Deadfall (Nameless Detective) (16 page)

An elderly female voice answered and admitted to being Mrs. Prine. I said I was Charles Eberhardt, from New York; that I was a dealer in antique miniatures; that I understood she was a prominent local collector of rare snuff boxes; and that I had for sale an exceptionally fine and unusual eighteenth-century ivory box bearing a portrait by the famed English miniaturist, Richard Cosway. Was she interested? She was interested, all right. But she was a wily old vixen: she wasn’t about to show enthusiasm to a voice on the telephone, to react to such a proposition with anything but coolness and caution.

She said, “May I ask how you obtained my name and telephone number, Mr. Eberhardt?”

“Certainly. They were given to me by Alejandro Ozimas,”

Pause. “I see. And why did you choose to call me about the Cosway piece?”

“Mr. Ozimas said you were a collector of discerning taste. He also said you were both discreet and quite able to pay my price.”

“And that price is?”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

“I see,” she said again. “Describe the box, please.”

“It is made of ivory, as I said; oval-shaped, with delicate gold ornamentation. The Cosway portrait is of the Prince of Wales—an associate of Cosway’s, as I’m sure you know. Or at least he was before the scandal that linked him romantically with Cosway’s wife.”

“You’re certain it’s authentic?”

“Absolutely certain.”

“How did it come into your possession?”

“I purchased it from a collector in Hawaii.”

“His name?”

“I’m afraid I can’t divulge it.”

Another pause. Then she said flatly, “I do not buy stolen or tainted property, Mr. Eberhardt.”

I’ll just bet you don’t, I thought. But I said, feigning indignance, “Nor do I sell stolen or tainted property, Mrs. Prine. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in calling you. I’m sure Mr. Ozimas can recommend another local collector …”

“Just a moment. If you’re from New York, why don’t you take the Cosway there and sell it to one of your customers? You do have customers in New York?”

“Of course. But I hope to make another purchase while I’m in San Francisco, a very lucrative purchase, and it happens I’m short of cash at the moment. That’s why I’m willing to let the Cosway box go for twenty thousand.” It sounded phony even to me, but if I was reading her correctly it wouldn’t make any difference. “May I show it to you? I could bring it to your home within the hour—”

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. I am expecting guests shortly.”

“This evening, then?”

“Also out of the question.”

“Tomorrow? It’s important that I complete a sale on the Cosway as soon as possible—no later than Monday. I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m sure I do,” she said. “Very well, Mr. Eberhardt. Shall we say tomorrow afternoon at three?”

“Good. At your home?”

“I’d prefer not. Do you have objections to meeting publicly?”

I didn’t, although I would have preferred the chance to look at her collection—at the Hainelin box, if she did have it. I hadn’t expected an invitation anyway. She didn’t know me from a hole in the wall; she would have had to be a damned fool—and she was hardly that—to let a stranger who knew she had a valuable art collection set foot inside her door.

I said, “None at all. Where do you suggest?”

“The main lobby of the Fairmont Hotel.”

“How will I know you?”

“I carry a gold-headed cane,” she said. “You’ll know me by that. I .look forward to seeing the Cosway, Mr. Eberhardt.”

“You won’t be disappointed when you do.”

“I sincerely hope not,” she said, and the line clicked, and that was that.

I thought as I cradled the receiver: Even money she’s trying Ozimas’s number right now, to check up on Charles Eberhardt. But Ozimas had indicated that he and his houseboy were going to Big Sur this weekend; otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the calculated risk of using his name. The odds were pretty good that Mrs. Prine would show up at the Fairmont tomorrow afternoon, on schedule.

I hung around the office for a while, making inroads on a written report to Tom Washburn. Nobody telephoned, and I was fresh out of productive ideas. Hunger made me call it quits around two-thirty. I drove home, treated myself to a beer and the last of the leftover chicken, and spent the rest of the afternoon puttering around the flat, making a few minor repairs—damn toilet kept running, even when you jiggled the handle—and listening to the rest of the Cal game. The Bears were down twenty points late in the fourth quarter when I finally shut off the radio. Some game. It was a good thing I hadn’t gone with Eberhardt, I thought; I’d have been bored sitting there in the sun guzzling beer. Bored to tears.

I almost believed it, too.

At five I called Kerry. She was in a good mood; she said, “Come on over. I rented us a movie.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“You’ll see when you get here.”

“Not another of those X-rated jobs?”

“No, but it’ll do things for your body temperature.”

“I’m too old for that kind of stuff. Think about my heart.”

