“THERE IT IS.” CANELLI pointed. “That big old Victorian, there. That’s Zeda’s. Jeeze, it looks like a haunted house, or something. I bet it hasn’t been painted for fifty years. Except for the door.” He pointed. “I mean, that’s a red, red door.”
“Blood-red, no doubt. Come on—let’s see what he says.”
The front door opened on the third stroke of a huge dragon’s head brass knocker. We were greeted by a pale, slightly built young man with the eyes of a zealot and the voice of a sleepwalker.
“Is Emile Zeda in?” I showed him the shield. “I’m Lieutenant Frank Hastings. This is Inspector Canelli.”
“Yessir, he’s in.” The young man hesitated, plainly considering asking us to wait on the porch. When I stepped forward, he gave way.
“What’s your name?” I asked, watching the youth struggle to swing the heavy door closed.
“Hawley. Leonard Hawley.”
“Do you work for Mr. Zeda?”
“Yessir. I’ve worked for Zeda five and a half years.” His soft servant’s voice was touched with quiet satisfaction. Looking at him more closely, I realized that he was older than I’d first thought. Thirty, perhaps.
“How many other employees does Zeda have?”
“Just me. I’m the only one who’s always here. The others—come and go.”
“Do you mean that you help him with his—Satan worshiping? Or just with the house?”
“I help him with everything.” He said it as if he were pronouncing a benediction.
“But mostly with his services, or whatever you call them.”
“We call them revels.” He pushed back his shoulder-length hair with a quick flick of his wrist. The gesture’s nervous vitality contradicted Hawley’s soft voice and diffident manner. Studying the glittering intensity of his eyes, the formless softness of his mouth, and the limb-locked stiffness of his movements, I decided that Leonard Hawley was a creature of contrasts, rigidly suppressed. Dressed in a kind of rough peasant’s jerkin, shapeless trousers and open sandals, Hawley was perfectly suited to the vaulted Victorian gloom of the hallway.
For a moment we stared at each other. Then impassively he turned away, murmuring that he would bring Zeda to us.
I turned slowly, surveying the spacious foyer. To my left, a broad baroque staircase led majestically upward—only to stop at a blank wall. The staircase had been partitioned off at the first landing. To my right, a double archway was draped in heavy black velvet curtains. The archway opened on a large drawing room, doubtless reserved for Zeda’s “revels.” Only two other doors remained, one beneath the stairs, another leading to the rear of the house.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” Canelli whispered. “Look at that.”
Following the jerk of his pudgy chin, I saw a human skull displayed in a carved niche set into the hallway’s rich wooden paneling. Perched on the skull was a black raven. Beside the skull was a wax-incrusted candleholder.
“Jeeze, I thought it was real,” Canelli breathed. “The bird, I mean.”
“Shades of Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Have you ever been here before?”
“No.” I looked around. “Maybe I’ve been missing something.”
“Yeah, me too. I think I’ll bring Gracie here some night. She’s very big on all that astrology and occult stuff and everything. She’d love all this crap.”
I pointed to a carved wooden music rack which displayed a black-bordered placard announcing Friday night revels at eight o’clock. “Tonight’s your chance, Canelli.”
“Hey. Yeah. Jeeze, maybe I will.”
“You can put in for extra hours. Surveillance.”
As he looked at me doubtfully, the small below-stairs door opened. The low doorway was filled with Emile Zeda.
He wore a white toga gathered at the waist with a thick black cord. His waist was slim, his chest deep and powerful. His head was shaved, his thick mustache and beard were trimmed to a sharpened Satan-shape. His thick black eyebrows completed the demonic illusion, arching high over bright, wild eyes. An angry scar traversed his forehead, angling upward from eyebrow to skull-crown.
Zeda was approximately six feet tall, weighed about two hundred, and was probably about forty years old. As he advanced on us, I noticed that he wore tennis shoes.
“I was downstairs, jogging in place,” he said. “Thus the tennis shoes.” He looked from one of us to the other. “Which of you is Lieutenant Hastings?” His voice was a deep, theatrical bass. As he spoke, I caught the gleam of two gold teeth.
Before I could reply, he raised a peremptory hand, palm forward. He fixed his sorcerer’s eyes on me. “You. You’re Lieutenant Hastings.” It was a showman’s statement, not a question. Without waiting for a reply, he turned toward the rear door. “We’ll talk in private, gentlemen.” He led the way down the back hallway to a small library lined floor to ceiling with books. Over his shoulder, Zeda ordered Canelli to close the library door. Zeda sat behind a huge, claw-footed table, imperiously gesturing us to twin chairs, which could have come from the hall of a medieval castle. As I sat down, I caught Canelli’s eye. His awed expression almost made me laugh.
