Salvation Boulevard

by Larry Beinhart

  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.”

  “You want anything to eat?”

  “No, I can’t eat.”

  “A soda? We should probably order something.”

  “Sure, alright.”

  I waved at the waitress and ordered a Diet Coke for her, the grilled chicken platter special and coffee for myself. “I missed lunch, running around,” I said to Gwen.

  She smiled, pleased at the normality of it. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Eating regularly? The place you’re staying, is it alright?”

  “It’s clean. And I’m not starving to death, no. But I miss your cooking.”

  “I wish I were a better cook. I try.”

  “You do fine,” I said.

  Our waitress brought my coffee. I stirred in some cream. “What makes you think Nicole’s in the tower?”

  “This is terrible, Carl. I don’t like to . . . maybe she’s not. I don’t know.”

  “Well, tell me what you do know.”

  “You think she’s”—it was hard for her to say it—“she’s having a relationship with Paul.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s what, well, what some of the girls say. His private apartment, that’s where . . . the girls say”—she couldn’t bear to be the one saying these things and had to put the words off on others—“that’s where he . . . goes.”

  “With his girls.”

  “I guess,” she said, desperately reluctant to acknowledge it. “Yes.”

  “So there’s more than one.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think about it.”

  “What do they say? With his girls or with his girlfriend?”

  “With ‘someone special,’” she said.

  “Alright, he goes to his private apartment with someone special. Did anyone say Nicole Chandler was his someone special, his ‘own special angel’?”

  “One of the other girls in the choir,” she said. “When I was asking

  . . . I did what you wanted . . . I asked if anyone’d seen Nicole or what she was up to, and one of the girls said, in a catty kind of way, ‘Oh, Pastor Paul’s special angel.’ Then she said, ‘Maybe he’s locked her away in his ‘own special heaven.’ And I asked, ‘What’s that mean?’ She said, ‘The private apartment, so near to God.’ I mean, normally, I just refuse to listen to things like that. But . . . but now I did. This is horrible, Carl. I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Can’t you . . . ”

  “That’s not a lot to go on.”

  “No,” she said unhappily. “I know it’s not, but I thought . . . I thought if I showed you I was trying to help, you’d come back.”

  “I want to come back,” I said. “I do.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, with the unspoken question—when?—on the end.

  “When it’s over,” I said again. “How can I get in?”

  “Do you really want to do that?” she asked. Her tone let me know that she’d still rather I didn’t.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I thought you would,” she said.

  “Will you help me?”

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly.

  CTM has very good security thanks to Jerry Hobson. Most of the locks are number pads. Gwen is constantly going in and out. I never asked because there was no reason to, but now I did. “You know the codes?”

  She gave me a tight little nod.

  “Including the one to the private apartment?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve brought papers up, and once or twice he said, ‘This is private. Put it in my apartment,’ and told me the code.”

  “He trusts you a lot.”

  “I feel very bad about this.”

  “Look, if there’s nothing wrong, no girl hidden away there, then we’ve found out he’s innocent, and we’ll both feel a lot better. But if we don’t go, this will fester forever. You’ll never be able to believe in him again, not entirely, and things will never be right between us. There’ll always be the question. So, if we’re going to have a marriage, and if we’re going to be members of the CTM community, then we have to get this settled, and I don’t know any other way to do it.”

  “Alright,” she said, nodding miserably.

  “Good,” I said. “Sooner rather than later. Let’s do it tonight.”

  “No, not tonight,” she said, sounding frightened. That was natural enough. It was one thing to talk about it, another to face doing it. But it turned out that she had a specific reason. “They’re setting a special stage set and display of the City on the Hill with a giant cross—I mean giant for inside—that they plan to build outside, later, and they’ll be working late. And you know how those things go. They always take longer than everyone expects. They could be there all night tonight and Saturday too.”

  “When then?”

  “Sunday night would be best. Sunday night it’s quiet. But late, midnight. And . . . and you could go in from the college side.” The way she stuttered showed that even though she’d agreed, it still wasn’t easy for her. “You wouldn’t have to go through the Cathedral at all.”

  “Here’s what I need you to do,” I said. “Get me the keypad codes to get in, go up the elevator, then into his office and his apartment.”

  She nodded.

  “Gwen, listen. Can you go there tomorrow?”

  “I’m supposed to, to help with the choir.”

  “Good. Walk it through. Not all at once but in pieces. Notice where there are locks. Then make sure you have the codes. I don’t want to get in and get halfway and find some stupid door we didn’t think of.”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “Then we’ll meet up sometime Sunday afternoon. We’ll go over it all, and you’ll give me the numbers.”

  “Sunday afternoon,” she said, sounding sad and wistful.

  “Sunday afternoon,” I said, putting my hand over hers and looking her in the eyes. “We’re going to get our Sunday afternoons back, baby. We will.”

  She looked at me, her eyes brimming with tears and with love. “I want that. I want our Sunday afternoons back.”

