Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “Yay-yass?” he said, like a cartoon granny.

  “Reverend Dice?” I said.

  “Yay-yass,” he said again, as if all were forgiven.

  I could feel Bluerock bristling behind me. Even the spaniel took a step back, as if he’d come upon something too sweet for his palate.

  I dug a business card out of my wallet and handed it to Dice. “I’d like to talk to you about one of your parishioners.”

  “I’ve no parish, friend,” Dice said in a mellifluous voice that was scented slightly with the garlic he’d had for lunch, and with the mouth spray that he’d used to cover it up. “The Lord’s work requires no church. No, nor license, either.” He raised a scriptural finger. “Although, it would be a blessing to have a permanent sanctuary, a place of prayer and retreat. And if the Lord sees fit to grant me that gift, I would not say nay.”

  From the look of him, I had the feeling he wouldn’t say nay to anything that turned a buck. He had a couple of gold rings the size of brass apples on his fingers, and it was clear from what I could see of the house that the price of his furniture had come out of the collection plate before the money for his place of prayer and retreat.

  “Would you mind giving me a few minutes of your time?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, glancing at his Rolex, “I do have a prayer meeting in half an hour.”

  “I’m sure the Cougars would appreciate it.”

  “The Cougars?” he said with curiosity. “You are working for the Cougars?”

  I nodded.

  “Then perhaps I can spare a moment. Come right in,” he said, waving his arm. “Mi casa es su casa, as our friends south of the border like to say.”

  As I started through the door, Bluerock caught me by the arm.

  “I think I’ll skip this one, sport,” he said. “I gotta weak stomach.”

  “All right,” I said. “I shouldn’t be too long.”

  I walked into Dice’s plush home, and Bluerock went back to the car, the dog wandering after him.

  “Your friend has something wrong with his stomach?” Dice said.

  “Too much for lunch,” I said.

  “He is a Cougar, is he not?”

  “He is,” I said.

  “I thought I recognized him. You know, I am a close personal friend of many of the players on the team.”

  From what I’d heard he was a closer friend to the wives of the players. His wimpy, childish manner wouldn’t have gone over well with most of the athletes I’d known. In fact, I could hardly believe that a man like Parks would have given him the time of day.

  Dice led me down a short hall to his living room. There was a long picture window on the far wall, looking out on a magnificent view of the river and of the Kentucky shore. A squared off, buff-white conversation pit was situated in front of the picture window, with teak bookshelves on either side of it and an ivory Oriental carpet on the floor. There were no books on the shelves. They were filled instead with religious artifacts—statuettes, manger scenes, pamphlets. Dice plucked one of the pamphlets from the shelves as we passed the bookcases and handed it to me. It was the same pamphlet I’d found in Parks’s desk, the one announcing the end of the world.

  “It’s coming, friend,” he said, holding up an admonitory finger. “Believe it.”

  Dice sat down on the sofa, crossed his legs, and folded his hands on his knee. “Now, how can I help the Cougars?”

  I sat down across from him. “You can tell me about C.W. O’Hara and Bill Parks,” I said.

  He nodded his head, but his eyes didn’t move, as if they were weighted in their sockets like the eyes of a doll. “Carol was a close friend,” he said. “We all mourn her passing.”

  “Would you mind answering a few questions about her and Bill?”

  Dice smiled tolerantly. “Being a minister is a little like being a psychiatrist, Mr. Stoner. My friends come to me with many problems, and I listen to them and try to give them sound advice. But they would not tell me the things that they do if they thought I would discuss them with other people.”

  “I understand the need for confidentiality,” I said. “But seeing that the girl is dead and that Bill Parks is in a great deal of trouble, couldn’t you see your way to making an exception?”

  Dice made a troubled face. “What is your interest in this matter?” he said.

  “I’m trying to clear up the confusion surrounding the girl’s death.”

