Sam took a closer look. Funny Thing Number Two: all the Marys had the same face, the same pretty smile, the same fat cheeks. This had to be Nadine.
“Help you?”
Sam jumped a foot high as a tiny old man dawdled through a side door with a broom. “I’m looking for Sister Nadine.”
“Well, go on back that way.” He flapped a hand like it was a dust rag over toward the right of the lobby.
“Through those doors, up one flight of stairs. I reckon she’s up there, all right.”
Sam thanked him, and at the top of the stairs found another set of double doors. When she pushed them open, all her preconceptions went bye-bye.
*
It was by now edging onto seven P.M., yet this office, a study in black and soft gray modern Italian design, was humming like the coffee had just perked and it was rise-and-shine time.
“May I help you?” asked an officious little number in an expensive black suit that looked nice with the furniture.
Sam gave her her name and her Constitution business card.
“I don’t think you have an appointment.” The suit frowned.
No, she didn’t. And she hated to intrude. But she was in town for only a little while. Would it be too much trouble to ask—?
The suit’s neatly coiffed head bobbed up and down. Nothing else moved, not even the heavy gold ear clips. Sam could take a seat, she said. The pile of magazines and papers was neat too. U.S. News & World Report. Forbes. Money. Barron’s. The Journal. Not a single Broadman Hymnal to be found.
All around her, business bustled on well-shod feet. Women, mostly young, came and went across an ocean of pale gray pile, pausing at intersections with sheafs of papers, reports, ledgers, giving her little polite smiles.
It was all cool, calm, efficient, and serene—the women as well-tuned as a bunch of Stepford wives.
Against a back wall Sam spotted a mainframe computer about the size of a large car. An old Buick, say. Her mind slipped into reverse. She replayed that night—the rain, the dark, the crash of heavy steel.
“Ms. Adams?” The suit was back. “Sister Nadine will see you now.”
*
Just went to show you how wrong a person could be. TV evangelist? Female? Rubenesque statuary downstairs? Kitty had said something about pies? A cross between Julia Child and Tammy Bakker was sort of what she had in mind.
Not this rotund, to be sure, but suavely beautiful woman in her mid-forties, her gold and platinum hair twisted into a chignon, silver at ears and throat, her bulk artfully camouflaged head to toe in floating drifts of black. Roseanne’s body beneath Kathleen Turner’s face.
“Ms. Adams.” The voice was Turner’s, too, husky, sexy. The grip firm. “What can I do for you this evening?” In Nadine’s sleek office they sat facing each other on black leather club chairs to the right of her desk—a cool white marble slab.
Sam was nonplussed. In her line of work she’d happened upon corpses that gave her less pause than this living woman’s persona.
Sister Nadine smiled. “You’ve seen me on TV.”
“Nooo.”
“They told you I play the tambourine, speak in tongues, and wail.”
“Something like that.”
“They tell you I don’t wear shoes too?”
Sam couldn’t help looking down. Beneath trim ankles Nadine wore beautiful black calf pumps.
Nadine laughed. “Look, I give them what they want. Remember what H. L. Mencken said.”
“‘No one ever went broke underestimating—
“‘—the taste of the American people.’ It’s the secret of my success.” Nadine smiled. “And what do you want, Samantha?”
“Sam.” She laid out for Nadine her mission for the Lee family.
“Oh.” Nadine’s pretty face clouded. “Dear Church. I do miss him so.”
“So he was a—”
“A believer?” A rueful smile. “Church was a good Uptown Catholic. He wasn’t one of my followers, though he believed in my work and sometimes recommended that people like Mr. Leander come and talk with me. And we were friends.”
As in lovers?
“Special friends?”
“You might say that.”
Sam didn’t want to let it go.
“How special?”
“Now, Sam. I could never answer a question like that for a member of the press, could I?”
So be it. But she thought romance was the right track. Nadine could have been Church’s secret girlfriend, the one Kitty had hinted at. Her public image would be ample reason for the secrecy.
