We had reached the door to the soundstage, but a red light was flashing and we waited for it to stop before going in.
“And Francis Carrington Shaw heard of this. Of your successes?” I said.
Gillespie turned to face me, and I was astonished to notice a trace of moisture at the corners of his eyes. He nodded mutely and swallowed twice before he was able to go on.
“Yes,” he said finally. “He did. Better still, he came to see for himself.”
“In person. Actually appeared at the mission?”
“Yes. This was before he got so sick. So afraid of germs that he wouldn’t go out of this room or let anyone in to see him. He had just moved to Las Vegas at the time. Very few people knew him by sight, and he was able to move around without attracting attention. Besides, this time he was in a kind of disguise. Francis Carrington Shaw came to our door as a supplicant, pretending to be a gambling degenerate himself—to see what we had to offer. And he was convinced.
“The next day he sent word that he wanted to talk to me, and I went to where he was living. In a suite he had at the Flamingo, before he bought the other hotels and built the Scheherazade. He sat me down in a chair and offered me...all that I had ever wanted.”
Specifically, Shaw had proposed an expansion of the Rev. Holroyd J. Gillespie’s field of operations and an amplification of his voice. The mission was all very well in its place, but the techniques that had proven so effective there could be applied elsewhere. To a wider array of problems. And to a nationwide—perhaps even worldwide—audience.
By the time Holy Joe arrived for the interview, Shaw had already purchased the two little ranches outside town whose combined acreage he thought might be suitable for their purposes—he seemed to take his new protégé’s assent as an accomplished fact—and an architect had presumably worked through the night to produce a basic plan and perspective rendering of the buildings and satellite transmission tower that were to rise there.
“He said my voice—and my message—would be heard wherever there were ears to hear.
“Wherever there was need...”
The Voice of Heaven’s eyes were focused on the middle distance, on the spot where remembrance of things past always seems to dwell, and the words came softly as if telling the landmarks of a vanished Beulah Land.
“But...why?”
It was rude of me, and unfeeling, to call him back from the happy place where he had gone. But my curiosity has always been stronger than my sense of decency. Besides, I thought the answer might be important.
But Holy Joe didn’t seem to understand the question.
“Why...what?” he said.
“Francis Carrington Shaw,” I said, “is an international businessman who inherited a paltry five or six million dollars from his father and turned it into nearly two billion. When he was sixty years old, perhaps because Nevada has no inheritance tax—though that doesn’t really make sense, since he has no known family left on earth—he moved here and bought six hotel-casinos and an airport and a couple of high-tech laboratories and a spread of desert land that’s said to be the largest parcel of privately owned acreage in the world.
“So far, you’ve got a reprise of the Howard Hughes theme—and just to complete the picture, the man is now in semi-hermetic seclusion surrounded by a Mormon bodyguard.
“But Hughes’s only major philanthropy was a medical foundation that was set up when he got tired of one of his companies. Otherwise, he was so tight in the fist that he out-fumbled people for restaurant tabs, never mind charitable contributions over and above the ones he had to make to keep the income tax accountants happy. And you’ll forgive me if I say I haven’t heard that your friendly benefactor was notably different.”
The smile he gave me was all of sweet accord.
“Yes,” he said. “But this time God had spoken to both of us, and told us what we must do...”
The red light stopped flashing, and we went through the door to the soundstage.
Inside, it was tear-down time.
Holy Joe’s “soap opera” television serial was apparently taped with three cameras—one for master scene and the other two for coverage—to cut time and movement to a minimum. But there were three complete sets, unusual for all but the highest-budget shows, and the crew appeared now to be moving equipment from one set to another.
A tall woman with dark hair and eyebrows approached us, and I was startled to hear Mrs. Gillespie’s voice.
“Has he got your name on a contract yet?” she inquired with a smile that was not quite cynical.
I must have looked blank.
And she laughed. “I keep forgetting,” she said. “Yes, it’s me in here. I play two roles in this thing—good girl, bad girl, you know? And this is my bad girl getup.”
It was effective.
I made a mental note to have a look at the show sometime. There might be more to it than I’d thought.
“But I still want to know,” she went on. “Are you going to join us? Has he signed you up?”
Holy Joe was smiling, too, but he shook his head.
“Not yet,” he said.
“But you must! Maxey said—”
I caught the warning look from Holy Joe that told her she’d gone too far, too fast, and her instant reaction came through the makeup intact.
“We thought,” the Voice of Heaven said, choosing words with obvious care, “that Maxey—Mrs. Goines, I just can’t think of her as a widow, much less imagine Sam Goines being dead—that Maxey might have filled you in on the problems we have encountered of late.”
This was getting complicated.
Maxey appeared to be on closer terms than I’d thought with the Gillespies. But all the same, she hadn’t clued them in on the fact that Sam was alive. Or if she had, they hadn’t been told that I knew it, too. And the idea that she’d been aware of the pitch Holy Joe was going to make, and might even have considered it a good idea, was less a surprise than a distinct and depressing shock.
Could a few years have changed us both that much...?
