Silver Spire

Six

When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, he found the latest edition of the Gazette folded neatly on his desk blotter. I’d been through it already, of course. The headline, in two-inch-high capitals, screamed MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL! The secondary head, in only slightly smaller letters, read PRIVATE DETECTIVE CHARGED. There was a three-column picture of the Silver Spire tabernacle, and under it head shots of Bay, Meade, and Fred Durkin, along with a story that ran ten inches on Page One and jumped to the back of the first section, where it took up another two full columns. It didn’t tell much that I didn’t already know, except that the deceased was forty-seven and married to a Wall Street executive, had one child, and had been with the church since just after Bay founded it. Durkin was described as “a longtime New York free-lance private investigator, often employed by the legendary Nero Wolfe. In this instance, however, Durkin was operating independently, although he had been recommended to the church by Wolfe’s associate, Archie Goodwin, himself a private detective.”

An adjoining article by Tom Walston, the Gazette’s religion editor, described Meade as “second only to Barnabas Bay as a dynamic figure at the Silver Spire church. Insiders have said that Meade was clearly the anointed successor, if and when Reverend Bay decided to step down as spiritual head of the large and internationally known church and its affiliated television ministry.”

I kept quiet while Wolfe read, and when he finished I gave him a verbatim report of my session with Fred, which earned me a scowl, nothing more.

“Any instructions?” I prodded after he had retreated behind his book. I didn’t get an answer — not then, obviously not at dinner, and not when we were back in the office with coffee.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to stop in and see Fanny and the kids at least once a week, to try to keep their spirits up,” I said. “Or maybe Saul and I can alternate. I’ll take an orchid each time I go, to help brighten the place. I seem to recall that Fanny’s partial to yellow, so maybe the Oncidium varicosum will be—”

“Confound it, what are you blithering about?” Wolfe set his book down and glared.

I answered the glare with raised eyebrows. “I was just thinking about what the Durkin household is going to be like after Fred goes to Attica. Even with Parker in his corner, he’s a three-to-one shot to get life, of course, and I suppose—”

“Enough!” he bellowed. “Instructions.”

So that is why, one fine spring morning a few days after Royal Meade’s funeral, I was on the hulking ferry as it groaned into its slip at Staten Island. Part of my instructions from Wolfe was that I was not to go to the church until after the funeral because, he said, “The distractions among the staff will be manifest. They will be intense enough even the week after the services, but we can afford to wait no longer.”

Before leaving home that morning, I had called the church for directions, and a chirping secretary had told me that “It’s not more than twenty minutes’ walk from the ferry terminal, and tours are every half hour.” She’d helpfully given me street directions, which I copied onto a sheet of notebook paper I was now holding as I stood in front of the Borough Hall on Richmond Terrace, a street overlooking the waterfront and the distant towers of Wall Street.

“Downtown” Staten Island, if you can call it that, looks more like a small harbor burg than part of a borough of New York — a borough that, one, is tired of being a garbage dump for the rest of the city, and two, has of late been making noises to secede. Whatever the arguments pro and con, this sure didn’t seem like New York. There were no horns honking, and only an occasional pedestrian on the sidewalks that passed in front of small, empty shops and more than a few boarded-up storefronts on one- and two-story buildings. If it wasn’t a sleepy town, it was at least taking a breather.

After consulting the directions, I got myself squared away, heading south up Schuyler Street — and I do mean up.

If I ever knew how hilly the island was, I’d long since forgotten. In ten minutes, I was out of — and above — the small business district and into tree-shaded residential blocks where at least half the two-story frame houses cried out for a coat of paint and looked as though they had served as models for Charles Addams cartoons, complete with window shutters hanging at cockeyed angles by a single nail. I followed winding streets, all of which ran uphill, until, breathing hard, I reached a large open area that was level. In the center of this clearing, at least a block away, stood the Tabernacle of the Silver Spire, which looked vaguely like its photograph in the Gazette.

