Murder Sees the Light (3 page)

In 1976 he was pictured on
Time
's cover wearing a white robe of office. He was quoted in the article, when asked about his globe-trotting, as saying that if God ever looks in on us, we'd better look busy. In a piece in
Newsweek,
the same year, he defended the church from being lumped with the California cults that had so often been confused with his flock. He was notorious for catching all derogatory comments in the press and suing writer, editor, publisher, right up the line. He'd retained a fat stable of lawyers who rarely lost a case. For example, one well-known magazine devoted to the lives of men and the bodies of women lost an undisclosed amount in a hard-fought case that was finally, at the last minute, settled out of court. That was in 1977. Patten's victory had given cults a new lease on life, and only the most foolish papers tried to pillory them after that.

From the articles before 1977, I was able to get a fair idea about how the cult operated. Patten was the absolute despot; his rule was law. All submitted to his whim. He was suspected of seeking sexual favours among the faithful, and most certainly relieved the members of their private property. Everything was owned in common by the church, but on paper the church was Patten. At the beginning, Patten urged his flock to imitate the practices of early Christianity: they met in secret, referred to the mysteries of faith in anagrams and symbols; there were no churches as such. But there were collections, and the proceeds maintained Patten in several earthly kingdoms. There was a large estate near Reno, Nevada, formerly owned by another celebrated multi-millionaire, a hideaway on the coast near San Clemente, and later a villa outside Palma de Mallorca.

I couldn't find any evidence among the clippings that Patten's empire was in any way corkscrewing down from its eminence. But there was a shipbuilder in Spain who had repossessed a yacht in Palma, and the U.S. Army, in light of the many ex-GIs who had flocked to the Ultimate Church, was checking whether the events described in
The Blinding Light,
Patten's uplifting best-seller; ever in fact happened. A fifty-year-old hack journalist from Baltimore claimed in one of the clippings to have ghosted the book in 1975 from six hours of tape Patten had dropped off in a Georgetown apartment. Nevertheless, the book remained on
The New York Times
best-seller list for twenty-two weeks. And even in Grantham I found a copy nestling on a shelf next to Kahlil Gibran's
The Prophet.
The bookseller told me it had been translated into seventeen languages and was on sale wherever books of any kind are known. He said it in a funeral director's voice. I couldn't figure out whether he was a consumer of Patten's doctrine or simply impressed by the book's sales.

Well, Patten was a long way from
Time
magazine this afternoon. The rain was falling on the just and the unjust alike. I wondered how the park looked to him after
Newsweek
and CBS. What was it like to come home again when you couldn't whisper who you are. No drums and no trumpets for the local hero, not even in the
Huntsville Weekly Register.

I heard the bang on the screen door and guessed Joan was coming across the duckboards between our cabins. She came in, bringing the rain and a scent of freshness and earth with her. Her glasses were steamed up, and she took them off along with her big soaking straw hat.

“Gawd, what a downpour! This is what the weatherman called intermittent showers.” Thunder shook the roof; a reminder not to take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. “I brought your milk.”

“You didn't have to bring at over at the height of the storm. That's above and beyond the call of duty. I've got the kettle on. Tea?”

“Fine. Only, let's get some light on the subject.” She took the lantern from the table where I'd left it and primed it and pumped it until it hissed. She added a match and a high intense light brought colour back into the cabin and sent long shadows from the ketchup bottle and the salt and pepper shakers radiating along the caramel-coloured table top.

“That's better,” she said, climbing out of her black raincoat and setting it on the horsehair sofa. “The Goddamned beavers have blocked the culvert again. I knew those bedsprings wouldn't keep them out of there. There's a lake across the road a foot deep. And after this rain … Oh damn, I don't want to think about it.” I made the tea and kept my mouth shut. In my line, that's the way to find things out. When it happens. A set of ironstone mugs for the tea were finally located on the shelf above the sink. I bashed the teabags to cut down on the waiting time and got out the open can of evaporated milk.

