Salvation Boulevard (16 page)

“I want you to pray, Carl, about good and evil, because I know Jesus will guide you. And then, do what's right.”

I was wrapped in a spool of anxiety as I rode down the elevator.

It had been way too much. America, Jesus, God, and Mr. Green were all anxious for me to get off the Nazami case? Too much promise and too much threat. The war between Christianity and the ACLU, my ass. I couldn't say if Plowright believed it all, but I didn't.

Most of all, too much sweat and too much passion.

The ride down was interminable. I felt like the elevator was being lowered by a hand crank.

So, what the hell—hell—was really going on? What could possibly be going on? What could Plowright, or someone in the church, or someone high up that he owed big time have to do with the murder of Nathaniel MacLeod? So that we all had to be sure that Ahmad Nazami hung for it?

Did I want to go up against Plowright? And the Cathedral of the Third Millennium? I liked him. I owed him. He had more money than anyone but Pat Robertson and God Himself. And he was connected to every power base in the state.

What was I going to do?

Why was the elevator so damn slow?

What about Manny? Why had he lied to me? How much had he lied about? Did he have a secret agenda? Was it true that he had lied? I would have to check.

Finally, the elevator trembled to a halt and opened on the fourth floor. Gwen works in book sales. I went to her office, but she wasn't there. I asked after her and a sweet Mexican woman named Alissia, whom I knew slightly, said, “She's with the Angels. They're rehearsing something from when she was one.”

“Where? The rehearsal halls or the stage?”

“The stage, I think.”

I took the stairs. I had to be moving. I couldn't bear the slow creep inside a container.

 

I entered the church from one of the side doors.

The Angels have angelic voices. They're mostly white, and there are lots of blonds. They're also young and very pretty, in a very wholesome way, of course.

I walked across the church quietly so as not to disturb anyone. Even with the stop-and-go of rehearsal, the music moved me the way it always does. There's a kind of pure perfection that connects everything in ways I don't understand, and the musical harmony suggests other types of harmony and clearly induces good feelings.

I walked up the stairs on the side of the stage.

Such beautiful young women. To look at them, to look past the music and costumes of chastity, is to be filled with temptation. So much of religion is about seeing them as angels instead of human beasts to be rutted with like the animals of the field.

Gwen was surprised to see me.

I wanted her to be ecstatic to see me or something like that. I wanted to know that she was swept away by me. Once and forever. Because I had a question to ask. As with any tough question, I wanted to know the answer before I asked.

I took her by the arm and led her away from them so that we wouldn't be overheard.

“What is it? Is something wrong? Angie?” she asked.

“No, no. I don't know if anything's wrong.”

“Why are you here?”

“I have a question to ask you.”

“What's that?”

“If, and I say if, if there were a conflict, between me and the pastor... ”

“You and Paul?”

“Yeah.”

“How could there be?” she said.

“If there were, I need to know, whose side would you be on?” Because if there were, she and Angie might be all that I had left.

“But there couldn't be. Why would you ask such a question?”

“If there were,” I said. “I want to know. Would you be on my side?”

“How could that happen? Did you have a fight with him? Did something happen?”

“Nothing's happened,” I said. “I just need to know.” But, of course, by then, she'd already answered. Plowright preaches all the time that God's plan is for the husband to be the head of the household and for his wife to follow him. That's what makes the world go around and marriages work. The whole thing is about certainty, you see, certainty and order. Now there was uncertainty.

I addressed her silence. “I'm your husband. Would you follow your husband?” All of this urgency was spoken very quietly so as not to disrupt the Angels or expose our private business.

“I can't imagine it happening,” she said. And then, she added, “Of course, I would choose my husband. Of course.” As if she'd been called on to recite her homework in class and had, after she'd given the wrong answer, abruptly remembered what the textbook said.

How do you live in an uncertain world? Do you accept what someone like Paul Plowright tells you and let go of all your doubts?

Or do you check and check until you achieve certainty. I could only know who everyone was—Manny: friend or liar; Paul Plowright: pastor or criminal; Gwen: true wife or just some woman I was married to; and myself: someone who would take a deal or keep his word, who would quietly desert the field or crash and burn before he quit—I could only know who everyone was by going forward and finding out who killed Nathaniel MacLeod. Not that it had a damn thing to do with him.

I looked up, and Jeremiah Hobson was up in the balcony staring down at me.

William Thatcher Grantham III had called me. He was the Grantham in Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb. I assumed that he was calling me to terminate my services. I did not return his call.

Since I had not been notified, I could still act on Nazami's behalf, and for that matter, I could still bill for my time.

It gave me another day. I knew it wouldn't be enough. Not nearly enough. But often this world is a matter of doing the best we can with what is available to us.

Teresa Mansfield-Pellita, Nathaniel MacLeod's widow, had also called.

I returned Teresa's call.

She had news. She was letting me know, as I had asked her to do, that the police had released her husband's office. We could now go in. She had a key. She offered to meet me there. Her voice was smooth and smoky, with hints of this and that. It made me think of very fine whiskey, a reminder that there are places where the winter nights are long, that some things should linger on the tongue as their flavors emerged like memories coaxed out of dreams.

 

The first thing the devil does when he wants you back is offer you a few small lies that you can tell yourself as you walk yourself over to his side.

I did need to see the crime scene if I was going to continue.

It made perfectly good sense—indeed, it was more convenient—for Teresa to meet me there and let me in. There were many things she would know about her husband's work and his possessions that I couldn't understand without asking someone. In fact, there were many things I wouldn't even know to ask.

