It was an attached one-and-a-half-car garage used by a vehicle that had bled a copious amount of oil. There was a closed blue door that led into the house. Rudolph used a key to get this door open.
“Go on in,” he said.
The garage door led first to a very domestic laundry room the size of a janitor’s storage closet. There a small and boxy washing machine was set directly underneath a dryer of the same size. A largish utility sink took up the remaining free space. The doorway leading into the house proper opened on a dark hallway that was only three paces long. Beyond this was a lighted space that turned out to be a modest kitchen lit by a quartet of electric bulbs shining inside a rose-colored glass bowl that was screwed into the ceiling.
I stopped in the kitchen to reevaluate my predicament.
Sitting in the car, surrounded by young and hale zealots, I was like a swaddled infant, unable to make my own moves. But in the kitchen I might be able to arm myself, find another exit or hiding place.
“In here,” a man’s tenor voice called.
I followed the words through another doorless doorway, into another cramped hall, then through to a small living room decorated with an inadequate sofa, an old-time TV tuned to a newscast, Fox I think, on at a very low volume, and a recliner chair where sat a smallish, balding white man in a green suit. The shoeless man wore light blue socks festooned with dark blue diamonds.
“Mr. Oliver,” the tenor greeted behind a perfectly welcoming smile.
“Mr. Cormody.”
The beaming lips morphed into the expression of a bad taste.
“Did one of the men tell you my name?”
“It’s my job to know potential players in any investigation. You’re the so-called war secretary for the Men of Action.”
Relaxing, Rembert Cormody sat farther back, bringing the big knuckle of the pointer finger of his left hand to his lower lip.
“I’m impressed,” he said.
I shrugged and, without invitation, sat on the less-than-ideal couch.
“You’re investigating Alfred Xavier Quiller?” Cormody asked.
“If you say so.”
“No benefit being coy, son. I’m alone right now, but them that brought you here are watching; be sure of that. This is what you would call a serious meeting.”
“If you hired me to do a job I’d tell anyone asking about that job the same thing.”
“And who hired you?”
“My clients expect anonymity.”
“Good for them. But I’m not sure how it is for you.”
“What am I doing here, Mr. War Secretary?”
Cormody, a small and slight man, sat up in the recliner without engaging the mechanism, looking like a wrinkled green chick in its nest.
“We feel that Mr. Quiller and his family should be protected from unwanted scrutiny,” he said.
“Has somebody complained that I’ve made them feel unsafe?”
“We have eyes.”
“And mouths too. Maybe you should use those to ask Al or his wife if they feel they’re being harassed by me.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m the one asking the questions. You are the one standing on the gallows with the rope around your neck.”
Even if Rembert was an expert in some Eastern exercise system I believed I would have been able to incapacitate him before he could stop me. I suspected that he had a weapon secreted in the folds of the mechanical chair. I could snap his neck and come up with the probable firearm before the other white men ran in to be slaughtered.
I could taste their blood. It was this tang that calmed me.
“Look, man,” I said. “I’m not gonna give you anything. Okay?”
“Do you have anyone that might speak for you?”
I understood the question but asked, “Meaning?”
“Is there anyone that might sway us from disciplining you?”
In order to be a cop, or a PI who takes on criminal cases, you have to live just a little bit outside of the normal fear responses of the average Joe. My body had made the decision to kill Rembert. The only thing holding back my hands was a thought, a memory of the man I once was; the man who colored inside the lines for so very long.
“My uncle,” I said, “but he’s in prison for some kind of crime so convoluted that the prosecutors had to fudge the evidence at his trial. If he was a white man they would have found him not guilty.”
Cormody gave that non sequitur answer serious consideration. He even laced his fingers trying to work out the informational knot of my reply.
I smiled mercifully and said, “Melquarth Frost.”
Cormody’s head pulled back and then swiveled from one side to the other, making sure that there was no one else in the room. Melquarth, even just his name, had that effect on certain people.
Having made sure of temporary safety, Cormody looked back at me. This time his eyes doing God’s honest research.
After maybe two and a half minutes of this fruitless investigation, Cormody said, “Excuse me a moment.”
He hopped up from the nest of the reclining chair and moved quickly from the room.
Sitting on the hard-cushioned couch I reviewed my assets. I didn’t have a weapon or any way to make a call. My wallet was of little use. I wanted to kill somebody, I truly did, but there was no profit in that. I might have made it outside, and once there, I might have found some foliage in which to hide. It all seemed a little much. There was already a plan in motion. Might as well have confidence in myself.
Seeking distraction from the deadly situation, I began to wonder again about Mathilda Prim.
I couldn’t imagine what she was doing with Quiller or, for that matter, what connection there was between the odd couple and the extremists who had taken me. Prim was a lover, Quiller a thinker, and the MoA a people who, at least, coveted violent action.
Having these thoughts, I was preoccupied when Cormody came back to the room. He was climbing into his recliner when I became aware of his return.
“Mr. Frost says that you are a good friend and associate,” he said.
I smiled, sure that my sociopath buddy had said a lot more than I was all right — though he probably used fewer words.
“What’s your interest in Quiller?” I asked the secretary of war of the MoA.
“This meeting is for your interrogation,” he said pointedly. I noticed that he didn’t call me son this time.
“I need to go,” I said. “I have appointments to keep.”
“Look, Mr. Oliver, we are a valid, benevolent society that’s only trying to make sure that the government doesn’t try to suppress a great man’s theoretical work. You know, the government is the enemy of all freethinking men.”
I was nigger-no-doubt when I entered the house, but now I was a fellow freethinker with a common enemy to boot.
“We don’t like each other, Mr. Cormody, we both have that right. But I’m not trying to hurt, subvert, or expose anything about your great thinker. I’m working for a third party who merely wants information.”
“What information?” The war secretary was nervous.
“I’m not gonna tell you that.”
“How do you know Frost?”
“If you asked him that question he’d tell you I was a scarlet bird. I’d say that despite his whiteness, he is my darkest sin.”
The little white man with the big aspirations evaluated me again, this time for about a minute.
“You can go out the way you came,” he told me. “Nobody’ll mess with you.”
10
My midget car was parked in the garage, hiding the huge oil stain on the concrete floor. The keys were in the ignition and I had yet to spill one drop of blood over my exertions. If I walked away from the jobs Ferris and Monica had given me I’d almost definitely survive the season.