Salvation Boulevard

by Larry Beinhart

  “One crazed jihadist, Ahmad Nazami, who pretended to be some sort of refugee, who pretended to accept America’s hospitality, America’s amazingly generous hospitality, who took advantage of that hospitality to pick up a gun and murder a man because that man dared to disagree with his mad version of religion.

  “How many more were on his list?

  “How many were on Ahmad Nazami’s list? Who was next?”

  “Well, I too disagree with his religion,” Pastor Plowright said. “Does that mean I’m next on his jihad hit list?”

  “You disagree with his religion,” he said to us.

  And we agreed. “Jesus,” many of us cried. “We belong to Jesus.”

  “We have the Bible right here. It’s the word of God. I have read this book from cover to cover many times. So have many of you, so if I missed something here, feel free to correct me. But as I recall, nowhere does Jesus say, ‘Oh, by the way, although I am the Son of God, I didn’t get my gospel right.

  “‘So wait awhile, six hundred years or so, and then an illiterate Arab is going to come out of the desert to do a rewrite.’ An Arab, by the way, who married a woman old enough to be his mother, married her for her money.

  “Then he married at least fifteen other women.

  “One of those marriages was to a six-year-old girl, and it was consummated when she was nine years old. Nine years.

  “Do you think that God would send a child molester—we are speaking of a major-league pedophile—to come and redo the scriptures? What kind of religion worships a pedophile?

  “Mohammed is a prophet that only the ACLU could love.”

  Laughter, applause, and amens!

  “Let me tell you what Jesus did say. He said, ‘I am the way and the truth.’” That got many more amens. “Not a way and a truth. The way and the truth, the one and only way and the one and only truth.”

  “Hallelujah,” the chorus sang.

  “So, am I next on his list?” he asked, then pointed out to us in the congregation. “What about you? And you? And you?” And into the camera. If you were watching at home, he pointed at you through your TV. “And you?”

  “We are in a war,” he declared. “Our enemy has no hesitation to kill. No hesitation at all. Our enemy is barbaric and violent. This is not a war between civilizations. It is the war for civilization.

  “I call upon you all to uphold the faith and the gun. This is a war we must win!

  “There is no middle ground. Compromise is appeasement, and appeasement is death. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy is treason.”

  He didn’t point at me or call out my name. But I felt as if he was talking directly to me.

  I felt as if he was talking about me.

  Walking out afterward, I felt like eyes were all over me.

  The criminal justice business is a small world. Anyone in it knew who Manny Goldfarb was, and he would have been hated as thoroughly as the ACLU itself, except that he made so much money. Doing it for money made it right. I can’t say exactly how or why, but that was the fact. Doing it for ideals made it suspect and twisted, subversive and evil, part of the plot against America and the War against Christianity.

  A lot of them knew that Manny was defending Nazami, and quite a few would have known I was Manny’s number one investigator, something I’m normally proud of, as he has the hot cases and the deep pockets.

  But now, it was as if Plowright had hung a scarlet A around my neck, one that stood for ACLU, for Ahmad, for apostate and atheist, friend of the Antichrist.

  Jeremiah Hobson gave me one of those cold, don’t-fuck-up looks that high school football coaches practice in front of the mirror. He used it a lot when he was running my squad in narcotics.

  Alan clapped his hand on my shoulder. He didn’t say anything—nobody actually said anything. Maybe I was being paranoid. Alan’s expression said, Good luck. Do what you gotta do.

  Manny was my number one individual client, but the Christian community that connected through the Cathedral of the Third Millennium, as a group, gave me more business than he did. So I was trying to figure out how to keep everyone smiling, drop the case, and have Manny understand.

  Then Leander Peale came up to me, the CO who’d brought Nazami to us. He gave me the kind of smile a hard man with a lot of hard biker miles beneath him has. An inexpensive flipper covered the loss of three teeth on his upper right. He came up close, his idea of discretion, the tobacco smell coming off of him, ashtray sharp, and said, “You gotta do something for that kid.”

  “I gotta?”

  “If that kid kil’t mor’n a roach, I’ll draw you milk from a bull’s tits.”

  “And you know that?” I asked.

  “Carl, I walked C”—that was C block, not the worst, but bad enough—“seven years. Worked the hoo’ d’ow’”—midnight to morning, the hoot owl shift. “You know they cry. They call you over, hunk’ by the grate and whisper tales. Done the mainline three, and the row two”—that was central block and death row. “Heard every line of shit, every con, hustle, prayer, conversion, the born-agains, Nation of Islam, Black Israelites . . . . Makes you a judge a character, Carl, seeing what I seen.

  “That Persia kid, he di’n’t do the crime, and you know he can’t do the time.

  “A’other thing, those Homeland Security guys, there’s something ain’t right. I don’t know what, but they give me the feelin’ like some guy pissed on my leg, then tol’ me it was rainin’.”

  “Who are they?” I asked. “Do you know who they are?”

  “That’s part of the strange. They got no names.”

  8

  Alan Stephens was still on the job. He was someone I could reach out to, ask for a favor and trust too. It was the Tonto and Lone Ranger thing. He saved me, so you’d think I owed him, but he’s never asked for a thing, and he keeps offering me his hand.

