Malevolent (11 page)

Kent and Sara Lamplighter. Matthew and Roseann Porter. Travis and Gina Kendall and their baby. Chris and Abby Scranton and three very bored kids. Mr. Pierce, first name withheld. Dick Biddle. Mrs. Washinski and her grown son, Thad. William and Candy Tatum, the apparent guests of honor. A few others whose names she didn’t pick up, and of course Sandy and Vincent Applegate.

Most of them struck Patty as the sort of people who tend to join and fully partake of church activities—polite and friendly and eager to please, though a bit socially awkward. They all seemed honestly pleased to meet Patty, but most had little to say and most conversations sputtered out after a few exchanges.

Patty was annoyed to recognize but not be able to place a slight, middle-aged man with glasses and a befuddled air. When the information was relayed that Matthew Porter was her mailman, her mind immediately and successfully placed him in blue-gray shorts and iPod headphones stuck in his ears.

Dick Biddle was a shaggy-haired man who broke the conversational pattern with his inability to even pause for breath. He told Patty all about his exciting career in data processing, his recent front brake problems, the ineptitude of the Cleveland Indians and how his home had been tax appraised too high and his frustrating efforts to get a reappraisal.

Patty turned to the Lamplighters when Dick paused for breath and quickly asked them if she hadn’t seen them on her street walking a toy poodle.

Tonka Toy, as it turned out, was being treated for a canine condition ending in
isis
. The Lamplighters were surprised that Patty had never heard of the ailment. They both had the same silver shade of hair, the same plump, soft figures and protruding eyes. Patty at first had taken them for siblings rather than husband and wife and had made the mistake of asking if there was a blood relationship.

“What would make you think that?” asked the bug-eyed couple.

That’s when Vincent had come to her rescue. He steered her by her elbow into a relative clearing in the corner of the little church’s vestibule.

“I’m sure you weren’t expecting all this,” he said. “You wanted to be alone with your thoughts and it’s like New Year’s Eve in here.”

Patty hoped the tall minister didn’t notice her rueful smile at his overly bright description of the listless affair. “Well, it wasn’t my intention to crash your party.”

“You didn’t.”

He watched her, seemed to be waiting for her to say something. It occurred to her that he was, in some ways, as socially awkward as the others. Just hid it better.

She said, “My boyfriend has stopped in here a few times lately. I don’t think you know him, though. Apparently there wasn’t anyone else around at the time.”

An eyebrow shot up. “Try me. Since I own the only key, I hardly think he sneaked in.”

Her stomach twisted. She wanted to tell him to never mind, to change the subject. She knew how this one would turn out. But she also knew it was too late. “Tim Brentwood,” she said.

She watched his eyes as his brain processed the information. “I’ve met a lot of people lately…” he said, sounding as diplomatic as a politician.

She felt tears welling in her eyes and angrily blinked them away.

“Come here,” he said.

He directed her, with the barest elbow contact, to the darkened chapel beyond the vestibule. His voice sounded soft and hollow from the back of the larger, shadow-filled room. “This is yours whenever you need it.” He laughed, a clear, honest sound. “I’m not trying to steer you away from our little shindig. Just telling you that we’ll leave you alone if you’d prefer. If you need the solitude.”

Patty leaned against the back of the last pew. It felt cool and solid against her, its wood grain oiled and buffed for a century. Although the sorry little party could still be heard beyond the wide, open doorway, the room swallowed much of the sound.

“You’re not what I expected,” she told Vincent in an embarrassing burst of candor.

He smiled. “I got my clerical diploma in a cereal box, basically. I’ll be the first to admit that. My degree’s in social work and that’s my day job.” He stopped, seemed to consider how to proceed. “Over time I began to see that even the most well-funded, best-intentioned social programs don’t hold all of the answers.”

He brought the high-ceilinged room into the discussion with a wave. “I didn’t think you could actually buy a church, but I suppose if it’s in bad enough condition, it’s gone into foreclosure and you’ve got enough money…” Again he stopped, considered, shrugged. “My wife’s a corporate lawyer and a damn fine one, so we have the money. We’re not affiliated with any organized religion, but we’re not the next Branch Davidian sect either. There’s no spiked Kool-Aid. No weird sexual practices—at least not that I’m aware of.”

Patty laughed. “Well, what
do
you do?”

“When we’re not slugging down white wine by the jug, we actually pray some, sing some and talk out our problems. These days, it’s the economy, as well as the old standbys–money, sex, work/life balance, child-raising.”

It felt to Patty as though the young, unaffiliated pastor had seen through each of her suspicions and confronted them head-on. Now he seemed like nothing more than the neighborly, well-scrubbed family man that would have been her first impression if she hadn’t first known he headed the little church.

“Well, it’s been very nice to meet you,” she said. Or at least got most of it out before noticing his attention was elsewhere.

His face had changed. His lips were pressed tightly together, his eyes focused beyond her. She followed his gaze back to the vestibule, where Vincent’s wife, Sandy, was talking with—or, rather, listening to—the ever-talkative Dick Biddle.

Patty felt instant empathy for the minister’s trapped wife. She could almost see Sandy’s eyes glazing over while the hunched young man with the wispy moustache sucked her into his boring little world.

Vincent’s eyes seemed to dart from Sandy to Dick, Dick to Sandy. Without his disarming smile, which was definitely missing now, his features took on a harsher, more looming look, his eyes going hard, his mouth firm.

Patty scraped her feet noisily over the wood floor. Vincent twitched at the sound, peering at her as if she’d startled him awake. “Sorry,” he said, and his smile was instantly back in place, his eyes warm and liquid again. “I must have…
what
were you asking?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m just wondering…is this it? Your whole congregation?” Thinking,
You’re sure you haven’t run into a young man named Tim Brentwood?

