Fallen Angels

by Alice Duncan

  “Bother.” The whole mess was making me feel crazy.

  At that moment the front door opened, and who should walk in but Detective Phil Bigelow. I didn’t even try to smile at him. I was too angry.

  “Phil,” I said in a stony voice that reminded me of my mother.

  He took off his hat and walked over to stand in front of my desk, placing one of his hands on one of the chairs I’d placed there so that clients wouldn’t get too close. “Listen, Mercy, we’re doing everything we can to find out the murderer of that woman.”

  “So Ernie thinks. I don’t share his opinion. Or yours. And you know as well as I do that O’Reilly is just longing to pin the murder on Ernie.”

  Phil winced. I suppose my statement had been bald and merciless—unlike my name—but I didn’t care. I was still furious, darn it.

  “Mercy.” Phil sounded almost desperate. “Ernie’s my best friend. Do you think I want him to go to prison for such a heinous crime? I’m not going to allow O’Reilly to railroad him, either.”

  “I don’t know what you want, Detective Bigelow, but I aim to clear my boss’s name. And I don’t trust your precious Detective O’Reilly any farther than I could toss a . . . a grand piano!”

  Ernie appeared, looking disheveled, at his office door. “Don’t even bother talking with her, Phil. She’s sure that damned church is involved in the case somehow, and once Mercy’s mind is set on something, it takes a crowbar and a blowtorch to get it unstuck.”

  I rose regally from my office chair. “Fine. If that’s what you think, that’s just fine. I’ll just go out and do some snooping on my own then.”

  “Hey, Mercy, don’t you have to work until lunchtime?”

  I guess Ernie thought he was being cute.

  Turning to glare at him, I said, “So fire me.”

  Then I grabbed my hat and handbag and barged past Phil and out into the hallway. I heard a faint “Mercy!” as I headed down the hall to the staircase, but I didn’t stop in my progress. I didn’t know which man had said my name, either.

  When I got to the lobby, Lulu asked, “Where you going, Mercy? You look steamed.”

  “I am steamed,” I declared. “Ernie and Phil Bigelow are such . . . such men!”

  I saw Lulu’s eyes widen. “Uh-oh. Sounds like you guys had a little disagreement.”

  “A little one? I swear to heaven, Lulu, if I don’t take charge of this case, Ernie will swing. Or go to prison for the rest of his life. Neither Phil nor he seem to have the slightest interest in the most important aspect of the death of Mrs. Chalmers! And that man who’s supposed to be in charge of the case, that Detective O’Reilly, hates Ernie’s guts!”

  “Golly. I thought Bigelow was in charge of the case.”

  “No. Unfortunately, one of Ernie’s bitterest enemies has that privilege. And I’m darned sure he doesn’t care any more than Ernie or Phil do about what seems to me to be the most glaring aspect of the case!”

  “They don’t?” Lulu paused in the act of filing her nails and glanced up at me, standing rigid before her, my handbag under my arm and my fists clenched. “Well, that Bigelow character did try to pin a murder on Rupert, so I believe it about him. And I don’t know O’Reilly, but I’d believe anything about an L.A. copper. But Ernie? Shoot, Mercy, it’s his life that’s at risk here. Don’t you think he wants to find out who the real killer is?”

  I sagged a trifle. “I’m sure he does, but he seems to have lost heart, Lulu, and that worries me. A whole lot.”

  Lulu shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine Ernie losing heart. He’s so . . . I dunno. So . . .”

  She couldn’t come up with the right word, so I supplied a few of my own. “Nonchalant? Insouciant? Casual?”

  “Um . . . I’m not sure what those two first words mean, but you’re right about the casual part. I can’t imagine Ernie caring a whole lot about anything.”

  Her words gave me pause, and I sank into the chair in front of her desk. “He doesn’t care that his life might be in danger?” I thought about the unsettling notion.

  “Well. I don’t mean that, exactly. It’s just that . . . I dunno.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” I said. “Ernie gives the impression that he’s a devil-may-care man of the world. He wants everyone to think he’s jaded and cynical. What I think is that he cares too much. He puts on that casual air, but you do know he quit the police department because he couldn’t stand the corruption there, don’t you?”

