Static answered.
At the bottom of Hurt Street, Le May turned right on Waverly, part of a historic enclave dense with trees and Victorian houses in various stages of decay or renovation. From Waverly, we wound onto the southwest-to-northeast diagonal of Euclid Avenue, eventually creeping uphill past a row of shops to the brightness of Little Five Points. We crossed Moreland and dipped away from the bustle of the Points into a neighborhood of shabby clapboard bungalows and red-brick apartment buildings from the 1940s. I had no idea where we were going, but Adam seemed to.
“The Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Niedrach replied. “How did you know?”
“Here, for many Sundays and a few troubled weekdays, Miss RuthClaire and I took our church before my surgery. I liked it. It had no rigid doctrines and welcomed anyone who had a spiritual hungriness.”
Presently, then, Le May let the Plymouth coast to rest behind a Fulton County police car and an ambulance parked beside the Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center. A host of people stood on the narrow front lawn. The blue-and-white flasher on the squad car picked these people out of the darkness, again and again. The door to the Meditation Center—once, I could tell, a single-story brick house like many other houses here—stood open. The stained-glass fanlight above the door was illuminated from behind by a cruel electric glare. Obviously, the police had been here a while.
Niedrach told Adam and me that when we entered the building, we would see just what the Meditation Center director, Ryan Bynum, had found upon entering its sanctuary at 8:47 P.M. for a routine check of the premises. The policemen working this crime had restored the scene to the physical conditions that had greeted Bynum.
Le May had already threaded his way through some of the teen-age gawkers on the lawn. He beckoned us after. Adam and I reluctantly obeyed. One of the young people, recognizing Adam, came forward with a copy of Newsweek and asked him to autograph its cover. Strutting uncertainly, the kid looked scarcely more than fourteen.
“You’re impeding a murder investigation,” Niedrach told him.
“Four letters,” the kid snarled. “Just his goddamn first name.”
Distractedly, Adam signed the magazine, printing ADAM beneath the image of his naked feet. The kid grumbled thanks and moved back into the crowd loitering nearby.
“He’s going to sell it to a speculator for two hundred or so bucks,” Niedrach said.
Adam shrugged.
In the church’s foyer, a man with a gold teardrop in his left ear lobe hugged Adam possessively. Tall but graceful, he had to stoop to do so. I knew without being introduced that this was Ryan Bynum, the Center’s director.
“Good to see you again, Adam,” Bynum said. “You’ve been away too long.”
Adam said, “I am not here to rejoin, but—”
“You can talk! My God, it’s a miracle, Adam!”
“—to accompany Mister Paul. These agents think he may be able to identify the victim.”
Bynum was beside himself over Adam’s ability to speak, but, upon receiving a condensed version of the events that had brought it about, began to discuss tonight’s untoward happenings: “Some churches get firebombed. Some get defaced with graffiti. But ours draws a more creative, more neurotic, kind of vandal.” Bynum was sidling along the foyer wall so that we could squeeze past him into the living-room-sized sanctuary. “Whoever did it, well, he ought to be a member. He needs us. If not us, then serious, serious therapy.”
The sanctuary, or main meditation room, was brightly lit—a departure from the way Bynum had found it only an hour ago, a departure from the aqueous gloom into which members had to tiptoe when they wanted to meditate or commune. Because of the lights, we could look across the sanctuary to the dais under a huge bronze mandala and see exactly what Niedrach and Le May wanted us to see, namely, the murder victim, who reposed in a leather lounger that someone had wrestled onto the dais so that it sat there like a laid-back throne.
Adam and I exchanged puzzled looks because a shaggy, orangish-red orangutan sprawled in the lounger. The creature wore a set of headphones, but its posture betrayed its lifelessness. Upside-down in its lap was a naked plastic dolclass="underline" a black baby doll for a black child. It had fallen across the orangutan’s lap so that its head was wedged between one shaggy thigh and the lounger’s leather armrest.
“It’s a costume,” Niedrach said. “Mr. Bynum found the victim this way. The head comes off.” He wove his way through rows of loungers and divans to the dais. There, gripping the orangutan head at the neck, he turned it—as if trying to unscrew a diving helmet from a diving suit. A moment later, he lifted the head clear and gestured at the startling human visage protruding from the costume’s neck hole.
It was Nancy Teavers. Her head shone like a large mottled egg. Either she or Craig had shaved off every lock of her hair. The spiky white coiffure she had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances had been a wig. Whatever the case then, tonight she was bald. Her eyes bulged. Bruises discolored her cheeks. Her lips were bloated. I still recognized her as the unhappy waitress who had decided to go west to make her fortune. Instead, she had gone to Craig Puddicombe, and Craig had turned her into a punkette, a babysitter for the kidnapped T. P., and an orangutan. What did this grotesque progression mean? Perhaps a bizarre homicidal performance-art parody of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.
“Do you remember his first call?” I asked Niedrach. “He claimed he didn’t do violence.”
“We all knew he was lying… to himself as much as to us.”
Adam, who’d gone forward, started to pick the doll out of the victim’s orangutan lap, but Le May caught his wrist. A Fulton County detective, he said, would have to bag the doll for forensic analysis. Fingerprints, Mr. Montaraz, fingerprints.
“It proves our Paulie is dead,” Adam said. “That’s the doll’s terrible meaning.”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
“That’s right,” Ryan Bynum said. “How could it mean that? You don’t believe in voodoo, do you?” Ignorant of the kidnapping, Bynum had jumped to the conclusion that Adam was surrendering to an atavistic Carib superstition.
My unofficial identification made, the Fulton County detectives shooed us out so they could finish their work. As we stood on the lawn, two men with a stretcher entered the building and reappeared a few moments later carrying the costumed Nancy. The ambulance at curbside took her in and departed with her without benefit of siren or flasher. After all, what was the hurry?
“It looks as if she was strangled,” Le May told us. “But it didn’t happen here. The only sign of struggle has to do with rearranging furniture. No breaking and entering, either. Puddicombe used somebody’s membership card, opened the back door from the inside, and dragged Nancy in from the rear drive.”
“I am so sorry for her,” Adam said.
We left the site in Le May’s Plymouth, and Niedrach told us that shortly before noon, just three or four hours after most newsstands and drugstores had begun selling the latest Newsweek, Craig had rented the orangutan suit from Atlanta Costume Company. A clerk there had given detectives a good description of the renter. Bearded. Young. Blue-eyed. He hadn’t been wearing painter’s coveralls, though, but toast-colored, pleated pants and a white T-shirt that had left his midriff bare.
He had claimed to be a student at Georgia Tech, wanting the costume for some kind of fraternity prank. He had paid a deposit in cash—rather than with a check and the supporting evidence of a student ID, but the address he had given as his parents’ seemed more than peculiar in retrospect: it was Adam and RuthClaire’s address on Hurt Street. His name he had given as Greg Burdette, and for that he had shown a current driver’s license with a photo of his own likeness. He had struck the clerk as an oddly somber type to be renting an orangutan costume, but she had rationalized this anomaly of bearing as an attempt to complete the rental with a deadpan savoir-faire. In fact, once he had left the front counter, she had burst out laughing at his successful act.