I exited the store and motioned for Julie to get out of the car.
Even with the risk associated with her clothes, I didn’t want to be alone. The short, balding man came outside and joined me. He was very thin, and I noticed that his feet did, in fact, look narrow. He was wearing black shoes with the laces missing in the left one.
“Are you the lawyer?” he asked.
“Law student. I’m Tami Taylor.”
I gestured again at Julie, who remained in the car.
“Roddy has a place in back where we can talk in private,” Miller said.
“No. Let’s go outside.”
Walking around to the side of the building, I could hear Miller’s footsteps as he followed me.
“How tall are you?” Miller asked.
“I played basketball in high school.”
“And I bet you were pretty good at it.”
The car’s trunk was covered with dead leaves from the previous winter.
“Do you think it’s okay if I put my briefcase on it?” I asked Miller.
“I’d be more worried about getting your pretty satchel dirty. A guy traded that car to Roddy for four cases of beer and three hundred dollars just before Christmas. It didn’t run past New Year’s Day.”
I glanced over my shoulder. The other two men were sitting on the front steps of the store. The one wearing the uniform shirt was smoking a cigarette. Julie stayed in the car. Opening the briefcase, I took out the list of questions I’d attached to a clipboard and efficiently clicked my pen.
“Please state your full name.”
Miller looked at me. “I don’t have a driver’s license. I lost it in the river several years back and never bothered to get another one. It didn’t make much sense to get another one, seeing I don’t have a car to drive.”
“Okay. Your name, please.”
“Sonny Miller.”
I didn’t move my pen. “Your legal name.”
Miller glanced at the other men on the steps of the store and lowered his voice. “None of those guys know my name is Bernard.”
“And I won’t tell them. Do you have a middle name?”
“Yeah, Gregory.”
I wrote down “Bernard Gregory Miller.”
“Age?”
“Fifty-seven.”
“Date of birth?”
“Are you going to send me a birthday card?”
“No, sir, but I want to have accurate information.”
Miller shifted on his feet. “Look, you’re a pretty girl, and I want to be nice to you, but I got better things to do than stand around and answer a bunch of stupid questions. Aren’t you hot out here?”
The tree above the car offered a little shade, but it was a muggy day. Julie had started the car’s engine and was running the air conditioner.
“If you want to ask me anything else, we’re going to have to go inside,” Miller continued. “We can stand in front of the beer cooler if you want to.”
The little man walked toward the store. I returned to the car. Julie lowered the window a few inches. I leaned over and spoke in an intense whisper.
“Are you going to stay in the car?”
“Yes, with the doors locked. Get in, and we’ll say we couldn’t convince Miller to talk to us.”
“I haven’t really tried. He wants to go inside the store where it’s air-conditioned.”
Julie shook her head. “It’s air-conditioned in here, but I don’t want him that close to me. He might hijack the car. Let’s get out of here.”
The two men were still sitting on the steps. Miller wasn’t in sight.
I straightened my shoulders.
“I’m going to give it one more shot. Promise you’ll wait for me.”
“Of course. Do you think I’d drive off and leave you stuck here?”
“No, but you look scared.”
“And you’re being naive.”
“Give me about fifteen minutes.”
Julie rolled up the window.
“I know Sister Dabney real well,” the man wearing the uniform shirt said when I reached the steps. The name Earl was stitched on the shirt. “I’d be happy to talk to you for nothing.”
I stopped.
“What’s your last name?”
“Steele.”
I wrote “Earl Steele” on the corner of my paper.
“Earl, if you can hang around, I’ll be out in a few minutes after I finish with Sonny.”
“My name’s not Earl. It’s Rusty Steele.”
“Why does it say Earl on your shirt?”
The man looked down as if discovering the name for the first time.
“I got this at the thrift store.”
I went inside. Miller was standing in front of a cooler filled with beer. The same man was behind the cash register. The door opened behind me, and a black woman about my age and height came inside.
“Now, she was a good basketball player,” Miller said, pointing to the woman.
The young woman picked up a loaf of bread and several cans of food and took them to the cash register.
“Marie, how many points did you score your senior year?” Miller asked.
The young woman turned around, her expression flat.
“About twenty points a game, but that doesn’t buy me a loaf of bread today.”
“How many points did you average?” Miller asked me.
“Not that many.”
The woman eyed me suspiciously.
“This is a student lawyer who’s asking me questions about Sister Dabney,” Miller volunteered.
The young woman didn’t speak as she left.
“Does she know Reverend Dabney?”
“Oh yeah. She and her little brother have hung around the church.”
“Will she tell her I’m asking questions about her?”
“It won’t make any difference.” Miller shrugged. “Sister ain’t afraid of nothing or nobody.”
I glanced again at my sheet. Questions carefully crafted in the quiet of the law firm library were unwieldy at Bacon’s Bargains. I skipped to page three.
“Do you go to Reverend Dabney’s church?”
