Peeper (9 page)

She flipped the switch on the intercom. “Anita, call security.”

“You want me to tell them to blow the little fucker away?”

“Just call them.”

“Soon as she's through Ziebarting her nails,” Ralph said. “Anyway, the boys in security already know you're ugly. I bet poor old Gus kicked the bucket before he figured out which end to fuck.”

“I'll have your severance check sent to your apartment.”

“Keep it.”

She blinked. “Keep what?”

“The bucks. The currency. The lucre. The swag. The dough-re-mi. The stuff that dreams are made of.”

“Do you mean the money?”

“Sure, I mean the money. Give it to a plastic surgeon. I know one in Ferndale'll cut you a deal on a new honker. He uses those little pieces of Styrofoam that come with Osterizers. Cuts down on the overhead.”

“Cancel security.” She turned off the intercom in the middle of Anita's disappointed groan. Then she put on her glasses. “When did you start losing interest in cash?”

“When I got a better job. This new one uses my talents.”

“Is the circus in town?”

His grin felt lopsided. He was drunker than he'd thought. “You remember the time that truck pulled into your driveway and unloaded forty gross of Popeil potato smashers and six dozen
Slim Whitman Yodels Songs of Faith
albums?”

“It took me a week to get them off my front lawn. How'd
you
know about it?” Realization dawned. “You bastard.”

“I thought it was April Fool's Day.”

“It was Martin Luther King's birthday. I was seeing an oboist with the Detroit Symphony at the time. He dumped me. It wasn't because of the potato smashers.”

“How about the time you stuck your hand into your mailbox and come up with a fistful of live bait?”

“Nothing like that ever happened to me.”

“C'mon, it was just last month.”

“I don't even
have
a mailbox. I use the post office on the corner.”

“Shit. I must of got the address wrong.”

“Level with me, Ralph: why did Gus hire you? You're a sleaze and a goof-off and everyone you have any contact with comes to misery. I never met a stick before with
two
shitty ends.”

“Gus and me had a lot in common.”

“What, two ears and the same shoe size?”

“You wouldn't see it, just being married to him. You never sat in a car with him all night long in front of some blonde's house, drinking coffee out of a Thermos while somebody's husband was inside slam-dunking her between silk sheets. Why'd he pick you, anyway?”

“I showed him which fork to use at a formal dinner party and how to tie a white tie. I took him out of polyester and made a gentleman out of him.”

“I got to say he looked damn good laid out in them tweeds.”

“He died of trichinosis from the Tuesday special at the House of Pork,” she said. “A restaurant you recommended.”

“Yeah, I was sorry when they closed the place down. They gave me free meals in the kitchen for sending them business. Not on Tuesdays, though.”

She straightened. “Good luck with your new job, Poteet. I mean that. I wouldn't want to see you taking up perfectly good bedspace down at the Perpetual Mission.”

“'Bye, Lucy. Let me know when you want that plastic guy's name. If you say I sent you he'll throw in electrolysis.”

Anita was reading
Cosmopolitan
when he came out. He leaned over the desk, grabbed a double handful of her frothy platinum hair, and kissed her square on the mouth. She was still spitting when the glass door gasped shut behind him.

Chapter 11

St. Balthazar Cathedral occupied a city block on Detroit's upper east side, a Gothic dinosaur built with automobile money in 1924. Now it reared four buttressed and gargoyled towers against a backdrop of empty stores, gutted warehouses, and unfinished, never-inhabited, already-decaying HUD houses. The building's surface provided a convenient forum for every local creed whose believers possessed at least a fourth-grade education: peace signs, swastikas, Stars of David, Arabic crescents, laughing Buddhas, devil-worship symbols, and old Yoo-Hoo advertisements decorated its brownstone walls outside. Inside, a huge stained-glass window above the doors depicting the Annunciation sported a fresh BB hole through one pane, neatly blacking out the angel's left upper incisor.

The vaulted echoing interior contained four sections of pews with olive-colored runners in the aisles between, a ballustraded balcony circling the base of the cupola, and a twelve-foot crucifix with a bronze Christ writhing in lost-wax agony behind the altar. At His feet, a boy of eleven or twelve dressed in a white robe was busy lighting candles with a Zippo.

