Silver Spire (The Nero Wolfe Mysteries Book 6)

by Robert Goldsborough

  “Why are you unloading now?”

  She looked down at her coffee, pulled off the big sunglasses, and aimed green eyes at me. “Because of what Roy Meade said to me.”

  “You’ve got my attention.”

  “This is hard to talk about, but I knew this morning, when you were with Sam and me, that you were somebody who would … listen. I don’t know anything about Mr. Wolfe, but you—I don’t believe that you are judgmental.”

  I couldn’t think of a suitable response, so I didn’t say anything. She allowed a smile to escape, this one first-rate, and then went on. “After Sam and I got married—that was almost six years ago now—I felt like I’d been given a second chance. And the truth is, I had. It really started when I joined the Spire Choir, not long after I became a member of the church. I’ve got a good voice, Mr. Goodwin; I was a nightclub singer for years—here, the Poconos, the Catskills, even a couple of the smaller spots out in Vegas. Which gives you some idea of the kind of people I was hanging around with in those days.”

  She stopped for breath and more coffee, and the cup shook in her hand so much that I thought the java was going to spill onto the table. “Anyway, you don’t want to hear all this stuff. I—”

  “I want to hear whatever you choose to tell me.”

  That earned Doctor Archie another smile. “I’d been singing with the choir for, oh, maybe three months when I met Sam,” Carola said. “It was at a coffee-and-cake reception in the main lounge after one of our Sunday-afternoon choral concerts. He’d been a widower for about four years, and—well, things just developed, you know?”

  I nodded. “What about Roy Meade?”

  “Oh, yes, what he said to me. Well, about a year or so after Sam and I got married, Barney formed the Circle of Faith. I was surprised that he asked me to be part of it. I figured it was just because I was Sam’s wife, and I told Barney that it was a nice gesture, but I knew it was Sam that he really wanted in the group.

  “‘No, Carola,’ he said to me, ‘I want you there, too, every bit as much as I want Sam; your faith journey is an inspiration, and don’t ever, ever sell yourself short because of what you may view as a tarnished past. The life experiences you’ve had give you a far better perspective on the world than many people—and I believe those experiences have strengthened you greatly in your Christian walk.’ So I became part of the Circle, and I could tell almost from the first Circle meeting that Roy resented my presence there, although I didn’t know for sure why.”

  “Did you ever ask him?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’ve always gone out of my way to avoid confrontation. But I thought maybe it had something to do with my marrying Sam. Roy had known Sam’s first wife, and I figured maybe I didn’t measure up to her. Or that maybe he disapproved of the kind of life I’d lived before I found the Lord, which I guess would be easy to understand. Anyway, Roy and I hardly ever spoke to each other, except for the occasional ‘Hello, nice weather, isn’t it?’ kind of pleasantry. And then, about eight months or so ago, I was stuffing envelopes for a mailing in one of the unoccupied offices—I do volunteer things like that around the church a couple of days a week, whenever they need an extra pair of hands. The door to the office was open, and Roy was walking by in the hall. He looked at me, and then came on in and shut the door behind him.”

  “A little unusual, wasn’t it, given your relationship with him up to that point?”

  “Very, and it startled me. He came over to my desk and looked down at me, very solemn, frowning. ‘How are you and Marley getting along?’ he asked. I didn’t understand where he was heading, and I said something like ‘Just fine.’

  “‘I’ll bet it’s just fine,’ he said with a terribly nasty tone to his voice. ‘Poor, poor Sam.’

  “Then, of course, I got his drift—sometimes I’m a little slow—and I stood up and asked him, loudly, what he was talking about. I was shaking and trying to keep from crying. He just smiled—smirked—and walked out. It was awful.”

  “For the record, what is your relationship with Marley Wilkenson?”

  She nodded grimly. “A fair question. Marley’s a wonderful choir director—tough, but excellent. He really knows his stuff. And our relationship is strictly director to singer, that’s all. I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging, but he was delighted to have me in the choir. First off, I’m good, and second, he has never had to pay me, which is great for his budget. The Spire Choir has a lot of paid soloists, but not me. I’m Mrs. Sam Reese, which is all I really want to be now, and I’m happy to sing—and solo—as a volunteer.”