  With a sniff, Lulu said, “I can believe that. About the corruption, I mean.”

  “And if he truly didn’t care about anything, the corruption wouldn’t bother him, would it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And he considers Phil Bigelow about the only honest copper in Los Angeles.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Lulu said, still in stout defense of her innocent brother whom Phil had locked up the prior month.

  “Well . . . I don’t know. I think he’s as honest as he can be. Whatever that means.” The idea of Phil Bigelow manfully attempting to maintain his integrity in the face of monumental police corruption gave me pause.

  Was Phil truly an honest man in a dishonest profession? How could he stand it? I don’t believe I could. On the other hand, while I didn’t know a single thing about Phil’s background, I know mine was grounded in the fundamentals of Bostonian propriety and, therefore, not particularly tolerant of any digressions therefrom. But did Phil really tolerate the misdemeanors—perhaps even the felonies—of his fellow policemen without objecting or trying to make such behavior cease? How could he?

  Then again, what else could he do? Maybe being a copper was the only thing he knew how to do. Maybe he had a family to support. I didn’t know much about Phil personally. I suppose he could quit and take up the profession of private investigator. If he had a family, he probably wouldn’t dare do that. Knowing how little income Ernie’s private investigation business produced, it was difficult for me to imagine competition from dozens of honest coppers who quit the force because of corruption in the L.A.P.D. Heck, there weren’t enough straying husbands and wives or fraudulent insurance claims in the entire city of Los Angeles to keep a whole army of private eyes in work.

  I sat in the chair, slouched in a position of which my mother would never approve, and thought dismal thoughts.

  “Where were you going in such a hurry, Mercy?” Lulu asked at last.

  “Hmm?” I looked from my handbag in my lap to Lulu’s face, which was plastered again this morning with makeup. Well, why not? Nothing Sister Emmanuel had harangued us with yesterday mentioned anything about makeup or the use thereof, although I knew from articles I’d read that she greatly disapproved of what she considered “wicked women.” I wondered what she thought about the “wicked men” who used them. But that was a whole ’nother kettle of fish. Anyhow, Lulu wasn’t wicked, but she did wear a lot of makeup, which was a trademark of the “wicked” group, or so I’d been led to understand.

  “You came down those stairs like a man on a mission. Or a girl on a mission, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” I said, borrowing a word from Lulu’s vocabulary. “I’m definitely on a mission. I’m going back to the Angelica Gospel Hall, and I’m going to get a handle on exactly what Mrs. Chalmers did there.”

  “You really think the church is involved somehow in her murder?” Lulu appeared as skeptical as she sounded.

  “Not the church itself, but somebody connected with it. Yes, I do.”

  “Yeah?”

  I lifted my hands and spread them in a gesture of despair. “Everyone else has been ruled out, Lulu! Somebody committed that murder, and it wasn’t Ernie! I’m the one who found him drugged and tied up, remember?” I added bitterly, “Even though the police don’t believe me.”

  “Rotten bananas, all of them,” she muttered.

  “Besides, while I can see Ernie killing if he had to . . . say, if someone he loved was in danger or something, I can’t feature him brutally ba
shing a client on the head and pushing her down the stairs. Especially if the client was a woman. For one thing, we don’t have enough clients that we can afford to be killing them off.”

  Although I hadn’t meant the comment to be funny, Lulu laughed. Eventually, even I saw the humor in my boss’s too-few clients. With a sigh, I rose, feeling a little more chipper after my chat with Lulu. “Don’t forget, we’ve got a date for lunch at the Ambassador this coming Wednesday, Lulu.”

  Her eyes brightened up. “That’s right. I can hardly wait. I’ll wear my very best dress.”

  Oh, boy. I couldn’t wait to see that. “I’ll be back in a bit. If Ernie or Phil ask after me, tell them I’ve gone to do their jobs for them.”

  “At the Angelica Gospel Hall?”

  “That’s where I aim to begin, yes.”

  “I dunno, Mercy. That lead seems kind of slim to me.”

