Valediction (7 page)

I wandered down to the Kirstein Business Library off School Street behind the old city hall and browsed among the exotica of corporate finance and municipal bond issues for most of the rest of the day. I didn't find out where the Reorganized Church of the Redemption got its money, but I did discover in a copy of
Bankers and Tradesmen
that the Bullies were financing the construction of an office park in Woburn. The church held a 500,000-dollar mortgage. The developer was listed as Paultz Construction Company, Inc.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I walked up School Street to the Parker House and had a couple of beers in the downstairs bar and thought about how Bullard Winston and his church could loan 500,000 dollars to a construction company. Maybe just the new kids got a stipend and after a while they had to start paying dues or making tithes or whatever you did when you belonged to the church militant. There were 10,000 Bullies altogether, Keneally had said. Fifty bucks a head would cover the mortgage loan, but then there would have to be money to cover expenses. Not impossible. If you got 100 bucks a year from 10,000 people, you had a million. And since it was charity, you didn't have a tax problem. Still, Sherry said they didn't pay dues, they received a stipend. She said it as if all of them received one.

I looked at my watch, almost six. I thought of seeing Susan and then caught myself and felt that spasm inside that I always felt when it happened. I took in as much air as I could and let it out and stood up and went home to make supper for Paul.

The next morning I was at the Kirstein Library when it opened and I went through several years worth of
Bankers and Tradesmen
. By noon I knew that the Reorganized Church of the Redemption had made construction loans to Paultz Construction Company for about three and a half million dollars. Christian charity. I left the magazines on the table and went out.

I walked up over Beacon Hill on Beacon Street with the Common on my left and the elegant eighteenth-century brick-front buildings on my right. I turned up to Commonwealth on Arlington at the bottom of the Public Garden and in fifteen minutes I was at Bullard Winston's door again. A man in the deacon outfit I was getting to know so well told me that Reverend Winston was not at home and wasn't expected soon. I said thank you and went back down the steps and crossed the street and leaned against a tree and waited.

I experimented with keeping my mind blank. It wasn't as hard for me as it might be for others, but it wasn't easy. If you weren't careful, you'd start thinking of things. And if you thought of things, then your stomach would hurt again. Maybe I could take up meditation, get into self-hypnosis. I shifted my other shoulder against the tree and refolded my arms across my chest and thought of blankness. Like carrying a very full glass of water up the stairs, Hawk had said. He knew things you wouldn't think he'd know. He seemed immune to pain, yet he knew about trying to balance it. He seemed immune to affection, too, except with Susan . . . I tightened my arms across my chest and got my mind back into its blank balance.

It was nearly quarter to five when the same chauffeur-driven rose-colored Lincoln I'd seen before pulled up in front of Winston's house and the good reverend got out. I walked across the street.

"Evening, Reverend," I said.

Winston frowned at me for a moment and then said, "Oh, Mr. Spenser. Did your chat with the young woman proceed satisfactorily?"

"Yes, sir, it did. But now I wonder if you could spare me maybe five minutes more of your time."

"Regarding?"

"Regarding the three and a half million in mortgage notes you hold on property developed by Paultz Construction."

"I hold no mortgages," Winston said. "The church does."

Winston looked at me for a good silent period. That was okay, I had my mind so blank I could have taken a nap while he stared. "Spenser, you are becoming a pest."

"Yes, I am," I said. "Thank you for noticing."

"I went out of my way to satisfy your curiosity about this young woman. Your curiosity is, I believe, satisfied?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then why do you concern yourself with the financial affairs of a Christian church?"

"Theological speculation, Reverend. I was wondering about whether it really was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."

Winston turned without a word and walked up his front steps.

"I take it that's your final answer, Reverend?"

The front door opened, Winston went in. The front door closed. Spenser, master of the probing interview. I walked back down Commonwealth, with the sun behind me. The matter of finance did not seem to be some thing Winston liked to discuss. Why not? If it was all on the up-and-up, why wouldn't he want to rap about it with a pleasant guy like me? The question contained its own answer Where did the church get three and a half million to loan to a construction company. And why to only one, and why that one?

I wonder if Susan is dating.

I always enjoyed a reason to go to the State House. The great gold dome gleamed in the summer sun and from the top of the steps you could look down across the Common and feel the density of the old city thickening behind you in time's corridor. I went in and found the Secretary of State's office and got sent to the Charitable Trust Division and without having to kick back to anyone got a copy of the yearend financial statement for the Reorganized Church of the Redemption.

I took the computer printout with me and walked from the State House, across the street past the Robert Gould Shaw monument at the top of Beacon Hill, and down the steps into the Common. There was a lot of skateboarding and roller-skating and Frisbee, and wino. Some Hare Krishna shucked and shuffled down near the Park Street subway kiosk. I found an empty bench and sat down and took off my sunglasses. I put my sunglasses into my breast pocket and looked around me. No one was watching. i put my hand unobtrusively into my inside jacket pocket and came out with a pair of half glasses and put them on. I looked around again. No one seemed to have noticed. I looked down at the printout. Ah-ha. There it is. I wear these only to see.

The physical assets of the Bullies were worth less than 300,000 dollars. Their income, from interest on mortgage loans, was 315,000 dollars. If they had three and a half million out, that meant it was loaned at less than ten percent. That was five or six points below market. Of course maybe it wasn't when the loan was made. I got out my small yellow notebook. Time was I could remember everything. Now I had half glasses and a notebook. Next thing I'd have a midlife crisis. A pigeon landed on the ground near my feet and waddled around looking for a kernel of peanut among the littered shells in front of the bench. Why this is midlife crisis nor am I out of it. I looked at my notes. The loans were recent. Mortgage rates had not been under ten percent when the loans were made. The pigeon gave up on the peanut shells and flew away on undulating wing. I watched him go. What the printout didn't tell me, and what the notebook didn't tell me, and what Reverend Winston wouldn't tell me was where the Reorganized Church got three and a half million bucks to lend out in the first place.

