Fool's Flight (Digger) (2 page)

"This won’t cost anything. I even paid for the call myself. So you’ll tell Koko?"

"Right away."

"Thank you. By the way, how’d you know it was me if you never talked to me before?"

"Mister Needham, the manager, told me how to recognize you."

"How was that?"

"He said you were crazy."

Digger had finished yet another drink when the telephone rang. Sweater started for the phone.

"Don’t bother, it’s for me," Digger said.

"How’s the most beautiful woman in Las Vegas?" he asked.

"You were supposed to call last night," she said.

"Koko, I did call," Digger said.

"You didn’t. I was home."

"Okay, then I didn’t."

"Where were you?" she asked.

"I don’t remember. If I couldn’t remember where I was, you couldn’t expect me to remember our phone number, could you?"

"Scratch it. What do you want?"

"I want to invite you to go on vacation with me."

"Where?"

"Fort Lauderdale."

"When?"

"Tonight. Think about it. Ocean. Surf. The lap of luxury. All the things you won’t see in Las Vegas."

"I just bought two new bathing suits. How long would we stay?"

"How’s a week sound?"

"Seven days?"

"It’s usually seven days," Digger said.

"I’ll buy five more bathing suits."

"Good. Charge them to me," Digger said.

"You don’t have a charge account anywhere. Nobody trusts you."

"Then pay for them and I’ll give you the money back."

"I don’t trust you, either, Digger."

"Good girl. Get the suits and come on down. We both deserve a rest from Vegas."

"I know. I haven’t had a real vacation in so long."

"Maybe we’ll stay longer than a week," Digger said.

"It would be terrific," Koko said. "This is really nice of you."

"I’m just basically a nice person," Digger said. He looked around the bar. Sweater was shaking his head no. So was Hat.

"No matter what anybody says," Digger said, "I am really a nice person."

Chapter Two

"You prick."

"You’re really looking very nice. Is that a new dress? Brown goes with your yellow skin. You look like a very healthy banana."

"You prick."

"Is that anyway to talk to the man who brought you to Fort Lauderdale?"

"No. You’re right. You are a pusillanimous, recreant, craven dastard of a prick."

"Dastard’s not a noun."

"Yes, it is."

"This is a very unprofessional attitude on your part, Koko."

"I bought seven bikinis. Now I’m supposed to work instead of lying on the beach?"

"You can wear them to bed."

"Bulldookie. I’m wearing chain mail to bed. Armor. Chastity belts. Pull your pudding, you’re not touching me."

"I hate it when women use sex to gain their ends," Digger said.

"Nice motel, too. You sure you can afford the eight dollars a day?" She looked around in disgust, then slapped her hand against the ratty blanket on the bed and nodded when a little puff of dust rose from it.

"Everything else is booked up," Digger said. "We’re first on the waiting list at the Howard Johnson’s. Listen, stop complaining, I’ll work, and you lay around on the beach. How’s that?"

"Big deal. Except Fleabag Arms here is sixty miles from the beach. Anyway, you’ll start bumbling and stumbling around and I’ll wind up doing what I always have to do."

"Which is?"

"Saving your bacon," Koko said.

"I won’t need you this time. This whole job’s a chipshot."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Only two hundred and five suspects. I proved it to Walter Brackler with infallible Aristotelian logic. He was very impressed and he agreed totally."

"I hate you, Digger."

"As long as you’re here, make the most of it. I really wanted you to have a vacation."

"You wanted an unpaid assistant, admit it."

"I don’t need you. I’m the expert after all."

"You’re nothing without me."

"Oh?" said Digger, as if it were news to him.

"What can you do without me?"

"Light cigarettes in the wind. Women can never light cigarettes in the wind."

"I give up but I hate you anyway."

"Want to make love?"

"Yes, but not to you."

"You’ll come around. I’m irresistible."

"I finally know why your ex-wife didn’t contest the divorce. What I don’t understand is why she just didn’t kill you before you left."

"Time out," Digger said. He reached behind him, under his jacket, and through his shirt pressed a button. After a few seconds, he pressed another button. Koko’s voice, loud and metallic, filled the small motel room…. "pusillanimous, recreant, craven dastard of a prick."

