by Reed Arvin
The phone on my desk rings, and I let it go to voice mail. I check and see how many messages have come in since we left with Buchanan: eleven. I push “play.” First up is Dina Kennedy, anchor of the local NBC affiliate, followed by reps from all the other local networks. I punch through them without listening to the messages. The Tennessean has left three calls, each more urgent as the paper’s deadline grows closer. There are two from fellow prosecutors; both are supportive, and one is an invitation to get pissed together. Then the one piece of good news for the day: I hear Jazz’s voice, calling from Orlando. Of course. They left early this morning.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says. She sounds happy, and eleven years old, and not a part of all the shit of the world, not yet, anyway. “I’m leaving you this message at work so you have something fun to listen to for a change. We’re already in line for Revenge of the Mummy. It’s supposed to be really scary, but I doubt it. Michael isn’t here. He had to go to a meeting. It’s just me and mommy. Wait, she wants to talk to you.” There’s a pause, and Rebecca comes on the line.
“Listen, I know this thing is gonna cut me off. Just wanted you to know we’re fine. We’ll be home on Sunday night. If you want to pick up an extra night with Jazz sometime, just let me know. Anyway, she’ll see you soon.”
I lean back in my chair. God, I love it when Jazz calls him Michael. You bet your ass it’s Michael. Buy her the damn world, pal, but I’ll always be Daddy. But I also know that when Bec and Jazz get home on Sunday, they’re going to find out that Daddy is in the middle of a firestorm. She’s eleven, and she won’t understand it. But she’ll see my face on TV, and she’ll know people aren’t happy. Eleven years old. I stand up, wondering how long before we have to have the talk about what I really do, about the kind of people with whom I interact. The bodies I’ve looked at. The coroner’s reports I’ve read. The crime scenes I’ve visited. This year? Next? It’s not that I’m not proud of what I do. It’s just that I know that the moment she understands what my job is really all about, a part of her childhood is over.
I pack up and leave the office, taking the back exit to the employee parking lot; the lot’s empty, with only a few cars left. The temperature is finally easing a little; heavy clouds are streaming across the sky from the north, bringing a cold front and rain. A few drops hit the windshield as I get in, and by the time I’m out of downtown and on the interstate, I’m driving through a steady drizzle.
The traffic is manageable, and I make it home in forty minutes or so. The weather front is solidifying quickly, with dark clouds coagulating above the city. I pull inside the garage and come in the house, looking for Indy: he’s not around, which isn’t a surprise. The cat hates water, and he’s probably crouched under a neighbor’s porch until the rain stops. My answering machine is blinking, which I ignore. I go through the house and take all the phones off the hook, per Rayburn’s instructions. I make dinner—salad from a bag, topped with some precooked shrimp—open the first of what I plan to be several Killian’s, and flip on the news. The CBS affiliate leads with the gun story, and a quick check of the others shows they do the same. I flip back to CBS and watch Barry Dougherty’s videotape of the DA being questioned in the ninth-floor reception area of 222 West. Carl and I are visible in the background. The video cuts to the site where the gun was found. The picture shows the police ID officer holding up the Browning and pans to Rayburn’s stoic face. Dougherty comes back on. “We’re going to have more on this in our ten o’clock report, including exclusive interviews with two jury members on the original Sunshine Grocery case. Stay tuned for more.” The show goes to commercial, and I flip the TV off. The jurors. I try not to think about them, because they’re carrying their own truckload of weight at the moment, and carrying my own seems like a full-time job.
It gets dark about 8:30. I grab a couple of beers, open the sliding glass door that leads to the deck, and step outside underneath the protective overhang. I’ve put about a hundred man-hours into designing and building a pretty damn glorious, two-level deck with a covered spa. The backyard is fenced and there’s nothing behind me but woods anyway, so the privacy is pretty close to total. Many is the night the spa and a couple of beers have leveled me out, and with the cool air finally giving the city a break, I decide to do the same tonight. I turn off the lights and pull off the heavy cover. The steam curls upward into the dark night. I strip naked, put the jets on low, and step into the warm water. The beers are lined up on the edge of the spa.
The water envelopes me, and I lean back, wanting a few minutes of freedom from the day. My father fixed things. I thought about him constantly while building the spa. It’s when I’m making things or working on the truck that I feel closest to him. The house didn’t really suit me at first—Bec picked it out, and it was always more her than me—but in the last eighteen months or so I’ve made it my own. My father would have loved this spa, and I imagined him swinging a hammer with me while I built it, telling me about a loose fitting on an F-18 Tomcat hydraulic line or what it was like to check an aileron the size of a man on a C5 Galaxy transport.
Looking west from underneath the protective overhang, I can see a smattering of stars where the clouds haven’t filled in the sky. The rain is falling steadily now, and I let myself doze off.
Sometime later—I’m not sure how long—I become aware of a tapping on the door behind me. I listen a second to be sure, and the tap ping happens again, harder. I turn to look; there, standing behind the glass, dressed in jeans and a black, tucked-in T-shirt, is Fiona Towns. I practically levitate out of the spa in surprise until I remember I’m naked. Towns isn’t smiling, and she doesn’t look particularly embarrassed. She slides the door open halfway and steps out of the house under the covering. “Your phone is off the hook.”
