“This was a few months before I met Barney,” she went on. “He was in his last year of seminary, that was down in Georgia, and Roy was two years behind him, but they’d gotten to be casual friends. On a long weekend or a break between terms, I forget which, they went to one of those Gulf Coast resort towns along the Florida panhandle that college kids like so much—Panama City, I think it was. Anyway, Barney, who never has been a very good swimmer, went out a little too far off shore and got caught in an undertow. Roy swam out and carried him in. Barney was unconscious—blue, the way Roy told it—and he gave Barney artificial respiration for a long time, by whatever method they used back then. A crowd gathered. Barney told me that the first thing he remembered when he regained consciousness was this mob of people standing around him on the beach. Roy was a hero.”
“And your husband owed him his life.”
“Yes,” she said soberly, “and it’s a debt that he’s been paying off for almost fourteen years now, Archie. I don’t mean to sound bitter, and I certainly didn’t mean to go on this much. Forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive. I assume your husband brought Meade in as an assistant because of this debt.”
Elise ran a finger along one nicely arched eyebrow. “It was about a year after Barney got here, and all we had then was that small church building—we call it the Cana Chapel now—that you probably saw on your tour with Nella the other day. Roy came looking for work; he’d had several positions since seminary, the last one as an assistant minister at a little parish someplace in the Tennessee mountains, and it hadn’t worked out, something about a difference in philosophy between him and the senior pastor. He asked Barney for a job, and you can guess what happened.”
“Barney couldn’t say no.”
“That’s right,” she answered, setting her jaw. “At that point, we were just getting started here, and we weren’t in a position to afford another pastor, but as you phrased it, Barney couldn’t say no. I urged him not to hire Roy. I reminded him they had never really been all that close before the swimming incident, but he went ahead anyway. He said he owed it to Roy.”
“That decision couldn’t have been too much of a calamity, given the way the church has grown since then.”
She leaned back in her chair and let her shoulders sag. She still looked dazzling. “I wouldn’t call it a calamity, by any means. Roy played a big part in the success of the Silver Spire,” she said, “but …”
“But you never liked him.”
Her shoulders sagged some more, making me wish I could do something to perk her up. “No, you’re right. I hope I loved him, as one Christian loves another—I know I prayed for him regularly, and for all the other members of the Circle of Faith and the staff. But I never really liked him. And I wanted to like him, I honestly did.” She stopped herself abruptly and looked up at me with an expression of surprise. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get people to talk. I haven’t said as much about my feelings toward Roy Meade in the last ten years as I have today, except maybe to Barney, and then mostly indirectly. Then you come in here and hardly ask any questions at all, and I start spouting like Old Faithful.”
“It’s a trick I learned many years ago in the Orient,” I said with a thin smile. “Now that I’ve got you gushing, tell me what happened on the night Meade was shot. The meeting was right here, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, her eyes moving from one end of the big table to the other. “Right in this room. As I’m sure you know, the whole Circle of Faith was here. And Mr. Durkin, of course. I don’t mean to sound like I’ve got ESP or anything like that, but I had a bad feeling about that meeting even before it started.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. It wasn’t those notes that Barney had gotten; they never really bothered me all that much, and I frankly thought bringing in a private detective to find out who wrote them was kind of silly. So the notes, or whoever wrote them, didn’t frighten me. Any man in the public eye as much as Barney gets accustomed to dealing with cranks. I don’t know, I just had a … feeling that something was going to happen.”
“Who do you think wrote the notes?”
She chewed on her thumb and shook her head. “Somebody who was disturbed, obviously. We get some pretty weird people here occasionally. I don’t know if it’s because we are on TV and that draws them to the tabernacle, or what. I’m glad we’re well-publicized—anything that brings folks to the Lord is good—even though you also risk, well, the kind of person who devised those horrid messages.” She shuddered delicately.
“So I gather you don’t see any connection between the notes and Meade’s murder?”
