Father Martin cut him off. “Exactly what are you suggesting?”
“I’m not sure. Some sort of ritual?”
Incredulity blossomed in the priest’s expression. “You can’t be serious. Religions regard human life as sacred. Besides, Christ’s sacrifice made all others pointless.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Christianity.”
“What were you thinking, then?”
“I don’t know. No stone unturned, I guess.”
“Surely there are other explanations for this tragedy. Now, if you will excuse me.” There was an edge to the priest’s tone.
Defuse, Wil thought, getting to his feet; he looked around, spotted the collectables in the bookcase. “Interesting display,” he said. “Isn’t Leonardo Guerra in the antiquities business?”
Father Martin followed him to the bookcase. “That’s right. He’s always giving me little things—clay animals and whatnot.”
Wil focused on a sculpted male figure with a strand of cowrie shells draped around it. “This one, for instance?”
“Among others.”
Wil was sure now: The statue was the same as those he’d seen that night in Guerra’s office. For the priest’s benefit, he spent another moment admiring it: bearded figure with bulging eyes and broad nose, smaller figures bent over in supplication, the wood cracked in places. “Looks old,” he said. “Would you happen to know its origin?”
He caught it just before it vanished, the look in Father Martin’s eyes: faint ripples in a deep pool, a cloud across the moon.
“Someplace in Latin America. Now I really must ask you to leave me to my work. Good night, Mr. Hardesty.” He moved to his desk and sat down.
“Good night,” Wil said. At the door he turned back, cherry-picked the words. “Father, I need your counsel. In Catholic school, I learned that someone who is pleasing to God always tells the truth.”
The priest looked up sharply from his desk. “What makes you say that?”
“Being lied to in my work, I suppose. Maybe it’s just me, but there doesn’t seem to be much premium on veracity anymore.”
“And that troubles you?”
“What I want to know—at least understand—is whether the virtuous man is still responsible for the truth.”
“I see.” Father Martin’s eyes held a distant look, as though he was poring through an album of old photographs. “It would help me if you were eight years old, Mr. Hardesty. Then I’d simply insist that a virtuous person—one who would be with God—is always truthful. That lying is wrong.”
It was not the answer Wil expected. “Then you do understand,” he said.
“What I believe I understand, Mr. Hardesty, is that it is still possible to be a good man, if not a virtuous one.”
“A good man?”
“Someone who strives for the greater good in what he does and prays every day for forgiveness.” Father Martin got up from the desk and stood facing the window, hands clasped behind his back. “Drive safely,” he said.
Wil eased out, letting the door click shut behind him.
Father Martin was still staring at the rose garden when the door opened and Leonardo Guerra entered. “Goddammit, can you not give a simple yes or no answer when it’s called for?”
Martin DeSantis said nothing.
“You might just as well have told him you were lying, for Christ’s sake. Where is your head?”
“So much killing…”
“Don’t forget, presbitero, if I go down, all of it goes down. You, this, everything.”
“You have her, don’t you? His little girl.”
“Just keep in mind what I said.”
“You think I don’t? Every day—every minute? How do you think I keep going?”
Leonardo Guerra lifted the lid on the briefcase. “Save the self-righteous shit for your flock, Martin, it’s wasted on me. And calm down. Sometimes I think you’re losing your mind.”
“He knows about Zavala.”
“So I heard.”
“And?”
“And we have work to do. Yours and mine.”
Wil found a frame place open late on Ventura Boulevard and a sub shop near it where he put away a wilted salad and a meatball sandwich. Another stop and he was at the Rodriguez place at eleven. He fumbled for the key in the fuschia planter, let himself in, opened the pint of JD he’d bought, and poured himself a stiff one, which he carried to the den along with the newly framed photograph. He opened the door, went to the spot on the wall. The photo fit fine in the space. For a minute he looked at the two friends with the torn seam between them, him and Paul at Cam Ranh, frozen in time. He poured in a slug of the Jack Daniels, hoping to flood the guilt-voice and the one yelling about what the bleeding hell he was doing with a drink in his hand—clashing, incessant voices that led to mumbling into the bathroom mirror at 3:00 A.M. and thinking about the razor blades in the cabinet behind it.