  “For the Cougars?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Dice leaned back, planting his hands at his sides and examining me with a critical eye. “Aren’t the police looking into the murder?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I fail to see why the Cougars would want to finance an investigation of their own.”

  “They have been implicated in Bill’s problems with the law,” I said. “They want to clear their reputation.”

  “Ah, their reputation!” Dice said, with irony in his voice. He clasped his knee and pulled himself forward again. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you, Mr. Stoner. Not without some assurance that what I say won’t be made public.”

  I studied his face. For some reason, he was beginning to remind me of George DeVries. “What would it take to reassure you?” I said.

  He pursed his lips and put a finger beside his nose. I thought he was about to click the heels of his patent leather shoes and vanish. Instead, he said, “A contribution would be appreciated.”

  It seemed as if an awful lot of people were trying to get rich off of Bill Parks’s troubles. But then, I supposed, there was nothing new about that. “How much of a contribution?” I said warily.

  Dice shrugged. “Under the circumstances, I’m sure the Cougars would want to be generous,” he said sweetly. “In fact, I think it would be a very nice gesture on their part to contribute to the funding of a team chapel. Of course, it wouldn’t make up for the way they’ve fucked Bill and their other employees over. But it would be a start.”

  I stared at him for a moment. I’d been wrong about the Reverend. He looked like a Milquetoast, but he had the soul of an agent.

  “You don’t approve of the way the Cougars deal with their personnel?”

  “That is putting it mildly,” he said with his slick smile. “I do not intend to help them clean up their messes without making them pay.”

  What could I say? I needed his help, and he knew it. “I think I might be able to arrange a contribution,” I told him.

  “Fine.” Dice got up and went to the bookshelves. He pulled what looked like another pamphlet from the shelves and brought it over to me. “Would you mind calling your friend in to witness the transaction?” he said, handing me the paper.

  I glanced at it. It was a boilerplate contract—what amounted to a personal promissory note. I wondered how many of the Cougar wives and players had signed them. Dice certainly had an ample supply on the shelves.

  “Just leave the amount blank,” he said as he handed me a plastic pen with Reverend Carl Dice embossed on it. “You may keep the pen, to make your neighbors jealous.”

  “Jealousy is a sin, isn’t it?”

  “One of the worst. But human—all too human.”

  I looked up at him. “You weren’t always in the religion business, were you, Reverend?”

  “I sold cars, Mr. Stoner,” he said coolly.

  25

  I CALLED Bluerock in to witness the extortion. He signed on the witness line, I signed for the Cougars.

  “You know,” I said to Dice. “This won’t stand up in court unless it’s notarized.”

  “I am a notary,” he said, and pulled a seal down from one of the shelves. He smiled at me after he stamped the document. “I went through many lives before I found my true calling, Mr. Stoner.”

  “How big a bite are you going to take?” I asked.

  He rubbed his lower lip. “Enough to make it hurt,” he said.

  “Isn’t greed a sin too?”

  “A ter
rible vice. One that I suggest that you consult your employers about. They are such experts.” He sat down opposite Bluerock and me. “You must think I’m a terrible devil. And I am a bit of that, when I have right on my side.

  “Carol O’Hara should never have died,” he said with something like real feeling in his mellifluous voice. “She was a good soul, and she was trying to do the right thing for herself and for her man. If it hadn’t been for your employers, I think she would still be alive.”

  “What does that mean?” Bluerock said.

  “You read the papers, Mr. Bluerock,” he said. “If the Cougars had shown the slightest interest in Bill as a person, this whole tragic business would never have happened. But the Cougars didn’t show an interest. They never do. What an odd attitude the NFL ownership has about its players. They are expected to exhibit loyalty, spirit, and self-sacrifice in the service of management. They are expected to go out on the field and risk what are all too often permanent disabilities, in order to win. And how does management reward their warriors? With negotiations that break the heart of even the most dedicated veteran. Or with instant waivers, if the man has been too badly hurt to suit up. Or with a trade to faraway places, if he gives them trouble at the bargaining table. Or with callous indifference, as is the case with Bill, if he has problems that don’t jibe with the all-American image that the NFL is so eager to ascribe to its personnel.

