Boyfriend from Hell (13 page)

“Why would we want to name ourselves after them?” Bayers said. “It gives them publicity.”

They nodded in agreement. Power was slipping away from him quickly, Wilson felt, and he needed to come up with another name fast.

“How about the Anti-Satanist Group?”

“I think it’s good,” Bayers said and the others agreed.

“So we have it, the Anti-Satanist Group,” Wilson said. “Praised be the Lord.”

Bayers and Wilson collaborated on the flyer, which included, “This Randall Cummings and his so-called church advocate more evil at a time when the world needs less evil. … This evil-spewing church and its teachings oppose everything God-fearing, good people believe in. … This evil-spewing church is opposed to all organized religion. … This evil-spewing church and its members and their possible actions are a threat to everyone outside their church.” Wilson contributed, “This evil-spewing church’s members should go to hell since they admire its gatekeeper so much.” He was proud of that. In summation they called for local, state, and federal authorities to shut the church down.

After her meeting with the private investigator, convinced of the course of action she needed to take, Ronnie called Cummings.

“Randall Cummings.”

“Veronica Delaney.”

“Ah, Ms. Delaney, calling me to make a dinner date?”

“Don’t leave your office, Mr. Cummings. Don’t go anywhere. I’m coming there.”

“It will be the highlight of my day.”

Wilson wasn’t doing very well distributing flyers on a humid May afternoon, the temperature in the nineties. Beattie Ryan was his only colleague on this sticky day and few people were interested in taking the literature. The sight of Ronnie walking toward the building aroused them—someone was actually there—and they began raising their banners and shouting, “Down with Satan, down with Satan.” She glanced over at them, not slowing her step. Wilson hurried over to Ronnie as she was about to head toward the side entrance of the building.

“I’m John Wilson of the Anti-Satanist Group,” he said, trying to behave in a leaderly fashion.

Under other circumstances she might have evidenced curiosity. She just wanted to get at Cummings.

“Okay.”

She turned away from him and he glared at her, offended.

“Our literature,” and he handed her a flyer.

She took the flyer without looking at it and folded it into a pocket of her jeans as she resumed walking.

Wilson was extremely disappointed in her reaction. He wanted her to read the flyer in its entirety in front of him so he could answer questions. Her indifference was an affront to him and he suddenly went from calm to seething at her behavior.

“I do the Lord’s work!” he said. “Do you work for the Devil?”

“No,” she answered. “I’m freelance.”

Ronnie rang the bell at the side door and Cummings’s assistant appeared. “I spoke to Mr. Cummings. He knows I’m coming.” He looked at her with contempt, stepped aside for her, and continued out of the building. She entered Cummings’s office and by contrast he was veritably sunny.

“Ah, the beautiful and talented Veronica Delaney.”

“Mr. Cummings.”

“I should add, and the egregiously misinformed Veronica Delaney.”

“Mr. Cummings, since I wrote the article I’ve been sent a dead black cat, black cats were thrown in my path, a death skull trinket was tossed at me by someone weird who ran off, and the latest is, I received in the mail a head shot of me, cut, with the head separated from the body.”

“Now what would any of that have to do with me?”

“Retaliation?”

“For what? I have more members since the article appeared than I had before. Surprise you? You probably thought you were putting me out of business.”

“Nobody else would care about me. It’s you or that assistant of yours or another one of your people.”

“Cosmo? He may be a little—socially challenged. But he wouldn’t do anything I didn’t tell him to do, and I didn’t tell him to do anything. As I said to the police more than once and I’ll say to you, it isn’t in my business interest to badger you. Now you got a good article out of me. I
am
good copy, let’s face it. Nice byline in a major magazine. Good for your career and a chance to get your
vivid
writing on display. By the way, you’re a very good writer for somebody so young. You
could
use more objectivity.”

“About someone who takes advantage of people?”

“I read your piece, darling. Anyway, we both got something out of it; you helped your reputation, I got the exposure.”