Tightening his grip on the glass, he turned and left the den.
The pint didn’t help. He slept like crap—tossing fitfully in Raeann’s small guest bed, trying to jam together pieces of a puzzle that wouldn’t go. Finally at four-thirty he gave it up, showered and shaved, then left the house and chased the moon west over Topanga Canyon to the beach. Cold light saw him walking on sand like wet pavement, accompanied by foghorns, the ka-whump-hiss of surf, the salt-rot smell of low tide, his own breath. Groups of sea birds stood hunched as though they were trying to disappear into their feathers; mist obliterated the horizon.
The hangover made it hard to think, but his general take on last night was that Father Martin was a strong man hiding something. Resigned to it as though it was a price to be paid. To whom—Guerra? Had to be: Guerra-Zavala, Guerra-DeSantis followed. Niños de Mexico: kids adopted, kids dead—nothing definitive except for Guerra smack in the middle of all of it. His take on Guerra: smart, smooth, deadly dangerous. Could he have ordered Zavala killed? In a heartbeat, but why? Easier to let father and child simply disappear into Mexico, right? Not if Zavala dead was where the investigation was supposed to stop. Wil was reasonably sure his mention of the second bullet to Father Martin would get passed on. That had been his intent: unnerve, trigger a mistake.
Wishful thinking.
He picked up a stone and skimmed it off an incoming line of scud.
Curious that DeSantis didn’t bring up Niños last night when talking about Guerra’s contributions to St. Boniface. Then there was the shell-draped statue, more on that definitely unsaid. Which left him…where?
Wil crossed the bikeway and passed a scattering of sleeping homeless people, shapeless lumps backed up to the public restrooms. He searched his jeans, came up with a couple of dollar bills, which he handed a young woman with an old face who looked up as he went by. She said nothing, but he felt her eyes on his back. Up on Ocean Avenue, the traffic signals blinked red.
At a breakfast spot near the Santa Monica pier, he drank most of the owner’s first pot of coffee and polished off a not-bad Denver omelet. As he ate he scanned the Thursday morning Times. Toward the back of the first section was an article taking issue with the lack of progress by the Innocents task force: shakeups loomed, according to unnamed sources. Wil put it aside and thumbed through his notebook to the names taken from Guerra’s files the night he broke into the Niños office.
Something there maybe.
Following the café owner’s directions to the library, he used the pay phone outside to try Lisa again. This time her father hung up. Donna Pacheco at least talked to him: the cops had been okay, the job was fine, the car ran—the deadness in her tone said more. Be patient, he told her, and then the library opened and he was inside cruising through the phone directories. Of the names from the old Niños files, none were still listed. Faring better with the personal file names from Guerra’s desk, Wil checked out the addresses in the detail street-map books and plotted his route: Bel Air, Toluca Lake, Pasadena.
Next he searched the periodicals subject indexes under DeSantis, Martin, and f
ound twenty-two stories, fourteen newspaper and eight magazine. Each was accompanied by photographs: Father Martin at the St. Boniface groundbreaking, passing out food to a crowd of immigrant families, sorting mounds of clothing destined for Latin American outreach, balancing a child on his shoulders as he talked earnestly to reporters at a mission opening, leading a candlelight parade down Wilshire, shaking hands with the Mexican consul-general, signing his book The Clarity of Absolutes, clutching a bullhorn at an AIDS rally, on and on—roughly twenty years of photo-op passion and commitment. Later articles, the more rapt ones, placed the priest’s lifetime of service in the Schweitzer-Sheen-Mother Teresa category and hinted at international honors to come. Wil sifted for facts: born 1931 near Portillo, Cuba; arrived Key West, Florida, 1945; studied for the priesthood in Baltimore beginning 1949; served in North Florida, Louisiana, and Texas parishes before assignment as assistant pastor at St. Boniface, then a tiny dot on the Archdiocese of Los Angeles map; took over eight months later when its pastor died suddenly. From then on a welcome and rising star, as though the questing root had struck fertile ground.
