Salvation Boulevard (40 page)

“Never. It was Jeremiah.”

“Me? You lying fool. We had it all, billions, and you couldn't control yourself,” Jerry snapped at him.

“Don't listen to this man. He is a dishonest man. He is a man of violence. Surely you know that. I would never do such a thing. It was him. You missed the sermon, Carl. I am building a City of God. Think of the good we will do, the service to God. We're this close to making the vision real! This close. Don't stop it now!”

“It was under control, under control,” Jerry yelled at him. “I leave you alone for two minutes, and you have to shoot him.”

“He was an atheist, a militant atheist,” Plowright said, preaching to me. “I saw him destroy young minds, seduce them, steal their faith. And he mocked God. He mocked Jesus. He laughed and called Christians deluded fools. You know what he said to me? He said to me, ‘Your religion is to faith what pornography is to sex.'”

“You!” Gwen cried as she stepped out from behind the protection of the filing cabinet, “You”—she pointed her finger at Paul Plowright—“have angered the Lord. You have broken his covenant.”

“Get back,” I said, but she ignored me like I didn't exist.

“Jerry,” I yelled. “Keep your gun pointed at me. If it moves a quarter inch in her direction, I'll shoot you. If you even flinch, I'll shoot you, the both of you. I don't care.”

Gwen kept walking toward Plowright. Her voice was unnaturally calm and uncannily certain, and she spoke the words that Jesus said. “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

Jerry and Jorge looked at her like she was simply crazy.

But Plowright looked shaken, truly shaken. It was as if, instead of Gwen, that loyal, familiar member of his congregation, one of the many insignificant employees from down below, he was seeing an avatar, a sword-carrying angel of righteousness who possessed her and spoke through her, and its voice said, “Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.”

“Gwen, get down,” I said.

“Be without fear,” she said to me. “My savior is my shield.”

She turned her gaze on Jerry. “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils and the hold of every foul spirit.”

“Don't fuckin' move, Jerry,” I yelled.

“Put your gun down, Carl,” he yelled back at me, “or she's dead. Do it, Carl. Fuckin' do it.”

“Gwen, get down,” I called to her.

“He will keep me safe from the hands of this Philistine.” The clarion certainty of her words rang true. He would; yes, He would. Unless Jerry shot and a bullet entered her.

“If your gun moves a millimeter, Jerry, you're dead,” I called out frantically.

Then Gwen turned on Hobson. With the words that Joshua spoke to the Israelites, she uttered God's curse upon him. “Ye have transgressed the covenant of the Lord. Ye shall perish quickly.” The words of the Book have power and tap our primal fears. No man is so rational that when the voice of the prophet calls his name to ride the hell-bound train, he will not waver. And Hobson flinched.

Jorge sensed the hesitation. He seized the moment and launched himself sideways, twisting out of Jerry's grip.

As Guzman went clear, I fired.

The big .45 slug hit Jerry's chest, right over his black heart. I fired again. That one hit him too, even before the impact of the first shot made him stagger back. His arms flew up. Arterial blood spurted from his chest. And then I fired another, a tracking shot, as he fell.

I turned the gun on Jorge. He was reaching for the slim little Beretta that he had on his belt under his suit jacket. He stopped. He pulled the gun out with his finger tips and dropped it. He backed up toward the lobby.

Plowright made a run for his private elevator. He was unarmed. I wasn't going to shoot him. But as I turned to see what he was doing, Jorge lunged toward the door and made it out. I let him go and went for Plowright, but the elevator closed before I could reach him.

 

We watched on the TV screen as, moments later, Paul Plowright ran out on the stage. He yelled, “There's murder, murder, murder in the house of God. Upstairs. In the citadel. Evil is unleashed. Murder. Stop them. We must save the City of God.”

He was waving his hands and pointing, and he struck his hand against the cross. Several of the tubes broke, the glass slashed his hand, and he started to bleed. In frustration and fury, he shoved the cross away, then realized what he was doing and tried to grab it and save it.

Clutching the crumbling cross, he suddenly froze.

He reeled, turning in a circle. He let go of the cross, and it fell across the model, smashing and breaking into thousands of fragments. Plowright put a hand to his head and staggered. His feet caught in the cables, and then he fell.

When he fell, the high-voltage line that was tangled at his ankles was yanked from the ballast box, and it arced. The arc set the cloth drapes around the bottom of the display on fire.

The model city was made of cut foam and plastic, balsa wood, and paint, and the moment a flame touched it, it offered itself up as if fire had always been its true desire. It hissed and it crackled and it sighed, and it seemed that out of the sounds of destruction, there came the mad cackle of John the Revelator, crying out from Chapter 18, “Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to naught.”

So many things must come from that moment. Running off in different directions, crisscrossing each other, as we all work out our own destinies.

 

Gwen and I had each been in the same place, lived through the same moments, heard the same words, threats, confessions, lies, and pleas.

She had experienced the presence of the Lord. He had held her in the palm of his hand. He had protected her with his sword and shield.

Admittedly, I was a little miffed that she gave Him all the credit and none to me, as if I hadn't kept Jerry in check and finally killed him. As if I were merely an incidental instrument of the Lord, to the degree that I mattered at all. But that's a minor thing.

I loved her more than ever. I was in awe of her faith and the courage it gave her. I envied it.

But I could not share it.

I didn't think that Paul Plowright had erred in spite of his faith. In his sexual misconduct, and even some of what followed from it, he could be seen as a sheep who had strayed. But he had also committed crimes as a direct result of his faith. The same faith that gave him the strength to do great and good things told him to commit deceptions
and theft and to engage in coercion and conspiracies, even murder, certain that he was good and righteous and doing the work of the Lord.