  “Yes. It seems slim to Ernie and Phil and Detective O’Reilly, too, curse them.”

  “Hey, don’t curse me.”

  “I won’t. I’m just angry with those three men at the moment.”

  “See ya later.” Lulu went back to filing her nails.

  Were they all right? Ernie, Phil, O’Reilly, and Lulu? Was there no connection between that wretched church and the death of Mrs. Persephone Chalmers? And, of all nonsensical things, I still wanted to know why she didn’t call herself Mrs. Franchot Chalmers. Was that something to do with the church, too? I understood that Sister Emmanuel didn’t care for earthly titles, but why wouldn’t Mrs. Chalmers use her husband’s first name in correspondence and stuff like that? When she first called Ernie in that stupid, breathy voice of hers, she’d called herself Mrs. Persephone Chalmers.

  Nuts.

  Thanks to the late, generous legacy of my great-aunt Agatha, I took a cab from the Figueroa Building to the Angelica Gospel Hall. Only when we were almost there did I wonder if the church might not be open on Mondays. But churches were always open, weren’t they, so that people could go in and pray? Or was it only Catholic churches that were open all the time? Shoot. I didn’t know. Still, at least the administrative staff should be there, I thought.

  Did churches have administrative staffs?

  Nuts again. The things I didn’t know about the Angelica Gospel Hall could fill a library. Actually, they probably would, if you cut out and pasted into books all the articles written about the Hall and Adelaide Burkhard Emmanuel. My mind boggled at such a library, and I wondered if religious libraries really existed. They must, mustn’t they? Heck, before King Henry VIII, didn’t the monks in all the monasteries write those illuminated manuscripts? They must have been kept in libraries. I think.

  The cab pulling to a stop in front of the Hall stopped my mind from wandering down fruitless paths, which was a good thing since I was already confused enough. I paid the cabbie, got out, and stared at the immense edifice before me for a few moments. Two huge radio towers had been installed a few years before, so that people all over the United States could hear Sister Emmanuel’s message. From what I read in the papers, thousands of people believed that message and sent her money to prove it.

  Was Sister Emmanuel only in this religious thing for the money? After meeting her, I couldn’t believe it.

  That didn’t leave out all the people who worked with her, though. What if Mrs. Chalmers had uncovered some dire plot to divert some of the money that people sent in, supposedly to help with the church, so the money was lining non-church pockets? That would be a good motive to kill her, wouldn’t it?

  It was difficult for me to imagine the fluttery Persephone Chalmers uncovering much of anything, but that was because I held her in what I’m sure was irrational dislike. And she was dead. Shame on me.

  With a sigh, I started walking up the wide, white stairs to the big doors of the church. If I were to guess, I’d guess, Sister Emmanuel had designed those stairs—or she’d had someone else design them—so that people would believe themselves to be on a stairway leading to heaven as they climbed them. Was that a cynical thought? Was I turning into an Ernie-type female?

  Ghastly thought. Almost as ghastly as the notion of turning into a Mother-type female.

  On the way up those stairs, I worried that the huge double doors might be locked. Then what would I do? Was there a back entrance to the place? Well, of course, there was. And a couple of side ones, too, but they wouldn’t help me gain entry if they were all locked, would they?

  I needn’t have worried. The front door to the sanctuary opened with nary a whisper, thanks to whoever oiled the hinges on a regular basis; perhaps that, too, was one of Brother Everett’s many tasks. The church was very well maintained. Well, it should be, given that it had such a huge congregation, all of whom, I presumed, donated money, or time and effort, or some of all of these to its upkeep. Imagine that. One smallish woman had created her own gigantic empire in the name of God. While I was still of two minds about Sister Emmanuel’s message, I admired her sincerity and plain, good old marketing ability. That she’d also, according to some published articles I read, trampled the Bible under her feet to come up with her own version of Jesus Christ’s message wasn’t anything new. People had done that since the year aught, I suppose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have huge churches of all denominations, would we? And probably before the year aught, as well. If not, we’d all be united under one idea about God and how His church should be run.

