Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales (15 page)

"Thanks, buddy.'

"You sure you didn't take pictures? It'd be your style to try and put the squeeze on a bishop."

"I thought about it, but my camera's in hock." Ralph got up. "You can get me at my place. They got the fire out before it reached my floor."

"That was lucky. Gin flames are the hardest to put out."

H
e was driving a brand-new red Riviera he had promised to sell for a lawyer friend who was serving two years for suborning to commit perjury, only he hadn't gotten around to it yet. He parked in a handicapped zone near his building and climbed stairs smelling of smoke and firemen's rubber boots. Inside his apartment, which was also his office, he rewound the tape on his answering machine and played back a threatening call from a loan shark named Zwingman, a reminder from a dentist's receptionist with a NutraSweet voice that last month's root canal was still unpaid for, and a message from a heavy breather that he had to play back three times before deciding it was a man. He was staring toward the door, his attention on the tape, when a square of white paper slithered over the threshold.

That day he was wearing his legal gun, a short-nosed .38 Colt, in a clip on his belt, and an orphan High Standard .22 magnum derringer in an ankle holster. Drawing the Colt, he lunged and tore open the door just in time to hear the Street door closing below. He swung around and crossed to the street window. Through it he saw a narrow figure in a long black coat and the back of a close-cropped head crossing against traffic to the other side. The man rounded the corner and vanished.

Ralph holstered the revolver and picked up the note. it was addressed to him in a round, shaped hand.

Mr. Poteet:

If it is not inconvenient, your presence at my home could prove to your advantage and mine. Cordially,

Philip Stoneman, Bishop-in-Ordinary

Clipped to it was a hundred-dollar bill.

B
ishop Stoneman lived in a refurbished brownstone in a neighborhood that the city had reclaimed from slum by evicting its residents and sandblasting graffiti off the buildings. The bell was answered by a youngish bald man in a dark suit and clerical collar who introduced himself as Brother Edwards and directed Ralph to a curving staircase, then retired to be seen no more. Ralph didn't hear Morgan climbing behind him until something hard probed his right kidney. A hand patted him down and removed the Colt from its clip. "End of the hail."

The bishop was a tall old man, nearly as thin as Morgan, with iron-gray hair and a face that fell away to the white shackle of his collar. He rose from behind a redwood desk to greet his visitor in an old-fashioned black frock that made him look like a crow. The room was large and square and smelled of leather from the books on the built-in shelves and pipe tobacco. Morgan entered behind Ralph and closed the door.

"Thank you for coming, Mr. Poteet. Please sit down."

"Thank Ben Franklin." But he settled into a deep leather chair that gripped his buttocks like a big hand in a soft glove.

"I'm grateful for this chance to thank you in person," Stoneman said, sitting in his big swivel. "I'm very disappointed in Monsignor Breame. I'd hoped that he would take my place at the head of the diocese."

"You bucking for cardinal?"

He smiled. "I suppose you've shown yourself worthy of confidence. Yes, His Holiness has offered me the red hat. The appointment will be announced next month."

"That why you tried to croak me? I guess your right bower cashing in in a hooker's bed would look bad in Rome."

One corner of the desk supported a silver tray containing two long-stemmed glasses and a cut-crystal decanter half full of ruby liquid. Stoneman removed the stopper and filled both glasses. "This is an excellent Madeira. I confess that the austere life allows me two mild vices. The other is tobacco."

"What are we celebrating?" Ralph didn't pick up his glass.

"Your new appointment as chief of diocesan security. The position pays well and the hours are regular."

"In return for which I forget about Monsignor Breame?"

"And entrust all related material to me. You took pictures, of course." Stoneman sipped from his glass.

Ralph lifted his. "I'd be pretty stupid not to, considering what happened to Lyla Dane."

"I heard about the tragedy. That child's soul could have been saved."

"You should've thought about that before your boy Morgan croaked her." Ralph gulped off half his wine. It tasted bitter.

