If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  “I think that most of us are aware of somebody in our churches that has attended his meetings. I particularly have talked to maybe half a dozen people who thought this man was a legitimate minister of the Gospel, and I had to fill them in on the truth about Beau Dupere.”

  Aside from the video, no one in the meeting had yet pronounced Beau Dupere’s name, until that statement. This reflected the preparations for the event, intended to provide the wealthy healer as little free airtime as possible. Dixon glanced at Ken Bennington, who kept his eyes trained on the far wall, in order to avoid that indicting look from his fellow pastor. He knew that he had slipped off the script.

  Again, that young woman in the front row raised her hand, this time more quickly, as if grabbing a fly out of mid air. However, Dixon called on someone else, a mannequin-like woman from a local network affiliate.

  “Pastor Claiborne, have you confronted Mr. Dupere himself about these accusations? The financial improprieties, the sexual questions, and the legitimacy of his healing claims?”

  For a moment, Dixon floated on the syrupy thick tone of that reporter’s alto voice, which sounded as good in person as on the nightly news. He had to break away from the momentary hypnosis prompted by her big blue eyes and curvaceous lashes to answer.

  “Ah, yes, some of us have tried to talk to him, to tell him of our concerns, on several occasions. He fails to take us seriously, I’d say. And, in some instances, he doesn’t even bother to deny our claims, just laughing them off as if they don’t matter.”

  That young woman in the front row scribbled in her notebook when she heard the low, introspective voice and saw the distant gaze Dixon fixed while answering. “He seems to be remembering a particular conversation, or conversations,” she wrote.

  Another reporter received the nod from Dixon, before that young reporter finished writing and could raise her hand again.

  “How do you intend to carry this campaign forward from here? Do you plan any kind of action, legal or otherwise, against Mr. Dupere or his church?”

  Dixon scowled at the word “campaign,” and then yielded the microphone to Bishop Jefferson.

  “This is not a campaign, not the formation of any kind of organization, nor the launch of legal action. Rather, this is the effort of a group of united servants of God to alert our fellow believers, even beyond our own flocks and our own city, that there is a predator loose among us, that danger is near.” He spoke with his head lifted high and his voice as undulating as the California coastline. “We are issuing a warning, and certainly we will continue to issue warnings, in hopes that good people will make wise choices, and the integrity of the body of Jesus Christ will be restored.”

  As he listened, Dixon’s face shifted from raised eyebrows that bespoke admiration for the articulate bishop, to squinted eyes and his lower lip clenched under his upper teeth in concern. That young reporter in the front row wondered whether Dixon’s look was from concern about Beau Dupere, or concern that the golden-tongued bishop was stealing the show? When Dixon regained the microphone, and terminated the press conference, he seemed to confirm her suspicions. Several of the ministers cast squinting inquiries in the direction of their quarterback, but none spoke up to question the play call.

  Anna Conyers, that young reporter in the front row, folded her notebook shut and turned to look at a sound engineer next to her. His fuzzy microphone, like the tail of some arctic beast, had brushed against her cheek and she recoiled from the tickle.

  “Sorry,” said the engineer, reeling in his mic cable and telescoping in the boom.

  Anna just waved a hand at him and continued to stare down her little nose through her big glasses, as if a replay of the press conference ran on a little screen there. Though Dixon had shut her out, she was determined to ask her questions and she wouldn’t limit her interviews to only the accusers.

  Show Me Where it Hurts

  In downtown Chicago, in May, the midday sun warming the uneven pavement between the shoppers and commuters on Michigan Avenue, Beau Dupere settled his sunglasses on his nose. He had finished lunch at a pricey bistro located on that prime strip of real estate. He wore pale khaki slacks and a medium blue dress shirt. His thick hair ruffled in the lake breeze, but an expensive haircut and a moderate amount of gel kept his signature look in place. Next to him stood a much younger man, his son, Ben, who had also donned his sunglasses against the clear spring day. Ben followed his father’s gaze up and down the street. He knew that the free time before their flight home would fill up soon, and just waited to see how.