Koko listened for a few more sentences, then clapped her hands over her ears. Digger turned off the tape recorder.

"Must you always wear that thing? Being with you is like a lifetime pass to the filming of ‘Candid Camera.’"

Digger patted the tape recorder on his right hip. "The tools of the trade," he said. "I’d be nothing without it."

"You’re nothing with it," Koko said.

"That’s fair enough," Digger said.

Chapter Three

DIGGER’S LOG:

Tape recording number one, 2:30 A.M. Monday, make that Tuesday, Julian Burroughs in the matter of the Interworld Airlines crash.

I’m talking softly because Koko is sleeping. Or pretending to sleep. Koko, your tits are too small. I hate yellow women, particularly when they think they’re smart. You’re also lousy in bed and I’m glad you lost World War II.

Okay, she’s really asleep but I’ll talk softly anyway. There is a simple rule in checking out potential insurance frauds. Get on the tail of the guy who gets rich.

That will be the Reverend Damien Wardell, the pastor of, God help me but it’s true, The Church of the Unvarnished Truth.

But there are ways of doing it and ways of doing it. I don’t like to go right after somebody frontally. I kind of like to nibble around the edges some and get some background. I think I’ll just go and hear one of his sermons first. Maybe I can still be saved.

Brackler has promised the list of victims on the plane crash so soon I’ll have names and ages and addresses.

I took Koko for a late dinner tonight. I think she really liked the diner down the road. But she said she wouldn’t help me. I’ll win her over, though. I’d like to think that’s because of my charm, but I don’t know. She makes a good part of her living by letting people think they’re getting over on her. It’s part of her casino’s hospitality policy, asking her to be nice to high rollers who suddenly get stricken with yellow fever. Ahhhh, she does what she wants to do and I work for Walter Brackler. So which one’s the whore?

I wish my mother liked Koko so I could ask her to explain her to me. Shit. I wish my mother liked
me
. My mother doesn’t like anybody, including my father. Maybe she liked Uncle Phil, the only Jewish drunk besides me in the whole world. His liver exploded in the Bronx one day and closed down the George Washington Bridge in both directions for ninety minutes. Shadow Traffic went batshit.

The question of the day: why did that pilot insure himself at some airport machine? Why did he name some hop-in-the-ass preacher as his beneficiary? I read a book once by Bernard Wolfe. One of the chapter headings was "What Ho. Smelling Strangeness."

What ho.

I’ll do my expenses tomorrow.

Chapter Four

As Digger turned into the giant parking lot outside the huge white tent, the thought crossed his mind that if God had wanted to be worshipped in tents, he would have made everyone Muslim.

It was nearly 11 A.M. and already the summer sun had hammered Fort Lauderdale into submission.

He slowed down instinctively, looking for a parking lot attendant. Seeing none, he drove on ahead and parked his rented Ford between two pickup trucks. There were four hundred vehicles in the lot, the majority of them campers and pickup trucks with out-of-Florida license plates. No question, Digger thought. The Reverend Damien Wardell was an honest-to-God tourist attraction.

The gravel crunched under his feet and the dust swirled up, talcing the toes of his shoes as he walked toward the tent. It was a giant circus tent but he had never seen a white circus tent before, and it had no scalloping around the sides where the tent roof met the walls. Instead, it seemed to have every intention of being dignified and restrained. And then there was the sign over the entrance. He had heard it but he hadn’t really believed it. But there it was. The name of Wardell’s church.

CHURCH OF THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH

Reverend Damien Wardell, Pastor

Services: Wednesday, 11 A.M.

Saturday, 7:30 P.M.

Sunday, 11 A.M. and 8 P.M.

Digger stepped up into a family group, father and mother who could be differentiated because he was wearing the plaid shirt and she the flowered, and three children. Moving in a Trojan wedge, they surrounded Digger and marched him into the tent as if they were taking him to the gallows.

The inside of the tent was set up with wooden bleachers, stacked at a sharp angle, surrounding a rectangular center stage. Most of the bleacher seats were already filled and Digger escaped from his temporary family and moved up a flight of rickety wooden stairs to sit in the very back row, high up near the top of the tent.

