Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  Then a long shot of the church steps and two men standing midway up them, one holding a microphone—Kyle, undoubtedly—and the other either a thin bullfighter in his suit of golden lights, or Festus Lemming. As the camera slowly zoomed in and the two figures grew steadily larger on the television screen, Johnny-on-the-Spot’s voice, serious and solemn, declared, “Pastor Lemming has retracted—repeat, retracted, and in its entirety—his initial statement that he had reason to believe his would-be assassin was Shell Scott and that Mr. Scott was acting merely as a hired gunman—agent, in the Pastor’s words—for Emmanuel Bruno, well-known creator of the highly controversial nostrum, Erovite.”

  “Nostrum!”

  That wasn’t on television. That was Doctor Bruno, here in Dru’s living room. Who, I thought, cared what the gabby announcer called Erovite? It was a bit more important what he—and Lemming—called me and Bruno. Of course, the allegation had been retracted.

  Except for the one barked word, that was all from Doc. He was leaning forward, eyes on the television set, elbow on knee, thumb and finger gripping his chin.

  “Mr. Scott,” the apology continued, “no stranger to violence, is a local private investigator whose exploits have previously received national attention. Not only the police but some private citizens have expressed their confidence in Mr. Scott’s integrity and reliability. Pastor Lemming’s charge was made immediately after the attempted murder, when he was shaken and upset by his nearly fatal meeting with death. And here, live from Weilton, California, is Festus Lemming, Sainted Most-Holy Pastor of the Church of the Second Coming.”

  The camera lens had zoomed about as far as it could zoom, and now was in tight on Lemming’s nickel-thin face, narrow shoulders, and enough of his golden chest to show the top ruby-cross button on his coat of chain mail. “Fellow children,” he sighed, like a small whirlwind, keeping the volume down, “fellow children of Almighty God, I deeply appreciate this opportunity afforded me by the blessed ABS Network to retract and refute my former words, made when I was shaken and upset by my nearly fatal meeting with death, here, before the doors of my Church of the Second Coming, open wide in welcome, in Weilton, California.”

  He stretched to his full five feet, three or four inches, lifted his head a little. “I regret, regret deeply my initial unthinking allegation that it was Sheldon Scott, acting as agent for Emmanuel Bruno, who attempted to kill me. Yes! I regret it. I do not know the identity of the man or men involved in the murder attempt. I repeat, I do not know, I do not know. In partial expiation for my sinful thoughtlessness I can only confess that, less than an hour prior to the assassination attempt, Mr. Sheldon Scott departed from this house of God—” he waved one arm in an all-embracing gesture which seemed to include the church behind him, Southern California, Earth and Heaven—“after here interrupting holy services, shocking and disturbing the entire congregation of five thousand.…”

  Already up a thousand from four, I thought, not really caring much.

  “… or six thousand souls. And after having threatened me. Yes! After having threatened me with … bodily harm. This was in my mind, this was my thought, when the death bullets screamed past my head … this and the fact that Mr. Sheldon Scott had so recently made the threat. It was a human error, and I regret it. I have no evidence, no proof, of that allegation and I here publicly retract and deny it in its entirety! I repeat, it was only because of my recent dialogue with Mr. Sheldon Scott, and his threats at that time, that I made my thoughtless allegation, my reprehensible human error, and because of other …”

  Other what?

  He didn’t say. He just left it dangling there.

  I thought that was clever of him. It did not endear Festus to me, but I thought it was clever. What else besides my dangerous presence and threats had impelled him to make the reprehensible charge? Surely a something other, and surely something specific, even if delicacy prevented it or It from passing his lips. And so soon after the repetition of “human error … human” … could it possibly have been something in or unhuman? A little bird? A big bird? Something even bigger?

  Festus did not say. He let his listeners guess.

  “Well, he’s cooked my bird,” I said aloud. “My goose, that is.”

  No one else spoke. Not here, in the room.

  Festus spoke. There, under the stars.