My first impression was “What’s the big deal?” The blocky, glass-and-concrete hulk appeared unimpressive, but I later figured out that was partly because the spire dwarfed it. And, after all, I was still at least three football fields away. The “clearing” turned out to be a parking lot — acres of blacktop, crisscrossed with yellow lines. Poles supporting floodlights poked out of the asphalt at regular intervals. Each one had a sign with a section and aisle number, just like a shopping center, lest the worshipers forget where they parked the family sedan. As I walked across the lot, the tabernacle seemed to grow, and by the time I got to the entrance — four sets of double doors with silver, cross-shaped handles — I conceded that this was indeed a big deal.

I pushed into the entrance hall. It was twice the size of my old high-school gymnasium and had a chrome-and-gold chandelier that Donald Trump somehow missed when he was fitting out his casino in Atlantic City. A bright-eyed redhead in a snappy green outfit sat inside a circular, chrome-skinned counter under the chandelier and shot a smile my way. “Good morning, sir. Here for a tour?”

“Not today.” I smiled back, recognizing the voice as the same one I’d heard when I called earlier. “I’d like to see Lloyd Morgan.” My voice echoed off the walls, or maybe it was bouncing off the floor that made my footsteps sound like I was eight feet tall and wearing hobnail boots.

She asked if he was expecting me, and I shook my head but gave her my name and told her he knew me. She picked up her phone and punched a number. “Mr. Morgan, a Mr. Goodwin is here to see you. Yes... He says you know him... Yes... All right.” Cradling the receiver, she threw another smile at me, crinkling her eyes and showing off a pair of dimples. “Mr. Morgan will be out in a moment. You can have a seat over there, Mr. Goodwin.” I smiled my thanks and walked around the hall, stopping to contemplate a large oil painting of Barnabas Bay in a chrome frame. The image oozed success and sincerity. Bay’s blond hair was styled, his eyes looked bluer than the oceans on the big Gouchard globe in Wolfe’s office, and his half-smile was all warmth and no smugness. I was still looking up at the face when clicking heels on the gleaming terrazzo floor announced Morgan’s arrival. He obviously wasn’t thrilled to see me.

“Why are you here?” he asked in an angry semi-whisper that couldn’t be heard by the dimpled redhead. I noticed that he was wearing a silver lapel pin in the shape of the church’s spire.

“To talk to you, of course, and Mr. Bay, too. I—”

“You’ve got colossal gall showing up after what’s happened,” he snapped, dispensing with the whisper. “I went to you in good faith, and when you and Mr. Wolfe turned me down, I trusted that your recommendation would be a sound one.”

“My recommendation was a sound one, and still is,” I told him. “Which is why I’m here. Fred Durkin didn’t murder Meade, and Mr. Wolfe intends to find out who did.”

“That’s total nonsense!” Morgan hissed. “The police arrested him, it was his gun, and he—”

“Time out, please,” I interrupted, holding up a hand. “You spent some time with Fred.”

“Enough. He talked to me first, of course, when he came here. And we had a couple of other conversations, neither of them very long.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“How did he strike you?” I asked.

Morgan shrugged and looked irritated by my questioning. “He was... all right, I suppose. It was clear that the man isn’t a genius, but he struck me as a decent person. Which goes to show we all can be fooled at one time or another.”

“He is a decent person, Mr. Morgan. I’ve known him for years, and seen him in some tough situations. Fred Durkin is not a murderer.”

“Huh! The evidence is otherwise,” he said stiffly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal to do.”

“I’d like to see Bay.”

“Impossible. He’s tied up with a thousand things.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

“No, but if he did, I assure you he would not want to see you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for a meeting.” Morgan turned to go back to wherever he’d come from, and after a wave at the redhead, I fell into step with him.

“Mr. Goodwin,” he said, wheeling on me and indulging in a deep, loud breath, “I must warn you that if you don’t leave, I will ask one of our security guards to escort you from the premises. At the risk of sounding impolite, you are not welcome here.”

“That’s pretty impolite, all right. Okay, I won’t tax the resources of your private constabulary, but you and the good reverend haven’t heard the last of Nero Wolfe and me. So long.” Having thus told Morgan off, I gave him a salute, but it bounced off his broad back as he stalked down the hall, presumably returning to his meeting.

