“Who cleaned off the lot next door?” I asked.
“How should I know? They were workmen. The landlords over there had insurance too. But their insurance agents couldn’t see the violations you had.”
It was my turn to stare. I looked hard at the store owner. He took out a small green rag with which he began to wipe the small space of the glass counter before him.
“Did the fire investigators come over here to talk to you?” I asked.
“Why would they?” he said, more defensive than angry.
26
I GOT BACK in my car, uncertain whether I should go find Theodore or wait and take care of the business at hand. Finally I decided that my worries over the store had to wait.
MESSENGER OF THE DIVINE looked a lot different in daylight. The stucco bungalow it inhabited was pathetic and gray around the edges. The red velvet curtains that had covered the picture window were now drawn back to reveal dozens of black men, women, and children crowded together, dressed in their Easter best. The men wore black suits with white flowers in their lapels. The women wore dark dress suits with fancy hats.
Recorded organ music issued through the open doors. I spied the coffin that stood up front. Before the coffin stood the elderly African-featured man I had met a few nights before, Father Vincent la Trieste.
Father Vincent was in the middle of his baritone sermon when I entered.
“… they won’t let us have his body,” Vincent was saying. “No. They say they’re keepin’ it for the coroner to examine. But we don’t care about them or their laws, do we, brothers and sisters?”
“No, Father. No,” was said by more than one.
“We know that the Lord called on Brother Grove. The Lord in his wisdom laid down his iron hand!”
“Preach,” someone said.
“Tell it,” another agreed.
“He laid down his iron hand for the mighty to tremble and the vermin to scurry away. But we are not afraid. No, no. We are not afraid of bullets and knives, of policemen who bar our way or of doctors fool enough to believe that they hold the answers of life and death in their hands. Only the Almighty has the power of life and death. Only the Almighty can reach out and snuff out the flame of life as if it was no more than a matchstick.” Vincent held out his left hand, slowly closing it against a powerful though unseen force. While he did this, he looked into the eyes of each man, woman, and child in the room. He was God, and they were witnessing the miracle and the majesty of His terrible strength. The older man’s eyes were potent even from the back of the room where I stood. They were potent, that is, until they lit on me. And then, for only a moment, they switched to fear. He glanced quickly from side to side, and three large men turned their heads in my direction.
These men were dressed darkly like everyone else, but they were wearing white gloves. These were the deacons, the faithful, the sergeants at arms. I wondered if it was Vincent and these men who had routed the tough detective Latham and snuffed his life like Vincent’s mimed God did to that imagined flame.
I turned away, a mourner who, after registering his regrets, heads off to the bar for a final toast to the dearly departed. I didn’t turn my whole body, just my head and torso. Another deacon stood directly behind me. From the look on his walnut-colored face I knew that he had gotten the high sign from somewhere.
I resumed my listening position.
“… Brother Grove is free…,” I remember Vincent saying. It struck me that he was calling the dead man brother and not minister or reverend. He said a lot of things. None of them made much sense, but they were moving. Or at least they would have been moving if I hadn’t been thinking that that shiny black coffin up front might soon be my home.
The sermon went on for quite a while afterward. I don’t know how much time passed. All I know is that I was wishing for a few more minutes when it was over. I hadn’t been able to think my way out of the trouble I was in in the time allowed.
I felt a walnut-hard hand on my shoulder.
“The Father would like to see you in back,” a meaty voice said.
“I’d like to, but I got to get home,” I replied.
The hand turned into a vise. I followed the pressure toward the doorway to the back room.
One or two of the pained parishioners noticed the strong-arm move, but they didn’t interfere. There was party mix and clam dip, fruit punch and sandwiches for the mourners. They were hungry, and I was a stranger in shabby clothes.
The deacon pushed me through the same side door I’d used to go to the toilet a few nights before. Then he led me into the room I had spied upon. That room was now empty of contraband.
Empty of stolen merchandise but full of life. Vincent and four of his deacons were in there with me.
The deacon who had waylaid me let go and shut the door, casting the room into a particularly frightening darkness. There was only one light source, and a featureless deacon stood in front of that.
