Silver Spire

Seven

By the time I arrived back at the brownstone, Wolfe had finished lunch and was in the office with coffee and his book. Fritz, bless him, had saved me a plate of rice fritters with black currant jam, so I voted my priorities by sitting in the kitchen and polishing off the fritters, then chasing them with two wedges of blueberry pie before reporting. Besides, if I had gone straight in to see Wolfe, he would have refused to hear me out until I’d eaten anyway. If he had a motto, it would be something like “Food first, all else in due course.”

When I did get to the office, carrying a cup of java, he was ready to listen. I gave him a fill-in, including my tour of the buildings and grounds. He kept his eyes shut throughout my report, scowling a couple of times and grimacing when I told him that Nella the tour guide had tried and convicted Fred. When I finished, he drew in air, letting it out slowly.

“Confound it,” he grumped, ringing for beer, “get that minister on the phone.” Wolfe always assumes I can reach anybody instantly just by picking up the phone, dialing, and declaring that Nero Wolfe is the caller. I punched the church’s number, and the redhead who sits in the splashy lobby answered again. I asked for Bay, and she put me through without any questions.

“Doctor Bay’s office,” a pleasant female voice answered.

“Nero Wolfe calling,” I told her, nodding to Wolfe, who picked up his instrument.

“What is this in reference to?” she asked politely.

“I think he’ll know,” I replied, and we got put on hold. For the next thirty seconds, we both were treated to the strains of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” which for me brought memories of my Sunday-school days in Chillicothe. I’m not sure what it brought Wolfe, who doesn’t like using telephones and likes hearing recorded music on them even less, but the hymn got interrupted in midverse by a voice only slightly tinged with a southern drawl. “Barney Bay here,” it said. I stayed on the line.

“Mr. Bay, this is Nero Wolfe. I believe you know of me.”

“I do indeed,” the reverend replied evenly, “by reputation.”

“I am drawing on that reputation to impose upon you, sir. I need to talk to you, preferably today.”

“Well, I have a few minutes right now...”

“This conversation must be in person, and at the risk of further imposition, I request that it be held in my house, as I rarely leave it.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wolfe,” Bay said, his voice still even, “but I have a meeting in less than a half-hour, and I’m teaching an adult class here at the church tonight.”

“Tomorrow, then.” It wasn’t a question.

I could hear Bay breathing, then sighing. “I assume this has to do with Roy Meade’s death and your Durkin fellow.”

“It does, sir, and it would be in the best interests of both you and your church if you spoke with me. I assure you I will not prolong the discussion unnecessarily. My time, like yours, has immutable value.”

Another sigh. “All right, I can come tomorrow, in the midmorning. Ten-thirty?”

“Eleven,” Wolfe corrected, then gave him our address. Bay agreed without enthusiasm.

“Okay, you’ve pulled it off,” I said after we cradled our receivers. “I would’ve bet three-to-two against. Congratulations.”

Although you’ll never get him to admit it, Wolfe enjoys praise as much as the next guy. His mouth formed what passes for a smile, and he went back to his beer and his reading, while I swiveled to my desk, where orchid-germination records awaited updating.

The next morning, Wolfe beat Bay to the office, but only by half a length. It was precisely eleven when the groaning elevator announced the great man’s descent from the plant rooms. He was crossing the sill into the office as the doorbell rang. “Get yourself comfortable,” I told him, “while I play butler.”

Viewed through the one-way glass in the front door, Barnabas Bay, clad in a light gray suit that made me want to ask the name of his tailor, looked surprisingly like the painting I’d seen twenty-four hours earlier in the tabernacle, right down to the warm-but-not-smug half-smile. He was alone on the stoop, although I could see someone behind the wheel of the modest dark blue sedan parked at the curb.

I opened the door and gestured him in. “Mr. Bay, I’m Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe’s assistant.”

“Oh yes, of course, Lloyd has spoken of you,” he said in his gentle drawl, giving me a firm handshake. “In fact, he said you were at the tabernacle yesterday. Sorry I couldn’t see you, but I had meetings all day. If I had known in advance...”

I told him not to worry about it, that I’d taken a tour. By then, we were entering the office, where I made introductions. Bay, who sensed Wolfe isn’t big on shaking hands, nodded a greeting and eased into the red leather chair.

Wolfe leaned back and considered his guest. “Would you like anything to drink? I’m having beer.”

“Ice water, please,” Bay responded. Like Morgan, he had one of those spire-shaped pins on his lapel.

“Your given name is Robert Bailey,” Wolfe went on after he’d touched the buzzer under his desk, summoning Fritz. “Why did you change it?”