“Well, Lieutenant, what can I do for you? What is it this time? Another hand-wringing complaint from the ASPCA?” As he folded his arms across his barrel chest, I noticed that Zeda wore his fingernails almost an inch long.
“No, Mr. Zeda. The ASPCA isn’t my beat. I’m with the Homicide Detail.”
“Call me Zeda,” he said brusquely. “Just Zeda.” Plainly, he equated the single name with some special, extrahuman attribute.
“All right.” I cleared my throat.
Unfolding his arms, he began to drum his long, gleaming fingernails impatiently on the arm of his chair. Our roles, I realized, had become inexplicably reversed. He was acting the inquisitor’s part.
I started again. “We’re investigating the death of Thomas King. You probably read about the case in the papers.”
“I never read the papers. However, I know that he was killed. Tuesday night, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Tuesday. How’d you learn about it?”
“From Mrs. King. His wife. She’s a follower of mine.”
“When did she tell you about the murder?”
“She didn’t tell me about it, Lieutenant.” His voice was elaborately patient. “She wrote me about it.”
I decided to pretend innocence. I wasn’t yet ready to reveal my knowledge of Mrs. King’s visit. “She wrote you about it?” I asked.
“Yes, I have no phone. No radio. And no TV, of course.”
“And you don’t read the newspapers.”
He condescendingly nodded. “That’s correct. For my purposes, it’s best that I receive information and impressions directly, either by word of mouth or handwritten letter. I can’t afford to submit my mind to electronic debasement.”
“When did Mrs. King write you?”
“I received the note yesterday, along with several others. Yesterday evening, about ten o’clock. Very often, my followers drop notes to me during the day. I read them between ten and eleven at night. During the week, I select a few of these notes, on which I comment during our Friday night revels. Leonard collects the notes and puts them there.” He gestured to a shallow brass tray.
“What’s the nature of these notes?”
Zeda shrugged. “Experiences. Impressions. Thoughts. Anything, really. You’d be amazed, the things I get.”
“You must have a lot of very devoted followers.”
“Well”—he permitted himself a smile—“I don’t know whether ‘devoted’ is quite the right word.”
“Sorry,” I answered dryly. “Fanatical, then.”
“Much more apropos, Lieutenant.” He studied me for a long, sardonic moment, then said, “You should come to one of our revels, Lieutenant. For someone in your, ah, profession, I think it would be a valuable experience. Come tonight. I’ll see that there’s a place for you.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will.”
“Bring a friend.” Plainly, he meant a woman. Thinking of Zeda’s troubles with the vice squad, and imagining Ann beside me in his audience, I smiled faintly. Then casually I asked, “Do you still have Mrs. King’s note? The one she dropped off last night?”
“No. Every morning, without fail, my followers’ notes are burned.”
“Do you burn them?”
“Leonard does.”
“What did Mrs. King’s note say?”
“Simply that her husband had been murdered. It was a simple reaching out—a desire to communicate her loss.”
“Will Mrs. King be coming to your service tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does she come every week?”
“No. She only comes once a month, I’d say. She’s a very independent-minded woman. Very strong-willed.”
“I know. And I’m surprised that she’d be involved in—your kind of thing. She doesn’t strike me as a cult worshiper. And as a matter of fact, she doesn’t strike me as someone who would feel she had to come out last night just to ‘reach out.’”
“Why not, Lieutenant?” It was a quiet, probing question—a psychiatrist’s question.
I shrugged. “It’s just a hunch—a feeling. But in my business, you learn to trust your feelings.”
“It’s the same in all businesses, Lieutenant. The conscious mind is incredibly complex. And the subconscious is more complex still—a complexity compounding a complexity. The human subconscious is nature’s crowning achievement. And feelings, intuition, are a tracery of the subconscious. Anyone who can listen to his feelings learns a lot.”
“I agree. By the way, did you know Thomas King?”
“No, I never met him. But by coincidence I knew both his wife and his business associate. So I felt—” He paused. “I felt close to Thomas King. I felt as if I knew him.”
“His business associate?”
“Charles Mallory.”
“Mallory is one of your followers?”
“Not really. He’s only come twice to revels. Both times with friends. He should have come more often. Mallory is a homosexual. He would have profited immensely.”
“How so?”
“Our sect is aberrant. Oddball, to coin a phrase. People who are also aberrant find a great meaning with us. A great meaning.” Accenting the last phrase, he fixed me with a meaningful stare.
“What’s there about Mrs. King that’s aberrant?”