“Why are you here, Mr. Lockwood?” Father Vincent asked, using the name I had given him when we met.
“I heard about Reverend Grove. I heard about Grove.” I wondered if I would ever get beyond those words. “And… and I wanted to find out what had happened.”
“What does that have to do with you?” a big deacon standing behind Vincent asked. It was less a question than it was a threat.
“Quiet, Brother Bigelow,” Vincent said sternly. I got the feeling that the elder reverend was struggling to maintain order among Grove’s deacons.
The big man was of the same size and disposition as Leon Douglas, but there was less wear and tear on his face. He grumbled something and shifted restlessly.
“Why did you come, Mr. Lockwood?” Vincent asked again. His tone told me that he only intended to ask a certain number of times before something else happened.
I looked around at the deacons. All of them were rough men. Their suits satisfied the appearance of Sunday school, but on a closer look the fabric was cheap, and one or two jackets were illfitting. These were men who had lived with Satan before coming to God, and they were still willing to venture over to the wrong side of holiness if the situation demanded it.
“This man,” Vincent said, addressing his rough-hewn henchmen, “came asking about Brother Grove a few days ago, and now William is dead.”
I could feel the room turn colder.
“Have you come to kill somebody else, Mr. Lockwood?”
“I didn’t kill William Grove,” I said in a surprisingly calm voice. I mean, I doubt if my voice surprised any of those men, but it astonished me. “I came here to wonder why he was dead. Him and that police sergeant.”
The mention of a policeman sent a wave of anxiety through the room.
“I walked in here,” I continued, “with no gun, nobody to back me up. All I have is a little information about a government bond and about a white man I saw talking to Grove right out in front of this church three nights ago.”
“What white man?” Brother Bigelow wanted to know.
I moved my head upward, prepared to answer the question, but Father Vincent cut me off before I had the chance.
“Wait a minute,” the elder said hastily. “I need to talk to this man alone.”
This caused bewilderment among the deacons.
“Let us alone for a few minutes,” Vincent said. “Let me talk with him.”
“But, Father —” one deep-voiced deacon said. The rough men hesitated.
“Not now, Brother Noble. Not now. Go on, leave us, I want to question this man alone before he damages William’s name.”
The deacons moved slowly at first as if they were a tangle of logs gradually giving way to a strong river flow. Each one committed my face to memory as he walked around me toward the door.
The last man out closed the door behind him.
“This is —” I began, but Vincent put his hand up for silence.
We sat there quietly for over a minute. Then Vincent walked over to the door. He turned the knob and pushed it open quickly. It hit something, a head I’d bet, and Vincent looked at someone on the other side without saying anything that I could hear.
“Come with me,” he said to me.
He led me from the storage room through the hall to the back of the building. We went through a small yard and into a building that had probably been the garage of the house behind. This was Vincent’s office. There was a green metal desk in the center of the concrete floor with throw rugs and folding wooden chairs here and there. The ceiling was cross-hatched with unpainted rafter beams and decorated with spider webs.
“This is all I wanted to start with, Father Vincent. I don’t want any trouble.”
“What’s this about a policeman?”
“There was a cop killed with Grove.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s in the late edition of the Examiner,” I lied. But it was late enough for me to have seen an afternoon article. “Where’d you find out?”
“The police came. They told me what happent. They didn’t say nuthin’ ’bout no policeman gettin’ killed.”
I hunched my shoulders.
“What do you want, Mr. Lockwood?”
“I wanna know what that white man had to say to you.”
“What white man?”
“The one who you talked to the night that I came knockin’ at your door.”
“You were spying on me?” The Holy Roller’s voice rose, promising righteous retribution to follow, but I wasn’t impressed.
“There’s a lotta money in this, Vincent. And at least four dead people —”
“Four?”
“A woman was murdered too. And a man, an associate of Leon Douglas, died of gunshot wounds in a hospital a few days ago.”
The mention of Douglas hit Vincent like a slap.
“What does any of this have to do with me?” he asked.