“Good heavens, no. Archie, I know he’s your friend, but I don’t doubt for a second that Mr. Durkin killed Roy.”
I leaned back and stretched my arms over my head. “But anyone in the meeting could have done it, right? There was plenty of time, while the rest of you were all closeted in offices meditating for fifteen minutes or so.”
She frowned. “Technically, that’s true, but in the first place, good Christians—and I certainly include everyone in the Circle of Faith in that category—aren’t murderers. Second, why would any of them—any of us—want to murder Roy? And third, how would we even know where to find Mr. Durkin’s gun?”
“Those are all good questions, Elise, and I can’t answer them. But then, I’m not the question answerer on our organizational chart, I’m the fact collector. Mr. Wolfe answers the hard questions. All I can tell you is that Fred Durkin isn’t a murderer, either. How did you learn that Meade had been shot?”
“From Marley Wilkenson—he burst into the office where I was; he was hysterical. He’d just found Roy.”
“And you were in a vacant office?”
“It’s used by one of the membership secretaries,” she said. “And it’s right next to Roy’s office.”
“But you didn’t hear shots?”
A shake of the head. “No, but you really can’t hear anything through these walls. I remember sitting in Barney’s office with him one time when Sam Reese, who was right next door, opened one too many drawers on his filing cabinet at once, and the whole thing tipped over and almost fell on him. Sam told us it made quite a thud hitting the floor, but we never heard a sound.”
“Interesting. What did you do that night after Wilkenson told you about Meade?”
“I ran into Roy’s office to see if I could help, but Barney was already there, giving him CPR. Then I went to other offices, telling Mr. Durkin and Carola what had happened.”
“How did Fred react?”
“He was surprised—or at least he acted surprised. I remember asking him if he’d been in that room the whole time. I guess subconsciously I was suspicious of him, even then.”
“Uh-huh. I’d like to go back to the notes for a minute, since they’re what triggered everything else. They were found in the—what do you call them, offering pouches?”
“Yes, for six weeks running.”
“What happens to the pouches after the Sunday services?”
“They’re taken to the vault—that’s in a room one floor below us—and locked up until Monday, when the counting teams come in and sort through the cash and the checks, which then get deposited in the bank.”
“Is it a vault with a combination?”
Elise nodded. “Yes, a dial.”
“Who knows the combination?” I asked.
“Each of us in the Circle of Faith, and nobody else that I’m aware of. But I don’t see what that proves.”
“It may not prove anything,” I said as I stood up. “Remember, I’m just the fact collector. And I’m not even sure that the facts I’ve been collecting will be of any use to Mr. Wolfe. All I can do is feed them to him and let genius take its course. I know you’ve got a lot of work to do, so I’ll leave you alone. I know the way out.”
She looked up at me with a smile that again—just for an instant—made me want to rush to
the nearest florist and buy a dozen long-stemmed American Beauties. There are probably a lot of guys around who send roses to other men’s wives, but I don’t happen to be one of them.
ELEVEN
IT WAS ALMOST THREE WHEN I got back to the brownstone. Wolfe was in the office, and he looked up from his book when I walked in. His eyes said “Well?”
“Do I report?”
“Have you eaten?”
“No, I—”
“Confound it, empty stomachs make for empty minds, and I have concern enough for your mental capacity when your stomach is full. Fritz has saved you a plate of sweetbreads. We will talk at six.”
Meaning when he came down from his afternoon romp with the orchids, which was fine with me. Wolfe and I are in agreement that Fritz’s sweetbreads amandine in patty shells are worth a postponement of business. For the second time since the Tabernacle of the Silver Spire had intruded on our lives, I ate a late lunch at my small table in the kitchen, lobbing compliments Fritz’s way, which always makes him blush. “How is the case going, Archie?” he asked, twisting a towel in his hands. Fritz worries when we don’t have a job, and when we do have a job, he worries that we won’t get paid.
