Butterfly (47 page)

when Danny was most dangerous. This was how he had looked that night years ago when

he had gone after that poor old doctor in the Hill Country, and then later, just before

Danny had taken off for a quick trip to California, Fort Ord, where he had a score to set-

tle with a certain sergeant. Danny was on edge now, and unpredictable. And Bonner

decided Danny was filled with a kind of evil energy that sometimes burned inside him.

“Well, I…uh, don’t know, Danny. I mean,
something
raised him from the dead, didn’t it?”

Danny inspected the large gold ring on his left hand. He held it up to the light,

watched it shine and glint. Then his mouth lifted in a slow smile and he said, “Yes…”

When a knock came at the door, Bonner looked at it for a long moment before getting

up and answering it. If it was another reporter, well, he’d just politely tell him or her to get

on his or her way—

“Reverend Mackay?” the flashy man standing in the hall said. “Reverend Danny

Mackay?”

Bonner eyed him with suspicion. There was something a bit cornball about the

stranger’s appearance. He was fifty years old if he was a day, but he was wearing bright

pink bell-bottoms and a tight lavender shirt with gold chains in his chest hairs. An enor-

mous peace symbol dangled down on the end of a leather thong. “Frank Hallstead,” he

said, thrusting out a hand that had too many rings on it.

After they shook hands, he said, “Mind if I come in and talk a li’l bidness with your

boss?”

“What sort of business?”

Hallstead pulled out a card and handed it to Bonner. “I manage Good News

Productions. We own WBET out of Austin? Get it? Double You Bet! I think we might

could use someone like Reverend Danny on our Sunday programs. Think he’d be

interested in preaching weekly to three hundred thousand people through a television

camera?”

Bonner looked over his shoulder at Danny, who was still staring out the window,

ominously silent.

“Danny?” Bonner said.

“What’s his deal?”

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203

Hallstead tried to peer past Bonner into the elegant penthouse. He could just glimpse

Mackay by the window, looking out. “Well, uh, can I come in?”

Danny made a gesture and Bonner said, “State your deal first.”

“Well, ah, what the Reverend did tonight, it’s made a lot of folks interested in seeing

him. And he can’t go driving all over the South, and his church only holds seven thou-

sand. But now my television stations reach hundreds of thousands of people just thirsting

to hear the Word preached by Danny Mackay. What do you say, Reverend?”

Danny looked down at his hands. He pictured the face of the dead man, all ashen and

blue around the lips. The wailing wife, the seven thousand stunned into silence.

Then he thought of the people in their living rooms, the millions of TV sets in the

country, and his face, his voice, his power reaching out to every one of them…

“Let him in,” Danny said. “We’ll talk.”

Beverly was by the window looking out at the otherworldly lights of Houston’s oil-

processing plants. She had stood there all evening, silent and pensive. She hadn’t touched

the food room service had brought up, not even the carrot sticks and black tea. There was

too much to think about. One thing on her mind was the business deal she had come to

Houston to close—the establishing of twenty Royal Burgers franchises in Texas. Another

was Jonas Buchanan’s latest report.

A year ago, just before she had gone to the meeting of the Hollywood Chamber of

Commerce, Jonas Buchanan had called to tell her he had his first new information on her

mother and sister.

“You were right about the old lawyer,” the private investigator told her that night

when he came to her office. “Hyman Levi Senior died a few years ago. His son left

California and, according to the Bar Association, is retired and is no longer practicing law.

I found him through the Internal Revenue Service; I have a friend who works in the

Hollywood branch office. Hyman Levi now lives in a cabin about a hundred miles east of

Seattle. He writes detective stories under a pen name.”

Jonas Buchanan had been able to persuade Mr. Levi to take his father’s old records out

of storage and go through them. It had been a tedious process, but Buchanan had found

what he was looking for: that the second twin baby born to Naomi Burgess at Hollywood

Presbyterian had been adopted by a couple named Singleton. And they had named the

baby Christine.

That was as far as Jonas had gotten at that time. He was back in Hollywood and

would follow that lead right away.

On the mother, he also learned new information. He went north and visited the nurs-

ing home where the previous investigators said she had once worked as a cook. As luck

would have it, the elderly black woman who cooked there now had been Naomi’s assis-

tant eighteen years ago. But she was very protective of Naomi, for whom she had a great

fondness. She wouldn’t speak to the other investigators, but as she was black, she opened

up to Jonas.

“She said your mother went down to Fresno, where she said a cousin lived, a Miss

Ann Burgess. I went to Fresno and found Miss Burgess. She wouldn’t talk to me, but a

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neighbor was helpful. He said Miss Burgess’s cousin had moved on to Sacramento when

some police came to the door one day. My investigations in Sacramento have turned up

nothing so far, but I have friends working on it.”

That was a year ago.

Since then, Jonas had made periodic reports to Beverly, none of them amounting to

anything of great value. The Singletons also seemed to have been people who moved a lot.

Jonas had to travel quite a bit, speak to many people and hunt through stacks of old

records. And that took time. But then, this morning he had telephoned Beverly here in

her Houston hotel room to inform her that although, unfortunately, he had lost the trail

of the Singletons because of a divorce twenty years ago, he had a tip on someone who

might have some concrete information on the current whereabouts of Naomi Burgess.

“Thank you,” Beverly had said to him. “Please follow through. I anxiously await your

next report.”

Christine Singleton,
Beverly thought now as she looked out at Houston’s lights.
My sis-

ter, my twin, Christine. Where are you now, at this very moment?

