John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "They try to stay on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, television, radio, Bible lessons, talk shows, repeats, pageants, God only knows what. They have a lot of local talk shows scattered around, and for that they draw on their affiliated churches, about eighty of them. What happens, they get people to tithe, to send in ten percent of their income and sometimes even twenty and thirty percent.

  The money rolls in and the visitors roll in. Magazine and newspaper people, politicians, IRS, investigators from state and national committees, people writing books and lots and lots of hustlers. The big shots come in by private airplane and land on the strip back here beyond the hill where the Manse is.

  Some of them even get to stay in the Manse, which I understand is considered to be one of the finest small hotels in the world. At least it is staffed by people who used to work in fine hotels. ECB Enterprises has a couple of Gulfstream jets, a couple of small Beechcraft and a chopper along with a little tower and a staff of ten to fly and maintain them."

  2-4 "What do you mean about hustlers?"

  "Big money attracts all kinds. Healers keep coming around to hitch a ride on the big bandwagon, but the Meadows family doesn't seem to want to get mixed up with any charismatics.

  They stay on the fundamentalist side of almost everything.

  And, of course, a lot of people come around who want to be licensed to sell souvenirs and trinkets. Those are handled by some kind of corporate subsidiary. Photographs, paintings, lapel pins, brooches, bumper stickers and insignia of their Society of Merit."

  "Insignia?"

  "There's lots of levels and degrees. Like if you give a hundred thousand dollars to the Church, you become a Founder of the Society of Merit, and you get a gold pin with diamonds, and you get to be flown in and stay at the Manse. The Manse looks a hundred years old, but it's only six. The people who want to sell stuff, they screen them very carefully. Just like they screen the people who apply for space in the Mall. I kept my eyes and my ears open, Mr. Owen, and the mail has to be trucked out there every single working day. Lots of bags of mail. There is a big mail room in Communications. Deposits go to the bank in an armored car. I can't make a guess because I don't have the figures on how many people contribute and tithe and so on.

  But from what they spend and how they live, they've got to be taking in more than two million a week. Maybe an awful lot more. And the Church is tax-exempt. It got the exemption back in 1946 when old Matthew broke away from the Baptists and started his own church. He had sixty parishioners to start with, and one old lady died and left everything to him. He used the money to go on radio."

  "I've been watching the broadcasts. I see Matthew Meadows once in a while," Roy Owen said.

  Those are old repeats. He's got Alzheimer's disease. That's what they call senility these days. If they let him loose he wanders away and gets lost. What do you think of the television church services?"

  They seem very... well organized. Very attractive young people in the choir."

  The Angels. Some are students at Meadows University, and some of them work in the area, and some of them are kids in trouble that their folks bring and leave here. A lot of them live 2-5 in a dormitory inside the primary security area beyond the Garden of Mercy. The ones who aren't in school and don't have regular jobs have to do odd jobs around the area to pay for their keep."

  "You certainly learned a lot about it."

  Hanrahan slowly folded the map and handed it to Roy Owen.

  "You can have it. It wasn't hard finding out how they are organized up there and what goes on. It isn't any kind of illegal setup. I kept asking how I could get a security guard job and if it was hard work once I got it. Security guards talk because it is very dull standing around."

  "Why all the security? Why so much?"

  "I wondered too, at first. But pretty soon I realized why it has to be. John Tinker Meadows and his old man and his sister, they rope in their supporters by playing on their fears and on their hatreds and their loneliness. When you play that game with a big net, you are going to scoop up some people here and there who are pretty well unwrapped. Like they say, their elevators don't go to their top floors. There are metal detectors set into the frames of those big Tabernacle doors, and the guards are very good at quietly intercepting people going in. Six or eight times a year some loony tries to take a gun into church.

  Maybe God told them to blow John Tinker away, or take a shot at that big Sister Mary Margaret. Maybe in some sermon or other John Tinker told any Church member married to a sinner to pack up and get out. So the sinner brings a gun to get even. Or some nutcake decides he's so steeped in sin that the only way he can acknowledge it is blow his brains out during the service. By now do you know what I've been trying to tell you?"

  "I... I guess I do, Mr. Hanrahan. It's a great big powerful organization and they are geared to repel boarders of any kind.

  With that sort of money coming in, they could make themselves immune to almost any kind of nuisance approach. My wife was just one person in a big crowd of... hustlers."

  "And her chance of worming her way inside was zero, or the next thing to it. If they have to hire somebody to run the two-ton dishwashing machine in the Manse, they background them as carefully as the FBI and the CIA. Everybody working inside the primary security area has been cleared back to the cradle, and even so there is a lot of quiet surveillance going on."

  z6 Roy Owen took a card out of his wallet and slid it across to Hanrahan, saying, "Did I get it right when you phoned me?"

  He pushed the card back.

