Silver Spire

Ten

Morgan couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. When we were out in the hall, he gestured toward Wilkenson’s office but made no effort to do any escorting, which was fine with me.

“It’s the third door on the left, across from the main office,” he muttered. “If Marley’s not there, you’ll probably find him in the choir room; one of the women in the office can give you directions.”

I considered thanking him, but took a pass on that bit of civility. Besides, Morgan ducked back into his office so fast and shut the door that he wouldn’t have heard me anyway. All by myself, I was able to find my way to a door that had a small brass MARLEY WILKENSON plaque engraved with musical notes. I rapped my knuckles on oak and heard something that sounded vaguely like “Come in.”

Pushing the door open, I was in another well-decorated layout, this one done up in about ten shades of brown, from the carpeting and the walls to the draperies and the furniture and the lamp shades. Wilkenson, his white hair as impressive as Fred had described it, sat behind a desk that looked as if it belonged in the Oval Office, scribbling furiously with a fountain pen the size of a small howitzer that probably set him back almost as much as his brown three-piece pinstripe. He looked up without expression. “Yes?”

“I’m Archie Goodwin; I believe Mr. Bay mentioned me to you.”

“Yes, Doctor Bay did,” he said, standing me corrected and fixing me with light blue eyes that were every bit as friendly as his voice. “Please sit down. Will this take long?”

“Not very,” I told him, dropping into one of the two matching upholstered guest chairs — brown, of course — in front of his desk. “Just a few questions.”

“Your ‘just a few questions’ is about all I have time for right now,” he declared. “In fact, I don’t even have that luxury, but after all, Barney did ask me to see you.”

“I promise that I’ll be brief. If I understand this operation correctly, you’re in charge of all the music at the Silver Spire.”

“You hardly needed a meeting with me to confirm that,” Wilkenson said, smiling sourly.

“Just a feeble attempt to be sociable,” I responded with an honest-to-goodness grin, my sincere one. “Did your job bring you into contact with Meade often?”

“Correct.”

I waited for some more words, but they didn’t come. “How did the two of you get along?” I asked.

“We each had our jobs,” he responded sharply. “We rarely interfered with each other.”

“How did you feel about Meade?”

Wilkenson sniffed. “What possible relevance can my feelings about Roy have? Or do I get damned simply by refusing to answer?”

“You aren’t about to be damned by me under any circumstances,” I said, rerunning my sincere grin. “The truth is, with my track record, I’d be hard-pressed to damn the devil himself.”

That drew a real smile, which spread across Wilkenson’s long, bony face and was joined by a chuckle. “I have to say I like your candor, Mr. Goodwin. Are you by any chance a tenor?”

“Beats me.”

“I’m short a couple of first-rate tenors right now. One had the misfortune of being transferred to Philadelphia by his company, another decided to move to Colorado and to find himself, whatever that’s supposed to mean these days.” He snorted. “Well, you’re not here to listen to my problems. As far as my feelings about Royal Meade, they were frankly ambivalent. Roy was an incredibly dedicated man — a real workaholic. It seemed like he was always in the office, early mornings, nights, Saturdays. And he was a good preacher, too. But that intensity...”

“What about it?”

He studied his handsome pen, then looked up at me and wrinkled a white brow. “Roy could never unwind — at least I never saw it. He was always in high gear, tense. Now, this is a big operation, Mr. Goodwin, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. But I don’t think of it as a business — at least not like the businesses across the harbor.” He made a vague gesture with a hand in the direction of Manhattan.

“But Roy was the only one of us, other than Lloyd, of course, who seemed like... well, a businessman rather than a churchman sometimes, if you follow me. He was — hard, there’s no other word for it. And his people skills frankly weren’t very good; he didn’t have much patience with anything less than perfection — at least his definition of perfection.”

“That can’t have made him very popular.”

“He wasn’t very popular. Oh, on the surface everyone was rowing the same boat, but that’s because most of the staff and the lay leaders of this church and the other members of the Circle of Faith are fine Christians who practice their faith. They tend to forgive breaches in manners and avoid confrontation. And everybody knew how much Barney valued Roy, so they didn’t want to complain. A few of us did talk to Barney about him from time to time, though. As I mentioned earlier, I got along reasonably well with Roy — the music operations are in the main self-sufficient. But others have complained to me about his brusque and even insensitive attitude toward them. I felt Barney should know, so I mentioned it to him — without naming names, of course.”

