Parishioner by Walter Mosley Page B

room of the two-story home, Xavier looking for anything suspicious and Winter just gazing around nervously.
    The freezer in the kitchen was filled with TV dinners, and the refrigerator held nothing but condiments and a moldy loaf of white bread.
    The back porch was stacked with cardboard boxes that were empty and seemed to be quite old, covered with dust and inhabited by spiders.
    They found a tiny bedroom next to the porch. It was spare, almost a cell. There was a single-mattress bed and a simple oak bureau with three drawers. There were no clothes in the closet or the drawers. The only trash in the blue plastic wastebasket was an empty tampon carton. This single clue told Ecks that this room had recently been tenanted by Doris Milne. There were no pictures on the night table or hanging from the wall. There were no holes from nails that might have been used to hold frames, nor any blemishes or discolorations from posters a young woman could have taped up.
    In contrast, Sedra’s bedroom took up at least half of the second floor. It was carpeted with real animal hide, probably deer, and contained a bed that was at least a hundred inches in width covered by a fire-engine red silk down comforter. The drapes went from ceiling to floor and were velvet, the color of gold, if gold could rot.
    The wall-wide closet was stuffed with hanging dresses and coats, pantsuits and scarves from over the decades. Perpendicular to the closet stood a highly wrought, curved chest of drawers covered by an ivory veneer. Xavier pulled out each of the eighteen drawers, dumped whatever was in them on the hide floor, and checked all the sides for possible secrets. Two-thirds of the way through his thorough search he found a red fabric-bound journal taped to the back of a drawer that had been filled with staples, a stapler, dried-out rubber bands, and large rolls of black electrical wiring tape.
    The journal was the size of a mass-market paperback book, at least a hundred and fifty pages. The paper was of a higher quality—acid free and heavy. Two-thirds of these pages were covered with minuscule writing. Most of the scribbling did not comprise normal lettering but character symbols like punctuation, dollar signs, and mathematical indicators. These symbols appeared without spaces. Sometimes a character would be half-size on the upper portion of where a full-size representation might be. Nearly the entire book was filled with this meaningless jabber, about forty lines to a side. No breaks, spaces, or paragraphs appeared anywhere. Now and again there was a change in the tone of the ink, but it was always blue. If Sedra and her niece hadn’t tried to murder him he might have thought that this was the meaningless, obsessive scribbling of a madwoman.
    He pocketed the journal and continued his way through the drawers.
    “Hey, Ecks,” Win said.
    He was standing in the doorway. Xavier hadn’t even realized that the young man hadwandered off.
    “What?”
    “You got to come see somethin’, man.”

    In a pantry off the kitchen was a door. This door opened upon a down stairway.
    “A basement,” Xavier said in a matter-of-fact tone.
    “How long you been in LA, Ecks?”
    “A few years.”
    “Not long enough to learn that nobody has a basement or cellar out here.”
    “Oh, yeah?”

    The huge green metal door at the foot of the stairs seemed to be built for some kind of giant. To call the locks that held it shut padlocks would be like calling Fort Knox a safe. They were huge, ugly things made from metal, specially designed to be unbreakable.
    “What the fuck you think they got in there, man?” Winter asked.
    “The answers to all my questions. Probably something neither one of us wants to know.”
    “I’ont think you got to worry about it, brother. ’Cause unless you got some kinda key to them locks we not gettin’ on the other side’a that mothahfuckah there.” There was more than a little relief in the driver’s tone.
    The basement light was