We followed arrows to the office. I wanted to stop by, pick up some church lit, and see if I could get some clue to Penelope Rideout’s pointed reaction to the Cathedral by the Sea.
The office was a two-story building that looked far more humble, and much older, than the swashbuckling chapel. Inside, it was cool and open and quiet. The floors looked like 1950s linoleum shined to brilliance by janitors. A sign on the front counter read “Welcome!” There were neat stacks of pamphlets, magazines, and the Cathedral by the Sea bulletin, From the Lighthouse. Behind the counter sat two neat desks and two rolling task chairs. And beyond them, a long hallway with offices on either side. Rectangles of sunlight shining in.
“So, what are we doing here?” asked Violet. “Privately investigating?”
I shrugged, wishing I’d been more clear when I’d briefed Violet what not to say on this excursion.
“Are we searching for God or bad guys?”
I held a finger to my puffy split lip.
Her expression froze. She nodded.
Frank listened and watched but said nothing, his standard MO when he’s away from home. He was afraid someone would hear his accent, then question, arrest, and deport him. These things happen. He told me that if he returned home to El Salvador he’d be killed on sight, having witnessed his father’s murder. Here in public, I knew I was harboring and employing an illegal immigrant, but I still thought that in this case, it was the right thing to do. Which made me a criminal, too, living in a nation of laws while holding an innocent man’s life in my hands.
I helped myself to some of the church pamphlets set out on the counter. And this week’s From the Lighthouse, which had a calendar and all the upcoming events. Picked up a glossy flyer about an upcoming “Special Appearance by Lamar Fleming of Houston, Texas.” And another announcing the recent launch of Pastor Reggie Atlas’s complete recorded sermons, available online through Four Wheels for Jesus Ministry.
“Wait for me here,” I said.
Violet gave me a complicit squint and Frank nodded.
I went around the counter and into the hallway, my shoes squeaking on the polished floor. The offices left and right were marked clearly: Assistant Pastor Erica Summer, Activities Director Rudy Mercator, Bible School Administrator Patrick Clarke, Youth Minister Danella Witt. I wondered if this was the youth ministry director who had lavished attention on Daley. According to Penelope, who would have had to have mistaken Danella Witt for a man. But maybe Penelope had just gotten someone’s title wrong.
All of their doors were closed until I came to Pastor Reggie Atlas, whose door stood open.
He sat behind a desk, his back to me, looking through a window that faced the courtyard, where the last of his ten a.m. congregation was disassembling. Rungs of sunlight and shadow through half-drawn blinds.
He pivoted. “Yes?”
“I enjoyed the service. My first time here.”
“Thank you, and welcome. Come in if you’d like.”
I met him halfway to his desk, where we introduced ourselves and shook hands. Strong and cool. I took off my hat.
“Looks like a bad one,” he said.
“T-boned at a four-way stop. He never even slowed down.”
His grand smile. “Good insurance, I hope. Do you live nearby?”
“Fallbrook.”
“I have friends there. And some of my congregation, too. Please have a seat. I was preparing for noon fellowship, but I have a few minutes.”
He pulled out a chair for me, then took up his own again behind the desk. We talked San Diego: weather, surf, drought, wildfire.
“So, why do I have the feeling you didn’t come here to hear my message?” he asked pleasantly.
“I’m looking for a girl named Daley Rideout. She’s fourteen and she came here once last month.”
“Has something happened?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure exactly what.”
“What relation are you?”
“I’m a private investigator, hired to locate her.”
“Then this is very serious.”
“I believe it is.”
“I sincerely apologize, but I’ll need to see some ID.”
I got the wallet from my coat pocket, handed him a laminated copy of my license and a business card. He studied them, then handed back the mock-up.
“What day was she here?” asked Atlas.
I gave him the August date that Penelope had given me. I described Daley and said she had come with two friends, girls her age. I handed him my phone. He stared at the screen, scrolling along with one finger.
“Not familiar,” he said. “Certainly possible, though. I’m sorry, but as you saw today, the young people really turn out. So long as you don’t wake them up too early. The young are our future, Mr. Ford. They will multiply us into heaven. It wasn’t like that when I started out all those years ago. It was always the old folks back then.”
“I liked the old-man-as-an-angel story.”
A raise of an eyebrow. “Not an angel, probably. But every word of it true.”
“I believe you.”
“Do you think that something bad has happened to the girl?”
“Disappearing at fourteen is bad.”
“Are the police looking for her?”
“They are. Do you know Nick Moreno?”
Reggie Atlas sat back, placed his hands flat on the desk. “Yes. He was almost a regular here. I heard what happened to him from my singles minister. Ugly and sad.”
“Do you know Alanis Tervalua or Carrie Calhoun?”
He shook his head.
“Daley’s age,” I said. “Friends.”
“No. But you should talk to our youth minister, Danella. She’s out of town now, but she’ll be back on Friday.”
“What about Penelope Rideout?”
Reggie shook his head again, then spread his hands in a gesture of mild surrender. “I’m sorry. Related to the girl?”