“But the exposure of the way you’ve been harassing me, if I wrote about that, it wouldn’t be so good for you, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t. The media likes to protect their own and if it got to be a big deal, that isn’t the kind of coverage I’m looking for.”

“So let’s come to an agreement here. I don’t write the follow-up piece telling how you harassed me and you don’t follow up with any more of these harassments.”

“I can’t say yes to that.”

“And why is that, Mr. Mephistopheles?”

“Because, as I keep telling you, which you don’t want to hear, I had nothing to do with it. Here, want me to e-mail my people telling them to cease and desist? You can write it yourself.” He turned to his computer, did some typing, and read aloud, “‘To all members. It has come to our attention …’ What would you like to say?”

“You say it. They’re your people.”

“‘The writer, Veronica Delaney, who wrote an article about the Dark Angel Church for
New York
magazine, has been receiving unpleasant …’”

“Make that ‘has been receiving threats.’”

“‘Has been receiving threats.’” He composed aloud as he typed, “‘These are not the wishes of your leader, and anyone involved must cease and desist, effective immediately. Noncompliance will result in expulsion from the church.’ There. They’ve been told.”

“All right. But it doesn’t cover
you.”

“It doesn’t have to cover me. I would never do anything like that. Use your logic. Why would I? I don’t need you here, threatening me with bad publicity. On some level, all publicity is good publicity, we’ve seen that, but I don’t need that kind of story. I didn’t do it. Repeat, I didn’t do it. Nobody under my instructions did it. You think there’s some rogue member of my cult, acting on his own, making the assumption it’s what I wanted? I truly doubt it. And if it’s so, and I do truly doubt it, with that e-mail, it’s over.”

She began to become dizzy, something about the tension of this encounter, she presumed, and Cummings began to blur in her vision. She vaguely heard him saying, “… it becomes me being the one harassed … the police … the time dealing with it …”

She made an effort to rise from the chair, “… get you something … water … call a car for you?”

She was aware of saying, “It’s over then,” and she made her way out of his office, holding her hand against the walls of the corridor for balance, and walked shakily into the street. She squinted from the sun, everything blurry, the group across the way chanting when they saw her, “Down with Satan, down with Satan,” a car horn blasting, someone yelling, “Watch where you’re walking!”

Her fingers brushed the sides of buildings for balance. If she could only sit for a minute she would be all right, in the shade somewhere, she couldn’t just sit on the sidewalk in the sun. With her blurry vision she saw something in the distance as if it were a mirage, benches beneath trees, and she sat on a bench and closed her eyes, and passed out.

She regained consciousness, a headache pushing in on her eyes. She checked her watch, 3:49. She had been up there an hour and a half. Her sight was clear now and she saw that she was on a bench outside an apartment building in a housing project two blocks from the Dark Angel Church. People were going in and out of the building and whoever she was who nodded off, a junkie, or a drunk from downtown, they were indifferent to her. She walked to 125th Street, hailed a cab, and closed her eyes until they reached her building. She was shivering from the strangeness.

A
NOTHER BLACK HOLE, NO
consciousness, a blank. She remembered talking to Cummings to a point and then nothing. She couldn’t trace a memory from the moment her vision began to blur to the time when she awoke on the bench. She lay on her bed with the lights off. She had been tense, it was a hot day, perhaps she had become dehydrated, but mainly the tension, she believed, the cumulative effect caused her to become faint, and Cummings, the tension of dealing with him, arrogant and blameless—and for all his protestations she still had no assurance some other awful object wouldn’t be sent her way.

No way around it. She needed to see a doctor. Her gynecologist worked in a medical group with other doctors and Ronnie prevailed upon her to arrange for an appointment with an internist.

By evening, after rest and a couple of aspirin, she was feeling more stable. She scanned her e-mail; Richard had written to her.

Paul Stone says you are gorgeous and smart. I didn’t need a P.I. to tell me that, but apparently he thinks as I do, wait it out and the bad guys will go away. Back in New York in about two weeks.