If the question caught Bay off balance, he didn’t let it show. “I’m afraid ministers are not without their vanities,” he said with a shrug. I could see how he would project well on television. He had the looks, to be sure, and all his gestures seemed natural and fluid. “As a seminarian in Georgia, I grew to admire Barnabas very much. He worked closely with Paul in Antioch, and—”

“I am aware of who he was.” Wolfe was taking the biblical lecture with his usual good grace. “A good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and a great number of people were brought to the Lord.”

Bay nodded, and his grin revealed teeth that could light up a revival tent. “Acts 11:24. You know your Bible well.”

“It is literature,” Wolfe responded. “Why the altered surname?”

“You seem very interested in my names,” Bay answered good-naturedly. “I could tell you that I thought Bay seemed more dramatic than Bailey, which I suppose is partly the case. The main reason, though, is that my father deserted the family when I was eight. None of us ever saw him again. My mother raised four of us by working two full-time jobs, which probably took at least ten years off her life. I couldn’t forgive him, and I didn’t want to carry his name.”

“Yet you are a highly visible representative of a faith in which forgiveness is among the most exalted of virtues.”

Bay chuckled and slapped his thigh with a palm. “I like your direct approach, Mr. Wolfe,” he said without resentment. “You are right, of course. My failure to come to terms with the anger I felt at my father has pained me for years. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to work my way through it, at least to some extent. But,” he added with a slight smile, “after all these years, I’m stuck now with the name I gave myself in seminary. I know you didn’t ask me here to talk about my past, though.”

“Indeed. Our business is very much of the present. It is my intention to prove that Fred Durkin did not dispatch your associate.”

“The evidence would seem to indicate otherwise,” Bay said, lowering his voice theatrically.

“How would you describe your relationship with Mr. Meade?” Wolfe asked after giving Fritz Bay’s drink order and requesting beer for himself.

“We were close, of course.”

“One of the newspapers suggested that he was your heir apparent.”

Bay, folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes for several seconds. I wondered if he was always onstage. “Mr. Wolfe, it’s difficult for me to even talk about Roy right now, so soon after... well, so soon after what happened. And you can’t believe all the newspaper and TV people that have been in the church the last few days. Lights and cameras everywhere. And of course the police. I wasn’t even going to come here when you asked, but given that Lloyd approached you originally because of those notes, I felt that in a strange way I owed it to you.”

“You owe me nothing, sir. But since you have raised the subject, what is your opinion about the origin of the notes?”

“My guess is, an eccentric. Sad to say, every church gets them once in a while. I even had a few back in my little parish in New Jersey.”

“Have you received any other hostile missives since you’ve been in your present location?”

Bay looked at the ceiling as if in contemplation, then leveled his blue eyes at Wolfe. “Oh, just a handful, mostly complaining about the content of a sermon, or about the hymns we sang, or my theology. But never a whole series like this. And never so threatening. I suppose that’s the underlying reason I agreed to let Lloyd come to see you. But honestly, they — the notes — didn’t concern me much. I’m not easily frightened, Mr. Wolfe. And after all, we get more than twelve thousand worshipers at the Silver Spire every Sunday; a few of them are bound to be, well, unusual.”

“What do you think of Mr. Durkin’s theory that the notes came from someone on the church staff?”

“Unthinkable!” Bay snorted, waving the idea away as if it were a gnat. “That outlandish comment of his is what started the whole furor. If he hadn’t said that, Roy would be alive today.”

Wolfe drank beer and dabbed his lips with a handkerchief. “Was Mr. Meade in fact your designated successor?”

Bay calmed himself and shifted in the red chair while his television smile returned. “As I told that police inspector, Cramer, we’d never actually established a formal succession,” he said.

“Was there a tacit understanding?”

Bay frowned and tilted his head to one side. “If so, it wasn’t because of anything I said or did, although I can see where, given his duties, Roy may have made some assumptions. And possibly others made them, too. The truth is, though, I simply haven’t started thinking about a successor. That’s probably not good management on my part, but I’m not even forty-nine years old, Mr. Wolfe, and I feel like I have a lot of good years left in parish ministry, which to me is what the Silver Spire really is, despite our TV network and the national publicity and the books I’ve written.” If that last reads to you like a rehearsed speech, join the club. That’s how it sounded when he said it, too, although the guy really knows how to use his voice for maximum effect. I found I was almost enjoying hearing him talk.

“Assuming you were ready to step down, would Mr. Meade have been your choice as a successor?” Wolfe asked.

