Preach No More

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “Way the book says,” Shapiro said, “‘A good detective is always more or less suspicious and very inquisitive.’ You might find this Mrs. Mathews, Tony. And be inquisitive. Mr. Higgs will know where she is, probably.”

  “Room six twenty-three’s where she is,” Maloney said. “Supposed to be, anyway.”

  Tony took two steps down the corridor and then stopped and turned back, because the door to Mrs. Prentis’s room opened and a small, trim woman in a dark suit came out into the hall.

  “Detective Flanders,” Maloney said. “Lieutenant Shapiro, Grace. Homicide.”

  She repeated Shapiro’s name and added, “Sir.” She said, “She’s gone to sleep. I think she’d taken something just before I went in. Probably the best thing for her to do.”

  “She’s taking it hard, Miss Flanders?” Shapiro asked.

  “She’s not hysterical, or anything like that. More—sort of dazed. She wanted me to pray with her. That was just before she dozed. I think she wanted me to get down on my knees by the bed.”

  Grace Flanders spoke dispassionately.

  “Did you?”

  “I stood still and ducked my head,” Detective Flanders said. “I even closed my eyes. When I opened them, she’d gone to sleep.”

  “Detective Cook’s told us what she told you both,” Shapiro said. “Did you believe her?”

  “No reason not to,” Grace Flanders said. “Yes, I guess I did, Lieutenant.”

  “And,” Shapiro said, “that she’s fairly young and rather good-looking. In the face, anyway.”

  “Not all that young,” Grace Flanders said. “I’d guess early thirties. As for the rest of her, yes, that’s all right the rest of the way. She was coming out of the bathroom when I first went in and she was wearing this long, no-shape nightgown but—well, I wouldn’t say there was much the matter with her figure. Tallish, well proportioned. She wants me to ask this Mrs. Mathews to come in. At least, she did just before she went to sleep. Before she asked me to pray with her.”

  Maloney raised eyebrows at Nathan Shapiro.

  “No reason why not,” Shapiro said. “Detective Cook’s going along to see Mrs. Mathews. Ask her a couple of questions about last night. You may as well go along with him, Miss Flanders.”

  She said, “Yes, Lieutenant.” She said, “Only it’s Mrs., by the way.”

  Shapiro said, “Mrs. Flanders,” and watched while she joined Cook and they walked away together down the corridor in search of Room 623.

  “Her husband was Peter Flanders,” Maloney said. “The one they gave an inspector’s funeral to a few years back.”

  Shapiro remembered. Peter Flanders, detective first grade and off duty, had stopped a car because he recognized one of the four men in it. They recognized him. He had wounded two of the men and killed a third before he was himself killed. The two wounded men were men the police had been looking for for a long time.

  “I remember,” Shapiro said. “I knew him. He was a good cop.”

  Cook and Detective Flanders were halfway down the corridor toward the elevators when a tall, broad-shouldered man came toward them and passed them. He had thick yellowish hair. He wore a dark gray suit and a black necktie. When he came up to Shapiro and Maloney, Shapiro saw that gray was creeping into his yellow hair.

  He stopped when he reached the two policemen. Slowly, he nodded his head.

  “Yes, Captain,” he said. He had a low musical voice. “It is the Reverend Prentis.” He sighed. “The loss is great,” he said. “To our cause. To a world in need of Christ’s guidance. The loss is irreparable.” He sighed again.

  “This is Mr. Farmington, Nate,” Maloney said. “He’s the choir leader. He volunteered to identify the body, since Mrs. Prentis wasn’t up to it. This is Lieutenant Shapiro, Homicide.”

  Farmington’s hand moved as if he were about to reach it out to be shaken. But he did not reach it out. He repeated Shapiro’s name. He said, “It is a tragic occasion, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “You’ve no doubt it was Mr. Prentis’s body? Mr. Higgs felt it couldn’t be. Because of the circumstances of his death. Especially, I gathered, the whereabouts of his death.”

  “It’s sure hard to believe,” Farmington said. “But there it is, isn’t it?”

  Shapiro was a little surprised at the lapse into informal speech. He did not express his surprise. He said, “I’m afraid it is, Mr. Farmington.”

