John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "You've talked to her?"

  "Of course I've talked to her!"

  "Don't get edgy, Mag. How'd she react?"

  "First denials, and then she got very sloppy. Tears and hysteria. She claims she's in love with him. If we send her home she'll kill herself. She knows that she and the Reverend Deets are committing a sin, but she says they can't help it."

  "Background?"

  "She quit high school and went to work in a McDonald's.

  She got mixed up with a motorcycle gang and got pregnant and miscarried at five months. Her mother brought her to me.

  They've been church members for twenty years. She miscarried after her boyfriend got killed sliding under a truck on his cycle. She was in deep depression when she got here. She's been coming out of it nicely. Pretty little thing. Lovely untrained voice. And now this."

  John Tinker Meadows sighed.

  "I'll tell Joe to cool it, for whatever good that might do. I'll threaten him."

  "Thanks. I guess it's too much to hope to ask him to stay away from her. Just please make sure he keeps it very, very quiet. And there are a couple of other things, as long as we're talking."

  "Mag! Later. Okay? God is love."

  "Bless His holy name," she said obediently, and he got back into the elevator and went up to his suite on the fourth floor. It was refuge, a place of blues and grays and clean surfaces. A place of silence. There was a study, but he seldom used it, preferring either his office over in the Administration Building or, less frequently, the old man's office, over beyond the conference room, which he could enter directly from the living room of his suite.

  He went straight to the bathroom, peeling off the sweaty white surplice with the broad gold trim and the sky-blue cassock. He kicked the garments toward the hamper, and before he turned on the shower he lowered himself to the floor and did his twenty fast push-ups, a routine so deeply embedded he seldom gave it any conscious thought. He was breathing deeply as he stepped into the steaming needles, and as he lathered himself with the pine soap he thought ahead to the private Sunday conference with Finn Efflander, going over the items Finn would bring up.

  After he had dressed in sandals, tan slacks and a white knit shirt, he went into the study and accessed his schedule for the week on his personal terminal. The most important item was the weekday breakfast with the Senators.

  Though he knew that Finn was next door in the conference room, waiting for him, he went over and stood at the big windows for a little while, looking out at a slice of the Meadows Center. He could see, beyond an angle of the Tabernacle, a portion of the giant, landscaped parking lot, and beyond it the divided boulevard that led toward The Lakemore interchange five miles away on the north-south Interstate. On the far side of the highway he could see, in the distance, a segment of the Meadows Mall and the large parking areas.

  Directly ahead of him were several of the University buildings Administration, the Library and the Student Center.

  Remembering that someone had mentioned the possibility of adding a wing to Administration, he turned idly to look at the colorful rendering of the whole Meadows Center, done in pastels from an aerial photograph taken for a magazine article.

  He experienced a moment of disorientation when he saw the blank wall near the fireplace where it had hung. He remembered that several weeks ago he'd had it taken down and rehung over in the lounge in Administration.

  Over the past two years he had disposed of so many decorations and memorabilia, the suite had begun to look almost completely impersonal, like a suite in an elegant residential hotel. He did not care to wonder why he was doing this. He suspected it might be a reaction against the old man's practice of clinging to every possible artifact of success, framing everything frame able mounting the mountable. But he did not care to speculate about it at any length or with any intensity. It made him feel uneasy to do so. He told himself he merely did not like clutter.

  Without warning a dream edged back into his memory, and he did not know if he had dreamed it only once, or many times.

  It was a brief dream wherein he was standing on some high place in the same position as the Christus overlooking Rio, arms outstretched. It was very cold, but it was necessary he keep on standing there, without movement. It was imperative.

  Snow was blowing and clinging to his clothing and hair and eyebrows. Suddenly he was back at a distance looking at the statue of himself, watching the snow and the wind turn it white as marble. As the wind grew stronger, the white figure began to topple. It toppled so very slowly he realized it had to be of an immense size. It fell over onto the left hand and arm. They shattered with the bright clean sound of crystal smashing, and big transparent disks and segments of the arm went bouncing and rolling over a stony slope down toward the sea.

  His eyes stung, and a single tear rolled down his left cheek. It startled him. Everything, he thought, is getting to be too damned much. The old man is going so fast. Every week he is worse. The days are too short. Privacy is almost impossible.

  Mag is becoming ever more difficult and contentious. And now Molly has begun making the little boring demands. Too much, too much, too much.

  Two Roy Owen sat in a small downtown hotel room in a city sixty miles southeast of Lakemore and the Meadows Center. He was drinking coffee and trying to read the newspaper, and found himself reading the same paragraph over and over without comprehension. He was waiting for Hanrahan, the private investigator, to arrive, and the anticipated interview was so alien to the patterns of his life that he kept thinking of it as a kind of charade, a game he had agreed, too hastily, to play.