  Two middle-aged men in suits approached, apparently arguing about something, though they seemed to be at ease with each other, the intensity of their voices and gestures reaching a low ceiling before settling down. Ben glanced at his dad who nodded. Turning back toward the two men, Ben stepped in their path, as if he might be heading for the curb and a taxi cab. This slowed them down and distracted them from their conversation briefly. Beau seized the opportunity to address them.

  “Pardon us, gentlemen,” he said, with the precise confidence of upper level management, even if he looked like he might be on the way to the country club. He raised one hand chest high, holding up one finger. “You mind if I ask you something?” he said, removing his sunglasses, as if they had been a mere prop put in place just for this smoothly executed gesture.

  The older and thinner of the two, a balding man with an orange complexion, looked at Beau as if he anticipated a sales pitch. Looking like a successful salesmen, Beau was used to that response. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not gonna try to sell you something,” he said with a chuckle that seemed to settle both men. The second man, in his late forties, with slicked-back blonde hair and a gray, designer suit, studied Beau, as if trying to recall how he recognized him.

  Looking at the first man, Beau said, “I believe you have liver cancer and have been in remission until just recently. Is that right?”

  The man cocked his head back one notch, raising his nose. Now he studied Beau more closely. “Do I know you?”

  “Not yet,” Beau said with a smile. “But you will after I kill off that cancer for you.”

  “What?” the man said, his voice sharper now.

  Ben stepped up. “He can do it. He does stuff like that all the time.” He too removed his sunglasses as he spoke, revealing his smiling hazel green eyes.

  Compared to Beau, Ben seemed like an All-American Midwestern boy, his tan face under a neatly cropped head of golden brown hair. He was dressed similarly to his father, with gray slacks and a lighter blue shirt that highlighted his bright eyes.

  “Kill my cancer?” the man said. His voice had turned from skeptical to plaintive in those few seconds.

  “I’m Beau,” the smiling healer said.

  “Roger,” the man said, offering his hand.

  As Beau shook hands he hung on for an extra second. “Feel some heat starting?” He pointed toward Roger’s midsection.

  Roger looked down, glanced at his friend, and then said, “I do feel a strange heat, like inside.” His eyebrows rose above his slim glasses and he looked a question at Beau.

  “That’s what it feels like when cancer gets healed,” he said. No intensity or unusual inflection accompanied those words, as if what he said was as indisputable as a second doctor’s opinion about that cancer’s existence.

  Roger reached for his stomach, just below his rib cage. “I don’t know what it is, but it really feels good.”

  Just then his friend swore as he stared at Roger’s face.

  Roger shifted his attention to his friend, though he kept his hand in place, along with the smile that had begun to bloom. “What are you looking at?” he said, with a slight chuckle.

  “Your face . . . your skin color . . . it just changed. You look like your old self all the sudden.”

  Ben and Beau had seen the change too and traded smiles at the truth the other two men had just begun to accept.

  Roger stared, his smile falling slack, his mou
th open an inch, as if waiting for words he expected to come out. He closed his mouth and started shaking his head. “Are you sure about this?” His eyes begged for rescue, as he turned to Beau, with questions bigger than what he could formulate just then.

  A couple in their twenties stood a few feet away watching and trying to listen unobtrusively.

  “I’m sure,” Beau said. “You’re healed.” Sympathy softened his usual confident voice.

  With that, the eves dropping couple found their confirmation. “Hey, you’re that guy that heals people,” the young man said, stepping forward and pulling out his smart phone, as if his hand moved of its own volition.

  Even as he moved into position to start filming the four men, he said, “I’m gonna put this video online.”

