The Do-Re-Mi Read online

  He reached into a pocket for his pipe and tobacco, stuffed the pipe, and lit it with matches from Louella’s Lounge. “Son,” he said, “You’re a man now. You’re smart. But let’s don’t presume you’re wiser than I am.”

  I hung my head.

  “How about this,” he said. “Should we pick up the casings or leave them and bring the sheriff out here? Either way, he’s going to accuse us of planting them.”

  I said, “We could dream up a lie to get the sheriffs out here on their own. We could call in an anonymous report about the marijuana stalks.”

  “And they’d get around to investigating first thing after Halloween.”

  WE decided to leave the casings where they had fallen and report them to Knudsen, who Pop supposed was the lawman with the fewest loyalties in Evergreen.

  We walked to the Cadillac and drove to the Van Dyke home. Othello, the oldest cupid, was throwing his pocket knife, trying to stick a log. Pop reached across me to the glove box, opened it and pulled out his Instamatic. Then he leaned out the window and asked for Roy.

  “My dad went shopping,” Othello said.

  Pop climbed out of the car. He squatted beside the boy and handed him the camera. “You know how to work one of these?”

  “Sure. We got one.”

  “Anybody comes by, going that way . . .” He pointed east. “Snap a couple pictures. Don’t let him see you doing it, though.”

  The boy aimed the camera at his brother.

  Pop gave the boy a dollar and said, “Save the camera for what I asked, all right?”

  Back in the car, Pop said, “Tell you what. I’m going to find Deputy Barker, have a talk. You go to church, ask your mama to pray we make the right move.”

  “Church?”

  “Your mama needs an escort besides Ava.”

  “No, if you don’t want me there with you and Barker, I’ll get busy questioning everybody I see, at Quig’s and the jamboree, till I know who was out in the woods with Jimmy.”

  “Do that after church, if I’m not back to Quig’s yet. Your mama wants to go to church, and I’m not letting her out of that compound without one of us along.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a rule of mine. Clifford, anytime I’m making dangerous enemies, I settle my family out of the way. How many times growing up did you and your brother and your mama stay over at Claire and Harry’s when you didn’t know why?”

  “Five or six, I guess.”

  “Now you know why.”

  “Nobody’s after Mama,” I said. “If you’re worried about the Cossacks, what good would kidnapping Mama do them?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Pop, she hasn’t gotten kidnapped in twenty-two years.”

  “Strange. That’s exactly how long I’ve been going by this rule.” He used a look he rarely gave because it could sear flesh and made plants wither. “It’ll please your mother.”

  Just because Pop was my hero, I thought, didn’t give him the right to make believe I was the brains and then, at his convenience, treat me like a dim-witted kid. So I sulked until we reached the highway and he said, “Look alive, Clifford. For your brother’s sake. Tell me this. Since the casings fall where the rifle’s shot, why did we find them so close to the place where the murderer started dragging the body? According to the newspaper, Jimmy’s murderer shot from at least fifty yards away.”

  Seventeen

  WHEN Pop let me off at Quig’s main gate, I plodded into the compound thinking church was the last place on earth I wanted or needed to be, especially now that we had some evidence about the murder.

  I found Mama and Ava sitting on the steps to her cabin, dressed for church. I sat beside Mama and told them about our walk through the woods. When I explained what we believed the tracks showed, Ava covered her eyes. “Moccasins. Not bare feet. Jimmy had toes." She groped for Mama's hand and squeezed it. "Except for sports," she said, "Jimmy wore moccasins everywhere.”

  I SEE the booths in Babe’s Cafe all occupied when Pop enters at 8:50 Sunday morning. From the way they stare at him, the patrons look like a potential lynch mob of loggers, retired loggers, and the children and wives of loggers.

  Placing his hat on a stool at the end of the counter, Pop sits on the stool next to it. Then he orders coffee and eavesdrops. From the nearest booths he hears talk about the bullet meant for Phil Ochs. Two groups lament that the Mexican had missed and threaten to run the commie Big Dan Mills out of town for inviting such a traitor as Ochs to Evergreen.