  After a long pause, after that significant and titillating “other …” he said solemnly, “I am sorry. I deeply regret my too-precipitate speech. I am sorry.” And while the “ry” of “sorry” still brushed his lips he turned his head to stare keenly to his left. Where, to nobody’s surprise, least of all mine, Johnny Kyle was waiting, a question on his lips.

  As the camera pulled back and there was room for both men on the screen, Kyle queried, “Pastor Lemming, you say Mr. Shell Scott threatened you? Threatened you with bodily harm? That is a serious charge—”

  “Yes! And that charge, sir, I do not retract, that charge I will not retract.” Not a sighing any longer, beginning to boom and thunder now, voice rising as Festus turned and let his burning eyes blister all the fellow children watching. “He came into my church during my sermon, while I spoke, he confronted me during the Chorale—away, away from the eyes of my flock … and there said he was acting as agent for Emmanuel Bruno … name and face and force of evil! He said if I did not cease my work against Emmanuel Bruno, and against unholy Erovite, he would …”

  “Yes, Pastor?”

  “I hesitate—he did not say he would kill me. No, he did not.” The shoestring lips curved in a teeny-weeny smile, with the warmth of the last little coal from yesterday’s fire expiring on the hearth. “Those who know Mr. Sheldon Scott need not be informed that he speaks in strange ways. His words are strange, and his ways … If I recall his words to me, precisely, he said he would break my arms and legs and neck—Yes! And neck!—in at least one, if not several, places.”

  Johnny Kyle couldn’t speak. Well, maybe he could. He didn’t.

  Finally Festus confessed, “I came close, then, to feeling … fear. He—Mr. Sheldon Scott—is a huge man, a towering beast, very muscular, almost obscenely broad and bulgy.”

  The camera drew back just a little, and because the camera cannot lie it could not help revealing how little, how frail, how weak and puny Festus Lemming was alongside five-feet-eleven and one-hundred-and-seventy-pound Johnny Kyle. He looked like Kyle’s arm. Which naturally meant he would look, alongside the huge towering bulgy beast …

  “Yes! I would have felt fear in the presence of that violent man had I not known I would be protected by the seven thousand members of my congregation … and by …”

  “Did it again,” I said.

  “I understand, Pastor Lemming, that one of the bullets which missed you injured a member of your congregation.”

  “Yes. Fortunately the wound was slight, very slight—the shock to her was greater than the wound. There was … hardly any blood.”

  “You’ve got to hand it to this guy,” I said aloud. “Of course, you don’t save three million souls in only seven years unless you know what you’re doing. I think I underestimated—”

  I stopped as I heard Festus say, “Miss Winsome.”

  “Miss Winsome,” he said, “tarried after most of the other worshippers had left, remained behind in order to discuss some of her duties with me. She is one of the most diligent and devout, one of the finest and most spiritual members of the Church of the Second Coming. I know I am not supposed to have any favorites, but.… We were standing outside the church entrance when the shots rang out and hissed past my head. One of them wounded her. It was a slight wound, very slight, high on her left side. But that bullet, aimed at me to kill, could have struck her young heart! Could have killed her! Could have torn through the tender flesh, pierced the innocent brea—”

  “Yes, ah, yes, Pastor, ah … she is all right, though, is she not?”

  I was thinking, at least one of those slugs did not quite hiss or scream past your head,
Pastor, not if it nicked Miss Winsome high on her side.

  “Yes, she is,” said Festus, “thank God.”

  On that lofty note, the interview with Festus Lemming was concluded.

  There was about half an inch of bourbon and water left in my glass. I polished the drink off and said, “Well, I guess the old boy has also fixed me up just great with Regina.”

  Dru finally turned to look at me. “Who?”

  “Regina Winsome—the gal Lemming was just talking about.”

  “You know her?”

  “I met her tonight at the church. When I beat up on Lemming.” I paused. “Well, at least now I know that freak is a fraud and a liar. Didn’t know it before, not for sure. Which makes him, perhaps, even more dangerous.”

  Bruno straightened up. “He is the most dangerous man in America,” he said, as though without fear of contradiction.

  “The champion goose-cooker, at least. Mine, of course, is totally charred, on the outside and inside, but yours is about done, too, Doc.”

  “He is attempting to get at me through you.”