“No way; that woman is too hard on sinners for me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Go to one of her meetings, and you’ll find out for yourself. She’ll yell her head off and point that fat finger of hers at you until you get down on your knees and start confessing your sins.”
“But she gives you shoes?”
“No, she makes me work for anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“If any man don’t work, then he don’t eat. She says that all the time.”
“What has she made you do?”
“Lots of stuff—clean up around her place, pull weeds by hand.
She even had me preaching on the street corner.”
“You’re a preacher?”
“No way,” the man scoffed. “But she took a bunch of us over to stand in front of that outfit that’s trying to steal her church.”
“Paulding Development Corporation?”
“Yeah.”
I quickly turned over to a fresh sheet.
“Tell me about that.”
Miller hesitated for a moment. “Is that why you wanted to talk to me? Do you work for that company?”
“Yes,” I answered, hoping a short answer would be enough.
Miller shrugged. “Then I guess it’s time you showed me that forty dollars you promised me.”
I took out the bills but kept them tightly in my grasp. He held out his hand.
“When we finish,” I said.
“Give me one as a down payment.”
I hesitated, then handed one of the twenties to him. He relaxed.
“Sister was tore up mad about the whole thing. She wrote a speech on these sheets of paper telling us what to say. I thought it would be easier to hand them out like advertisements for the county fair, but she said no.”
“What did
the sheets say?”
“It sounded a lot like her preaching. She said the man running that company was a big-time sinner and thief who would be hanging over hell on a rotten stick when judgment day came calling.”
“Do you have a copy of what she gave you?”
“No, Sister grabbed them up when we finished. She said the spoken word has the same power as the written word. I don’t know what that means, but it ain’t the first time I didn’t understand what she was talking about.”
“What did you do at Paulding Development Corporation?”
“Like I said, we stood on the sidewalk and hollered at anybody who would listen.” Miller leaned closer. “It was pretty funny. A bunch of drunks calling men in suits sinners and crooks. We stood out there for about an hour pretending to be preachers before Sister came by and picked us up.”
“Reverend Dabney wasn’t with you?”
“No, and you may as well call her Sister Dabney. Everybody else does. Anyway, she said we were like her twelve apostles sent out by God, except there were only five of us.”
“Who were the other five?”
Miller listed four names, including Rusty Steele.
“And the police didn’t do anything?”
“A patrol car came by after a few minutes and the cops watched what we were doing. They were laughing their heads off. Sister Dabney said we wouldn’t be breaking no law as long as we stayed on the sidewalk and didn’t get in a fistfight.”
“How do you know she wrote what was on the sheet of paper? Did you see her do it? Did she sign it?”
“It didn’t have nobody’s name on it, but it sounded just like her, and she gave it to me with her own hands.” Miller paused and leaned closer to me. His breath was stale. “Now, you answer me something. Why would a fancy law firm care about Sister Dabney?”
I backed away. “There could be lots of reasons. I’m just here to investigate.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Miller grunted. “Sister don’t have nothing worth taking. I’ve been inside her house plenty of times, and she don’t live much better than the rest of the folks in the neighbor-hood. I like her and hate her at the same time. She’s been on the bad side of angry since Pastor Dabney ran off with that younger woman and moved somewhere out west.”
I was rapidly taking notes.
“Her husband left her?”
“Yep, several years ago.”
“What was his name?”
“I only knew him as Pastor Dabney. He and Sister came to Savannah over ten years ago. They’d traveled all over the country, but Pastor got down in his back and couldn’t go anymore. In the beginning, lots of people went to the church to hear him. He was different from Sister. He could make a grown man cry.” Miller looked past me as if reliving one of those meetings. “I got saved at least once or twice a year when Pastor Dabney was here.”
“Sister Dabney isn’t as good a preacher?”
“Nah, there’s an edge to the way she talks that’s worse than finger-nails on a chalkboard when she really gets to squawking.”
“What else can you tell me about her?”
“She thinks a woman using makeup is a big sin and always goes out wearing a baggy-looking dress. There’s no telling what she weighs.
I don’t know what made Pastor marry her in the first place. She sure ain’t much to look at. I didn’t go to her birthday party a few weeks ago ’cause you can’t be around her if you’ve been drinking. She can see it on you before she gets near enough to smell your breath. It’s pretty spooky.”
I’d already smelled Miller’s breath and didn’t want another whiff whether he’d been drinking or not. And I could fill in the gaps the little man left out without meeting Sister Dabney. After a lifetime of sacrifice and zeal for ministry, she’d lost any good looks she had when she was younger. Her husband found a newer-model woman and drove off into the sunset. Left alone, Sister Dabney allowed bitterness to poison her spirit. It wasn’t an excuse for her conduct toward Mr.
Paulding but made it somewhat understandable. Now she was trying to hold on to the church, the only thing that remained of a past that had once been fruitful in the ministry of God.
