John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  Jenny Albritton looked troubled.

  "But if it should go wrong, couldn't it turn out to be very, very ugly? Like jail?"

  "But, my darling, I keep telling you. Unless we can come up with an absolutely perfect plan, we just won't do it at all."

  "Don't be cross with me."

  "I'm not cross, Jenny A."

  "I guess you've been thinking about this for a long time."

  Jenny MacBeth smiled across at her young lover and winked and said, "Practically all my life."

  Nineteen When the Reverend Walter Macy arrived at his office on the ground floor of Administration, Eliot Erskine was waiting for him, sitting on the couch across from the desk, under the photo mural of the Meadows Center, sitting so stolidly, impassively, Macy had the momentary impression the man had been there all night.

  He did not arise or move or speak when Walter Macy came in, merely watched him with his small pale eyes, slack fists resting on the big thick thighs. There was a faint blush of sunburn on the fair skin of Erskine's forehead and cheeks.

  Macy stared at him, then turned and closed the office door quickly and said, "What are you doing here? What do you want?"

  Eliot Erskine gave himself a slow count of five before answering. It was a device he had used when he had been on the interrogation team in Atlanta. It had been easier there, because they could rotate play good guy, bad guy, skeptic, old buddy, maniac barely under control whatever the situation seemed to require. And when one approach began to work a little bit, they could use that to pry the suspect open. He had used the slow count in poker games, before betting or folding. It worked well there too.

  "I just thought it was time we had a little talk."

  "But I told you not to come here. Not ever. I mean, unless it is about something else."

  Slow count.

  "This isn't about anything else." He thought Walter looked bad. His colour was bad. His hand trembled as he went through a charade of sorting the opened mail on his desk.

  His cheeks sagged and there were dark blotches under his eyes.

  The skin of his forehead and cheeks looked mottled and scaly.

  "Erskine, you said that you decided there was no point in continuing because it was all repetition. So it's over, isn't it?"

  He gave him a longer count and then said, "Over?"

  "Over! Finished! How else can I say it?"

  Erskine stared at him with expressionless intensity, like a man looking into an aquarium.

  "Do you have the pictures and the tapes?"

  "Of course not! I destroyed them."

  "When?"

  "Well... as soon as I heard about Molly's accident."

  "You had me collect those materials because you wanted to use them to force John Meadows out so you could be top preacher."

  "No, no, no. Nothing like that. That's your conclusion. I told you nothing like that. He doesn't like me. He's made that clear.

  I was afraid he would try to force me out sooner or later. So I wanted to have evidence I could show him. If he knew I could destroy his reputation, he wouldn't dare force me out."

  This time Erskine gave it a very long count, and he allowed himself to look puzzled, troubled. Walter Macy said, "I really have a lot of work here."

  "If that's why you wanted evidence, why did you destroy it?

  Wouldn't it work just as well whether the woman is dead or alive? Maybe her being dead would make the case stronger."

  "I... I destroyed it on impulse. I was upset about her getting killed that way."

  "And have you regretted destroying it?"

  "Well... I guess so. A couple of times."

  "Then you can relax. I've got duplicates, Wally."

  Walter went pale, then red with anger.

  "I told you in the beginning there was supposed to be just the original, nothing else. You promised."

  "What you had me do is illegal, Wally."

  "Stop calling me Wally! It's... disrespectful."

  "Okay, Reverend Wally. It was illegal and I did it. There is an old saying around every courthouse in the country, C.Y.O.A.

  It means Cover Your Own Ass. You wanted that stuff because it might be useful against somebody. I wanted copies because they might be useful against you if you got to be top man somehow and tried to boot me out because of what I know about your methods."

  "I order you to destroy the copies!"

  The only person giving me orders is Rick Liddy, and what I would have to do is go to him and explain the whole thing, show him the stuff I've got and ask him if I should destroy them the way you have ordered me so to do."

  "No, don't do that. Where are those copies?"

  "In a safe place. Every set is in a different safe place."

  "Every set?"

  "Along with a little statement from me about how I came to take the pictures and bug the trailer, and who I gave the originals to. It's what's called a form of insurance."

  "Oh my God!"

  "Don't get so upset, Wally. I'm not going to peddle them. I had the whole operation figured wrong, I guess."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The way I had it worked out, once you had the evidence that would ruin John Tinker, you were going to try to slip it to somebody who'd give it a lot of exposure, like in newspapers and magazines. I thought you were going to get him dumped that way, and nobody would know you were the one behind it.

  Except me, of course."

  "I just told you why I wanted the pictures and tapes!"

  "When that little blonde woman got in to see you that day in May, she acted so weird and I followed her in, remember?"

  "In May? I see so many people every day."

