Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“Do you remember his first call?” I asked Niedrach. “He claimed he didn’t do violence.”

“We all knew he was lying… to himself as much as to us.”

Adam, who’d gone forward, started to pick the doll out of the victim’s orangutan lap, but Le May caught his wrist. A Fulton County detective, he said, would have to bag the doll for forensic analysis. Fingerprints, Mr. Montaraz, fingerprints.

“It proves our Paulie is dead,” Adam said. “That’s the doll’s terrible meaning.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“That’s right,” Ryan Bynum said. “How could it mean that? You don’t believe in voodoo, do you?” Ignorant of the kidnapping, Bynum had jumped to the conclusion that Adam was surrendering to an atavistic Carib superstition.

My unofficial identification made, the Fulton County detectives shooed us out so they could finish their work. As we stood on the lawn, two men with a stretcher entered the building and reappeared a few moments later carrying the costumed Nancy. The ambulance at curbside took her in and departed with her without benefit of siren or flasher. After all, what was the hurry?

“It looks as if she was strangled,” Le May told us. “But it didn’t happen here. The only sign of struggle has to do with rearranging furniture. No breaking and entering, either. Puddicombe used somebody’s membership card, opened the back door from the inside, and dragged Nancy in from the rear drive.”

“I am so sorry for her,” Adam said.

We left the site in Le May’s Plymouth, and Niedrach told us that shortly before noon, just three or four hours after most newsstands and drugstores had begun selling the latest Newsweek , Craig had rented the orangutan suit from Atlanta Costume Company. A clerk there had given detectives a good description of the renter. Bearded. Young. Blue-eyed. He hadn’t been wearing painter’s coveralls, though, but toast-colored, pleated pants and a white T-shirt that had left his midriff bare.

He had claimed to be a student at Georgia Tech, wanting the costume for some kind of fraternity prank. He had paid a deposit in cash—rather than with a check and the supporting evidence of a student ID, but the address he had given as his parents’ seemed more than peculiar in retrospect: it was Adam and RuthClaire’s address on Hurt Street. His name he had given as Greg Burdette, and for that he had shown a current driver’s license with a photo of his own likeness. He had struck the clerk as an oddly somber type to be renting an orangutan costume, but she had rationalized this anomaly of bearing as an attempt to complete the rental with a deadpan savoir-faire. In fact, once he had left the front counter, she had burst out laughing at his successful act.

“Did she see what he was driving?” (My obsessive concern.)

“Unfortunately, no,” Niedrach confessed.

Adam said, “No one here should tell Miss RuthClaire what we saw at Meditation Center. Already, she has enough to cope with.”

I looked at Adam. I had no doubt that in his mind’s eye was a picture of that black doll upside-down in Nancy Teavers’s lap.

But back at the house, RuthClaire got the truth from Adam in five minutes. He could not lie to her, and she would not be put off with stalling tactics or verbal evasions.

“You didn’t think I could handle the news, is that it?”

“I wanted only to—”

“To keep it from me. That’s sweet. But I’m not a little girl. I’m an adult.”

Small and forlorn, Adam stood in shadow with his back to the beaverboard panel in the downstairs studio, his profile at once heroic and prehistorically feral.

“Nancy dead, strangled, dressed in a monkey suit, put on display in Ryan Bynum’s Meditation Center. But why? To horrify us? To put us on notice?” RuthClaire paced among her canvases.

“A puke-livered terror tactic,” Bilker said from the far side of the big room.

“Paulie’s dead already,” RuthClaire told us, ignoring the security guard. “Or else Craig plans to kill him this evening. We’ll find the body tomorrow.”

“That’s a defeatist look at the situation, ma’am,” Le May said.

“You think I like it? I don’t. It makes my heart swell up and my rib cage ache.”

“Mine, too,” Adam said—so simply that I was moved for both of them.

“It’s the waiting that’s killing me,” RuthClaire said. “Craig’s told us what he’s going to do, and we’re still waiting. We frail females—” putting her hand to her brow like Scarlett O’Hara—“are supposed to be able to bide our time, but how you go-git-’em macho fellas can take it is beyond me.”

“This such fella takes it very badly,” Adam said.

RuthClaire went to him, and they embraced. Then she turned to Caroline. “Come upstairs, Caroline. I want to lie down, but it would be nice to have somebody to talk to.”

The two women left. I sipped at a Scotch on the rocks that Bilker had made for me. I felt a hand on my arm. It belonged to Adam. Its grip on my biceps tightened inexorably. “You’ve had enough, Mister Paul.”

“I haven’t even had one . Sit down. Bilker’ll fix you right up.”

“Abraxas,” Adam said.

“What?”

“We should go to Abraxas. I, Mister Paul, am going there. Please come with me. It is what needs to be done.”

“What’s going on at Abraxas? Aren’t they closed on Mondays, like the High and most independent galleries? Besides, they’d all be closed by now .”

Adam said, “Nancy Teavers dead in Ryan Bynum’s church is a red flag waving. Interpret the signal. Where might Mr. Puddicombe next appear?”

“Abraxas?”

Bilker Moody had his hands in a stainless-steel basin full of suds and highball glasses. “Hell, yes,” he said. “ Hell, yes! ”

Niedrach and Le May were no longer with us. Back in the kitchen with Webb? Probably. “Tell Niedrach and the FBI men,” I urged Adam.

“I don’t think so. They are worthy gentlemen. I like them very much. But none of them has read the signals.”

“Tell them, then, for God’s sake!”

“This is my fight, Mister Paul. I am the cause of it all, basically. If you are not coming with me, promise to say no word to the special-agent gentlemen when I go.”

“And if I don’t promise?”

Adam eyed me speculatively. Then he gave me his fear grin, his lips drawn back to reveal his realigned but still dauntingly primitive teeth. “I will bite you, Mister Paul.” In the light from the cut-glass swag lamp at the end of the bar, Adam’s teeth winked at me like ancient scrimshawed ivory.

“You give me no choice,” I said.

“I’ll get my jacket and some heat,” Bilker said, wiping his hands on a towel. He exited the wet-bar booth and trotted off toward his converted pantry.

We told the agents we were going out for some fresh air and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. We’d bring back whatever they wanted—cream-filled, buttermilk, old-fashioned, they could choose.

“Make it quick,” Le May cautioned. “Mrs. Montaraz can take a call upstairs, but we’ll need your input after we’ve taped it. Going out’s risky. You could miss it.”

“Thirty minutes,” Adam said. “No more.”

We took my Mercedes because I did not feel competent to handle the hatchback with its elevated foot pedals or Bilker’s dented ’54 Chevy. I was driving, rather than Bilker, because Adam wanted Bilker to have his hands free. He was riding shotgun, a position of “great importance.” Now, though, it seemed funny to be driving so big and expensive an automobile as my Mercedes to a one-sided rendezvous with a murderer.

Adam directed me to park on Ralph McGill Boulevard about two blocks below the old school buildings housing the Abraxas art complex. We would have to walk the rest of the way, but Craig was not likely to shoot out my windshield or riddle a sheet of the car’s body metal with bullet holes.