So I’d been run off the property, sort of. Wolfe’s instructions had been for me to try to see Bay, but not to push it. I sure hadn’t pushed it, and I felt so frustrated that I barely smiled at the bright-eyed redhead in green as I went out the door. I started across the parking lot on my way back to the ferry terminal, when I spotted a cluster of people gathered outside another door to the big church. I put on the brakes when a woman in the group waved at me and said something I couldn’t hear, so I got closer.

“Are you looking for the tour?” she asked when I was within a horseshoe pitch of her. “I’m about to start one.”

I began to say no but put the brakes on my tongue. “That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks,” I told her. The guide was a pleasant-looking sixtyish lady with perfectly coiffed white hair, and wearing a tailored, buff blue sixtyish-lady’s suit, and standing around her in a neat, respectful arc were eight tour-takers, six of them women. They all looked to be in the same age bracket as their guide.

“I thought you appeared to be a little bit lost,” Ms. Guide said with an indulgent smile. “I’m Nella Reid, and I was just beginning to tell the rest of our guests here about how the Tabernacle of the Silver Spire came into being.”

“Don’t let me interrupt. Tell away.”

“Oh, it’s all right, I just this minute started. As I was saying to the others, our founder and leader, Barnabas Bay, began a ministry some eighteen years ago in a small town down along the New Jersey coast. He was young then — he’s still young, in my view,” she chuckled, “forty-nine on his next birthday. Anyway, Barney — that’s what he likes us all to call him — had been an assistant pastor in two churches in Georgia, where he hails from, when he felt a call to come north. So he packed up with his pretty wife and went to this resort area just north of Cape May. For about four years, he preached to vacationers who would gather on the beach in the warm months; and he preached to the locals — there were a lot fewer of them, of course — in the cold months, using an old church building that had been vacant for ages.

“Well, the Lord works in wondrous ways. Time magazine heard about Barney, and they did a big feature on this ‘barefoot preacher of the beach,’ as they called him. After that article ran, money came in from all over, and Barney was able to build a beautiful new church building in that little town, a building that is still used today.”

Nella Reid’s eyes danced as she looked from face to face. “Now, if I were to ask each one of you to name the most godless city in America, what would you answer?”

A tall, big-boned guy with a deeply lined face and white hair falling over one eye who I later learned was named McPherson piped up: “That’s easy — we’re in it right now, the good ol’ Big Apple.”

“We’re from Sioux Falls,” his wife added solemnly, as if that lent weight to her spouse’s opinion.

“Anybody else want to comment?” our smiling guide asked.

“I’d have to vote for New York as well,” a moonfaced woman of a certain age laughed, “even if I did come all the way from Kentucky to see the town.”

“I’ll add my vote too,” put in another woman, this one thin, with oversize dark-rimmed glasses and sporting a Prince Valiant haircut, “and I’ve been to Las Vegas — twice.”

“Barney wouldn’t be surprised to hear how you’ve all responded,” Nella Reid told them in exactly the tone that Mrs. Cunningham, my third-grade teacher, used when congratulating one of us on spouting a right answer. “He felt, and feels, the same way you do. When he was down there in New Jersey, he knew the Lord was calling him to come to New York City, where there was — still is — so much work to do.”

She paused, but she was nowhere near good enough an actress to make it seem spontaneous. “Now, I must add that New York is filled with absolutely wonderful, wonderful people, many of whom are stalwarts in our congregation. But there are so many more thousands who desperately need to be reached. Barney knew that when he came here fourteen years ago, and he knows it more than ever today, despite the magnificent progress he’s made here at Silver Spire.

“See that?” she asked, gesturing dramatically to a small brick-and-frame church with a steeple about a fourth the height of the big spire in a thick grove of trees across the parking lot. “That is our Cana Chapel, and it was Barney’s first building after he came here. He named it for Christ’s first miracle, where He turned the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, because he felt his establishing a church on Staten Island — right in the city of New York — was indeed a miracle. We’ll visit the chapel later, but now it’s time to see the tabernacle itself. Follow me, please.”

We obediently trailed her, with the McPhersons squabbling about what year they’d made their first and only other expedition to the wilds of New York. I think the wife won, but I made a point to drift to the opposite side of the group as we entered the building through a different door than I’d used earlier. Nella Reid led us into a two-story lobby and held up a hand to still any conversation.

