“OK. He’s tied fanaticism in with his deviance. That’s why there’s a page of Psalms stuck in each of the porno mags we found. The two are linked with him. Or maybe a part of him knows what he’s doing is evil, and somehow the Psalms consecrate it in his mind. Say he’s a psychotic. That he’s killing for God. Any of that’s true, it doesn’t take us one whit closer to nailing the bastard. Let’s just try and put together the hard evidence, and you can play Freud on your own time. Come on. What have we got?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t know it’s such hard evidence. But here’s what I think we’ve got, and what I speculate. Your Uncle Chester and Illium were friends, Illium worked with the church. That’s why Uncle Chester’s poor addled mind thought the coupons were important. He was trying to point a finger at the church. The painting led us to the Hampstead place, and what’s under it. We’ve already established what the book’s connection was.”
“Illium,” Leonard said. “And maybe with the title of the book, he was trying to give us the nature of our criminal. Dracula ain’t nothing compared to this guy.”
“I think your uncle and Illium, probably because of something Illium saw at the church, got onto Fitzgerald. Perhaps the way he dealt with the boys in the programs there, the illegitimate ones especially. And somehow Chester and Illium connected him to the Hampstead place. Could be the good Reverend makes a pilgrimage up there to worship the water stain or something, Illium followed, watched from hiding. Fitzgerald went home to memorize his sermon, and Uncle Chester and Illium poked around and found the bodies. Six of them anyway. I bet the other two are up there.”
“So my uncle took one of the bodies and hid it here while he and Illium did their own investigation. Probably in case the old boy moved the remains.”
“That’s where they screwed up. They should have gone to the cops.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “and by not going, the body being found here, it just helped give the Reverend a way out.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Your uncle loses his memory, dies, so he’s out of the picture. Add Illium into the equation, dead at the bottom of his pond with porno mags and kid’s clothes on the couch, and the Reverend isn’t going to look as ripe for the part as he might have back then. So we have a lot of circumstantial evidence. Is it enough?”
“Have you thought about this?” Leonard said. “Could be we just don’t like the bastard, and we’re tying all this together the way my uncle got tied. It looks bad, but are we seeing smoke or fog? Just because it all leads back to the church doesn’t mean it leads to Fitzgerald.”
“I’ve thought about that,” I said. “I’ve also thought about the last week of August coming up. I’ve thought too, we play our hand before we have the evidence, the bastard could get off. He did, he wouldn’t quit doing what he’s doing, but he might get more cautious doing it.”
“It’s not like he’s been sloppy so far,” Leonard said. “This has been going on for years.”
“Kids like this, to some extent, they’re like prostitutes when they’re victims. They’re considered expendable. Illegitimate black kids with no hope and no future and no one to care. It’s easy to waste someone like that and not get caught. And consider that the murderer started wasting them during a period of police administration when views toward the ethnic community were less than considerate, and are maybe still that way-”
“He could go on indefinitely.”
“Exactly.”
“Got a next step, Mr. Sherlock Freud?”
“We wait until Hanson finds Illium, then we tell him what we suspect. Tell him about the Hampstead place and show him what we found, and see what he has to say.”
“And in the meantime?”
“I guess we fix MeMaw’s porch.”
Leonard poured us another cup of coffee. He said, “Something else is wrong, isn’t there?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I can just tell. Florida?”
“Yeah.”
“She went home with Hanson last night, didn’t she?”
I looked at him. “You could see something too?”
“They had eyes for each other. You could kind of smell it too. His musk, her in heat.”
“Thanks for being delicate.”
“Well. Did she?”
“I think she did.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“She’s a grown woman. She does what she wants.”
“Hey, she’s the one messing up here. You’re good people, Hap. It’s her loss. Even if Hanson probably has a bigger dick.”
“Thanks, Leonard, that perked me right up.”
“Hey. We friends, or what?”
28.
It’s hard to deal with knowledge like that. Dead kids under a house, a killer on the loose, and his prime time for new murder fast approaching, and then there was the matter of my woman done gone off and left me for an older man, and me and Leonard were building a porch.
Fortunately, the work we were doing was soothing. I had begun to like the lumber, the feel and smell of it in the hot open air. I liked the sensation of taking something weak and insubstantial and turning it into something solid and pleasing. I liked helping MeMaw.
MeMaw looked rough that day, but she gave us a dentured smile and invited us in for late-morning coffee. We drank it, even though we were already floating in our own. We finished that up, she asked us to help her to bed, said she felt weaker than usual and wanted to be perked for when her baby boy showed up. We helped her out of the walker and onto the bed and Leonard covered her with a light blanket and turned a fan on to circulate the warm air.
“Won’t our hammering bother you?” I asked her.
“Tired as I am, only one can wake me up is the Lord. And he gonna have to shout today.”
“Rest, MeMaw.”
She looked so ancient lying there. Not like a person, but like a praying mantis. All bone and tight-stretched skin. She was asleep before we could leave the room.
We worked as quietly as possible, and long about noon, Leonard decided he wanted hamburgers and fries and was going to use one of Uncle Chester’s coupons to get it. I stayed to crawl beneath the house and pull out some old lumber that was under there so we could take it to the dump. It had fallen out from beneath the porch ages ago and was wet and rotten and an invitation to termites.
I was doing that when the porch above me squeaked like a sick rat. I figured it was Leonard. I crawled back to the front of the house and out from under the porch and stood up, ready for a burger. But it wasn’t Leonard. It was a black man about my size and age, and I knew who he was immediately, though we had never met. He has wearing a cheap blue suit and was looking at me like I was a snake that had crawled out from under the house.
“Who are you?” he said, and he had the look of someone ready to fight.
“Hap Collins,” I said. “You’re Hiram, right?”
He eyed me for a second. “How’d you know that?”
“I’ve seen your picture. I’m a friend of MeMaw’s. Me and my buddy Leonard are fixing her porch.”
“Where’d she get the money for that?”
“Doesn’t need any. She paid in pie.”
He grinned slowly, and when he grinned, damned if he didn’t have that confident air Leonard’s got, like he’s immortal and knows it. MeMaw was right. They did favor.