“I’ve got a different organ in mind,” she said.

I said, “That’s me you hear knocking on the door.”

I took a quick shower, changed clothes, got the car, and drove up to Diamond Heights. Parking on Kerry’s street is sometimes as bad as it is on mine; somebody must have been having a party this afternoon because there wasn’t a space anywhere closer to her building than a block and a half. I hoofed it uphill, taking it slow so I wouldn’t use up all my energy just getting to her.

Even so, I was puffing when I reached the building vestibule. Which is why I had my head down, which is why I didn’t see the guy coming out of the door. He didn’t see me either; we collided, caromed off each other—and I found myself standing there eye to lunatic eye with the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston.

I said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

He said, and I’ll swear to it, “God sent me.”

“Dunston, if you don’t leave Kerry alone—”

“She is my wife.”

“She is
not
your wife!”

“ ‘Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother—’ ”

“You quoted that one before. Try a new one.”

“Heathen,” he said.

“Crackpot,” I said.

We glared at each other for about five seconds. Then he turned on his heel and stalked off, and I turned on mine and went inside and upstairs and whacked on Kerry’s door so hard I jammed my wrist doing it.

She opened up, took one look at me, and said, “Oh God, you ran into him.”

“Literally.” I pushed past her, massaging my wrist.

“You didn’t do anything to him?”

“No, I didn’t do anything to him. But I might have if I’d had a straitjacket handy.”

“I didn’t let him in,” she said.

“Good for you. Did he tell you God sent him?”

“Yes. Among other things.”

“Me too. He’s driving me as crazy as he is, you know that?”

“You think he’s not driving
me
crazy?”

“This is the last straw,” I said darkly. “Tomorrow we quit pussyfooting around. Tomorrow we put an end to this one way or another.”

“How?”

“By paying a visit to the Church of the Holy Mission,” I said. “By having a talk with the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak, with or without God’s permission.”

I don’t much like San Jose.

This is no reflection on the people who live there—not on most of them, anyway. Everybody’s got to live somewhere, and in California these days, with the economic situation being what it is, your options are pretty much limited to areas with a reasonably high employment rate. There are some nice little communities near San Jose—Los Gatos, for instance; I have nothing against those. Just San Jose itself. It’s like a big overgrown kid who sprouted up too fast, seems bewildered by his sudden wild growth, and doesn’t quite know what to make of himself. It can’t make up its collective mind if it wants to be a big metropolis or a small city, or if it’s really just a little country town at heart. It has no real identity because there are too many opposing components in its makeup: part agricultural, part industrial, part Silicon Valley hype, part Mexican barrio, part Vietnamese refugee resettlement center, and part mindless, tasteless urban and suburban sprawl. It has some cultural attractions downtown, and the local Yuppies have begun renovating and restoring some of the old mid-city Victorians; but the downtown area is just a pocket surrounded by slums, industrial areas, cheap apartment buildings, and seemingly endless strings of tract houses and shopping centers. The city also has a high crime rate and harbors more than a few bizarre institutions, not the least of which are the Winchester Mystery House, a model of lunatic construction built by the widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, who believed she would die if the house was ever completed and therefore kept adding on things like doors that open on blank walls and stairways that lead nowhere; the Rosicrucians, a leading candidate for the Weirdest California Cult award; and now the Church of the Holy Mission, not to mention the Moral Crusade, the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston, and the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak.

When Kerry and I got to San Jose a little past noon on Sunday, it was the first time I’d been there in more than a year. It seemed much more sprawling and congested than I remembered it, even on a Sunday—not that that surprised me any. I took the downtown exit off Highway 17, and we drove around for twenty minutes looking for Langford Street; if Kerry were a better map-reader we’d have found it in ten because it was not far from either City Hall or the San Jose State University campus. The neighborhood was neither well-to-do nor shabby: Langford was that vanishing breed, a lower-middle-class inner-city residential street shaded by leafy trees and featuring a dozen different architectural styles, from wood-shingled cottage to big gabled Victorian.

The biggest lot and the biggest Victorian on the fourteen-hundred block belonged to the Church of the Holy Mission, which announced its presence by means of a six-foot, billboard-type sign on its front lawn. It was three lots, actually, on a corner; in addition to the Victorian, freshly painted a sedate white with blue trim, it contained a low modern wing, a separate box-shaped outbuilding, and parking facilities for maybe thirty cars. The parking area was full at the moment, although it wouldn’t be for long: services must have just ended because people were streaming out of the modern wing, most of them young, some with small children in tow.