“Care to name names now?”

I got another ice-blue glare. “I do not.”

“Tell me about the night of the murder.”

“Good Lord, the papers and TV have been full of it! What’s left to know? Fred Durkin all but accused somebody in the meeting — he didn’t say who — of writing those blasted threats Barney was getting, and Roy came down on him like an anvil. Then Durkin blew his stack and started cursing, and Barney stepped in. We all went away to cool off for fifteen minutes, and you know the rest.”

“You found Meade.”

He snorted. “Correct. After fifteen minutes were up — actually it was a little longer than that — I got up and poked my head out in the hall. It was empty, so I figured, since other than Barney I was the farthest one from the conference room, I’d work my way back, getting everybody to return to the meeting. Roy’s door was the first one on my side of the hall, so I knocked twice and got no answer. I opened the door, and he was... face down on the desk.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

He sighed irritably. “Come, come, Mr. Goodwin. We’re all indulging you with these cursed interviews. There’s not a person under this roof right now who doesn’t think Fred Durkin shot Roy. And, of course, that includes Barney. I commend you for your loyalty to a comrade in trouble, but it’s a sadly misplaced loyalty. Do everyone a favor and give it up.”

“Call me a lover of lost causes,” I told him. “What do you think about those notes that Barnabas Bay got?”

Another grumpy sigh. “The work of some oddball. We get a few weird ones occasionally. That’s to be expected considering the number of people who worship here every week. But I hope you’re not trying to somehow tie those notes to Roy’s death — that would be ridiculous. Now, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me,” he said, rising. “I have a meeting in less than ten minutes with the woman who oversees our Sunday-school choirs.”

Never one to stand in the way of meetings, I got up, too, figuring I’d gotten about all I was going to out of Wilkenson, at least for the present. He walked with me to the door and shook hands, unsmiling. “I’d wish you luck, Mr. Goodwin, but in this case, I’m not sure what that would mean, so I’ll just say good-bye.”

I didn’t much like the guy, but at least he was honest. I said good-bye, too, and returned to the main office, where only one of the two secretaries, Diane, was at her desk. “Oh, hi again, Mr. Goodwin,” she said with a lilt, looking up from her typing. “I guess you’ve talked to Mr. Wilkenson now, haven’t you?” I told her I had.

“That just leaves Mrs. Bay for you to see, right?” I nodded. “She’s in the conference room, catching up on some paperwork. She said to just go right on in; she’s expecting you. It’s way down the hall, almost to the end on the left, just beyond the drinking fountain.”

Thanking her, I went back along the corridor to yet another door — I’d opened almost all of them in the last couple of hours. Even though the plaque said CONFERENCE ROOM, I treated it as if it were a private office and knocked on the oak, waiting a discreet few seconds before pulling the door open.

I like to think I’ve been around enough beautiful women through the years that I don’t behave like a stage-door Johnny anymore, but Elise Bay almost made me want to rush out to buy a dozen roses. Even though I had seen her once before, almost exactly forty-eight hours earlier, I wasn’t quite prepared for the face framed in dark hair that smiled up at me from the conference table where she was sitting with papers spread out around her. Chances are she didn’t hear the catch in my breath as I stepped in, every inch the sophisticated big-city detective.

“Mr. Goodwin,” she said in a quiet, warm voice that had just a touch of the Carolinas in it, “please sit down. I apologize for the conference-room setting, but this becomes my office when I stop in three or four times a week.”

I said I didn’t mind a bit and slipped into a chair across from her, wondering what adjective would best describe the shade of gold in her eyes. I mulled that over while catching a scent from her that I didn’t recognize but wouldn’t mind getting more familiar with. “I didn’t realize you had a formal position here,” I said as an icebreaker.

She smiled and spread manicured hands, palms up, in a movement similar to one I’d seen her husband make. “Oh, I don’t, not really. I guess I’m what you’d call an almost-full-time volunteer. I oversee the calling teams the church sends out to visit our homebound members, which means a lot of paperwork and a lot of telephoning.” She gestured to the phone next to her. “Say, I’ve seen you before. Yes — on one of Nella Reid’s tours of the church. Day before yesterday, wasn’t it?”