  45

  Dante Mulvaney had left a message and marked it urgent.

  “I caught the Nazami thing,” he said when I called him back.

  My gut reaction was, Oh, no! Poor Ahmad. Dante’s a lifetime member of the “meet ’em and plead ’em” club.

  “It’s a big case,” I said, trying to pump him up. “Make a name for yourself.”

  “Nah, it’s a piece o’ shit,” Dante said.

  “I’m telling you—” I began.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, like a guy who’s upended his piggy bank for bus fare and doesn’t want to hear about the express that’s just twenty bucks more.

  “Well then?” I asked.

  “Kid insisted—insisted—I bring you.”

  “Bring me?”

  “Yeah, I show the kid gold—I’m talking a pile of shinin’ shekels—and he says, no, he has to talk to you first. Whaddaya you two got, a thing goin’?”

  “Dante, would you tell me what’s goi
ng on—in order?”

  “Yeah, sure. Caught the case. Lo and behold, DA’s office calls me. They got an offer. Man two. For a guy put a gun to another guy’s ear and capped him, that’s lower than as low as it can go. And all he does is seven to fifteen. Keeps his nose clean, he’ll be out in five ’n’ a half. What’s not to love?”

  “Have you seen the state’s material yet?”

  “Nah, but everybody knows, the kid confessed.”

  “Have you seen the confession?”

  “What? What’s to see? I’m gonna overturn a confession? Come on, come on.”

  “I think the kid’s innocent,” I said.

  “And I think my daughter’s a virgin.”

  “So what happened?”

  “So, I schlep all the fuckin’ way up the fortress of stone—for just one case,” he said, wanting sympathy and commiseration, because the game, when you’re getting the state rate of $35 an hour, is to have at least three or four guys to see, give them each fifteen minutes, then bill for full hours, and maybe bill the travel time in multiples too. “I offer him the deal, and he says no. So how about you help me out, run up there, and tell him this thing’s golden, and let’s wrap it up. Whaddaya say, Carl?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t think I was interested in convincing Ahmad to take a deal, but I did want to talk to him. “When?”

  “No time like the present,” Dante said, which I took to be a sign of how little work he had. “Let’s put a bow on it and deliver it to the judge.”

  “You set it up?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll ding ’em right now.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Call me back, give me the time, and I’ll meet you up there.”

  “Why’n’t you swing by. I’ll go up with you,” he said.

  I knew he wanted a free ride and then he’d bill for the mileage. I understood. Every nickel counts. Especially since the price of gas more than doubled this year, and the state won’t raise the mileage allowance until the legislature votes on a new budget next January. But I was driving around with one eye in the rearview mirror, and who knew, maybe Mulvaney was setting me up. He’d do it for fifty bucks. Why not? It was more than his hourly rate.

  46

  Ahmad looked better. A lot better. He had much of his dignity back.

  I guessed that a lot of it came from the Koran he held in his hand.

  “Thank you for coming to see me,” he said.

  “I tried earlier,” I said.

  Dante, a fat man with a brush mustache and sad eyes, was already sweating in the closed, dead air of the prison’s interview room, and he looked uncomfortable in his suit. It wasn’t a very good suit, but he wore it because he believed that’s what lawyers did. His tie was loose, and the top button of his shirt was open. He didn’t have much choice about that. He had more neck than it would hold. “Carl here can tell you,” he said, eager to be done and on his way, “what a golden deal I got for you. Right, Carl?”

  “Have you made any progress with the investigation, Mr. Vanderveer?” Ahmad asked. However tight he held his holy book, he could only squeeze solace out of it. He was reaching out to me for hope.

  “Yes, I think I have,” I said. He exhaled, releasing the fear that I was there as the bearer of evil tidings. “But I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Of course,” he said politely.

  Mulvaney rolled his eyes.

  “I see you have a Koran,” I said.

  “Yes, it helps.”

  “I thought . . . you being close to MacLeod . . . and I talked to that imam before he was shot, and he gave me the impression that you weren’t a particularly good Muslim.”

  Ahmad smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It transformed him. Suddenly he was someone who had a life, with laughter and pleasure and memories. “Oh, yes, he was quite upset with me.”

  “The raisins,” I said.

  The smile turned into a grin. Then a chuckle. “Yes, the raisins.”

  “What the fuck are you guys talkin’ about?” Mulvaney asked.

  “You need to be sure,” I said, “that they can’t paint you as a fanatical Islamicist.”

  “I was raised in Islam,” he said, the smile fading to something wistful and sad. “The things we have around us when we’re children”—it was strange to hear that from someone young enough to be my son—“they’re very strong. I can’t have my mother and father, my sisters and my cousins . . . the food, any of it . . . but I can have this,” he said, gesturing with the book, which had an intricate design and Arabic letters on the cover. “It’s funny. I wouldn’t have thought of it. It was CO Peale who suggested it.”

