The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  He looked back at me but didn’t smile.

  “The trouble began two years ago,” he said. “About the time their second child, the girl, was born…”

  The first intimation Marilyn Prescott had that her husband might be in trouble, Jake said, came when he drank too much at one of the country club’s Saturday parties.

  “I’d seen him do a little drinking in the past,” Jake said, “and on those occasions the liquor only seemed to relax him a bit.

  Bring out the overgrown clown. It was low comedy, like watching an elephant try to roller-skate. Harmless. But this was a different kind of drinking. Almost a different person. Pres spent most of the night holed up in one corner, leaving only to get another refill of vodka on the rocks. And when he finally did move, it was in the direction of J. J. Barlow…”

  Jake took a deep breath. J. J. Barlow, he said, was chairman and president of the town’s biggest bank. And chief trustee of the grain cooperative. And director of the local oil-and-gas marketing organization. And a power in the federal stockyard association, the merchants and manufacturers club, the chamber of commerce, the county and state Democratic central committees.

  “And just about anything else you’d care to name,” he said. “One of the two or three individuals without whom nothing much can be done in a town like Farewell.”

  “A .90 caliber,” I said.

  “A very big gun indeed,” Jake agreed, “and all the more remarkable because of his physical limitations. Until Pres Prescott came home from Vietnam, J. J. Barlow was Farewell’s one and only living, authentic war hero. The old man won the Silver Star—and lost both legs above the knee—during the Battle of the Bulge. Been stuck in a wheelchair ever since.”

  I thought it over and offered the first thought that crossed my mind. “Class of ’45,” I said.

  Jake made a face. “You, too?” he said. “I know what Vietnam veterans think of the ones from World War II and Korea, but I’d hoped that you, of all people—”

  “Jake,” I said, stopping him before he could get us committed to the kind of debate that I’d quit trying to win a dozen years ago, “no one thinks anything, all right? The comment was just a mental note—that Pres Prescott and J. J. Barlow might have had a little trouble understanding each other on some points.”

  Jake sighed and nodded again. “You’re right,” he said. “I wish you were wrong, but you’re right. Which makes what happened all the more difficult to understand…because up until that night, the two of them had what seemed for all the world almost a father-son relationship!”

  Barlow had been in Prescott’s corner from the very first, Jake said. In high school, when Pres first began to show signs of the size and talent that would make him a star, it was the wheelchair-bound banker who encouraged him, made sure that he studied enough to remain eligible for the team, and adroitly managed the behind-the-scenes wrangling that finally resulted in a full athletic scholarship to Michigan.

  “And when he went into pro ball,” Jake said, “it was J. J. who made sure Pres got the kind of manager who could and would protect his client through the bonus-baby infighting and then safeguard his interests when he had to take time out for that excursion to Southeast Asia.”

  “Valuable,” I said. “A number one ally.”

  “More than that,” Jake said. “Pres Prescott’s father died when he was fourteen years old, and from that time on, J. J. Barlow was the man Pres went to for advice, for sympathy, and for the kind of emotional support that few real fathers can offer.”

  “Until that night,” I said.

  “Until then…”

  Prescott had left his corner chair, Jake recalled, and was en route to the bar again when J. J. Barlow came through the door. There was the minor scurry that small-town protocol dictates: Bankers get the big hello and a lot of quick service, especially if they’re in wheelchairs—and this was a man who was popular as well as powerful.

  “But this time Prescott didn’t join the rush,” I said.

  Jake shook his head. “He not only didn’t join, he went the other way. Picked up a fresh drink at the bar, stood looking at J. J. for a moment, and then walked past him without a word—out the door and out of the clubhouse to the first tee, where he stood nursing the glass until it was empty, then got into his car and drove away, leaving Marilyn behind to make the apologies and find her own way home.”

  I thought it over and shook my head. “Saturday night standard,” I said. “An earthshaker for the country-club set, maybe. But…”

  “That was only the beginning,” Jake said. “Or maybe just the first outward sign of something that had been going on for a while. I really don’t know. Marilyn tells me the gambling had started a few weeks earlier.”

  I scored a tiny mental check mark. Gamble. The operative word. Now I knew why I was in New Mexico.

  “Gambling, how?” I asked.

  Jake looked the question back at me.

  “Craps?” I prompted. “Horses? Las Vegas weekends? Lottery tickets?”

  Jake shook his head. “Poker,” he said.

  “Your game,” a woman’s voice said from the space behind me…

  It had been a long time, and a lot had happened to all of us. But I didn’t have to turn my head to know who had spoken. In all my life I have known only two people who could enter a room behind me with such minimal noise, so little disturbance of the atmosphere, that the sound of their voices would come as a surprise and a startlement. Both of them were women, and one was long dead.

  “Hello, Helen,” I said.

  I stood up and turned around. Helen Spence is a tall woman, only an inch or two shorter than her husband, and I remembered her as a beauty. The ministry, even in a place like Farewell, might agree well with a man like Jake, but I’d been wondering about her.

