by J. A. Kerley
“An unfortunate rumor. I’m still here it seems, though now in the Knight’s Inn, a few blocks east.”
“I knew Daddy was lying. Whenever he lies his voice sounds like fur feels.”
“I hear you got grounded.”
An eye-roll from Rebecca. “Daddy told the ogres on the staff here – all those happy-faced goofs in the lobby? – to make sure I didn’t leave the motel. If I did I’d be grounded all summer.”
Which explained the bellhop’s words about keeping an eye on the girl. Nautilus looked inside, checking out the expansive suite of rooms.
“Where’s your mama, Rebecca?”
“My aunt came from Tampa and they went to Orlando. Mama said they’re going shopping but I’ll bet they go to Disney World. It’s a lot better than that crummy old park here. And I’ll bet it doesn’t smell like goats and camels.”
“Your father?”
“He’s been gone since I got up. He’s almost finished with some project, then he wants to talk. Something about our future.”
The move to Jacksonville, Nautilus figured. “Listen, Rebecca, Greta called. She’s scared and doesn’t trust me, but she trusts you. She’s afraid I’m setting some kind of trap, or a test. She’s going to call in about ninety minutes. I’d like to stop back then and have you answer the phone and convince her to trust me and meet with me.”
Rebecca crossed the floor in thought, spun back to Nautilus. “I don’t think Greta’s going to trust me over a phone, Harry. She’ll need to see me, right? To be …” the kid puzzled for the word, said, “assured that everything’s all right.”
“Not in the cards, Rebecca. You can’t leave the motel.”
The kid held up the bottle of soda. “I’m not allowed soft drinks. You know that convenience store down the street? I just got back from there. I put on sunglasses, tucked my hair up under a scarf, and went down the back stairway. I made myself walk like I’m older …” the kid straightened and crossed the room with choppy steps – the gait obviously stolen from her mother – and turned back to Nautilus. “See?”
It was a masterful ploy, Nautilus had to admit. Seen from the lobby as she crossed the lot toward the c-store, none of the busy staffers would make Rebecca as the sixteen-year-old sequestered upstairs.
He shook his head. “You have to stay here. I’m not going against your parents’ wishes. That’s final, girl.”
A pout started to cross Rebecca’s face, a look Nautilus hadn’t seen since they’d made the trip to the park. But like a thin cloud passing a bright sun, it dissolved into radiance.
“OK, Harry. We’ll do it your way. When you coming back?”
Back on the balcony of the motel, Harry Nautilus looked at his watch, ninety minutes had passed since he’d spoken to Greta, meaning it was time to return to Rebecca. He patted his pocket for the Joshua pass and headed to the second-floor walkway, stepping down to the lot when a voice came from behind him.
“Hi, Harry. Jeezle, it’s hot out here.”
He spun to see Rebecca Owsley leaning against the doorframe of the room where the soft-drink, snack and ice machines were located, dramatically fanning herself with one pink hand, the other clutching a can of Dr Pepper.
“What are you doing, girl?”
“I wanted another Dr Pepper, but somehow just kept walking.” Her amused eyes scanned the parking lot, weeds growing from the asphalt. “This place is kind of a dump, isn’t it?”
“You can’t be here with me, Rebecca. It’s a motel. You’re sixteen. It doesn’t look right.”
She grinned. “We’ll tell people you’re my father. They’ll believe that, y’think?”
Nautilus sighed. “Get in the car. I’ll drive you close to your digs and you can sneak—” His phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket. The screen said REBECCA.
“Hi, Greta,” he said, his voice as creamy as a chocolate. “I’m happy you called back.”
“I … I’m on break, they told me to go early so I can work later. I’ve only got a minute.”
“Like I said, Greta, we need to meet, to speak.”
“Is she there? Rebecca?”
“She can’t be with us, Greta …” Nautilus started to explain. “It’s gonna be impos—”
The phone disappeared from Nautilus’s hand, snatched by Rebecca Owsley.
“Give me the phone,” Nautilus said, fingers making the gimme motion. But Rebecca Owsley danced away, talking as she moved across the parking lot. Nautilus started after the kid, but glanced toward the small swimming pool to the side, two scruffy palms shadowing a pair of hefty ladies in one-piece swimsuits, stern and suspicious eyes turned on the big fiftyish black man and the petite teenager, the women probably about to dial 911.
Nautilus put his hands in his pockets and approached the pool, putting on his warmest voice and most benign visage. Carson had once said that – when he wanted to – Harry Nautilus could charm the milk from a coconut without leaving a hole in the shell.
“Howdy, ladies,” he said, putting his elbow atop the fence surrounding the pool. “This looks like the place to be today.”
A look between the women, wondering whether to respond. “Yes,” the one on the right finally said. “It’s hot today.”
“Down to visit folks, or just enjoying our fine Florida weather?”
Another pause; wondering what his angle was. The one on the left said, “We come down every year and visit Hallelujah Jubilee.”
“Don’t you love the Ark?” Harry said. “It’s so real. I think it’s like being there at that blessed time.”