“But I just brought you fresh,” she said. She had cleaned her glasses on a piece of pink Kleenex and put them on again.

“New habits die hard. Take it easy. I'm just learning the ropes around here. First you show me how to do everything, then you come over to see that I do it your way. There's more than one way to trim a wick.” She smiled and I poured her a cup. I took out the fresh milk and punctured the plastic bag. Joan, the diplomat, took a drop of both, then showed how a real frontiersman stows the plastic milk in a plastic pitcher.

“Are all my chickens safe?” she asked.

“I guess I haven't taken a proper count, but I haven't seen anything unusual. Your coming in with the groceries was the big event of the afternoon.” I lit a cigarette and put the wooden match in an ashtray with the name of a defunct brewery on it.

Joan Harbison had a good ordinary face with blue eyes that didn't grab you all at once. It took three days. Under light eyebrows, their effects were subtle, like the way the dimple on her right cheek played tag with a little brown mole. Her hair, when it wasn't soaking wet, was kept in a light and airy brown tangle. Now it hung in dark fangs stuck to her forehead. She didn't use makeup and she didn't have to. On the day I arrived she was changing the air filter in her Honda and confessed that she was stealing time from the generator which really needed attention. Since then, I'd seen her cutting the grass, chopping and stacking cordwood, rebuilding an outboard motor, flinging a pail full of fish heads to the four cats, and wrapping a piece of brown paper around an ovenproof casserole. She was followed everywhere by a twelve-year-old boy who belonged to the American in one of the log cabins.

She sipped her tea. The downpour gave her a few minutes to relax. The Delco, the cats, the boats, and all of us could run around the block until the weather cleared.

“I've got to do something about that beaver,” she said, watching my cigarette smoke drift up to the rafters. “He can build a dam faster than I can pull it down. It's a pair, really. For two cents I'd scalp both of them, sell the skins in Toronto, and fix my chainsaw with the proceeds.” Outside, the belly of the window screen was luffing in the wind, sometimes flattening itself against the glass with a muffled smack. Joan hunched over her cup. “I'll let the rain settle overnight,” she said, “but tomorrow's another day.” She heaved an exaggerated sigh and reached for the teapot again, just as she'd reached for the Nescafé I'd made that first afternoon. Beyond the screen door, the fury of the rain was settling down. It was losing its tropical passion; the wind was no longer raking the ground and blowing the puddles from one depression to the next. One of the cats peeked in the door, and I gave it a dirty look: let it walk with its dirty, wet feet over a floor I don't have to sweep. I was taking my domestic responsibilities to heart.

“It's giving up,” I said, nodding at the weather. Joan smiled distantly. “Good weather for fishing.” She didn't seem to hear.

“When Mike and I moved into the lodge, it was a day like this. We looked like a couple of drowned rats by the time we had the truck unloaded. Everything had been left in terrible shape, and in the rain it looked like we'd made a bad bet. Then I found mice running around in the oven, after I got the generator going. When I saw that, all I wanted to do was pack up and head back to Toronto.”

“Is that where you and Mike go in the winter?”

“Of necessity. As it is he can't leave his city job except in August. I'm glad to see him on weekends though. Maybe next year we'll go south.” Joan sighed at the sound of that. She was too realistic to allow herself to dream, even on a rainy afternoon. “Fat chance,” she added, like a footnote. “To be brutally frank, Benny, the lodge isn't the gold mine we thought we were buying. I made more teaching. We've taken ads in the papers and magazines, put up signs, but our main business still comes from the people who've been coming up here year after year. Oh, there's a little word of mouth but not enough to retire on.” We listened to the rain slacken off for a minute.

“It's giving up,” I said again. This time you could hear the difference. Individual plonks of rain were hitting the roof. I could see drops form, grow fat, and drop off the leaves outside the window. “This is the best fishing weather, they say.”

“Well, make sure you put motorboat fuel in your tank and not straight gas. I wouldn't want to lose another boat like the one I rented to Mr. Edgar over at the Woodward place.”

