The Bass Wore Scales (The Liturgical Mysteries) Page 11

  “There’s a difference,” said Billy. “This here’s the Lord’s money. Not the bank’s.”

  “What are we going to do next week?” asked Bev. “I mean, if Junior wins the race in Bristol.”

  “Hardly much chance of that,” said Meg. “He’s never won a race yet. Last week was the best he’s ever done.”

  “But now he has St. Barnabas on his side and Holy Water in the radiator,” said Bev. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  She was right. Junior Jameson won his first race that very afternoon.

  * * *

  “How are we doing?” I asked, using the royal “we.” The Bad Writing Circle had decided to meet at the Bear and Brew, and all three ladies were looking glumly at their efforts when I arrived.

  “I think we’re all too good for this contest,” said Elaine. “I can’t seem to make the sentence bad enough.”

  “Maybe I can help,” I said. “I’m not as good as you three.”

  Elaine sniffed. “Okay. Here’s mine.”

  “Enid? Enid Pendulous?” Bernard called out into the

  waiting room, not for the first time regretting his occupation as a “glamour” photographer in the small town of Upchuck, Georgia; and, as he held the door open for his next appointment and watched, horrified, as his old Sunday School teacher walked in, dropped her robe, tousled her hair and settled, naked, onto the heart-shaped bed, he didn’t wonder very long about what genetic make-up in her ancestry had been the origin of her strangely erotic surname.

  “Hah!” I chuckled. “Okay. That one is pretty bad.”

  “Isn’t that the point?” asked Elaine.

  “I have one,” said Meg.

  Little Bunny Tinkletoes belied his name, being a stone-cold contract killer with a heart like a piece of granite and a face like an even cragglier piece of granite; the first piece being more of a regular piece--but as soon as he walked into the powder-puff pink boudoir and saw Cassandra Starlight laying wanly on her satin sheets, he knew that this assignment would be his last the way he knew that his mother gave him a better name than Little Bunny--Clarence, in fact--but not that much better.

  “That one’s great!” said Ruby. “It’s bad in so many ways.”

  “Thanks, Mother. I wrote it on Hayden’s magic typewriter.”

  “How come you get to use the magic typewriter?” asked Elaine.

  “I just asked extra nicely,” said Meg.

  “Can I use it, too?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m very busy working on my detective story. And it’s too late for you’se guys anyway. I have my final entry. It’s perfect.”

  “Let’s hear it,” said Ruby. “I can’t wait to hear what the master has come up with.”

  “Well, as you know,” I said. “I already have my really good sentence about Lauren Bacall eating chalk…”

  “Ah, yes,” said Ruby. “I remember reading it. Meg brought me a copy of your latest choir missive.”

  “And my one about Lola, the meat-metronome,” I continued, but this one may even be better.”

  Although Brandi had been named Valedictorian and the outfit for her speech carefully chosen to prove that

  beauty and brains could indeed mix, she suddenly regretted

  her choice of attire, her rain-soaked T-shirt now valiantly engaging in the titanic struggle between the tensile strength of cotton and Newton’s first law of motion.

  “It certainly is very good,” agreed Meg. “A re-working from one of your earlier stories, is it not?”

  “Not completely,” I said. “But I did cobble together a few well chosen similes from previous efforts.”

  “Here’s mine,” said Ruby. “It’s very poignant.”

  As he looked across the breakfast table at his aged, sickly wife slurping down a bowl of Wheateena, her teeth soaking in a glass that had once held her morning Mimosa, he remembered the woman he had once known--a vivacious, exciting beauty with a sense of adventure--and immediately wished he had married her instead.

  “Bravo,” said Meg, laughing. “Good work all around.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Go to the Bulwer-Lytton website, get the address and send in your entries. You can e-mail them if you want.”

  “When’s the deadline again?” asked Elaine.

  “I think we can send them in through the end of June, but the official deadline is April 15th.”

  “So we’re still okay?”