Bleary from reading, Wil left the library. As he drove up Sunset, the chill left the air, replaced by sunshine. Houses got bigger and began receding behind whitewashed walls. Lots spread out under sycamores; hedges rose up; poinsettias flamed under arched windows. Hibiscus Place came to mind.
Parker Henry was an investment banker who worked out of his Bel Air home, a raw white Monterey-style with new plantings of purple lantana and lines of black drip-hose. Over coffee served by Mrs. Henry, Wil told them he’d been referred by Father Martin, admired their round-faced baby girl, Alyssa, asked what they knew of the baby’s origins, the process, Lenny Guerra, money, snags to be aware of—things that might smack of fraud or worse. If so, they were artfully concealed: The Henrys couldn’t be more pleased. Despite the cost? Emphatically.
The Lawrence Briscoes of Toluca Lake were equally forthcoming. He was a literary agent, she ran their office; weekends they served meals to the down-and-out at Gentes de Cuidad. Their boy, Steven, was a dream come true. Sure they knew the facts—he’d been left on the steps at Los Amigos de Hermosillo—but they couldn’t care less. Elaine Briscoe told him they were behind a group promoting Father Martin for the Nobel.
Wil kicked the Super Glide toward Pasadena.
The air was thick now with valley inversion layer; above the stinging haze he could make out the tip of Mount Wilson, hovering there with a lone patch of snow. Twenty minutes later he found Orange Grove Boulevard, started looking for the Warren Sumner place not long before he spotted it. Palms lined the drive; on a broad expanse of green, a man in a straw hat guided a sit-down mower around flower beds. From the sidewalk a golf pro could clank the portico with a five iron, but only just. A large gold crest was split between the two halves of open gate where Wil left the Harley.
Diane Sumner was about his age, blond and attractive and dressed in paint-smudged work denims. At first she was reserved, then opened up about Martin Scott Sumner, their new addition, the baby named after Father Martin, whom she considered a near-saint. Warren, her husband, was an activist lawyer and legal counsel for St. Boniface; would Wil like to wait? He was supposed to be home by four. Even before he checked his watch, Wil could see where this was heading and excused himself.
From a street pay phone, he dialed Mo Epstein, gulped aspirin as he waited for Epstein to finish a call. On Colorado there was a squeal of brakes, then angry horns blaring, making his head hurt worse. He ached for a six-pack, the thought both consuming and revolting, notice that this was where the alcoholic craziness ended or there was no end. Just a spinning, grinding carousel of demons and twelve-step programs and falls from grace, how it had been for his mother before her Corvair crossed the line and smashed into a bus full of El Toro marines in 1967, taking his father with her. Christmas week it had been. Somewhere he still had the watch they were going to give him, the day/date crash-frozen on December 21.
“Hey,” Mo said into his ear, “persona non grata. What’s happening?”
“Just a great day so far. How’d you like to live dangerously?”
“I already am, talking to you. Sorry about the freeze.”
“My luck. Speaking of which, I just spent five wasted hours with some big fans of Niños de Mexico. You remember it?”
Wil heard the creak of a chair, then Mo: “Guerra’s operation, sure. You spoke with some of the adoptive parents?”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause. “Why do I doubt that he just handed you the contacts?”
“Ask me no questions, Mo. You able to help without totally compromising yourself?”
“No, but fire away.”
As Mo wrote them down, Wil gave him the names from the old list that hadn’t been in the telephone directories. “If you can manage, see if these people still live in L.A.,” he said. “They weren’t listed, but if you score, I’ll follow up. Who knows, maybe it’ll lead someplace.”
“Don’t trust us, huh?
Wil paused. “Thanks, Mo. I know what it means.”
“Horseshit. You gettin’ anywhere?”
“Don’t ask. You?”
“Nothing more on the second bullet. Dietrich’s men scoured the site and found zip, not even a cartridge case. As for the Pacheco girl, nobody’s seen her. Drop by the casa some time, you know where it is.” Epstein hung up then, the broken connection underscoring Wil’s sense of futility.
Walking toward the Harley as cars fumed and chased each other down Colorado Boulevard in the late afternoon sun, he felt as distant and insubstantial as the shadow cast by an airplane.