“I’m curious. Do you think his death was accidental?” She watched Nadine’s face carefully.
“I do.” The evangelist answered without a quiver.
“So you don’t know why anyone would have wanted him dead?”
“I didn’t say that. I do. Or, rather, I did.”
“That’s a yes?”
“You’ve met Cole Leander?”
“I have.”
“Cole wanted to do terrible things to Church.”
“And do you think he did?”
“No. I know he didn’t.”
“How?”
“Because we talked about that, and he came to see that the right thing to do was to forgive Church. To pray for his salvation, to pray that he would never make such a terrible and careless mistake again.”
“So you do believe—?”
“In the power of prayer? In the power of salvation? I’m not a total shuck-and-jive artist, Sam.”
Sam would blush when embarrassed till the day she died. Now the blood spread up her neck and face. “I meant—do you believe what Leander said? That he wouldn’t”—she stammered—“I didn’t mean that I thought you—”
“Of course you did. You see me on TV, you see a fat woman with long blond hair streaming down her back, dressed in a white robe, singing and dancing and telling you how Jesus loves you just the way you are. For your ownself. How Jesus wants you to make a joyful noise. Wants you to love yourself. All of yourself. Be yourself. Even your fat self. Sister Nadine even gives you recipes for pies. Of course you think I’m a shuck. But that’s because you don’t come from what I come from. Don’t know what I know. Don’t know the mingy tight pinched little lives people like me grow up with. Don’t know how much we’d love to love the Lord.”
Nadine’s voice had been growing bigger and deeper and wider. Now its cellolike resonance filled the room. In one graceful movement she was out of her chair, whirling around the room on nimble feet.
“Rednecks want to love the Lord same as other folks, looser folks, do. Want to sing the praises of the Lord. Dance the jubilation of the Lord. Raise Him up while they’re partying down.
“Folks don’t want to spend their whole lives feeling bad. Feeling guilty. Sad. Eating saltine crackers and drinking Welch’s grape juice, pretending it’s the Body and the Blood.”
Nadine was swaying now.
“Folks want to feel jubilation. Feel joy that they don’t need booze for. Don’t need drugs for. Don’t need anything but the power of their own hearts, telling ’em to do what comes natural.”
Then Nadine took a deep breath and seemed to catch herself in midflight. She floated for a moment, slowed, then stopped. Reached inside her sleeve and pulled out a white square of linen edged in lace and wiped her brow.
“I ain’t one of those Southern women what glow,” she said, putting on the accent. “How about you?”
Sam laughed. “Me either. I sweat.”
Sam could see why Church would be drawn to her. She was drawn to her. Nadine had that thing, that magic, that all stars possess.
Nadine settled herself back down. “Well, well, now, now. You must forgive me. I get carried away. Now, we’ve talked about Church. Cole Leander. Is there anything else you want to know?”
“Yes. Do you know Church’s daughter, Zoe?”
Once again a cloud crossed Nadine’s smooth brow. “I’ve never met her, but I pray for
her.”
“You do? Why?”
Nadine stared at her with amazed blue eyes. “Why, because of all her problems. She’s such a sad child. I hope somehow we can save her.”
“Church talked about her?”
“Of course. He was worried sick about her.”
“He knew about the drugs?”
“The cocaine? Yes.”
“Did he know she was dealing?”
“Oh, dear.” Nadine took a long deep breath, then sighed. “No, I don’t think so. He never said so to me.”
“Do you think he would if he’d known?”
Sam waited. Finally, softly, Nadine said, “I don’t know. I think so, but I can’t be sure. Oh, it makes me so sad to hear you say that about Zoe. Our young people. Our poor children. They’ve inherited a hard world, haven’t they?”
“Indeed they have. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes, have to start over now.”
“Nor I. However.” She was up on her feet again, but not because she was moved with the spirit. Sam could see that Nadine was moving on to something else in her mind. Some other agenda was pressing. The interview was done. “We do what we can.”