“They look normal enough, don’t they,” Kerry said as I drove by hunting a place to park.

“You can’t tell a fanatic by his appearance.”

“They’re not all fanatics,” she said, and sneezed. She was getting a cold and she’d been snuffling and sneezing all morning. “A lot of them are disillusioned or have emotional problems.”

“Yeah,” I said. And a lot of them, I thought, will drop out later on even more disillusioned and with even greater emotional problems. There had been an article in the
Sunday Examiner-Chronicle
not too long ago—the Sunday paper is usually the only one I read —that dealt with dropouts from fundamentalist and ultrafundamentalist religious groups. Things were so bad with these people after experiencing a cultist dependency on leaders like Daybreak, authoritarian types who practice a kind of religious mind-control, that an outfit called Fundamentalists Anonymous had been formed to help them deal with the real world again. Maybe the Church of the Holy Mission wasn’t quite one of the wild-eyed ultrafundamentalist sects, but like the Southern Baptist Convention and other mainline fundamentalist churches, which Daybreak seemed to be patterning it after, it would bring more harm than good to some of its followers.

A car was pulling out of a space in the next block. I waited patiently while the driver, an elderly lady wearing a hat that looked like the rear end of a rooster, maneuvered her way clear; then I wedged us into the space. We passed several members of the flock as we walked back to the church. None of them was smiling; they all had a solemn mien. Services at the Holy Mission were serious business, no doubt. There aren’t many chuckles in fire-and-brimstone religion.

We went along a path toward the wing. Kerry said
sotto voce
, “What do we do if we run into Ray?”

“Ignore him. It’s Daybreak we want, not nightfall.”

She didn’t think that was very amusing; neither did I, for that matter. There was something about the place, now that we were on the grounds and breathing its sanctified atmosphere, that made
me
feel solemn and cheerless.

A middle-aged guy in a dark-blue suit and tie was standing at the entrance to the wing. Beyond him, through an open set of doors, I could see a plain raised altar, a podium with a microphone on it, and a section off to one side that contained an organ and some chairs for the choir. The rest of the space was taken up with rows of unpainted wooden pews. There were a few people in there, none up around the altar; Dunston, happily, wasn’t among them.

We stopped alongside the middle-aged guy and I said, feeling a little foolish, “We’re looking for the Right Reverend Daybreak. Can you tell us where he is?”

“Of course, brother. He is in the Sanctuary.”

“The which?”

“The Sanctuary.” He gestured at the boxy-shaped outbuilding. “For his hour of meditation. Perhaps I can help you? I am Reverend Holloway.”

“Thanks just the same, but we need to talk to the Right Reverend. It’s very important.”

“In what way, brother?”

“It has to do with money,” I said. “My wife and I are thinking of making a substantial donation to the Moral Crusade.”

That perked him right up. He said, “Come with me, please. If the Right Reverend has not yet begun meditating I’m sure he’ll be pleased to give you an audience.”

Audience, yet. As if he were right up there with the Pope.

We went with Holloway to the Sanctuary, and he took my name and disappeared with it inside. When we were alone Kerry said, “Why did you lie to him?”

“Quickest way to get results. If I’d told him the truth, do you think we’d be getting a fast audience? We’d be getting a fast runaround instead.”

“You’re not going to lie to Daybreak, are you?”

“No. We’ll be paragons of indignant virtue. Just let me do the talking.”

The Reverend Holloway was back in less than two minutes. He smiled at us gravely and said, “The Right Reverend Daybreak will see you,” as if he were announcing a miracle at Lourdes. “This way, please.”

We followed him inside. Some sanctuary; it looked like a glorified office building—no doubt this was where the take from the church’s various nontaxable enterprises was counted, blessed, and secreted. Through an open door I had a glimpse of one large, mostly bare room that may or may not have been used for meditation; three other doors along the central hallway were closed. We stopped before the last of these. Painted on the panel in dark-blue letters were the words: THE RIGHT REVEREND CLYDE T. DAYBREAK. And below that, in somewhat larger letters: THE MORAL CRUSADE. A hand-lettered sign thumbtacked above the knob told you to
Please Knock Before Entering.

The Reverend Holloway knocked. A voice inside said, “Come right in,” and Holloway opened the door and Kerry and I went in. He stayed out in the hall, shutting the door after us.

