Book of Nathan (2 page)

“You
can’t be serious!” Doug gave me a hard look.
      

“Totally serious,” I replied, at the same time doing a
mental rundown on the long list of differences between Doug and me. He was
manufactured slick from his hair transplants to his “Doctor” title, courtesy of
an honorary degree from the State University of New York. I was a
forty-something Joe with a plain vanilla bachelor’s degree from Penn State and
a retreating hairline. For all our dissimilarities, we had a weird kind of
connection that had weathered a dozen years.
  

Doug adjusted his glasses the way he did when he was super
serious. “Bullet, your boy
murdered
Benjamin
Kurios!”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“No, not
maybe.
Two
witnesses
saw
Zeupeneltoth—”

“Zeusenoerdorf.”

“Whatever. The fact is, your guy used a two-by-four to punch
a hole in Kurios’s head.”

“It wasn’t a two-by-four. It was a cross.”

“All right, all right,” Doug moaned. “So it was a cross.
Your boy banged together
two
two-by-fours
and then whacked the crap out of the world’s most famous Bible thumper.”

“He’s not my boy,” I protested.

“The hell he’s not!”

I could have argued, but it would have meant confronting the
disconcerting fact that Doug was probably right. In many respects,
Zeusenoerdorf
did
belong
to me.
 

Doug glared at me over his nearly finished lunch. “What am I
doing here?”

“Eating osso bucco—which I’m paying for.”

“Yeah, right,” Doug laughed. “If you’re paying, then I’m
being set up. What do you want?”

Doug Kool might be superficial, but he was far from dumb. He
knew I was picking up his tab at Panico’s, one of the city’s better
restaurants, because I needed a favor.
 

“A meeting with Zeusenoerdorf,” I said bluntly.
“Face-to-face.”

Doug gave a little tug on his tie. “Mission impossible. The
man’s sitting in an Orlando jail cell.”

“I know.”

“And even if you could work out a way to talk to him, the
bigger question is
why
would
you want to bother?”

“Because there’s a chance the guy’s innocent,” I explained.
“Zeus could be—”

“Zeus?” Doug interrupted.

“That’s what he’s called.”

Doug puffed his cheeks, shook his head, and motioned for me
to continue.

“Look, I know it’s a stretch, but it’s possible Zeus didn’t
kill anyone. Maybe he’s in custody because he happens to be a little—strange.”

“Strange?” Doug cut in. “I think it’s safe to say that
somebody who pounds the bejeezus out of an evangelist is a few notches beyond
strange
.
”

“Being odd doesn’t necessarily make the man a murderer.”

“Let me get this straight,” Doug pressed. “If you can get
eye-to-eye with this nutcase, you’ll figure out whether he’s innocent or
guilty. Am I hearing you right?”

It wasn’t the easiest case to make, but I was determined to
give it my all. I leaned forward so Doug wouldn’t lose what I was about to say
in the noontime buzz of the busy restaurant.

“There are a couple of things you should know.” I spoke with
as much sincerity as I could muster. “First, Zeus is slow. Second, he’s got a
serious speech defect.”

Doug grimaced. “I see. The man’s not a killer—he’s just got
a communications defect, right?”

I shrugged. “Could be.”

“Good God.” Doug waved down a waiter and ordered a cannoli
and cappuccino. My wallet groaned.

“I’m not saying he’s innocent.” I tried the you-may-be-right
tactic. “But I’m not totally convinced
he’s guilty.”

Doug took a deep breath. “Can’t help yourself, can you?”

“What?”

“Standing up for every loser who falls on his ass.”

“Not
every
loser.”

“Most. I gotta tell you, you’ve really found your calling.”

“My calling was your lucky day,” I reminded my pal. And for
a few moments, both of us were spun into the past.

I first met Doug a couple of years after he started with
Harris and Gilbarton. H&G was arguably the top fund-raising firm in the
nation, and Doug had been hired because he was born and bred rich, which meant
he was hardwired to big money. But it wasn’t his connections that rocketed him
to the top of his firm’s talent pool. It was his I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer
salesmanship. I figured his annual
salary had to be about five times what the Gateway put in my pocket.

Granted, Doug had raw talent, and he might have climbed to
the highest rung of his work world without me. But he wouldn’t have gotten
there so quickly if I hadn’t given him a boost. What brought us together was
the United Way of America—the charity goliath that H&G had been trying to
land as a client for years. The notion that the fund-raising United Way needed
help from another fund-raising consulting firm probably would have forever been
written off as a bad idea if I hadn’t opened the door for Doug.

It happened a few months after Anne died. That was twelve
years ago and yet I could easily reconstruct every detail of the Morgan Stanley
executive dining room where I was brought in as the dessert-and-coffee
performer for ten United Way board members and an H&G representative named
Dr. Douglas Kool. H&G, as I would later find out, had volunteered Doug as a
pro bono
consultant
to review my agency’s plan for a national United Way public service ad
campaign.