“And what’s that?” Sam was gathering her things together, but she wanted to know what Nadine meant.
Nadine waved her hand at the offices out through her open door. “Is this where you think the money stops? I make millions with my ministry, you know.”
“I have no idea what you do.”
“We invest it. Half the young ladies you see out there are financial planners. The money grows like Topsy.” She grinned. “That’s the nice thing about money, you know. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t live very nicely, I’d be the first to tell you that I do, but the bulk of what I raise goes into shelters for women and children and for rehab centers. We have three centers in the state and we’re building more.”
“Rehab for whom?”
“Youngsters with drug problems. They come to us, at no charge, for a minimum of eighteen months. They learn real-life skills, build projects, I mean buildings as well as their self-esteem. We have construction contracts all over the state—though right now we have to work harder because the economy’s so slow. That’s how Church and I met. He’d heard about my work and came to talk with me about Zoe.” They were at the door now. “He loved her so.”
“But she wasn’t ready to enroll in your program?”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“She hasn’t bottomed-out yet.” Sam thought, it takes the Lees a while. Sometimes, like Church, they don’t live long enough to begin the long climb back.
“No,” said Nadine. “She’s not ready to help herself.”
Then Sam heard herself saying, “I know something about it. I’ve had my own problems with alcohol.”
Nadine’s sweet smile was like the Marys’ downstairs. Patient. Understanding. Compassionate. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
There were spooky ladies in this town. G.T. and her voudou and now this.
“Did you read my mind?”
“Just a feeling. The Lord sends us those we need. He works in mysterious way.” Nadine was still smiling the Mary smile.
But it faded the moment Sam left. As the door clicked closed behind Sam, Nadine picked up a silver picture frame she’d earlier turned facedown on her cold marble desk. Now she ran her fingers across the features beneath the glass and whispered, “Oh, sweet Jesus. What have you gone and done now, sweet baby mine?”
Nineteen
LAVERT, DRESSED IN chef’s whites, was standing over his six-burner Garland, making sauce for Joey, who called it gravy. He and the boys were lounging at the other end of the kitchen around a big round table.
That same table had been the site of many a meeting. There, over ziti with rapini, the decision had been made to do Mickey Boy Gambino. Over braciola, Ralphie “the Ear” Zambolini’s fate had been sealed. And it had been a first course of bruschetta the boys were enjoying on that night when Joey’s uncle Carlos decided it would be just the ticket to help D.A. Jim Garrison implicate Clay Shaw, the director of the Trade Mart who’d renovated the apartments next door, in the Kennedy imbroglio.
But that was all way before Lavert’s time, and even before that the oak table had sat in Carlos’s mother’s kitchen, and her mother’s before her in Messina.
It wasn’t just fancy Uptown citizens who furnished their houses with antiques, who knew about keeping things in the family.
“Hey, Gino, you tasted my man’s gravy?” Joey was saying now.
“Sure, I tasted his fucking gravy. Lotsa times.”
Joey’s heavy glass tumbler of Valpolicella hit the table with a thud. Gino’s shirtfront looked like Ralphie the Ear’s when they’d finished with him.
“Hey!”
“Hey your fucking self, talking ’bout my man’s fucking gravy. It’s my mother’s gravy. You treat it with respect.”
Gino knew when to stand up for himself and when to sit down. Speaking about Joey’s mother, even inadvertently, it was best to do the latter.
“Sorry, Joey. I didn’t mean nothing.”
“Okay, you apologized to me, now apologize to my man.”
Lavert looked up across the top of the counter, steady gaze, nothing on it. He knew how hard this was for Gino, didn’t want to have to pay the price for it sometime down the road, when Gino, with a fresh round in his Uzi, might mistake him for some other nigger, as he’d later explain.
“Sorry,” Gino muttered.
“Right.” Lavert gave him a little smile. No teeth.