Also, the standard rule in federal and most state courts is that for crime scene evidence to be admissible, the examination has be witnessed, and she could be the witness.

Obviously, once she'd let me in, she would need to stay there with me.

That's how good the lies are; they're all true.

If the devil's in a really good mood, he offers, as a free promotional gift, one of his special cloaks made with the insulation of righteousness.

My head was spinning around with the story that Gwen had failed me. Make no mistake, the jabber box in my mind said. That she would even think of siding with Paul Plowright against me was worse than some simple act of sexual infidelity. Of course, I knew perfectly well that had Gwen been loyal in all things except some random sex act, then adultery would have topped my list of all available human betrayals.

The title of her sin wasn't what mattered. What mattered was what matters to children: she did it first! So what I did would be caused by her and cloaked in righteousness. I would be immune from blame.

When I heard Teresa's voice on the phone, an audiotape started rolling through my mind: “pretty fabulous . . . I'd learned a lot, a lot . . . tricks and toys and exploring the boundaries . . . . ” And I remembered the way she looked at me and the electricity of our connection.

As we were speaking, I had my to-do list in front of me, and I noticed the name of the other widow on it, Manny's beloved Susan. She was more than beautiful; she was graceful and gracious, which made the thought of despoiling her even more thrilling, and it was as if I'd already had Teresa and was craving the next woman down the line.

Something was slipping inside of me. But I didn't really know what or why.

There'd be lies and deception. It would get bigger and wilder, until I found a way to make it all crash. And it would be Angie who felt the most pain.

So I tried to think of Gwen in all the positive ways. She was lovely and sexy and wanted more adventures than we ever seemed to have time and money for. I conjured her up as I'd last seen her, in front of the Angels, the Third Millennium Choir of Angels, and my imaginary eye drifted to them, and a sniggering voice inside me said, “You know that good girls tanked up on Jesus are wilder than strippers snorting speed.”

You either stop. Or you don't.

There is no single act of sex that ever satisfies. No single drink or toke or snort or swallow or shot. When Johnny Cash was old, and both his body and his memories were full of pain, but he was off the pills, some reporter asked him, “If someone offered you a pill that would stop the pain, would you take it?”

And Johnny Cash said, “You mean, just one?”

I told myself that when I met Teresa, I would be all business. I would stay focused. I would concentrate on the job.

“So, do you want to meet me at the office?” Teresa asked when I hadn't replied right away.

I said, “Sure.”

She said, “When?”

I said, “How about now.”

“His book is missing,” Teresa said.

All the smoky, sexy flirtation was gone.

She was in Nathaniel's swivel chair, frantic and distraught, and she was taking the office apart. His desk drawers were open. She was pulling out his files, stacking them on the desktop, on the visitor's chair, and on the floor. Just as I came in, with my equipment kit in my hand, she took a set of stuffed manila folders and placed them right on top of the chalk outline that the crime scene techs had made where the gun had been found, oblivious to the idea that she was destroying the integrity of the scene, that if I discovered anything, a court could easily refuse to admit it.

“It was important,” she said. “It could be a really important book.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking I should have told her not to go in before me, not to touch anything until I had set up to record it. But I'd been too busy listening to the imps in my mind.

“Just stop,” I said. Maybe it couldn't be a full-scale, technical CSI, but at least I could get a sense of what might have happened and what couldn't have happened. “Give me a chance to see things as close to the way they were as possible. It's already been trampled on by twenty people, but let's not make it worse.” She paused for a moment and looked at me, close to tears. Though whether of grief or frustration or what, I didn't know.

She said, “I was wrong. I underestimated him. He was always talking about writing an important book. A book that would matter to people.

“You know what my attitude was, my secret attitude? It was, you're in the
philosophy department.
Of the
University of the Southwest.
” Her tone made it clear that she meant them as labels of derision, as if nothing that mattered had come out of a philosophy department for a hundred years. And if, by chance, it did, it had better come from a name-brand school—Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley—where the coastal elites reside. Not from our state university, huge and ambitious as the system might be. Now she felt guilty about it.

But her voice of mockery conveyed too much, too concisely; it was too practiced and came too easily for me to believe that it represented some private inner voice or that she'd kept her contempt to herself. She'd said it out loud, and said it just like that, and said it plenty of times to her late husband.

If it had been me, and I had the sort of ambitions that she claimed he did, I would have hated her for it—and said so. Or, if I'd kept silent and endured it, I would have hated myself, and something inside would have shrunk and dried and withered away. The great world mocks us, we in the Christian community—I know that—as backward and unsophisticated. But we at least try to understand men and women as we really are. And we don't let political correctness force us to lie to ourselves about our own nature. Women want love, but men, above all, want respect. And you can find that in the Bible: Ephesians 5:33.

Something of what I'd thought must have showed in my face.

“I'm sorry,” she said, not like she meant it but was annoyed that someone was being critical of her and she might have to admit to being truly wrong. Then she said, “I am sorry,” with a sigh and sadness, and meaning it. “All this time . . . since . . . I was thinking that I should get the book published. It would help give his life some meaning. So I was eager to come here, because I thought I could accomplish something, do something, find the book and . . . see to it. But it's gone.”

I knelt down to pick up the papers she'd put on the floor. “What are these? Where did they come from?”

“Student papers,” she said. “I don't know, from in the desk.”

“I'm going to put them back,” I said, gathering them. She didn't care.