“What happened? What’s going on?” The women spoke almost in unison. Bilker mumbled something about our having lost the girl’s trail, and RuthClaire, glancing back and forth between her bodyguard and me, clutched my lapels.
“You know who it was, don’t you?”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” I said, “but I think it was Nancy, with her eyebrows plucked and her head partly shaved. You know, little Nancy Teavers, Elvis’s wife.”
Bilker spent the next thirty minutes charging through the crowd at Sinusoid Disturbances, buttonholing people to ask if they’d seen a skinny female carrying a kid in white shorts. He barged into the restrooms—the women’s as well as the men’s—to identify the startled occupants of the toilet stalls. His efforts were unavailing, but he kept trying, as if single-minded persistence would make T. P. reappear.
I telephoned the police, who sent a squad car and notified the offices of several other area law-enforcement units. The cops who came interviewed RuthClaire, Caroline, and me while Bilker continued to play detective on his own. The older of the two policemen did all the questioning. His nametag said Crawford. He was a stocky man with a forehead furrowed by years of occupational squinting and skepticism. So he could hear our answers, he questioned us on the sidewalk out front. His partner, meanwhile, descended into the pandemonium of Sinusoid Disturbances to look under the rocks that Bilker had not already turned over.
Aboveground, Crawford pursued his interrogation: “She was a waitress in your restaurant in Beulah Fork?”
“Once upon a time.”
“Why would she kidnap the Montaraz child, Mr. Loyd?”
I told Sergeant Crawford about the Ku Klux Klan involvement of Nancy’s late husband, E. L. Teavers. I told him how Adam had wrestled E. L. into the vat of an abandoned brick kiln in Hothlepoya County. That was all it took. Crawford recalled the story. Every city cop and backwoods deputy in Georgia knew it. He took a note.
“Revenge? You think her motive’s revenge?”
“I don’t think she planned this herself,” I said. “At the West Bank, she was a sweet, hardworking kid. She liked me. She liked RuthClaire. Somone’s gotten to her.”
“Who?”
“Craig Puddicombe, to put a name on him.”
“Oh, God.” RuthClaire slumped into me. “I handed Paulie over to her. I put him into her arms.” She began to cry.
“On some level,” I said, “you recognized Nancy. She took T. P. from you, you didn’t foist him on her.”
“I might as well have wrapped him up in a box and mailed him to her doorstep.”
“Look, you’d been entertaining T. P. all evening. The subliminal-recognition factor made you trust the girl in spite of her getup. You befriended her after E. L.’s death, you certainly didn’t expect her to betray that friendship.”
“I wasn’t thinking about any of that!” RuthClaire cried in frustration.
“That’s my point. It all worked on you subconsciously. Stop blaming yourself for somebody else’s villainy.”
Crawford tapped his pen on his notepad. “Puddicombe vanished after that brick-kiln business. His picture’s in every post office in the Southeast, but nobody’s seen him since.”
“Nancy Teavers has.”
“What makes you so sure?” Crawford eyed me from under his furrows. “For all we know, Mr. Loyd, the kid could be living in Acapulco.”
“For all we know, he could be sitting down there in Sinusoid Disturbances with a Mohawk haircut and a safety pin through his cheek. Nancy would have never planned something like this by herself. But Craig may’ve convinced her that this is how to pay back Adam and RuthClaire for E. L.’s death—even if he did bring it upon himself.”
“Adam has to be told,” RuthClaire said. “He has to know.”
Curious patrons, wraiths from the pit, had gathered around us to gawk and eavesdrop. At last, though, David and Evelyn Blau came out to us through these bizarre figures—with Bilker Moody and Crawford’s young partner right behind them. Mireles, the second cop, approached Crawford. “The ticket seller says the kidnapper—the female punk you described—began showing up for Fire Sine Fridays in June.”
“Alone?” said Crawford.
“She isn’t sure. It’s dark in there. The girl always paid her cover and went on in.”
“She just came on Fridays?”
“The ticket seller only works three nights a week, which helps pin it down. She remembers her coming especially for Fire Sine Fridays.” Mireles flipped open a notepad of his own. “The only time the suspect ever spoke, the ticket seller says, she asked if… uh, the Blau Blau Rebellion was doing a gig.”
“A gig?” said David Blau distastefully.
“When she found out they weren’t,” Mireles added, “she didn’t bother to pay the cover. She left.”
“A fan,” Evelyn Blau said. “There’s loyalty for you.”
“And she came alone?” Crawford pressed.
Mireles had a thin, sallow face with eyes as brown as Hershey kisses. “It’s like I said, Sergeant, she was careful to appear to be alone.”
Bilker said, “I found a guy who’d seen her with somebody.”
Sirens wailed. Traffic on the nearby expressway and the bass notes thrumming through the nightclub made the whole hill quiver like a drum skin.
“One of the yahoos who kep’ yellin’ during y’all’s show,” Bilker said. “He got concerned when I told him what happened to Paulie. He said the freak that took him would sometimes sit at a table with a bearded fella.”
“More,” Crawford demanded.
“He tried to play it cool-punk, like—but he couldn’t quite get it on, the look and all—cowboy boots ’n’ jeans instead of tennis shoes and pleated baggies. Like a guy with an eight-to-five job whose boss would can him if he ever showed up lookin’ freaky.”
“Craig Puddicombe,” I said.
“I’ve got to go see Adam.” RuthClaire dug her fingernails into my wrist.
“Somebody needs to go back to your house,” Crawford said. “There may be a telephone call. That’s almost always the next step, the telephone call.”
“Not if the motive’s revenge,” RuthClaire said. “They may just kill him.”
“Not too likely,” Crawford said. He explained that a kidnapping usually pointed to a less gruesome motive, like extorting a ransom. If Paulie’s abductors had merely wanted to kill him to punish his parents, they could have shot him from ambush. They could have run him and his guardian down with a car. They could have set off a bomb on the porch. Instead, they’d staged a crime requiring some knowledge of the kid’s mother’s movements, some fairly elaborate disguises and subterfuge, lots of patience, and an entire bistro basement full of luck. Tonight, everything, including Adam’s confinement in the Emory hospital, had come together for them. It was even possible that the accidental conjunction of all these elements had provided the couple an irresistible opportunity to act on impulse. Now, though, they’d try to cash in. Crawford staked his reputation on the inevitability of a telephone call demanding money and outlining a sequence of steps for delivering the ransom.
Caroline, who had held RuthClaire’s arm throughout this spiel, spoke up: “You’re not being clear, Sergeant. Do you think the kidnappers planned the whole thing in excruciating detail, or just got lucky and took the main chance? It seems to me that their initial motive might tip their ultimate behavior.”
“I’m not being clear, miss, because I’m not a mind reader. Maybe they planned everything in ‘excruciating detail’ for some other night, but got lucky this evening and jumped the gun. Same difference, as I see it. They’re gonna ask for money.”