I took off my half glasses and put them back into hiding. Maybe I should have my sunglasses made prescription and I could wear them all the time and people would never know. They'd think I was cool.

I stood and put on my nonprescription sunglasses and walked back toward my office. In the Public Garden I stopped an the little bridge and leaned on the railing and watched the swan boats move about on the pond and the ducks in solicitous formation cruising after the boats, waiting for peanuts. They could not be fooled by shells. I wondered how ducks knew so quickly the kernel from the husk. One of nature's miracles.

When I got to my office there were two thugs waiting in the corridor. I've spent half my life with thugs. I know them when I see them. They were leaning against the wall in the corridor on the second floor near the elevator just down past my office door. I unlocked the office door and went in. I left the door open. The thugs came in behind me. I walked over and opened the window and turned around and looked at them. One of them had closed the door.

The head thug was bald with squinty eyes and a longish fringe of hair in the back that lapped over the collar of his flowered shirt. There was a scar at the corner of his mouth as if someone had slashed it during a fight and the repair job had not been done by Michael DeBakey. The assistant thug was taller and in better shape. He had black hair in a crew cut and deepset eyes and long wiry forearms with blue dancing girls and twined snakes and daggers tattooed on them. There were four upper teeth missing in the front of his mouth and someone had somewhere in his life obviously deviated his septum.

We looked at each other.

"You guys in the Mormon ministry?" I said.

"You Spenser?" the bald one said.

"Mmm," I said.

We looked at each other some more. A small objective part of me noticed, from the far upper right corner of my consciousness, that I felt almost nothing. A faint lassitude, maybe. No more. Blankness is all.

"Look, you guys, I'm trying to get clammy with fear, and I can't. I know that disappoints you, and I'm sorry. I'm trying, but nothing seems to happen."

The bald one said, "You got nothing to be afraid of if you do like we tell you."

"Or if I don't," I said.

"You do any more messing around with the Reorganized Church then you gonna end up bad dead," Bald said.

I felt something. What I felt was d don't care. Just a little flash of I don't care, then it was gone and blackness came back.

"You two going to do it?" I said.

"You don't do what you're told, we'll do it."

"You might want to take a number," I said. "There's a waiting list."

"You think we're fucking around, asshole?"

"It's the best you can do," I said.

Bald looked at his partner. "Maybe he needs a sample of what we can do," he said. The partner nodded and looked mean. Bald looked back at me and found that I was pointing my gun at the little indentation in his upper lip, right below his nose. He stared at it.

"Ordinary caliber thirty-eight slug," I said. "No liquid center, no cross-cut in the nose, no magnum load. Nothing special to worry about for a couple of toughies like you."

Both men stared at me.

"I don't suppose you feel like telling me who asked you to come over here and frighten me to death."

They didn't say anything.

"No, I figured you wouldn't. It's a corny question anyway."

They didn't move.

"It was good of you to show me what you can do. I don't mean to be ungrateful. But if you come back, I'll kill you."

They kept looking past the gun barrel at me.

"Take a hike," I said, and they both turned, together, and left my office. I went and closed the door behind them and then with my gun still in my hand, hanging at my side pointing at the floor, I walked over to my window and looked out onto Boylston and Berkeley streets.

In a moment they appeared on the corner and walked to the car that was illegally parked by the subway entrance. It was a white Chevy sedan. Bald got in on the driver's side and his partner got in the other and they drove away. As they did I wrote down their license number. A trained detective.

Bald's white Chevy was registered to Paultz Construction Company. My finely honed investigative instincts began to sniff the aroma of rat. Bald and his partner were hoods. They didn't do construction and they didn't do Bible study. They did kneecaps. I'd seen too many guys like Bald and his partner to be wrong on that. And it meant that Paultz Construction was dirty. And it meant that the connection between Paultz and the Bullies was something that people wanted to keep secret.
"So what?"

Nobody had hired me to investigate anything like that. Tommy Banks had hired me to rescue his girlfriend and she didn't want to be rescued. I was just killing time. Killing time with Paultz Construction could get me killed.
I don't care.

Across the street my art director was back, bending over her board. She looked up as I looked at her and smiled and waved at me across the street. I waved back. She bent back to her work.

I took the phone book off the window ledge where I kept it and looked up the number of the ad agency and dialed it and asked for the art director. I watched across the street as she picked up the phone and tucked it against her face with her left shoulder.

"Linda Thomas." She continued to work on the board as she spoke.

I said, "My name is Spenser, I'm across the street smiling a winning smile out my window."

She looked over.

"My God," she said. "It's like talking to a pen-pal."

"Would you care to have a drink with me after work?" I said.

"That would be lovely," she said. "Where and when?"

"Ritz bar, this evening when you get through."

"Five thirty," she said.

"I'll meet you there," I said.

She waved across the street again and we hung up. It would feel a bit silly to sit there the rest of the day looking across the street. I got up and went out. It was good weather and I had Susan's book. I went to the Public Garden and sat on a bench near the swan boat pond and read.

A man and woman in their forties came and sat down on the grass near the pond under one of the willows. They had lunch in a big paper bag and shared it, leaning against the tree trunk, their shoulders touching. I dogeared my page and stood up and walked away, across the Public Garden, toward Arlington Street.

Sherry Spellman didn't belong in an outfit that had connections with Bald and his friend. I couldn't spend the rest of my life reading in the park. I couldn't take her away from the church, but maybe I could take the church away from her. I had one end of someone's dirty laundry and I was going to pull it all out, it was a way to kill time. And it was better to kill time than have it kill me.