  Pop hasn’t seen Brady Barker or asked me for a description but the deputy isn’t hard to recognize. He’s the man who walks in wearing a badge and gazing around with burning eyes. Neither does Barker have difficulty recognizing Pop, who stands and offers a handshake. But either the deputy doesn’t want to touch a Hickey or he suspects that even at sixty-six, Pop can grip hard enough to break fingers.

  When Pop moves his hat of the end seat beside him to the counter, Barker comes over, sits on the end seat and yips at the waitress, “Coffee, Midge.” He leans on the counter as though he has worked graveyard and the swing shift before it. “I’ve got a minute is all.”

  Pop drains his coffee. “Let’s get to business then. My boy still can’t use his right hand.”

  Barker only sighs.

  “I can’t imagine my boy is the first suspect you’ve brutalized,” Pop says.

  The deputy rises off the counter, stiffens his posture, and rotates the stool so he faces Pop squarely. Keeping his eyes on Pop, he drinks a swallow of black coffee, slaps a dollar on the counter, and stands. “See you around.”

  “Whoa. Another thing.”

  “Make it quick. I’ve got to round up a Mexican.”

  “No need. Clifford and I did a little snooping and came up with a pair of 30.06 casings as well as a trail of footprints that beat the devil out of the ones your team found.”

  “Where?” Barker demands. And the shift in his eyes and the hitch in his voice tell Pop that if the deputy isn’t in on the murder, he knows somebody who is.

  “My boy and I will keep that information to ourselves for now, at least until we talk to FBI Agent Knudsen. We’ve got an appointment.” He checks his Bulova. “In an hour.”

  “Knudsen’s flying.”

  “Right. I got patched through to his radio. We’re meeting at the airport. Here, I’ll tell you this much. What I’m going to give the Feds makes a strong case that you’re gunning for Alvaro for reasons of your own.”

  Barker’s crossed arms fall free. One hand makes a fist. His lower jaw pushes out, but he doesn’t speak.

  Pop stands, grabs his hat and pipe from the counter, and tosses down two dollar bills. “If I’m you, I’m rushing to tell the hunters nobody had better shoot Alvaro. If they do, you’re conspiring to murder. And Clifford and I, we’ll invest our hearts and souls to see the charge gets made and to make it stick.”

  AS we neared the church, I wondered how God in whom I occasionally believed viewed the fact that I had gone surfing on Sunday mornings and had ditched chapel three of my five years of college, disillusioned by preachers charged with embezzlement or worse or whose every third phrase expressed or implied a plea for money. I couldn’t abide another admonition about serving God with tithes and offerings from a snappy dresser with razor-styled hair. And in the midst of the Vietnam war, the blind patriotism of too many Christians had made me think of most churchgoers as Pharisees.

  Ava had recovered. She was holding Mama’s hand. I asked, “What’s your pastor like?”

  “He got saved out of the drug scene in Haight Ashbury, only about six years ago. He planted our church on his own, in the back room of Burgers and Brew. He raised enough to buy this lot at the river bend, and he built the church himself, with some volunteer help. He lives all alone in the attic.”

  The shoulder of River Road served as the church parking lot. I pulled in at the end of a lineup of vehicles. My ball-peened Chevy looked in its element with flowered buses and
old pickups with body and fenders all different colors. People here might call my many-dented wagon a work of art.

  We followed a trail through a meadow and a maze of berry vines behind a girl probably younger than I was who looked about a minute from delivering her fifth child. The other four climbed on or clung to her or the hairy bear of a man at her side.

  Music lilted out of the church, a redwood structure with a peaked roof I suspected didn’t leave much standing room in the pastor’s upstairs living quarters. Stained glass in simple patterns of crosses, Holy Spirit doves, and fish embellished the front and side walls in random locations.

  Pastor Bob stood at the door. From twenty yards, I saw him peering at me. He was wiry, about thirty, had dark brown wavy hair and a clipped mustache and goatee. He wore huaraches of the Tijuana tire-tread-sole variety, cotton slacks, and a collarless muslin shirt. Even while he kissed and shook hands with the family of six and a half and ushered them through the double doorway, he kept one eye on me. He gave Ava a chaste hug, mostly shoulder. She introduced Mama and me. His hasty nod told me he already knew about us.