“Problems?” I said.
The Voice of Heaven nodded.
“Time, for one thing,” he said. “Electronic miracles like the ones in the communication center are all very well, and we can pretty well make our own schedules here to take maximum advantage of our time. But even so, there are just not enough hours in the day for all that we hope to do. All we wish to accomplish.”
I could understand and almost sympathize. But the solution seemed obvious. “Cut back,” I said. “Take it a little easier. Surely the Almighty doesn’t mean you to shorten your life by overwork.”
His reaction was unhesitating and definite. “I cannot do that,” he said. “The Lord’s plan for H. J. Gillespie has no room in it for sloth. For idleness. The vineyard in which he labors is not his own, and he fears the wrath of a hard master!”
I had a momentary urge to ask him how he could be sure of that when he and the Lord were no longer on speaking terms. But I managed to restrain it, and before things could get any deeper he excused himself, muttering something about wanting to talk to the production manager.
“What we need,” Sue Harriet Gillespie said, taking up the slack with a smoothness that spoke of long practice, “is a second minister. Someone with a message of his own that does not conflict with ours. Someone with the charisma to command the same size and kind of audience.”
I shook my head. “Wouldn’t work,” I said. “Look what happened when Jerry tried to take over for Jim and Tammy Faye. Disaster!”
“Jerry was wrong for the job.”
“Plenty of experience...”
“But no force. No fireworks. No personal aura of love and strength. No mana!”
The final word surprised me. I wondered just where she’d heard it and what it might mean to her. Before I could put my curiosity into words, however, she gave me something else to think about.
“Right now,” she said, “you have a ministry limited to the sound of
your voice and the reach of your arm. Less than one hundred souls—and all of them gathered in a single spot, a miserable little mountain town in California.”
I bridled a bit at the word “miserable.” Best Licks was, and is, a pleasant and comfortable place in a landscape of surpassing beauty. But the flow of words gave me no chance to object.
“The work you do is good work. Worthwhile. You have something to offer the men and women whose lives were interrupted and deformed by fighting an unsuccessful war under the direction of leaders who can only with charity be thought of as merely incompetent...”
Again, I felt the urge to edit and object, and again found myself unable to break through the seamless fabric of words.
“...and uncaring. But think how much more you could do, how many more you could reach and sustain and nurture if your voice could be amplified and the reach of your arm extended through the power of modern technology.”
It was an echo. Her husband had used much the same words to explain his reasons for accepting Francis Carrington Shaw’s original proposal, and the questions this raised in my own mind finally forced me to interrupt.
“Tempting,” I lied. “But it still doesn’t add up. Help’s easy to find and there are plenty of ministers who’d jump at the chance to join you—as partners or employees or any deal you’d care to make. You don’t need me.”
“But we do!”
The reply was too immediate and vehement to be mere persuasion. She meant it.
“Why?”
I let the single word hang there.
It was the most obvious question in the world, but for a moment I didn’t think I was going to hear an answer. Sue Harriet Gillespie looked at me with something savage and carnivorous prowling just behind the mirror of her eyes, and there was a moment when I was sure that she was going to tell me to go to hell. But the moment passed and the answer came in the flat tones of verity, edged with ice.
“We’ve slipped,” she said.
She wanted to stop there, and I almost wanted to let her. But I kept my mouth shut and waited it out.
“Joe thinks it’s our own fault,” she said. “But I don’t agree. It started when everyone else went crazy—when Pat started running for president and Oral said God wanted protection money and the Bakkers got into their pissing match with Falwell and Swaggart. Suddenly everyone else in the world was without sin and started throwing stones.
“That was it.
“The donations dried up and the Nielsens went into the dumper and, worst of all, Francis Carrington Shaw stopped returning our telephone calls.”
She paused again, as if waiting for me to supply a final line that I already knew. But I had no idea what it might be.
“And then, last week, he sent a message,” she said when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to jump in. “Didn’t you wonder why Joe was in that poker game at the Scheherazade?”
Now that she mentioned it, I had. But Sam Goines had set it up, and I had assumed he knew what he was doing.
“Joe was there,” Sue Harriet Gillespie said, “because I got a call from someone who said Francis Carrington Shaw wanted him to use that game to get to know you and try to bring you into this ministry. Surely you’re not going to try to tell me you knew nothing about it...that Shaw hadn’t talked to you about it in advance?”
Well, Jesus out of the boat.
“Mrs. Gillespie,” I said, “I have never seen, spoken to, or in any way communicated with Francis Carrington Shaw in all my life. I do not know the man. He does not know me.”
She didn’t want to believe it and her eyes called me a liar, and I think her voice might have said it, too, but we were interrupted by the return of her husband—with Maxey in tow.
“Some hostess you are,” he said, only half joking. “I found poor Maxey wandering around all alone outside, looking for us with an armful of mail.”
His wife seemed not at all abashed.
“If I know poor Maxey,” she said, “a mail clerk was passing, and she grabbed the load from him just to keep from getting bored.”