  “In this cheap dive,” Farmington said.

  “Not cheap,” Shapiro said. “Rather an expensive dive. Mr. Higgs thinks he may have gone there as—as part of his missionary work. To convert someone.”

  “Lead someone to Jesus,” Farmington said. “Yeah. It could have been that, I suppose. To save a soul. He was a man of God, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro nodded his head in acceptance.

  “Of course,” Farmington said, “down underneath he was human. The way we all are. He wouldn’t have denied it. He, as they say, wrestled with it.”

  Shapiro repeated the word “they” and inflected a question mark after it.

  Farmington shrugged wide shoulders and raised blond eyebrows. The gray hadn’t yet crept into the eyebrows. He was a handsome man, Shapiro thought. He was built rather like a football player. One, of course, who was getting along.

  “Only,” Shapiro said, “that you seemed to disassociate yourself, Mr. Farmington. From ‘them.’”

  “Didn’t mean to,” Farmington said. “Different way of putting things, is all. Doesn’t mean I’m not a believer. Haven’t been saved. Only—I grew up differently. The Reverend Higgs, the Voice himself—well, they use different words. Meaning the same thing, of course.”

  “You were an opera singer when you were younger, I understand. Before you joined Mr. Prentis’s—crusade? Is that what you call it?”

  “No. Somebody else has crusades. Ours is a mission, Lieutenant. The Mission of Redemption’s the way it’s incorporated.”

  “Incorporated?”

  “Yes. Nonprofit religious corporation. Accredited. So contributions are tax-exempt. Not my part of it. My part’s the choir.”

  “Whose part?”

  Farmington said he didn’t get it.

  “The financial setup,” Shapiro said. “Who handles it?”

  “Oh,” Farmington said. “The treasurer. Main office is back in Saint Louis, you know. Man named Henry Pruitt. Stays in Saint Louis mostly. “Mrs. Mathews is the fund chief—assistant treasurer. Travels with us. Signs the checks. That sort of thing.”

  Shapiro nodded his head. But there was something tickling in his mind. Almost at once he recognized it. It was a name.

  “Mrs. Prentis’s maiden name was Pruitt, wasn’t it?” he said. “Any relation?”

  “Brother. Been with us for a good many years. Before I was, matter of fact. Introduced the Voice to his sister years back. Way I understand it, anyway. As I said, it was before my time.”

  “You call Mr. Prentis ‘the Voice,’” Shapiro said. “Is that—that usage—general? With those in the—” He paused momentarily, and rejected “troupe.” He said, “Mission.”

  “Voice of one crying in the wilderness,” Farmington said. “He used that a good deal. Partly that and partly because of his own voice. Actual voice, I mean. Great voice. He could have been a singer.” He paused. Then, quickly, he shook his head. “No disrespect,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you to think that, Lieutenant. He was a man of God. He brought many thousands to Christ.” He broke off and looked intently at Shapiro. Then he said, “Shapiro, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “It’s a Jewish name, Mr. Farmington. Few more questions I’d like to ask you. Just to get the setup straight in my mind. May want to make a few notes. Some place we could go? Say your room, perhaps?”

  “Share a suite with the Reverend Higgs,” Farmington said. “There is a living room. Only—well, Higgs may be using it. There’re going to be a lot of odds and ends to pull together. It’s a big operation, and now the foundation�
�s knocked out from under it.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “If Mr. Higgs needs the living room we can make do in your own room, Mr. Farmington.”

  Farmington said, “O.K.” He said, “Down this way. Right opposite the—”

  “I know where it is,” Shapiro told him, and they walked down the long corridor. Maloney did not go with them. He said he’d “keep an eye on the boys.”

  The “boys” would be half a dozen members of the precinct squad he commanded. One of them would be downstairs, trying to check out on the time Farmington had gone to the coffee shop for his cup of coffee the night before; trying to check out the time of the return to the hotel the night before of Higgs and Farmington and the man now dead. Others would be going from room to room on the sixth floor, seeking somebody who had seen Jonathan Prentis leave his room wearing sports jacket and slacks instead of clericals.

