Salvation Boulevard (28 page)

Then she stopped, let go, and sat up slightly straighter, not looking at me, and reached for her drink. She took a swallow, not a sip. After it went down, still facing away, she said, “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be.”

She got up, holding her glass, and walked out of the room into the bathroom. I heard the water run. When she came back, I saw that she'd washed her face, and she gave me a small, nervous, apologetic smile.

All I could say was, “It's okay.”

“Show me the rest,” she said, and we went through it quickly. When it was done, as I was disconnecting the camera, she stood up and, looking at me, said, “You're very good. You really are.”

“Thank you,” I said, looking back at her.

She came forward and kissed me, her mouth just slightly open and her lips very soft, and I could smell and taste both her and the bourbon, one almost as enticing as the other. It was quick, and it was over before I had a chance either to stop her or join her.

 

We sat in the living room. Me in the chair again, her on the couch, legs tucked up, as she liked to do, showing a lot of her thighs.

“Where do we go from here?”

“Like I said, I send the stuff out to the labs. I'll let you know in advance what it'll cost. If it turns out there are unidentified prints, particularly from the computer, I'll try to get the prints of the people I suspect and see if we have a match. This all would be much easier if I were still a cop”—able to have a DA get warrants and threaten people with the power of the state—“but . . . ”

I shrugged. I'd find some way. “While that's going on, I'll look for the girl.” That was about it, and I sounded like I was done.

“You're wearing a gun,” she said, which kept the conversation going. “You weren't before.”

“Well, it's . . . . ” I felt awkward about it. “Someone came at me.”

“You didn't tell me that.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because I didn't want to admit to a stranger, to a woman who wanted to go to bed with me, that my wife had betrayed me. I didn't want to say out loud to this university person, with all her condescending contempt for religion, in particular my kind of born-again, megachurch, evangelical faith, that another pastor, still another one, my own, the one who had brought me to Jesus, was involved with a young woman outside of his marriage and was possibly a murderer. And that he wanted to destroy me because I was stumbling toward the truth. Admitting it to her would be like turning on a light in a room I wanted to keep dark, and with her eyes upon it, I too would have to see it for what it really was.

She'd finished her first drink, and now she reached to pour another, but she paused and tilted the bottle toward me, offering. I declined, but it took a moment.

“It bothers you,” she said, figuring at least some of it out, “that these people whom you're so close to, whom you look up to, who tell you what's right and wrong, that they might be involved.”

I shrugged, like I didn't care.

Getting nothing out of that and seeing me adjust my body, preparing to get up to leave, she asked, “Can I see your gun?”

“That sounds like a line from an old movie.”

She laughed, “Yes. Yes, it does.”

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” she said back. “What you said before. About how you make up a narrative. If you start applying that to some of the other things you think—”

“Like believing,” I said, annoyed.

“Yes,” she said calmly. “Let's say that God is one of your narratives about this great crime scene we live in.”

“Why do you care about what I believe in?”

“Because you might decide to put your faith ahead of—”

“Of what you want,” I snapped, cutting her off.

“I was going to say, ahead of the truth.”

Would I, if I ever got there?

“So, I was going to say,” she went on, “that we have this great mystery. And we made up a narrative. Call it the God story. God did it, did it all. Then we said, ‘In fact, he's the answer to all the mysteries.' But the detectives among us, people who think exactly like you do, looked at that story and said, ‘All right, let's examine the evidence on the assumption that the story's true,' but they found things that were inconsistent with that story and facts that seemed to require a different story. If that happened to you in an investigation, you wouldn't hesitate to change your theory.”

“Like what?” I said, challenging her. But it felt like my mind was in two parts: one was on the surface, up front, certain and sure of my Lord and his word, but another, like some soulless accountant, was running the tallies in a back room, then sending e-mails to headquarters that the numbers weren't adding up.

“Well, let's take the narrative itself. I write. I'm not much of a writer; I just do academic stuff. But if I were God, I would be a perfect writer. So why did we have to have an Old Testament and then a new one. And all the different prophets in between, with the story always changing. Why not write it down, or have it written down, perfectly the first time?”

“Because we weren't ready to understand it. He gave it to us as we were ready. There were whole different periods. They're called dispensations, in case you don't happen to know that.”

“You know that doesn't make sense. There's nothing in the New Testament that the people in the Old Testament couldn't've understood.”

“God moves in mysterious ways,” I said, shaking my head. “We can't pretend to understand the mind of God.” Phrases I'd heard and used a thousand times, and they always seemed to answer for all. But speaking them in front of her, I heard them differently. They had the hollow sound of a suspect in the interrogation room who claims he was home alone watching the game on TV and, knowing it sounds too thin, tries to prove it by telling us the score.

“Everything moves in mysterious ways,” she said. “I can try to understand you, but you will always be a mystery to me, an interesting
and exciting one, but always a mystery. And me to you. We can't understand what an electron is—that's one of Nathaniel's favorite examples—but we make up a narrative about what it might be and then we put it in circumstances where we see if it acts like the thing we made up in our story. The ‘mysterious ways' thing is just a dodge to hide from the obvious truth, that the story doesn't make sense. In exactly the same way that the story of Nathaniel's suicide didn't.”

“And what am I going to do,” I asked, feeling like there were cold winds blowing down from the wilderness, “if I have no God?”