It wasn't a matter of finding some other church, maybe one less dogmatic and certain. Or some other pastor, one less powerful and less of a sinner. The lesson of the parable, for me, was that belief, in and of itself, was neither good nor evil. It wasn't even a guide to good and evil. They existed independently of faith, came from a different source and resided in a different place. That struck at the very root of the thing. It couldn't be fixed by trimming branches here and there.

Where would Gwen and I go from there?

 

If Gwen and I couldn't make it, what would happen to Angie?

Even if we could, then what? I had exposed the leader of our community. I had killed his closest advisor. Rumors were already flying around. No one knew the truth; most of them wouldn't believe it even after they heard it. How could Angie go back to school? How could she go to church in the face of all that?

Did I want her to go to Third Millennium Christian Academy? Or to any other religious school where people like Paul Plowright set the curriculum and taught that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, that obedience came ahead of thinking, that the world was seven thousand years old, and where they were so obsessed with the sins of lust that their moral compasses only and always pointed due south to the genitalia?

Homicide is the taking of someone's life by another person. I had committed homicide.

Despite what the Ten Commandments say or how they're translated, homicide is not a crime.

There are a whole variety of circumstances in which it is not a crime. When it is ordered by the state, as in war or an execution. When the police use lethal force, in a reasonable way, carrying out their duties. When it is an accident. Provided that it was not done during the commission of a crime and provided that there was no contributory negligence.

Finally, and most importantly for me, when the killing is done in self-defense or in defense of another.

Facts do not speak for themselves.

As a matter of law and as a practical matter, a district attorney speaks for the facts. He speaks to a grand jury. There are exceptions, and in some states it's different, but in our state he makes a presentation to a grand jury. The person who committed the homicide, which is at that point not yet a crime, may speak to the grand jury and present his version of the facts. The grand jury determines if the homicide is a crime.

In almost every circumstance, the grand jurors decide how the district attorney wants them to decide.

“Your case is a clear case of justifiable homicide,” my attorney, Max Hernandez, said.

That was the good news, and my body automatically sighed with relief, though my mind knew there was more coming.

“Provided we accept the facts as you told them to me.”

At the very beginning, which seemed like long ago, Manny had told me, “I promise you this at least. If you get charged with anything, this firm will defend you. At no cost to you. You have my word on it.” I had called in his marker.

As the flames devoured the model of Paul Plowright's dream, I tracked down William Thatcher Grantham III on his cell phone. He was in the locker room at Kavanaugh Golf Club. It was true that I was no longer working for Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb when I shot Jerry Hobson, but I told him that I had only continued the job because I'd made a promise to Manny.

He listened until I was done. “Manny was my friend,” he said.

They assigned Max Hernandez, a relatively new associate. He was a local boy who'd gone to USW, then to Columbia Law. He spent three years with the Manhattan district attorney's office because he liked criminal law. He'd come home because he liked it here better than there, then joined Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb because he liked money too.

While I told him the short version of what I knew, Max had taken notes. He paused thoughtfully, looking at them, then he said, “This is a pretty high-profile shooting. There's going to be pressure to bring charges. If the DA doesn't, then there will be howls of outrage, and the Christian community is a very politically important group. They're not going to want to accept that a couple of their leaders were involved in kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder, which led you to commit justifiable homicide.”

“There are witnesses,” I said.

“Bear with me here,” Max said. “I was an ADA, just like you were a cop, so I know how prosecutors think.

“If I were prosecuting, and I wanted to put you away, here's what I would say.

“You entered into a conspiracy, with your wife and Nicole Chandler to extort money from the Cathedral of the Third Millennium and Paul Plowright in particular.

“You were short of money. I'd pull up your financials and establish that.

“You heard Paul Plowright talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Wow, that sounded great. You wanted a piece of that.

“Maybe you did hear rumors that Plowright had sexual relationships with some of his congregation. But you didn't even have to hear it. You could have just thought it up yourself. Look what happened to Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker. From millionaires to nobodies overnight. Plowright should be willing to pay a couple of hundred thousand to keep from turning into the next Ted Haggard.

“You found a girl, Nicole Chandler. She had been seduced by a lecherous, old, atheist professor over at Secular U. Under his spell, she came to hate religion and Plowright in particular. You said, Hey, we got a way for you to really get at this guy. Just say you were having sex with him. True or pretend, it doesn't matter. He'll have to pay, big time, and you can have a share.

“Then you decided to really dress it up.

“You made up a DVD that said he was having girls beat up and raped.

“The DVD was there; you were there; it's yours.

“Maybe you staged the scene with Polasky—fake blood, all of that. Maybe you really tortured him. There's a corpse, so we know he's dead. You have the DVD, so you're my number one suspect for that killing too. Why kill him? If you tortured him, the reason is obvious, and so is the arson to cover it up. If you faked it, you killed him because he had second thoughts, or you didn't want to share four ways.

“Daniel Polasky is not available as a witness. Nobody can ask him what happened. Jorge Guzman is not going to come forward and admit that it was his DVD.

“Next stop, you and your wife and Nicole break into Plowright's private offices and private apartment. Yes, you broke in. Just because employees have access to certain parts of an institution doesn't mean they can enter places they're not authorized to go. That's breaking and entering just as much as if a stranger did it.

“You bring a sack of sex toys and dirty DVDs and the torture DVD with you. Your plan is to plant the sex toys and all the rest in Plowright's apartment. Put the DVD in the player, then when he comes up from his sermon, surprise him. Here's the girl. Here's a really embarrassing collection of marital aids and pornography. Here's a video alleging physical assaults and rapes. How about a couple of hundred grand, maybe a million?