Эд Горман - Blood Moon

“Kenny.”

I walked down the center aisle. The stained-glass images were difficult to pick out with no sunlight streaming through them.

He’d played a few chords, hadn’t heard me.

“Kenny.”

This time, he looked up. He wore a green Western-style shirt and jeans and Texas boots.

“Hi, Mr. Hokanson.”

“You seen the reverend?”

“Not in the last hour.”

“Think he’s up at the house?”

Kenny shrugged, looked back at his guitar. “Suppose he could be.”

I reached the altar, looked up at him.

“You a part of it, Kenny?”

He didn’t raise his eyes, kept pantomiming notes. “A part of what, Mr. Hokanson?”

“Remember I asked you how the reverend made enough money to keep everything afloat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I found out how he does it.”

Now he raised his head and looked at me. “It’s like I told you, Mr. Hokanson. The reverend’s treated me pretty good, all things considered, so I don’t figure it’s my business to ask him any questions about where his money comes from.”

“He’s the worst kind of man there is, Kenny. He molests little girls and boys.”

He frowned. “Now I sure don’t believe that. Tell me he drinks a little, or cheats on his old lady from time to time — yes, I’d have to say he probably does. But what you said — no way, mister. No way at all.”

“You ever go into Cedar Rapids with him?”

“Not really.”

“How about Mindy? She go in with him?”

The shrug again. “Sometimes, I guess.”

“They pretty tight are they, Mindy and the reverend?”

He picked a chord. The church echoed with its keening power. “Tight? Yeah, they’re tight I guess you’d say. After the reverend learned the truth about Mindy and all. He had a hard time with it at first, the reverend did, but he seems all right about it now.”

“I guess I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kenny.”

“About Mindy.”

“What about Mindy?”

He looked at me with unfathomable green eyes. Very somberly, he said, “Then you couldn’t tell either, huh?”

“Tell what?”

“Neither could the reverend.”

“Tell what?”

A slight smile this time. “Heck, I couldn’t tell either. Not till the reverend told me.”

“Told you about what?” I said.

“About how Mindy used to be a man.”

He just kind of drawled it out, nothing special now, old news in fact.

But to me it wasn’t old news.

If Tolliver was right that his son was still alive and killing people... what better disguise to assume than that of a woman?

“You’re sure of that?” I said.

“Mindy told him one night. All about it, I mean. Personally, I didn’t want to hear it. When she started talking about how — when he was still a man, I mean — they had to cut off his... Well, you know what I mean. I just couldn’t get that out of my mind. What kind of guy would let somebody cut off his... you know, down there.”

“Where did she have the surgery done?”

“Holland, according to the reverend.”

I thought of what the reverend’s wife had said last night, talking around a smirk, about how she hadn’t known her husband was so “kinky.” She’d been referring to the reverend and Mindy. Now her remark made sense.

Her husband was sleeping with a woman who had once been a man.

“They’re lovers?”

“Guess so. Like I said, it really ain’t my business.”

“And you don’t have any idea where I could find either of them now?”

“Not unless they’re up to the house.”

“Mindy goes up to the house?”

“Oh, sometimes. But then they get to squabbling. You know how women like to squabble.”

He played another lick, shrill and obscene in this ersatz house of God.

Then he grinned at me. “Gotta say one thing for those Dutch doctors.”

“What’s that?”

“They sure gave Mindy one fine set of hooters. I mean, her being a guy and all.”

I drove up the driveway to the reverend’s house. My car smelled of dampness now. The rain was falling so hard, it sounded as if hail were being mixed in.

I was still trying to make some kind of visceral sense out of what Kenny Deihl had just told me. It’s all very well to watch Oprah and Geraldo and Phil interview transsexuals but it’s another matter to realize that you actually met one. My first instinct, of course, was Kenny’s. Why would you willingly submit to having your pee-pee removed? You worked hard all your life to keep it from getting injured or damaged in any way — the little thing was pretty vulnerable when you came right down to it — and now here comes a guy who opens up his flasher coat and says, Take me I’m yours.

Of course, the reason I couldn’t understand that was because I didn’t have any sense of why transsexuals do what they do. Homosexuality is at least imaginable in many respects — you keep your born-with sexual identity, which means that you prefer lovers of similar identities. Not very mysterious, when you come right down to it. But transsexualism...

Both bays of the garage were open. Only one Lincoln was there. The garage was attached to the house so I parked inside the empty bay, then walked up to a veranda filled with colorful lawn furniture that looked like children forced to stay inside because of the rain. The veranda smelled of gin and cigarette smoke.

I knocked on the door several times but got no answer so I tried the knob, which was unlocked, and went inside.

The kitchen was what they call farm-style: wide-open spaces with lots of shiny pots and pans and cooking utensils dangling from a wooden contraption on the ceiling, large butcher-block table in the center of the big room and gleaming white refrigerator and stove and dishwasher tucked neatly into the east corner.

“Hello.”

But nobody answered.

“Hello.”

Again no answer.

I walked into the dining room. Like the living room and den, which I saw shortly after, it looked like a tribute to an interior decorator rather than a place where real human beings actually lived and laughed and sweated and snored and kissed. A little too-too, if you know what I’m talking about, from a very elegant but obviously uncomfortable Barrymore sofa to an antique china buffet that had to have cost at least half my annual income. But who would dare risk opening it up? I was as intimidated here as I was in a museum, a little boy’s fear of bumping or nudging or backing into some pricey work of art and watching it tumble to the floor and shatter.

I looked for foot tracks that a man might make who’d been running through the woods tonight but didn’t see any.

The noise was faint but had a regular rhythm. Opening and closing; opening and closing... opening and closing drawers, I finally realized.

The house was carpeted throughout so it didn’t take any great stealth on my part to quietly reach the door of the master bedroom and put my ear to it.

Drawers being opened and closed. Definitely.

I reached inside my jacket pocket, took out my Ruger with my left hand and eased the door open with my right. He was packing, getting ready to flee.

When he turned and saw me and saw the Ruger, he said, “What are you doing in here? I could have you arrested.”

He was still every bit the suave TV minister, from the carefully moussed hair to the suitably purposeful gray pin-striped suit to the brilliantly shined cordovan loafers. And he looked right standing in a room like this, with its canopied double bed and huge, curtained window. But despite his bluster, his poise was gone.

I took the photo I’d found earlier this morning. I walked over to him and tossed it on top of the bureau.