  "Exactly right. Lenore Olan instead of Linda Owen. Amateurs tend to stick with the same initials. Room sixteen at the County Line Motel, which is way on the other side of Lakemore. That's where she stayed. And that's where whatever happened began, or began and ended."

  Roy Owen was silent, remembering how Lindy had sounded when she'd phoned him on May sixth, that last Friday night he had heard her voice. Despondent was too strong a word.

  Listless and tired.

  "It isn't like I thought it would be," she had said.

  "There's a lot of stories here, but nothing Out Front I would want to use. And maybe there's a nice juicy Out Front story behind the scenes, but I don't think I'm going to get it. If one lead works, I might stay a couple of days, maybe not. I don't know. Maybe I'll give up this line of work. Makes me feel just a little bit tacky. Now don't tell me how happy that makes you, or I just might not quit." He remembered hearing the soft husky sound of her yawning just before she said good night, told him she loved him and hung up.

  "As I said in the written report, she phoned you on Friday night, Mr. Owen, and then she left the motel before dawn sometime during Saturday night. The motel owner didn't pay any attention particularly, because she was paid through Sunday. The room was empty and she and her rental car were gone. It was a cold trail by the time the police came into the picture. After you talked to her editor and said you couldn't reach her, they tried and then reported that she was a missing person."

  "The report wasn't very clear about the car."

  "Nothing is clear about the car. It was a Budget Ford on a corporate credit card. The license number was on the motel registration. When they traced it through Budget, they found out it had been brought here, to the airport lot. The keys and the rental agreement were in the glove compartment. The charge went through. By the time they found the car, it had been rented several times and it was down in Tampa. Car rental offices at airports have problems with people who cut it too close making their flight. They found the car in the airport lot on Monday, according to the charge they made on it, but 2-7 nobody knows when it entered the lot. Apparently there was no parking ticket issued, or it was lost."

  "So if something happened to her in Lakemore, somebody else drove the car down to this city, Mr. Hanrahan. And if she was the one who drove it down here, then something happened to her at this airport or at La Guardia, or in the city before she got to her apartment. Which was it?
"

  "She was Eastern Airlines coach, round trip, and her name did not show up on any of the manifests of any of the flights Saturday, Sunday or Monday, the seventh, eighth or ninth.

  The trail was ten days cold when the police got on it. And right now it's three months cold."

  "I know. I realize that. But it is hell not to know. You keep thinking about it and wondering."

  Hanrahan shrugged.

  "We've got fifty thousand kids disappearing every year and every year they come up with maybe two thousand unidentified bodies of kids. That means there are lots of people doing a lot of wondering. A lot of pain. I'm not trying to make yours sound like less..."

  "I realize that. I've got a month, a little less, of vacation. I'm in touch with my assistant. The market doesn't seem to be doing anything interesting. I don't want to be a dimned fool, but I keep thinking that if I could find somebody she got friendly with the time she was here... and if that person might have noticed anything... I don't know why, but I keep thinking of going to that motel and staying in that same room."

  "I can tell you it's not much of a place." He stood up.

  "There's nothing more I can do. I don't know what happened, if anything, and I don't know how to find out. I don't think that hanging around that area is going to do you any good. On the other hand it isn't going to do you any harm. And it will keep you from wondering if you could maybe have done something."

  "I appreciate all your time and trouble, Mr. Hanrahan. What do I owe you?"

  "Let's say you paid me up to date. This little conference was on the house."

  Hanrahan shut the door quietly behind him, leaving a faint stale smell of cigar in the hotel room. Roy Owen looked at the crude map Hanrahan had given him. Manse. Mall. Tabernacle. Careful printing.

  He folded the map and took his round-trip air ticket out of the zipper pocket in his carry-on case. The return reservation was open. He found the airline number in the yellow pages.

  The recorded message told him to please stay on the line, one of the agents would be with him shortly. They played zither music to him, a Hungarian tempo vaguely familiar. He thought about Lindy again and the soft sound she had made when she yawned into the phone in her motel room in Lakemore.

  And he thought about Janie, about how strange she had been lately. The place to be was with the child. But what do you tell the child? Daddy couldn't find out anything about Mommy. Nobody knows anything about Mommy. Nobody knows where she is. Hell of a thing to try to explain to a child harboring some kind of fright, tucked far away inside her.

  The zither music stopped and a voice said, This is Caroline.

  May I help you?"

  "Would that you could," he said.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I'm sorry. I guess I've changed my plans," he said, and put the phone back on the cradle.

  2-9 Three Finn Efflander sat alone in one of the leather chairs at the side of the long executive conference table. He had kicked a moccasin off and had one heel braced on the seat of his chair, his long fingers laced around his ankle, knee sharply bent. Idly and patiently he watched the interconnecting door to John Tinker Meadows' suite and waited for the man to come out.

