Happy Policeman (4 page)

Chapter Seven

FULL NIGHT
had fallen by the time DeWitt reached the poor neighborhood of the Hollows. Streetlights cast golden pools on the asphalt. Frame houses crowded near the road like cattle gathering to fences.

In each brightly windowed living room was a VCR and a big-screen Sony. Every refrigerator was stocked, the result of the Torku’s largesse. DeWitt hadn’t admitted his contentment to Hattie, for fear of being misunderstood. It pleased him that the hardscrabble poor had come into their own, not for justice, but for the sleepy satiation it brought.

No more burglaries. No more holdups. Glutted by consumerism, Coomey, Texas, napped.

But in the wealthier neighborhood on the other side of Guadalupe Road, vandals had painted a stop sign yield-yellow. Someone, uncharmed by the Torku’s magnanimity, had sprayed
EAT SHIT
on the side of the volunteer fire station.

By the time DeWitt reached Foster’s well-kept Victorian house, he had lost his smile. Propping his notebook against the saddle horn, he made a note of the vandals’ damage; then he dismounted and climbed the stairs to the wraparound porch. Windchimes, nudged by the breeze, plinked like three-year-olds on xylophones.

As DeWitt knocked, his gaze snagged on Foster’s ‘68 Corvette gleaming on the concrete drive. The classic car might have been used to transport the children’s bodies, but Loretta was too large to fit in that trunk.

Foster jerked open the door, his bearded face in a grin. The white-haired banker might have looked snappy in his suit had the tie-dyed shirt under the vest not been such a hideous orange.

“Hey.” His hand lifted, the index and middle fingers spread into a V. “Peace.”

Without waiting for an invitation, DeWitt eased around the banker and into the warm living room. Arranged on the wall, fronted by scented candles, was the pictorial altar of Foster’s past: a young naked Foster, one of the many nude and beflowered disciples surrounding Timothy Leary; a clothed Foster smiling and shaking the hand of a thankfully-clothed Phil Gramm. Next to that was Foster’s framed college diploma and the photo taken the night of the Coomey High School Senior Prom: Foster’s possessive arm around a beaming, sixteen-year-old Janet. Janet’s blond hair was in a French twist, flowers tucked into its gleaming plaits. She looked different—younger, of course. She also looked happier than she had in years.

DeWitt wrenched his eyes away. The dining-room door was shut, but behind it DeWitt could hear quiet activity. A rattle. The clack of something small and hard hitting a firm surface. What woman did Foster have in there this time?

“Don’t mean to disturb you,” DeWitt told him, his eyes still on the door.

The back of Foster’s hand collided with DeWitt’s chest. DeWitt staggered back a half-step in surprise and saw that the banker was holding a swatch of pale yellow fabric to his uniform.

“Spring, I think.” Foster frowned at the piece of cloth and then at DeWitt’s face. The banker was so close that DeWitt could see the subtle brick color of his eyeshadow, the touch of blush on his cheeks.

“You’re a Spring. Should wear more bright colors. Your hair’s highlights are toward the blond. Yellow would make that brighter. Eyes—what are they? More blue? More green? And the skin, warm peach. Yeah. Spring.” Foster stepped back and opened his vest to flash more of his shirt. The necklace of beads and bells he wore jingled. “I’m an Autumn, myself . . .

“What about Loretta?”

Foster stroked his beard. From the other room came a rattle. A series of sharp taps. Foster seemed to be fighting an urge to glance toward the closed door. “Loretta thought I was a Winter. She never could do colors well. She didn’t understand the vibratory resonance.”

“Was? Have you heard she was murdered?” DeWitt hoped to catch him off guard, but the banker’s expression was as empty in its own way as Billy’s had been.

“Do you meditate?”

“I—”

“You’re a Spring. Full of life. A hair-trigger temper that you regret later. Summers are impulsive, busy-work people who hurt without ever realizing it. Winters never forget a slight, but they possess psychic powers. Autumns are the most spiritual. I knew Loretta was headed for murder. Definitely a Summer. The quintessential victim. Summers never know revenge is about to fall until it hits them in the face.”

“Who’d she hurt?” DeWitt tried to picture Loretta as one of Foster’s conquests and failed. Then he pictured Janet waiting in Foster’s dining room. The vision stuck in his mind like an annoying snatch of melody.

“A Winter, obviously.” Foster tossed the swatch of fabric onto a turquoise-and-burnt-umber couch. “They’re brooders.”

“You got anything to drink?” DeWitt parked himself on the sofa next to the square of fabric.