Bay waited several beats before answering, studying his hands and glancing at his elegantly simple wristwatch. “Roy has — had — been with me a long time. As Senior Associate Pastor, he functioned more or less as my chief of staff. He was loyal and devoted to our work — a real soldier for the Lord.”

“But not a general.”

Bay unleashed a self-effacing smile. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to,” Wolfe remarked. “How did the members of your Circle of Faith relate to Mr. Meade?”

Bay took a drink of water, returning the glass carefully to the small table at his side. “Mr. Wolfe, Roy had many fine qualities. He worked day and night — in fact, I had to urge him to ease off sometimes, to go home to his wife and son. He was a fine preacher, with a strong delivery and well-prepared, well-organized sermons. He often filled in when I was away if we didn’t have a high-profile guest minister lined up. And he always wanted everything to be just right — he was a perfectionist, which you must realize isn’t always conducive to popularity.”

“What comes to perfection perishes.”

Bay raised his eyebrows. “That’s not from the Bible; is it Shakespeare?”

“Browning,” Wolfe said. “Have you in fact answered my question?”

An earnest nod. “As I’m sure you’ve gathered from what I’ve said, Roy tended to be rigid. Some of the others chafed at this from time to time.”

“Did you intercede when there were differences?”

“Oh, Mr. Wolfe, indeed I did, indeed I did. Roy and I talked — and prayed — about his, well, I suppose abrasiveness is the best description. He was aware of the problem, and I feel he honestly tried to improve.”

“But still you received complaints?”

A shrug of the gray-suited shoulders. “Occasionally.”

“From whom?”

“Mr. Wolfe, we’re getting into an area of confidentiality here,” Bay said, rippling his brow. “I don’t feel I can answer that.”

“A man has been charged with first-degree homicide. I am not indulging in hyperbole by stating that his life is on the line.”

“There is no death penalty in this state.”

“Come, sir, that is a quibble. A long prison sentence spells the end for an individual as surely as does the hangman’s noose or lethal gas.”

“All right,” Bay said, reaching for the glass of water. He did not raise it to his lips. “Every one of the Circle of Faith, and that includes even my wife, has complained at one time or another to me about Roy.”

“What was the nature of the complaints?”

“Well, most of them centered on Roy’s abrasiveness, as I mentioned before. He could be extremely curt with people. To give you a bit of background, I assembled the Circle of Faith as a somewhat informal advisory council, sort of like those ‘kitchen cabinets’ that presidents used to have years ago. All the people in the Circle have been part of the Silver Spire ministry just about from its beginnings. Elise, of course, has been with me a lot longer than that; we’ve been married almost twenty-five years. Anyway, the Circle has been extremely important to me, both as a spiritual support group and an advisory body. They’re encouraged to be very close-knit and supportive of one another, as well as of me. Unfortunately, Roy tended to strain relationships, rather than bond them. He’d always been somewhat that way, and in the last several months, I’d gotten increasingly concerned about his divisive nature.” Bay let out air loudly, as if exhausted by his short monologue.

“And you had told him of this concern?” Wolfe asked, draining the beer in his glass and contemplating the remaining foam sourly.

The clergyman’s shoulders sagged. “Several times. And finally, about two weeks ago, we had a long meeting in my study. It got pretty tense. Roy just didn’t seem to understand why I was so upset about his methods. He told me that I coddle the rest of the staff too much. Now, maybe I do try awfully hard sometimes to avoid confrontation, but that’s my style.

“Mr. Wolfe, I’m a positive thinker, to lift the phrase from Norman Vincent Peale, and I don’t apologize for being one. We call our approach at Silver Spire ‘Inspirational Theology,’ which was also the name of a book I wrote a few years ago. Not a very exciting title, I admit, but it did sell pretty well, still does. Anyway, ‘IT,’ which is the abbreviation we like to use, calls among other things for everyone to place a high value on respect and support for one another. As a faith, we try to avoid confrontation and seek conciliation wherever possible. I loved Roy Meade, and I’ll miss him terribly, both as an individual and as a brother in the Lord. But on too many occasions, his conduct ran contrary to our principles. He was always quick to find fault with others on the staff and point it out — both to their faces and, worse, behind their backs. More than once he made critical remarks — really critical — about one or another co-worker in front of others, including secretaries and even volunteers from the congregation who happened to be within earshot. Criticism given in the proper spirit is not necessarily a bad thing, as you know. But often Roy’s criticisms were rough and, well... hurtful. And if the church leaders don’t themselves set an example, then what is the flock to think?” Bay turned his palms up in what seemed like a gesture he’d spent time perfecting.