  “Did you tell your husband what Meade said?”

  Carola looked away from me. “No … never. Like I said, I don’t handle confrontation well, and I didn’t want to upset him. And I’d do anything to keep from hurting him in any way.”

  “Would he have believed you?”

  She held her cup with both hands and allowed her eyes to meet mine. “Yes, I’m … almost positive that he would have,” she said quietly. “And I did think about bringing it up, but I took an indirect tack instead. I asked several times if he thought I was spending too much time with the choir, and he always said something like, ‘No, no, not unless you feel stressed out.’ He loves my being in the choir. He’s very proud of me and my contribution.”

  “Did Meade ever say anything to Wilkenson similar to what he told you?”

  “Not that I know of. If so, I can’t imagine Marley keeping as quiet about it as I did. He probably would have read Roy the riot act, then gone straight to Barney to complain about him.”

  “And nobody else ever knew about what Meade said to you?”

  “I don’t think so, although I was always worried about it getting out—even though there was really nothing to get out.”

  “Why do you feel Meade said what he did?”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “I honestly don’t know, except that he really wasn’t a very nice person, and …”

  The sentence trailed off as her glance went over my shoulder. I turned to see a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a forest of curly black hair lumber into the grill. He looked as if he’d been overserved, and he blinked twice as he noticed Carola. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he slurred. “If it’s not the ol’ torch singer herself. God, I haven’t laid eyes on you in years, honey. You look great.”

  “Hello, Derek,” she replied listlessly.

  “You don’t sound real happy to see an old friend,” he told her, leaning on the table and grinning, then tossing a look my way. The atmosphere around the booth had quickly turned eighty-six-proof.

  “Derek, this is Archie Goodwin. Archie, Derek MacKay,” she said.

  “Don’t bother gettin’ up, pal,” MacKay said, slapping a beefy palm on my shoulder. He turned back to Carola. “So, I heard someplace that you went and got hitched up to a preacher-type over on Staten Island. This him?”

  Carola cringed and obviously wanted to crawl under the table. “No, Archie is a friend,” she murmured.

  MacKay guffawed. “He don’t look to me like a preacher. Oh, I get it, baby. You got yourself both a husband and a friend now. Pretty nice deal.”

  I shot him my best scowl. “Tell you what, Derek, why don’t you go back outside and get some air? Mrs. Reese and I have some things to discuss.”

  Another guffaw. “Oh, so her name’s Reese now, eh? And I’ll just bet you two have got stuff to talk about. Good stuff. How’d you get so lucky, pal?”

  “Pal, you started in on the joy juice pretty early today. It’s time for you to leave,” I told him, standing up. He had two inches in height on me, and probably at least that much in reach. But he was tanked, and that gave me a false sense of security. When his right came, I wasn’t fast enough, and the fist caught me on the left cheek, knocking me backward. A couple at the next booth and an old guy on a stool got up and moved to the rear of the room, while the waitress stared from behind the counter, her mouth open.

  I grabbed MacKay’s right arm and in
one quick twist had him in a hammerlock, just like the book says to do. He howled and called me a couple of colorful endearments, and I pushed him toward the door. “We’re going out to see what the weather’s like,” I said, moving him ahead of me as the filth kept spewing out of his mouth.

  “I can either see how far your arm will go before it breaks,” I told him when we were outside, “or I can let loose of it and you can walk away, just like nothing happened. But if I do let go and you try something stupid, you’ll be lying on the sidewalk faster than you can say your favorite naughty word. What’s the choice?” I gave his arm another upward yank, just in case he needed reminding.

  “God, all right, I’ll go, I’ll go!” I dropped his arm, and damned if the lumbering oaf didn’t come at me with another right, a roundhouse. This time I was ready. I blocked it easily and caught him on the chin with a right, following it with another right to the stomach, which doubled him over. I was ready for more, but he just clutched his gut with both hands, groaning. Our one-round bout had drawn a small but noisy crowd. Give New Yorkers something they want to see, and they’ll turn out for it.