  Ministers’ wives get the worst of both worlds—all the restrictions that go with their husbands’ calling, but none of the immunities. It can be devastating, and she wouldn’t have been the first to find herself empty and drifting. The incidence of alcoholism among ministers’ wives is comparable to that found among the officers’ ladies on remote military posts.

  But one glance told me everything I needed to know. Helen was still Helen, and there was a calmness now, almost a serenity, in the smile she offered in a package deal with the kiss and hug of welcome.

  “You’re skinny,” she said when we unclenched.

  “You’re gorgeous,” I said, grinning at her.

  “You’re a liar,” she said. “And I love it.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, and I found myself wondering about Sara, how she would have responded to the real world if we’d ever had a chance to live in it. If I’d gone Jake’s route…

  “Sara would have fattened you up,” she said, reading my thoughts. “And she would have kept you from wearing that perfectly awful black suit.”

  She put boldfaced emphasis on the word “awful,” and I pretended to take offense. “Your husband’s wearing one,” I pointed out. “He wears one every day, and I bet you don’t say that to him.”

  “He has to,” she said. “He’s a priest.”

  Which stopped the conversation for a moment.

  We looked at each other, and the words that didn’t pass between us were far clearer and more audible than anything we’d said aloud. Fair enough. Personal criticism and reproach are privileges I reserve to myself and to a very few others. But Helen was qualified. She’d been to see the elephant. And besides, there was nothing she could say or think that I hadn’t said or thought for myself over the years. Absolutely nothing.

  She glanced at the desk, saw the Prescotts’ wedding picture, looked quickly at me and then at Jake, who answered with the least perceptible of shrugs.

  “About poker,” I said when the moment finally ended.

  “About poker.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and took up the tale where her husband had left off.

  “Marilyn, Pres’s wife—I can’t get used to th
inking of her as a widow—tells me he’d been playing in the poker game at the country club for only a few weeks before that scene with J. J. Tell me, are other little towns like this? Do they all have a poker game that’s been going on for years?”

  “Not all, maybe,” I said, “but most. I used to have a regular poker route, playing in them; start the season just outside Cincinnati and continue, town by town, down through Kentucky to Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and into Southern California. It’s how a player learns his trade—like a stand-up comic sharpening his timing and his material in Des Moines and Paducah before he tries for the Tonight show.”

  “It sounds…”

  “Different,” I said, to keep her from finding the word she wanted. “A different frame of reference. A different sky.”

  She sipped at her coffee, not looking at me, and went on.

  “At first, Marilyn thought it was harmless,” she said. “But then she began to notice things: changes in Pres…”

  The sometime wide receiver had always been a smiling man, Helen said, an outgoing person who made friends easily. The changes in him were subtle, and his wife noted them at first only in passing, sure that they were a temporary response to some kind of problem that he would finally share with her. But the time of sharing never came, and the changes continued.

  “At first, he was simply preoccupied,” Helen said. “He developed this middle-distance stare that insulated him from people. It got to be very hard to communicate with him. And then there was the thing with J. J.—whatever it was. Marilyn tried to talk to Pres about it, get him to open up and tell her what was wrong. He wouldn’t discuss it, and finally she stopped trying. But it was wrong for Pres. All wrong. He needed J. J., depended on him, and not just the way any businessman has to depend on a banker. This was personal, always had been. And Marilyn could see it was eating Pres alive…”

  The marriage changed, too, Helen went on. The distancing and preoccupation noticed by the Prescotts’ friends began to extend to the children. The helicopter jockey had always been an affectionate and interested father; now he dropped out of the committee work he’d been doing with his son’s Cub Scout pack and abandoned the playhouse he had been building for his little girl. But most startling of all, at least to Marilyn Prescott, was the alteration in their sex life.

  “It diminished,” Helen said. “And then it dwindled. And then it died. Marilyn says Pres had always been a goat, but now he moved into the spare bedroom. Tried to pass it off as courtesy—he was putting in some late hours at the heliport, and sometimes when he played poker he didn’t get home till sunrise. Said he didn’t want to disturb her sleep. But Marilyn was at her wits’ end. Just a week ago, she was even thinking about a divorce…but of course, it never came to that.”

  I looked a question.

  “Pres died three days ago,” Jake spoke up. “A crash about ten miles south of town. He was dusting a wheat field.”

  “The official report,” Helen said, cutting him off, her voice flat and metallic, “will call it an accident. That’s what the sheriff says, and I don’t think the Transportation Safety Board, or whatever they call that federal agency, is going to find anything to the contrary.”

  “But you don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Not for a moment,” she said.

  I sat still a moment, looking at the two of them, sorting out the sticks and stones. The Reverend and Mrs. Harold J. Spence had come up with a very hot potato indeed—at least in their own terms. Especially if Jake had done what I damn well know he had done.

  “You handled the funeral,” I said, keeping my voice even and my face full of nothing. “You made the arrangements and you buried him in consecrated ground.”

  Jake nodded unhappily.

  “But now there’s reason to think that Prescott was a suicide.”

  Helen started to speak, but Jake cut her off with a look.

  “There is reason,” he said.