  Roy Owen was a small, trim, quiet man, conservative in dress and manner, hesitant in speech. He was in charge of the investment programs of three large no-load mutual funds headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, and marketed nationally by General Services, Inc." which was associated in some obscure corporate manner with a large cable television enterprise.

  There were twelve mutual funds in the General Services family of funds, five fund managers, with telephone switches permitted and even encouraged. The managers were in competition with each other insofar as annual fund performance was concerned. But there was not, as one of his colleagues termed it, any chickenshittery about staff meetings, advisers, committees and reviews. Top management did not care if you used chicken bones, the Ching, witchcraft or IBM to decide when and what to sell, and when and what to buy. All they wanted was to have one individual on whom they could pin blame for bad performance, or pin medals for success. You could write your own expenses, visit the corporations, devise your own guidelines. Just avoid any conflict of interest, or any use of insider information. They would let you have a bad year, if it came after a bunch of good ones.

  He had worked for a time with a mutual fund outfit where everybody looked over everybody else's shoulder, and you could expect to be given more advice than you needed or could use. It had made him very nervous and had given him a small temporary ulcer. He was content with this outfit.

  He had a good assistant, Dave Wager, now watching the store, supervising the daily computation of per-share value, keeping a close and wary eye on the holdings in the three funds, well aware of how much of an emergency would require his phoning Roy.

  Roy Owen had few illusions about himself. He knew that he did a very good job with the funds. And he did that good job because he relished winning and hated losing. Each year his base salary was sweetened on the basis of a complicated formula wherein his growth and income records were compared with the records of the Dow, Value Line, Standard and Poor 500, the Wilshire 5000 and several public funds comparable in size with his. He knew he was the sort of person people had to meet a dozen times before they began to remember his name. He enjoyed playing games and he enjoyed winning at whatever he played, be it handball, tennis or backgammon. In victory he was gentle and humble and self-deprecatory, carefully concealing the rush of pleasure he felt.

  He was a graduate of the Wharton School and the lovin
g father of Janie, aged six. His only concession to a certain independence of thought was a drooping pistolero mustache, shades darker than his hair, glinting brown-red in direct sunlight.

  The investigator phoned and came up from the lobby and knocked on the door. When Owen opened it the fellow said, unnecessarily, "J. B. Hanrahan, Mr. Owen." He extended a large soft white hand. He was tall, sallow and thin, with bad posture and a watermelon belly. His thin dark hair was worn long at the left side and combed back across his bare skull and glued in place. He smelled of cigar. He wore green polyester trousers and a ranch shirt in faded yellow, with pearl buttons.

  A scar ran from the center of his forehead down through the outer edge of his right eyebrow and ended near his ear. At first glance the man looked both flamboyant and silly. Then Owen realized that Hanrahan was a chameleon hiding in the flower patch. He fitted into the sun-belt scene, a sickly old boy retired from almost any kind of office or factory work. The correct message was in the eyes of J. B. Hanrahan. They were a clear, unblinking green, like the eyes of a predatory water bird standing in the frog pond.

  He carried a plastic briefcase of imitation lizard, and said that, yes, he would like a cup of coffee if there was enough in the pot. Owen said he had ordered up coffee for two.

  They sat at the small table by the window. Hanrahan said, "Glad you could come down. This is better than trying to do it by phone or in writing. I did just as good as the police did. I got nothing too. My inclination is to drop it right now and recommend you do the same. But she's your wife. Is or was.

  "And you've put out a lot of money on me and got nothing back except what I told you already. And the police there in Lakemore could have told you that much. What I'm saying, Mr. Owen, I've run out of places to turn. If I knew more about the woman, maybe I could make a better guess about what could have happened."

  "What kind of thing would you want to know?"

  "Pretty personal, if you don't mind. More personal than what you told me at first."

  "Such as what?"

  "You and she get along good?"

  He shrugged, trying to find the right words.

  "I don't imagine there are very many perfect marriages."

  "Planning on splitting up?"

  "Oh no! Nothing like that. It's just that Lindy has a lot more than her share of energy. After Janie was born, she got into a lot of volunteer work in Hartford. Library drive, blood bank, hospital foundation. Over a year ago she said she was getting tired of playing games where nobody kept score. She said that money is the device people use to keep score. An old friend told her about a job opening up on that magazine in New York called Out Front. The idea is that it's about people who are out in front, in the public eye. It wasn't difficult to make arrangements about Janie. Lindy's mother lives in a town house not two blocks from our place."

  "You objected?"

