The Four Last Things

Chapter 21

"Go away," Sister Zachary said at the door. In the bright morning light her fat face was bumpy and pitted, as though there were loose gravel beneath the skin. The tentlike dress was crumpled and dirty.

"Mrs. Jenks," I said, "it's either me or Homicide. You and Jinks may have even fewer choices in the immediate future."

"Homicide?" she said, not even noticing the use of her name. "What's Homicide got to do with it?"

"They haven't traced Sally Oldfield here yet. They'll be real curious when they do."

"Why shouldn't she come here?" she said defiantly.

"Even more interesting, why should you two and Jinks lie about it?"

She caught the name this time. Her face stiffened. Her features were all squeezed tightly into its center, making her look like the end of a cigar that's been crimped and bitten off.

"What do you know about Jinks?"

"Not as much as I'll know in fifteen minutes."

"We told you she didn't come."

"And I know differently. Now, are we all going to sit down for a chat, or am I going to come back with the cops?"

"You're going to get us into trouble," she said childishly.

"I certainly hope so."

"I don't mean the cops. We're used to cops."

She wavered irresolutely while the morning traffic on Vermont puttered north and south behind me. "I'm not going anywhere," I said. "I'm not the kind of problem that disappears if you don't think about it. Come on, let's go talk to Jinks."

She decided. She tipped her two hundred pounds left, swayed, and then lurched to the right, hauling the door open as she went. I followed her, closed the door behind me, and snapped the lock.

Wilburforce was right where we'd left him, sitting on the edge of his desk. He had an accountant's ledger on his lap and he looked up, startled, as Sister Zachary waddled swiftly into the room with me in panting pursuit.

"Counting souls?" I said, sitting down in the same uncomfortable chair.

"What? What?" he said a little wildly. He sounded like an outboard motor. "Oh, souls, I see. Souls, indeed. A little newspaperman's joke." He summoned up a rheumatic chuckle from the lower depths.

"Newspaperman, my ass," Sister Zachary said. "He just threatened me with the cops."

"You're not a newspaper reporter?" Affronted innocence flooded his eyes.

"So we all lied a little," I said. "You didn't tell me about Sally Oldfield, and I didn't tell you I was a detective."

His eyes got very small and he looked over at Sister Zachary, who was sulking in the corner. "Show me your buzzer," he said.

"I don't have a buzzer, Jinks," I said, reaching for the book. He was quicker than I was. He slammed the ledger shut and placed it carefully on the desk behind him.

"That was a former life," he said with an air of great dignity. "That person no longer exists. And if you haven't got a buzzer you're not a detective, are you?"

"I'm a private detective."

"Well," he exhaled, giving me the false choppers from ear to ear, "then I don't have to talk to you. You might as well be a Campfire Girl."

"Wrong. You're withholding evidence in a murder investigation. I'm involved in that investigation in a semiofficial capacity."

"Semi," he said, with a blinding grin. "A miss, as they say, is as good as a mile."

"And the Homicide cops," I said, smiling back at him, "are as near as your phone."

"He knows she was here," Sister Zachary said. "Stop farting around, Jinks. He knows she was here."

"My dear," Jinks said reprovingly. "Language, language. Remember what Malagrida said. 'Language was given to man to conceal his thoughts.' "

"Who was Malagrida?" I asked in spite of myself.

"I don't have the faintest idea. Stendhal quotes it in a chapter heading for The Red and the Black."

"That must be a useful book in your profession."

"We can all learn from Julien," he said sententiously. "It's a young man's education in the ways of the world, really. It's not Julien's fault that the world's machinery is oiled with religious hypocrisy. There's a lesson in it for all of us."

"This is fascinating," I said. "If we had the rest of the morning we could probably get through The Charterhouse of Parma too. But we don't. I know Sally Oldfield was here, and I know that you-both of you-went to some lengths to convince me that she wasn't. I want to know why you lied and I want to know what happened here."

"I don't mean to be thick," he said, "but could you explain again why we shouldn't just throw you out?"

"No. Mrs. Jenks here just indicated that the cops were no worry compared to-what? — the Church?"

"You didn't," Jenks said, stricken. Sister Zachary gave him a sullen shrug.

"As far as I'm concerned, you can have them both," I said. "Talk to me, and I'll try to see that you only get the cops."

"Un embarras de richesses," Jenks said bitterly in second-year French. "We have a nice little life here. We're not breaking any laws, we're not hurting anyone. I haven't performed surgery in years, not even an appendectomy. The nearest hypodermic is probably down on the sidewalk. Why should you come along all of a sudden and ruin everything?"

"Ask Sally Oldfield."

"She's dead," Jenks said promptly.

"Precisely."

"Oh," he said. Then, after a minute he said, "She was just a girl."

"She found out something about the Church. She came to you. What did she say?"

Husband and wife exchanged a long, fraudulent look. "Who told you she came here?" Sister Zachary said at last.

"Forget it. I want to know what happened."

"It doesn't seem fair," he said.