Foster looked toward the dining room. “Lemon verbena tea? Peppermint? Maybe some Red Zinger?”

“Mint sounds great.” DeWitt relaxed into the cushions.

After a hesitation, Foster left. When DeWitt heard water running in the kitchen, he got up and crept over the hardwood planks to the closed door. The glass knob turned in his hand.

DeWitt froze, the image of Janet returning. What would he do if he found her? he wondered. But he had no choice. If she left him for Foster, DeWitt would place his love at the Line of their estrangement:
JANET, FOREVER AND ALWAYS, CHERISHED WIFE
.

He pulled the door open and peeked around the jamb. Jealousy assaulted him from an unexpected direction, impaling him so quickly, so painfully, that he found it difficult to breathe. On Foster’s dining room table a Monopoly board was set up. Sitting across from each other, wordlessly intent on their game, were a pair of Torku.

DeWitt eased the door to. Confused, he made his way back to the sofa. Foster walked in, toting two mugs. A shell-and-bead necklace was entwined in the banker’s hand like a rosary.

“Sorry I took so long.” The edges of Foster’s smile twitched.

DeWitt met the man’s suspicion with a studied lack of guile. Taking the mug, he asked, “Loretta ever hurt you?”

“Hurt me?” Foster put his mug down on the glass-topped table and offered the necklace to DeWitt. “Start wearing this. It helps the vibrations. Ties are out now. Phallic symbols, you know. We have to get in touch with our feminine sides after that game of nuclear hardball.”

DeWitt put the necklace into his pocket.

“Hurt me?” Foster asked again, plunking himself into a worn La-Z-Boy. “Nothing can hurt me anymore, DeWitt, now that I’ve set my priorities in order.” The chair reclined with a thump and a groan of springs. DeWitt found himself staring at the bottom of the banker’s sandals.

“They did us a favor.” Foster spread his feet to peer at DeWitt. “The Russians. The Torku. You know, in college I thought the trick was revolution. Then later, when I followed my father and became a Republican, I imagined money was the answer. But there aren’t any answers. When you get right down to it, nothing’s meaningful. Nothing at all.”

Foster was talking a notch too loudly, and DeWitt began to wonder if the speech was meant for the Torku in the next room. The rattle of dice, the clack of the pieces along the board, fell silent.

DeWitt sipped at his tea. It was watery, and Foster had put no sugar in it. “Loretta thought you were a sinner.”

“Loretta thought a great many things that weren’t true. She was the wrong season to be perceptive, remember?”

DeWitt put his cup down.

“Loretta was a Thou Shalt Not,” Foster told him. “Consider me a Thou Canst. When the bombs hit, I lost a lot of money in the stock market, but you don’t see me crying over it, do you?”

No
, DeWitt thought.
But I see a pair of Torku in the next room learning all about acquisitions and mergers.
He wondered what Kol Seresen, what Pastor Jimmy, might think of that.

“So you hated Loretta.”

The chair returned to sitting position with a startled bang. Foster leaned forward, his face too pink, too Summery, against the strident orange of his shirt. “Why would you think that?”

“Pastor Jimmy’s people prayed God would take the sinners. Seems to me that when you have a congregation that wants something bad enough, one of them might help God along. The law would understand if you killed Loretta in self-defense.” In a kindly tone he added, “Secrets eat you up inside, Hubert. So tell me. Where were you last night?”

Foster’s cheeks went a sickly shade of gray. A Winter-sky hue. “Here. At home.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Jesus, DeWitt. Loretta was the town’s only Mary Kay rep. And I’m completely out of skin toner. Why in the world would I kill her?”

Slowly, pointedly, DeWitt looked at the living-room door. He had thought Foster could get no more sallow, but the banker’s cheeks went through a Torku transformation. He was as pale as Loretta, as white as his trimmed hair.

“What’s going on between you and the Torku? Does Seresen know his people are here? And what did Loretta find out?”

Irate, Foster shot to his feet, then appeared to be amazed to find himself standing. “The Torku and I have a lot in common. There’s no crime in that, is there?”

Putting his hand into his pocket, DeWitt was surprised to feel the cold beads tucked away like a secret.

“Well? Is there?”

“Let me handle the Torku, Hubert. It’s better if they talk to one person. It keeps things from getting confused. I don’t want the Torku confused.”

“Oh, I understand. You’re jealous. That’s what all this is about. Well, you don’t
own
the Torku. Envy is a pre-holocaust idea, DeWitt, and you’d better learn to get rid of it. The whole town had better learn to get rid of a lot of things. Outmoded ideas of demons. The Judgment Day holding tank that Pastor Jimmy thinks we’re in.”