It was already baking temperature in the tent and Digger felt like a fresh Idaho potato. People were fanning themselves with newspapers and heavy cardboard fans. Down on the stage he saw a piano, a guitar, and an electric bass. He glanced around and met the eyes of the woman sitting next to him. She seemed equipped to be a finalist in the national lady bicep contest.

"Hi, young fella," she said, with a syrupy drawl.

"Hi there," he said.

"First time?"

"Yup."

"Won’t be your last. You’re in for something, you really are."

"That’s what ah heah," Digger said. "You comin’ heah long?"

"Since he started the church. Four and a half years ago. We drives down from Georgia ever’ chance we gets. He turned my life around."

Yeah, Digger thought. Before, she used to be fat.

"Ever meet him, this Reverend Wardell?"

"The reverend? Sure. Lots of times. Nothing stuck-up ’bout him either, just a regular person, ceppin’ God touched him."

"How come I never see him on television when I go up north?" Digger asked.

"He ain’ one of those TV preachers. He’s a real preacher." She waved with her hand, a gesture condemning the cathode ray tube, television, the photoelectric effect and television ministries to the same rubbish heap.

The conversation stopped as a man walked out and sat at the piano. He wore a medium-gray three-pieced suit and his hair was cut short enough to make Digger realize that entire years had gone by in his life when he had never seen another man’s ears. The piano player was followed by two other men, identically dressed, and then a young blond woman with almost white hair, wearing a mid-calf-length white dress. She came onto the stage up a slight ramp that Digger saw led to another door in the tent’s wall. She looked like a snowflake, he thought.

She sat primly on a chair while the second two men picked up the stringed instruments and, upon a nod from the piano player, began to play.

Digger wondered if there was a talent agency that dealt in religious music groups; there probably had to be, there were so many preachers. Were they in the musicians’ union? Did they pay union dues? Did they tithe? All right, man, let’s get it up. Ten percent for the church, ten percent for the agent, ten percent to the union, ten percent for Southern Comfort, and ten percent for some good Mexican dope. What kind of musicians were they anyway?

The blond singer was okay. She had been given a pure voice that could sing on-key and that was what she did. It was all she did. There were no shadings, no nuances, no vocal tricks or experimentation. She sang each song the way it was written in those music books for chord organ…big melody notes, bang, bang, bang, right on the beat. It was really a shame, Digger thought, because the voice might have been exceptional if it had been used, truly used. It was Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Cleo Laine, never asking a question of the music, just taking it as it came.

The blonde’s movements were something else again. She was trim and shapely but she moved around the stage woodenly, heavy footed, without grace of gesture or movement.

The woman with the arms next to Digger leaned over and said, "Isn’t she good?"

"Raht," Digger said.

"That’s Mother Candace."

"Who’s she?"

"The reverend’s wife."

Digger looked at the blond chanteuse again. She was tall and had milk-fed baby skin. Her hair was so light that it just had to be dyed; yet somehow it looked natural on her. She gave him the impression of a photograph in a darkroom somewhere, sitting in the developer, with the blacks and the grays not yet punched up by the chemicals.

Digger put her age in the late twenties or early thirties, but there really wasn’t much way to tell. She had avoided the sun and she did not have the leather-skinned look that he’d seen while driving on the Lauderdale streets, a look that infuriated him because it seemed to testify that its owner, generally a woman, was trying her best to turn into a wallet. Mrs. Wardell was beautiful.

The blonde was through "The Church in the Wildwood," which got a good round of applause and "Rock of Ages," which seemed to be on everyone’s top forty because a lot of people hummed or sang along. She got another big hand.

The lights inside the tent dimmed momentarily as one of the musicians knelt over a control box in the far corner of the stage. Then they flared up even brighter and, through loudspeakers all over the tent, a voice sounded.

"God lives. And He
is
King of Kings and He
is
Lord of Hosts and He
is
the Prince of Peace and He’s a’coming for all of us, Hallelujah."

The thousand people in the tent echoed "Hallelu-jah," as if the powerful voice that came over the speakers had issued a command that they could not disobey.