“Then why’re you scared to go in there?”
“I’m not scared. I’m just waiting for Briggs to bring Clemmens.”
Miles allowed the lie to go unchallenged. He knew that the small woman had power. He felt her presence, but not like other men did. There was something obscene in his experience. He didn’t hear a silent siren’s call. The dark place in his heart responded with distaste and anger.
After a few minutes Lonnie Briggs returned with George Clemmens. Clemmens was tall and heavy, Barber once told me, with loose flesh that fit him like a suit a size or two too large. He also had big shiny eyes and nearly no chin.
“Okay, Lonnie,” Bonhomme said. “Let’s stop acting like kids and get this thing over with.”
Lonnie Briggs pulled open the door with a solemnity that made him blush. George Clemmens, who was the state prosecutor, looked from one agent to the other with an uncomprehending frown on his face.
Barber was introduced as a special consultant on the case.
“What’s wrong with you guys?” George asked. “You act like you got an armed and dangerous in there. I mean, you know this is late for me to be talking to someone we’re about to indict.”
“You trust me, George?” Bonhomme asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I guess.”
“Then hold on to your hat and don’t touch her, no matter what you do.”
Claudia was sitting on a three-legged wooden stool, her legs crossed and lips red. Her skirt was hiked up to her thigh, and she was smiling.
There was the look of hunger in her small eyes.
Miles found that his distaste had grown nearly into hatred.
“Claudia Zimmerman,” the prosecutor said.
“Claudia Heart,” she purred.
“You know you should have a lawyer present. These are serious charges you are facing.”
Bonhomme and Briggs watched the prosecutor closely.
“I don’t need a lawyer, Mr. Clemmens,” Claudia replied. “And if there are too many people in the room at the same time, I sometimes lose my concentration.”
A dog howled outside. Claudia looked up with the light of recognition in her face and smiled.
“All you have to concentrate on are the concerns at hand, Mrs. Zimmerman,” George Clemmens said. “We would like to know how you plead to the charges, if charges are brought, and it would be better if you had a lawyer on hand to do that for you.”
“I don’t plead to anyone.” The love goddess tossed her limp brown hair back out of her face.
“Has your attorney explained to you the charges?”
“What color are your eyes, Detective Bonhomme?” Claudia asked.
Later the inspector told Barber and Briggs that he was surprised not by the question but by the simple fact of how plain she was. “Just a plain-looking woman in her thirties. Not ugly exactly, but homely, unattractive, you know?”
“Answer the questions, honey,” Bonhomme said with the harshest tone he could muster. “You’re going to be indicted tomorrow for second-degree manslaughter and inciting to riot.”
His manner struck Claudia as if it were a bucket full of ice. She got up from the stool and went into her little water closet, half closing the door behind her. The men could hear the retching grunts and then the toilet flushing. A few minutes later Claudia came out of the stall pale and uncertain.
“Has she been seen by a doctor?” George Clemmens asked the agents.
Neither Briggs nor Bonhomme would answer.
“Have you seen a doctor?” the prosecutor asked Claudia.
Claudia went from nausea to a bright smile in an instant.
“Of course,” she said, not to Clemmens’s question. “I’m pregnant, and all the power has gone to nourish them.”
“Excuse me?”
“Leave me,” Claudia commanded, a goddess again. “I must rest.”
“Mrs. Zimmerman—” George Clemmens said.
“Leave me.”
“Come on, George.” Bonhomme patted the lawyer on the back. He was smiling. “Let’s leave her to boil in her own soup.”
The indictment was easy to obtain. Claudia Heart refused to recognize the court or to speak to the attorney that the court appointed. She didn’t mind the jail cell or the green-and-white striped dress she was given to wear.
George Clemmens asked for an extension to prepare his case and was granted six weeks. In the meantime, Bonhomme and Briggs plotted with ex-Detective Barber to find the whereabouts of Winch Fargo.
Gerin Reed was already under arrest and being held on various charges, including the unlawful detainment of his wife. Robert Halston also awaited trial. Bonhomme had Mackie Allitar transferred from the prison infirmary, where he was dying, to a secured room in the city hospital in Sacramento.
“It was all me by then, Chance,” Miles Barber said. “That bitch had scared all of them. The men that had been her studs were dying. All of Allitar’s friends were already dead. All they had left was Allitar, Reed, Heart, and Halston. They had them together for a trial that would never be, but I knew that Gray Man would be there if Heart was. I knew it.”
He sounded like a good cop on the trail of an exceptionally hard-to-catch crook. But the sweat on his face and the glaze on his one eye told me that all he’d really felt was fear. He was compelled to hunt. Compelled by his previous life. He couldn’t help himself, and so he created a lie and a false faith. He had convinced himself that he could conquer Death — but somewhere, just below the surface, he knew that it was all a lie.
Miles Barber fooled himself that he was the puppet master, that the forces brought together were working for him. But much more than he knew was to unfold.
Nesta Vine had read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Claudia Zimmerman and her arrest. Even though the journalist, or her editor, played down the power that Zimmerman’s followers claimed she had, Nesta felt something from the article, from the words that were missing. She went to visit the lovelorn remnants of the commune in the Haight. The empty structure, which was once a small appliance store, was filthier than the worst crash pad or drug den. The members at first glance seemed as if they might be related. But it was the glassy eyes and emaciated bodies that made them kindred. They lived on corn bread mix and beer. Not one of them ever ventured farther than the supermarket. They didn’t bathe or groom, speak or dream. All they did was huddle together in threes and fours in the low, dark room.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nesta asked a small cluster of forlorn lovers.
“Just sad,” one of them said.
“We’ll be better soon,” another added.
One doe-eyed and acned acolyte looked up and said, “She said that we had to wait until she came back. But that means she’s comin’ back, don’t it?”
On the upper floor Nesta found three bodies that had been piled in a closet. It was the closest thing to a burial that the love cult members could muster.
“They’re dead.” The woman’s voice startled Nesta.
“Who are you?” Nesta asked, addressing the darkness of the larger room.
A young woman came from the gloom. Her large eyes and slender form marked her as a member of the cult, but she seemed to have more life to her.
“I’m Trini.” The girl spoke clearly but slowly.
“What happened here?”
“Without Miss Heart they don’t wanna live,” Trini said. “She was all they wanted and now she’s gone.”
“Why didn’t the reporter write about this? Why haven’t the police come?” Nesta found her humanity pulsing in the wake of this destructive blue light.