by John Dalmas
Gonzaga paused and grinned. "Incidentally, my office has taken half a dozen calls like yours. Williams has lots of friends."
I hadn't foreseen that, but it didn't surprise me. "Thanks, Lieutenant," I told him, and we disconnected. I felt pretty burned. I was sure the church had set Williams up, and right then I really wanted to get something on them: hopefully Ray Christman's murder. Assuming, of course, that Christman had been murdered.
* * *
When I'd finished the paper, I called Molly Cadigan's number and caught her at home. I explained who I was, and told her I was investigating Christman's disappearance. We agreed to meet at her place at ten o'clock, which gave me plenty of time. Briarcliff Drive is in the Hollywood Hills, but it's not one of those winding little goat-trail streets that appear and disappear up there. It's easy to find and keep track of.
So on a hunch, I went out of my way to swing by the Campus, and parked in the church's lot. I stopped in at the Saints' Deli to look at the notice board. Sure as hell, there was a Times fax right in the middle, with everything else moved back a little to draw attention to it. Next I went into the Neophyte Building and found one on the notice board in their reception area, edged with red tape to make it hard to overlook. A typed note beneath it read: "This is the kind of person who attack Ray adn the Church. And this the kind of thig that happen to them." Replete with typos and poor grammar on church notepaper. I wondered how the church could favorably impress someone like Armand Butzburger. If someone typed for him like that, he'd fire their ass in a minute, I was willing to bet.
When I came out, I saw a guy across the street and down a ways, sitting on the edge of a planter lighting a cigarette. A lightish-brown black guy with a short beard. Minutes earlier he'd been going into the deli when I was just about to leave. I couldn't help wondering.
So I sat down on a bench and pretended to check through my pocket notebook, waiting to see what he'd do. After a minute he got up, crossed the street, and walked into the Neophyte Building. I put my notebook back in my pocket and went to my car, where I sat and waited. Five minutes later he came into the lot and drove away in a somewhat beat-up red Chevy. Not a sea blue Hyundai. False alarm, I decided, and left.
Next I drove past Gnostic Withdrawal Assistance, which was pretty much on my way. There was space at the curb, so I stopped by. The place was open, with a white guy at the desk now. He wasn't as big as Williams, but he made the same kind of impression: straight, competent, fearless. I introduced myself; his name was Eric Fuentes.
"Gerald may be back pretty soon," I said, and told him what Lt. Gonzaga had told me.
He laughed. "It figures. The church's been caught in enough dirty tricks that people distrust them automatically."
Then I told him about finding the Times faxes at Saints' Deli and in the Neophyte Building. He gave a wry grin. "Right," he said. "It's the Disinformation Section in the Division of Public Relations. That's the way they operate. They're in charge of dirty tricks."
He was matter-of-fact as hell about it. I was surprised he didn't look mad, and told him so. "It's a waste of energy to get mad," he answered, "and a bigger waste to stay that way." He grinned again. "I admit I was steamed when I got here this morning and found a copy taped to our front door. And to most of the front windows along the block." He gestured at his waste basket. "I ripped 'em all off." "They actually have something they call the Disinformation Section?"
"Yeah. It's not shown on the open T.O., the table of organization that the public sees, but it's there, part of the Information Department, Division of PR."
"You must be a Gnostie exile."
"You've got it. I was a case reviewer in the Technical Division. Got in a row with Evanson himself, and told him what I thought. A year earlier I'd have said 'yes sir,' and done what he ordered, regardless of my own judgement. My eyes had been opening since a friend of mine got kicked out by a kangaroo court."
And apparently all in the name of saving the human race. The more I hear about them, I thought, the less I like them. I wondered if Fuentes' friend was Fred Hamilton.
* * *
I looked at my watch then. It was 9:37, and I'd rather get somewhere early than late, so I left. I got there early enough that I sat in the car and listened to KFWB News Radio for a few minutes. At 9:58 I knocked at Molly Cadigan's door. A young woman opened it, wearing blue jeans, a red-and-white checkered blouse, and a small apron. I decided she must be family. "My name is Seppanen," I told her. "I have an appointment to see Ms. Cadigan." She took my card and peered at it, then turned.