The bishop laid a bony hand atop an ancient ornate Bible on the desk. His guest thought he was about to swear his innocence. "This belonged to St. Thomas. More, not Aquinas. I have a weakness for religious antiques."

"Thought you only had two vices." The air in the room stirred slightly. Ralph turned to see who had entered, but his vision was thickening. Morgan was a shimmering shadow. The glass dropped from Ralph's hand. He bent to retrieve it and came up with the derringer. Stoneman's shout echoed. Ralph fired twice at the shadow and pitched headfirst into its depths.

H
e awoke feeling pretty much the way he did most mornings, with his head throbbing and his stomach turning over. He wanted to turn over, with it, but he was stretched out on a hard, flat surface with his ankles strapped down and his arms tied above his head. He was looking up at water-stained tile. His joints ached.

"The sedative was in the stem of your glass," Stoneman was saying. He was out of Ralph's sight and Ralph had the impression he'd been talking for a while. "You've been out for two hours. The unpleasant effect is temporary, rather like a hangover."

"Did I get him?" Ralph's tongue moved sluggishly. "No, you missed rather badly. It required persuasion to get Morgan to carry you down here to the basement instead of killing you on the spot. He was quite upset." Ralph squirmed. There was something familiar about the position he was tied in. For some reason he thought of Mrs. Thornton, his ninth-grade American Lit. teacher. What is the significance of Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum" to the transcendentalist movement? His organs shriveled.

"Another antique," said the bishop. "The Inquisition did not end when General Lasalle entered Madrid, but went on for several years in the provinces. This particular rack was still in use after Torquemada's death. The gears are original. The wheel is new, and of course I had to replace the ropes. Morgan?"

A shoe scraped the floor and a spoked shadow fluttered across Ralph's vision. His arms tightened. He gasped.

"That's enough. We don't want to put Mr. Poteet back under." To Ralph: "Morgan just returned from your apartment. He found neither pictures nor film nor even a camera. Where are they?"

"I was lying. I didn't take no pictures."

"Morgan."

Ralph shrieked.

"Enough! His Holiness is sensitive about scandal, Mr. Poteet. I won't have Monsignor Breame's indiscretions bar me from the Vatican. Who is keeping the pictures for you?"

"There ain't no pictures, honest."

"Morgan!"

A socket started to slip. Ralph screamed and blubbered.

"Enough!" Stoneman's fallen-away face moved into Ralph's vision. His eyes were fanatic. "A few more turns will sever your spine. You could be spoon-fed for the rest of your life. Do you think that after failing to kill you in that apartment I would hesitate to cripple you? Where are the pictures?"

"I didn't take none!"

"Morgan!"

"No!" It ended in a howl. His armpits were on fire. The ropes creaked.

"Police! Don't move!"

The bishop's face jerked away. The spoked shadow fluttered. The tension went out of Ralph's arms suddenly, and relief poured into his joints. A shot flattened the air. Two more answered it. Something struck the bench Ralph was lying on and drove a splinter into his back. He thought at first he was shot, but the pain was nothing.; he'd just been through worse. He squirmed onto his hip and saw Morgan, one black-clad arm stained and glistening, leveling a heavy automatic at a target behind Ralph's back. Scrambling out of the line of fire, Ralph jerked his bound hands and the rack's wheel, six feet in diameter with handles bristling from it like a ship's helm, spun around. One of the handles slapped the gun from Morgan's hand. Something cracked past Ralph's left ear and Morgan fell back against the tile wall and slid down it. The shooting stopped.

Ralph wriggled onto his other hip. A man he didn't know in a houndstooth coat with a revolver in his hand had Bishop Stoneman spread-eagled against a wall and was groping in his robes for weapons. Dale English came off the stairs with the Ruger he had been carrying since Ralph was his partner. He bent over Morgan on the floor, then straightened and holstered the gun. He looked at Ralph. "I guess you're okay.'

"I am if you got a pocketknife."

"Arson boys found the circuit breaker in the wall switch just like you said." He cut Ralph's arms free and sawed through the straps on his ankles. "When you didn't answer your telephone I went to your place and found Stoneman's note."

