Corrupt Practices (12 page)

“From what I hear, you and he were hardly friends.”

“He was my friend,” I repeat. “I thought you might be interested in helping me find the people who’re really ripping off your organization. And who murdered Rich.”

“Rich Baxter was diseased. He was offered the cure—faith in the Fount and in its teachings—but he flouted it. He embezzled from the Assembly. A tremendous amount of money that had been earmarked for good works, and he stole it. He consorted with prostitutes. He was a drug abuser. The Assembly offers salvation. Baxter had every opportunity to save himself, but he fell. He let his church and his family down. Of course, misguided, empty people like you and his father—Raymond Baxter’s your client, right?—can’t accept the truth of that.”

“How do you . . . ?”

“How do we know what?” he says, taunting me. “You mean that Raymond Baxter hired you?”

I don’t respond, though I’d very much like to know how the Assembly learned this confidential information.

“Do you think secrets really exist, Stern? Belief in secrets is a superstition, a figment of the imagination of those who don’t accept the Fount, who can’t see beyond their own limited reality. People like you and Raymond Baxter. Only the ignorant believe in secrets, because secrets seem to explain away their lack of enlightenment. There’s only one true secret—the mystery of the Fount.”

“I suppose that’s why everyone knows that the TCO is a shill for the Assembly even though you try to keep that secret?”

He doesn’t react to my lame attempt at a counterpunch. I feel as though he’s gripped my spine and twisted it violently. I
have
built my life on secrets. But this is how they manipulate you, how they lure you into the fold or frighten you into silence—by pretending to possess some extrasensory power that lets them see inside you. Like all false prophets and petty grifters, they have no power unless their target believes. I refuse to believe.

“Rich was murdered,” I say. “He discovered something incriminating about your church or someone in it and he was killed for it.”

“If you and Baxter so much as wink at the news media about a false accusation like that, you’ll be hit with a lawsuit so large that in the end you’ll be working for the Assembly for the rest of your lives. However long those lives are.”

“I thrive on lawsuits, remember? That’s what I do. And I assume you’re not making a physical threat with that last remark.”

He’s not smiling anymore. His lips are pressed together, drained of color.

And at that moment, I’m sure that Raymond Baxter is right—the Assembly intends to come after Rich’s estate. They’re just biding their time while they build a case. That’s how the Assembly approaches a lawsuit—like a well-coordinated military campaign. “How about some cooperation,” I say. “To our mutual benefit.”

“Why would we need your help with anything?”

“Because I’m better than you at getting to the truth.”

He crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. “You are an arrogant man. You always were, with your self-righteous refusal to work on our matters as if you were superior to us, when you were the one dwelling in the darkness.” With his shaded eyes and his impeccable tan and his perfect hair, he’s machinelike. “You’re to stay away from us.”

I get up to leave.

“Wait.” He points a finger at me and jabs it in the air. “You and your client must stop harassing Monica Baxter. No matter how contaminated her husband was, she’s still a grieving widow, and she doesn’t deserve such treatment.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll spell it out for you. Mrs. Baxter has gotten anonymous e-mails claiming that her husband was murdered.” He shakes his head in disgust. “Harassing a widow while she’s in mourning. I would have thought as a protégé of Harmon Cherry these tactics would be beneath you. That’s something he never would have tolerated. Stop the e-mails. If you don’t, there will be consequences. The Assembly protects its own.”

“That’s the second time you’ve threatened me. And your second grave mistake.”

The side of his mouth begins to twitch almost nonstop. Without saying another word, I walk out.

The ninety-minute drive to the Mojave Desert takes Lovely and me through some of the most desolate terrain in Southern California. Because it’s early on a Sunday, there’s not much traffic. She’s dressed down—blue jeans, a red Nike T-shirt, and a navy blue hoodie, hair pulled back in a ponytail, no makeup. It doesn’t matter. Her voice is electric, and her smoky gray eyes continually draw me in, so much so that I often find myself looking at her instead of the road.

We talk about our search for the women we’ve come to refer to as “Rich Baxter’s hookers,” about how Rich could have been murdered in a crowded jail, about the constitutional defenses to obscenity prosecutions. I talk about my days at Macklin & Cherry. She reveals that after law school, she’s going to join Lou Frantz’s firm—nothing short of remarkable, because he never hires directly out of law school, preferring lawyers with at least five years of trial experience.

There’s a long stretch of quiet, as exciting as standing water. The radio is tuned to a jazz station. I wrack my brain for something clever to say. When Joe Pass’s rendition of “Night and Day” comes on, I ask her if she knows the late guitarist’s work. She’s never heard of him. I bring up basketball, but she has no interest in sports. She mentions a couple of recent movies that I haven’t seen. We have absolutely nothing in common, except that we both agree on how wonderful Deanna is, a fact that gives me a twinge.

After escaping the smog of the suburban Inland Empire, we hit the desert and drive another hour on a highway that’s empty except for an occasional tumbleweed. For the first twenty minutes, the desert scenery, dotted with Joshua trees and brittlebush, seems exotic. After that, tedium sets in again, and the landscape resembles overdone meatloaf.

When we near our destination, I grip the steering wheel hard. “Ms. Diamond, I have to read the stories.”

“Oh my God, you’re doing this now? When we’re just about to get to her house?”

“I’ve asked you for them before, and you haven’t—”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I read them out loud while you’re driving.”