It was a large office, done in plain blond-wood paneling, with its dominant feature being a plain blond-wood desk set in front of windows shaded by Venetian blinds. The blinds were open now and sunlight came streaming in. It bathed the Spartan contents of the office in a benign radiance, as if by design: the desk, a group of matching and uncomfortable-looking chairs, a blond-wood file cabinet, a painting of Christ on one wall, a huge cloth banner on another-dark-blue lettering on a snowy white background that said THE MORAL CRUSADE—and the sole occupant coming toward us with both hands outstretched.

Clyde T. Daybreak was something of a surprise. I had half-expected a tall, dour, hot-eyed guy dressed in black—a sort of cult version of Cotton Mather. Or maybe the strong silent type with a gaze that was both penetrating and hypnotic, like Robert Mitchum in
Night of the Hunter
. Clyde T. was neither one. He was short, he was round, he was bald except for a reddish Friar Tuck fringe forming a half-circle around the back of his head. He wore the same kind of conservative dark-blue business suit as the Reverend Holloway, and a skinny tie with a gold clip that, believe it or not, formed the words
The Moral Crusade
. He was smiling, and his cheeks were red and rosy, and his eyes were as bright and blue and serene as a mountain lake on a summer day.

He took hold of my hand and worked it up and down vigorously, as if he were trying to prime a pump. Which, in a manner of speaking, he probably was. He said, “Welcome, brother, welcome!” in a just-perceptible Southern drawl. Then he took Kerry’s hand and pumped it and said, “Welcome, sister, welcome!” Through all of this I paid close attention to his eyes. Behind the bright blue serenity there was a shrewdness and something that might have been guile. He had a kind of aura about him, too, that electric quality that makes people respond to religious and political zealots everywhere—a combination of intense will and either deep conviction or the ability to simulate it. He was the type who could lead a crusade, all right, all the more so for his plain looks and deceptively open manner.

He asked me, “Have we met before, brother? I don’t seem to recall having the pleasure.”

I told him it was our first visit to the church. I didn’t tell him I hoped it would be our last.

He invited us to sit down, ushered us to the chairs in front of his desk, held Kerry’s for her, and then bounced around behind the desk and sat down himself. His swivel chair must have been wound up high or built up with extra padding; as short as he was, he still seemed to be looking down at us like a little king on his throne.

“Were you with us for services this morning?” he asked.

I said, “No, we missed them. We just got here.”

“Too bad, too bad. You’re familiar with the teachings of Ezekiel, of course? The resurrection of dry bones?”

I nodded. Kerry took out her handkerchief and sneezed into it.

“Well,” Daybreak said, and smiled, and then said, “The Reverend Holloway tells me you’ve come to offer a donation to the Moral Crusade.”

“Actually, no,” I said. “That was just a ruse to get in here to see you.”

He had terrific poise, you had to give him that; his smile didn’t even waver. “Deceit is a sin, brother,” he said gently.

“That depends on the magnitude of the deceit. Some kinds are more sinful than others.”

“To be sure. But all sin is wicked, brother; those who indulge in it casually are no less apt to be damned than those who embrace it with open arms. The sins of man are the devil’s playthings.”

“Would you say harassment is among them?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Harassment. The kind that’s done in the name of God.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“This lady is Kerry Wade,” I said. “Does the name mean anything to you, Reverend?”

“No, brother, it doesn’t. Should it?”

“It should if your assistants confide in you. Ms. Wade is your Reverend Dunston’s ex-wife.”

His smile was gone now; but it seemed to have faded out gradually, rather than to have disappeared all at once. In its place he wore a grave, earnest expression.

“I still don’t understand,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better explain the purpose of your visit.”

“Isn’t it obvious? We’re here to put a stop to Reverend Dunston’s delusion that Ms. Wade is still his wife. She divorced him more than five years ago.”

“The Church of the Holy Mission does not recognize divorce,” Daybreak said. “In our eyes, divorce is—”

“—a pernicious invention of man,” I finished for him. “Uh-huh, so I’ve been told. But that doesn’t change the legality of Ms. Wade’s decree. Or her unwillingness to remarry her ex-husband, which is what he keeps pestering her to do.”

Kerry blew her nose loudly, as if in emphatic agreement.

Daybreak said, “May I ask the nature of your involvement in the matter, sir?” I seemed to have lost my status as his brother; now I was just plain “sir.” “Are you Mrs. Dunston’s attorney?”

“It’s Ms. Wade, and no, I’m not her attorney. I’m a friend of hers, a close friend. Dunston has been harassing me, too.”

“Ah,” Daybreak said.

“Ah?”

“Ah.”

“All right,” I said testily, “I confess: I’m a fornicator. What of it?”

Kerry suppressed a giggle and blew her nose again. It sounded like a goose honking.