“That was your boat, was it?”

“Oh, he paid me for it. But I just meant be careful.”

“What makes a motor explode like that? Do you have to be
that
careful?”

“I get all kinds of people through here, Benny, and most of them know nothing about motors. This is the first time I've heard of one blowing up. It had to be more than the wrong fuel to make it do that.”

“You're not saying you don't think it was an accident, are you?”

“I wouldn't go that far. What a funny idea. Why would anybody want to hurt Mr. Edgar? I could understand somebody putting a bomb under George McCord the way he zooms around the lake, but …”

“It was just a thought on a rainy afternoon. It's just a game I play. If life's a mystery, who are the suspects?”

“Hey! Your suspects are my paying customers, Of course, you are free to suspect Maggie and George McCord, and I'll throw in the Rimmers. You can have them for nothing.”

“I didn't mean to suggest … I haven't really met many of them.”

“Well, I've been neglecting my duty as owner then. I'll see that you meet all the suspects you want in the Annex tonight.”

“Fine. I'll sidle over and you can fill me in when they aren't watching.”

Joan left a handful of change on the pine table, put on her boots and the grim expression of someone who has a generator to fix, and disappeared splashing into the subsiding weather. I pulled on a sweater, a waterproof groundsheet that also worked as a poncho, and collected my fishing gear. The red fuel tank was where I'd left it the day before. I used the rowboat in the mornings; couldn't stand the noise of the motor until the afternoon.

It didn't take me long to attach the tank to the motor again and untie the soaking painter. I tipped out the puddles in the indentations in the plastic-covered cushions and steeled myself to pull the starting cord.

THREE

“… Of the nine of them, Manfred Gunning is the only one you can be sure of. At least Gunning will write a minority opinion that will go down in legal history.” It was Patten's voice on the cassette recorder I'd planted on the island nearest the Woodward place. Not guessing that I would become a friend of the great man himself after picking him out of the water, I'd set up some fancy borrowed surveillance equipment in two plastic garbage bags under a groundsheet hidden by pine boughs and leaves. It took me five minutes to locate the hiding place myself. Inside the machine, the tiny reels turned slowly. “… It's not Gunning I'm worried about,” Patten said in a controlled whisper. “It's Harper, and Bartenbach, and the woman, what'shername, McCready.”

“Because they're Democrats? Surely …”

“I'm not talking politics, Ozzie. Haven't you been listening? Harper and Bartenbach both have a history of upholding decisions made in the lower courts, everything else being equal.”

“If the decision goes against you, they'll be opening up a can of worms that every church in the country's going to yell about. There will be shouting from the pulpits in every hamlet in America. Think of it, Norrie.”

“What do you imagine I've been thinking about? I've been through all the arguments. Diodati made only a third of the points I raised with him.…”

“Now, Norrie …”

“You told me he was the best.”

“Diodati? He is the best. He's one of the club. You need that. You can't parachute an outsider into Washington. They've got to start from the same mark. Diodati gave it his best shot.” Considering the compactness of the microphone and the distance between it and the island, I was getting excellent value from the equipment. It even knew when to turn itself on and off. I'd never want to own stuff like this; I'd use it maybe once in ten years. I moved the tape ahead. There was more crackle now. It was Patten again with Ozzie.

“I want to talk to Van,” Patten said.

“Norrie, please, leave him out of it.”

“You heard me. Or is he leading this vendetta against me? Maybe it's him I can thank for dragging my name through the courts. My friends scorn me. That's the first step.”

“Norrie, the senator's been your most loyal friend since the beginning. Since
before
the beginning. Please don't start up with him again. Why he even let you use this place. Is that unfriendly?”

“He could have been behind that motor exploding like that. He was one of the few who knew where to find me.”

“Norrie, you're not talking sense. The senator loves you.”

“In the last days men shall be traitors. I don't trust Van or you or Lorca, here. I don't trust anybody. You're all out for yourselves. Don't think I don't know your little games.”

“Norrie, you know we all love you.”