Ralph took the handiest aisle to the altar. He could have made a lot more noise pulling a mechanical duck across Joe Louis Arena.

“Hey, kid.” The two words banged around inside the cupola for a while.

The boy went on lighting candles. “You're supposed to uncover your head in God's house.”

Ralph took off his hat. “What's your name, kid?”

“Francis Xavier Dillinger.”

“Bullshit.”

“That's what everyone says.”

“Where's your boss, Frankie?”

“Up there on the cross.”

“Yeah, yeah. I mean the guy that runs this place.”

“Monsignor Breame died. St. Peter came while he slept.”

“So did Monsignor Breame. Where's the bishop hang out?”

“The rectory, I guess.”

“Where's that, in back?”

“That's where they usually keep it.” He was lighting the last bank of candles now. Ralph could feel the heat.

“Ain't you supposed to use one of them long matches for that?”

“They keep blowing out. There's a mean draft in here.”

“Show me where the rectory is.”

The boy snapped shut the Zippo with an expert flip he hadn't acquired in catechism, genuflected before the big crucifix, and led the way through a door in back onto a flagstone courtyard choked with pigeons.

Ralph was the only man in the Detroit metropolitan area who stepped on pigeons regularly. One of them squawked and fluttered a short distance away, making a neat deposit inside Ralph's hat on takeoff. Cursing, Ralph shook it out and put on the hat.

“You smoke, kid?”

“No sir.”

“Drink?”

“No sir.”

“Cuss?”

“No, sir!”

“Kid, you need an old man.”

The boy pointed out a smaller version of the cathedral surrounded by rosebushes. Ralph left him and pushed the button by the front door. Chimes rang inside. The Bells of St. Balthazar.

When no one answered the second ring, he tried the door. It was locked. He looked back over his shoulder, saw that the altar boy had gone back inside the cathedral, and tried the celluloid window from his wallet. The lock was a deadbolt. Giving up on it, he went around to the back, but his route was cut off by a flower garden surrounded by a six-foot stone wall with a locked iron gate. So much for perpetual church access.

Maybe Bishop Steelcase was snoozing on the couch. The old guy was getting up there, might not remember last night's offer if they didn't discuss it soon. Ralph tried the stained-glass casement window on the side of the little building, then its mate on the other side, which represented either the Three Wise Men on their journey to Bethlehem or the Ritz Brothers. That one was open.

Ralph had never broken into a church. He started counting Commandments on his fingers, but couldn't remember if it was covered. At length he decided rectories didn't count. He hoisted one leg over the casement, then the other.

As he lowered himself into the dim interior, something gave way under his foot. The crash was a lot louder than a mechanical duck. He froze sitting on the casement.

When after a full minute no one had come running from any direction, he supposed the stone walls had swallowed the noise. He lowered himself the rest of the way. Something crunched. He was standing on one of a dozen or more 78-rpm phonograph records.

He wondered about a bishop's taste in music. Kneeling, he read the labels: the theme from
Peer Gynt, The Eroica
symphony,
Perdido, The Magic Flute
. Ralph was standing on Tchaikovsky. There wasn't a Slim Whitman in the collection. He rose with a grunt.

The building was a combination living quarters and office suite, with a narrow entryway meant for hanging hats and coats (the hall tree bore neither), a sitting room with a view of the garden, a small bedroom equipped with a nightstand, reading lamp, and a pointedly diocesan single bed, and two offices, the smaller of which was vacant and was probably the one Ralph would have used had he taken the bishop up on his first job offer. Bishop Steelcase was in none of them.

The larger of the two offices was paneled in dark oak after the masculine priestly fashion and had a big walnut desk with an amber leather top to match the chair behind it. The other chairs in the office were upholstered in tough green Naugahyde and stood on a red Oriental carpet with gold trim, well worn. There were the requisite wooden cross on the wall behind the desk—smaller and much less ancient than the one in the bishop's study—and a case with glass doors, stocked with hardbound and paperback books ranging in subject from the lives of the saints to
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
. Ralph reminded himself that the rectory had been used by Monsignor Breame, not the bishop, and that its contents reflected the tastes of the former. (He wondered if the narrow bed had driven the ample prelate to the four-poster in Lyla Dane's apartment.) For all that, this room had an aroma of new tobacco smoke similar to the more established odor that pervaded Steelcase's environment. Well,
someone
would have had to assume leadership of the parish in the pastor's absence.