  “So I’m not going to feel too bad about whatever figure I write on this note,” he said. “This isn’t greed, Mr. Stoner. It’s justice.”

  “Justice for whom?” I said.

  “For her,” he said.

  I looked around the room—at the teak bookshelves, loaded with promissory notes, at the plump white sofas from Closson’s, at the beautiful Orientals on the floors—and shook my head. “You know, I have the feeling that this isn’t going to be your last job, Reverend—protecting the poor. I have the feeling that you have another calling in store, something less free-form, more institutional.”

  “Tut-tut, Mr. Stoner,” Dice said, wagging his finger. “You must learn to lose gracefully in negotiations, just as the players do.” He folded up the promissory note and stuck it in his pocket. “Now you may ask whatever questions you deem fit.”

  “Before you went into your Independence Day speech, you said something about C.W. trying to do the right thing for herself and for Bill. What did that mean?”

  “Just what it sounded like,” Dice said. “Before she came to me, Carol was a lost soul. She had no purpose, no values, no sense of direction. All she had was a racking sense of guilt, which was nothing more than her soul crying out for the truth. I helped show her the way to that truth.”

  “Did she have to sign one of those things first?” I said, pointing to the shelf full of contracts.

  “Everyone has to pay his way, Mr. Stoner. That is the first law of life. Certainly, Carol made donations.”

  “And what did she get in return?”

  “Counseling. Advice. Instruction.”

  “Instruction about what?” I said.

  Dice gave me a cautious smile. “You must know about the problem she had created for herself.”

  “You mean Bill’s drug arrest?”

  He nodded. “She had betrayed her lover, and there was another person involved. A person for whom she felt responsible and who was accidentally killed.”

  He was trying to be tactful. But I already knew that he was talking about Barb Melcher.

  “Did C.W. tell you about her part in the drug bust?” I asked.

  “She talked around it, the way people feeling an overwhelming guilt will do. But I got the message.”

  “Did Bill know what she had done?”

  “No,” he said. “Certainly not. It would have destroyed her if he’d found out. She lived in constant fear of that possibility. And of course, they were having so many other problems—with money and with each other. Which is what made her final decision so brave.”

  “What decision?”

  “To testify before the grand jury,” he said.

  ******

  For a moment I was too surprised to speak. And Bluerock looked just as stunned as I was.

  “C.W. was going to testify to the grand jury?” Otto finally said.

  Dice nodded. “Frankly, I tried to talk her out of it. I thought it was much too dangerous, especially since they had been having such terrible fights about the baby. But she seemed to feel as if she had no choice, as if she owed it to Bill and to her friend, for whom she had never stopped mourning. And to her unborn child most of all.” Dice had an odd look on his face. “You know I speak of Christ to many people. I say the words and they listen. But they seldom listen with their hearts. Carol did,” he said with a touch of amazement. “She truly believed that she had to atone for her sins. She truly believed that amends must be made.”

  Even a charlatan must have his successes. And the fact that C.W. O’Hara’s change of heart struck even Dice as something of a miracle didn’t make it any less real.

  “When did she make her decision to testify?” I said.

  “Last Sunday,” Dice said.

  “Did Bill know?” Bluerock asked.

  “No,” Dice said. “But he might have been told. The papers say that he himself changed his mind about testifying. Perhaps that was the reason why. Perhaps she finally shamed him into doing the right thing. If so, it was a last minute decision, because he was absolutely adamant about refusing to go to court.”

  “So C.W. decided to go in his stead,” I said. “Do you know whom she was going to testify against?”

  “The same people that Bill would have testified against. After all, she was with Bill constantly. She knew who had been supplying him with those dreadful drugs. That’s the only reason that she agreed to help the federal agent in the first place when he approached her—to help Bill regain his balance.”

  “Bill was doing that much cocaine?” I said.