  “Leapy?” I asked, incredulous that Leander Peale, dedicated member of the congregation of the Cathedral of the Third Millennium, had turned someone on to Islam.

  “At first, he tried to bring me to Christ.”

  “That sounds right,” I said. And it would have helped his case.

  “But . . . . ” He shrugged. “Then he said I needed something. To make it through. And also, he told me that if I get released into gen pop, I’ll need a group. He thought I could hang with the Black Muslims.”

  Desperate times.

  “The motive is supposed to be that MacLeod was an apostate,” I said, which wouldn’t work if Ahmad was practically an atheist, but it might fly if he came into court clutching a volume with Arabic squiggles on the front.

  “I may need something to hold onto,” he said. “But I still have my rational mind.”

  “Get on with it, get on with it,” Mulvaney said, snapping his fingers on both hands.

  “Tell me about the girl,” I said to Ahmad.

  “What girl?”

  I took a picture of Nicole Chandler from my pocket and showed it to him.

  “Oh, Nina,” he said, using the name she’d gone by at USW, and it was clear from his tone and expression that he liked her. Liked her a lot.

  “Tell me about her.”

  “I don’t know that much,” he said, his features tightening in concentration. “She didn’t . . . she wouldn’t talk about herself. Only about ideas.”

  “Tell you what, tell me about her in chronological order—when you first met her, what happened, what happened next.”

  Ahmad nodded. “She would come to the class . . . . ”

  The first class she just sat in back, like a stranger in a strange land. That appealed to Ahmad because it was how he felt much of the time. At the same time, she looked like his dream American girl: blonde and clean and pretty, but not so gorgeous as to be one of the unobtainable goddesses.

  After class, she hurried off. Not talking to anyone, avoiding even eye contact.

  But she came back, and in the third class, things changed.

  The subject was the problem of evil: if God is good, all knowing, all powerful, and the creator of all things, how can there be evil in the world? It’s a very old question, going back at least to Epicurus, around 300 BC. There is a whole subcategory of theology, called theodicy, that is still attempting to deal with it twenty-three hundred years later.

  MacLeod was presenting his own version, which was colorful, and had a little twist at the end.

  A man is sitting beside a pool, enjoying his cigar and a mojito. A woman and her child are nearby. A stone falls out of the sky and knocks the woman out. Unattended, the child falls into the pool. It’s only three feet deep, so it would be easy for the man to get up and rescue the toddler, but he sits by and watches the child drown. When the woman wakes up, she finds her baby dead. She screams and weeps. She yells at the man smoking his cigar, “Why didn’t you save my baby?” The man tells her she should be grateful for this great chance to experience grief and loss. Furthermore, she should love and adore him for giving her that opportunity.

  Then MacLeod asked the class if they thought the man’s actions were evil. Everyone had to agree that they were, but the metaphor was obvious, and one student spoke up. “That’s true for a man,” he said, “
but not for God. God moves in mysterious ways, and we can’t understand the mind of God.”

  “Fine,” MacLeod said. “Let’s accept that for the moment.

  “Here’s the question, the real question. We all agree that the man was evil. How is it that we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than we hold God?”

  Ahmad, who was peeking at the mystery girl, saw that the question had reached in and caught her like a hook. After class, she approached MacLeod and spoke with him.

  From then on, she would join their professor after almost every class, sometimes alone, but usually with two, three, or four other students. When they talked about the subject of religion and philosophy, she seemed very involved. Not just in an intellectual way, but in a very emotional way. Her academic background was very spotty. MacLeod constantly said, oh you must read this, you must read that, and soon started bringing her books and essays to read.

  But she never talked about her private life. She fended off personal questions and avoided any social involvements. Ahmad had tried, several times, to get her to join him for coffee, a movie, or a campus event. Others did too. “We’re going to the concert at Farrell Hall tonight. It’s free. Wanna come?” She always said no.

  In class, she continued to sit in the back and rarely spoke, as if she felt she didn’t really belong there and was afraid of being found out.

  I asked him if he thought she and MacLeod had a sexual relationship. He said no very definitely. I said it sounded as if she clung onto his every word. How could he be so certain of it?

  One day after class, Ahmad told me, she had approached MacLeod and clearly asked to speak to him alone. Nate excused himself from the other students and went off with her. Ahmad followed them to a campus coffee bar. He sat where he could see them, but not so close that he could hear what they said. Nina, the name he knew Nicole by, seemed distressed, near to tears. And very uncomfortable to be so upset in public.

  They got up and left.

  Ahmad, curious or jealous or some combination of the two, continued to follow them. They went to MacLeod’s office. After they entered and closed the door behind them, he stood outside in the hallway and tried to listen. There was a lot he couldn’t hear. Also, when people came by, he had to move away from the door and pretend he was waiting for an appointment. From what he managed to make out, it seemed that she was crying over a man she’d been having a relationship with, who was older and married. Nate had opened her eyes to how wrong it all was, how deluded she’d been. She said some other things, very softly, murmuring, maybe embarrassed.