“Moving along,” I answered between bites. I wasn’t about to tell him that this looked more like a pro bono enterprise every day. I made the sweetbreads and a wedge of apple pie disappear and carried a cup of coffee to the office, where I sat at my desk and played back to myself what I’d dug up. By all accounts, Royal Meade had alienated everybody in the Circle of Faith, in varying degrees. But, I asked myself, why would even his strongest antagonist at the church want to shoot the guy? Sure, he was a royal pain, to indulge in a cheap pun. So are thousands of other people, though, and they don’t have bull’s-eyes pinned to their heads.
I printed the names of the Circle members on a page of my notebook. There was the earnest, insecure, paranoid Roger Gillis, who was positive Meade wanted him tossed out as Christian Education Director. It was hard to imagine Gillis killing anything larger than a spider—a very small spider. But he had been publicly humiliated by Meade, which can sometimes turn the mild wild. I remember the “quiet, bookish” auto mechanic in Newark who made national news by running amok with an Uzi after his boss had chewed him out in front of some customers. Maybe Gillis, too, had been a stick of dynamite waiting to be lit.
And what about Sam Reese, the marketing dynamo who was bitter and defensive about Meade’s trying to muscle him aside? He was an intriguing possibility; I didn’t have to work too hard to visualize Reese smiling as he pulled the trigger and watched Meade slump across his desk. But did he have the nerve—or the motive—to dispatch Meade?
Carola Reese looked like a more likely candidate from where I sat. For starters, she’d been around the course a few times before she and Sam paired up—that seemed clear. Second, either she was one hell of an actress or she was genuinely incensed about the way Meade had been treating her husband. I voted for the latter. I like a woman who goes to bat for her man, but what if her bat becomes a thirty-eight-caliber revolver? This one definitely was worthy of further research.
I penciled a large question mark next to Marley Wilkenson’s name. To be sure, he was an arrogant number, and I don’t like anybody presuming to tell me I’ve got a “sadly misplaced loyalty.” But neither of those character flaws qualified him as a murderer. And to hear Wilkenson tell it, Meade pretty much kept his mitts off the music program. Something whispered to me, though, that there was more between those two guys than I was getting from Wilkenson. The question mark stayed.
Even though he had attempted to become our client, I wasn’t about to eliminate Lloyd Morgan from consideration yet. True, he seemed too stuffy to even contemplate anything as drastic as murder, let alone committing the act itself. Also true, he didn’t seem to have a whole lot of motive I could see for dispatching Meade. I put him down as a long shot.
That left the Bays. I opted to give the padre a pass, at least for the moment. It was bad enough that somebody near the top of the church hierarchy probably killed a minister; I wasn’t about to cast Numero Uno as the villain—not yet, anyway.
Then there was Elise, stunning Elise. She didn’t like Meade, not at all—it didn’t take somebody with Wolfe’s brainpower to figure that out. And it also didn’t take a genius to realize that beneath that wonderful exterior she had the strength of steel. Assuming that her loyalty to her husband was intense and absolute, as it appeared, then anything or anyone threatening his success would presumably be her enemy, right? Right, but I still couldn’t see Elise using Fred’s thirty-eight on Meade. And it wasn’t because she dazzled me, although she did. I’ve known a few other beauties who’ve used handguns to solve their problems, including one who I once thought might make a dandy Mrs. A. Goodwin. But that’s a story for another time.
I looked at the list of names again, shaking my head. Nothing fit. I toyed briefly with the notion that maybe Fred Durkin really did pull the trigger, but within seconds I hated myself for the thought. Fred was no killer—in fact, he was too averse to violence to even be in the business, which is probably why he’s never done all that well at it. His idea of a good time is an evening of TV with Fanny and the kids, and he’s turned down some good out-of-town assignments because he doesn’t like to be away from the family.
Only once that I knew of did Fred go after a man with intent to kill, and I have good reason to remember the episode. Years ago, the owner of a trucking outfit came to Wolfe and asked him to find out who was hijacking cargo—mostly computers and other electronic gear—from his rigs. Wolfe wasn’t much interested, but the bank account was unusually anorexic at the time, and I nagged him into accepting the case. It ended up being more complicated than I had thought, and we hired both Saul Panzer and Fred to help stake out a warehouse and loading dock in Brooklyn where Wolfe and I figured the stuff was being lifted from the trucks.