I scrunch down into the water, grateful it’s dark. “What are you doing here?”
“I just told you. You’re not answering the phone.”
“So you invited yourself in?”
She shrugs. “I knocked. Three times.” She doesn’t move, like she’s willing to stand there all night.
“Look, if you’ll go back outside a minute, I’ll put some clothes on.”
She looks at me like I’m nuts. “It’s raining, Dennehy.”
“Then go into another room, for God’s sake. There’s an office off to the right.”
Her eyes briefly move down into the water. A smile flickers, and she walks back into the house, disappearing down a hallway. Cautiously, I climb out of the spa, making sure the coast is clear. A towel would make a lot of sense right now. I trot naked and dripping through the living room to my bedroom. I dry off and throw on some pants and a shirt. I walk back out, dressed but in bare feet. Towns is standing there, looking impatient. “You have a habit of walking into people’s houses like this?” I say.
“When there’s something more important than being polite, yes.”
“So what is it, then?”
She looks at me calmly. “You had a bad day today, Dennehy.”
“You could say that. I wonder if you had anything to do with it.” She walks across the room and helps herself to a chair. “Have a seat, Ms. Towns. Seriously. You look tired.”
She looks around, taking in my living room. “You’ve got taste, Dennehy. I wouldn’t have figured on that.”
“Thanks.”
She smiles. “The pine armoire is nice. Kind of southwestern touch.”
“It was my wife’s. She’s from San Antonio.” I pause. “Ex-wife.”
“Gone?”
“Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Well, she had good taste.”
“Why are you here, Towns? Come to gloat over my office’s embarrassment?”
She fixes me in her gaze. “I’m here about Moses Bol. I think you’re going to win, Dennehy.”
I shrug. “Rita West is a good lawyer.”
“She’s a marvelous lawyer, but she can’t save Moses.” She tilts her head. “I looked you up, Dennehy. Y
ou always win, even when you shouldn’t.”
“You mean the Sunshine Grocery murders. Wilson Owens.”
She nods. “Like I said, you had a bad day.”
“So you did come to gloat.”
She shakes her head. “I came to invite you to church.”
I look at her skeptically. “It’s a little late for me to get religion, Towns. But the minute I decide to make confession, you’ll be the first to know.”
“It’s ten o’clock at night, Dennehy. I’m not exactly inviting you to regular services.”
“So what is it?”
“I drove all the way out here. It’s the least you can do.”
“Guilt,” I say. “No wonder you’re a preacher.”
She smiles softly. “So how about it? Come to church, Dennehy.”
“No thanks.”
“Why not?”
“For starters, because you’re a key witness for the opposition. And because I’ve got a fairly good idea you’re behind everything shitty that’s happened to me over the last week. But mostly because I’m pretty damn sure you’re a few days away from obstructing justice and committing perjury. That being the case, I’d like to keep my distance.”
She stares back at me quietly. “If you had any sense, you’d realize those are all excellent reasons to come.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Come with me or stay, Dennehy. But I can promise you one thing. It won’t be a waste of your time.”
I still don’t move. But then I think about the notes I’ve been finding on my car, and it hits me that somebody very smart and very determined is fucking around with me and my office lately, that I don’t understand exactly who or what that thing is, and that the woman in front of me almost certainly does. “OK,” I say flatly. “I’ll come.”
She looks up, a little surprised. “Why the sudden change of heart?”
“No questions, Towns, or I might change my mind.” I walk across the room and pick up some shoes near the door that leads to the garage. “I’ll drive,” I say. “It’s dangerous around there at night.”
She rolls her eyes but follows. We walk into the garage, and she slows by the old Ford. “You have two trucks,” she says.
I stop by the ’82. “The new one’s my daily driver, but this older one is special; 1982 Ford F-150, belonged to my father.”
“So you own the same kind of truck?”
I shake my head. “This is actually his truck. I tracked it down through the DMV nine years after he died. It had changed hands a few times. Flew out to Kansas, gave the guy who owned it four grand, and drove it home.”
She looks at the pickup thoughtfully. “That’s fairly human of you, Dennehy. Once again, I’m surprised.”
“I don’t even drink blood before midnight, Towns. Get in.” I step into my father’s truck and reach across, opening her door. She steps inside, and I turn the key, letting the V-8 rumble away in the night air. I open the garage door, and we pull out into a dull rain.
Nobody speaks for a good five minutes, until she breaks the silence. “How did your father die?” she asks.
“You don’t beat around the bush, do you, Towns?”
“Not usually.”
I stare ahead at the road. “An accident at work. He was an aircraft mechanic. Civilian contractor with the air force.”
Towns watches the last well-made houses and manicured lawns pass by as we reach the commercial district. “My father died working, too.”
I look over at her. “No kidding.”
“Heart attack. Too much stress, too many martinis, too many mistresses.” She frowns. “He wore himself down to nothing for the big house and a Mercedes.”
