Джо Горес - Cases

Hector and the loot had departed, the knot of Mexicans had disappeared. The faithful were milling about as if a movie had just let out. Rephaim made his way to Dunc. His eyes burned.

“You do not believe,” he said in deep rolling tones.

“Maybe I just don’t understand,” Dunc told him earnestly. “Who chooses a new priest when one of you dies? The other six?”

“None of us knows the others.”

“Then how do you even know one of the priests is dead?”

“One feels the call here.” He laid a hand over his heart.

“Will you ever move up to Sixth Priest of Melchizedek?”

“I shall forever remain the Seventh.” Then he thundered, “Enough questions! You do not believe!” and Dunc found himself thrust into the outer darkness by eager female devotees. A remarkably pretty girl about Dunc’s age fell into step with him.

“You do not believe,” she said in a Rephaim voice.

“Nope. Do you?”

Laughter danced in her eyes. “Nope. But even Aunt Goodie takes advice from him. Drives Uncle Carl nuts.” She offered her hand. “Penny Linden.”

“Pierce Duncan. I’m sure we’ve met before.”

“I’d have remembered,” she said gravely. Her chestnut hair was in a sort of bun at the back of her head. Her face was round, with a generous mouth that laughed easily, a short nose, sparkling wide-set hazel eyes under beautifully arched brows.

The army six-by-six came wheeling past, Hector at the wheel, to disappear up the gravel road to the highway with roaring motor and clashing gears. Under the canvas top, tight-packed figures.

“Hector making his getaway with the loot?”

“Hector? Never. He spends every Saturday night here, helping Rephaim with his Sunday sermon.”

“And the guys in the back?”

“Fruit pickers from the San Fernando Valley. Hector gets them for the Sunday service and takes them back afterwards.”

“You’re saying they understand this guy?” She just laughed and shrugged, so he said, “You don’t seem to fit in with—”

“With Angela and Fayme and Birdie? The coven? Of course they aren’t a real coven of witches, but don’t you think Rephaim might be some sort of mystic con man?” Her clear hazel eyes flashed sideways at him from beneath luxurious lashes. She took his arm. “Come on. Aunt Goodie and Uncle Carl were in pictures, they can give you all the dirt on Rephaim.”

Uncle Carl was a short man in white shirt and slacks with crisp blue-black curly hair and bright eyes and a recent layer of fat on his cheeks. Aunt Goodie was a plump cheerful-looking blonde in shorts and red halter. Their arms were entwined.

“Your niece says you used to be in the movies.”

She grinned. “Birdie and I were extras at Paramount for a few years after the war.” She nudged her husband. “But Carl was a chorus dancer in all those MGM musicals, weren’t you, hon?”

Uncle Carl said, “How did you like Rephaim? I keep telling Goodie, the man’s selling snake oil. Back in the thirties, before he started dating Christ, he was in a slew of B pictures that—”

“Carl!” Goodie gasped. “What a way to talk!”

Penny said quickly, “Weren’t they sort of horror films?”

“Most of them with Bela Lugosi,” nodded Carl.

As they started away, Aunt Goodie said to Penny, “See you at the car, love,” leaving them alone together.

Dunc ventured, “Uh, Penny, have you heard of Muscle Beach?”

“Isn’t that where all those bodybuilders hang out?”

“That’s it. I was thinking of going down there to look the place over next Saturday. If you aren’t doing anything...”

She touched the intricate gold pin on her blouse. “I’m pinned. My fiancé is coming out from Iowa tomorrow for a week.”

“Pinned?”

“When a man gives a sorority girl his fraternity pin, they’re sort of unofficially engaged. We’ll be married after I graduate from the U of Iowa next June.”

“Oh.” Dunc was forlorn. “Notre Dame doesn’t have frats.”

She shook his hand. “They’re waiting for me, Dunc.”

Only after Uncle Carl’s car had pulled away did he realize that, feature for feature, she’d been the beautiful twenty-year-old in his Minneapolis dream who’d told him to face the killer.

Now she was gone and he didn’t know how to reach her. And even if he did, the girl of his dreams was pinned.

It was Thursday, their fourth day on the job at the San Fernando Mission some twenty-five miles north of Los Angeles, erecting three long two-story seminary buildings in a U-shape around a courtyard out behind the mission plaza. They were hod carriers on a cement crew, doing prefab work before the pours.

The other hod carriers were two Negroes and seven Mexicans. Osvaldo, who spoke English, brought the other Latins each morning in a rusty, rattling pickup, took them away at night.

“Dunc! Gus!” Mike Donovan was the crew supervisor, a red-faced Irishman with a beer drinker’s gut and pale bloodshot eyes. “Help Samuel and Joshua with those goddamn forms.”

Samuel was about thirty, good-looking, light-skinned, blocky and muscular, with thick, shapely arms shown off by a blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had a habit of smoothing his heavy mustache with the side of his finger.

Those goddamn forms were sheets of plywood that contained and shaped the liquid cement in the monolithic pours — so called because each new layer was bonded to the layer below.

Samuel told Dunc, “We wet down the inside of the forms. Then we grout ’em.” Grout was hand-mixed liquid cement liberally splashed into the forms and over the rebar to bond them with the poured cement. “Then the cement crew itself makes the pour.”

Joshua was older, maybe thirty-five, India ink to Samuel’s milk chocolate, long and lanky and slightly stooped, with huge hands and long arms banded by stringy muscles of great strength. He wore Can’t-Bust-’Em coveralls, and his normal splayfooted gait was a slow shuffle.

“Ain’t got me but one speed — supreme low. But watch out when I’s coming through.”

At lunch break Dunc wolfed down Aunt Pearl’s sandwiches, then cut across the old-style Spanish-mission compound to the small fully restored red-tiled church. He knelt in a back pew with the rosary he’d bought for the penance given him by the Las Vegas priest. Thursday. The Joyful Mysteries. Perfect. He felt pretty much joyful right now, where he should be, when he should be. Of course Penny was pinned by somebody else, but...

Gus slid into the pew next to him, oblivious to the burning sacristy light that marked the Sacred Presence in the tabernacle behind the altar. “Get a look at those walls — seven feet thick at the bottom, five feet thick at the top. Built to last.”

Native designs of bright primary colors covered them. “Who did the artwork?” whispered a resigned Dunc. “Indians?”

“Originally, yeah. These are just copies.”

At quitting time Dunc drove them south through Sepulveda’s endless traffic toward Los Angeles, inching them into the smog, eyes smarting, thinking of Penny. Gus broke in on his thoughts.

“Birdie wants me to spend the whole weekend with her.”

“Congratulations,” said Dunc. “I’m going to Muscle Beach on Saturday, I’ll drop you off.”

On Friday morning they were on top of the wall pounding nails into forms. Dunc paused to wipe the sweat off his face; he noticed Osvaldo going into the portable latrine just as a blue sedan followed by a closed van raced up the dirt track to the seminary site. Two men in suits and two in uniform jumped out.

Mike Donovan cupped his hands to yell up at them.

“Dunc! Gus! Down here on the double.”

The Mexican members of the cement crew were being herded into a van by the uniforms. Osvaldo started from the latrine, saw this, stepped back in quickly, and gently closed the door.