  Higgs was not in the suite sitting room when Shapiro led the way into it. Shapiro went to sit at the desk. He got a notebook out of his pocket. Witnesses are sometimes impressed when they see things being written down.

  He asked Farmington about the night before. He remembered it as Higgs had remembered it—a successful meeting; many had “come forward to accept Christ”; he and Higgs and Prentis had ridden from Madison Square Garden to the hotel in the limousine, which was leased for the time of the mission’s appearance in New York. They had got to the hotel a little before eleven. Higgs and the Reverend Prentis had gone up in the elevator.

  “You stayed downstairs,” Shapiro said. “That’s as Mr. Higgs remembers it. For coffee, he says.”

  That was right.

  “For about how long?”

  “Half an hour, maybe.”

  “In the coffee shop, I suppose. It stays open that late?”

  “Sure in the coffee shop. Stays open to midnight.”

  “Were there many other customers in the coffee shop last night, Mr. Farmington?”

  “Not very many. You leading up to something, Lieutenant?”

  “Just feeling around,” Shapiro said. “Trying to get the general shape of last night. You had your coffee. Then you came up here. Went to bed, I suppose?”

  “I was tired. Checking the kids in all afternoon. Sometimes some of them fail to show up. Rehearsing them. Sure I went to bed.”

  “The kids?”

  “The choir. Most of them are young. I think of them as kids.”

  Shapiro said he gathered it was a large choir. He was told that it was around two hundred, half men, half women.

  “They all travel with you? You were going on to Chicago from here, I understand. The whole two hundred go along, with the rest of you?”

  “I don’t see—” Farmington began and Shapiro nodded his head sadly.

  “Probably hasn’t anything to do with Mr. Prentis’s death,” Shapiro said. “Start of things, Mr. Farmington, all we can do is sort of bungle around. Try to get the shape, as I said. The choir?”

  “Twenty-four regulars go along on the plane,” Farmington said. “The Negro quartet plus ten other men and ten women. Sort of help me shape them up, if you know what I mean. The rest I get through their agents. When they’ve got agents, and most of them have. New York, Chicago, London. All full of hopefuls who want to sing for their suppers. I—well, one way of putting it would be that I sort of order them through their agents. So many sopranos, so many contraltos, so many baritones and tenors.”

  “Not volunteers, I gather. Er—” He groped for a word. “Not dedicated to the cause.”

  “We pay scale. The twenty-four regulars get above scale. And I still can’t see what this has to do with the Voice’s death. Seems to me you’d be working this from the other end, Lieutenant. Starting with this dive he was killed in.”

  “Oh,” Shapiro said, “we’re working it from all ends, Mr. Farmington. You’d been in town about how long? I mean, for this mission.”

  “Three weeks,” Farmington said. “Oh, some of us were here earlier, of course. Getting things set up. I was here almost two weeks before we opened. Rounding up the singers. Getting them shaken down. I still don’t—”

  This time he left it hanging there.

  “Because,” Shapiro said, “all of you would be, I’d think, in a sense isolated from the city. Living here together. Not, I’d think, meeting too many people outside your own group. I don’t say that that narrows it down to members of the group, of course. But—well, it’s a place to start. These extra members of the choir. The ones you recruit. I take it they don’t live here in the hotel with the rest of you?”

  “They live all over town, I guess. Doesn’t matter as long as they show up at the Garden. Mrs. Mathews has their names and addresses. So she and her girls can send out the checks.”

  “Do you suppose Mr. Prentis knew any of these extra boys and girls?”

  Farmington shrugged his shoulders. He said he didn’t suppose so. He said that the choir—all the details—were left to “people like me.” Getting the mission from place to place, leasing the halls in which the meetings were held, handling the press and radio and TV people—all those things were left to people who knew those fields.

  “Mr. Prentis stayed aloof from all that? From the mechanics of the mission?”

  “The Reverend Mr. Prentis preached the word of God. His days were filled.”

  “He preached at these meetings three times a week, as I understand it,” Shapiro said. There was no special comment in his tone.

  “He spent time in prayer,” Farmington said. “Also, there was the syndicated column, of course. Hundreds of papers across the country. And in England, too. Five times a week it appears. And there were television tapes. That sort of thing. To carry the word.”