  “Besides which, the Pastor and I aren’t very close. What’s this?”

  More action on the televison screen. Nothing of unusual importance, just quick interviews with three members of the flock.

  “Yes, I seen him, standin’ there yellin’ his fool head off, like as if something … I won’t say what … entered into him. He shouted and bellered like as if to bring the walls down with his yellin’.”

  That was a man. The next one was also, very likely, a man. “I didn’t know he was Shell Scott, then. But I saw all that yellow moving up and down the aisle, up and down—uh-huh, he had yellow clothes on. Yellow clothes. Stood there and howled. Like a wolf. WooOOOoo. Like that, you know?”

  Then a woman for sure. Probably an actress, because I was almost certain I’d seen her on an old late-night movie, something about “The Undead Return,” if memory serves me, in which she’d played the title role. “Me and my bluvd husband we was settin’ real close to him. This Scott, the one they say is a detective. He swore, took the Lord’s name in vain, right there in the Lord’s house, cursed, went back and forth and stamped up and down, cursin’ and swearin’ like he was a wild man, and he yelled out with a great noise something I can’t reclect except it was loud and I didn’t like it.”

  From that point to the end of the newscast there wasn’t anything else of importance, but we watched and listened to reports of an explosion on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a bloody riot at Vassar, and a severe earthquake during a hurricane in Florida, then Dru switched the set off.

  Bruno got slowly to his feet as Dru came back to the divan and sat down, then, looking at us, started ticking his points off. “First, Festus Lemming is, as you say, Sheldon, a liar. But he is not a fraud. He is sincere. He believes, believes not only his message but that whatever he does in preparation for the Second Coming, if it in any way furthers the imminence of that desired goal, is justified. Not merely justified but is his holy, his sacred duty. I know the man, have studied him, observed him; he is sincere. He is thus—contrary to your conclusion, Sheldon—all the more dangerous. The sincere fanatic, convinced of his righteousness, has always been more dangerous, bloodthirsty, cruel, more horrible, and horrifying than the conscious fraud. To him who is sincere, nothing is too monstrous and nothing is forbidden if it saves souls from hell or the world from sin. On the contrary, no matter how hellish the act, it is virtuous because it is pursued in the name of heaven by a righteous man.”

  “I apologize for my too-precipitate human error.”

  “Yes, that was rather well done, wasn’t it? If God is on Lemming’s side—even if Festus, exercising admirable restraint, won’t come right out and admit it—who can be against him? And I dare say that is precisely what he believes. Surely, Sheldon, you have known other men who could steadfastly believe the unbelievable? And make others believe it—or him—as well?”

  “Hasn’t everybody?”

  Bruno began pacing while he talked. “We are in a most unusual and interesting predicament. Consider: Every ding-dong anywhere loose now knows that an agent controlled by the Antichrist attempted to kill the agent of the Lord, who was saved only because the forces of good are stronger than the forces of evil, after which both the mindless puppet and his master escaped on a red scooter—it would have to be red, wouldn’t it? The ding-dongs are few in number, but we ignore them at our peril. Our greatest peril, however, probably comes from the others, those millions who now know that someone tried to kill Festus Lemming, that someone fled the scene, and that in the preceding hour Mr. Sheldon Scott had threatened to inflict upon the Pastor such huge injuries as to a lesser man than Festus would prove fatal.”

  “You make it sound worse than it is.”

  “It is worse than it is. If that comment puzzles you, Sheldon, I ask you not to doubt but to have faith. Out there—” he pointed at nowhere in particular—“sits a tuna salesman who has just experienced the Midnight News. Who, he is wondering, could that murderous someone be? He has heard the name Sheldon Scott an even dozen times, I would say. And the name Emmanuel Bruno four times. And directly, or by implication, the name of Almighty God six or seven times. Our tuna salesman wisely eliminates Almighty God. Who, then, is left?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “I’m only a mindless puppet.”

