The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  “Understood,” I said.

  “Okay. Well—I made me some calls here and there, and what I found out was more or less what I expected: The Citizens National Bank of Farewell made pretty much the same kind of mistakes everyone else did a few years back when Third World loans looked like a shortcut to fame and fortune. Especially fortune.”

  “And got burned?”

  “What else? A man loans money at twenty percent or more—and keep in mind they could throw your ass in prison for charging that kind of interest a few years back—he has got to understand that there is a hell of a risk involved.”

  “So why did they do it?”

  “Greed, my friend. Simple human greed…and I am by God entitled to say the word right out like that because I paid for the privilege. Took my lumps the same way, and for the same reason, as all the rest of the damn fools.”

  “So Barlow’s bank is in trouble?”

  “Not necessarily. Not at all, in fact, far as anyone I talked to seemed to know.”

  Most of the nation’s smaller banks, he said, had jumped at the opportunity to stake out a piece of the international loan business when the field opened up suddenly in the late sixties and early seventies. Until then, giants like Citicorp and BankAmerica had dominated. But changed conditions—and new laws that made it easier for regional banks to syndicate their efforts—meant that just about everyone was invited to the party.

  “But not all of the country cousins knew how to dress,” Dee Tee continued. “Iron underwear is a must in that kind of company. Come about the time the price of oil started going up like there was no tomorrow, it was Katy-bar-the-gate. Energy loans were the coming thing, and a lot of the money got loaned to a bunch of little hill-Hitlers who hadn’t been wearing shoes five years earlier.”

  “And then they stopped the music.”

  “They sure’n hell did, and you never heard such a wailing and gnashing of teeth in all your born days. All the members of OPEC that had been so buddy-buddy in the beginning had got just as greedy as the bankers, and every one of them was pumping twice as much oil as their quotas called for, and the price went into the dumper. A few of the bigger thieves in Africa and South America had already defaulted, of course. They sort of led the way. But now just about every single one of those twenty and twenty-five percent loans stopped paying off. And you could hardly hear yourself think for the sound of banks collapsing.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “But the way I heard it, a few people were able to salvage a crumb or two from the debris.”

  Dee Tee snorted.

  “You been reading my mail again,” he said. “Okay, sure. Hell, I was one of the lucky ones. Got burned bad enough early enough that I could find a good strong safety net and survive more or less in one piece. Then turned it around and got even by picking up a few goodies later, when everyone was screaming how it was the end of the world.”

  “And Barlow…?”

  “Did pretty good, too, far as anyone seems to know. Citizens’ loan portfolio got some rough handling early on—couple of big ones stopped performing—but they wrote the paper off, and the stockholders hung tough, and Barlow was still in the saddle ready to play Lone Ranger when one of the other banks in his town was declared insolvent.”

  “I didn’t hear about that.”

  “No good reason you should, probably. It would be old news by now. But there would have been quite a bit of fur and feathers flying at the time. The federal boys always talk a good game about maintaining competition and all that, but when they got a busted bank on their hands, it’s ‘Who’s got the bailout money?’ and the hell with anything else.”

  “Someone else tried to buy the insolvent bank?”

  “Oh, sure. One outfit over there in Albuquerque and even a pretty big one in California…before it got into trouble of its own. But J. J. Barlow beat them all out and wound up skimming that cream away and leaving the feds stuck with the garbage.”

  “So he’d have been on solid ground by the time he did that?”

  For the first time, there was an instant of hesitation on the Houston end of the line. “Well, now,” Dee Tee said in a careful tone, “I don’t exactly know as I’d say that. At least, not for certain sure.”

  “Damn it, Dee Tee, don’t go all cagey on me.”

  “I’m not, Preacher. Really. But just talking about it here, I all of a sudden began to get kind of an interesting idea, you know…”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, hell, I just began to wonder how cozy things could get in a little place like Farewell. You know, one hand washes the other and all that cliché crap?”

  I had a sudden vivid flash-memory of the faces around the poker table. Controlled, game-playing faces. But comfortable with one another in a way that comes only with a lifetime of practice at close quarters.

  “It would be that important?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. Thing is, I guess, nobody ever thought about J. J. Barlow that way, you know? Always real solid. Two, three cuts above what anybody’d expect for the head of a bank in a little bitty town like that. But it might could happen…”

  “Keep going.”

  “Couple of bank officers—say, the president and the treasurer or chief financial officer—could cover their tracks pretty good for a long, long time if they needed to, and if they had some good reason to trust each other.”

  “You think that happened here?”

  “Frankly, no. I don’t, just because it’s J. J. Barlow. When he took over that bank, backalong, it was in terrible shape, and it was him built it up piece by piece when the easy thing for him and for the shareholders would’ve been to sell it to the best bidder they could find as soon as it was on its feet and healthy. Barlow might not have any legs, but that wouldn’t have had to hold him in a little place like Farewell. Man with his brains and energy, he could make it in the big time as good as anyone and better than most. So when we get to talking about how easy it would be for a friendly pair of thieves to play some fancy numbers games with a little bank like that one, I just have trouble fitting him into the picture, you see what I mean?”