She looked at me caringly, came up off the couch and got on her knees beside me and took my hand. I wondered if this was how Nathaniel MacLeod got up inside Nicole Chandler, a little doubt, a loss of faith, and then, when the proposition came, there was nothing left to say no with, just the lost soul's sigh, “Why not?”

“You'll do what you're doing now. Trying to be a good man. Looking for the truth. You know what's right and wrong inside you, not because your pastor told you what it was.”

It sounded so good and so possible. She didn't know how crazy and destructive it could get. Or maybe she did, and that was what she wanted.

She was on her knees beside me, holding my hand. I bent forward and put my lips to hers, slowly and carefully, tasting. And it tasted quite as good as I expected, better even, warmer and more intuitively responsive to each nuance of what I seemed to want than I had imagined.

Then she was up in my lap, her arms around me, and my hand, which had been curious, so very curious for so long, began to stroke the smooth and tender flesh of her thigh. I wanted to take a long, tantalizing time getting where this was going. I left her thigh and trailed my hand, barely making contact, up over her belly to one of her breasts, exploring the shape and tenderness of it. I felt the nipple against my palm, and it grew firmer. I had been touching her lightly, as lightly as I could, but then I took her nipple between my thumb and forefinger and squeezed it hard, with just a touch of the barbarity she craved, and she sighed with recognition.

Then my cell phone rang.

It was Gwen.

I said, “Hello.”

She said, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was wrong.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I want to help. I think I know where Nicole might be.”

“Where?”

“In the citadel,” she said, meaning the cylindrical office building attached to the Cathedral.

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“Because,” she said.

“Because why?”

“I'll tell you when I see you, alright?” she said, sounding flustered.

“How could I get in there?” I said, not really asking her so much as thinking out loud.

“I know a lot of the security codes,” she said. “I'm so sorry. I want to help. You're my husband, and, and I should help.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Come home. Will you come home?”

“I better not,” I said. “Let me think of some place to meet. Then we'll figure things out. I'll call you.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow after work.”

“But—”

“Do as I say,” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

I hung up and looked at Teresa.

“I have to go now,” I said.

I looked down upon Gwen from the top of the atrium, three stories up.

I watched her walk to the specialty coffee shop, the one that roasted its own free trade, organic, kosher beans. I saw her stop and marvel at the prices they charged and compare them mentally with what we pay for Yuban at Wal-Mart. Amazing what you can imagine people are doing from looking at the top of their heads from forty feet in the air.

My cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. It was a discount attorney named Dante Mulvaney who worked out of a cubicle in one of the older office buildings downtown, close enough to the courthouse to walk. He shared a reception area and a secretary with four other lawyers with similar cubicles. I very much doubted he'd have any work I wanted.

I shut off the phone. Then I used the prepay cell I'd gotten from Jorge to call Gwen's cell. I asked her where she had parked. I told her to enjoy a latte or a cappuccino or whatever she wanted and then go back to her car. She said, “I don't understand.”

I said, “Just do it.”

Then I went out to the parking lot and got my rental car. I moved it near to where she had parked. When she came out of the mall, I watched some more. Nobody seemed to be following her. When she got into her car, I called her again. There was a diner about
three miles down the road. I told her to go there and, when she got there, to find an empty table near the back. I followed. The route required four or five turns. If anyone was following her or was with her, between the three or four of us, it would turn into a parade.

But as far as I could tell, she was alone. She hadn't set me up. My relief was immense.

It was late for lunch and early for dinner. There were about twenty people there and room for a hundred and twenty. Gwen was at the back, like I had asked her to be, at a round table set in a booth. When she saw me, she waved. Normal enough. She watched me eagerly, but nervously, as I came through the diner.

“Carl,” she said, as I slid into the padded bench seat across from her, “come home. Please, come home.”

“I want to,” I said. “But not yet.”

“I miss you. I miss Angie. I can't stand this, Carl.”

“We have to get things sorted first,” I said.

“Can't you just, I don't know, talk to people, get things settled?”

“Talk to who? Get what settled?”

“With . . . , ” she began but stopped, realizing, I expect, the trap of saying the names.

“With Paul Plowright and Jerry Hobson?”

She nodded, but miserably.

“Someone tried to kill me. So, if I settle with them, then they'll stop trying to kill me. Is that what you mean?”

“I can't believe . . . but if you believe it,” she said, forcing the words out of herself, “and you say it's so, then I have to . . . to agree.” She looked at me hopefully, though not happily.

“You can't have it both ways,” I said. “If it was somebody else, then settling with them does nothing. Somebody will still be after me. And Angie—or you—could turn into ‘collateral damage.' I can't live with that.”

She nodded. I was trying to protect my family. She could understand that. There was no arguing with that, and she reached tentatively across the table for my hand.

I put my hand around hers and held it. I so much wanted us back together.

A waitress came over and smiled at us holding hands. “Here's the menus,” she said. “You all call me when you're ready to order, unless you want something right away.”

“We're okay.”

“I see that. Take your time. I'm here when you want me.”

“That was nice,” Gwen said when she left.

“Look, Gwen, this is hard for you. It's hard for me too to think this way. That if it is Hobson and Plowright, then they're people who kill people. Or have people killed. Why should I settle with them?”

“They can't be. They just can't be. Not Paul, never. Jeremiah? No

. . . I can't . . . I'm sure there's an explanation. Just call them and talk to them.”

“They have my number. They can call me.”

“I miss Angie,” she said. “Both of you, so much.”