  “I believe so. If we’re too late this year, we’ll have to try again, but we’ll probably be all right.”

  “When do they decide the winners?” asked Ruby.

  “The first week of July.”

  “And when do I have to take you all out to dinner?” Meg asked.

  * * *

  It was eight o’clock in the morning when Nancy called. I had finished showering, let Baxter out to chase the wild turkeys, put a deceased baby squirrel on Archimedes’ sill, and settled down with a cup of coffee when the phone rang.

  “Hayden Konig,” I said, identifying myself, since I still hadn’t bothered to get caller ID, and I had no idea who was calling.

  “It’s Nancy, Chief.”

  “What’s up?”

  “You’d better get on out to the New Fellowship Baptist Church. Dave just got a 911 call from Bootsie Watkins. She’s the secretary. Something’s going on.”

  “Are you there now?”

  “I’m in Boone, but I’m on my way. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

  “That’s about how long it’ll take me,” I said. “See you there.”

  * * *

  New Fellowship Baptist Church was about two miles Northwest of town, and Nancy was waiting for me when I arrived. She hadn’t been waiting long, I surmised, because she was just taking her helmet off and securing her Harley. The church had put up a new sanctuary about three years ago. It was a pre-fab metal building with a modicum of faux-stone around the edges to make it look more like a Baptist church and less like a warehouse. The large fiberglass steeple, frosted glass windows and drive-up covered portico completed the architectural facade. The appearance of a frugal, monetarily conservative congregation disappeared, however, once Nancy and I stepped inside.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Nancy. “I’ve never been in here before. What do you call this? A narthex?”

  “A foyer, I think,” I said, looking around. I was just as impressed as Nancy. “I doubt they’d know a narthex if it walked up, shook their hand and introduced itself. Maybe it’s a lobby.”

  It was clear that whatever the church had saved on the shell of the building, they were happy to make up in furnishings and other accoutrements. We walked from the marble entryway onto a plush, deep purple carpet inset with dark red and gold runners. The lobby of the church reminded me of a very expensive hotel. There was gilded furniture strategically placed for decoration as well as to hold brochures on everything from the Three-Step Plan of Salvation to registration forms for the Iron Mike Men’s Retreat. There were plants galore, a couple of small trees, rich draperies adorning the frosted windows and a chandelier with enough bangles to make ZsaZsa Gabor smack her grandma.

  “Which way?” asked Nancy.

  “I think Bootsie’s office is this way.” I started down the hall and heard Nancy’s cell phone ring.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Hang on a sec.” She handed me her phone.

  “Hayden here,” I said.

  “Hayden!” It was Kent Murphee on the phone. “Hayden, we need your help!”

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Kokomo is gone! Stolen! By that minister you guys brought over!”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Penelope’s over the edge. She’s already called the University Police, the Boone Police and the FBI. The first two are on their way over to your minister’s house.”

  “He’s not my minister. Hey! Wait a minute. How do you know that the minister took him?”

  “Penelope and I went out last night. She didn’
t want to go and leave Kokomo by himself. She said that when they’re on the road, Kokomo gets upset if he’s by himself for too long. Anyway, this Brother Kilroy has come to see the gorilla a couple of times over the past few days, and they get along fine together. Real friendly. So when I ask Penelope out, he volunteers to stay with Kokomo. He says don’t worry about it; the wife’s out of town, stay out as late as we want. So we did.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Umm, about 7:30 this morning. We lost track of the time.”

  “And when you got back?” I didn’t even bother to needle him about his date.

  The gorilla was nowhere to be found. He’s gone and so is Kilroy.”

  “Get Penelope, tell her to bring her dart gun or whatever she uses in case of an emergency, and come over to the New Fellowship Baptist Church. I’m afraid I know what’s happened.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here. Call the police too, and send them over here. A five hundred pound gorilla is nothing to mess with.”

  * * *

  Bootsie Watkins was standing by her desk under the most impressive beehive hair-do it has ever been my pleasure to witness. She was wringing her hands. Actually wringing them. It was the first time I’d ever actually seen a person do such a thing.