Maxey made a face, and the two women smiled at each other in the ease of old friendship.
“Well”—the Voice of Heaven handed a sheaf of letters to his wife, glanced briefly at others he had kept in his own hand, and then aimed both eyes in my direction—“has Sue Harriet succeeded in convincing you that your future lies here? With us?”
His eyes were bright and his manner was brisk, all traces of moisture and fatigue I had noticed earlier erased as if they had never been, and I surprised myself with a sudden and vivid recollection of the little packets of white powder I had noticed spilling from under his coat after the machine-gun attack.
No wonder he was in trouble.
“Not exactly,” I said. “But Mrs. Gillespie is a powerful persuader.”
She smiled at me with all those sixty-four teeth.
“Flatterer,” she said. “Just for that, you get one of my specialties tonight—not that I will fix it myself, but it’s my recipe: rôti de coq à l’orange. Maxey says you are a man of good appetite. Hope she was right!”
She slipped the letters under her arm with a businesslike air. “Meanwhile,” she said, “I am off for the house to get out of this damn makeup. Stick with them, Maxey—make sure he says yes, or we’ll have to keep up the sales talk through dinner!”
She fumbled a ring of keys out of the tote bag she was carrying.
“Brought one of the tour cars over, thank the Lord,” she said. “Otherwise someone’d have to carry me.”
“Well, Mrs. Gillespie, if you’re looking for volunteers...” I said.
“You shopping for a fat lip?” Maxey inquired in mock earnest.
Holy Joe laughed. It almost sounded real. And his wife grinned at us from the doorway.
“All compliments gratefully accepted,” she said. “And please, let’s not be so formal. Call me Harry...everyone does.”
The soundstage door closed on that pleasantry, and I was beginning to roll it around in my mind—trying to connect it with something only half–remembered—when the Voice of Heaven began to make strangling sounds.
Maxey and I turned to see him standing transfixed, a flap-torn envelope still in his hand, gazing in mute horror at the five playing cards it had contained.
Two aces.
And three eights.
“No!” The power of speech, returning, concentrated itself in a single terror-laden word as the moment of paralysis ended and he flung himself upon the stage door, heaving at its sound-devouring weight with the strength of desperation. I moved to stop him, to seize the cards, to ask what he knew about them—and how. But we were both too slow.
The door had moved only an inch or two when the shock wave arrived, and the world outside erupted in a cataclysm of light and sound and fire-breathing ruin.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Life begins and life ends and the beginning is called birth and the ending is called death and neither can exist without the other. The end awaits the helpless as surely as the powerful, the virtuous no less than the wicked...
NINETEEN
The explosion didn’t leave much.
One of the experts from the Las Vegas police bomb detail speculated later that it was probably three or four sticks of high-grade dynamite wrapped around an electric blasting cap and wired across the ignition system of the pint-sized runabout Sue Harriet Gillespie had been using.
“The minute she turned the key, that was Katie-bar-the-gate!” he said.
No one seemed ready to argue.
The Voice of Heaven on Earth had been knocked unconscious by the blast that filtered through the partially opened doorway to the soundstage, and it was just as well. That gave me a chance to get him back inside and into the hands of people who liked him and would keep him from going out to look at what had happened to his wife.
Maxey sat with him to make sure he stayed put.
But I had to look at it, the police saw
to that, and I was glad when Corner Pocket, who had arrived with the first wave, suggested that they take all of us somewhere else for the inevitable questioning. The bomb squad’s guess at the amount of explosive used to produce such results surprised me a little. I’d have thought it was more.
The coroner’s cleanup detail arrived just as we were leaving for the main house—I was getting so I could recognize a couple of them on sight—and stood around holding body bags, looking helpless.
They had my sympathy.
But I was only a passing thought, and the interrogation that began as soon as we were gathered again in the living room drove everything else out of mind.
Clark County Central Homicide meant business this time. Maxey and I sat still and moved our jaws on command. We were almost used to it by now.
But they left Joe Gillespie pretty much alone.
He was conscious by the time paramedics arrived, and he passed their physical examination without difficulty. Not a scratch. But he didn’t seem to want to let go of the five playing cards that had remained clamped between the thumb and fingers of his left hand through the blast and its aftermath, and he didn’t seem to hear much of anything that was said to him—though he was not entirely speechless.
“They meant it for me,” he said as we arrived at the house.
Everyone paused, waiting for him to go on. But that was all, and he repeated it once more after we were all seated in the living room. And then stopped talking entirely. The compound’s staff doctor looked him over and summoned a specialist from Las Vegas, who arrived while the primary interrogations were still in progress. He recommended immediate hospitalization, and there were no objections when he administered a sedative on the spot. But he still couldn’t pry Holy Joe’s fingers loose from the dead man’s hand.
Corner Pocket took it all without comment.
He hadn’t spoken again after we left the soundstage. But I could see him slouched in the corner, hands in pockets, apparently oblivious. And I could feel the banked fire of anger that brightened each time he glanced in my direction. He could afford to wait. His turn was coming.
Aces and Eights Page 18