“She lives a dual life,” he answered promptly. “Most of us do, of course—at least in fantasy. But she feels the conflict more than most. On the one hand, she’s an utterly straight wife and mother. And most important, she’s an executrix. A very good executrix, I’m told. All of which means that really she has very strong drives to dominate and excel. Which is an expression of her primitive side. And Marjorie’s primitive side is at once stronger than most and at the same time more rigidly suppressed, especially by the demands of her career. Which produces conflicts. And these conflicts draw her to me, because the worship of Satan—the bacchanalian worship of Satan—is the essence of primitive behavior. It’s a release—the ultimate vicarious release. And that’s precisely Marjorie’s problem: finding a suitable release for her primitive emotions. So I help her.”
I smiled. “Some, uh, nonbelievers say that members of your flock could release just as many of their inhibitions by going to a porno movie, and maybe smoking a little pot at the same time.”
His answering smile mocked me. “There are doubters everywhere. It’s easy to doubt. To believe—that’s difficult.”
“Is Mrs. King’s affair with Arnold Clark an example of her primitive instincts finding release?”
He inclined his shaven head. “Precisely.” He showed no surprise.
“Are you acquainted with Arnold Clark?”
“Certainly. He was one of those who had an unfortunate experience with your centurions.”
“How would you describe Clark?”
His eyes shone with pleasure; his forked devil’s beard parted to reveal teeth clenched behind false-smiling lips. “Clark is a magnificent specimen—a perfect example of the species American primitive, subspecies ghetto black. He’s exactly what Marjorie King needs.”
“I think Clark is a conniving, sadistic bastard. His kind is the same, black or white.”
“From your point of view, Lieutenant, he’s precisely that.”
I nodded, glancing at Canelli. It was his cue to ask a few questions while I tried to sort it all out. Canelli came to attention in his chair.
“I got to go along with the lieutenant,” he said. “Mrs. King just doesn’t strike me as the type who’d have to get herself comforted by ‘reaching out to you’ or whatever you call it. I mean, she’s just too tough. Smart and tough. I just don’t see her trotting out at night and leaving notes for you to ease her mind or something. Not only that, but she told the lieutenant, just yesterday, that she didn’t think you were all that much. So it seems to me that”—Canelli paused for breath—“it seems to me that we’ve got a contradiction here. I mean, we’ve got her telling us one thing, then acting like she believes something else about you—at least, to hear you tell it.”
Zeda had been listening with an air of amused tolerance. Now he said, “What was your name again, Inspector?”
“It’s Canelli.”
“Certainly.” He nodded, mockingly ceremonious. “Well, Canelli, I’m afraid you’ll have to quiz Mrs. King on that point. I’d have no idea, of course, what she told your lieutenant concerning her opinion of me. But, meanwhile, I think you should reflect on the nature of our sect. Better yet”—he turned to me—“better yet, you should come to one of our gatherings. Ventilate the mind.”
I rose to my feet. Canelli did likewise.
“I might just do that, Zeda, as I said. Meanwhile, though, we have to be going.” I turned to the door. Then, pretending a sudden afterthought, I turned back to face him. “I wonder whether you’d mind getting Leonard for a minute.”
“Certainly.” Also on his feet, he touched a button on his desk. Almost immediately Leonard appeared. He stood serflike in the doorway, hands slack at his sides, mutely staring round-eyed at Zeda.
“Have you burned the messages you received yesterday, Leonard?” I asked.
His eyes didn’t leave Zeda, who was standing just behind me and to my left. Leonard hesitated, then nodded his head, obviously on cue. “Yessir, I burned them.” He turned his blank gaze on me, nodding woodenly.
I turned immediately to Zeda. “I’d like to see the messages you’ve received today, Zeda.”
He shook his head. “No, Lieutenant, I can’t show them to you. Of course, you can get a court order. But short of that, you can’t see them. If I showed them to you, I’d be striking at the corner-stone of our edifice.”
“If you put me to that trouble, Zeda, you’ll be giving yourself some trouble, too. Most people in your position violate a few municipal codes. Usually there’s no problem. But there can be problems. Do you understand?”
He accepted the threat with a monk’s arm-folded stoicism, eyes half closed, head slightly bowed. It was a masterful performance. “I’ve put up with persecution for years, Lieutenant. It never stops. But neither do we. The worship of Satan’s darkness is the one message this neohedonistic American society can’t bear—because it can’t bear the truth. But our message comes through. Because it’s the truth.”
I turned on my heel and walked to the doorway. “I’ll be seeing you, Zeda. Maybe you need a little persecution to keep you on your toes. After all, look what it did for Christ.”
We left the house to the echo of Zeda’s mocking laughter.