"He confessed to the hooker's murder."

"I know. I heard him."

"How the hell long were you listening?"

"We had to have enough to pin him to it, didn't we?"

"You son of a bitch. You just wanted to hear me holler."

"Couldn't help it. You sure got lungs."

"I got to go to the toilet."

"Stick around after," English said. "I need a statement to hand to the city boys. They won't like County sticking its face in this."

Ralph hobbled upstairs. When he was through in the bathroom he found his hat and coat and headed out. At the front door he turned around and went back into the bishop's study, where he hoisted Thomas More's Bible under one arm. He knew a bookseller who would probably give him at least a hundred for it.

I
was halfway through my third ham sandwich when the intercom on my desk razzed. Angrily, I choked down the mouthful I was working on and punched the speaker button, which was too small for my rather broad thumb.

"Sharon, I thought I told you never to interrupt my lunch."

"Sorry, Matt." The mechanical voice coming from the speaker didn't sound sorry. The inference was that a man in my condition could afford to have his lunch interrupted now and then. "Seth Borden is here to see you. I thought you might be interested."

I sat back for a moment, frowning. A trip to Las Vegas for Dickens' venerable Miss Havisham was easier to envision than a visit from Seth Borden. He was the last person in Roseacre I would have expected to need an attorney.

"Herd him in." I rewrapped the uneaten portion of my sandwich and put it away in the file drawer, sweeping crumbs in after it off the desk top. By that time my visitor was standing awkwardly just inside the door.

Seth was older than the woodwork in the office and looked it. Little and wizened –"elfin," the Sunday supplement writers would call him –he wore gold-rimmed spectacles on a bent nose, a white shirt, and fuzzy gray pin-striped trousers under a leather apron streaked liberally with grease. His face and his white tousled hair and his hands were no cleaner, the latter calloused and stained a permanent brown from the many compounds and acids with which he worked. He looked out of place, as he would have anywhere but amid the general disarray of his little workshop on Main Street.

I winched myself out of my chair and took his hand. It was warm and a little sticky. "Hello, Seth. Have a seat." I indicated the client's chair on his side of the desk.

He shook his head. "Can't stay. Got me some glue drying on two sticks of wood and can't let it set no longer'n ten minutes. I come to hire you, if you're in the mood for it." He fished a scrap of paper out of an apron pocket and handed it to me.

It was a subpoena ordering him to appear in court in two weeks to answer charges of diminished capacity filed by his daughter. Her name was typed at the bottom of the sheet: Mrs. C. Burton Scott. I gave it back. "What brought this on?"

"It's her husband put her up to it," he said. "When I refused to sell my shop to that developing firm of his, he got himself a lawyer and between them they cooked up this thing that says I'm crazy and should be committed. June always did do what Burton told her, so he got her to sign this here complaint. Once I'm out of the way, the shop's hers, and they can do what they want with it."

He seemed more sad than angry, which was like him. People like Seth Borden live their lives never believing they'll get hurt. They get hurt a lot. The scenario made sense. No one who lived in Roseacre could recall a time when Seth's shop wasn't there. Dwarfed though it was by skyscrapers the little brick structure occupied a substantial part of the business district and was worth hundreds of thousands to the developer fortunate enough to acquire it. Knowing what I did about C. Burton Scott, I wondered why I hadn't seen this coming.

Not that no one had tried before. Twenty years earlier, Bedelia Borden, Seth's sister and partner by grace of their father's will, had tried to bully Seth into selling her his half so that she could make a bundle from a man who wanted to buy up the block and build a department store. Her constant browbeating made her brother miserable and may have led to his wife Ruth's fatal heart attack at age forty-two. Bedelia might have won, having thus broken her brother's spirit, had not a severe recurrence of her childhood asthma forced her to abandon her interest and move to a dryer climate. No one had heard from her since and it was believed that she had died out west. Now the property was worth ten times what had been offered then.