  My philosophical mood dissipated as I walked through the gigantic lobby and into the sanctuary. By gum, people were there! There weren’t many of them, but still, it was kind of nice to know the Hall welcomed folks all day long. One woman knelt at the altar, and a couple of other folks seemed to be praying in pews.

  Looking around, I didn’t see hide nor hair of Sister Emmanuel, however. Drat. I’d really wanted to speak to her. For all her religious fervor, she’d seemed a sensible woman when I’d met her, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t pooh-pooh my ideas as Ernie had. In fact, she was probably eager to discover who had murdered one of her flock. It didn’t look good to have congregants butchered, after all. Mrs. Chalmers’ affiliation with the Angelica Gospel Hall had been written about in many a local newspaper, and Sister Emmanuel would undoubtedly welcome the arrest and conviction of her murderer.

  That’s what I told myself as I walked toward the chancel, trying to recollect how one got to Sister Emmanuel’s office. There had been a door and a hall and . . . Oh, bother.

  “Sister Allcutt?”

  Startled, I spun around to see a familiar face. Thank goodness! “Sister Everett, I’m so glad to see you.”

  “I must say I’m rather surprised to see you,” she responded in what didn’t sound to me like a very welcoming voice. Nevertheless, she walked toward me, a very, very large, robust woman in a white gown. I got the impression most of the insiders who worked within these hallowed walls wore white regularly.

  “If I could, I’d like to speak with Sister Emmanuel for a minute or two. I won’t take up much of her time.”

  Sister Everett reached me. She towered over me, and I had to bend my head back to look into her eyes, which seemed cold and distant, although that might just be my prejudice showing. “Sister Emmanuel and Brother Everett left some time ago to go to an interview at a radio station downtown.”

  “Oh.” Darn it. “Do you know how long they’ll be gone?”

  “No, I don’t.” She pasted on a smile. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  Was there? Shoot, I didn’t know. What the heck. I suppose it was the duty of a good private investigator to use the materials at hand. “Well . . . I’m here to do some more investigation into the Chalmers murder,” I said, rather weakly I’m afraid.

  Sister Everett heaved a deep sigh. “I don’t know what you expect to find out here, but if you’ll assist me in straightening out the hymnals in the pews, perhaps I can answer questions for you while we wait the return of Sister Emmanuel.”

  “Happy to help,” I said, meaning it. At least th
e woman was willing to answer my questions, providing I could think of any.

  “What we need to do,” she said as she walked to the front of the sanctuary, “is make sure all the pews contain two hymnals and one Bible in each holder. People are always stuffing Sunday bulletins into the holders, and we must be sure to remove them and any other trash they leave behind.” She sniffed. “You’d expect people would treat the house of God with some respect, wouldn’t you?”

  “Indeed, yes.” We sure did back in Boston, anyway. If Chloe or I had even thought about leaving behind a hankie or a church bulletin, we’d hear about it for weeks.

  She carried a big white cloth bag kind of like a pillow case, into which we stuffed all left-over bulletins, irrelevant pieces of paper, and so forth. “So, what did you want to ask?” Her voice sounded crisp and efficient.

  “Well, let me see.” Sheesh. I’d already asked everybody all the questions I could think of. “Um, how long was Mrs. Chalmers a member of the church?”

  Another sniff. “I recall seeing her for the first time about a year ago.”

  “I see. And did she ever attend church with another person?”

  “She and Sister Pinkney were very close, I believe. I don’t know if they ever traveled here together.”

  “I see.” Now what? Well, what the heck. “What about Mr. Chalmers? Did he ever attend church with her?”

  “Not that I know of. I don’t even know what the man looks like, but I don’t recall seeing her enter the sanctuary with a man.”

  “I see.”

  “The only person I recall seeing Sister Chalmers with regularly was Sister Pinkney.”

  “I see. Did you know that Mrs. Pinkney’s husband was—probably still is—against Mrs. Pinkney attending the Angelica Gospel Hall?”

  “Yes, indeed. Sinful man. I pray daily for Sister Pinkney and for Mr. Pinkney, too, that he’ll see the light and stop persecuting the poor woman for doing God’s work.”