  "Look, I didn't like it then, when it started, and I didn't get to like it any better. She was going to come back home every weekend, but they have been sending her on special assignments, like this one. When I met her she was a young reporter on the Philadelphia Bulletin. My work is very interesting to me. When I try to explain it to anybody except another market analyst, people begin to yawn. We have been living the same life a couple might live who had a friendly separation. And I don't like that magazine. It seems to try to make things sound dirty, no matter how innocent they might be."

  "So she came down to make the Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows seem dirty?"

  "She said there was some smoke and she was looking for fire.

  I don't like talking about personal things. I'm sorry. I'm not very good at it. Lindy and I were once upon a time good friends very much in love. Okay, lately I'd thought we were turning into pretty good friends, but I was wrong. I know I still love her. And I know Janie needs her badly, so badly she can't even let it show how much."

  "Do you still feel, like you told me in the beginning, that the Church might have had something to do with her disappearance?"

  "I don't know. That's what I wanted you to find out."

  The Meadows family has regular contacts with the press.

  This whole setup has become very important over the years.

  Why do you think she came down here and used a cover name?"

  "I have no idea. She didn't say. Maybe she thought the name of the magazine would dry up any official or unofficial source.

  And if they found out she was using a false name, they could have assumed she was... more of a threat than she actually was. Big money is clout, Mr. Hanrahan. From what I've been able to read about this Eternal Church of the Believer, they seem to take in a lot of money."

  Hanrahan smiled. The smile spread his pouched cheeks. It was a humorless smile, the grin of the basking shark.

  "Indeed they do. Yessiree bob, indeed they do. I better tell you a little more about those people."

  He took a map from his dispatch case, moved the cups aside and spread it out on the table. Roy Owen hitched his chair closer to Hanrahan.

  "Now this isn't to scale. It's just to give you the feel of the place. The Interstate is way over here to the west, and the city limits of Lakemore start two miles west of that. All of this, this whole shebang here, is the Meadows Center, located just about six miles east of the Interstate. I could have researched just how many hundreds or thousands of acres they've got, if there was any point to it.

  "You can divide the whole thing into four parts. Right here is the Eternal Church of the Believer, the Tabernacle, the Manse and these buildings here, Administration, Security Office, Communications and so on. That's the primary security area.

  You just don't get in there at all, and the fence line with the sensors and guard system, it butts up to the back side of the Tabernacle, so the public can get in the church, but the clergy and so on, they go out the back and they are in a secure area.

  They got a generator system in there, and their own water and sewage setup. In this here Communications Building they've got a couple of big main-frame computers in the basement, dug out of the limestone rock, that handle all the Church records and the University records and I suppose the records from the commercial area."

  ' "Commercial area"?"

  "I'll get to that in a minute. Now over here is the University complex. There are only about six hundred students and maybe fifty faculty, and anywhere else it would be called a college. It's still in the process of construction. Just about everything around there is being built up and added on to. And here to the north of the University grounds you've got the Meadows Settlements. Like a small city of retirement homes and homes where the employees live. That's all the secondary security area. Guards and gates to go through and so on, but not as tight as where the Manse and Communications are.

  "You asked about the commercial area. This is it, all along the divided boulevard here for about three miles. This divided part of it is called Henrietta Boulevard after old Matthew Meadows' mother. It changes to two-lane when it gets to about two miles from the interchange, and changes back to State Road 433.

  "This controlled commercial development is owned and managed by ECB Enterprises. ECB for Eternal Church and so on. What you have is the big Meadows Mall here, biggest mall in that end of the state. Along here are the big motels where the tourists and the pilgrims stay. And fast-food places, all leased from ECB. Lakemore Construction is the building arm of ECB.

  It builds commercial to the tenant's wishes, and it builds all the little houses in the Meadows Settlements according to several standard floor plans. Then there is Meadows Development, Inc. I'm not exactly sure what it does. Planning, maybe. The executive offices for the commercial side are on the second floor in the Mall. The Mall is the third grade of security area, just enough guards and patrols to keep order there and around the motel parking lots at night and so on.

  "ECB Enterprises seems to own the Central Citizens Bank of Lakemore. Anyway, they bought a controlling interest back from the bank holding compan
y that picked it up years ago, and they have a majority on the board of directors.

  "What have I left out? Oh, maybe the most important part.

  In Communications they've got professional television and radio broadcast facilities, with first-class people. The early church service they had there this morning gets cut to fifty minutes and goes up to the transponders they've got on a couple of satellites, sent up there through the big GTE narrow beam dishes on the roof of Communications, over at the end away from the heliport. It's a full hour when they get through with it, with five minutes of solicitations in front and in back of the service. From the satellite, either Tex-Tel or Westar, it goes to the cable and to the television stations that use it direct, so you might have a couple hundred stations putting that morning service on the air right now.