’d have to be a real angel to know that, Moroni.”

  9

  SLEEP TURNED out to be as elusive as Claire. Finally Traveler groaned in frustration, switched on the bedside light, and went to work on the address book that had belonged to both Varneys, mother and daughter, reading through it methodically, starting with the A’s. Surprise came four letters later. In what appeared to be the more recent handwriting, there was a listing for R. Dixon. No address was given but there was a phone number.

&nb
sp; Fueled by a sudden surge of adrenaline, he snatched up his watch from an early American chest of drawers that had once served as a landing strip for his model airplanes. For a moment he thought the second hand had stopped moving. Then he heard ticking and realized the time was correct, two o’clock in the morning, too late to do anything except go back to sleep. But the thought of Reuben Dixon, compounded by the coffee, or the brandy, or both, had him wide awake.

  With a sigh of resignation, he went back to the address book. But after a couple of pages he realized it was no use. He knew himself too well. He was going to call R. Dixon no matter what the time.

  Barefoot, he tiptoed down the hall past his father’s bedroom, through the dining room, and into the alcove that held the phone. He let it ring for a long time without getting an answer. Three possibilities came immediately to mind: the man wasn’t home, he was a heavy sleeper, or he was refusing to answer. Of course, there was always the chance that Traveler was calling an entirely different R. Dixon. But he didn’t believe in coincidences like that.

  Then it hit him. Use your head. Look it up in the phone book.

  Sure enough, the number in the address book matched Mountain Bell’s listing for Reuben Dixon. The address given was on Edgemont Avenue, only a few blocks north of the temple.

  He woke his father to borrow the jeep, which had four-wheel drive and a new set of snow tires.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Martin said groggily. Then he saw the look in his son’s eyes. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Not when the church is involved,” Martin said, slipping out of bed to grab hold of his pants which he’d abandoned over the back of a chair. He fished car keys from a front pocket and held them out. “Be careful.”

  ******

  The Edgemont address turned out to be one of those bleak three-story apartment buildings that had gone up in the thirties. Traveler had been inside enough of them to know they were all the same: four apartments on each floor. There would be a plaque, usually brass, next to the door with an imposing name, something like The Centurion or The Cambridge.

  His knowledge came from a summer job his father had wangled for him delivering furniture. Invariably the buildings had one small elevator that wasn’t to be used by the likes of workmen. As a result he’d hauled hide-a-beds, sofas, and even a piano up narrow service stairs on more than one occasion.