UCLA was as he remembered: sprawling, wooded, comfortably academic. Two years he’d gone to school there, played intercollegiate volleyball and partied around before transferring north to Santa Barbara. Time-capsule days and nights. At an outdoor table by the bookstore, he finished noting everything he could remember about the Guerra-DeSantis statues, wishing it were more, then crossed a broad expanse of treed lawn. The air was cool now and smelled of watered grass. On the way Wil passed three coeds in Bruin sweatshirts—pretty babies who smiled boldly at him, making him wonder where twenty-four years had gone.
The anthropology department was in a Romanesque brick building with olive trees by the entrance, just where Lindeman had told him on the phone. “Thank you for staying,” Wil began.
“No problem. A break from grading, actually.” Professor Lindeman was thin and tanned with a shock of flyaway hair. He wore khakis, Topsiders, a pilled navy polo shirt, hornrims that made him look studious. He studied Wil’s page of notes. “You don’t have a photograph—a Polaroid or something?”
“No,” Wil said. “Unfortunately.”
Lindeman took down some reference books.
“Then unless you find something similar in these, I can only speculate. Holler if you do.”
For twenty minutes Wil flipped through pages while Lindeman graded papers. At a photo in the last book he stopped. “Like this, only cruder and older—more weathered.”
Lindeman took the volume, studied the page. “Yoruban,” he said at length. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. The central figure was larger relative to the supplicants. More strident.”
“These figures are orishas, deities,” Lindeman said, reviewing the pictures again. “The Yoruba religion comes from Nigeria, where it’s still practiced. Cowrie shells are part of their ceremonies. Where did you say you found them?”
Wil made up something about verifying origin and authenticity for a dealer client; Lindeman’s eyes narrowed, wrinkles appearing at the corners. “I really should see a statue or a photo to be certain,” he said, “but there are a number of similar elements. You checked the rest of the book for an exact match?”
“That’s as close as I found.”
He rubbed the back of his ear. “One of the anthropology journals had an article a while back. As I recall, some deities like this were found in Cuba. I’ll try
to scrounge up the pub and have a look.”
Wil asked about the connection to Cuba.
“Yoruba came to the New World with the slaves,” Lindeman said. “It blended first with local tribal customs, then with the religion of the occupying countries. Cuba belonged then to Catholic Spain. Unlike the Spanish, though, the Yorubans were a flexible sort. They found a way to coexist.”
Something clicked. “Santería?”
“You’ve heard of it.”
Wil nodded. “Read some. Please go on.”
“Well, if you’ve read about it, you know Santería literally means ‘worship of the saints.’ Basically they meshed—syncretized—their orishas with the saints: lots of orishas, lots of saints. For a while everything was fine.” He offered Wil a Perrier from a cooler beside his desk and chugged from his own.
“The Spaniards weren’t altogether blind, though,” he went on. “Santería’s fundamentally a worship of natural forces, full of magic. They came to realize their slaves were into the magic more than the Holy Ghost. So they tried to kill it.” He rested his Topsiders on the desk. “The religion went underground. To this day the Santeros are secretive, even though the threat has long since passed. Hell, there are millions of them today, but who’d know?”
“So what about the figures?” Wil asked, rolling the bottle slowly in his hands.
“You want me to hazard a guess?”
Wil nodded.
Lindeman took another look at his notes, then the book. “Not very academic, but here goes: The slaves arrived with nothing, so unless the figures were smuggled in somehow from Africa—which I doubt because of the workmanship you describe—they would have been carved in Cuba sometime after the turn of century.” He looked up. “Sorry, seventeenth century—when the Yorubas began arriving. Some slave priest probably carved them from memory.”
“Couldn’t they have been brought in later from Nigeria?”
“They sound too old for that. Figures like yours would have been used in rituals around the time the two faiths were syncretizing. Besides, Spain didn’t permit Cuba to trade with other countries until the late eighteen-hundreds. By then, different images would have replaced this kind of thing.” He picked up a pencil, pointed to one of the photos in the book.
The Innocents Page 18