An e-mail from Nancy:

Straight to business thing for Bob, then his place. See you in the a.m.


A break for Ronnie in television programming;
Roman Holiday
was on cable. She made an omelet for dinner, ate in bed watching the movie, then went to sleep.

Cummings made an appearance in her dreams, he was her taxicab driver and drove her into a black hole. She awoke and fell back to sleep. The clock radio went off at seven. Her intention was to try restoring herself physically with a jog in the park. She was getting into her jogging clothes when Nancy entered after spending the night at Bob’s apartment and called out a hello to Ronnie. Nancy went into her bedroom and turned on the television set to the news. The announcer’s tease for the next item after a commercial break startled her.

“Ronnie, get in here right away!”

Ronnie hurried into the room.

“Coming up, you’re not going to believe this,” Nancy said.

The female announcer appeared with an insert behind her on the screen, a shot of Randall Cummings.

“Satanic cult leader Randall Cummings is dead. The head of the Dark Angel Church, located on 129th Street, was apparently strangled to death in his church yesterday.”

“What?” Ronnie said, and her insides tightened with this shock to her system.

“He was found by an employee of the church. Police officials report a motive for the slaying is unknown. The Dark Angel Church advocates worship of Satan; the cult said to number over a thousand in the Manhattan-based congregation and via the Internet. Cummings was forty-five years old.”

The announcer started her next report and Nancy clicked off the television set.

“My God, I was there. Yesterday. In the afternoon.”

“You know how lucky you are nothing happened to you? You might have just missed the killer.”

“I went there to tell him to stop harassing me. I was
in
his office.”

“Strangled to death. Whew.”

“He sent an e-mail to his congregation to leave me alone. I think he was going to cooperate. I can’t believe it. He’s dead.”

Nancy eventually went to work. Ronnie took a long bath, contemplating the nearly incomprehensible events of the previous day. She went to see Cummings to confront him, she blacked out, she couldn’t even remember much of her time up there, and he was murdered. What if she
had
been present when the killer arrived? She might be dead, too.

A few minutes after 11:00
A.M.
she pushed herself to her desk to coordinate notes on the book. She worked unevenly. If she had never written about Cummings, she contemplated, would attention not have been directed toward him and would he still be alive? Did she contribute to the death of someone? It was a hard way for the harassment to stop, with his death, but she assumed it would stop now.

The original call to the police about Cummings came the previous afternoon from the assistant, Cosmo Pitalis. When Santini and Gomez arrived he was sitting on a step to the rear door, weeping. After observing the editing of a new film for the Web site, Pitalis returned to the church from the production studio at about 4:30
P.M.
and found the body, he told the detectives. Beginning to build a time line on suspects, they asked if he could remember when he left the building. A few minutes after 2:00. His appointment at the video studio was for 2:15. This was later confirmed by three different people at the production house, located on 125th Street. Pitalis arrived there at 2:15 and departed from the studio at 4:20. He originally left “when that woman arrived,” he said.

“What woman was that?” Gomez asked. The detectives were kneeling next to the overwrought assistant.

“The Delaney woman. That so-called writer.”

“She was here?” Gomez said. He and Santini were taken aback by the information. “What was she doing here?”

“I have no idea.”

“And she came just after two. What time did she leave?” Santini asked.

“I couldn’t tell you. I was gone. Why did they kill him? His mission was to help people,” and he began weeping again.

“How do people get in and out?” Gomez asked.

“Front door, locked during the week. Side door, when I open it. This door is for deliveries and it leads to parking.”

“Can you just open a door and walk in?”

“Can’t get in unless a door is opened for you.”

“So you found the body—”

“In the corridor.”

“Near this door?” Santini said.

“Yes.”

“Did you see anyone entering the building at any other time when you were here or anything suspicious when you left the building?” Gomez asked.

“Nobody. Except the assholes.”

“What assholes might that be?” Santini said.

“With the signs.”

“The protesters,” Santini said. “They were there when you left the building?”

“Yes.”

“And when you came back?”

“Yes.”