Ralph inserted his buttocks in the amber leather chair and went through the desk idly. He found the usual drawer stuff along with a dogeared paperback full of Flannery O'Connor's stories about demented Catholics and a Detroit Tigers scorecard. He wondered what it was about priests and baseball. In the top drawer he came upon a pigskin notepad cover with corners that looked like gold, which he pocketed, pad and all.

That was it. No Frederick's of Hollywood Christmas catalogue, no
Playboy, Penthouse, Gallery, Oui, Screw, Anal Lust, Blue Boy
, or
Balling Bovines
, no X-rated playing cards with fifty-two original and educational positions plus the Joker abusing his orb and scepter in glorious color; not even a medical text with colorplates of the female reproductive system and pop-up clitoris. Either the monsignor had been more cautious than the standard run of closet satyr with desks to hide things in, or someone—Carpenter?—had been through it and confiscated everything incriminating.

Ralph gave the bishop half an hour. Then he gave him forty-five minutes. He read several of the O'Connor stories and understood nothing about them beyond the fact that some authors were a lot bloodier than others. At the end of an hour and a half he used the telephone on the desk to call Steelcase's home. It rang four times.

“This is Philip Steelcase.”

“
I'm
here, Your Bishopness,” Ralph said. “Where the fuck are you?”

“… can't come to the phone right now, but if you'll wait for the beep and leave your name and number, I'll return your call.”

Shit. Ralph waited, then repeated what he'd said, adding, “This is gonna cost you.”

He hung up, realized he'd forgotten to leave his name, and called again. Halfway through the recording someone broke the connection.

Back in the cathedral, Francis Xavier Dillinger had removed his robe to run a Bissell sweeper over the olive-colored runners between the pews. The boy had on jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt with Madonna's face on the front and her ass on the back.

“Seen the bishop today, kid?”

“No sir.”

“Come in every day, does he?”

“I'm not here every day.”

“When you're here, then.”

“Usually.”

“What time?”

“I don't have a watch.”

Jesus, thought Ralph, then glanced self-consciously in the direction of the enormous crucifix behind the altar. “About when?”

“He's always here when I come in at noon and he's still here when I leave after a couple hours.” The sweeper went up and down, rattling in the cupola.

“Take a message?”

“I don't have a pencil.”

Ralph held out a card. “Tell him I was here. He can reach me at home. He knows the number.”

The boy stopped sweeping to put the card in the watch pocket of his jeans. Then he resumed.

“You're with the wrong order, kid,” Ralph said. “It's the Benedictines that take the vow of silence.”

“Yes sir.” He ran the sweeper over Ralph's foot.

On his way home, Ralph sought out puddles with pedestrians standing or walking nearby and ran the Riviera through them. Whenever he splattered one, he celebrated with a swig from his pocket flask; two when he got two with one splash. At a bus stop he scored four senior citizens, a mailman, and a dog relieving itself against an advertising bench and drained the flask. Little victories. If he'd quit his job for nothing, he'd tell Neal English to send the film to both newspapers and all the TV stations and Steelcase could say goodbye to the Vatican over his morning roll and coffee. He stopped at a liquor store to purchase a refill from a counterman who looked like Muammar Khadafy, but after that puddles were hard to find and he had to settle for a bum on Sherman who needed the bath anyway. The bum was wearing a Tyrolean hat just like Ralph's.

Nearing his building, Ralph spotted a tan Chrysler parked in the loading zone and slowed down for a better look. It wasn't unusual for the adult bookstore's customers to wait there for picketers with cameras or passersby who might turn out to be their neighbors to disperse before they went in; but the sidewalks on both sides were deserted, and anyway the Closed sign was still prominent in dead Vinnie's window. Two men were sitting in the front seat. Just as Ralph cruised past, the man at the wheel turned his head and Ralph saw O'Leary's big scorched face and squinched nose framed in the window on the driver's side.