Walter Mosley - Parishioner

“You got Chapman.”

Iridia smiled and reached across the table to touch his dark killer’s hand. He remained still. She stood and moved over to sit on his lap.

“You need this, Ecks,” she said. “You need this if you’re going out to work for Frank for the first time.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She kissed his lips lightly.

“You’re fairly new to the congregation,” she whispered. “Frank’s sermons are only the beginning. We are his Bible and he studies us like a religious scholar analyzing scriptures. But it’s not just that. When he sends us out it’s not only for the obvious. He’s also teaching us something, folding our pasts up into who we are becoming.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Ire.”

“The first man I destroyed,” she said, undoing one button and slipping her hand in against the skin of his chest, “was a billionaire from Oregon. He was young and very innocent. When I was through with him he had killed a man in Seattle, and it took a big bite out of his father’s fortune to keep him from going to prison.

“When Father Frank sent me to Hong Kong I had no idea that my first victim now traded in sex slaves. His demolition, as Frank says, had been complete, and it was my job to destroy him again.”

“You saved the women,” Xavier said.

“And children,” she added, “from a monster that I created.”

She gave Xavier’s erect nipple a hard pinch.

“So you’re telling me you believe we’re Frank’s living scriptures?” he managed to say.

“Come fuck me, Ecks, and I’ll tell you more.”

“I don’t want to have to hurt Chapman,” he said. This his last line of defense.

“I gave him some of my special tea. He won’t wake until morning. By that time I’ll be sleeping peacefully by his side.”

When Xavier woke at three in the morning she was already gone, but the words she’d shed in his ear were still there-loud and clear.

She told him about the missions Frank had orchestrated and the tolls paid by his parishioners.

“So you think that I’m connected to Benol in some way?” Xavier asked in between their second and third ruts.

“Not necessarily,” she cooed. “Sometimes the missions are metaphors for the missionaries.”

Iridia knew how to get a man excited and keep him that way. In the dark of morning, while Xavier drove his truck down to pick up his young paper delivery staff, he still felt the physical sensations.

“Why didn’t anybody else tell me about this?” he asked her as they drifted on the aftermath of passion, leaving the border of obsession.

“Less humility and more humiliation keeps us quiet. Frank doesn’t give you a mission until he thinks you’re ready to face yourself. The Sunday sermons are like boot camp. But when he sends you out on a job, that’s a one-man war. And when a soldier comes home from battle she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Forty-seven hundred newspapers filled the canvas-covered back of Xavier’s oversize pickup truck. Inside Damien, Carlo, and Angelique folded and wrapped, threw and carried the papers and special insert advertisements up and down the blocks of Xavier’s district. The kids were all fifteen years old, making thirty dollars a day. They worked from approximately four forty-five until eight fifteen, seven days a week.

After dropping them off at their school, Xavier went to Lon’s Diner on Grand for breakfast and the first reading of Benol Richards’s file.

He read the seven sheets of legal-size yellow, lined pages from front to back. There were no surprises: the names of the victims and their parents, the private detective, Lou Baer-Bond, and the places where the crimes occurred.

The parents of the kidnapped boys were the Van Dams, the Tarvos, and the Charleses.

While he read he remembered Iridia in his bed. There was a scent to her that he knew like his own sweat.

“Did Frank send you here?” he asked just before sleep.

“He didn’t tell me or ask me to come,” she said. “But whether he sent me or not I can’t say.”

“I don’t think you should come here anymore after this,” Xavier said.

“I don’t think I’ll need to.”

Lou Baer-Bond’s office was on Olympic a little east of La Brea. It was the last office down a drab hall on the third floor above a D-Right Drugstore.

Ecks stopped at the door. Black lettering painted on the opaque, wire-laced glass read, Lou Baer-Bond, Discreet Private Investigations . Rule wondered at the use of the word discreet . It rhymed with sweet but had the feeling of decay to it.

After a moment of empty contemplation he knocked.

“Come on in,” a medium tenor called.

It was a janitor’s closet with a desk instead of a sink, and a dirty window in place of a pegboard. Not enough room for a couple to practice a two-step waltz under a ceiling that was a foot too low for Xavier’s comfort.

Behind the desk sat a white man who was in the process of turning gray. His hair was salt-and-pepper, and any élan that he was born with had drained out of his face and hands. Maybe fifty, maybe more, he looked up through light blue eyes wondering about the black man with the deep gash under his right cheekbone.

“Yes?”

“You the man on the door?”

“Can I help you?”

“I come here for my cousin,” Ecks said, falling into the speech pattern of an earlier life.

“Why couldn’t he come himself?” Lou asked. His suit was loose and also gray but darker and more solid than his skin and eyes. This brought to Xavier’s mind a ghost trying hard to pass for human.

“Can I sit?”

“You plan to stay awhile?”

“Benol Richards,” Xavier said, positioning the visitor’s chair.

The seat was made from curved chrome piping around a stained red cushion. Rule was wearing a light lime suit and a chocolate brown shirt. He worried that the chair might impart some of its soil to his trousers but sat anyway.

“That’s over,” Lou Baer-Bond said, maybe just a bit too quickly.

Looking around the desktop, Xavier noted a pink ashtray in the form of a nude woman with its six crushed-out cigarette butts and a burned-out book of matches, a paper plate with a half-eaten chili-cheese dog, fries, and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol standing guard from the rear.

“She didn’t believe that you gave her absolutely everything you had and wanted me to come by and get it.”

“Get what?”

“Benol said that you told her that you didn’t find anything about Brayton.”

“Yes. That’s what I said. That’s the truth.”

The discreet truth , Xavier thought.

“Understand me,” the Parishioner said. “I’m not blaming you. Maybe Bennie wasn’t completely truthful for her part.”

“What’s your name?” the detective asked.

“Noland.”

“Noland what?”

“Egbert Noland, but I go by my last name.”

“And you say you’re Miss Richards’s cousin?”

“Second cousin, once removed.”

“How’d you get that crack under your eye, Noland?” Baer-Bond asked.

Xavier wondered whether he was trying to show that he was a tough guy who wasn’t afraid of a scary-looking black man crowded into the janitor’s closet-with the door closed.

“Brayton stole Benol’s car,” Xavier said. “She’s kind of a free spirit, you know. Moves around a lot. So the car is sometimes her bedroom, sometimes her safe-deposit box.”

Xavier didn’t think that Lou meant to raise his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He might not even have been aware that he had done so.

“She looked pretty solid,” the detective said.

“Her car looks like a car.”

“What are we talking about here, Egbert?”