“But you and Mr. Davison have been through this with us before,” RuthClaire said. “The FBI won’t dump you fellows completely, will they?”
“I’ll try to make that point, Mrs. Montaraz, in telling them what’s happened so far. Meantime, though, Adam—Mr. Montaraz, I mean—should move out, to give every appearance of complying with the sickies’ demands. Mr. Moody’s right about that.”
Bilker grunted, startled to find an ally where he’d posited a bungling bureaucrat.
RuthClaire said, “I can’t believe Nancy’d let anything happen to Paulie.”
“Nancy may be in as much danger as your son,” Niedrach said.
And so it was decided that Adam would leave the house on Hurt Street. Niedrach would have a secretary at the state GBI offices telephone the Atlanta newspapers with an anonymous tip about the deteriorating marital situation of the Montarazes. She would claim to be a neighbor with firsthand knowledge of their troubles, including a confidence from RuthClaire that her husband had agreed to a trial separation requiring his immediate departure from the household. RuthClaire would grant the papers a tight-lipped interview omitting any mention of the abduction and confirming the anonymous friend’s separation story.
“But a separation on what grounds?” RuthClaire pleaded.
“Anything you can think of that doesn’t strike you as unseemly,” Niedrach said.
Adam tried to speak, but his gravelly computer voice would not cooperate, and he reverted to sign language. RuthClaire interpreted it for us. “Career incompatibility,” she said. “We’ve been arguing about Adam’s career plans. I want him to keep painting, but he wishes to enroll—” she struggled to read his gestures correctly— “in the Candler School of Theology at Emory. He wishes to take the curriculum leading to the Master of Theological Studies degree. I’ll tell the reporter that Adam has gone off the deep end on matters God-related.”
“That’s great,” Niedrach said. “That’s inspired.”
Davison grimaced. “A habiline religious nut?” Yes. Apparently so. The point of the ruse, of course, was to get word to Craig that RuthClaire and Adam had stopped living together. The story’s appearance in print would insure its finding its way onto local TV news broadcasts, where Craig could monitor recent muggings, rapes, street-name changes, city-council shouting matches, and mayoral trips overseas.
“What’s the chance of the media catchin’ wind of the kidnappin’ itself?” Bilker asked.
“Dust-ups at Sinusoid Disturbances are a regular thing,” Davison replied. “We’re in the clear for now.”
Niedrach said, “Puddicombe may break the news himself. Publicity doesn’t worry him. He might even like it. So if the story leaks, Paulie won’t be in any more—or any less—danger than he already is.”
Where was Adam going to move to? We mulled the options. He needed a shelter offering privacy as well as a certain remoteness from the urban bustle of Atlanta. What qualified? A rented house in Alpharetta? A lakeside cottage in Cherokee County? The monastery in Conyers?
“Let him come to Paradise Farm with me,” I suggested.
RuthClaire said, “Wouldn’t Craig look askance at that? You’re my ex-husband. You’re also Paulie’s godfather.”
“Two castoffs commiserating,” I said. “It’s honky-on-hibber marriage that upsets Puddicombe, not white and black males cohabiting.”
“What would that do to our cover story about his decision to attend the Candler School of Theology?”
Adam signed again, and RuthClaire said, “It’s too late to enroll for summer term there, and fall semester doesn’t officially start until the last Monday in August.”
“So the alibi holds,” Niedrach said. “Take him with you, Mr. Loyd. We’ve got an agent in Hothlepoya County investigating the drug scene there. He’ll act as a go-between, relaying information from us to you and vice versa. So go on.”
“When?”
“As soon as he can get ready to go. Now, if possible.”
RuthClaire and Adam climbed upstairs to get him packed for his stay at Paradise Farm, and to tell each other goodbye. Bilker and the GBI agents, discreetly embarrassed by this turn of events, huddled in the kitchen drinking coffee and swapping companionable tall tales about their prowess as bodyguards and their expertise as sleuths.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” I told them.
Davison, who had draped his black jacket over his chair, blurted, “An hour? Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“To tell somebody goodbye.”
I drove to Caroline’s—not in her little blue beetle, but in my big silver Mercedes. I arrived at 9:37 A.M., bleary-eyed, funky, and anxious about the deadline I’d set myself. An hour? I now had only forty-six minutes. It might take me that long to convince my hapless generative equipment that it could still pretend to that title. It might take me longer to convince the lovely Caroline to let me try to convince my equipment. Wasn’t I presuming too much?
Staggering along the walk to her porch, I felt that I was bound in a pair of tinfoil shorts. I itched. I had not slept all night. My stubbly beard seemed to be infested with microscopic lumberjacks sawing away at every follicle. Who—whom—was I kidding? I had no chance with this lady.
Forty-four minutes.
At last at her door, I leaned with one elbow and all my bathetic longing into the tiny button that rang her bell—her dear, melodious bell. Inside her apartment chimed the opening eight notes of “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. They chimed over and over again because I was too weary to pull back my elbow.
Forty-three minutes.
“Who is it?” Caroline’s voice cried.
“Me.”
She opened the three inches her safety-chain allowed. “What do you want?”
“A friendly fee-fi-fo-fum.”
“Has anything happened? Have they found Paulie?”
I tried to alchemize my weary nonchalance into concerned sobriety. “Listen, Caroline, if you’ll—”
“That’s not my car,” she said, peering past me. “How am I going to get my car home?” She shook her head. “Damn! That’s not important. The important thing is Paulie. I’m still three-quarters asleep.”
“If you’ll let me in, I’ll tell you all I—”
Caroline unhooked the chain. The door opened, and she was standing against a backdrop of framed Broadway posters, porcelain flower vases, and at least two copper umbrella holders. The breath of the apartment’s air-conditioning rippled over me. As for Caroline herself, she wore a yellow dressing gown that seemed to be lined with layer upon liquid-thin layer of an even paler material. She looked and smelled like the demigoddess of a fragrant wheat field.
“You have to shower. And talk to me. And eat breakfast here.”
“Forty-one minutes,” I said. “I’ve got forty-one minutes.”
“Listen, Mr. Loyd, there’s a clock in every room but the bathroom. You can hang your watch on the shower spigot for all I care. If you have any sense, though, you’ll forget about your stupid forty-one minutes and put your watch in one of your shoes.” She pulled me inside and shut us both into her apartment’s Fundy Bay briskness.
As matters unfolded, I put my Elgin in one of my shoes and deliberately forgot about it.
I spent more than forty-one minutes at Caroline’s. I spent more than eighty-two minutes at Caroline’s. In fact, I didn’t make it back to Hurt Street until better than two hours after my departure—but neither Bilker nor the GBI agents scolded me, for Caroline, fetching in old jeans and a bright yellow tank top, had accompanied me. She had to pick up her VW, didn’t she? Further, as a witness to the crime, she wished to accommodate Niedrach and Davison by recounting the event from her point of view. Wouldn’t they have sought her out eventually, anyway? They admitted they would have.