John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "Billy... other gun... operation. Ethel, Ethel!..." When he had stopped cutting brush and had stood out there in the bug-humming heat of the overgrown feed lot with his eyes shut, straining to hear more of what the voices were saying, they faded out entirely. And as he worked, another voice came into his head and told him where to go, and to go at once.

  He walked through the people, staring straight ahead over the heads of all of them. When he reached the fountain there was a short time of hesitation, and then he knew what he had to do.

  He climbed up onto the wide concrete shelf that encircled the water jets and the green pool. It was only two and a half feet high, a comfortable height for sitting when tired from shopping.

  A lot of them looked at him curiously as they walked by. A few stopped and stared at him, alert for the slightest deviation from normal behavior on the part of anyone.

  He spread his big arms wide.

  "Hear me!" he brayed in his great voice.

  "Hear me! Hear this, all nations! Pay attention, all who live on earth, important people, ordinary people, rich and poor alike! My lips have wisdom to utter, my heart whispers sound sense; I turn my attention to a proverb, and set my solution to the harp. Why should I be afraid in evil times, when malice dogs my step and hems me in, of men who trust in their wealth and boast of the profusion of their riches? But man could never redeem himself or pay his ransom to God: it costs so much to redeem his life, it is beyond him; how then could he live on forever and never see the Pit when all the time he sees that wise men die; that foolish and stupid ones perish alike, and leave their fortunes to others?"

  His huge voice overpowered the pervasive Mall music.

  More and more people gathered around. A security guard came pushing through the people and yelled up at Moses, "Get down from there! You get down from there!"

  "You get down on your knees, brother, and pray for the dead souls of the Meadows family." The man grabbed at Moses, and Moses leaned over and clubbed him on the side of the head with a thick fist. The man was caught by the crowd before he could fall. He recovered his balance, shook his head and went unsteadily away to find reinforcements.

  "Their tombs are their eternal home, their lasting residence, though they owned estates that bore their names. Man, when he prospers, forfeits intelligence; he is one with the cattle doomed to slaughter. So on they go with their self-assurance, with men to run after them when they raise their voice. Like sheep to be laid in the grave, death will herd them to pasture and the upright will have the better of them. Dawn will come and then the show they made will disappear. The grave is the home for them! But God will redeem my life from the grasp of the grave, and will receive me. Do not be awed when a man grows rich, when the glory of his House increases; when he dies he can take nothing with him, his glory cannot follow him down. The soul he made so happy while he lived, thinking all the time, look after yourself and men will praise you he will join the company of his ancestors who will never see the light of day again. Man in his prosperity forfeits intelligence; he is one with the cattle doomed to slaughter, to a darkness everlasting, forgotten by man and God alike. And so this House, these Meadows, they have raised up an edifice they call a Church; it is but a possession, an earthly glory for them and their progeny, and it has nothing to do with worship, nothing to do with eternal life. I proclaim the everlasting life of the one who once lived who was named Paul Meadows. A holy man who 2-43 died young and now has life everlasting in the kingdom of heaven' "You are under arrest," the tall young deputy said.

  "What for?"

  "Creating a disturbance. Disturbing the peace. Assault on a civilian security officer. Come on along."

  The audience backed away from the officer. He took two steps back and unsnapped the flap on his holster. Moses jumped down lightly and said, "All right, all right. If that's what you want, all right."

  When Eliot Erskine arrived at Rick Liddy's small office, Liddy was just finishing his sandwich and coffee.

  He nodded, chewed, drank the last of the coffee and said, "Siddown, Elly. How'd it go?"

  "All right. Dockerty had Moses in a little holding cell. He seemed calm enough. Lieutenant Coombs got there a few minutes before I did. Like you guessed, they're going to try to make him for the Linda Owen murder, but their hearts aren't in it. He'd been read his rights. He said he was willing to talk without a lawyer present. He told about driving the woman from the motel to the Center when she couldn't start her rental car. He said he hadn't known her name at that time, and didn't find out until much later when he heard she was reported missing, and Peggy Moon at the motel told him that was the same woman he had transported to the Center and back.

  "Dockerty asked him why he had started preaching at the Mall, and Moses said that some voice had told him to.

  Dockerty wanted him to promise he wouldn't do it again, and Moses said he would be glad to promise, but if the voice told him to do it again, he would. Coombs asked him if the voice had ever told him to do other things, bad things, and Moses said that the voice, and other voices he couldn't understand, had started about when the big rains started. And he said that he did not believe the voice would ever tell him to do anything bad. He said he had been thinking about that voice, and he thought it was the voice of Paul Meadows."

  Liddy nodded.

  "The kid brother."

  "Moses was in the funny farm with the brother years ago.

  That's why he came here. He got religion from the brother."

  "I heard about that from somebody. Maybe the Sheriff."

  "Witnesses say Petersen grabbed Moses by the leg and tried to yank him off the side of that fountain, which is a damn fool thing for a spindly little guy almost seventy to try. Moses leaned over and kind of casually belted him alongside the head, which seems like an okay response to me. Woman told me it was more of a push than a blow. He went right along with the deputy, meek as a lamb. Petersen won't press charges. I ordered him not to, like you suggested."

