Silver Spire

Fourteen

Ten minutes after I left Sara Meade, I wheeled the Mercedes into the Silver Spire Tabernacle’s parking lot. Except for a dozen cars huddled near the entrance, it was as empty as Shea Stadium in January. I found a spot twenty paces from the main door and sauntered into the lobby, where the redheaded receptionist was pondering People magazine and jawing on a stick of gum.

She looked up and unleashed both her pearly whites and her dimples. “Hi! Back again? You must like it here.”

“I do. Half the fun of coming is seeing you and your smile and your outfits. That blue number is very becoming.”

“Thank you,” she said, blushing like a freshman on her first date. “It’s my boyfriend’s favorite color.”

“With good reason. Say, could you call Diane and tell her that Mr. Goodwin is here and would like to see Dr. Bay?”

“My pleasure. And you didn’t have to tell me your name — I remember it.”

I thanked her and waited while she used the telephone. “She says to go right on back,” the redhead told me as she cradled the receiver. “You know the way.”

“Hello, Mr. Goodwin,” Diane sang when I got to the office. The secretarial pool at the tabernacle seemed untouched by the recent murder. “Dr. Bay is in a meeting, but he knows you’re here and said to wait, that he wouldn’t be long.”

And he wasn’t. A tall, lean, bald-headed specimen that I hadn’t seen before sauntered out of Bay’s sanctum, nodding soberly to Diane and the other receptionist, who never seemed to look up from her typing. “You can go on in now,” Diane said. Her smile wasn’t as blinding as the redhead’s, but it was more genuine. I smiled back.

“Hello, Mr. Goodwin,” Bay said neutrally when I got within three feet of his desk. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but we weren’t expecting you. I was just meeting with the chairman of our stewardship campaign. You know, the dollars-and-cents side of things.” He smiled. “Everybody needs more money to operate, even us church folk.”

“Your cash flow good?” I asked.

He gave his palms-up gesture. “Pledges are right on target, even slightly above. We’re down a bit in our loose offering, though — that’s the money, most of it currency, that we get Sundays from our one-time visitors and other nonmembers. The members almost all write checks, a lot of them monthly or quarterly. But then, all businesses have money problems, and as I get reminded frequently, we are among other things a business.”

I told Bay I wanted to spend a few minutes in Meade’s office. “I’m not looking to steal anything; you can have somebody in there with me the whole time if you’d like.”

“What are you looking for?” He smiled but narrowed his eyes.

“I won’t know until I see it — if then.”

Bay folded his arms across his chest. “It sounds to me a little like a fishing expedition. Up to now, we’ve indulged you and Mr. Wolfe, but there’s a limit.”

“I don’t think we’ll be making many requests of you after this. And I won’t be here more than an hour.”

“Sara — Mrs. Meade — has taken a few personal items away already, and she mentioned she’ll be back for more later, when she feels up to it. Lloyd, Sam, and my secretary Diane all have been going through Roy’s correspondence and other papers, mainly to make sure no church business falls between the cracks. I can’t imagine what you expect to find that would help you in your... quest.” Bay rose slowly and walked to his mullioned window, tugged a cord that opened the cream-colored draperies, and gazed out on the acres of blacktop and the Cana Chapel beyond, nestled snugly in its grove of trees. He turned back toward me as if striking a pose, then absently fingered a silver chalice on an ebony table next to the window. “Do you truly feel all this is necessary?” he asked quietly.

“It’s probably just the proverbial goose chase,” I conceded. “But what have you — or the church — got to lose? Meade didn’t have anything to hide, did he? And even if he had, Morgan, Reese, Diane, or his wife surely would have discovered it by now. I assume his office has been unlocked since his death.”

“Of course it’s been unlocked.” Bay sounded offended. “All right, Mr. Goodwin,” he went on, trying halfheartedly to mask his irritation, “you can go ahead. I don’t like this business, but I believe you to be both honest and well-intentioned.” He pushed a button, and within seconds, Diane entered, wearing her ever-present smile.

“Mr. Goodwin wants to have a look at Roy’s office,” Bay told her. “Take him, please, and show him where everything is, and then you can leave. He’ll probably be in there for an hour or so.”

