“Did she see what he was driving?” (My obsessive concern.)
“Unfortunately, no,” Niedrach confessed.
Adam said, “No one here should tell Miss RuthClaire what we saw at Meditation Center. Already, she has enough to cope with.”
I looked at Adam. I had no doubt that in his mind’s eye was a picture of that black doll upside-down in Nancy Teavers’s lap.
But back at the house, RuthClaire got the truth from Adam in five minutes. He could not lie to her, and she would not be put off with stalling tactics or verbal evasions.
“You didn’t think I could handle the news, is that it?”
“I wanted only to—”
“To keep it from me. That’s sweet. But I’m not a little girl. I’m an adult.”
Small and forlorn, Adam stood in shadow with his back to the beaverboard panel in the downstairs studio, his profile at once heroic and prehistorically feral.
“Nancy dead, strangled, dressed in a monkey suit, put on display in Ryan Bynum’s Meditation Center. But why? To horrify us? To put us on notice?” RuthClaire paced among her canvases.
“A puke-livered terror tactic,” Bilker said from the far side of the big room.
“Paulie’s dead already,” RuthClaire told us, ignoring the security guard. “Or else Craig plans to kill him this evening. We’ll find the body tomorrow.”
“That’s a defeatist look at the situation, ma’am,” Le May said.
“You think I like it? I don’t. It makes my heart swell up and my rib cage ache.”
“Mine, too,” Adam said—so simply that I was moved for both of them.
“It’s the waiting that’s killing me,” RuthClaire said. “Craig’s told us what he’s going to do, and we’re still waiting. We frail females—” putting her hand to her brow like Scarlett O’Hara—“are supposed to be able to bide our time, but how you go-git-’em macho fellas can take it is beyond me.”
“This such fella takes it very badly,” Adam said.
RuthClaire went to him, and they embraced. Then she turned to Caroline. “Come upstairs, Caroline. I want to lie down, but it would be nice to have somebody to talk to.”
The two women left. I sipped at a Scotch on the rocks that Bilker had made for me. I felt a hand on my arm. It belonged to Adam. Its grip on my biceps tightened inexorably. “You’ve had enough, Mister Paul.”
“I haven’t even had one. Sit down. Bilker’ll fix you right up.”
“Abraxas,” Adam said.
“What?”
“We should go to Abraxas. I, Mister Paul, am going there. Please come with me. It is what needs to be done.”
“What’s going on at Abraxas? Aren’t they closed on Mondays, like the High and most independent galleries? Besides, they’d all be closed by now.”
Adam said, “Nancy Teavers dead in Ryan Bynum’s church is a red flag waving. Interpret the signal. Where might Mr. Puddicombe next appear?”
“Abraxas?”
Bilker Moody had his hands in a stainless-steel basin full of suds and highball glasses. “Hell, yes,” he said. “Hell, yes!”
Niedrach and Le May were no longer with us. Back in the kitchen with Webb? Probably. “Tell Niedrach and the FBI men,” I urged Adam.
“I don’t think so. They are worthy gentlemen. I like them very much. But none of them has read the signals.”
“Tell them, then, for God’s sake!”
“This is my fight, Mister Paul. I am the cause of it all, basically. If you are not coming with me, promise to say no word to the special-agent gentlemen when I go.”
“And if I don’t promise?”
Adam eyed me speculatively. Then he gave me his fear grin, his lips drawn back to reveal his realigned but still dauntingly primitive teeth. “I will bite you, Mister Paul.” In the light from the cut-glass swag lamp at the end of the bar, Adam’s teeth winked at me like ancient scrimshawed ivory.
“You give me no choice,” I said.
“I’ll get my jacket and some heat,” Bilker said, wiping his hands on a towel. He exited the wet-bar booth and trotted off toward his converted pantry.
We told the agents we were going out for some fresh air and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. We’d bring back whatever they wanted—cream-filled, buttermilk, old-fashioned, they could choose.
“Make it quick,” Le May cautioned. “Mrs. Montaraz can take a call upstairs, but we’ll need your input after we’ve taped it. Going out’s risky. You could miss it.”
“Thirty minutes,” Adam said. “No more.”
We took my Mercedes because I did not feel competent to handle the hatchback with its elevated foot pedals or Bilker’s dented ’54 Chevy. I was driving, rather than Bilker, because Adam wanted Bilker to have his hands free. He was riding shotgun, a position of “great importance.” Now, though, it seemed funny to be driving so big and expensive an automobile as my Mercedes to a one-sided rendezvous with a murderer.
Adam directed me to park on Ralph McGill Boulevard about two blocks below the old school buildings housing the Abraxas art complex. We would have to walk the rest of the way, but Craig was not likely to shoot out my windshield or riddle a sheet of the car’s body metal with bullet holes.
It had begun to rain, lightly. An ocean of upside-down combers rumbled above the treetops. Traffic was nonexistent, and the three of us trudged uphill on the margin of the street. The plummeting runoff had not yet acquired volume or momentum, our shoes remained dry, and the cooling thunderstorm seemed an ally rather than an enemy.
“Dristle,” I said. “That’s what Livia George calls a rain like this.”
“Very good,” Adam replied.
Bilker halted at the top of the hill. An elm-lined row of clapboard houses curved downhill to our left. In the dark, we could see Atlanta’s skyline, traffic lights reflecting on wet pavement between Abraxas and the city. The old school building loomed in the rain like an insane asylum from a florid gothic novel. Its studio annex perched on the downslope of the ill-kept property as if it might soon slide away, like a stilt-supported house on the California coast. Brooding. Medieval. (Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe would have loved the place.)
“No security?” Bilker said. “At a gallery?”
“The third-floor galleries are between shows,” Adam said. “So the studio wing is tightly locked.”
“Locked-schmocked. Folks will pick locks. This place needs round-the-clock security. Needs some lights on it, too.”
“Needs its grass mowed,” I said.
“No money for a guard,” Adam said. “No money for lights.”
I remembered that on my first trip to Abraxas, David Blau had griped about the current administration’s miserly treatment of the arts. Of course, Blau and his staff members could, and did, initiate money-raising projects of their own, but funding a security force had always taken a back seat to strong financial support for major new shows and deserving artists. For the two weeks of the Kander-Montaraz-Haitian exhibit, Blau had in fact hired a full-time security guard, but no one served that function tonight because there was nothing noteworthy to protect.
Adam said we must enter from the back. We crossed an asphalt drive that dead-ended forty or fifty feet farther on, and crept into the shadow of the print shop next to the school. We advanced single-file through soggy leaves and grass, hung a left at the end of the print shop, and wound up staring into the rear half of the facility’s car park. Trees closed off the back of the lot. Power-company spools and strange varieties of metallic trash showed in the gaps among the trees as mysterious lumps and silhouettes. Tonight, unlike in February, the trees’ branches were weighted with summer foliage, and the mist dripping through the leaves made the asphalt echo as if it were a basement drying room with dozens of frilly black-green dresses on its lines. We entered the shelter of a covered rampway leading directly to the main building’s rear entrance. From this ramp, we saw the whole parking lot and, straight across from us, the studio wing enclosing the lot on that side. Near the building’s door sat the only vehicle in the lot, a red GM pickup with its tailgate lowered. Whoever had parked it had placed an extension ladder in its loadbed so that the ladder cleared the rampway’s corrugated roof and leaned against the wall about twenty feet above the covered door.