  “Mr. Higgs helped with the sermons, he says. With the columns, too?”

  “Under the Voice’s guidance. With his inspiration. I believe he did. He, too, is a minister of the gospel. A man of God.”

  At intervals, Shapiro thought, Farmington talks as if he were quoting. But a lot of people do.

  “A few minutes ago,” Shapiro said, “you said that down underneath, Mr. Prentis was human. Did you mean anything special by that?”

  “Nothing. We are all human.”

  “But,” Shapiro said, “‘down underneath’?”

  “Nothing,” Farmington said. “A—a way of speaking.”

  Shapiro nodded his head. He said, “Mr. and Mrs. Prentis had been married about ten years, as I understand it. You probably saw a good deal of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “From the outside,” Shapiro said. “Which is as far as anybody can go, of course. It seemed like a good marriage?”

  “I’m sure they were devoted. There was every reason to think they were. Every appearance of devotion. Why do you ask questions like that, Lieutenant?”

  “To get the picture,” Shapiro said, and made his sad voice patient. “Apparently he was with a young woman at this restaurant. Before he was killed there. It was not his wife, evidently.”

  “He was a man of God. If there was a woman with him there was just cause. The cause of God.”

  “Sure,” Shapiro said, pointedly withdrawing from the unctuous; from what sounded like unctuous quotation. “Could have been that way. When you came up last night. After your cup of coffee. You didn’t see Mr. Prentis? Perhaps leaving his room? Perhaps in a sports jacket and slacks?”

  “I sure as—” Farmington said and stopped himself. He said, “I certainly did not, Lieutenant.”

  “In the coffee shop when he went out, probably,” Shapiro said. “He got to the restaurant downtown about eleven-thirty. Somewhere around then. So he must have left here shortly after eleven. You’d have been drinking your coffee.”

  Farmington guessed so.

  “With Mr. Prentis dead,” Shapiro said, “the—mission will disband? Or will somebody take his place? Perhaps Mr. Higgs?”

  Farmington repeated “Higgs?” on a note of evident astonishment. Then he said, “With that voice of
his?” Then he shook his head. He said, “Not a chance, Lieutenant. Without the Voice we just—well, I guess we just fold. The work will be in other hands.” He sighed. “God’s work,” he said, in case Shapiro had failed to understand.

  “An operation of this size must be—must have been—rather expensive,” Shapiro said. “Airplanes. Leases of places like Madison Square Garden. The money came from collections at the meetings? That sort of thing?”

  “Some of it, yes. But thousands send contributions to Saint Louis. Many quite large contributions, I’ve been told. To keep this nation Christian. To turn back the forces of evil. To save the American way of life.”

  “Very commendable,” Shapiro said. “Any idea how much? In a year, say?”

  “Our receipts have never been disclosed,” Farmington said. “The organization is recognized as a religious community. It is not required—”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “Tax-exempt. Was Mr. Prentis paid a salary?”

  “His needs were met,” Farmington said. “Listen, I don’t know about the financial side of the—the operation. I got paid to manage the music side. I mean, to arrange for voices to be raised in praise.”

  Sometimes he remembers his lines, Shapiro thought. Sometimes he slips up on them. He almost said he “sure as hell” hadn’t seen Prentis leaving the hotel last night. He caught himself. Which didn’t need to mean anything about Ralph Farmington, except that he had once been a professional singer and had turned to, or been tossed out to, another profession.

  “If you’ve got to go into the financial setup,” Farmington said, “you’ll have to ask Mrs. Mathews about it. Or get in touch with Pruitt. Only he’s in Saint Louis.”

  “You told me,” Shapiro said. “Probably won’t need to. Just trying to get the general picture. You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Farmington.”

  His tone was one of dismissal, and Farmington stood up. He started toward the door of his bedroom. Shapiro let him take two steps and then said, “Oh, by the way, Mr. Farmington.”

  Farmington stopped and turned back.

  “The young woman with Mr. Prentis last night,” Shapiro said, “seems to have been a blonde. Rather attractive, as the waiter remembers her. Any of the girls in your choir—the ones hired locally or the regulars—fit that description?”