DeWitt looked at the piles of tie-dye, the beads, the canny little incense holders scattered about the room. An old paisley tie just the pattern of today’s Line. Foster was an ingenious man. He could have devised an ingenious murder weapon.

“So you’re telling me life is meaningless.”

Foster laughed. “I’m the one who should know. I campaigned for McGovern and then turned around and campaigned for Reagan. Find meaning in that.”

“Funny thing.” DeWitt’s fingers slipped over the beads one by one. “There’s never any vandalism in the Hollow. It happens over here, right on the good side of town.”

“So?”

“So it makes me wonder about rich kids. Remember when you were in high school, Hubert? And my daddy arrested you for DWl? And how the circuit court judge just seemed to drop the case?”

Foster’s jaw muscles tightened. “You drove drunk, too. You were just never caught.”

“Well, your daddy can’t bribe you out of trouble this time.”

The banker swallowed hard.

“Isn’t it ironic?” DeWitt asked. “We get everything we want, and rich kids tear it up. They break street lights, they spraypaint graffiti on walls. All those people starving on the other side of the Line, and here you are, telling the Torku that life is meaningless.”

“Of course I tell them!” Foster’s voice was strident, a voice to carry though closed doors. “I’m a teacher now. I’m not a wild teenager or a corporate pirate anymore. I’ve studied the arrogance of power dressing. The male Anglo-Saxon mind-set it creates. And if I could get through the Line, I’d teach those people the truth.”

DeWitt pushed himself off the sofa and turned as though to leave. He whirled. Foster was planted, feet apart, pose defensive. “Did you borrow anyone’s car last night?”

“No.”

“I’ll find out if you did, Hubert. Don’t bother lying. I keep thinking that only murderers would believe life’s worthless.”

Foster’s eyes wavered, dropped. “I never said that.”

Chapter Eight

“WITHOUT FAITH,”
Jimmy Schoen thundered, “good works are meaningless!”

He stopped, trapped by the eyes of the demons.
Meaningless,
he thought, his hand still upraised.

The demons’ eyes were a murky pink, with undertones of blue and hints of saffron—the color of chaos. Down one side of the small church they sat, shapeless hands in laps, their expressions intent.

Quickly, Schoen looked at the human half of his congregation. Dee Dee sat in the front row, prim and stiff and smiling, her gaze adrift. Daydreaming again, even though Schoen, by Biblical right, should be the appointed focus of her world.

At the unexpected silence, the others became restless. A few shifted in their seats. The Minister of Youth quietly, discreetly, coughed.

“Won’t you pick up that cross and follow?” Schoen pleaded.

At the rear of the church a child paged noisily through a hymnal while his mother checked the status of her nails.

“Won’t you follow?”

Why wouldn’t they listen? The head of the building committee was staring out the window into the parking lot. One of the Washed in the Blood Cake Sale members seemed to be counting ceiling tiles. If they didn’t follow his lead, he would never attain Glory. When Schoen entered Heaven, God expected him to bring his lambs along.

Glancing down at his sermon notes, Schoen realized he had lost his place.

He had been silent so long that an elderly deacon was now snoring. Schoen, too, was bone-weary, tired of it all. He could feel, as he could feel the boredom of his congregation, the succor of Heaven just out of reach.

In sudden impotent rage he sent his notes flying. The papers fluttered to the carpet, a flight of wan moths.

“AMEN! “ the demons cried.

Startled, Schoen looked at the left side of the church. The demons were on their feet, caught in a tide of ecstasy.

The Minister of Music, obviously perplexed by his pastor’s cues, hit an E-flat chord on the piano and the choir slid into the first verse of “Just As I Am.”

No,
Schoen thought in horror. But wishing couldn’t stop the inevitable. Prayer had not helped, either. As they did each and every evening service, the demons were lining up to be saved.

Chapter Nine

DOC’S CLINIC DOOR
was unlocked. DeWitt fumbled through the dark offices to a back examining room. There, on a gurney, he found Loretta, her body positioned under a surgical lamp like an actress in a tedious play.

The edges of the wound were dry and the torn skin sat up in frays. The laceration was so deep that he could have put his hand inside. There was not a drop of blood anywhere.

DeWitt tried but failed to imagine what weapon could have caused that destruction. Around the eye socket the soft tissues had been gouged out, laying the bone bare. The other eye was open and focused in surprise at something behind DeWitt’s back. He fought an urge to glance over his shoulder.

