tell you the truth, I was relieved.”
“Afraid it was Reverend Bill?”
“So, you know about Bill.” He shook his head. “I’ll be happy when this is all cleared up. I don’t feel safe here anymore. I don’t feel safe anywhere.”
I stood just inside the front door and looked around. Two bedrooms, one bath, living room, eat-in kitchen with a back door. The rug was threadbare but clean. The furniture was shabby. Not a lot of clutter. Colors were faded into a blur of neutral nothing. A couch, an overstuffed club chair, a TV and VCR. No dust on the coffee table.
“I imagine you’re not safe either,” Mo said. “You’ve been making Bill real nervous.”
I did a mental head shake. I’d unwittingly camped out in front of the Freedom Church. Mo and Bill must have been panicked, thinking I was on to them. Sometimes I amazed even myself. How could a person’s instincts be so wrong and at the same time so right?
Mo pulled a shade aside and peeked out the front window. “How did you find me?”
“I took a sort of roundabout route through the burg grapevine.”
Mo turned back to me, horror etched onto his face. I looked into his eyes and saw his mind racing a million miles an hour.
“That’s impossible,” he said, anxiety pinching his lips, turning them white. “Nobody in the burg knows about this house.”
“Larry Skolnik knows. You remember Larry? The kid who wrote secret messages on his arm. Works in his father’s dry cleaning shop now.”
I walked to the open bedroom door and looked in. Bed, neatly made. Throw rug on the floor. Bedside table with lamp and clock. The second bedroom was empty. Tracks on the rug from a recent vacuuming. A few indentations in the rug from furniture or whatever. Clearly the room had recently been cleaned out. I checked the bathroom. There was a heavy drape on the small single window. Darkroom, I thought. Mo probably did some stills of his stars. I walked back to the front door.
“I know about the movies,” I said to Mo.
He gaped at me. Panicky. Still not believing. I rattled off his list of credits. Asserting my dominance. Letting Mo know that the game was over.
Mo pulled himself together and raised his chin a fraction of an inch. A defensive posture. “Well, what of it? I make art films involving consenting adults.”
“Consenting, maybe. Adults is questionable. Does Reverend Bill know about your hobby?”
“Reverend Bill is one of my most devoted fans. Has been for years. Reverend Bill is a firm believer in corporal punishment for bad behavior.”
“Then he knows about this house.”
“Not the location. And it’s not a hobby. I’m a professional filmmaker. I make good money off my films.”
“I bet.”
“You don’t expect me to retire on the money I make selling ice cream cones, do you?” Mo snapped. “You know what the profit is on penny candy? The profit is nothing.”
I hoped he didn’t expect me to be sympathetic. I was having a hard time not grimacing every time I thought about my picture on his kitchen wall.
He shook his head, the spark of indignant fire sputtering out. Mo collapsing in on himself. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I was making a good living. Putting money away for retirement. I was providing entertainment to a select group of adults. I was employing deserving young people.”
I did some mental eye rolling. Moses Bedemier paid street dealers to recruit fresh blood for his porno movies. The street dealers knew the runaways and street kids. They knew the teenagers who still looked healthy and would do most anything to get a new high.
“I made one mistake,” Mo said. “One mistake and everything started to unravel. It was all because of that awful Jamal Brousse.” He paced to the window, clearly agitated, peeking around the shade, clasping and unclasping his hands.
“I hope you were careful not to be followed,” he said. “Bill is looking for me.”
“I wasn’t followed.” Probably.
Mo kept going, wanting to share his story, I guess, looking slightly dazed that it had all come to this, talking while he continued to pace. Probably he’d been talking and pacing for hours before I arrived, trying to talk himself into calling the police.
“All because of Brousse,” he said. “A drug dealer and a purveyor. I made a single unfortunate transaction with him for a young man to model for me. I just wanted some photographs.”
He held up and listened. “Bill will kill us both if he finds us here.”
There was no doubt in my mind. As soon as Ranger showed up we were moving out. “What about Brousse?” I asked, more to distract myself from thoughts of Reverend Bill arriving before Ranger, than raw curiosity.
“I honored my agreement with Brousse, but he kept coming back at me, making more and more demands. Blackmailing me. I was desperate. I didn’t know what to do. I might not make much money from my store, but I have a certain position in the community that I enjoy. Brousse could have ruined everything.
“And then one day Bill stopped in at the store, and I got an idea. Suppose I told Bill about this guy, Jamal Brousse, who was selling drugs to kids. I figured Bill would put a scare into him. Maybe punch him in the nose or something. Maybe scare him enough so he’d go away. Trouble was Bill liked the idea of community justice so much he killed Brousse.
“But Bill made a mistake on Brousse. Dumped him in the river, and Brousse bobbed in to shore two hours later.