  "What's your guess about what will happen?"

  Erskine shrugged.

  "There'll be a lot of pressure. I don't think the political pressure means much to Dockerty. He's too close to retirement. He's easygoing, but he's smart. He could have rousted Moses out of the area a couple of years ago. He decided he was harmless. If it turns out he isn't, it isn't going to hurt Dockerty. There was a television van there when I left, and some people with cameras. Moses was worried about his truck, so the Sheriff told a deputy to arrange to pick it up and take it out to where Moses lives, and explain to the woman there, Mrs. Holroyd, about Moses being detained."

  Rick Liddy pried between his back molars with a toothpick and inspected the end of it, and dropped it into his wastebasket.

  "But you know and I know that holding Moses is a crock. We've got a pretty good idea, haven't we?"

  Eliot Erskine tipped his chair onto its back legs and studied Rick Liddy. The man's expression was unreadable. He had a ruddy, rough-skinned complexion, big hands with the dimpled knuckles of the ex-brawler, a thick short neck as broad as his jaws, glossy black hair parted in the middle with such precision it looked like a wig, lots of meat on the shoulders and chest, pale eyes that looked out of the skull holes like creatures safe in caves. Liddy was one very hard person, one very good cop with that law degree the FBI likes their people to have. Erskine was trying to determine whether or not Liddy was leading him into some kind of a trap, and so he decided that it was best to say nothing at all. He had learned that difficult feat in Atlanta during interrogations. It is awkward in one-on-one situations to say nothing at all. The silence finally becomes intense and electric, like a scream unheard.

  Finally Liddy stirred and said, "When we talked last Tuesday, you were going to come back to me and tell me how Walter Macy reacted to your telling him you were stopping the surveillance." "I didn't get to tell him yet. It wasn't anything I wanted to say over the phone to him."

  Liddy closed his eyes, sighed, massaged his brow.

&nb
sp; "We were walking around it before the body was found. How does finding the body change what we had been guessing? It means she didn't pick up any hitchhiker, and she probably didn't have any car trouble."

  "Coombs told Dockerty that all indications were that somebody had done some of her packing for her, jamming things in the suitcase any which way. Coombs said Owen said his wife was neat and tidy about packing and about everything else, apparently. Do we get any kind of a scenario from that, Rick?"

  "I won't make any guesses until I know everything you know."

  "I think you do."

  "So why do I get the impression you're just a little bit edgier than you should be?"

  Erskine sighed.

  "Okay, we've both been in the business too long. And I did more than I should have. Anyway, I found out that Alberta Macy has a sister with cancer down in Jacksonville.

  She had a bad setback last May and Mrs. Macy went down there on Friday the sixth of May, back on Monday the ninth."

  "I kind of wish you hadn't done that, Elly."

  "I know. I wish I hadn't. Sure, I've thought it through. You know the type. They go along for years and years, keeping all the dirt locked up in their heads. We nailed one of them one time in Atlanta, he had a secret hidey-hole in his house, a baseboard with a concealed hinge, full of some of the dirtiest books I ever saw. His wife died when he was sixty, and he took to bringing women home, killing them, arranging them this way and that, taking Polaroid pictures of them and then burying them in the side wall of his cellar. He nailed three of them before his luck ran out and the fourth intended victim knocked him down and called the cops. He confessed the whole thing before we could hardly get his name and address on the records. We push Macy just a little and he will fold, Rick. That's my hunch."

  After a thoughtful pause, Liddy said, "Okay. So the scenario shapes up that he had about a minute and a half or two minutes alone with her before you came in, Elly. And she did some clumsy faking and got out. But he had set up a meet with her for Saturday night. Wife away. He had the pictures and the tapes and he had the innocence to think that any magazine or newspaper not just the cheapest scandal sheets would use garbage like that. So they were parked in a private place, maybe one of the old logging roads. It's dark. Maybe parking lights and dash lights. She's a city woman from the North, sweet-smelling, a working woman. And so she surprised him by being offended by that junk you collected for Walter Macy.

  So he started to preach to her about how in the name of decency she has to help pry John Tinker out of the top slot in the great Church. Maybe the garbage turned him on while it was turning her off. So she tried to get away from him and didn't make it. When he realized she was dead, he had to stifle the impulse to drive away and leave her right there. So he left his car there and put her in the rental car and drove back to the motel. He had her keys. There's no restaurant there, hardly any traffic. He'd wait until he was sure the office was closed and the Moons asleep." Liddy hesitated, then continued.

  "He packed up her clothes and toilet articles and snuck out to the car with them. Left the key on the bureau. Drove out and probably didn't turn on his lights until he was on the highway.

  No traffic to speak of out there beyond Lakemore late at night.