  It was best not to see him at his office in the police building downtown. So I caught up with him at the Bible study group he runs for men in law enforcement. There’s talk of making it people in law enforcement and letting women in, but right now the thinking is to let them start their own group, women in law enforcement, a separate-but-equal thing.

  “As men in law enforcement,” Alan said in his introductory statement, “we may well find ourselves in that terrible situation where we have to take someone else’s life. Maybe in self-defense or to protect someone else. Sometimes we may unintentionally cause someone’s death. We’ve all known car chases that resulted in a death—to one of our own, to the person running away, or most upsetting of all, to an innocent bystander.

  “As Christians, we are fortunate to have God’s Word, his Holy Book, to guide us. The Bible is very clear—make no mistake about this—killing is not wrong. Especially if you kill in defense of what is right. Then you’re doing God’s work, and it is righteous.

  “Let’s cut to the chase. We’ve all heard the Sixth Commandment quoted as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

  “That’s wrong. It’s a bad translation. It really, truly is . . . what it should be—and I will show you the Hebrew and the best dictionaries—what it should be—and in some Bibles you will see it the correct way—it should be, ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ That’s what God carved into the stone with his fiery finger, and it is what God meant.

  “Murder is the wrongful and intentional taking of a life.

  “Murder is wrong. And, in fact, God decrees the death penalty for murder. That is obviously the intentional taking of a life, but it is righteous and God approves, in fact God commands, the righteous taking of life.

  “Why does God support the death penalty? For the very same reasons that we believe in it. Deuteronomy 19:20, ‘And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.’

  “The strange thing, and the thing that may trouble many of us in law enforcement, is that every time we have an execution, or possible execution, there are ministers out marching against the death penalty to sa
ve the murderer.

  “Think about this. What does Satan want? He wants to convince people that there are no consequences for their actions. So that they will feel free—free to murder, to fornicate, to commit adultery. Free to do anything because there are no consequences. God’s law is that there are consequences, that there is punishment, even for his chosen people, should they commit error.

  “So why would a so-called reverend take up Satan’s work? Or fail to realize that he is taking up Satan’s work? Satan uses his own good-intentioned weakness to seduce him to try to seduce us.

  “How can that that happen? you may wonder. Lack of Bible study. Even preachers and pastors, and certainly priests—Catholics don’t actually read the Bible—you know that, don’t you?”

  “Anyway,” Alan said, coming back to the point, “God wants judges and police and soldiers here on earth. To keep earthly order, to keep His order, to protect the innocent, to protect His nations, His beloved followers, and He is not a fool, and neither was Jesus Christ a fool. They understand we live here in real life, with real problems, so they gave us this book with real solutions.

  “So if you see a crank fiend, and he is holding up a roadside attraction, and there is danger to yourself or to civilians, you should not be afraid to terminate his existence on the spot, if that is what’s necessary. You are doing God’s work. Don’t harm yourself with guilt afterward. You are doing God’s work.

  “If you see a terrorist, and he is plotting to go to the university and bomb it because it is critical of Islam, do not hesitate to use any means necessary to stop him and save innocent life.

  “And our work here today is to see that this is written down for us in scripture. Because, in something so serious as taking a life, we need to know we’re on the right side.”

  For the next forty or fifty minutes, we talked about Numbers 35:17–19, which ordains the death penalty; Matthew 5:17–18 and Luke 16:187, in which Jesus is very clear that he is here to enforce the old law; Exodus 2:11–12, in which Moses slew an Egyptian who was smiting a Hebrew, the sort of thing a cop can easily be called upon to do; and First Samuel 17:1–51, the story of David and Goliath, in which David, with God’s help and God’s blessing, killed someone who was threatening God’s people.

  Afterward, when we broke for coffee but most of the guys rushed off to work, I found a moment to be alone with Alan.

  “I’m kinda stuck here,” I said. “GGW&G, they’re my best client. I said I would take the job, and I don’t like to go back on my word.”

  He nodded. He could understand that, even agree with it. A man’s word is supposed to mean something.

  “Also, I’m not supposed to start judging their clients for them. ‘Don’t call me unless you have a case I approve of’—I say that, they won’t call me for anything.”

  “You’re gonna lose a lot of friends,” he said.

  “I got that,” I said.

  “And a lot of business,” he said.

  “I have a plan,” I said. “Maybe not much of one, but it’s the best I can think of so far. What I want to try to do is get Goldfarb a good start, get him enough to go on, enough that I can cut the case loose, and we both feel good about it.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Police reports,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you right now, I can’t get you anything on Nazami. That’s wrapped up tighter than shrink wrap.”

  “No, the original report, back when they thought it was a suicide.”

  “Maybe I could find that.”

  “And the university, the campus police must’ve made a report.”

  “You figure that’ll get you off the hook?”

  “That, plus interview a couple of witnesses, maybe find some alternate suspects he can throw at the jury.”

  “I’ll see what I can find,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  9

  Nathaniel MacLeod’s widow, Teresa, said, “You should really talk to his girlfriend.”