“What I’m suggesting is that we stop at a McDonald’s, get a cup of coffee, and I’ll read them. They’re Internet postings. It couldn’t take longer than what, fifteen, twenty minutes? We’re early anyway.”

“But why now?”

“Because it’s time I started treating you like my student and not my peer. I’m your professor. I’m responsible for you. I should’ve read those so-called stories a long time ago.” I check my speed. I’ve drifted up to eighty-five, a sure ticket if the highway patrol is lurking.

“They’re stories, not
so-called
stories.” She pouts for a moment, and then reaches out and puts her hand on my shoulder, her fingers charged with a faith healer’s energy, and I try to remember whether this is the first time we’ve touched. “OK. I’ll show them to you. But please promise me something. Don’t decide what to do until you talk to her. Because . . . because if you read those stories before meeting her, you’ll turn this car around and never want to get within a hundred miles of her again.”

“They’re really that bad?” I say, less to her than to myself. “Jesus.”

After more silence and empty desert, I exit the highway and head south. We find a place just off the main drag called the Perth Café. Googie architecture from the 1950s: a large red neon sign, flying-wedge roof, and plate glass walls. As we wait for a table, people look at us with a combination of curiosity and hostility. Some of the male customers leer at Lovely.

After our server takes our order, I lean over the table and whisper, “Let me see them.”

She hesitates before digging into her backpack and pulling out a half-inch sheaf of papers. I reach for them. She looks like she’s going to pull them back, but thinks better of it.

By the time I finish the second paragraph my hands are shaking. Several times, I restrain myself from crumpling up the pages. The stories recount in gruesome detail the sexual corruption, torture, and rape of children, not only by strangers but also by their own parents. And this isn’t overblown Gothic pornography that at least allows you to suspend belief. These stories are written in a detached, reportorial style that leaves you with the sense that they actually happened.

The waitress brings our breakfast, but I don’t realize it until the odor of eggs and oatmeal and coffee almost makes me gag.

When I finish a story in which a sexually aroused mother jabs knitting needles into her four-year-old daughter’s buttocks while exhorting her husband to sodomize the screaming child, I slam the stack of paper face down on the table. I shut my eyes, but the vile words hover in the darkness like retinal imprints.

I open my eyes. Lovely’s using her spoon to toy with her oatmeal, none of which she’s eaten. I know how much working on this case means to her, so I choose my words carefully. “Look, it’s noble of you to want to represent this person. I know she can’t afford a lawyer. But—”

“You promised you’d meet her.”

“That was before I read these stories. If I’d known what—”

Before I can finish my sentence, there’s a hard jolt. Lovely gasps. The table feels as if it’s about to buckle to the floor. Dishes clatter. Ice water and coffee slosh onto Tyler’s stories. I look up to see a wiry man glowering down at me. There’s a large Buck knife sheathed in a holster attached to his belt. Only then do I realize that he’s pounded on the table with his fist.

“What the hell was that about?” I say, standing and facing off with him. Lovely, too, begins to stand, but I motion for her to sit down.

He shoves me against the back wall so hard that I stumble, knocking down a stand containing a pot of hot coffee that crashes to the floor, splashes over my shoe, and scalds my shin. Lovely stands and gropes for him, but he shakes her off without effort, and she falls back into the booth. I regain my balance and use my superior weight to shove him back, and at first it’s one of those silly brawls where we both try to exchange punches but can’t land a blow because we’re so tangled up, until I free my left hand and land a clear shot just above his right ear. He doesn’t go down, his knees don’t buckle. His hand reaches for his knife.

A crowd of men descends upon us, and I lose track of my attacker and his knife, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve mixed it up with a local, these guys are intervening on behalf of a friend and neighbor, they’ll welcome the opportunity to beat on an outsider who drives a fancy car and travels with a beautiful blonde, and no cop around here will believe or care that the other guy started it.

“Philistine!” my attacker hisses. He breaks free and makes a dash for an emergency exit I didn’t know was there, setting off an alarm that sounds like an annoying schoolyard bell. A few of the men make a half-hearted effort at giving chase, but the guy is long gone.

“Turn that fucking thing off,” one of the men says to the busboy.

“Are you OK?” I ask Lovely.

“Yeah. Fine.” She’s trembling. I reach out, take her hand, and squeeze it to comfort her. She squeezes back.

The busboy comes over with a stack of towels to clean off the table and a mop to wipe the floor. The man in charge approaches us. “I’m sorry about this,” he says. “I’m the manager. Are you two OK?”

“Fine,” Lovely says, barely looking at him.

I check out the burn on my leg. It’s painful, but not blistering yet.

The manager shakes his head. “Do you know that guy?”

“No idea who he is,” I say. “You?”

“Never seen him before. But we got a big-time crime problem out this way. You’d think it was the big city. Drug dealers, gangsters, coyotes smuggling illegal aliens through the desert. You know, trash. Maybe he saw your nice car or and the pretty lady here and decided to give you grief. Anyway, let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

When he’s out of earshot, Lovely whispers, “You really don’t know what that guy was about?”

“Probably just like the manager said. Some nut who didn’t like the way we look.” What I don’t say is that the man was a messenger from the Sanctified Assembly. He called me a “Philistine,” which is pure Assembly-speak. After we had our falling out, Rich Baxter would call me a Philistine behind my back.