  He only said hello and welcome but in the press of his hand I read compassion, a peculiar reaction from a resident of Evergreen toward a Hickey. During the past three days I had learned that people hold the brother, father, and mother of a killer to blame. Pastor Bob, I thought, either doubted the charges or considered us victims like Jimmy’s mother and Ava. Or he was a master con.

  The church appeared to seat about a hundred. Half the spaces were occupied. Ava chose a row near the back. She slid in. Mama followed her. I sat on the aisle. Above the padded altar at which a few people knelt, four musicians performed. A gray-bearded man played guitar. Three young women, on dulcimer, autoharp, and tambourine, all wore gypsy dresses of gay colors, while their music was melancholy.

  I noticed the benches were joined with pegs rather than screws. Even those upon which kids squirmed didn’t creak. On the walls, the base boards and window moldings were perfectly mitered, and the wooden flooring was laid in star-shaped designs. The windows that from outside had appeared randomly set, from this angle created an abstract design I interpreted as believers ascending a road to heaven. I gazed around, looking for curly blond hair, but saw none. I asked Ava, “Did Roy Van Dyke help build this place?”

  She nodded. “How did you know?”

  “We were at his house yesterday. You don’t find many real craftsmen like him.”

  “Roy’s an angel,” she said. “So was Sara.”

  I watched Mama patting her knee in time with the music and silently mouthing the words.

  “What can wash away my sins,

  Nothing but the blood of Jesus . . .”

  My first clue that Pastor Bob wasn’t just going to preach out of McClaren’s Sermon outlines was the songs. They also sang:

  “There is a fountain filled with blood.

  And:

  “There is power, power, wonder working power

  In the blood of the Lamb.

  Then:

  “Grace that can pardon all my sins . . .”

  Four songs, each about sin and redemption, before the pastor left his post at the door. Because the musicians faded one number into the next, I knew the topic and sequence were scripted.

  Which could mean the pastor believed that all, some, or at least one of his flock needed lifting out of a place deep, dark, and foul. Like the guilt of doing murder, I imagined. Either Jimmy’s killer was in this church or Bob had expected him to attend, I would have bet my Gibson Hummingbird.

  A few minutes after the musicians completed their set and carried on with an instrumental medley of the songs they had already played, Pastor Bob left his post at the door and walked at bride-speed up the aisle. He stepped to the pulpit, excused the musicians, and sent off the children, who ran toward the doorway where two grinning women stood with picnic baskets.

  The pastor stared at the doorway at least a minute before he opened his Bible to Kings 11 and read about King David catching an eyeful of Bathsheba and arranging for her husband’s death. Which led him to a story from the Haight.

  In a crash pad where he had stayed, a hippie fellow who lusted after a certain girl implied to a drug dealer that the girl’s lover was a snitch. Soon the lover disappeared. The lonely girl turned to heroin and she gave the hippie what he wanted until she knocked herself cold with an overdose. Now the hippie, haunted by guilt, landed on the streets. Hunger and pneumonia drove him to repent.

  The pastor directed us to Luke 15, about the prodigal son who asks his father for his inheritance, squanders it on riotous living and after hitting bottom returns and asks for a place among his father’s servants. After he read, he closed his Bible and stared another minute at the doorway before he asked, “Did the father ask if he’d been out gambling?”

  “No.”

  “Had he robbed anybody?”

  Ava said, “Now comes Isabel’s part.”

  Isabel was balding, stoop shouldered, and corrugated with wrinkles. All along, even through the music, she hadn’t let a minute pass without hollering amen or a synonym. “Maybe he did!” she yelped.

  “Well then, had he raped anybody?”

  Isabel flung her hands in the air. “He just mighta done that too!”

  The pastor shook his head. “But at least he didn’t kill anybody.”

  Isabel sounded outraged. “Who says he didn’t?”