“We are in the narthex of the sanctuary now,” she said with reverence. “I know it looks terribly expensive, what with all this beautiful white marble on the walls and granite on the floor, but you should know that every bit of that stone — and most of the construction cost of the tabernacle and its office-and-school wing — was donated by a gentleman in the congregation who is a builder and who came to know God through Barney. Now let’s go into the sanctuary.”

It was an impressive auditorium, I’ll give it that, with a big balcony and a wall of glass at least twenty feet high and twice that wide behind the pulpit that looked out on a grove of willows and a picture-postcard lagoon where a pair of white swans floated lazily. A large glass or clear plastic cross hung above the pulpit, apparently suspended on wires, although I couldn’t see them. Nella told us, at least three times, that the place seated something over thirty-six hundred — all upholstered theater-type seats, not pews — and that it was jammed to the rafters for the three services Sunday mornings, plus one service each Sunday night. She pointed out the locations of the four TV cameras and the control booth at the back of the balcony where the sound and lights are monitored.

“Our middle service each Sunday is telecast on a cable hookup to more than two hundred stations across the United States and goes by satellite to several foreign countries. Barney preaches every Sunday that he’s not traveling. And sometimes he illustrates his sermons with films or tapes,” she told us proudly. “There’s a control panel built into the pulpit that allows him to dim the lights, draw dark curtains electronically across the big window, lower the large screen that’s recessed into the ceiling, and activate the projector upstairs. When we have a well-known singer or musician here to perform at a Sunday service, their image also gets projected by video on the screen so that worshipers farther back in the sanctuary get a better view.”

“Real space-age stuff.” Mr. McPherson of Sioux Falls nodded his approval.

“I guess you could call it that,” our guide said. “We aren’t trying to be fancy here, but Barney feels many churches today don’t involve their congregations enough. He’s always coming up with new ways to get his points across. For instance, you’ll notice that the pulpit is actually up on a theater-type stage. Barney had the tabernacle designed with a stage rather than the traditional altar, because he likes the flexibility of sometimes having a playlet or a drama as part of the Sunday service. And the pulpit itself can be lowered hydraulically into the floor of the stage so that it’s totally out of sight when not being used.”

“Not what I usually think of as a church,” said the moon-faced lady from Kentucky, shaking her head, “but I guess it must work.”

“We like to think so,” Nella replied, trying unsuccessfully to sound modest. “But we also know there are many paths to the Lord.”

“Amen.” That came from the Prince Valiant lady, the one who had been to Las Vegas twice. “Does Barnabas Bay work here during the week?”

Our hostess nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes, every day. We have a whole wing devoted to offices and to Christian Education — classrooms for both children’s and adult Sunday school, as well as for classes that are held on weekday evenings. And we have a day-care center, too, for more than three hundred children.”

“The offices — that’s where that man who worked here was...” Mrs. McPherson, looking self-conscious and getting a stern eyeballing from her husband, let the sentence trail off.

“Yes.” Nella pressed her lips together and studied her serviceable low-heeled black pumps. “That’s where Mr. Meade was killed by that private detective. A tragedy, awful.”

I started to respond to that trial-by-tour-guide remark, but stifled myself. Sobered at the mention of Meade’s murder, we shuffled out of the huge sanctuary and moved on to the office-and-classroom wing. Nella showed us a couple of the classrooms, which would have made most universities envious, and as we walked along the hallway, a stunning brunette approached. “Hi, Nella,” she said with a smile that could melt the polar ice cap. “How’re those lovely grandchildren of yours?”

“Just fine thanks, Elise,” she answered as the brunette moved fluidly away down the hall. Already my life seemed emptier.

“Who was that beautiful woman?” the Kentucky lady whispered, asking the question for all of us.

“Elise Bay, Barney’s wife,” Nella said. “And she’s every bit as nice as she is beautiful. She’s very active in the tabernacle’s work. She was Miss North Carolina once, and from what’s been said, she should have been Miss America instead of second runner-up, but, well, there were politics involved. You know how that can be.”

We all nodded and continued on along the hall. I considered hanging back and drifting away from the group to do a little further solo exploring of the premises, but I took a pass. Wolfe has told me more than once that I lack patience, and after all, he had a plan. Or so he said.