Timothy Hallinan - The four last things

"You promise," he said.

"If I can do it, I will."

"That's not much."

"It's all you're going to get."

"Give it to him," Sister Zachary said fatalistically. "What else can you do?"

He wrote something on a card and then bustled back around the desk and handed it to me. He looked very nervous.

"Tell me how the Revealings work."

"I really don't know," he said. "Anna was a bona fide channel. I've always assumed that the other two were suggestible enough, and wanted approval badly enough, to hear voices of their own."

I looked at him skeptically. "If he knew how to do it," Sister Zachary said with a bite in her voice, "don't you think we'd have a Speaker too?"

The two of them glared at each other.

"So," I said, pocketing the card, "who'd you sell Sally to?"

Jenks looked surprised that I'd had to ask.

"To Brooks, of course," he said piously. "Merryman would have killed her."

Out on Vermont I squinted into the sunshine and plotted my day. The sky was almost clear for the first time in a week, and the pavement was already drying. Heaven seemed near at hand. It was the kind of day when you could drive forever, which was probably what I was going to do.

I ticked off the possible stops on my itinerary. Get a different car, take Eleanor back home to help her pack, talk to Speaker Number Two-Jessica Fram-and nail Brooks's ears to the nearest wall. The order sounded about right. I wanted to get Brooks at home, not at the office. I didn't think the formidable Marcy would let me back in.

Wrent-a-Wreck on Hawthorne had just opened for business as I pulled in. The manager was a potbellied little man in a tight white T-shirt. The T-shirt said nothing. It was a real, honest-to-God undershirt.

"I didn't think they made them anymore," I said.

"They're not easy to get, let me tell you," he said. "Try to find something white at a white sale. But if somebody wants to write on my chest, let 'em pay me rent, that's what I always say." He gave Alice an appraising eye.

"Low-rider special, huh? Haven't seen one of these since JFK. What's 'Sweet lice' mean?"

"It used to be Alice," I said defensively. " 'Sweet Alice.' The A came off."

"You want to sell her? I could probably do some business with a heap like this. Penetrate the Cholo market. Big Hispanic bucks in L.A. now."

"What I want," I said, "is to leave her here for a couple of days and drive away in one of yours. Some nice, dull, anonymous, average, medium-size car with no pizzazz and no writing on it and very small license plates."

"Bank job, huh?" He gave a short barking laugh.

"No," I said. "I'm only going to drive it to church."

Getting Eleanor moved was harder. For one thing, she didn't want to leave the office at that point.

"I just got here," she said. "How can I turn around and walk back out?"

"How about I call in a bomb threat and when they evacuate the building you can just get into my car?"

"You remember Jackie Vinh?"

"Sure. She was with your ex-idiot at that Halloween party. What has she got to do with anything?"

"I talked to her this morning. That's why I'm late. She's a nursing student. She said she'd call Mr. Ellspeth today and see if she can help out with Ansel. She's a nice girl."

"You're not so bad yourself. Let's go."

"I can't. You'll have to come back."

"Eleanor, I have a day in front of me that does not make it possible for me to waffle hither and yon. I can manage hither maybe once if the traffic lights aren't against me. Why don't you make out a list of what you need and then give me your key, and I'll drop the stuff by right after lunch."

"Do you really think this is necessary?"

"After last night, I certainly do."

"Well," she said grumpily, "I think it's melodramatic. And you'll never find everything I need."

Nevertheless, she gave me the key and a relatively brief list and I headed out toward the beach.

Jenks and Mrs. Jenks had made it pretty clear that there was a major split in the Church and that the main splittees were Brooks and Merryman. If my reading was right, Brooks controlled the dollars and Merryman controlled the Speaker. They needed each other. And they hated each other.

When Sally recognized Merryman for whatever or whoever he really was, she'd run to kindly old Hubert Wilburforce, who had promptly sold her to Brooks for $100,000 and the dismissal of a suit the Church had pending against the Congregation. Brooks, I would have thought, would have put her in a safe-deposit box as a piece of highly negotiable currency if she really knew something heinous about the good doctor. Instead, she'd been killed.

I was very anxious to have another talk with Brooks.

Eleanor's place seemed secure. The door was locked, none of the windows had been broken, and when I got inside, things were in their usual obsessive state of Eleanor neatness. It took me maybe forty-five minutes to pack everything she'd listed. I threw in a few things she'd forgotten, too. Shoes, for example. Eleanor belonged to the Bernie school of packing.

When I left, it was barely noon. Jessica Fram lived in the Valley, so I took the Santa Monica freeway to the 405 and pointed my awful, rattling little Camaro due north. It was a depressing shade of battleship gray that laughed at dirt. That's probably why they paint battleships that color. All that swabbing for nothing.

Jessica's house was in Reseda. It sat in the center of a flat little tract block that managed to stay brown even after all that rain. What lawns there were seemed to be made largely of mud. Dogs of indeterminate breed sprouted from it.

The only difference between the Fram house and the ones flanking it was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with an extra foot of barbed wire on top. One of those boxes with a button and a microphone sat perched on a pole next to the driveway, looking like a forlorn transplant from Bel Air.

For about fifteen minutes I sat in the Camaro at the end of the block and studied the house. Nothing moved. The curtains were drawn against the day's new sunlight, and two cars, washed by the rain, sparkled in the driveway on the other side of the fence. They were the only sign that anyone was home.

At twenty minutes to one the front door of the house opened and a middle-aged woman with short steel-gray hair came briskly out. The gate slid open. The woman gave the neighborhood a practiced once-over, pausing only for an instant at my car, and then hopped into a butch black Land Rover and backed out into the street. She ignored me completely as she passed. Maybe there was something to be said for the Camaro's color.

I pulled the Camaro up to the black speaker box and pressed the button. After what seemed like weeks a woman's voice bellowed, "Hermia?"

"No, it's not Hermia," I said. "I'm here to see Jessica."

There was a pause you could have driven a motor home through.

"For what?" the woman said. "She's in bed."

I looked at my watch again. Twelve-forty-five. Jessica certainly led a difficult life. I mentally flipped another coin.

"Dick sent me," I said.

After a long moment the gate rolled crankily open. I drove in.

Her hair was long and straight and bleached and deader than the Dead Sea Scrolls. She lay on the living-room couch under a handmade quilt with her arms stretched out on top of it, palms up, like an ascetic nun waiting to receive the stigmata. She couldn't have been more than seventeen.

A vague, frayed lady who had to be Mrs. Fram had ushered me into a tiny Formica dining room and asked me to wait. Unwatered house plants languished despondently in a window box. Mrs. Fram was either the most laid-back woman I'd ever met or the most heavily sedated.

"Sit," she'd said blearily. "There's four chairs." There were six. On the wall was an absolutely enormous color photograph of her and Jessica. It might have been taken before World War I for all the resemblance it bore to Mrs. Fram.