Maggie Kern, who was picking at the food on the room service cart, watched her

employer at the window. Since their arrival in Texas four days ago, Beverly had grown

tense and restless. Maggie knew it was the old memories that were haunting her, plus the

knowledge that Danny Mackay was here, in this same city. In fact, Beverly had not

wanted to come to Houston at all, but the business transaction involving twenty old ham-

burger stands and gas stations, and turning them into Royal Burger stores, was too impor-

tant to Beverly to leave to others to handle. It was typical of Beverly’s growing financial

acumen to oversee each phase and detail personally.

And with astounding results.

Maggie recalled that day a year ago when Beverly had returned from the Chamber of

Commerce meeting. She had burst into the office as if something were chasing her. “I

have it!” she had said breathlessly to Maggie and Carmen. “I know now what it is we

need.” What they needed to bolster the lagging profits of the Royal Burger chain. Beverly

had gone to the meeting out of curiosity; she had returned charged with her own inspira-

tion. She had given a speech, she said, and the speech not only had stirred the others in

the audience but had stirred her as well.

“We need a spirit!” she had said as she sat down and proceeded to draft a plan on

paper. “That’s what our problem was. The company lacks spirit!”

Well, Maggie recalled, Beverly had indeed come home from that meeting with spirit,

and she had struck off at once to inject that very same spirit into the lukewarm stores of

Royal Burgers.

Off they had gone in Ann Hastings’s car—Maggie and Carmen and Ann and Beverly,

taking to the roads of California armed with slogans and pep talks and appointment

books waiting to be filled. With unexpected energy and enthusiasm Beverly had visited

every Royal Burger outlet, met with every employee, learned their names, wrote down

their birthdays, shook hands and gave them her “spirit speech”: “We have to be better

than everyone else, because we
are
better! You don’t want to work for a mediocre com-

pany, you want to be proud of your company, as proud as if it were your own, as if it were

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205

your family! We don’t want our employees going through a daily grind and just earning a

paycheck. We want you to strive, we want you to have goals, we want you to dare to

dream.”

And to back up her passionate speech, to prove to them it wasn’t just talk, Beverly

established incentive plans within the company. She sketched out a hierarchy, from the

lowliest floor washer and beginning trainee cook to the manager, and promised her sev-

eral hundred employees that each of them was not just a number but a person and that

they would be recognized individually for their performance and would be rewarded for

loyalty and excellence in their work, and that there was room for advancement and pro-

motion within the company—“All the way up to the corporate headquarters in

Hollywood, if that is your goal.”

The campaign had been a success. Absenteeism and tardiness dropped as employees

started showing up on time and working harder. They received cards and a small bonus

on their birthdays, they received a letter of congratulations from Miss Highland herself

when a promotion was made or when store profits exceeded a set goal. Contests were held

among the stores; the Employee of the Month Award was created; a periodic employee

evaluation and pay-raise schedule was established; Beverly welcomed suggestions from

her workers and strove to answer them personally. Gradually the face and nature of the

Royal Burger company began to change. It became known as a company that cared for its

employees, whether you filled ketchup bottles or signed the paychecks. You weren’t for-

gotten, and incentive and creativity were rewarded. Soon the HELP WANTED signs disap-

peared from the windows of the Royal Burger stands; waiting lists grew as young people

sought employment with a company that promised a future. As a consequence the food

and service got better, profits rose, and new Royal Burger stands began to spring up all

over the West. Next month, Maggie and Carmen and Beverly were going to New York, to

start up the East Coast Division of Royal Burgers.

All because Beverly Highland had found the “spirit.”

And that wasn’t all that that remarkable day at the Chamber of Commerce meeting

had generated. Exactly fourteen days after Beverly’s speech, the president and chairman of

the chamber had approached her with a proposition: they were going to set up a study

committee on what Hollywood was going to be like in the next decade, the eighties, and

they wanted Beverly to serve as chairman of that committee. All three friends—Beverly,

Maggie, and Carmen—had recognized the significance of that gesture immediately.

Beverly Highland suddenly had her identity within the business community; she had

credibility and now was being given power.

It was, Maggie Kern knew, only the beginning.

A soft knock on the door of the hotel room brought Beverly and Maggie out of their

thoughts. They turned to see two men and a woman come in quietly and close the door

behind themselves.

“It went like a charm,” Ann Hastings said, kicking off her shoes and heading for the

food service table. “He bought it hook, line, and sinker.”

Beverly looked at the two men, one of whom was peeling a false bald head off his

skull and fluffing out his long sandy hair. Now that Roy Madison was a popular TV

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Kathryn Harvey

personality it took a lot of makeup to disguise his looks. But not one of the seven thou-

sand in Danny’s church tonight had recognized the actor beneath the doctor’s guise.

“God damn if I don’t deserve an Oscar for that!” he said, and let out a whoop.

Beverly looked at the second man, an actor named Paul who was trying to get into the

movies and who was Roy’s current lover. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He smiled shyly and said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m fine. I’ve had training in falling down and

holding my breath.”

“Not to mention,” Ann said, “how good you were with the makeup. That weak little

wipe of your hand across your lips took the blue right off.”

Roy let out another whoop, pulled the paunch out of his shirt and threw it down.

“Damn, this was hot!”

“Tell me what happened,” Beverly said.

Ann Hastings, who had played the grieving wife, recounted the episode as she picked

Gulf shrimp out of a salad and popped them in her mouth. She ended it with “Everyone