I got up, and both their heads snapped up to follow me. Their chins and sub-chins quivered.

"Listen," I said. "As Mrs. Jenks said, stop farting around. Who was it? Who'd she find out something about?"

"Merryman," Mrs. Jenks said. She pronounced the name very quickly, as though it were something she had to get out of her mouth before she tasted it. "It was Merryman." Jenks looked at her as though she were Benedict Arnold.

"My dear," he said.

"Oh, shut up," she snapped venomously. "Which do you want, the cops or the Church? It was that crap doctor."

"What did she find out?"

"We didn't ask," Jenks said. "We didn't want to know."

"They'd known each other somewhere," Mrs. Jenks plowed stubbornly on. "Or she'd known him, anyway. She recognized him from somewhere, and she was dismayed. She was crying."

I looked around the office, picturing Jenks, or Wilburforce, sitting fatly behind his desk and Sally crying. She'd run here. Of all the places in Los Angeles, of all the places in the world, she'd run here.

"You didn't ask what she'd learned?"

"As I said," Jenks repeated, "we didn't want to know. We've had our little experience with Dr. Merryman, thank you. He's nobody you want to fool around with, unless you're a snake charmer. And even then, you'd have to be careful. We wanted no part of it. Did we, dear?" he asked Sister Zachary.

"Not an iota," she said.

"So tell me about Merryman."

Jenks looked, if possible, even less comfortable. "He's Angel's physician," he said. "Although my guess is that he's not really an internist at all."

"Why?"

"My good man," Jenks said with a hint of his old manner. "I know more about the thorax than he does. What Merryman doesn't know about internal medicine would fill a library."

"So what is he?"

"My personal guess is that he's a classic sociopath. But who am I? I haven't practiced psychiatry yet. He could be a hat salesman for all I know."

"But he takes care of Angel," I said.

"She's a healthy little girl. They've all been healthy little girls. Most of what a doctor does, you know, is waiting for fatal signs to develop."

"And then what?"

"He sends the patient to a specialist."

"And where did you send Sally?"

"Good Lord," Jenks said. "Do I really have to tell you that?"

"First tell me what Merryman's real position is in the Church."

"Well, he's sort of in charge, isn't he?" Jenks said, looking at his wife for support. "He and Brooks, I mean."

"Meredith Brooks."

"Who else? Not that they like each other. Doctors and lawyers, you know."

"Sssssss," Sister Zachary hissed.

"Well, my dear," Jenks said placatingly, "he's going to find out anyway."

"Is there a feud?"

"That's one way of putting it."

"Serious?"

He pursed his lips retentively. "Perhaps. There is the potential there, let us say, for killing the goose that lays the golden eggs." He seemed very happy with the phrase.

"How long has he been with the Church?"

"Seven or eight years. He came about a year before we… withdrew."

"He threw you out."

"Yes," Sister Zachary said.

"No," Jenks said, over her. "We've explained all this. We left after Anna was killed, and they-by which I mean Brooks-started trying to draft a new Speaker. And then, when they found, or rather created, little Jessica, Merryman came with her, more or less. He was involved with Doris Fram, that tramp. Jessica's mother. Then, of course, he was involved with dear Mary Claire. Dr. Merryman is a man who likes to be involved. I always thought Angel was as dull as dirt," he added irrelevantly.

"Where's Jessica now?"

Jenks swallowed. "Jessica? What do you want with her?"

"That's not important. Just tell me where she is."

He looked at Sister Zachary. Sister Zachary gave a minuscule nod. "You're going to keep us out of it?" Jenks said.

"If I can."

He hesitated, then lifted himself off the desk and trudged around behind it. His pants were shiny in the seat. He opened a drawer in the back of the desk and pulled out a slender address book. He riffled through its pages and then looked back up at me.

"You promise," he said.

"If I can do it, I will."

"That's not much."

"It's all you're going to get."

"Give it to him," Sister Zachary said fatalistically. "What else can you do?"

He wrote something on a card and then bustled back around the desk and handed it to me. He looked very nervous.

"Tell me how the Revealings work."

"I really don't know," he said. "Anna was a bona fide channel. I've always assumed that the other two were suggestible enough, and wanted approval badly enough, to hear voices of their own."

I looked at him skeptically. "If he knew how to do it," Sister Zachary said with a bite in her voice, "don't you think we'd have a Speaker too?"

The two of them glared at each other.

"So," I said, pocketing the card, "who'd you sell Sally to?"

Jenks looked surprised that I'd had to ask.

"To Brooks, of course," he said piously. "Merryman would have killed her."

Out on Vermont I squinted into the sunshine and plotted my day. The sky was almost clear for the first time in a week, and the pavement was already drying. Heaven seemed near at hand. It was the kind of day when you could drive forever, which was probably what I was going to do.

I ticked off the possible stops on my itinerary. Get a different car, take Eleanor back home to help her pack, talk to Speaker Number Two-Jessica Fram-and nail Brooks's ears to the nearest wall. The order sounded about right. I wanted to get Brooks at home, not at the office. I didn't think the formidable Marcy would let me back in.