“Just about,” he said. His face changed again, only this time it was a further softening of his features rather than the cold, hard metamorphosis of moments ago. “You might have read about one of our people,” he said gingerly. “The media never mentioned her by name, thank the Lord, but she’s one of ours. She claimed to have been raped not far from here.”

Claimed?

Patty said, “So they haven’t found the guy?”

Vincent’s eyes flicked past her again. Patty could no longer hear Dick Biddle’s steady drone. The general background chatter had definitely thinned out, the crowd evidently running low on small talk. She suspected they’d soon be making their excuses for breaking away.

When Vincent turned back to her he said, “I haven’t followed the latest developments. I’ve talked to the police once, but I’m sorry to say that I haven’t had much contact with the poor woman. I call, but she rarely picks up her phone. And she has no voice mail.” He paused. “Now that I think of it, I haven’t laid eyes on her since the incident.”

Chapter Sixteen

The blonde showed up well after midnight.

He’d had a few customers early, mostly neighborhood people. Then, later, the middle-aged men with out-of-town wives and DVDs programmed for smut. The typical married guy’s idea of a wild time.

Griffin knew things would pick up once the bars closed, but this was the lull. He made good use of it by straightening display boxes and checking in the few returns he’d gotten in the last hour. It was while crouching and sorting at a display case that he caught a quick peek at the blonde behind the black curtain.

Griffin wrinkled his brow. He’d definitely seen an eye-catching fluff of platinum hair in motion beyond the narrow vertical crack where the single felt curtain failed to meet the doorway. Knees crackling painfully, he stood and hobbled to the end of the aisle for a closer look. Fifteen feet from the adult room, he could say for sure—definitely someone back there.

He moved to the front door and ran a hand by the electric eye. It buzzed, proving that it worked. He frowned again. Even if he’d been so immersed in his work that he’d neglected to notice a new arrival, wouldn’t he have heard the door banging open, footsteps? Seen the girl? It wasn’t like he was so used to foot traffic at that hour that it wouldn’t have made an impression.

The blonde chuckled. It was a deep, throaty sound that made his groin stir.

Hot women, they
never
went in there alone. Only in his fantasies.

Griffin returned to his display case, slapping one cover against another for no reason except to look and sound busy. Occasionally he’d glance over his shoulder at the window overlooking the dark parking lot, hoping for a car, a bike, a pedestrian,
someone
.

At twelve twenty-four, his cell phone rang.

“How are we doing?” Polly demanded.

“Not bad, Ma. It’s a little slow right now, though. Lotsa folks looking for the new stuff we don’t have. Let’s place another order.”

“And the money’s coming from where?”

“Ma.”

Polly Solloway didn’t like to rove far from home, which fit Griffin just fine. The insurance money from his father’s death belonged to her, but AfterHours had been his idea. It hadn’t been an easy sell. Polly did the advertising, she paid the bills and handled most of the ordering. Fine with him. By doing all of that from her Parma home and never driving the ten minutes it would take her to come to Old Brooklyn, it kept her from knowing—or at least acknowledging—the kind of business that went on behind that black curtain.

“Griffin? Griffin, are you still there?”

Just barely. He was staring at that curtain that wouldn’t leave his mind. He’d heard another sharp sound from back there. Like a single staccato sting of heel on the uncarpeted patch of floor. Now he caught a quick peek at black hosiery as a slender leg flashed into and out of view where the two curtains refused to meet.

“Yeah, Ma,” he said dully. “I got a customer. Let me call you back.”

What were the odds that he would have missed the entrance of a sleek blonde with black hose, stiletto heels and legs up to her neck? Man, he
must
be losing it.

He’d had three customers in the store at about ten thirty, a regular logjam for AfterHours. One guy had complained about his late-return fine and the other couple had tried to pay with a maxed-out credit card. Thinking back, that was the only time since he’d reported in that day that he could have been distracted by someone looking anything like the little he’d seen of the girl behind the curtain.

But that had been nearly two hours ago. Could she have been back there that whole time? If so, he could expect trouble. What if she was a radical feminist in the process of scratching all of his disks?

Then that dry chuckle came back to mind, and it didn’t sound like anyone displeased with what she was finding.

Maybe she was crazy.

Oh shit. He had to do something. Either
throw
her out or
ask
her out. He cleared his throat loudly in the hope that it would help make him sound manly and authoritative. Let the platinum radical maniac know how seriously he took his Fifth Amendment right to make pornography safe and readily available for all.
 
He heard nothing back there now. Motion of any kind tended to send the curtain fluttering, but it hung still as death.

She was waiting for him.

Now where had
that
crazy thought come from? He peered out at the parking lot. The overhead neon lighting threw a reflection of blinking pink onto the pavement. There were no cars out there, no foot traffic, no nothing.

“Excuse me,” he called out in the strongest voice he could muster.

No reply. He sniffed the air, taking in a subtle scent that was her perfume or his imagination. He took several slow steps forward and planted himself in front of the black curtain.

He cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said again.

Silence.

How would it look if he entered the room with her? Just the two of them and all of those lurid young bodies, pouting lips, oiled muscles, smirking smiles and shocking-pink pockets of flesh. Jesus, he’d already been accused once this week of rape.

He backed up.

The easiest thing would have been to keep backing away and forget about her. Better than standing out here like a creep trying to catch a glimpse.

Instead, Griffin stepped forward. He took a deep breath, grabbed one curtain and, like an adrenaline-buzzed soldier who charges the enemy foxhole, he threw open the flap and entered the adult room.

Adult
room. Where such “mature” subject matter as
Butt Cop’s Most Penetrating Case
,
Here Come the Bitches
and
Goy Toy
could be found.