“That’s more like it.” Joey was in good spirits again, rubbing his hands together, pouring more wine, grinning like somebody’d just given him a G-man for Christmas. Happier than when Lavert had figured out the recipe for the spaghetti sauce from tasting Joey’s mom’s. Pretending that the penciled scribbles she’d sent along would do the trick, when they both knew she wouldn’t give him ice in hell. Presuming to cook for her Joey. She’d show him.
She’d left out half the ingredients. All the secrets.
But she didn’t know what a palate she was up against with Lavert.
Joey was telling the story now. Of course, it was his mama. He was allowed.
“And she couldn’t believe it. He’d even got the cloves.”
“Stuck in the onion.” Lavert nodded.
“Right!” boomed Joey. “He figured out you don’t chop up the onion. Let it sit whole stuck with cloves in the gravy while it’s cooking, then take it out. She liked to have, Holy Mother of Jesus”—Joey crossed himself—“died.”
“But after that—” Lavert added.
“After that”—Joey was pounding on the table with his fist now, jostling glasses—“she made him an honorary member of the family. She comes over and sits right here”—he pointed at a stool near the range—“and tells my man secrets.”
“We trade,” Lavert said. “Together we are one mean team.”
The boys knew what they were supposed to do.
They howled.
Then wine flowed all around.
“So, Joey,” said his little brother, Pasquale, “you pleased with the way things going down?”
“I hate to say it.” Joey knocked on the wood table. “I’m happy. We moving more product than ever, squashed those flicking gamooshes over in Miami, showed ’em how to do business.”
“He’s happy,” said Frankie Zito.
“Happy,” echoed Jilly Mirra.
Lavert, chopping garlic with a swift motion of his chef’s knife against the cutting board, whap, whap, whap, thought, everybody’s so damned happy, this was the perfect time to run his little blond guy from the airport up the flagpole. See if any of them could ID him.
“We got another load coming in from La Guajira tonight,” said Jilly.
“Here’s to the spics.” Pasquale raised his glass.
“God love ’em.” Joey laughed.
“Listen,” Lavert began, “any of you know—”
�
��There is one thing, though,” Frankie said.
Lavert went back to chopping.
“What?” Joey turned to Frankie. Fast.
“It’s nothing, really. I mean, nothing I can’t take care of. Nothing.”
“What?” Joey asked again.
“Really, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Fucking what? You brought it up, you brought it up. Now what?”
“Somebody’s asking questions about one of my troops.”
“One of us?”
“Naaah. One of my punks. Little asshole name of Joyner. Billy Jack Joyner.”
“So? Who’s doing the asking? Heat?”
“Not unless he’s under. Guy asking’s a local. Used to do some process work. Now he’s dicking around for some insurance company.
“And?”
“He’s just been asking around about this Joyner is all I’m saying.”
“But you don’t think guy asking’s working for nobody else?”
“What do I know, Joey? Joyner kid could have a shitload of parking tickets. Smashed his car up on the I-10. I’m just telling you what I know.”
“Sounds to me like you don’t know dick.”
“I know I’m about up to here with this Joyner anyhow. He’s not moving what he used to move, whining about the Carnival season—”
That got a big laugh.
“He wanta be queen didn’t make it?” Pasquale asked. “Probably what you stuck us with, Frankie. Some twinkie small-time punk street dealer wants to wear a dress.”
“Shit, I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Joey. “I don’t like it somebody’s asking something about somebody we do business with.” He thumped the table for emphasis. “You know what I mean?”
Everybody nodded, even Lavert, who was chopping meat with a cleaver now.
“What you say this guy’s name is?”
“Billy Jack Joyner.”
“No, asshole. The gamoosh is asking the questions.”
“Harry Zack.”
Lavert dropped his cleaver. Whap!
Twenty
SAM WAS SITTING with Zoe in the candy-striped bedroom the young girl had claimed at Ma Elise and Kitty’s house after her daddy died. Peeking from under the bed’s flouncy dust ruffle was an empty package of pork rinds. Sam wondered how many of those Zoe had stuffed down before she’d made her pilgrimage into the bathroom to the Great God Ralph.
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