  “I know, you’re going to tell me that if you’d been sober, you would have put me away with three punches, four at the most,” I said. “I’m willing to admit that’s a possibility, but unlikely.”

  He swore again and straightened up, gritting his teeth and glaring. Whatever effect he was trying for didn’t exactly come off, and he staggered off down Third Avenue, still swearing.

  Carola was on her feet when I went back into the grill. “Are you all right?” she asked tightly. “Oh, you’re not—look at your face!” She dipped a napkin into her water glass and touched it to my cheek.

  I flinched and smiled. “Hey, this is part of the reason Mr. Wolfe pays me so much.” I noticed that the other customers had left the place, and the waitress was staring at me like I had German measles.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Carola said, pulling the napkin away gently and grimacing at the small red blot on it as we sat down again. “He—Derek—is one of those people I told you about before, from my old life. I hadn’t seen him in years; I didn’t even know he lived in New York. It just shows that you can’t run away from your past mistakes. They’ll always catch up with you somehow.”

  “I don’t buy that, and neither should you. I seem to recall something from my Sunday-school days about forgiveness for sins. How do you know MacKay?”

  “He was a bartender at one of the places up in the Catskills where I used to sing. He was always asking me to go out, but I never had much use for him. Even then, and that was close to ten years ago, he was a bad drunk.”

  “Yeah. Well, he hasn’t gotten any better. Ever see anybody else from your old life?”

  “Never—this was the first time since I’ve been married, and I hope the last.”

  I dabbed my cheek with another napkin. It was tender, but the bleeding had stopped. “Getting back to Meade, why do you think he said what he did to you?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Before Derek walked in, I started to say that Roy really wasn’t a nice person, but then, you already know what I thought about him from when you talked to Sam and me.”

  “I seem to remember the word ‘loathe’ being mentioned. Is there any chance Meade made some remark to your husband about you and Wilkenson?”

  She contemplated her fingernails. “I don’t think so,” she answered deliberately. “I think Sam would have told me about it.”

  “But you did not tell him.”

  “No.”

  “Even though you were positive he would have believed there was nothing between you and Wilkenson?”

  Tears formed in Carola’s eyes, and she started to shiver. “Oh, I guess maybe I was worried about how he’d react. I mean, he knows all about what my life was like … before. So do all the others in the Circle. I’ve talked about it, and except for Roy, they’ve been very supportive and understanding. But I’m still very self-conscious about those years. I just have never felt like I’m as good a person as the others.”

  “Why did you really choose to tell me about Meade’s nasty little comment?”

  She wiped her tears with another paper napkin. “I suppose I was worried that it might come out from somebody else.”

  “So you really were suspicious that he had talked to others about you and Wilkenson.”

  She sighed, and a tear spilled out of one of those jade-green eyes. “I guess so,” she whimpered. “There’s something else, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “Years ago, I had a child. I wasn’t married, but the father was, and he had no interest at all either in me or the baby. In fact, he was willing to pay me to keep quiet about everything. I didn’t want his money, though; he was really a bad one, Archie. Of course, I was hardly a bargain myself.” She stopped for breath and a sip of now-tepid coffee.

  “Anyway, I put the baby—it was a little girl—up for adoption, and I have no idea where she is today. She’d be fifteen on her next birthday. Now, this part of my life I never told anybody at the Silver Spire about, not even Sam. I just couldn’t bring myself to. But Roy Meade found out about it.”

  “How?”

  “This is my year to run into so-called old friends. I said it never happened before, but actually Derek MacKay is the second one. The father of my child climbed out of his hole in the ground about six weeks ago. He saw my picture in a feature one of the smaller local papers did on the church choir. He’s not married anymore, and he needs money, so …”

  “So he’s a blackmailer?”

  Carola swallowed hard. “He wrote a letter to the church, addressed to ‘Senior Pastor—Personal.’ And wouldn’t you know, Roy was the one who opened it. Barney was away at the time on a combination vacation and evangelical crusade to Australia, so Roy was handling all his mail.”