“Sister and guardian. Richard Hauser?”
“No again, sorry again.”
A moment of near silence. Distant seagulls and murmurs from outside. Through the window I watched a man tidying up the courtyard. He was young and muscular, with a white buzz cut, a sun-flushed face, and pointed ears. No aloha shirt and cargo shorts for this deacon. Chinos and a black golf shirt and shiny black duty boots. Clean cut, All-American, and doing good deeds for fellow man.
“You’ve come a long way from the hollers of Georgia,” I said.
A thoughtful look from Atlas. “I did the first years of my preaching from that VW van and a series of recreational vehicles. All through the South. I was too young to know any better. To know what a challenge it would be. As in my message today. I was absolutely consumed by the word of God. I got my first real brick-and-mortar chapel many years ago in a town so small you could blink and miss it. Now here—the cathedral of my dreams. Bills to pay, though. Leave it to Pastor Reggie to covet some of the most valuable real estate in the country.”
“I see you have an online program.”
“Four Wheels for Jesus. It does very well.”
“And you’ve got quite a following on the social networks,” I said.
He opened his palms and shrugged, a humble gesture. “‘The word of God is quick, and powerful . . . and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart’.”
“Hebrews,” I guessed.
A full smile then, and a knowing nod. There was something intimate about Pastor Atlas, something you-and-me about him. I’d noted the same quality in many successful salesmen.
“I feel powerless sometimes,” he said. “There are moments, though. With the Lord. With my wife and children and my believers. When I feel the power of the word coming through me. Not from, but through. He commands my body and soul. Are you strong in Jesus, Mr. Ford?”
“Well, that’s quite an acceptable start, I’d say. Please, come worship with us whenever you’d like. Bring your friends and family. Jesus will change your life.”
He raised his shirt cuff for a look at his watch.
“Who handles church security?” I asked.
“Security? I don’t know which company, but I can find out for you. Why?”
“It’s not important,” I said.
He nodded slowly, taking me in with steady blue eyes. For a moment he looked every one of his forty-nine years, if not more. Then, through some personal light and magic, his youth reappeared. He sighed and stood.
“Well, please, if I can help in any way . . .”
“You’ve been generous, Pastor. Thank you for your time, and for the good sermon. I’m glad you kept preaching.”
“I hope you’re sincere.”
“I’m usually too sincere.”
“Should I be worried? Nick? The missing girl? This alleged car accident that happened to you? This violence in the air?”
“Just keep your eyes open. And call me if you learn anything that might point me to Daley Rideout.”
“Yes, I’ll do that. But, Mr. Ford, do you think my family and I are safe?”
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just looked at him.
“I know,” he said. “You can’t answer that. In a world like this.”
13
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LATER that Sunday, Burt and I tracked down the San Clemente 7-Eleven clerk who had seen Daley Rideout early Thursday morning. Yash Chowdhury lived on West Escalones, a few blocks from the store.
He squinted at Daley’s pictures on my phone, nodding. “She was upset. I felt bad for her. I thought of calling the police, but she seemed to know the people she was arguing with. So I decided not to. I see things all the time. There was nothing physical, no forcing. Her sister called the police, but they got here after the girl left. The sister got so angry, they almost arrested her.”
Yash was early twenties, short and slim, with a head of black curls and a mustache. His wife, Riya, was studying medicine at UC Irvine. Their house was small and neat and smelled of incense and laundry detergent. Riya retreated to the bedroom to study while we talked. Burt and I sat across from Yash in the living room.
“The girl came to the store at three ten,” he said. “I checked the time because I was bored. She was in a white van. It was a commercial van with no windows, not a minivan. Old. The driver was hard to see. A middle-aged white man. She got out and he rolled his window down and said something, but she didn’t turn around. She came inside and went down the household aisle and watched the van leave. Then she went outside and used the pay phone.”
According to Yash, Daley had been wearing skinny jeans with high cuffs, flip-flops, and a black hoodie that read “I’m not as stupid as I look” on the front. She had had a black backpack slung over one shoulder.
Yash said that Daley bought an energy drink and three candy bars—the same ones I’d seen evidence of in her home wastebasket.
“When she paid, she was distracted,” said Yash. “And maybe angry. I asked her if she was having a good morning and she said it was none of my business. She paid and put the drink and candy in her backpack and zipped it up quickly. I had been reading a fantasy novel because the graveyard shift is slow, and she saw it and said, ‘Why read that? Real life is weird enough, isn’t it?’”
Then Daley walked out, and that was when Yash had seen the punchline of the joke on the back of her hoodie: “Are you?” Daley was halfway across the parking lot when a silver SUV pulled in and a man got out and started arguing with her. He was approximately thirty years old, an Anglo, dressed in chinos and a white dress shirt. He seemed to be ridiculing her, and she “got in his face” and defended herself. There was no physical contact, just words and gesturing. Then he opened a back door and she took the backpack off her shoulder and climbed in.