  “You’ve got to come with me,” she said. “Something is terribly, terribly wrong.”

  We followed her bouncing beehive down another purple and gold-carpeted hallway.

  “I got here at eight. I always get here at eight. Mr. Shipley had an appointment with Brother Kilroy at eight, and he was here as well.”

  “Mr. Shipley?” Nancy asked, writing in her pad while we walked down the hall. We heard a crash come from somewhere close.

  “Bennett Shipley. He’s the head deacon. He’s still waiting outside Brother Kilroy’s office. We’ve been banging on the door, but he doesn’t answer. All we heard were crashing sounds and some kind of shrieking.”

  We turned one more corner and came to an alcove outside a heavy wooden door with a stained glass window in the center about a foot square. Mr. Shipley was pounding his fist heavily on the jamb. He was middle-aged, about five-foot-eight and in good shape. His hair, dark brown with a premature white stripe running through it, swooped back away from his face, and was held in place with an inordinate amount of hairspray. He saw us and stopped.

  “It’s locked,” he said. “From the inside. I’m pretty sure it’s going to take a key to open it.”

  “Do you have a key?” I asked Bootsie. She shook her head.

  “Brother Kilroy had the only key. He brought this door from his grandfather’s old church. His grandfather was a preacher, too. It has an old-fashioned lock. Once it’s locked, you need a key. Or a locksmith.”

  “We could break it down,” said Nancy.

  I shook my head. “Look at the size of that door. It’s solid wood. We might break the jamb, but it’s just as likely we’ll break a shoulder. Just shoot the lock off, will you?”

  Nancy put her pad away and was reaching for her gun when we heard another shriek come from inside the office.

  “Wait a second,” said Mr. Shipley, “before you do that.” He picked up a hymnal from a side table and smashed the stained glass. Then he reached through the opening and found the lock.

  “The key’s in it,” he said, fumbling for a moment longer. Then we heard a distinct click and the door swung open onto a startling and terrible sight.

  * * *

  Brother Jimmy Kilroy’s huge office had been a tribute to his expansive ego. Bootsie Watkins told me later that his wife, Mona, had taken complete charge of the decorating. It had been a study in extravagant opulence. The seating area at one end of the room incorporated a gas fireplace, a leather sofa and two armchairs. In the center of the office was a desk that would have put Father Barna’s monstrosity at St. Barnabas to shame. It was constructed of black walnut and matched the built-in bookcases that surrounded the room. I recognized Amish craftsmanship when I saw it. There were a few Persian rugs lying on the hardwood floors. On the other side of the room was a grand piano. It might have been a beautiful office except for one thing. All the furniture had been smashed to kindling.

  The sofa had been ripped open, and the cushions (which had been down-filled) were empty, the feathers now spread across the room. The heavy oak frame of the sofa had been crushed, broken in half and thrown up against the fireplace. The chairs had fared no better. Across the entire room were pieces of books, yanked from the shelves, torn apart and scattered across the officescape.

  The desk had managed better than the sofa with the minor exception that it was now in two pieces. It looked as though a wrecking ball had been dropped directly in the center, smashing through the top and breaking it exactly in half. There were pieces of a computer on the desk—at least I suspected it was a computer.

  The grand piano was lying on its side, the top torn from the hinges, piano wire snarling around the soundboard and two of the three legs snapped off. I looked around and saw one of these legs protruding lewdly from one of the bookcases.

  What was left of the rugs was strewn across the wreckage of the furniture. Behind the upended piano were double doors standing open and looking in on a bathroom spa that would be the envy of any five-star establishment in the Carolinas. Nancy and I both pulled our guns and picked our way through the debris toward the bathroom.