A soft belch from a shadowed corner made him flinch. Doc was sitting alone in the dark, sipping Granger’s moonshine from a Mason jar. There was a gold wastepaper basket next to him.

“Scare ya?”

DeWitt walked over and, still shaken, poured the cold contents of a coffee mug into the sink. Picking up a red-and-yellow gas can, he served himself some liquor. The batch, like the gold trash baskets, was one of Granger’s least successful attempts.

“Jesus,” DeWitt gasped. “What’d he use?”

“Canned peaches.”

DeWitt sniffed at the cup.

Doc was sitting on a swivel stool, his legs stretched in front of him. “You find Loretta’s kids?”

“No.”

“I finally remembered when I seen Loretta’s kids last. Funny thing. I kept trying to picture them running around like they always do. They had to be the worst pair of boys I ever knowed.” Doc held the Mason jar to the light. From where DeWitt was standing, he could see the murky impurities in the liquor. “Just flat-out mean kids.”

“So?”

Doc’s eyes were unfocused, myopic. He was drunk—on schedule.

“But when I seen them last, they wasn’t messing around like they usually do. I seen them professionally, DeWitt. They was sick.”

“When?”

“Couple of days ago, near as I can remember.”

“Where were they?”

“At the house. Loretta was with them, fussing over them like she usually done. Always was a poor mother. Ain’t like she hated her kids or nothing. Just loved them too damned much. Never made them mind, and they grew up spoiled. Not like Hattie and her boys. Not like Janet.”

DeWitt was glad the comer of the room was dark. He felt prickly warmth cross his face, and knew he was blushing.

“Get to the point.”

“Them boys was bad sick.” Doc’s eyes glittered in the overflow from Loretta’s spotlight. “Nausea, fever. I thought it was the flu. Now I ain’t so sure.”

“So?”

“They had cramps, a lot of pain. Maybe it was something they ate, I thought, but Loretta’s always careful about her food. Cleanest kitchen I ever seen. But you know that. You know all them Homemaker-of-the-Month awards she won from the ladies.” He took another sip of his drink, grimaced. “If it wasn’t Loretta’s cooking, maybe the Torku supplies ain’t as good an imitation as we think.”

“Yeah?”

Doc put his Mason jar down. “Maybe the Torku poisoned them.”

Air came into DeWitt’s lungs in an aborted hiccup.

“Think about it, DeWitt. Could be that they must made a mistake somewhere and didn’t want the rest of us to get panicky. Big corporations used to hide mistakes just as careful, just as thorough.”

“Sounds like a stupid idea.” DeWitt’s voice held a reedy note of horror. “The Torku have taken care of us so far. There’s no reason to believe they’d hurt us. I mean, I’ll consider it. I even interrogated Seresen because I’ve got to talk to everyone, but—”

“I’ll give you another scenario, then.”

DeWitt fell silent. Anxiety settled in, tickling the hairs at the back of his neck. Next to him, Doc was a lumpy blur in the dark. The room was hushed but for the whispery sounds of their breathing, the quiet slurp as Doc took another drink.

“Let me start by asking you a question,” Doc said.

“Okay.”

“When’s the last time you been sick? I don’t mean the bursitis in your knee. I mean sick, like with the flu or a cold?”

DeWitt felt his forehead knot. He couldn’t remember.

“Not after Bomb Day. I been checking my records. We been hurt in accidents, yes, but nobody’s been sick after Bomb Day. It’s been six years, DeWitt. Most of our antibodies are gone, if we’re living in a clean environment. I think we’re bubble babies.”

“So?”

“So, thinking back on it now, them kids was real febrile. Hundred and two, hundred and three fever. What if it wasn’t salmonella? What if it was cholera, instead?”

The silence became so heavy, so complete, that DeWitt could feel its press on his shoulders. “Cholera?”

“Think of where the house is. Right near the Line. What if there’s a civilization dying on the other side? Cholera’s the disease of disasters, and maybe the Line ain’t as good a filter as the Torku think. Maybe Loretta’s well got tainted. And if the boys was sick with cholera, the Torku would have to protect the rest of us, wouldn’t they?”

When DeWitt didn’t answer, Doc’s voice rose. “Wouldn’t they, DeWitt? The Torku take the kids away, only Loretta fights them. They kill her and then hide her body so it looks like one of us might have done it. Now they get two birds with one stone, Wittie.”

At the use of his childhood name, DeWitt felt his stomach twist. He wanted to be eleven again. He wanted to forget Hattie and his wife and the murder and go hide at the top of his favorite tree. From the tree all the adults had looked tiny; and all his problems small.

“They get to study how we deal with it,” Doc said.