  “No incentive, then? No reason for him to do a thing like that, no matter how easy it would be?”

  Again the hesitation.

  “That’s the hell of it,” he said finally. “There could be. And it would fit pretty good, too.”

  I waited for him to explain.

  “I can’t see J. J. Barlow cooking the books to grab the money and make a run for Brazil or someplace, no,” he said. “But there’s another way it could be. Suppose he got hurt worse than anyone thought in the energy loan bust-up. Bad enough, say, that the bank itself would be on the line. That would be hard on him, of course, but not the end of the world, because he’s not the type to hide all his gold bricks in one hollow tree. He’d be sure to survive. Make book on it. But a lot of his friends might not, and the town where he’s lived all his life and where he’s still a big local hero, it might find itself in bad shape, too.”

  He paused for breath.

  “Keep talking,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, a certain kind of a man, now, he might find it sort of tough to face up to such a thing as that.”

  “He might,” I agreed.

  “And if that happened, the natural thing would be to hide it for a while, maybe with the help of that friendly bank officer we talked about. Or, hell, for all I know, with the help of the whole damn board of directors.”

  “But it would have to come out sooner or later, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. As soon as he was sure the whole screwup was hid well enough to throw the feds off for a while, the next thing would be to scout around and find something juicy. A really big financial score that could also be handled on the quiet, far enough out of sight that the money could find its way back onto the books in some way that would look real legitimate—make the bum paper seem to pay off, and take the bank off the hook.”

  “No offense, but it sounds
to me like the banking business isn’t too different from the one I’m in. Only chancier, maybe.”

  Dee Tee’s laughter shook the electronic firmament between Houston and Farewell. “Hell, son,” he roared, “sometimes I think the whole thing’s just nothing in the world but a damn back-alley crapshoot! All the same, if J. J. Barlow did do something like that—and mind you, now, I’m for sure not saying he did or even hinting at it—you’d still have to put him way over on the side of the angels.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, like I said, the easy thing would be to either grab the money and run, or let the bank collapse and pick up what pieces you could for your own scrapbook. Sticking around to try to plug the leaks and make the damn thing seaworthy again would be strictly a labor of love. Hard-nose charity, not the flabby, whiney kind. Some sumbitch doing his dead-level damnedest for people who trust him.”

  “So, either way, he’s still wearing the white hat?”

  “Well…kind of a pretty pearl gray, anyway. That’s if he did any of it at all, which is something I am going to make it my business to check out thirty ways to Sunday as soon as I get done talking to you.”

  “Thanks, Dee Tee. I owe you one.”

  He laughed again. “Damn well told you do! And don’t you think ol’ Dee Tee ain’t gonna hand you the bill one of these days. When you coming to Houston?”

  “Next time you round up some rich folks for me to play cards with.”

  “I’ll see to it directly. Y’all take care, now, hear?”

  The line went dead, and I hung up.

  Fatigue descended like a waiting assassin.

  Sack time!

  The urge was powerful and insistent. No more nonsense…

  But now and then you find a day that is just naturally longer than you mean it to be, and this was beginning to look like one of those times. Instead of lying still and making another call as I’d intended, I swung my feet over the side of the bed and levered myself, bones protesting every inch of the way, into a sitting position. The difference between thinking and sleeping for me can sometimes be a simple matter of posture, and the bed was just too soft.

  The hell with it.

  I decided to find out whether the new red rental car would move under its own power.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  What, then, is the purpose?

  Can it be comfort?

  Pleasure?

  Warmth? Security? Love?

  All these have their place, of course; they are, or can be, the grace notes to life…

  FIFTEEN

  Jake Spence was in his office at the church, but when I asked about Helen, he told me she was hiding.

  “Can’t say I blame her,” I said.

  He was always an easy blusher. “Maybe I ought to be hiding, too,” he said. “I noticed Dana Lansing’s resemblance to Sara, and didn’t warn you either.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said.

  He busied himself with the coffee cups and contrived to be looking out the window at something or other when he handed mine to me before taking his usual seat behind the desk.

  “I heard you met our newest deputy sheriff,” he said, still not meeting my eye.

  “Don’t change the subject. Just what did Helen—and you—hope to gain by giving me a heart attack?”

  He squirmed.

  “We didn’t think it would be like that,” he said. “Helen was going to introduce her to you over at the Prescott house.”

  “So I could collapse among friends? What is this, Jake? You were never like that before.”

  He looked at me with the punished-pup expression that must have been pure larceny on the bank accounts of his parishioners, and shook his head.

  “Sure I was,” he said. “You just never noticed. And so was Helen. We both loved you and we still do. And seeing this girl—”

  “She is a grown-up woman. And I’m a year or two past puberty, too.”

  “Seeing her and talking to her and liking her, it just seemed to us—both of us, not just Helen—that we might be doing the two of you a favor. If we were wrong, I’m sorry and I’m sure Helen is, too, but we didn’t plan for it to be a shock. Who would have expected Dana to break into your motel room?”