I followed Diane across the hall. Meade’s office was slightly larger than Wilkenson’s or Reese’s, but not as elaborately decorated. Bookshelves covered one wall, floor to ceiling, and papers were stacked up in two neat foot-high piles on his desk.

“Mr. Morgan and Mr. Reese and I have sorted some of Mr. Meade’s correspondence and his other papers, but we’ve got an awful lot more to go through, mainly the stuff in the filing cabinets,” Diane told me. “And I don’t know what we’ll do with all the books he had. Just look at them!”

“Quite a library,” I agreed. “What’s in these stacks on the desk?”

“Mostly things we’ve gone over that don’t need immediate attention, or that we don’t know what to do with. It’s here for Mrs. Meade to go through when she wants to. A lot of it we probably could have just tossed, but Dr. Bay thought it best that we should save it for her.”

I agreed and said thanks, and Diane left, closing the door behind her. My first stop was the bookcases. Meade kept his Bibles on the lowest shelf, six of them in all. I sat at his desk and paged through each one. Wolfe had said to look for marginal notes and underlinings, but there weren’t any. Either the guy didn’t use the Good Books much, which I doubted, or he didn’t like to mark them up. He probably was one of those kids who always gave the teacher a birthday card and never underlined in his school texts.

After a quick scanning of the rest of the shelves — most of the books had “Christian” or “Christianity” in their titles — I started on the piles on the desk. There were brochures about upcoming Silver Spire conferences and seminars; fliers advertising new religious books; a dozen magazines, most of them church-oriented; some letters from ministers around the country who apparently corresponded regularly with Meade; and a couple of thick mail-order catalogs filled with pictures of church furniture and paraphernalia like candle holders and preachers’ robes in white and black and purple.

There also was a pad of white notepaper with Meade’s name and phone number printed at the top that had some scribbled notations to call various people, none of whom was familiar to me. Tucked into the pad was a sheet of yellow lined paper, folded once, that also had some scribblings, in the same handwriting. I looked closer and realized they were Bible verses, then set the sheet aside and finished rummaging through the stacks without finding anything else that seemed even vaguely promising.

Diane was typing when I popped my head into the office. “Is there a copying machine I can use?” I asked. She gave me a bright-eyed nod and steered me to a sterile, fluorescent-lit, windowless room at the far end of the corridor. “This is our printing center,” she said proudly, gesturing to the three personal computers and several other pieces of high technology, one of which I recognized as a mainframe.

“We’re set up to do almost all of our own typesetting and printing,” Diane went on, “including the bulletins for our Sunday services, the weekly newspaper that goes to every home, and the reprints of Dr. Bay’s sermons that we send to TV viewers who request them. Some weeks we mail out several hundred of those, free. The only thing that has to be printed outside on a regular basis is our monthly magazine, SpireTalk. Have you seen a copy?”

I said I hadn’t, and she promised to give me one to take home. I thanked her, and while she waited I used the copier to duplicate the page listing the Bible verses and the sheets of Meade’s notepaper with the names and phone numbers on them.

“Okay, I’ve made copies of what I wanted. Come to Mr. Meade’s office with me and watch while I put these originals back on his desk.”

Diane grinned sheepishly and reddened. “Oh, now that’s really not necessary.” She giggled.

“It is for me. I want you to be able to tell your boss that I didn’t walk off with anything. Of course, you weren’t in there with me while I was going through the papers, so heaven only knows what I might have lifted and tucked away. Want to search me?”

She blushed again. “Oh, Mr. Goodwin, you are such a kidder.”

“Guilty. But I insist you go into Meade’s office with me. If you do, I promise to take a copy of your magazine home — and even read it.” She shrugged and smiled and tagged along as I returned to the office. “Is that Meade’s handwriting?” I asked, gesturing to the sheets as I put them back on the stack where I’d found them.

She squinted at each of them and nodded. “Yes, no question. Mr. Meade wasn’t much for dictation. He’d give me scribbled letters to people all the time that he wanted typed, so I know his writing very well. That’s it, all right. You can see that he never got an A in penmanship. I used to have a terrible time trying to read what he put down. I’m surprised those Bible verses are so neat.”