  Behind Efflander, the door to the old man's office was open wide. Efflander had learned through observation and experiment that John Tinker Meadows was slightly more tolerant and flexible in his judgments when he could see into his father's office.

  Efflander believed it was a daddy hangup, some suppressed guilt over taking over the store. All those plaques and citations on the wall, and all those pictures of a younger and more vital Matthew Meadows standing with the past and present celebrities of the world, all smiling out at John Tinker. Dr. Meadows and Sadat. Dr. Meadows and Churchill, Gary Cooper, Pat O'Brien, Herbert Armstrong, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Paul Harvey, Walter Cronkite, Tammy Baker, Howard Cosell.

  Finn Efflander exhaled slowly and deeply, reaffirming his posture and expression and appearance of languid ease, of mild amusement, of sleepy self-contempt. He could maintain this outward image when his bowels were turned to slime by anxieties, when his ears rang with tension, his mouth was dry, his hands wet, his heart banging. The look of total ease was his working armor, his costume. Basically impatient, he had taught himself a patience so endless it flattened those who tried to bargain with him and out wait him. Even when all his nerves were pulled so tight they sang, he could yawn and drawl and shuck around all afternoon. He was a long-limbed man in his early forties with pallid skin pocked with old acne scars. His cobweb-fine brown hair was receding rapidly. His eyes were hooded, his smile habitual, and he could make a brand-new custom suit look, within hours, as if he had bought it for three dollars from the Salvation Army.

  The door swung open and John Tinker came striding in.

  Finn lowered his cramped leg and smiled and said, "People say you done good this morning."

  John Tinker sat in the armchair at the head of the table and said, "It seemed as if I was getting a good feedback. It ran a little short. I left out a section of it. Didn't mean to. Just one of those things. I just checked the phone banks across the way. All the operators are busy. That's about the best way to keep score."

  "I've got a sort of agenda, here, John, but not in any special order of importance."

  "You always say that."

  "Just one of my nervous mannerisms. Nicpac is after a donation."

  "Because they did so great last time? Ha! And this isn't even an election year. What do you think?"

  "Down the road I can see little continuing areas of vulnerability. Tax quibbles. Direct satellite broadcasting regulations, new rules on cable access. What we all want, Nicpac keeps saying, is less government regulation. So, through Nicpac, we help support our friends in the government. They are going after funds from everybody. PTL, Moral Majority, 700 Club, Worldwide Church of God, Trinity, CBN. But they are all a little edgy about giving because of the People for the American Way campaign, which keeps saying that organizations qualifying for tax-deductible gifts cannot participate directly or indirectly in any political campaign. And Nicpac is a political entity."

  "What are they asking for?"

  "Quarter mil."

  "But they'll take a hundred thousand?"

  "Gladly. Happily."

  "So work it out with Joe Deets. It should come out of the Henrietta Fund, I think. Then we won't have trouble with those American Way fellows."

  Finn nodded. He scribbled a note to himself.

  "Okay. We're turned down again on accreditation."

  "But I thought you'd worked out something."

  "I thought I had too, but we can't fit into that NonTraditional designation either. It's full of art schools, diploma mills and such. So I've been on the phone with eight college presidents who share our problem. Between us we've come up with a list of thirty-four unaccredited institutions, and we've tentatively agreed that a new accrediting body is needed.

  NAROCU. Nah-ROW-koo."

  "Nahwhat?"

  "National Association of Religiously Oriented Colleges and Universities. If the nine of us come up with thirty thousand each and we tap the others for whatever they can stand still for, we can set up a headquarters, hire a couple of retired academics with respectable degrees and establish an accrediting procedure. We'll have some fair standards, of course. It will take a few years to establish some real plausibility, but in time we should be able to get a handle on our fair share of federal funds, and the degrees we grant will be more meaningful. Okay to run with it?"

  "Good work. Good creative thinking!"

  "But I want to ease out of it as soon as it starts to lift off the ground. I have enough to look after. Anyway, here's where we stand as of the Friday close." He took the familiar summary printout from his dispatch case and put it in front of John Tinker Meadows.

  The printout covered all of the Church accounts, all of its assets in all of its various pockets, along with the bank and security accounts of the ECB Foundation, the Et
ernal Trust and all the smaller investment accounts. It revealed the gain since the previous accounting, showing the amounts added by both donations and market value increases. The grand total was quite unreal. It used to give John Tinker a fluttering feeling just under the heart, making it difficult for him to take a deep breath. But instead of triumph he now saw merely numbers.

  Lots of them, adding up to meaningless totals.

  The second sheet of the printout was an interim profit-and loss statement which covered all of the commercial operations and commercial entities.

  "All in good health?" he asked.

  "All thriving," said Efflander.

  "Just one small problem. One of the flying squadrons of the IRS is making Rolf Wintergarten nervous."

  "He's being well paid to stay nervous," John said.