  "It turned out she was the one from that New York magazine outfit, they found her body in the well the other day."

  "I spoke to that person?"

  "Right here in your office. She had some kind of dumb story that didn't hang together about icons. I guess it was my imagination, Wally, but when I came in I had the feeling the two of you had suddenly switched the conversation to something else."

  "Ridiculous."

  "I guess I had that feeling because it seemed to me that if you could meet her on the sly and give her the materials, maybe she could use some of the stuff in the story she was writing about the Center."

  "Absurd, Erskine!"

  "It would have been an okay weekend to meet her, your wife being out of town and all. But I guess I'm letting my imagination run away with me. Because after that woman turned up missing, you still had me on stakeout picking up more stuff on Johnny and Molly."

  "Maybe you have been watching too much afternoon television."

  Erskine stood up slowly and smiled at Macy. It was his first smile of the morning.

  "Pretty dumb of me, huh? Because if it did fit together it would mean that you, good old Reverend Wally, are the rapist-murderer, smart enough and clever enough to almost get away with it."

  He had dropped the key word in there. Almost. He watched Macy intently and saw the impact of that word, saw Macy rolling it around in his mind while his eyes looked through Erskine and through the wall into the far distances of memory.

  Giving it too much time. Coming back with a start to here and now. Pulling himself together.

  "Mr. Erskine, I would really consider it a very great personal favor if you would arrange to destroy those copies. I am not going to pose any threat to your employment here. I think we should both forget the entire incident. It was an unfortunate lapse of judgment on both our parts. And there is no need to ever discuss it again."

  Erskine rocked slowly back and forth, heel to toe. He sorely missed the other members of the old team. Right now the one to send in would be Crazy Lew Yolen. He wondered if he could manage to be Crazy Lew for a couple of minutes. What the hell, it was worth a try. Crazy Lew would come in with the information about the shoulder bag. As he silently rehearsed, Walter Macy said, "Good day, Mr. Erskine," and picked up one of the papers from the pile on his desk.

>   Crazy Lew gave a sharp hard yell of laughter and jumped into the air and landed closer to Macy's desk. He slapped two hard palms on the desk and Walter nearly jumped out of his chair, mouth and eyes wide.

  "They found her purse, you old freak! Hey! How about that!

  Right where you threw it off the left lane of the southbound Interstate fifteen miles south of here, right where the shoulder strap got hung up on a tree, so it didn't wash away. It's up in the lab now. Shut up! I'm talking to you! You sure that shoe of hers didn't take a fingerprint on the shiny leather? What if it didn't! You in the clear? Bullshit. I'm going to chase your flabby old ass up and down the woods and the fields until you fall on your sorry old knees with the tears running down your face and tell me just how you came onto her like an animal and crushed her throat to stop the screaming. Shut up, you old freak. I'm on to you now and from here on in, and I am going to see you in hell." He leaned across the desk and yelled into Macy's face,"IN HELL!"

  He spun and took three long quick strides to the door and went out and slammed it behind him. That was part of Crazy Lew's technique. Don't give them time to respond. Let them do the responding to somebody else. He didn't know if it had worked at all, but he knew that there had been pure terror on Macy's face as he tried to get further back from the loud yelling, as he tried to roll his desk chair back through the wall behind him.

  One of the secretaries was standing beside her desk, looking at him with concern and astonishment.

  "What was happening in there?" she asked in a small voice.

  "We were rehearsing for the pageant," he said in a tired voice.

  "Pageant? Pageant?"

  He brushed by her and went out into a fading sunlight that was being extinguished as the big black cloud from the west swallowed the sun. Thunder boomed in the distance, rolling and re-echoing. His palms were wet. He had a faint dull headache. Old Wally had given all the wrong responses, confirming everything. Courts would not accept Erskine's intuitions, his professional perceptions. It was, he thought, much like buying a used car. You buy one every two years and you go in and expect to outwit the salesman on the lot and the sales manager in the little house. But they have been selling thirty a day ever since you bought the one you are driving now.

  Maybe eighteen thousand potential customers have come in with every intention of making a better deal than they deserve.

  Thus it is with the one-time or the sometime criminal confronted by an experienced officer. They might stand a chance in the courts, but no chance at all with the officer. No chance at all. But it wasn't a hunting license, he thought. Too bad. Our trouble is that too many times we all wish it was. Pow, pow, pow. End of case. Blow away the smoke and reholster. The next step was unpredictable. Old Wally could not try to regroup by demanding the firing of one crazy person named Erskine. He might try to feed Erskine an alternate theory on the death of the Owen woman. Very hard to say. The man was on the edge. He had been pushed, just a little, but he was still on the edge, waving his arms for balance, aware of the chasm in front of him and too scared to look down.