  “She didn’t break in. The locks are cheap and the same key fits them all.”

  “In any case, we didn’t plan to hit you in the face with it. That was an accident. And I apologize. I’m sorry about the deception, too.”

  “But not as much?”

  “But not as much…”

  Conversation languished for a moment while we both consulted the muse of caffeine. Say this for Jake’s coffee, it had authority. The drowsiness and fatigue that had been riding the borderland, awaiting an unguarded moment, retreated to the horizon and stayed there.

  “Okay, then,” I said, dropping the subject but retaining my hold on the coffee cup, “the message you left at the motel said you had something to show me. Is it here, or do we have to go somewhere to see it?”

  Jake swiveled to the table behind him and unlocked a drawer in its apron.

  “This,” he said, “was among Pres Prescott’s business files. The accountant Marilyn hired found it, going through them to try and make sense of the estate.”

  He handed me a sheaf of papers. The top item was a business letter from a bank in Tucumcari, and a quick scanning identified it as a favorable response to a proposal for refinancing of the Prescott helicopter business.

  “You’ll notice,” Jake said as I flipped to the next item, a similar response from a bank in Amarillo, “that the top letter is dated just three days before Pres was killed. The other is only a little earlier. Two answers within the same month, and both of them favorable.”

  I put the papers down on his desk.

  “So,” I said, “if Prescott committed suicide—don’t look like that, dammit; we still have to consider the possibility, though I’ll admit it’s getting pretty thin—we’d pretty much have to rule out despondency over his business prospects.”

  Jake still wasn’t happy. “What other reason could he have had?” he said. “If it wasn’t the business…”

  “The marriage?”

  “Nonsense!”

  I shut up and looked at him.

  “Well, at least I’ll never believe it,” he said after a few moments of fidgeting. “Pres just wasn’t made that way.”

  “Two days ago,” I said, “you were telling me there had been trouble with the marriage ever since Prescott had his little scene with J. J. Barlow at the country club.”

  “Trouble, yes…”

  “But not as bad as all that?”

  “Lord, no!”

  “How bad, then?”

  “Well…”

  “And how do you know? Did you live in the house with them?”

  Jake started to answer, but stopped himself instead and sat looking at his hands, a time-killing mannerism I remembered from Sewanee. He is the only man I ever knew who could out-stubborn a cat. I waited him out in silence.

  “A lot of things could have happened that I wouldn’t necessarily have known about,” he said, picking his words carefully when he finally decided to talk. “But if I didn’t live with them, I certainly did know both of the Prescotts over a period of years, and the marriage was a good one.”

  I started to break in, but he held up a restraining hand.

  “You didn’t spend much time in parish work,” he said. “The army got you too soon. But you had a few months of internship and worked at that Michigan mission with Sara for a week or so just before you were shipped out, so don’t tell me you didn’t learn to sniff the air when you went into someone’s home—sniff and taste. Good marriages have a scent all their own; bad ones, too.”

  “Things can change…”

  “The basics don’t. Not, anyway, without a lot of effort on both sides, and the trouble here was pretty much one-sided. Marilyn kept trying. I watched her do it. She kept hoping right up to the end th
at the tide would turn or that at least Pres would tell her what was wrong.”

  He stopped again, visibly relaxing and shifting gears.

  “Never mind,” he said, taking another swallow of the industrial-strength coffee and putting the cup down. “I can show you a lot more easily than I can tell you. Helen’s over at the Prescott house, and we’re invited for lunch…if you promise not to kill her out of hand.”

  “I’ll think it over.”

  “You do that. But don’t take too much time. We’re overdue already, and I want everyone on speaking terms before nightfall…”

  The Prescott house was a surprise. I had expected something imposing in the way of Small-Town Affluent, but wheeling my little red roller skate up the driveway in the wake of Jake’s wagon, I found myself making some drastic image revisions.

  Either the house had been there a lot longer than any of its neighbors, or the builder and architect had gone to a lot of effort and expense to make it look that way.

  Closer inspection told me I was half right. The broad handmade tile expanse of the roof and foot-thick adobe walls were nicely imitated in a complex of rooms that had been added at the rear, but there were subtle differences that marked them as contemporary in contrast to the assertive authenticity of the section closer to the street. No particular knowledge of southwestern architectural history was required to date the older part of the house into the latter half of the last century, though every brick and tile bore the imprint of loving care.

  “It was the original house on this land,” Jake said, noticing my interest as we walked toward the front door. “Working ranch house for half a century or more, but the people who lived here knew the worth of an honest building and took care of it—especially the adobe, which can be a bit of a problem when it rains.”

  I nodded appreciatively, noticing the slight imbalance in the walls of the older building.

  “Someone’s still at it,” I said.

  “Pres Prescott.” Jake nodded. “He and Marilyn bought this house when it was about to be torn down. Supervised renovation and expansion themselves. Afterward, it was Pres himself who patted and shoveled the softened adobe back into place after every big storm.”