  “You caught me there, Sister. Could be, out there in the hard world, he could’ve got so lowdown he did murder. We don’t know. It’s not recorded, is it? Strange. I mean, Jesus was telling this story. Maybe storytelling wasn’t his gig. Maybe he was in a hurry to get to the moral. How about that, Isabel?”

  "Go on, you."

  He laughed then gazed over our heads toward the open doorway as though waiting for the entrance of an actor dressed as the prodigal son. “The father looks at his son and he sees through his eyes to his heart, and that’s all he needs. The son's heart is broken. The father opens his arms. The end.

  “Could be the son was a robber, a rapist, a murderer. But he is none of those things anymore. Now he’s wearing party clothes, drinking new wine, carving the roast beef. He is born again.”

  “Yes he is!”

  Then the pastor let slip what cops and detectives like Pop called "a tell." He stared hard and long straight at me before he concluded the story he had left behind, about the hippie whose actions had turned a sweet girl into a corpse. “Now that sinner, who was as sorry an excuse for a man as you’ll ever meet, has got a darling wife, a healthy son, and a radio ministry.

  “Brothers and sisters, even Judas Iscariot could have asked God to forgive and God would’ve forgiven. Does anybody think Judas lost his portion of the Kingdom by turning the Lord over to his enemies? Because if you do, you’ve got it all wrong. He only lost his salvation when he failed to believe that the father loved him enough to redeem him.”

  Pastor Bob reinforced his point with a few more verses and a closing prayer. He didn’t take a collection, didn’t even mention the basket on the table by the door. The musicians returned.

  On the way out, I dropped my last five dollars into the basket, the least I could give to repay Pastor Bob for what he had given me — a conviction that he believed one of his flock was a murderer.

  I only had to cajole or squeeze him into telling me which one.

  Outside, Ava introduced us to a dozen hippies, a rancher couple, and a spastic man who walked with a cane. I tried to etch their faces in my mind and caption the faces with names. After all but a few had left, while Ava introduced Mama and Isabel, I caught Pastor Bob alone.

  “Good message,” I said. “So is sin and redemption your favorite topic? I mean, you’re so passionate about all that.”

  His eyes narrowed and his lips crimped sideways. “I think of the prodigal son’s story as a capsule version of the whole Bible.”

  What would Pop do, I asked myself. I doubted he would drag the guy out
back of the church and thrash him, or offer a bribe, or go to Simon and pry out of him whatever made him distrust Bob then come back threatening to expose the dark deed. Pop had a catalog of methods to draw peoples secrets out of them, I suspected. All I could think to do was fix my gaze on his eyes and lower my voice a half octave. “Something tells me you were talking to one of us in particular.”

  He stood rigid and still, waiting for me to go on. When I didn’t, he said, “Excuse me, I’m going to the jamboree.”

  While we drove back to Quig’s, I told Ava that one of the flock had killed Jimmy. And I told her who I thought it could be.

  Her face darkened, as if her opinion of me had plunged. She said, “You missed the whole point of Bob’s message, that we all are the prodigal son.” But Mama, a veteran churchgoer and expert on sermons and pastors, touched my arm and nodded.

  Eighteen

  EVERGREEN’S airport is a mile south of the Crossroads, directly across the 101 from a migrant camp that lies beyond a craggy burnt hill. The airstrip runs parallel to and in view of the highway. The building that serves as office and control tower looks like a three-story fruit stand. The only resident airplanes, three of them huddled close, are ancient crop dusters.

  Pop pulls up beside Knudsen’s government Fairlane. I see him smoking his pipe, glaring at the sky. He leans out of the car and knocks the bowl clean. He starts the motor and turns the car around to face the highway, for a faster getaway.

  The Cessna sputters in from the east, circles once for position, drops out of the sky, and bumps and skids a landing. Agent Knudsen jumps down, goes to his car for a steno pad, and climbs into the Eldorado. Before Knudsen gets buckled in, the car has sped out of the lot and up the highway.

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I’m expecting a visitor.”

  “Mister Hickey, it occurs to me that you might be in contact with Alvaro and for some strategic reason are trying to get me out of the air. If that’s the case, if you’re running any kind of game here, it’ll come back to haunt you.”