  Beau looked at him, smiled and said, “No, I don’t think so.” As he said that, the young man’s hand dropped, though he still clung to his phone. He started to shake from head to toe. “Have a good rest,” Beau said, grabbing the young man’s empty hand. Ben, apparently ready for such an eventuality, stepped forward quickly, grabbing the guy’s other arm, and helped lower him slowly to the ground.

  As the young man rested on the pavement, in what seemed like a peaceful seizure, Beau reassured his girlfriend. “He’ll be okay. He’ll be like that for a few minutes.” Then, as he stood up straight, Beau added an afterthought. “And tonight he’s gonna realize it’s time he finally asked you to marry him.”

  The girl nodded rapidly, apparently ready to agree with anything Beau said, perhaps hoping not to meet the same fate as her boyfriend. She squatted next to him and glanced back at Beau. “Okay,” she said. Then she added, “And thank you.”

  Beau nodded, as if he knew why she was thanking him, and turned back to Roger and his friend. “We should go somewhere we can talk, before a crowd gathers,” he said.

  The two men were as agreeable as the stunned girl.

  Roger’s friend, James, led the way to a bar up the street half a block, the dark interior cave-like compared to the bright midday. There, the four men would talk for nearly two hours about healing and about God. Even then, Beau didn’t have to try to sell anyone anything, he just answered all the questions that Roger’s instant healing raised. And that conversation spread beyond the little round table, scattered with a handful of beer glasses. The other half dozen afternoon patrons either beat a hasty retreat or leaned closer to listen, until they finally pulled their chairs over. As new customers stepped inside, they made the same choice, either flight or yielding to the magnet of that intense conversation.

  Who Stays? Who Goes?

  Claire Sanchez hunkered in the embrace of the worn, yellow velour chair, her navy business suit humbled by her wrinkle-producing perch. She noticed none of it. Instead, she strained to excavate the words from the muffled rumble of voices behind the pastor’s door. A church denominational magazine in her lap disguised her full attention focused on those voices. The tone said a lot, even if she couldn’t discern the vocabulary.

  Pastor Claiborne rolled a battalion of defenders over a hill and into the valley, defense turning into full assault, but without artillery. Pastor Sampras offered surrender and then added a caveat and withdrew his white flag, though still not firing a shot. An uninitiated listener would not have been surprised at which of those voices belonged to the senior pastor, the boss in this exchange.

  Of course, Claire knew for certain what they were discussing, she just couldn’t tell for certain the color of the smoke from their fire, nor decide whether the result would require an insurance adjuster or barbeque sauce.

  Connie cleared her throat like a ’58 Chevy trying to start in winter. Claire realized too late that the church secretary had caught her eyes drifting in the direction that her ears had already been straining. She grinned a mute apology at Connie and returned to her imitation of reading a church magazine.

  The unmistakable sound of winding down, if not the sound of reconciliation, vibrated through that oak door, as Darryl Sampras approached it and Dixon Claiborne’s voice followed. Claire intensified her I’m-definitely-interested-in-this-article act and still listened as the door opened and she heard two clear words not intended for her ears.

  “. . . another job.” That was the end of the sentence spoken by Dixon over Darryl’s shoulder, as the assistant huffed through the office door and vanquished the distance to the reception door in three steps, his head down, his face red and his fists clenched. Claire felt she knew the rest of that sentence.

  Following Darryl’s exit led Claire’s gaze across Connie’s desk. There, she found the secretary reproducing her own feigned magazine interest over visitor cards stacked next to her keyboard. Connie’s version, however, included rapid breathing and a tense shaking of her head, which seemed to be mounted on a spring that had been set in motion by Darryl’s stride through the office.

  Both Connie and Claire had to decide how to follow that exit. Claire relieved Connie of having to measure how long to wait until announcing the presence of Dixon’s next appointment. Claire stood up, dropped the magazine onto the pile on the end table next to her and mumbled something about forgetting something somewhere else. The second exit settled some of the dust stirred by the first, and Connie breathed easier.