I showed up at the Morgan Stanley lunch about the same time
I decided to exit the advertising business. I was still on my agency’s payroll,
but after Anne’s funeral, my heart wasn’t in the game. That became painfully
obvious to the United Way board members who found the crème brulee and
cappuccino far more interesting than my story boards. Later that same day, I
handed in my resignation.

After my poor Morgan Stanley performance, Doug was invited
into the United Way’s inner sanctum as a paid consultant. H&G had finally
landed one of its most elusive prospects, which might never have happened if it
weren’t for me.

“It still amazes me that you dumped Madison Avenue,” Doug
said.

“Every so often, principles trump the pocketbook.”

“Principles my ass. You bailed out of New York six months
after your wife died. The reason you’re running a homeless shelter is your
crazy way of paying homage to Anne.”

“There are crazier things I could do.”

“You’ve been at this for
twelve
years,
Bullet! You’ve turned your job into a kind of hair shirt
memorial to your wife, for God sakes. You don’t take vacations. You don’t date.
Your life is half about running a boardinghouse for lowlifes and half about
begging for money to keep the Gateway’s lights on.”

Harsh and partially true. Granted—Anne had a lot to do with
why I first took the job in New Brunswick. I needed to get out of Manhattan,
which had become a constant reminder of how much I had lost when cancer killed
my wife. I had planned to spend a year or two working with the homeless and
then jump back into the business world. That didn’t happen. Not solely because
of Anne, but because I also became infected with the same convictions that had
defined my wife’s life until her final day at Sloan-Kettering.

“Speaking of keeping the lights on,” I tried moving the
conversation in another direction. “Paying the bills would be a lot easier if
guys like you could arm-twist the upper crust into using their tax-deductible
donations to help the sick, poor, and homeless instead of buying privilege and
status.”
 

“Don’t start,” Doug implored.

I couldn’t help myself. It was an old ballad I loved to
sing. “You know as well as I do that for every ten-cent donation made to the
Gateway, ten dollars goes to some high-end nonprofit that promises to put a
contributor in good company or good seats.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Doug groaned. “So get back to why I’m parked
here in Central Jersey. What exactly do you want?”

“A free ride,” I answered. “To and from Orlando. Plus room
and board.”
 

“What’s the point? To spend five minutes with a man who’s
absolutely, positively guilty!
You’re
in denial, for chrissakes. Two guys saw your man do the deed.”

“They didn’t actually see what happened. The two college
kids who showed up on the scene got there a few minutes after Kurios was
attacked.”

Doug looked at me in disbelief. “Bullet, what they saw
was your guy holding a homemade cross
soaked with blood. And they saw Kurios on the street with his skull in pieces.
Jesus! What more do you want?”

“To hear Zeus tell me what happened.”

Doug leaned back. “You need to give this thing a rest.”

“I can’t do that—at least not yet.”

“You
do
remember
who your man, Zeus, exterminated, right?” Doug asked. “Benjamin Kurios. The
prince of evangelists.”

I didn’t need to be reminded of the obvious. The media had
been profiling Kurios since the day he died.

“Kurios wasn’t just another Joel Osteen, Jim Bakker, or
Benny Hinn,” said Doug. “He was better
than
Billy Graham, for God sakes. People followed him like lemmings.”

One of those lemmings was Miklos Zeusenoerdorf, who was infatuated
with Kurios. He rarely missed a televised sermon and had a complete collection
of the evangelist’s books on tape. Twice, Zeus saw Kurios live at stadium-sized
revival rallies, one at Madison Square Garden and another at the Meadowlands.
It was a chance to see Kurios perform for a third time that had taken Zeus to
Orlando.

I paused to give my coffee a counterclockwise swirl. Doug
and I both looked at my cup like it was trying to tell us something. “Zeus is
as gentle as they come.”
 

“If I remember right, you also told me he’s nuts.”

“I said retarded.”

“He’s retarded and
crazy.”

“Even if you’re right, he’s not a crack-your-head-open kind
of crazy.”

Doug wasn’t buying it. In fact, it seemed the entire country
wasn’t swallowing it except for me—and a few of the misfits who took up space
at the Gateway.
 

“Here’s another fact that may have slipped your mind,” Doug
said. “The man did a stretch in Rahway.”

“Simple theft. He got caught loading a few TVs into a van.
It wasn’t like he was locked up for murder.”

“So stealing televisions isn’t a clue your guy has certain
antisocial tendencies?”

“A couple of lowlifes paid him to do a half hour of heavy
lifting. The cops show up, the bad boys disappear, and Zeus is left holding a
forty-six-inch plasma.”

“And you actually believe that’s what happened.”

That’s exactly
what
I believe. “Zeus has, well, he’s a man with the mind of a child. If someone
tells him to shove a TV into the back of a van, that’s what he does. If he gets
caught, there’s no way he can talk himself out of it.”

“And if somebody tells him to whack one of the most magnetic
characters to ever set foot on the planet, does he do that too?”

This all was going nowhere. It was time to close the deal—or
at least try to. “Let’s get back to what I want. Three round-trips to Orlando
and three rooms somewhere in the city.”

“Three?”

“Three.”