“So you went the other way.”
The smile flickers again. “Very good, Dennehy.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“Now there’s a fascinating topic.” She pushes back in the bucket seat. “My mother’s God is Oprah. Not that she reads the books, of course. But she cries like clockwork when the celebrities come out and talk about their addictions.”
“So the two of you are close.”
She smiles and pushes a strand of hair behind her ears. “You know why I studied theology, Dennehy?”
“No idea.”
“Because there had to be something more than my father working himself to death, and more than my mother numbing herself with pop psychology.”
I stare out at the dark, wet highway. “And is there?”
The truck rumbles down the street for a good thirty seconds before she answers. “Took me a while to find out. A lot of unproductive roads. Boyfriends. Chemicals. I got lost for a while.”
“So, what? You found yourself in church?”
“Not in most of them, I can tell you that.” She smiles. “You know what my church is, Dennehy? It’s the church of the losers, of the painfully uncool. It’s the church of the dropouts and failures. Fools and sinners. It’s the church of the second chance.” She looks out the window. “Home, in other words.”
“Don’t be so self-deprecating. Not after what you did in court the other day, anyway. You took Judge Ginder to school.”
“Yes, and you’ve already told me I may regret that. But I’m willing to take some risks at this point in my life.” She lowers her voice. “Especially for Moses.”
“What’s the deal with him anyway? Carl says he’s a Benywal, whatever that is.”
“You’ll see,” she says. She falls silent, not speaking until we reach the church.
Fifteen miles down I-65, I take the ramp off the freeway to Church Street. We roll into downtown, the empty office buildings lining both sides of the street. I take the narrow alley behind the DPC and pull into the tiny empty lot behind the building. The rain is still coming down when we get out, and Towns and I jog up the grungy, concrete steps to the back door of the church. The alleyway and parking lot are both deserted; even through the rain, the smell of urine and homelessness pervades. Towns unlocks the large, metal door, and we step inside and out of the shower. She hits a switch and a set of fluorescent lights flickers on, but only half work. The light makes crazy patterns on the reflective floor. “Follow me.”
We walk down the long hallway to the rear entrance to the sanctuary. She pushes open one of the ten-foot-tall wooden doors, and we step into the dim, cavernous room. The large stained-glass windows glow palely from the exterior streetlights. The Egyptian reliefs painted above us are shadowed, and the great sandstone pillars rise from the floor only to vanish into the dark heights forty feet above us. Towns walks to the first row of pews. “You know the history of this place, Dennehy?”
“No.”
“You’re standing in one of the most powerful pro-slavery symbols in the South. Before the civil war, this church preached against freedom so virulently that the Union army actually came for the preacher’s head. He fled with his family to Mississippi, and he was never allowed back in the city. The government recognized that he had become a symbol himself, and kept him out in the interest of peace.” She turns toward me. “When the city fell, the Union army turned this room into a military hospital. The pews were ripped out and cots were brought in. Even Negro soldiers were operated on here. It found its calling again, and became a place of healing.”
I nod, looking around. “Why the Egyptian design?”
“That came later, after a fire gutted the original structure. The church rose out of its ashes, like the South itself. The building was once again the center of the city’s wealth and power, and this extravagance is an expression of that. The symbols changed again.”
“Somewhere along the way this place must have got lost. You’re almost closed down.”
She smiles. “On the contrary, Dennehy. It’s finally found itself at last. We’re a home for the wounded again, just as we should be. And nobody showed me that more than Moses Bol.”
She leads me several rows down the center aisle, turning left into one of the pews toward the west wall. About twent
y feet away from the wall, she stops. “You want me to tell you what Benywal means.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s impossible to translate. Something close would be ‘One who draws strength from the ancestors.’ But that doesn’t do it justice.” She leans on the pew behind her. “Once one of the boys wrote his name for me. It was ten lines long. He did this because his name is more than just his name. It’s his father and father’s father, back ten generations. He knew them all and could recite stories about each of them. They were real to him, Dennehy, as real as if he’d sat on their knees and touched their faces. Most Americans can’t even name their own great-grandfathers.” She looks out at the church’s towering pillars. “The Benywal is the living connection with everything that comes before. Not merely the names, but the essence, the stories, the history itself. He heals their sickness. He finds their way forward in the darkness.” She looks up at me. “He’s priceless, in other words.”
“Tell me you don’t actually believe in all that. I’d prefer not to think of you as nuts.”
She shakes her head. “If you’re asking me if it meets a scientific standard of inquiry, I’d have to say no. But their stories are extraordinary.”
“Meaning?”
“You know the boys marched hundreds of miles across Sudan to Ethiopia, and hundreds more to Kenya.”
“Yes.”
“Moses routinely went for days without sleep on those marches. He did this to drive away animals that would come in the night and drag away the sick or weak. The boys say he didn’t eat or drink for days at a time. Two eyewitnesses claim to have seen him walk through walls.”
I laugh darkly. “I’ll be sure and let the guards in Riverbend know. ‘Watch the African, gentlemen. He walks through walls.’”