"Molly!" she shouted, "it's Mister—" She stumbled and looked harder at the card. "Mr. Seppanen to see you." She said the syllables well enough, but put the accent on the second, even though I'd said it for her. That happens a lot. "Come right in, sor," she said and, turning, led me through a foyer and the living room, then into a hall, chattering as we went. Her speech was so Irish, I could hardly believe it. She gestured me into what had probably been a large bedroom originally. As no one else was there, she waited with me. It was an office now, with a big heavy table, desk, built-in bookshelves, and a Hewlett-Packard Executive VIII, about right for the Mount Wilson Observatory. Wide old-fashioned French doors stood open, with a balcony outside. The morning haze had burned off, and beyond the wrought-iron railing was a long view across the L.A. Basin, burnished by April sun and framed by the tops of eucalyptus trees lower on the ridge.
The spell was broken by the sound of flushing, and a moment later Molly Cadigan stepped out of her private bathroom. Behind me the girl left the room, leaving the door ajar. "Nice view, eh, Sweetbuns?" Molly said.
Not exactly a formal opening. "Yeah," I said, "it's beautiful."
Molly didn't sound Irish any more than most Americans who have Irish names. I decided I'd been met by a domestic instead of her daughter or niece. Cadigan was a big woman—six feet and 240 pounds, at a guess, and maybe fifty years old. With red hair that would have been carroty before it was diluted by encroaching gray. "Sit down," she said, and motioned to a chair. "You like coffee? Or tea?"
I sat. "Coffee," I told her.
She went to a stainless-steel urn on a sideboard. One of the spigots showed coffee in the glass, the other hot water, both near full. This, I thought, is a serious coffee drinker. The Insulmugs she filled held about a pint; she put one down in front of me. "Cream and sugar?"
"Both." My diet needed a break.
She put them on the table by my mug. "Doughnuts?"
I hesitated.
"They're good for you," she honked. "Chockful of vitamin sucrose."
I poured cream in my coffee—real cream by the look of it, and decided what the hell. "A doughnut would be nice."
"KATEY!" The abrupt volume almost made my ears ring. "BRING SOME DOUGHNUTS FOR MY GUEST!" Then to me: "You like chocolate?"
I sipped my pale brown coffee. It had hair on its chest. "Chocolate's my favorite," I told her.
"CHOCOLATE, KATEY!"
She looked at me again and sat down, picked up her own mug, and sipped the strong brew straight. Her eyes were interesting. Redheads most often have blue eyes, or green. Hers were chestnut brown, almost the color of Gerald Williams'.
"So you're interested in what might have happened to Ray Christman." I almost missed what she said. I was trying to picture what she might have looked like maybe twenty-five years earlier, to attract the sexual interest of the young guru. He was still a good-looking guy in news pictures as recently as a year ago.
"Uh, yeah. I'm accumulating a lot of information, but none of it points anywhere yet. One informant says Christman may simply have blown with a ton of money, and be living somewhere as an anonymous rich American."
She snorted. "Not likely. Ray was broad-spectrum greedy. He wanted a lot of things in life, and one of them was admiration—or adoration. He wanted to be something very special, and be appreciated for it."
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Try this one for size. Ray liked to live well—good food,
good booze, good-looking women, and he smoked like a fireplace with a dead buzzard in the flue. He stayed in halfway decent shape with steam baths, vitamins, massage, occasional dieting, and periodic fits of riding an exercise bike while reading.
"He may have just dropped dead. Stroke, heart attack, something like that. If he did, and it wasn't in public, Lonnie and Evanson would sure as hell try to hide it. Ray Christman, dying of a physical illness? It would ruin his mystique! The church would have to cover it—smuggle the body out, dispose of it, and release some kind of cover story."
Katey came in with the doughnuts, each about five inches across and loaded with chocolate frosting, a whole damn platter of them, about a thousand calories each, mostly fat. She set them down between Molly and me, then left. I eyed them carefully, then took one, broke it, and dunked. I was pretty sure Molly Cadigan wouldn't mind my dunking. It tasted as good as I'd known it would.