  She said it more cheerfully than you expect a wife to refer to a late husband’s girlfriend. I wasn’t sure, but it felt like there were tight coils of tension beneath the surface.

  “His girlfriend? What’s her name?”

  “Um, Emma? Emmy? . . . short for something else? I’m sorry, I’m really not sure, mostly he liked to call her his ‘own special angel.’”

  Teresa was slender, about forty. She wore no makeup, or so little that my eye couldn’t pick up on it. Her hair was styled, spiky and short, and it made her look a little bit dramatic. There were fine spider lines around her eyes, and you could see where the lines that would someday appear above her upper lip would be.

  Her full name was listed in the university course catalog as Teresa Mansfield-Pellita, which I took to be her maiden name. She had a PhD and was an assistant professor of geography. She taught urban commercial geography, business and environmental geography, and introduction to feminist geography.

  The house was relatively small, built in a southwestern style and done up that way inside too. What you call mission furniture, or something like it, sparse with lots of wood showing. A rug with the colors of desert sand.

  “Aside from that,” she said. “I don’t know what else I can tell you.” It was dismissive, conversation ending, putting up defenses, yet something in her tone said the opposite, but suggesting, somehow, that there were secret doors, hidden here and there along the walls.

  There were several photographic prints on the wall and two small paintings. To keep the interview alive, and maybe find one of those openings, I walked over for a closer look at the most striking of the photos, a desolate landscape, glossy black stones in the foreground leading to a field of sand, dark gray mixed with brown, with an orangered river of fire running through the center and off into the distance.

  “A volcano?” I asked. “Lava flowing?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s a river.”

  “Oh. The photographer manipulated the color,” I said, guessing.

  “That’s the color, the real color. It’s waste. It’s the runoff from a nickel mine, and that’s what it did to the river and the land.”

  On the opposite wall there was a set of five photographs framed together on a single panel. All had been taken from the same high angle, looking down at a McDonald’s. I said, “May I?” and went to look at those more closely. The series went from morning through night. Each was a multiple exposure over a fifteen-minute period, the aperture set so that the cumulative shots of the restaurant combined to make it seem solid and bright, the way a McDonald’s always does. But the figures that passed in front of it had only been given a fractional exposure, so they appeared like specters, dim and semitransparent. The dusk and night shots were even more dramatic, full of bursts of light from passing cars, their headlights leaving washes on the building and illuminating some of the people, as if they were flash attachments that let you catch ghosts on film.

  She followed me, and from close behind me she said, “It’s from one of my studies.”

  “Did you shoot it?” I asked.

  “No. I had it done. The hottest application of geography these days, so there’s grant money for it, is commercial traffic patterns. But the photos turned out to have their own aesthetic.”

  I turned toward her as she spoke. Her gaze was on me, and our eyes met.

  There was a whistling noise from the kitchen.

  “Would you like some tea?” she asked. “Green tea or some other kind? Or water? Or a drink?”

  “Tea would be fine, and I’ll have whatever kind you’re having.”

  “Green tea,” she said. “It purifies the blood.”

  “You think that’s true?” I asked as she moved toward the kitchen.

  “There was a study,” she said. “It proved that if you’re a Japanese fisherperson and you drink six cups a day, you’ll live longer than a fisherperson who only drinks one cup a day.”

  I followed her and, when she went in, watched her fr
om the doorway as she busied herself. She took out a Japanese tea set, glazed the color of iron, the pot with flat sides and curved edges, the cups without handles. Her gestures were neat and tidy. Precise and very concentrated.

  She was working very hard at being in control and self-possessed, at making everything seem casual and normal.

  But it was taking so much focus to do so—first on the pot, then on finding the tin with tea leaves, then opening it—that she blocked out the sound and had even forgotten that it was the whistle that had summoned her until it rose in volume and pitch to a shriek that pierced right through her wall of concentration. Then she yelled, “Dammit! Dammit all!” and threw the tea set to the tiled floor, where it smashed and shattered.

  She grabbed the kettle by the handle, yanked it off the burner, and put it on the one behind, banging it down. I was afraid she was going to scorch herself on the flame or splatter herself with the boiling water. I reached over and turned off the range.

  “Damn, damn, damn, and fuck and fucking hell, and all of it,” she said, kicking at the bits and pieces of cups and teapot on the floor. Then she stood still, standing in front of me, looking helpless and lost, her arms held at her sides. Her mouth was tight, and she was holding back the tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, automatically taking a step toward her.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m sorry for your . . . pain,” I said.

  We were less than two feet apart. She was looking up at me, into my eyes. So many things were going on inside her.

  There was a connection.

  It gets tricky. As an investigator, like when I was a cop, I wander in and out of people’s lives. I meet women at vulnerable moments, or merely at moments when I’m an unexpected presence, and they don’t have their standard controls over their emotional and sexual impulses up and in place. If I tune into that, communication opens up. Back in the day, I would fall into those waters, way past any excuses that it helped with the job, taking advantage, sometimes doing damage. Now, I don’t want that kind of trouble, but I do want information, so I let the doors open, knock gently to get them to open, but if it’s a bedroom door, I remember that I’m just there to look, from the entrance way, not to go in and participate.