Yash said that the vehicle had writing on the driver’s-side door, but he couldn’t read it with the headlight beams coming through the store windows. The SUV pulled onto El Camino Real and headed south.
The police arrived five minutes later, asking Yash if he’d seen a girl who matched Daley’s description. They described her accurately. It was three thirty-five. The officers didn’t seem particularly concerned about the girl, and they bought coffee before they left.
They were sitting in their car when a yellow Volkswagen Beetle skidded into the 7-Eleven parking lot, went straight into the handicapped-only slot, and a “curly-haired woman came flying into the store. She was maybe twenty-five. Small and pretty.”
Then the officers came back in and got into a three-way argument with the woman, and she broke away from them and started asking Yash questions about the girl. She said her sister was in trouble and she criticized him for not helping her, then she “verbally attacked” the officers for not getting there sooner, and they physically escorted her to their car and locked her in the back seat. Yash could see her, her face a blur behind the glass and the metal screen inside. Two more police cars arrived shortly. Their lights were flashing but no sirens.
They let the older sister out of the cruiser, and after a “ten-minute discussion,” the police let her come back inside the store. Yash answered her questions politely and hoped she wouldn’t start screaming at him, too. But she had calmed down by then, and Yash saw that she was not drunk or deranged at all but was very worried. She wrote her name and number on a complimentary snack napkin and ordered him, politely, to call if he saw her sister again.
I thanked Yash and handed him a business card. Told him the same thing Penelope had told him. “Or if you remember something that might help me locate her,” I added. “But call the police first.”
“Yes, of course.”
The three of us shook hands.
“You forgot something,” said Burt, looking up at Yash with his odd smile. Some of Burt’s bottom teeth show a little when he smiles, and if he’s looking up at you—which is often, because he’s short—the smile looks half jolly and half diabolical. I might know Burt well enough to say it’s mostly jolly, but I really might not. He has a strangely persuasive effect on some people.
“What did I forget?” asked Yash.
“Everyone forgets something,” said Burt.
Yash frowned down at Burt, brow furrowed, as if trying to take the man and his question seriously.
“She asked if we sell burner phones,” said Yash. “The younger sister. I just remembered that.”
“And?” asked Burt
“No, we don’t,” said Yash. “I told her to try Walmart.”
“Glad I asked.”
“And I always remember everything,” said Yash, looking puzzled. “There’s nothing else to do with a job as boring as mine.”
14
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BURT AND I walked south down the beach at San Onofre, past the prime surf breaks—the Point and Old Man’s and Dog Patch. I’m almost a foot taller than Burt—I was six-three and two hundred ten pounds as the heavyweight Rolling Thunder Ford—and I take long steps. But I was moving slowly that day and Burt had no trouble keeping up with me over the rock-studded beach.
I told him I’d struck out with Pastor Reggie Atlas, but that he appeared to be worried for himself and his family. Burt took that in short stride.
“Any clear reason why?” he asked.
“Nick Moreno. A missing girl who had possibly visited his church not long ago. My face.”
“Preachers know more secrets than shrinks.”
“One long confession,” I said.
“He’s hiding something.”
Which is what I had figured, too. “Ar
en’t we all?”
“True,” said Burt. “But trite.”
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shimmered in the sun up ahead of us, its two nippled domes rising like enormous concrete breasts from the sand. Thick black power lines laced the sky above the structure, lines that once carried rivers of electricity up over the Camp Pendleton hills and deep into Orange County.
No more. No more plumes of steam rising into the air. The station had been closed for six years now, following the failure of suspect Mitsubishi steam generators. The plant operator, Southern California Edison, claimed that the generators were defective and had failed years ahead of schedule. Mitsubishi disagreed and refused to replace or repair them. Which left rate payers on the hook for the plant closure and decommissioning, buying more expensive electricity elsewhere, and, most important, the four-billion-dollar cost of storing the waste.
No one in their right mind wanted it here. Not in our state. Not with Nevada and New Mexico offering to take it off our hands for a fee. Much the same story as other nuclear power plants across our land.
Now, as Burt and I approached, a mere eighteen hundred tons of deadly radioactive waste waited in limbo in temporary cooling pools and storage canisters buried somewhere down near the shoreline. All subject to time, design flaws, maintenance oversights, monitoring failures, leaks, earthquakes, tsunamis, and terrorist explosives.
But on a beautiful September afternoon like this, no one was thinking about such lethal surprises. Clear skies, mid-seventies, four- to six-foot waves and a mild offshore breeze to hold them upright. Pale green cylinders, thin-lipped and top-dusted. Crowded, as California breaks almost always are. I surfed until I went to war and never since. I don’t know why.
We came to Old Man’s, long the home of the San Onofre Surfing Club. Mom and Dad were active members back in the sixties and I joined myself as a college kid at SDSU. Ground zero of the club is the shack, which is just that, a rudimentary, unwalled frame of lumber for propping up longboards, holding up tarps for shade, providing a hint of cover for the occasional beer. Nearby, trees and tables and outdoor showers.
The Last Good Guy Page 8