  Joe Deets went down to the city Friday morning on the bus, and took a cab from the bus station to the airport. Her feeder flight was on time and soon she came walking out past the people waiting to go through the security check, looking from side to side until she saw him and came directly over to him.

  She wore a white cotton shirt-dress with short puffed sleeves, a black collar, black bands on the slash pockets and two black buttons on the double-breasted front. She wore black sandals with medium heels, and carried a large red shoulder bag. She wore big sunglasses with very dark lenses. He had the feeling she had selected what to wear with great care. She looked more slender than he remembered her. She did not smile at him.

  "So glad you could make it, Annalee."

  "You didn't give me much choice, Joe. I meet you here or you come down to my house."

  "I had to see you."

  "Sure."

  "I got here early, so I found a place we can talk. There's a motel pretty close. Walking distance. With a coffee shop."

  "We keep meeting in motels, people'll start wondering," she said.

  He laughed.

  "I'm glad you can joke."

  "Not too much choice there, either," she said.

  It was a huge motel complex, and the coffee shop was off to the left of the lobby. He led her to a red plastic booth in a back corner. They could look out a gold-tinted window at traffic the color of old brown newspaper photographs. It was a booth for two, with a narrow table between them. The air was chilly. She rubbed her arms, then pulled a red sweater out of her shoulder bag and put it around her shoulders. He ordered a pot of coffee and some toast. She asked for tea and Danish. She looked at her watch and said, "I got to get back over there by quarter to noon to get my flight. It wasn't easy to arrange. I'm not a very good sneak. What's this all about anyway?"

  "Coming down on the bus I had a pretty good idea of what to say and how to say it, but it's gone."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "It's gone because it was crap. Posturing. I'm trying to peel myself down like an artichoke, one dead leaf after another, to see if there is anything at all left in the middle."

  "Is something wrong with Doreen?"

  "She's fine. Splendid. Healthy, full of life. I bought her a new bike."

  "How terribly wonderful of you."

  "I know, I know. It was news, not a request for a gold star."

  "You must want a gold star for something."

  "You can see through me. All right. A gold star for cutting her loose. For trying to push her out of the relationship."

  She leaned forward slightly and took the glasses off and clattered them down on the tabletop.

  "First you seduce my daughter and then you want a round of applause for leaving her alone? You are a weird man. Do you know how really weird you are?"

  "I get a notion of it once in a while."

  "Did you come down here to make me feel good so you could feel good?"

  "That wasn't it."

  "Then what was it?"

  "When we talked that time... This is hard to say, Annalee."

  "And hard to listen to."

  "I know you couldn't care less. But something happened to me in that cut-rate motel room when you prayed. I'm sorry, but it never happened to me before. I know it bores you, but I came here to see you and tell you about it. It seemed to me as if something opened up inside my head or my heart. I don't know where. Like some strange flash of light. And it happened once again since then. It happened when I was thinking about you praying. Listen, ever since it happened I've had a kind of increasing contempt for myself. A contempt which comes, I think, from self-knowledge I didn't have before. I'm what they called in the olden times a libertine. I seduce women."

  "And children."

  "If you want to call her a child, all right. It's always been like a hunt. The right wind direction, camouflage, weaponry. All the right words. Walk lightly and move ever closer. Never be hasty. Never give up. It's been my avocation. And once they are caught, and when finally the novelty is gone, and the loving is getting too familiar, then I shuck them, as gently as possible, leaving as few scars as I can. And I've always been able to justify it by twisting the facts around. Doreen had been treated badly by her dead motorcycle friend. So-and-so's husband has been neglecting her shamefully. What's-her-name has never realized how attractive she is and it needs to be proven to her."

  "What's that got to do with me? Just drop her as quickly as you can and try not to hurt her anymore. Don't bother either of us."

  "I'm bothering you because you gave me the feeling that there is something in the world I didn't believe existed. Whatever it is, God or destiny or eternity, it's as if you're the only doorway I know about. Why are you laughing? Am I that ridiculous?"

  "I'm laughing because you're just beginning to find out what the Lord is all about. And I've felt my faith slipping away from me ever since I f
irst met you. Our place got flooded and most of the chickens got drowned, and the kitchen garden got washed away. That was part of my punishment for beginning to doubt.

  But I can't stop doubting. I went up there twice, you know.

  Everything is so rich and fine. All you people live so good. And right in the middle of all that religion, all those big chimes and singing and preaching, my little girl is being screwed by a preacher older than her daddy. I just can't keep my faith up in the front of my mind anymore. I pray and the words don't come right. I read the Book and parts don't make the same sense they used to. We send in money and I wonder for what. I keep wondering why God would want to reach His flock through a place like the Meadows Center. If He does, then He really doesn't care much about His people."