  “And if he did, of course, you’ve been adding up the number of canon laws you’ve broken, and you’ve come up with a figure you can’t live with, and you’re wondering what to tell his widow if it turns out you have to do something about it.”

  Jake sighed and looked at the ceiling. He was out of words.

  But Helen wasn’t.

  “My husband the martyr,” she said. “I’m not going to argue the fine points with the two of you. I never had a course in apologetics, and besides, I don’t think that particular question is ever going to arise.”

  “Helen…” Jake started to object, but she shushed him with a gesture.

  “For the moment,” she continued, uninterrupted, “the coroner lists Pres Pescott’s death as accidental, and it may stay that way even when the investigation is finished. Or it may change. If it’s suicide, a lot of people are going to be hurt, not just my straight-arrow husband and his scruples. But there is another possibility—one the federal investigators just might overlook.”

  It had occurred to me, too, but I held my peace and let her say it. Cathartic. Good for the innards.

  “There are a lot of things about that crash that don’t add up,” she said. “Enough to make a reasonable person suspect suicide. But that isn’t what happened.”

  She took a deep breath. “Pres Prescott didn’t kill himself out there in that wheat field,” she said. “We think he was murdered, and we got you out here to help us prove it.”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Here, then, is the paradox of the human condition, the basic conflict in the soul that has plagued us since first we fled, naked and ashamed, from the Garden of Eden:

  We love solitude, but seek friends.

  We rejoice in the unspoiled face of nature, but willingly pass our lives in cities.

  We talk peace, but make war…

  FOUR

  By 4:00 A.M., the game at the country club was finally beginning to go my way.

  I was a little money ahead.

  And, hand by hand, I was beginning to know the other players.

  Not that I’d exactly started cold; Jake and Helen had come up with personal background and character assessments that would have made a private detective squirm. Secrets die young in a town the size of Farewell. Still, all the Spences had to back up their murder suspicions was speculation—none of it even narrowing down to a specific name.

  Which checked it to me.

  Pres Prescott’s sometime poker buddies were a cross section, not of the town itself, but of the power structure that made it go. The planners of housing development. The backers of charity drives. The builders of new hospital wings. The late-night telephoners to Santa Fe and Washington whose calls were always returned. Very little could happen in Farewell without their knowledge and consent.

  But Pres Prescott had died broke, and no one seemed to know just why.

  Without a word to wife and friends, the football-pro-turned-helicopter-jockey had spent the last two years of his life mortgaging everything he owned, beginning with the helicopter business and ending with the inherited land it stood on. Even his home in Farewell was heavily encumbered.

  The one man who might have been expected to know all about it, of course, was J. J. Barlow. But the banker professed total ignorance. He told Marilyn Prescott that her husband had moved his bank accounts and financing across the state line to Amarillo the day after the still-unexplained scene at the country club.

  “Left ol’ J. J. right out there in the cold and dark,” he said.

  Glancing at the wheelchair-bound man who now sat across the table from me—the departure of Bobby Don and another player had left two empty chairs to my left—I tried to make that statement square with what I had learned during the evening of poker. And found myself in never-never land.

  I had dropped out of the current pot after seeing my third card, and had a moment or two to watch and assess the other players.

  J. J. Barlow might not have been a poker professional, but he was a strong contender, patient and wat
chful, bluffing rarely and milking the good hands with the finesse of a friendly cobra. At the moment he had a pair of fives showing, four of hearts mating one of the fives for a possible flush, and he’d paid to see the next card, gazing moon-faced at the wall while the other active players made their decisions.

  Prescott might have moved the accounts away from his old friend’s bank, but no way on this earth would J. J. Barlow have allowed a thing like that to deprive him of the kind of information that is the lifeblood of small-town power and economics. The old-boy network among bankers is one of the most effective in the world. It is international and it is accurate. If Barlow was pleading ignorance now, it could only be for some good reason, and I found myself wondering what it might be.

  But he wasn’t the only question mark in the room.

  Idling to Barlow’s left (he had dropped out of the pot a few moments before I did) was another: T. Bowering Woodbury, M.D., F.A.C.S. Woodbury had performed the postmortem examination after a rescue crew removed Prescott’s body from the wreckage of his helicopter. The doctor had come up with a finding of death due to massive cranial insult, adding (doubtless for the benefit of the widow) that Prescott had not been alive to suffer in the subsequent fire.

  He had also—pointedly—included the information that the retired wide receiver’s body contained no evidence of recent narcotics use: no cocaine, no amphetamines, no heroin, no marijuana, not even traces of alcohol. Jake and Helen had found it disturbing, perhaps even insulting, that the doctor had thought it necessary to mention such notions in his report.

  I couldn’t see it that way. In specifically ruling out drugs and alcohol, the doctor had effectively squelched the kind of leering speculation that has become inevitable in the violent death of anyone whose background includes professional sports. Or Vietnam. It was a thoughtful and intelligent move, totally at odds with the dim but affable face he showed to the world—a carefully dissembled persona that nonetheless had emerged in plenty of time to keep him from chasing an inside straight into the low-pair trap I’d set for him a few hands back. I wondered who else at the table could see the same man I did.