“But they are his writing?”

“Yes. For once, he must have slowed down a little.”

I thanked her and stopped at her desk long enough to get an issue of SpireTalk. It had a color photograph of the choir on the cover, with the line “The Spire’s Singers Prepare for a European Tour.” Maybe Wolfe would find some interesting reading inside, although I wasn’t about to bet on it. In fact, I wouldn’t even bet on his opening the thing.

As I was leaving the church, Roger Gillis blew into the lobby from the parking lot, his carrot-colored hair tossed by the wind. “Hello,” he said stiffly, trying to flatten the orange mop with his hand. “Learned anything yet?”

“Nothing that would get the newspapers excited,” I answered.

He snorted. “I’m not surprised. You’re still trying to find somebody to pin Roy’s murder on, aren’t you? When that’s not the mystery. Everybody knows who did it, and the police have already got him. The real question is, who wrote the notes to Barney? But you don’t even care about them — you just want to find some way to get your pal off. And you also don’t care who gets hurt in the process. Roy was right, rest his soul: You guys really are sleazy.”

Having thus put me in my place, Gillis strutted off in the general direction of his office, no doubt thinking I would lick my wounds and slink out. I didn’t slink, though, I strode, after first smiling at the redheaded receptionist, who gave her dimples another workout by smiling back.

The drive to Manhattan was a little slower than the morning trip, and by the time I got the car tucked in at the garage and climbed the front steps of the brown-stone, it was ten after four, which of course meant Wolfe was playing in the plant rooms. I went to the kitchen, where Fritz worked on dinner. He gave me a sorrowful look and reported that there were no lunch leftovers. “He ate all of the veal, Archie. I am sorry.”

“Hey, don’t be. Having feasted on your cutlets for years, I can’t blame him. I’ll make myself a sandwich.”

Fritz started to protest, but I stilled him with an upraised palm, built myself a ham-on-rye, poured a glass of milk, and went to my desk in the office. As I ate, I looked at the photocopies of Meade’s writing. The names and phone numbers I set aside, figuring the Bible verses were more promising, although I didn’t know the hows and whys.

The phone rang — it was Lon Cohen. “Maybe you remember me. The guy you call when you need information, but the guy you forget when he needs information.”

“Oh yeah, now I remember, the guy who helps to lighten my wallet at the gaming table every Thursday night.”

He made a sound that was a cross between a growl and a chuckle. “What’s going on with Durkin? He won’t come to the phone when I call — never mind that I’ve known him for years. And Parker doesn’t return my calls, but then, that’s a lawyer for you. Come across, Archie, give me something for tomorrow’s home edition. This story’s gone into the dumpster for days now.”

“Sorry, but I’ve got nothing to give. I’m as anxious as you are — hell, more anxious — to have something happen.”

“What’s Wolfe think?”

“Damned if I know. He rarely unburdens himself to me. Listen, you know that if and when something pops around here, you’ll be the first one I call.”

“Yeah. Can I get that in writing?”

“My word — spoken — is my bond,” I told him, getting a word in reply before the line went dead. I turned back to the sheet of paper in my hand.

I’m the first to admit my ignorance of the Bible, but when I was in confirmation class more years ago than you’ll get me to own up to, I memorized all the books of both the Old and New Testaments, and I got a red-and-gold pin for being the first one to do it. Never mind that I didn’t bother to learn what was in those books, beyond a few “begats” and “thou shalt nots.”

So much for my biblical training. I stared at Meade’s notations and wondered what, if anything, Wolfe would make of them. There were seven verses, neatly scripted and spaced out about three lines apart on the yellow sheet:

I briefly contemplated pulling one of Wolfe’s Bibles off the shelf and trying to make something out of all this, but I finished my sandwich instead, then started in on updating the orchid-germination records. I know how to use the old noodle, but I also know my limitations. On our team, Wolfe is the brains, and I’m the legs and the eyes and the sweat, when sweat is called for, which is most of the time. By and large, that division of authority works pretty well, and I wasn’t about to mess with it.