“To begin with,” I said. “You don’t want the people who killed Grove to kill you. And to end with, you might be concerned at the worth of that bearer bond.”
“Do you have it?”
“Have what?”
Vincent pinched his lower lip and tugged at it.
“You know what,” he said.
“Who was that white man?” I asked again.
“You aren’t the one in power here, Lockwood,” the minister said, seeking strength in his own words. “This is my stronghold. Those men outside answer to me now that William is gone. At just a word I can bring a terrible wrath down on you.”
I took my time before answering, allowing the air to seep out of his hollow threat. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Bigelow breathes on me hard and I tell ’im that there’s a bond somebody wanna buy for a hundred thousand dollars and then he kills me. And then he grabs you and says, ‘We all get a taste’a this pie.’ And if you’re lucky, you see a few bucks. That is, if one of the deacons don’t off you, or if they don’t do somethin’ stupid and get you arrested.”
“You should be careful what accusations you make, boy.”
“I’m not the one who has to be careful, Reverend. It’s you who’s got to watch out. ’Cause the man you set up with Grove might figure out that it was you called the crooked cop and told him they were comin’.”
“What kinda stupidity are you talkin’?” Vincent’s eyes grew wider with each syllable.
“A man called Latham at the motel he was at,” I said, holding up a finger as if I were the elder’s teacher. “Right after that, Latham tore outta there. Grove was already outside, though, Grove and a partner. The way I see it, Elana put Latham to sleep with a special wiggle she got, and then she called you, because she heard somewhere that Grove could turn that bond into gold. You called Grove, and him and a friend went over there. But then you called Latham to warn him. That’s the way I see it.”
“Th-th-that’s crazy,” he said. “Crazy.”
“No, it ain’t. Not crazy, it’s evil.” Those words broke down the minister’s defenses. “And if somebody find out about it, retribution gonna belong to them.”
“I ain’t sayin’ that anyone called me,” he said. “But even if they did, and even if I did send William down there, why would I turn around and warn the cop that I sent him?”
“Because Grove stole your congregation,” I said. “Because he brought in those goons callin’ themselves deacons, because they were using your church to sell stolen merchandise. But mostly just because you saw the opportunity and you took it.”
It could have happened differently, but Vincent’s frightened eyes told me that I was right.
“It had to be that white man with him,” I said. “ ’Cause Grove was afraid of Leon, and, anyway, Sol didn’t take no millions from some Negro.”
My voice was strong, but my knees were weak. I swore to myself that if I got out of the building and into my car, I would drive to Chicago, change my name, and end my days as a dishwasher on the southside.
“You cain’t prove that,” Vincent said.
“I don’t need to,” I replied. “You’re the one gonna be in trouble if anyone hears that Latham was warned. All I have to do is cast blame, and your goose is cooked.”
“What do you want from me, Lockwood?”
“I want you to answer my questions. No bullshit.”
“What you wanna know?”
“First of all, why did you run from your place on Central?”
Father Vincent glared at me with something close to hatred in his eyes.
“William’s girlfriend, Elana Love, got hold of a bond,” he said. “Through her old boyfriend, who was in prison. William decided that he was going to cash it in. He went to a bank, but they told him that they could only cash it for the man it was signed to. He should have let it alone right there, but William was a greedy man, he had to have everything he saw.
“The man the bond was made out to was a Jew in jail with Elana’s boyfriend. William went to the Jew’s wife with some lie and got her to tell him who it was the old man stole from.”
“So what?” I asked. “What good would that do?”
“He goes to ’em —”
“To who?”
“Lawson and Widlow, the accountants. He goes to ’em and says he got their money in a bond. They tell him that they’re all so interested and make a meeting at the church to see the bond —”
“He didn’t show it to ’em?”
“William was greedy to a fault but wasn’t stupid. He kept the bond safe in case they tried to use muscle or the law on ’im. Anyway, the next thing we knew, they had three white hoodlums down there knockin’ at our door. Real thugs. Me and William could see through the curtains that they didn’t come to negotiate, so we made it out the back and had the deacons move us out overnight.”