  The intercom on Connie’s phone chirped like a drowning bird and Dixon’s voice materialized out of wire and plastic.

  “Ah, Connie, let me know when that reporter from U.S. News is here, will ya?”

  “Of course, as soon as he gets here,” she said, her voice sounding more frightened than she intended, like it would have sounded if she suddenly discovered that the intercom system reached into the women’s bathroom.

  “Ah, thanks Connie,” Dixon said, oblivious to the micro dramas swirling out from his grand drama.

  So How Do I Find this Guy?

  Anna Conyers sat in her Honda Civic holding her small reporter’s notebook in her right hand, her left hand pressing a blue ballpoint pen to the paper, the ink remaining poised in its cylinder as she drifted away from the dusty dashboard and cluttered carpet, back to the press conference. She had just realized what had been missing. Beau Dupere. His name was everywhere except in the mouths of his accusers. Did they fear speaking the syllables? Did they fear some nefarious consequence to uttering that name, ricocheting their fire off his bulletproof surface and into them?

  The man did look bulletproof; so shiny and unscathed, seemingly unmarked by life. Yet he had to be over fifty years old, from what she could gather. Fifty? She stalled at that thought, from which she drifted further afield.

  She thought about how much she would rather spend an evening with Beau Dupere than with those self-righteous preachers. Of course, that must be what they hate about him so much, his looks, his money, his women.

  What about those women?

  Instantly, she was back to being the reporter who graduated from Northwestern University, with full feminist credentials. What about those women? Who are they? What do they think of Beau Dupere? Or of the coterie of conservative accusers? That would be her story. Now all she had to do is find out where they lived.

  As she discovered, the history of Beau Dupere’s real estate was both fascinating and baffling. The oldest address she found placed him in an apartment in Lawrence, Kansas, where he lived with two friends after college. There, he worked with one of those roommates who had gotten him a job for his uncle’s shipping pallet business. That was some cheap real estate.

  The next address she could find was Aurora, Colorado, from back when that town was still mostly in the planning stages, in the 1980s, not the billowing metropolis it is now. That apartment, he shared with his brother, who had been released from jail and needed someone to keep an eye on him while he cast around for something to do other than sell marijuana. She couldn’t tell what Beau did for work in those days, but found mention of his attendance of a trendy new church.

  In fact, that church affiliation connected Dupere to California, transporting him the
distance across half the continent, but still not moving him up to his present posh lifestyle. His first place of residence that she could find in Redwood, California, was the basement of a church pastor, as if that was the best the poor drifter from the Midwest could do. The first sign of some kind of career followed: a stint as the manager of a Denny’s restaurant, full benefits and a pathway to advancement included. Still, he lived in that basement next to the church, which met in a converted warehouse, literally on the wrong side of the train tracks, tracks that had once rolled lumber and then prospectors during the last dregs of the gold rush.

  He was thirty-two years old before he owned his first house, and that was given him by his deceased grandmother. That she selected him of all his relatives to receive this crown of her legacy deepened his alienation from parents and siblings. And it moved him south toward L.A. That move corresponded with a new church started by Dupere and a few of his friends, a sort of franchise of that warehouse church in Redwood.

  Here, she found the first mention of Beau Dupere in conjunction with healing someone. That appeared to be his occasional role in this new church. This was also where she found the first mention of his wife, the one listed legally as his wife, that is, Justine. Interesting that he would marry a woman with a French first name, Anna thought.

  When children entered the housing picture, the real estate increased in size and value, in the early 1990s. In those days, Dupere worked his way up in a financial brokerage firm, more of a meteoric rise, really, especially given his lack of formal training. A bachelor’s degree in history, from Kansas University, doesn’t generally land you in the big office with windows and secretarial support. By all accounts, Beau Dupere had a sort of sixth sense about investments, benefitting himself, as well as his clients, with prescient moves that prompted several investigations into insider trading over the years. He was never actually indicted.