Wrent-a-Wreck on Hawthorne had just opened for business as I pulled in. The manager was a potbellied little man in a tight white T-shirt. The T-shirt said nothing. It was a real, honest-to-God undershirt.

"I didn't think they made them anymore," I said.

"They're not easy to get, let me tell you," he said. "Try to find something white at a white sale. But if somebody wants to write on my chest, let 'em pay me rent, that's what I always say." He gave Alice an appraising eye.

"Low-rider special, huh? Haven't seen one of these since JFK. What's 'Sweet lice' mean?"

"It used to be Alice," I said defensively. " 'Sweet Alice.' The A came off."

"You want to sell her? I could probably do some business with a heap like this. Penetrate the Cholo market. Big Hispanic bucks in L.A. now."

"What I want," I said, "is to leave her here for a couple of days and drive away in one of yours. Some nice, dull, anonymous, average, medium-size car with no pizzazz and no writing on it and very small license plates."

"Bank job, huh?" He gave a short barking laugh.

"No," I said. "I'm only going to drive it to church."

Getting Eleanor moved was harder. For one thing, she didn't want to leave the office at that point.

"I just got here," she said. "How can I turn around and walk back out?"

"How about I call in a bomb threat and when they evacuate the building you can just get into my car?"

"You remember Jackie Vinh?"

"Sure. She was with your ex-idiot at that Halloween party. What has she got to do with anything?"

"I talked to her this morning. That's why I'm late. She's a nursing student. She said she'd call Mr. Ellspeth today and see if she can help out with Ansel. She's a nice girl."

"You're not so bad yourself. Let's go."

"I can't. You'll have to come back."

"Eleanor, I have a day in front of me that does not make it possible for me to waffle hither and yon. I can manage hither maybe once if the traffic lights aren't against me. Why don't you make out a list of what you need and then give me your key, and I'll drop the stuff by right after lunch."

"Do you really think this is necessary?"

"After last night, I certainly do."

"Well," she said grumpily, "I think it's melodramatic. And you'll never find everything I need."

Nevertheless, she gave me the key and a relatively brief list and I headed out toward the beach.

Jenks and Mrs. Jenks had made it pretty clear that there was a major split in the Church and that the main splittees were Brooks and Merryman. If my reading was right, Brooks controlled the dollars and Merryman controlled the Speaker. They needed each other. And they hated each other.

When Sally recognized Merryman for whatever or whoever he really was, she'd run to kindly old Hubert Wilburforce, who had promptly sold her to Brooks for $100,000 and the dismissal of a suit the Church had pending against the Congregation. Brooks, I would have thought, would have put her in a safe-deposit box as a piece of highly negotiable currency if she really knew something heinous about the good doctor. Instead, she'd been killed.

I was very anxious to have another talk with Brooks.

Eleanor's place seemed secure. The door was locked, none of the windows had been broken, and when I got inside, things were in their usual obsessive state of Eleanor neatness. It took me maybe forty-five minutes to pack everything she'd listed. I threw in a few things she'd forgotten, too. Shoes, for example. Eleanor belonged to the Bernie school of packing.

When I left, it was barely noon. Jessica Fram lived in the Valley, so I took the Santa Monica freeway to the 405 and pointed my awful, rattling little Camaro due north. It was a depressing shade of battleship gray that laughed at dirt. That's probably why they paint battleships that color. All that swabbing for nothing.

Jessica's house was in Reseda. It sat in the center of a flat little tract block that managed to stay brown even after all that rain. What lawns there were seemed to be made largely of mud. Dogs of indeterminate breed sprouted from it.

The only difference between the Fram house and the ones flanking it was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with an extra foot of barbed wire on top. One of those boxes with a button and a microphone sat perched on a pole next to the driveway, looking like a forlorn transplant from Bel Air.

For about fifteen minutes I sat in the Camaro at the end of the block and studied the house. Nothing moved. The curtains were drawn against the day's new sunlight, and two cars, washed by the rain, sparkled in the driveway on the other side of the fence. They were the only sign that anyone was home.

At twenty minutes to one the front door of the house opened and a middle-aged woman with short steel-gray hair came briskly out. The gate slid open. The woman gave the neighborhood a practiced once-over, pausing only for an instant at my car, and then hopped into a butch black Land Rover and backed out into the street. She ignored me completely as she passed. Maybe there was something to be said for the Camaro's color.

I pulled the Camaro up to the black speaker box and pressed the button. After what seemed like weeks a woman's voice bellowed, "Hermia?"

"No, it's not Hermia," I said. "I'm here to see Jessica."

There was a pause you could have driven a motor home through.

"For what?" the woman said. "She's in bed."

I looked at my watch again. Twelve-forty-five. Jessica certainly led a difficult life. I mentally flipped another coin.

"Dick sent me," I said.

After a long moment the gate rolled crankily open. I drove in.