"What do you think of the theory that someone inside the church killed him?" I asked.
"Hell, honey, anything's possible, but that's one of the less likely. I knew Ray when he was still young. Knew him well; you could even say we were close friends. People were already claiming he was psychic, but that was bullshit. He ran a bunch of interesting procedures on himself after that, but I'll bet you dollars against rabbit turds he wasn't any more psychic a year ago than he was in 1990.
"What he was was damned observant. He noticed things that even I didn't, and I'm one of the most observant people I know. He could pretty much read your emotions, even if you were good at hiding them. By things like slight eye movements, pupil dilation, subtle color changes in your skin and the white of your eyes. Along with more obvious things like facial expression, fidgeting, and sweat. He taught me some of it. If someone around him was hostile toward him, or was trying to conceal things from him, he'd know it, Sweetbuns, he'd know it."
I knew some of those techniques. My dad taught them to me when I was still a preadolescent. They were part of what made him such a good lawman. But I couldn't do the sort of thing with them that Molly Cadigan was claiming for Ray Christman, not reliably, and I doubted that Christman could either.
"Incidentally," she said, "if you want to know what he saw in me, that's me over there. And that's Ray's Corvette behind me." She pointed at a framed photo on the cluttered wall, showing a long-legged, shapely young woman in shorts, with a pretty face and hair like red gold. The car was an old gas-driven machine from before geogravitic power converters. And scarlet! Tuuli would love it.
Molly kept talking. "He used that talent to play people. It helped make him such a great salesman. And cocksman. Like I said, he loved the ladies, but he didn't waste his time or cause upsets by making passes at someone who wasn't already interested. Or at married women. He isn't—wasn't a bastard, just self-indulgent. And most of the people around him, including Lonnie Thomas, damn near worshiped the man.
"So no, I don't think someone inside killed him. Not unless they'd been PDHed, and killed him without any advance awareness themselves of what they'd been programed to do." She paused. "You know what PDH stands for, don't you?"
I nodded; I'd had a period of reading spy thrillers. PDH meant treatment by Pain, Drugs, and Hypnosis. To condition someone to do something, usually murder someone, when triggered by some word, or maybe music, or something that happened. I didn't know whether such things were possible, except in theory.
"It wouldn't be easy," she went on. "It may not even be possible to PDH someone that precisely, not without leaving them visibly strange, anyway. Maybe, just maybe, some outfit like the OSS could, but I can't see them taking Ray Christman or the church that seriously. I think they got over that sort of bullshit with Leif Haller and his Institute of Noetic Technology."
Which reminded me: Hamilton had said Molly'd been a Noetie first. "Could the Noeties have had someone kill Christman?" I asked.
She frowned. "Maybe, but I doubt it. Like I said, lots of things are possible, some of them things neither of us has thought of and probably won't.
"I was a Noetie once myself, but back in Rochester, New York, where things were different than here. And I'm way out of date on them. Matter of fact, I don't know who isn't. But I know a couple of people who may have kept some attention on them. They might have some insights for you."
She gave me two names, with addresses and phone numbers. One was a Dr. Winifred Landau Sproule—Molly gave me all three names plus the title, as if that was how the woman was referred to. She'd not only been a member of the Noetie's board of directors. Later she'd been on the board of directors of the Church of the New Gnosis, and a math professor at LACC. Now she was a research associate at the Hypernumbers Institute—the so-called "Beverly Glen Church by the Numbers." She'd also known Ray Christman "as well as anyone had," according to Molly. The other name was Olaf Sigurdsson, whom I'd heard of, a well-known psychic. Like Winifred Sproule, Sigurdsson had worked directly with the Noetie founder, Leif Haller, and eventually became estranged from him.
"They may not be any help to you," she added, "but they're interesting as hell, both of them. And who knows?"
Yeah, I thought, who knows? "Well then . . ." I started to get up.
"Just a minute."
I paused.
"Do you think you might try to interview anyone in the church? Lon Thomas maybe?"