“Yes,” I said. “I can understand why you believe suing Sister Dabney might not be worth it.”
I gave Miller the other twenty dollars and left the store so I wouldn’t see him buying liquor with money that had recently touched my fingers. Outside, neither Steele nor the overweight man who smoked was in sight.
And Julie’s car was gone.
16
I LOOKED AROUND IN PANIC. I RAN ACROSS THE PARKING AREA TO the street, frantically reminding myself that it was the middle of the afternoon, and I should be safe anywhere in Savannah. I wiped sweat from my forehead.
When I reached the street, I saw a car that looked like Julie’s turn out of a side street. It came toward me, but in the sun’s glare, I couldn’t see the driver’s face. A second wave of fear washed over me. Julie could have been abducted and now, someone else was behind the wheel.
The car slowed as it approached me. As the glare dissipated, I recognized Julie. She cracked open the window.
“Get in,” she said, raising the window before I could ask where she’d been.
I went around to the passenger side. The door was still locked, and I had to bang on the window before she unlocked it.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” I demanded, wiping my face with a tissue.
“After you didn’t come out of the store, those other two guys came over to the car and wanted me to get out and talk to them. When one of them picked up a big rock, I took off. I’ve been circling the block every couple of minutes. What were you doing in there?”
“My job,” I snapped. “What if Steele and the other man had been waiting for me with a big rock?”
“At least you know his name. All I saw were the dirty fingers of the fat one when he beat on my window, and the yellow teeth of the one named Earl as he leered at me.”
“His real name is Rusty. He knows Sister Dabney and was sup-posed to wait for me to interview him after I finished with Miller. You probably made him mad, and he left.”
“Good, and it’s time we left before they come back.”
Julie drove down the street. I seriously doubted her version of events was the truth. We reached Gillespie Street.
“Stop! Turn here!” I yelled.
Julie slammed on the brakes so hard that I jerked forward against the seat belt.
“What? Did I almost hit something?” she called out, moving her head from side to side.
“No, but the church is somewhere on that street. I’d like to see it before we go back to the office.”
“It would be nice if you could give me a little bit of warning before yelling at me,” Julie shot back, turning the steering wheel.
“And it would have been nice if you hadn’t abandoned me back there,” I answered. “How would you have felt if I’d driven off and left you alone?”
“I wouldn’t have hung around in the first place. I told you to leave, but you had to act all self-righteous and go ahead.”
“What does being self-righteous have to do with interviewing a witness?”
“It has something to do with everything you’re involved in.”
We rode in silence for three blocks. If my head had been a pot of water, steam would have been escaping from my ears. I turned the air-conditioning vent so it blew directly on my face. We crossed a major street, and the area changed. New construction was every-where. We’d stumbled into the middle of urban renewal.
“There it is,” Julie said, pointing to the left-hand side of the road.
In the middle of a large vacant tract was a long, white, single-story building with a crooked wooden cross in front and a hand-painted sign that read “Southside Church—R. Dabney, Overseer.” The church was larger than I’d imagined. Then I remembered Sonny Miller’s words that the ministry had prospered when Sister Dabney’s husband was on the scene. Nex
t to the church was a small brick house with low shrubs in front. The paint on the wooden eaves was peeling. Apparently no one had been forced to paint in return for food or shoes.
Whatever buildings had been on the surrounding property were gone, leaving a few concrete slabs and several small piles of loose bricks. The church and house formed an island in the midst of property awaiting its future. Julie pulled into an auto parts store across the street.
“She could sell and move a couple of blocks to be nearer the people she’s serving,” I said.
“What?” Julie asked.
“Sister Dabney could relocate. I don’t know what Paulding offered to buy her out, but it wouldn’t take much money to build a smaller, more modern church that’s better designed for the outreach she’s doing. The congregation has dwindled since her husband ran off with another woman. Sister Dabney is more interested in providing help to homeless and poor people than running a dying church.”
“How do you know all this?”
“You can learn a lot if you get out of the air-conditioned car and start asking people questions,” I said, turning sideways. “Did one of those guys really pick up a rock and threaten you?”
“Let me see your notes.”
I opened my briefcase and handed her my legal pad.
“What happened to your checklist?” she asked.
“You would have run out of gas circling the block if I’d used it.”
I waited while Julie read. Her eyes opened wider.
“She used five homeless men as street preachers to stand on the corner near Paulding’s office and condemn him as a thief and sinner deserving of hell?”
“That’s the way I understand it.”
“That’s more bizarre than the facts on a law school exam.”
“Real people don’t always stay within the boundaries of a law professor’s imagination.”
Julie returned the notes to me. “Well, this backs up what the for-mer church member told you, only worse because Dabney took her hate outside the walls of the church. These drunks were her agents, and their actions clearly satisfy the requirements for slander—a false, malicious accusation of criminal conduct broadcast to the public at large with an intent to harm an identifiable person or persons.”
“How do you know it was false?”
Higher Hope Page 18
