Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Adam approached him. “What has happened?”

“The bastard phoned,” Bilker Moody said, his upper arms straining the sleeve bands of his sweaty Banlon shirt.

“We’ve got a tape,” Le May said. “Come into the kitchen and we’ll play it.”

We filed into the kitchen. The tape machine, with two sets of headphones, was connected to the wall phone beside the door leading to Bilker’s pantry headquarters. Still, you could sit at the kitchen table while listening to or taping a call, and Adam and RuthClaire sat down there with Niedrach, Le May, and Webb. Hammond, Moody, and I found corners into which to wedge ourselves, and Le May turned a dial on the antique-looking recorder. Its milky reels began to turn, but at first all we could hear was the low hum of the refrigerator. Then Craig Puddicombe’s voice said, “ A whore and her hibber. For all the world to see .”

“ Where’s Paulie? ” RuthClaire’s voice asked. “ Tell me how he is, Craig .”

“ ’S good’s can be expected, considerin’ what and where he came from .”

“ We’re living apart, Adam and I. We’ve lived apart for nearly ten days now. You know that, don’t you? ”

“ No, ma’am. You’re standin’ right next to each other for all the fuckin’ world to see. That’s what you’re doing .”

“ We had no idea that— ”

“ That you had your goddamn clothes off? Interestin’ defense, ma’am. Interestin’ goddamn defense .”

“ That the photo would show up as a magazine cover .”

“ Course you didn’t. And the spade who raped a troop of Girl Scouts said, ‘Sorry, angry white folks. I had no ideah I was gonna get caught. No ideah at all.’”

On the tape, RuthClaire began to cry. “ What do you want me to do? The photo’s history. Adam and I can’t undo it. So what do you want from us now? ”

“ Who said I wanted anything, Missus Hibber Whore? ”

“ Then why have you called? Tell me about Paulie .”

“ You’ve surprised the whole damn country, haven’t you? Well, everybody deserves as good as they give, don’t they? A big surprise all their own .”

“ What surprise, Craig? ”

Puddicombe was silent a moment. Then he blurted, “ But I do want something. I want you and your hibber to get back together. Now. Today. This very evenin’ .”

“ Craig —”

He broke the connection. On tape, RuthClaire’s voice hurried to ask, “ Was that long enough to do any good? Was that —”

Le May turned off the recorder. “Telephone technology’s changing every day. If an exchange office has a computerized system, you don’t have to rely on taps and pin registers to trace calls. The computer will print out the number for you, then search its memory and identify the owner. This time we got lucky. The number Puddicombe called from belongs to a newly computerized exchange. We asked at all such offices and found an exchange with a recent call to this house. The time’s matched up exactly.”

“He phoned from College Park,” Webb said. “Not far from Hartsfield International.”

“Then you can catch him,” I said. “You can send people down there to stake out the place and grab him.”

Niedrach said, “If he were a complete dolt. But he isn’t. The number belongs to a pay phone in a public booth off Virginia Avenue. The College Park police checked it out, but Puddicombe hadn’t hung around long enough to say hello to them.”

“Then what the hell good does knowing where he called from do us?” I asked. “He’s gone, and we don’t know where.”

Investigator Webb, the agent with the Gus Grissom haircut, said, “We know he’s in Greater Atlanta. And we’ve got people in College Park asking questions of all the folks who might’ve seen Puddicombe using the booth. It’s on a sidewalk by a fast-food place, and the call came at a busy time in the afternoon. There’s a lead or two, Mr. Loyd. We expect something to break tonight.”

“And just what is it you expect to break?”

My question elicited embarrassed silence for an answer. No one in the Montaraz kitchen knew what to expect. Despite his Klan activities in Hothlepoya County, Craig was mostly an unknown quantity to these officers. The unpredictability of his behavior—the virulence of his racial and sexual hangups—could not fail to disturb us. My anxiety level was steadily mounting. That much I knew, but not a lot more.

Taking pedantic care with his phrasing, Le May said, “Seeing first that the perpetrator is still out there and, second, that his whereabouts aren’t fully pinpointed, we thought it best to have the Montarazes obey his last demand.”

“The bozo’s gettin’ ready to do something,” Bilker Moody said. “He’s just gettin’ everybody in place so the show can start. He likes theatrics, this guy does.”

“A surprise,” Niedrach said speculatively. “A surprise.”

Niedrach, Hammond, and Le May left the house to continue their investigative work elsewhere. Webb stayed to monitor the telephone and the recorder to which it was wired. Bilker and Adam went into the studio to play several tension-defusing games of Ping-Pong. Even in the kitchen, I heard the racket they made grunting, trading slams, and throwing their bodies across the table to return drop shots just over the net. RuthClaire, who might have been expected to want some time alone with Adam, approved their play. Just the simple act of spectating seemed to calm her nerves.

I stayed in the kitchen with Webb—Ping-Pong is not my game—and asked him what leads they had.

His mouth began to move even before any words came out. “Woman working at the fast-food place next to the phone booth. This gal says she saw a guy in a painter’s white coveralls go past the front window about the time our call was made. Bearded fellow. Young. She remembers because her boss had talked about repainting the divider lines in the parking lot. She wondered if the guy was there to do that. He must not’ve been, though, because there was only that one time he went by and the divider lines in the parking lot still haven’t been repainted.”

“You think Craig’s wearing a painter’s coveralls?”

“Her description of the fella sounds like Puddicombe.”

“Did your witness happen to see what he was driving?”

“Her position behind the counter didn’t let her, no.”

“That’s one helluva lead. If he keeps his coveralls on and walks around the city everywhere he goes, you’ll nab him before the year’s out.”

Webb smiled. “Touché.” His FBI affiliation had not gone to his head. Provincial rather than Prussian in his slacks-and-sports-jacket uniform, he had no trouble admitting that this investigation had him groping down one blind alley after another. His easy-going agreeability irritated me.

So I wandered down the hall to Bilker’s pantry headquarters.

If Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd .

A comforting thought. I entered the pantry and sat in front of the TV monitors on the plywood counter. Why hadn’t the FBI set up in here? Well, Bilker had denied them access. The pantry belonged to him, and he was responsible for security, just as they were for the investigation of Paulie’s kidnapping. One of Bilker’s screens, I noticed, featured a continuous panoramic display of Hurt Street, while another had its eye on the well-lit MARTA station on DeKalb Avenue.

“Comfy, fella?”

I looked over my shoulder. It was Bilker, his T-shirt three different shades of dark green and his face as red and shiny as a candy apple. His expression was malevolent. I hoped that he remembered Adam’s good opinion of me.