  We peered into a room almost as large as the office itself and then moved gingerly across the marble tile. To our right was a vanity with two sinks and gold-plated fixtures—to our left, an open Roman shower, also with golden fixtures. Straight ahead of us, dropping into the floor, was an expansive, ten-foot-sqare, built-in tub. Behind the tub stood a marble modesty wall, five feet tall, but it was the tub that interested us now. It was full of brownish water and contained—along with a torn chair cushion, a telephone, and several books—Brother Jimmy Kilroy, floating face down. Bootsie screamed from the doorway.

  “Is that Kilroy?” Nancy asked. “I can’t tell.”

  “Yes. I think so,” Bootsie sobbed.

  “Go outside and wait for the rest of the police,” I said to Bootsie. “They’ll be here in a couple of minutes.” She nodded and left. Mr. Shipley stood silently at the door of the bathroom, wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, and followed Bootsie out of the office.

  Nancy and I inched around the tub, both of us holding our weapons in front of us, and headed toward the wall, determined to look in the last place left to us. When we came around the side, our leveled guns were pointed directly at Kokomo, sitting on the toilet.

  He knew we were there, of course—we hadn’t intended to surprise him—but when he saw us, he leapt off the toilet with a roar that shivered every hair on my head. The floor shook and tiles broke when he landed—four hundred eighty pounds of pissed-off gorilla—and then he roared again, stretched to his full five-foot-eight-inches, showed me fangs that made my blood run cold, and pounded his hands on his massive chest just like every King-Kong movie I’ve ever seen. Nancy and I both froze. We were still twelve feet away, but twelve feet wasn’t nearly enough.

  “This little gun isn’t going to stop this gorilla,” I whispered to Nancy. “If he gets it in his mind to eat us, I mean.”

  “Nope,” agreed Nancy, also in a whisper. “Did you just wet your pants, too?”

  “Yep. Can we agree that Jimmy Kilroy is dead?”

  “Oh, yeah,” whispered Nancy.

  “Then let’s just back out of the room and wait for Dr. Pelicane.”

  “That’s a plan,” said Nancy.

  Chapter 11

  Dr. Pelicane and Kent Murphee arrived thirty minutes after I’d spoken with Kent on the phone. The two officers from the Boone P.D. were already on their way to Jimmy Kilroy’s house and beat them by fifteen minutes. I knew them both. The older fellow, a sergeant, was an experienced officer named Todd McKay. The other one, a new recruit named Burt Coley, had sung in the St. Barnabas choir when
he’d been a student at ASU.

  “Hayden,” he laughed, “did you know your pants are wet? What’d you do, spill some coffee?” Nancy had taken off her jacket and tied it around her waist, but I didn’t have the luxury.

  “One more crack out of you, and I’m sending you in there to get the monkey,” I snarled, not at all amused.

  “Sheesh, if it’s just a monkey, I’ll go get it,” said Burt. “Gimme a net or something.”

  I looked at him, then at Todd.

  “I haven’t told him yet,” said Todd, grinning. “Go ahead and give him a net.”

  “Let’s just wait on Kent and the handler,” I said. “The pastor’s not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  When Dr. Pelicane arrived, she was in a state of near panic. Kent had her by the arm, or she would have raced right past us and into the church.

  “Where is Kokomo? What has that idiot done with him?” Her voice was high pitched and frantic.

  “Calm down,” I said. “The gorilla is fine, but we have to figure out what to do next.”

  “What do you mean, ‘what to do next?’ Give me my gorilla! This instant!”

  “I understand your concern,” I said. “But take a few deep breaths and calm down.”

  “Hey,” said Kent, looking at my pants, “did you…”

  A look from me shut him up.

  “Did you bring a tranquillizer gun or something?” I asked.

  “I don’t use them.” Dr. Pelicane spat out the words. “There’s no need. Kokomo is very gentle.”

  “There’s a need now,” said Nancy. “That gorilla is madder than a wet badger, and the minister is dead.”

  “What?” exclaimed Dr. Pelicane, panic once again rising in her voice.

  I nodded. “He’s dead, and the place looks like a tornado hit it.”