  He would turn away from Lakemore, turn west. Two miles west you have a crossroads sign and a gravel road that leads over to the dirt road that parallels the main road. Weather records say it was a clear night. Would he have known about the abandoned farm and about the well? Maybe part of his job is looking at property in the area. Okay, so he'd gather her up out of the car and tote her to the old well, probably moaning out loud in the night, loaded with fright and remorse and guilt.

  He'd hear her go crashing down and thud against the bottom.

  Then he would drop her stuff, go find those boards and put them across the top of the well. And ever since then he's been trying not to think and trying not to remember. He drove down to the city and put the car in airport parking, and left the keys and the papers on the car in the glove compartment. Let's say he got there and walked away from the car about three thirty or four in the morning. There's a Trailways bus that stops at the airport terminal at five in the morning, and comes 2-47 down off the Interstate to let passengers off at Lakemore at ten of six. So he walked from there to his car, where he had left it in a place well off the road. Five miles? Six? Four?

  "Put him at his car at dawn, looking around to find what he had not seen in the dark. One of her shoes, her purse, the torn panties. Nothing else. He puts the shoe and the panties in the purse. He wants to get rid of those things as quickly as he can. I would think he would probably open his trunk, take out a tire iron, walk thirty steps into the pine woods, pry out a hole big enough, force the purse into it, cover it, stomp the dirt down, brush the needles back over the disturbed place. He drives home, cleans himself up, changes, and he's at the Tabernacle an hour before the service. Did I miss anything?"

  Erskine shrugged.

  "It covers everything, but a lot of it is what the lawyers call pure conjecture."

  Liddy stood up.

  "Lately I can't seem to think straight inside the office. Come on."

  They took a security car and drove out past the informal salutes of the guards at the gate, Liddy at the wheel. It wasn't until they were in the middle of Lakemore, headed west, that Erskine said, "I can't buy him being familiar with that farm and finding it at night. So I'd revise your scenario this way. On Saturday afternoon he drove around scouting the area, looking for a private place where they could talk. He checked out that little unpaved country road and when he came to the farm, he drove around in back of the barn. It seemed private enough.

  Maybe he walked around a little and noticed the well. He wouldn't have had any idea in God's world how he was going to use it, but later, when he needed to, he remembered it, and that roof over it would make it easy to find in the starlight. And that's where he left his car when he drove hers to the airport."

  "So why wouldn't he chuck the shoe and purse down the well?"

  "Maybe by daylight he felt too exposed. Maybe he heard a farm truck on that road. Maybe he could see somebody over on the next hill. He'd drive somewhere else and bury the purse."

  "I wonder where she met him?"

  "Maybe the Mall, early in the evening, after dark, and he asked her to follow him in her car."

  When they reached the burned-out farm, there were three young boys throwing rocks at the barn. After Liddy had stood and glowered at them for a few minutes, they drifted away, looking back, then yelled something when they were a safe distance away.

  Erskine looked at the tire tracks in the rain-soft earth and said, "Been lots of traffic in here."

  "Gawpers and goopers, official and unofficial. Two cars could park here with no chance of being seen from that road."

  Liddy walked over to where the house had stood and sat on the field stone foundation, his legs in the tall grass.

  Erskine said, "I think he's destroyed all the stuff I turned over to him. That would be a link. And he'll pretend to be annoyed when I tell him I've quit. But he'll be pleased."

  "Where are we?" Liddy asked.

  "Up some kind of creek. Especially me. It would take a very small push to open him up. And with or without the push, he is going to crack open, I think. Soon, maybe. A full and complete statement in which I am going to figure, along with John Tinker and Molly Wintergaften and Linda Owen. My services to Macy were illegal."

  "But you came to me and told me what he wanted and you said you were reluctant to do it, and I ordered you to do it, telling you it could affect security, and that is our job."

  Thanks, Rick. That's a nice thing for you to do."

  "Forget nice. Just hope it doesn't come up. Because we can guess what will happen if it does. The old man is permanently out of business. The number two preacher is on trial. John Tinker Meadows is in the papers as having an affair with the wife of one of the business executives who run the Mea
dows Center commercial interests. That bunch of affiliate ministers will run John Tinker out of the Church. And Finn Efflander didn't get where he is by having a poor sense of timing. He'll be off and gone the minute he's convinced what happened really happened. Elly, this whole thing is going to come tumbling down. When the elephant falls dead, all the hyenas come trotting out of the woods, licking their chops. Politicians, lawyers, commentators..."

  "But we should give him that little push, Rick."

  "These are nice jobs, yours and mine. This place does a lot for a lot of people. A very nice cash flow for a lot of good works."

  "And a lot of perks too."

  "Which wouldn't add up to much of a big percentage of overhead, Elly. How many weeks does it take to bring in enough to buy those two Gulf streams? You worked the mail and money room. Take a guess."

  "Eight to ten weeks."

  "John Tinker has built up a lot of friendship in Congress, with Charley Winchester's help. It's like having a nice tent to keep out the rain. Something like this would blow the tent down. There would be a lot of things they'd start paying attention to. Like how many blacks they've got in the University. One on the faculty. Three students. Discrimination.