Wolfe looked peevish. “How long had Mr. Meade been affiliated with the church?” he asked.

“Since just after I’d come to Staten Island from New Jersey — almost fourteen years. Before that, we were in the seminary together, although he was a couple years behind me.”

“What did he think of the notes?”

“He was even less concerned about them than I was,” Bay replied. “He argued with Lloyd about bringing in outside help, said they — the notes — were merely the work of some crackpot and weren’t something to worry about. We were in basic agreement on that.”

“Regarding that serious conversation you had with Mr. Meade two weeks ago, what was the upshot?”

Bay replaced the water glass on the table, leaned forward in the red leather chair, and rested his arms on his knees, looking intently at Wolfe. “I told him that I felt he must — absolutely must — ease up in his management style and control his temper. The flash point was an episode Roy had with Roger Gillis. There had been some kind of minor foul-up in the scheduling of a new track of adult-education classes. It was not a big deal, really, but Roy acted like it was; he chewed poor Roger out in front of the membership secretary. Said something like ‘We simply can’t keep having screwups like this, or you can bet there’ll be some changes made around here!’”

“Had Mr. Gillis been guilty of previous oversights?” Wolfe asked.

“Nothing major,” Bay drawled. “Oh, from time to time he’s been a little soft on details, but he more than makes up for it with his hard work and his good ideas. He’s tripled the number of adult classes we offer in the last four years or so. And he’s brought in a remarkable diversity of teachers — nationally known college professors, child psychologists, biblical scholars, and other theologians from the big schools in Manhattan. He even got the quarterback for the Giants to come over and talk on three straight Sunday nights about the role of faith in athletics. Of course, that really packed them in.”

Wolfe was unimpressed. “You said you told Mr. Meade that he had to rein in his temper. If he couldn’t?”

“We didn’t get to that point. As I told you a moment ago, I try to avoid confrontation. I did tell him that we would start meeting more often, one-on-one, with a single agenda: talk about and pray about his... problem. And he vowed to try to do better.”

“In the few days between that meeting and his death, had you seen an improvement in his behavior?”

“Honestly, no,” the minister answered sadly, passing a hand over his blond hair.

“Sir, as you are aware, Mr. Goodwin went to your church yesterday and was denied admission by Mr. Morgan. Now—”

“I know, and I’ve already told Mr. Goodwin I was sorry about my not being able to see him then. We’ve all been a little edgy since Roy’s death,” Bay said. “And Lloyd was just being protective of me and the rest of the staff.”

“I can appreciate that,” Wolfe said, “and I also realize that Mr. Goodwin arrived on your doorstep unannounced. Now, however, I wish to make an appointment for him to return and talk to each member of your staff.”

“That’s asking a good deal,” Bay said, sneaking a look at his watch. “I’ve already canceled two meetings and delayed another one to be here this morning. And my staff is upset and distracted enough as it is, what with the police and the reporters and TV people hovering around so much lately. And now you want to take even more of their time.”

“Your concern for your employees is admirable, sir. In a very real sense, Mr. Durkin is an employee of mine, or has been on numerous occasions that span a far longer period than the life of your tabernacle.”

Bay nodded and made a chapel with his long fingers. “And you remain convinced that Mr. Durkin is innocent — even though that innocence, if proven, would almost surely mean that someone at the Silver Spire is a murderer.”

“Just so,” Wolfe said. “But if you are convinced of Mr. Durkin’s guilt, there is nothing to fear from having them talk to Mr. Goodwin. And as to time, I assure you he will not draw out the interviews unnecessarily.”

“All right. I don’t like the idea very much,” Bay said, “but I’ll ask each of them to make themselves available for Mr. Goodwin. I can’t guarantee how forthcoming they’ll be, though.” He turned to me. “How soon would you want to see them?”

“Tomorrow,” Wolfe dictated. “Preferably in the morning.”

“That’s awfully short notice,” Bay complained. “I’m not sure they all will be in the building then.”

“I’m confident you can arrange it,” Wolfe said, rising. “If you will excuse me, I have a previous engagement.” He walked out, leaving me to say the good-byes to our guest, who watched Wolfe disappear with an expression somewhere between puzzlement and anger.

“He wasn’t being rude just then,” I reassured Bay. “He’s a genius, and when he has a lot on his mind, he tends to forgo some of the social niceties.” What I didn’t bother to tell him was that Wolfe’s previous engagement was a trip to the kitchen to supervise Fritz in his preparation of the stuffed veal breast we were having for lunch. As if Fritz needs supervision.