  “I’ll bet Meade loved getting that piece of correspondence,” I said.

  “He did,” Carola agreed glumly. “He came running to me with it. It was asking for five hundred dollars, as a ‘consideration for maintaining a discreet silence about an event that could embarrass the Golden Spire church.’ The jerk, Kyle is his name, couldn’t even get the color of the steeple right. To say nothing of the fact that nobody with any brains would try to blackmail a church. Me, maybe; the church, no way.”

  “Kyle sounds like a real sweetheart. What did Meade say when he showed you the letter?”

  “He could hardly hide his glee. He made a big, pompous deal out of telling me how he hadn’t showed it to anybody at the Spire, and wouldn’t. He said he was going to take care of things with Kyle, but he smirked the whole time. And then—God, how I hated Roy Meade—he said, ‘Let this be a lesson to you, Carola. I, of course, believe in forgiveness, just as our Lord does, but I must tell you, I’m having a hard time believing you have turned your back on your past transgressions. One misstep of any kind on your part, and I will have to consider what to do with this letter.’ What Roy Meade didn’t know, Archie, is that not even Sam was aware of what had happened all those years ago. If Roy had known, he would have made life even more miserable for me.”

  “Did you ever figure out how Meade ‘took care of things’ with Kyle?”

  She shook her head and stared at the tabletop. “Honestly, I think he could have just scared the guy off. Like I said, Kyle is a real jerk, or at least he was when I knew him, and the letter sounds like he hasn’t changed one bit. But also, I think he’s basically a coward. My guess is that Roy intimidated him somehow. I never wanted to ask. That letter, which Roy showed me but presumably kept, bothered me plenty. But it bothered me a lot more that Roy Meade had a sort of hold on me, and he could use it anytime he wanted to.”

  “But what would he use it for?” I asked.

  “I’m honestly not sure. He never came on to me, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Carola said bitterly. “I really think he just liked having power over people. He was a manipulator; he always wanted control.”

&n
bsp; “Did you kill Meade?” I kept my tone conversational.

  She jerked upright, knocking over her mug, which had less than a thimbleful of coffee in it. “Of course I didn’t!” she hissed in a loud whisper. “Or else I wouldn’t be telling you this.” She looked at me as though I’d just slapped her.

  “Sometimes guilty people talk a lot,” I responded. “Maybe to throw their questioners off track. And—”

  “So you don’t believe me?” Carola wasn’t whispering anymore, which meant we once again were the center of attention in the grill. She started crying again and began to slide out of the booth.

  “I didn’t say I don’t believe you,” I corrected her, holding up a palm. “Has that letter from Kyle been found among Meade’s effects?”

  She looked down again and began making circles on the Formica with a manicured index finger. When she finally opened her mouth, the “No” was almost inaudible.

  “It probably wasn’t hard to locate, was it?”

  She lifted her head slowly, fixing me with eyes that held no warmth. “What does that mean?”

  I grinned. “Don’t let my youthful looks fool you; I may appear to be only a few years removed from my Eagle Scout badge, but I’ve been around the block a few times, and not necessarily to help little old ladies cross the street. Was the letter from Kyle in Meade’s desk?”

  She clearly wanted to be someplace else—anyplace—but she stuck it out like a trouper. After some fiddling with her empty mug, she brushed hair back from her forehead and fixed me again with those marvelous green eyes, which now were warming up. “Yes, it was in his desk,” she said, making a stab at smiling. “I waited until after the police had made their search of Roy’s office. They really didn’t spend much time, if any, going through his stuff. I guess because they knew they had the right man.”

  “I guess. Did it take you long to find the letter?”

  She blushed. Nobody likes to be found out as a snoop, regardless of the reason for the snoopery. “Not really, no. I figured it would be in one of his desk drawers, not in a filing cabinet. I was right. Two days after Roy was murdered, I got to the Spire early in the morning—I told Sam I wanted to rehearse a solo. I found the letter in less than fifteen minutes, tucked away in a stack of miscellaneous papers.”