One night Fred and I were there, both armed. The warehouse was a block square and as dark as the tunnel of love. Around midnight, I thought I heard something. I was right, but slow. I’d found one of the hijackers, or rather, he found me. I still remember the moment when the flashlight beam played on me. “Say your prayers real fast, because you’re gone,” he hissed, and I heard a shot and tensed, but didn’t feel anything. The flashlight banged onto the floor, followed by moaning. When I got to the guy, he was lying there, clutching his right arm. His sleeve was beginning to show a stain, and his pistol was next to his open hand.
I leveled my Worthington on him and played my flashlight cautiously around the warehouse. Fred came barreling into the halo of light, panting, his own gun drawn. “You okay, Archie?”
“Yeah. Did you fire?”
“Uh-huh, once.”
“My God, what a great shot! You nailed him in the arm.”
“Not so great, Arch,” he wheezed, looking at the hijacker as he writhed on the floor. “I was trying to kill the bastard.”
Okay, that’s a long way of saying it, but Bay wasn’t the only one around who had a big debt outstanding. I was still scolding myself for thinking even for an instant that Fred might have shot Meade, when the phone brought me back to the present.
“Oh, Mr. Goodwin—I’m glad I caught you in.” Carola Reese sounded tense. “I need to talk to you.”
“This is as good a time as any. Go ahead.”
“No, I mean I … well, I need to see you. I’d rather not talk about this over the phone. I’m in Manhattan—at the ferry terminal. I can meet you anyplace you say, as fast as a taxi can get me there.”
I thought about having her come to the office, but figured Wolfe could walk in on the middle of our conversation. She sounded nervous enough as it was, and having him around wouldn’t help that any, to say nothing of what it would do for his disposition. He tolerates women in the brownstone, but only when there’s absolutely no alternative.
I looked at my watch. “Tell you what. It’s four-thirteen. There’s a coffee shop at Twenty-
ninth and Third, southwest corner. It’s quiet, it’s clean, and it’s got booths. I’ll meet you there at, say, quarter to five. That should give you plenty of time.”
She thanked me more than was necessary, and I hung up, going to the kitchen to tell Fritz I had an errand but would be home for dinner. Fritz did not greet the news with enthusiasm. “Archie, you are away for too many meals,” he said as soberly as if I’d just told him a relative had died. “That’s not good.”
Assuring him I was not about to miss his lobsters with white-wine sauce, I ambled into the outdoors. The skies had turned gray, but I bet against rain and walked, heading east on Thirty-fifth. At Third, I made a right turn, landing in the coffee shop at twenty to five. Carola wasn’t there yet, so I took a booth near the door and ordered coffee.
I was on my third sip when she walked in wearing mauve-framed sunglasses and looking as though she’d just landed in a country where she didn’t speak the language. Then she saw me and took a breath, smiling. “Thank you for seeing me on short notice,” she said, sliding in across from me. “I hope you aren’t angry.”
I grinned. “I save my anger for bigger calamities, like the Mets’ bullpen and cabbies who don’t know how to find their way from Herald Square to Rockefeller Center. Now tell me, what is the agenda for today’s meeting?”
She smiled weakly. “I feel very stupid about this, but I don’t know what else to do. I guess I should start by saying my life hasn’t always been, well … lived right, if you know what I mean.”
“Mrs. Reese, I have yet to meet anybody whose life has always been lived right.”
“That’s nice of you to say, Mr. Goodwin,” she replied, drinking from the cup that had just been set in front of her. “But in my case, I really mean it. Really. Before I started coming to services at the Silver Spire, and then met Sam, I was on the wrong track, in a lot of ways.”
Silver Spire (The Nero Wolfe Mysteries Book 6) Page 10