  “Our salesman will puzzle it out soon enough. And his suspicions, now uncertain, will be strengthened when he learns that André Strang, Sainted Less-Holy Pastor of the Church of the Second Coming, associate of Festus Lemming, has been murdered. And more, murdered most foully and by a strange and diabolical means. More, slain on the very night when the Sainted Most-Holy Pastor himself was well-nigh assassinated. More, near the body of André Strang lies a dead stranger. More, in the dead stranger’s corpse are three bullets from the gun of someone. Who? We know who, you and I—”

  “Stop. That’s enough more. I’d thought of that—or, rather, I had thought of part of it.” I paused. “You’re right. Faith wins. It is worse than it is. One ray of light, though, the three pills were hollow-points, which break up in the body.… But I am the man who reported the two dead guys to the Captain of Homicide, right? So Sam won’t need a ballistics comparison to guess I was familiar with the scene, right? And I had better call my pal, Samson. O.K. if I use your phone?” I looked at Dru and she nodded, indicated the Princess phone on a table across the room.

  But before I got up she said, “There’s another thing, Shell. By now Dad’s car must have been noticed in the parking lot at the church. To some, that’s going to look at least suspicious. And for the Lemmings, that will settle it.”

  “Ye gods, yes,” Bruno boomed. “I hadn’t thought of that aspect. Indeed, for many this will further congeal their suspicions, but for Lemmings it will be final and incontrovertible proof of my guilt. My automobile is, alas, a convertible Silver Shadow.”

  “You both lost me. Proof? I don’t quite …”

  Doctor Bruno stretched, then walked to his chair and sat down. Apparently studying his long fingers, he said, a bit wearily it seemed to me, “Most Lemmings of the Lord are quite poor. The few who were relatively well-to-do when they joined the Church of the Second Coming have in almost all cases—if they remained as members—given the bulk of their money or property to the Church. That is, to Festus Lemming. For they consider wealth undesirable, if not actually a mortal sin, and poverty a virtue.”

  He fell silent, examining his thumb, so I said, “That kind of grabs me. Why is being broke a virtue for the Lemmings but not for Lemming, for the sheep but not for the shepherd? And I still don’t get this proof—”

  “Ah,” he interrupted, “that is a difficult question to answer. I have personally found it impossible to answer. If I were a cynic, I would say that—if I were a Church—from my point of view it might be very helpful if my members believed poverty, humbleness, meekness, sacrifice, denial, obedience to me, faith in me, love offerings t
o me, even chastity and celibacy, and so on were stairways to the stars, little steps on the long-suffering ladder to my Heaven. But I am not a Church. I am something of a cynic, however, so I confess that I simply cannot imagine why the Law which applies to Church members does not also apply to the Church of, which the members are members.”

  He turned his hand and examined his thumb from the other side. But never mind. To Lemmings, poverty is a virtue because as good Christians they believe, first, it is better to give than to receive, and second, it is easier for a bean to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”

  “Yeah, I went to Sunday school myself, believe it or … Bean?”

  He finally folded up his thumb and looked at me. “The word—Gamla—translated as ‘camel’ in the Synoptic Gospels does mean camel, but it also means ‘bean,’ and ‘rope’ as well. If Jesus actually did make any such ridiculous statement about rich men, which is subject to reasonable doubt, he was certainly of such intelligence that given a choice among camel, bean, and rope, he would instantly have chosen rope—which though larger is of the same nature as thread. I will accept the premise that Jesus was divinely inspired, but not that the same is necessarily and equally true of all human translators of the Bible—lo, even unto this day. The translalator of Matthew, Mark, and Luke simply made a mistake. He—and all who copied him—wrote ‘camel’ when he should have written ‘rope.’ I choose the third possible translation, bean, just for the hell of it.”

  “It is easier for a rope … yeah. But this proof—”

  “Of course. I said my automobile is a Silver Shadow, which is to say a Rolls Royce, a not inexpensive vehicle. Because poverty is virtuous, and a Silver Shadow costs a great many beans, or dollars, its purchaser must be far removed from virtue. But, worse, a convertible Silver Shadow is stupendously costly. I paid … I would hate to tell you how much … for the undeniably sinful pleasure of owning such a vehicle. Therefore, at best I am damned, and at worst consciously in league with Satan.”