  “No,” Dice said, “although the cocaine was what the agent was primarily interested in. It was the other substances that she wanted to wean him of.”

  “The steroids?” Bluerock said, glancing at me.

  Dice nodded. “They were changing him so drastically, his mind and his body. And he simply couldn’t give them up. And then of course Carol’s baby had been affected.”

  “How?” I said.

  “I’m not sure how,” Dice said. “Carol had a series of tests done several weeks ago at Deaconess. She was supposed to get the results on Friday.”

  That was the same day that Clayton claimed Parks had found out about C.W.’s betrayal. If Bill had gotten bad news from the doctor, too, the combination could have been lethal. I made a mental note to check with Deaconess and get the results of C.W.’s tests. I also decided to pay Walt Kaplan a visit.

  I hated to admit it, but it looked as if Bluerock had been right—we should have gone to see Walt in the first place. He was not only Bill’s cocaine supplier, he was his source for steroids, too. And if C.W.’s baby had indeed been damaged by the drugs Bill had been taking, that would have given C.W. a very personal reason to want to see Walt put away, to see him punished. It also would have given Walt a good reason to eliminate C.W. And I had the feeling that that was exactly what he had done. Someone had told Bill all of C.W.’s secrets, and no one had a better reason to betray her than Walt did. Of course, that also meant that Walt himself had somehow found out about C.W.’s role in the bust and her decision to testify in Bill’s stead. I didn’t know where he’d gotten that information, but I intended to ask him—even it 1 had to use the method that Bluerock had proposed.

  I looked up at Dice, wondering if he had traded C.W.’s secrets to Kaplan in exchange for one of those promissory notes. He was one of the few people who had known the whole truth—he and Clayton and C.W. herself. One of them must have given the truth away, deliberately or by accident. According to Laurel, Dice had a reputation as a gossip, although in this instance the seriousness of the sit
uation must have given him pause. Moreover, his affection for the dead girl seemed genuine enough. Still, he was a greedy, fundamentally dishonest man. And if he had a loose mouth to boot, the facts might have gotten back to Walt, via one of the other players or one of the players’ wives.

  “You haven’t told anyone else about C.W.’s problems, have you, Reverend?” I asked.

  Dice gave me a hurt look, as if I’d truly wounded him. “Of course not,” he said. “I would have been killing her myself if I had. I loved that child. I tried my best to give her good advice. But the situation was so unpredictable—Bill was so unpredictable.”

  His eyes went blank, as if he were no longer looking out at the world but looking somewhere within himself. His cupid’s bow mouth twisted into a revulsed frown, as if what he saw inside had made him physically ill. “He’ll go to hell, you know,” he said in a spiteful, vicious voice. “He knew what he was doing. He’ll go to hell because he knew that he was wrong. He had a conscience, and he turned away from it. He felt guilt over what he had done to himself and to Carol through his drug abuse, and he denied it. It was such an unmistakable judgment on his sins; but he blamed her instead of looking inside himself. He thought it was a kind of weakness to feel guilt. His mother did that to him. A terrible woman.”

  “His mother seemed to be on his mind last week,” I said.

  Dice nodded. “She was hounding poor Carol—calling her constantly, vilifying her to Bill.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because of me, because of my influence on the girl and her influence on Bill. Carol finally had to tell her she was pregnant, thinking that the woman would relent once she knew that they were common-law man and wife. But that only intensified her fury. She threatened Carol. She threatened me.”

  Dice looked up at us with an eerie and disturbing light in his eyes. “I tried to get him to take Jesus back in his heart. But he wouldn’t do it. He thought Jesus would make him weak. He thought the girl and I would make him weak. He believed that his physical strength was his salvation. And he would not give up his faith in his body, even at the cost of his soul. He had made his muscles into a god, because at his very heart he knew that he was a weak and cowardly man. He will pay for his vicious arrogance. He will pay with his immortal soul. He will pay for all time in deepest hell.”