"It's crossed my mind." I used her line then. "Who knows?"
"Sit down, Sweetbuns." When I had, she went on. "What do you know about church staff? And the Campus? The actual physical property?"
"The property's four square blocks, six or seven buildings, and some parking lots. And the staff? There's a lot of them, and they aren't very smart."
She snorted. "Don't underrate them. They work incredibly hard, and do what they're told. More than a few of them are even bright; they just have a blind side. They're also loyal as hell. If Lonnie Thomas tells them a cow turd is cheesecake, they ask for seconds. Otherwise most of them wouldn't be there. They'd have seen through it and blown." I found my hands breaking another doughnut. My third? Fourth? I dunked it and took a bite, remembering the things Fred Hamilton and Eric Fuentes had told me about being on church staff. Molly opened a drawer of hanging files in her desk and handed me what looked like a folded-up road map. "The latest table of organization of the church," she said. "Of the Central Chancery—the central management organization that is. Could be useful to you, and I've got a couple others."
I started to open it. "Don't look at it now," she told me. "It'll take too long, and I've got to get some phone calls made this morning. Besides, you're not going to understand a lot of it. I just want you to have an idea of how big and complicated an outfit we're talking about.
"Meanwhile, Sweetbuns, if you decide to talk to Lonnie Thomas, and if by some quirk he agrees to see you, be careful."
"I'd probably do better to talk to someone lower on the totem pole," I said. "High enough that they might know something, but not that high."
She shook her head. "Nobody's going to talk to you about anything except registering for church services or joining staff. Except Lonnie. Even Ray never gave interviews; not since the early days. Said he was consistently misquoted, and his facts altered or used out of context. Which was true. If an outsider wants an interview with someone in the church, it's Lonnie or no one. Usually no one."
She cocked an eye at me. "And if you plan to join staff and snoop from inside, forget it. Anyone who wants to join staff gets grilled on a sort of lie detector first, a psychogalvanometer. You'd never pass.
"If Lonnie does give you an interview, be damned careful. There are interconnecting utility tunnels all over beneath the Campus. Some have dead ends used for storage rooms, full of junk and the personal stuff of people on staff, but mostly they hook up. If you know your way around, and some staff members do—the security people do—you can go between any two buildings there without ever sticking your head above ground."
"So?"
"So if Lonnie Thomas deci
des you're a threat, you could be quietly drugged, taken underground, and brought out through some manhole by the light of the moon. Slid into the back of some staff member's old van, and given a free ride out to the Ranch, where they could grind you up for fertilizer."
I stared at her. As far as I could see, she was serious.
"Do you think they'd actually do something like that?"
Her eyes were steady as a lioness'. "Damn straight they would! So don't give them an incentive. Don't even hint you're investigating the possible death of Ray Christman. Because if they think he's dead, and they think you might find any real evidence, they're going to be scared spitless."
Her eyes had narrowed, the pupils glistening out at me through the slits. Her voice, normally loud, lowered almost to a whisper, pulling me into it. As if it was important that I listen and understand.
"If the word gets out," she went on, "it will do two things. It'll do more than hurt the church's income. It'll slowly kill the church itself."
I thought then that I knew what she was getting at. Some of the staff members, maybe most of them, felt at a gut level that they couldn't survive outside it. It was their family, their home. Their cocoon. Williams and Hamilton and Fuentes, even Molly Cadigan, had left because they were disillusioned. If they got kicked out, it had been only the formal, final act. But for those who weren't yet disillusioned . . .
Molly wasn't done; she talked on relentlessly. "And to almost all of them," she said, "even Lonnie Thomas I suspect, reality and the alternative futures of mankind are exactly the way Ray Christman described them."
Her eyes burned me like lasers as she finished. "The ones who know their cover story is only a cover story are already scared. They're scared because Ray isn't with them anymore. They're scared because Ray won't be developing new procedures to bring people to Freed Being—or more to the point, bring them to Freed Being. They think of the church as the only salvation of mankind, and that its failure will damn us all forever. It's crazy, but that's how they see it."