“This have to do with where you were this morning?” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said. “OK, Doc. I think you see it the way it is. Let me run over your territory and fill it in some more. Say there’s this preacher, a real do-gooder in some ways, but you see, he comes from a background where his father was a religious nut too. Say the father wasn’t actually the father, but a stepfather. The stepfather married this woman with a child, and this woman’s child was a bastard. She was a prostitute, or at least a loose woman. The preacher, the stepfather, he thinks he can do right by her, show her the way of God. And perhaps, down deep, a whore is exactly what he’s looking for. With me so far?”
“We’re with you,” Hanson said.
“So he marries the woman, but he can’t reconcile the shame. He treats her badly. He treats the boy badly. He never lets them forget that she’s a slut and the boy’s a bastard, and that he’s doing them special as the right hand of the Lord. The woman gets pregnant again. The child is retarded. The preacher can’t stand it. He can’t accept his seed would produce such a child. Now he has two bastards, and one of them has the sense of a cement block. He gets it in his mind the woman’s gone back to her old ways, that she’d been with another man. Maybe she has, maybe she hasn’t. It doesn’t matter. The preacher broods, and one night something sets him off, and in a moment of anger he strikes and kills the woman.”
“And the stepson sees it,” Doc Warren said.
“Yeah. And let’s say the preacher knows the boy saw it, but instead of killing the boy, who’s already warped enough to think his father is God incarnate, he forces the child, or the child is willing, psychologically browbeat, however you want to put it… But say the boy goes along with the father to help get rid of the body. The father makes a religious ritual out of it. Perhaps to cover his guilt to the boy, to himself, both, or maybe he really believes that he’s done the righteous will of the Lord.
“Out of brutality, or convenience, the preacher cuts the woman up to fit in a cardboard box, wraps her body parts in a cloth and takes her to this abandoned house he knows about, wraps the body in chicken wire, to keep the animals out of it, probably in cloth too, like the others, buries her under the house. Later, she comes up missing, he says she ran off. She’s got a reputation to go with this possibility. What he was ashamed of before, now protects him. She was just a whore. She used a good man. She ran off and left him with two sons to raise, one of them retarded. See where I’m going?”
“This is guesswork, right?” Hanson said.
“Some of it,” I said. “And now it takes up where you left off, Doc. The boy is continuing to do that work in his own way, copying his stepfather’s pattern.”
“Why isn’t he killing women then?” Hanson said. “Me and Doc here, we dealt with a guy in Houston once, called himself the Houston Hacker. He had a thing against women, and women were all he killed, ’less someone got in the way. This kid sees his father kill a woman, why’s he killing kids? Wouldn’t he have a thing against women because his stepfather did, even if it was his mother?”
“That’s easy,” Doc Warren said. “He’s killing himself. He’s killing the nine- or ten-year-old fatherless, unwanted child that he was. Killing him in the righteous manner his stepfather killed his mother. He’s not associating the crime with women, he’s associating it with the evil of what she produced. A bastard. Himself. And somewhere, deep inside, he’s maybe killing himself because his existence is what turned the stepfather against the woman in the first place.”
“It has a nice ring to it,” Charlie said. “It sounds like bullshit to me, but it rings nicely. It’d sound better you had them teeth in, though, Doc.”
“What about the page of Psalms in the kid porn mags?” Doc Warren said. “You’re suggesting this isn’t a sex crime, but one of religious psychosis, so what’s with that?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the whole thing has turned sexual for him. Somehow he’s cleansing himself of that sinful preoccupation by getting rid of his magazines and destroying their power with a page of the Psalms. Like a cross in a vampire’s grave. I really don’t know. But here’s another piece of the puzzle. The retarded child grew up to be only slightly smaller than the Empire State Building. He does what his brother tells him. He helps him do this thing he does. And they do it every summer, last week of August. Which is, probably, about the same time of year the first murder occurred, the mother’s murder, and coincidently it’s a great time of opportunity for our man. It’s the week the East Side carnival comes to town, something our man helps sponsor.”
“I’ll be damned,” Leonard said.
“Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Hanson said. “Who the hell is it?”
“A fella I went to visit this morning,” I said. “The guy who killed Illium Moon, and would have tried to kill Chester Pine if Chester hadn’t died first. A preacher’s son. The preacher’s son. A preacher himself. Reverend Fitzgerald of the First Primitive Baptist Church.”
36.
Space suits in daylight. Red worms in flashlight, writhing and twisting in dark, odoriferous lard…
That night I lay in bed and remembered all that. It was not conducive to sleep.
I got up and went into the kitchen for a drink and saw Leonard had not made the couch into a bed. He was sitting on it watching television. The screen jumped with snow and rattled with static.
The movie he was watching was coming from a long ways, and the cheap rabbit ears weren’t picking it up too well. I could see it clear enough to make out noble German shepherds crawling on their bellies toward some nasty space aliens. I recognized the movie. I Married a Monster from Outer Space. It had scared me when I was a kid. I doubted any monster movie would scare me again.
I forgot the drink of water and went over to the couch and sat down by Leonard. He didn’t look at me. I saw in the reflected light of the television screen that he had tears in his eyes.
I turned my attention to the TV set. The aliens were catching hell now, both from German shepherds and good-old American citizens who weren’t going to stand for no space aliens messin’ with their women.
I said, “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Uncle Chester?”
“Yeah.”
We sat until the end of the movie and then another one started up. This one was about a guy that got some kind of radiation on him and grew incredibly big and had to wear a loin-cloth.
Leonard said, “What about you and Florida?”
“What about us?”
“That bad?”
“She just wants to be friends. I don’t know how you fags work, but a gal wants to be your friend after you’ve been fucking her, it usually means she doesn’t want to be anything to you but gone.”
“I’m usually the one wants to be friends. I used to want a relationship. These days, the shit I’ve been through, except when I have a hard-on, celibacy seems acceptable and preferable. You, on the other hand, don’t feel that way. If ever there was a guy wanted to be married and have two kids and a dog in the yard, it’s you.”
“Call me transparent.”
The big guy on the screen was starting to have some serious trouble with the U.S. Army. They were blasting the shit out of him.
“This murder case,” Leonard said, “how do you think we did?”
“It’s not over, but I think we did all right. Hanson believes he solves this case he’ll be in for a promotion. Him and Charlie both.”
“Charlie don’t think that. Told me he’s put in applications at burger joints, claims he’s one hell of a cook.”
“What Charlie is, is full of shit.”
“Hap, what if we’re wrong, and it ain’t Fitzgerald?”
“It’s him. And his brother too, though I don’t know you can count T.J. as knowing what he’s doing. He’s like a fuckin’ golem. Just does what he’s told.”
“We got so much circumstantial evidence, Hanson could get a warrant. Look around the church and