I grinned. “You’ve got a good memory, Mrs. Bay.”

“You’re easy to notice, Mr. Goodwin.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment until I hear differently. And please call me Archie.”

“It was meant as a compliment, and I’m Elise. Is that Archie as in Archibald, or as in Archer?”

“As in just plain Archie. Your husband told you why I’m here, didn’t he?”

She nodded. “Yes. And I’ll help if I can, although I really don’t know how.”

“First off, what was your opinion of Royal Meade?”

Her eyes moved around the big room, as if she was forming an answer. “That’s a more complicated question than it sounds, Mr. — Archie. I had several opinions about Roy.”

“I’m interested in all of them.”

She gave me the same smile that probably turned Bert Parks’s knees to jelly in Atlantic City years before. “Roy was a very complex person. I don’t think any of us — even Barney — knew just how complex he was. First and most important, he was a tireless worker. My, what a worker,” she said, throwing up her hands and shaking her head. “We all had a hard time keeping up with him. I never saw a man with so much energy, and believe me, Barney himself is no slouch in the energy department.”

“There can be too much of a good thing,” I said.

“Yes, and I’m afraid that was sometimes the case with Roy. He was so terribly, terribly intense. I think that’s why he’d get carried away and get cross with people sometimes.”

“You among them?”

Pink showed in her cheeks. “Once in a while. Roy was very detail-oriented, and I’m not really always as good on details as I should be. That irritated him occasionally, although it was really pretty minor. There was never what you’d call a real out-and-out argument between us.”

“How did his irritation manifest itself toward you?”

She sawed her lower lip with TV-bright teeth and frowned. Even her frown was worth committing to memory. “You know, I’m probably blowing this up into too big a deal. I don’t mean to make Roy out to be an ogre or anything.”

“Believe me, you’re not. Go on.”

“Okay,” she said, trying to smile. “I guess it’s just that I’m a little nervous. I’ve never talked to a private detective before, and I’m worried about what to say.”

“What’s to be worried about? After all, the police interviewed you after Meade’s murder, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but they seemed so sure that Mr. Durkin had shot Roy, while you think it was somebody else — which would have to make it one of us, wouldn’t it?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. You were starting to tell me how Meade showed his irritation toward you.”

She cocked her head and shot me another smile. “No, I wasn’t, Archie, but I will. Roy was clever about it, or at least thought he was. If we were in a meeting with other people, he would say something patronizing like, ‘Given your schedule, I can understand how you might have overlooked such and such.’ He did that all the time, trying to make it appear that I was spread too thin.”

“Were you?”

“We have four children, although they’re not really children anymore — two are in college, two in high school. But when they were growing up, I was at home most all of the time. I only came in here a day a week or so. Now they’re gone and I have more flexibility. I serve on the board of one of the shelters for abused women that we support, and I’m in here three or four days a week. I don’t see that as an overload.”

“Why did Meade suggest that it was?”

She looked at the two-carat diamond on her left ring finger, and when she spoke, she didn’t look up. “Roy really didn’t want me on the staff at all, even as a volunteer, and I know it bothered him that I was part of the Circle of Faith, too. But he wasn’t about to say anything that would bring him into a direct confrontation with my husband. As it was, Barney had been on Roy’s case lately about the way he treated other staff members.”

“It seems like Meade caused more trouble than he was worth,” I observed.

“But he was an awfully good preacher,” Elise said in a whisper, finally looking up. “And as I mentioned before, he did the work of a small army.”

“It probably wouldn’t surprise you to hear that what I know about churches wouldn’t fill one side of a sheet in a loose-leaf notebook,” I told her, “but I still don’t see why your husband didn’t go out and find himself a Number Two person who got along better with the rest of the crew. No matter how good a preacher and worker Meade was, you can’t tell me he was indispensable.”

She shook her head sadly. “No, no, I can’t tell you that. Only the Lord is indispensable. Apparently nobody’s mentioned what happened when they were in the seminary together.”

“I have a feeling I’m about to learn.”

“It’s not something that gets discussed often. In fact, I’m not sure everyone in the Circle of Faith even knows about what happened,” Elise said, still almost whispering. I wanted to reach across the table and give her hand a squeeze.

“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.