A pause. A large black man was speaking their language! The smiles widened and became real. “I love the rides, too,” said the lady on the left, nodding to her sister. “But they make Thelma dizzy.”
“I’ve got the vertigo,” Thelma said. “It’s in my ear.”
“There’s still so much to see,” Nautilus said. “Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the Passion play.”
“We see the Passion every time we’re here. We cry and cry.”
“Where are you girls from? Up north?”
A tinkle of laughter. Girls. The women were in their mid sixties, but probably saw girls in their mirrors, bless mirrors everywhere.
“Pittsburgh. We’re sisters.”
Nautilus turned and saw the kid approaching, phone away from her cheek, a happy smile on her face, a portrait in innocence. “Well, ladies, it looks like my stepdaughter is finished with her call or text or whatever. I can’t understand how those fancy phones do so much.”
“They confuse me no end,” Thelma’s sister said. “I wish I had my old Princess phone back.”
Harry did a courtly semi-bow. “Nice meeting you fine folks. Enjoy the park.”
Twin smiles on the chubby faces. “And wonderful meeting you, sir. Have a blessed day.”
Rebecca stood before Nautilus and handed back the phone.
“Don’t ever grab my phone away ag—”
“We’re meeting with Greta, Harry. You and me. She says there’s a motel on Conway Street with a small woods behind it, a path that goes inside. We’re supposed to wait in the woods and she’ll meet us.”
52
When I returned to the department, I found Belafonte huddled in conversation with Clinton Monroe, a former IRS agent and a crack forensic accountant whose primary duties were tracing drug money through its laundering and making cases against launderer and launderee alike. I was happy to see the brilliant Monroe, sixty-two, pudgy and balding and looking like a guy whose twin hobbies were bridge and bird-watching, which they were.
“We’ve been checking out Hayes Johnson, as you requested,” Belafonte said. “Which brings in the whole Crown of Glory network, including the Reverend Amos Schrum.”
I sat and asked a question I always wanted to ask about famous televangelists. “What’s Schrum make? My guess is a million at least.”
“Fifty grand,” Monroe said.
“What?”
Monroe chuckled. “The COG Foundation owns
Schrum’s fancy house and furniture and leases it to him for a dollar a year. The Foundation provides a car and driver. There’s a plane at his beck and call. All his meals and living expenses are picked up by the Foundation. I imagine there are other perks, like Foundation-supplied insurance and medical plans. Basically his life is funded by the Foundation, and I expect it’s a nice one.”
“It’s splendid PR,” Belafonte said. “The relative pauper’s salary looks like Reverend Amos Schrum has been called to service by God, not Mammon. And I expect it curtails potential problems from a staff that’s four-hundred strong.”
“Problems like what?”
“The network pays crap,” Monroe said. “A lot of the work is done by unpaid volunteers, the low-level stuff at least – handling the mail, deliveries, working the phone lines for donation. They offer a full page of internships, unpaid or with a minimal stipend. The median salary for a television studio cameraperson in the US is about seventy grand a year. The COG network pays its camera operators an average of forty-one grand.”
I once had a girlfriend who worked for a TV station and recalled the various unions attendant in the operation of the station. “They don’t have to pay union scale,” I said.
“Because COG is not a television network, it’s a church. And a foundation. And various subsets. It’s actually a very ingenious set-up.”
“So if a cameraperson or a singer or a stage electrician complains about the shit salary …”
“An administrator steps in and says, ‘Look, buddy, Reverend Schrum himself only makes fifty G’s. He’s grateful for the chance to serve God and all his angels.’”
I nodded. “And, of course, when you’re always asking for donations …”
“It looks great on the books. The folks at COG work there because they’re called to service. Plus the park, Hallelujah Jubilee, is run as a non-profit educational entity. It barely breaks even.”
“Breaks even?” I said, perplexed. “Harry tells me the park is a money machine … forty-buck admissions, four-hundred-dollar bibles, fifty-buck Ark posters. Unless they have heavy debt, it’s like owning a casino.”
Monroe shook his head. “No debt load there. The Hallelujah Jubilee Foundation didn’t pay for the land. It was bought for the sum of sixty-seven million dollars and donated. The benefactor was an Eliot Winkler. Anyone heard of Winkler besides me?”
“A crabby old fart in a wheelchair, according to Harry,” I said. “Seems to have some intense religious feelings.”
“Winkler’s worth about four billion dollars. His high-level managers are required to attend prayer meetings.”
“I’m more interested in Hayes Johnson. He’s rolling in the dough, right?”
“Johnson makes the princely sum of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year.”
“To run a whole network?”
Belafonte tapped at her laptop and turned the screen to me. I saw a palatial three-story pink-brick home on a waterway, a fancy motor yacht moored in the background. “I do love Google Earth,” Belafonte said. “Johnson’s domicile. Does that look like two-twenty a year to you?”
“I checked real estate records,” Monroe said. “Johnson bought the place for two-point-seven million four years ago.”
I turned to Belafonte. “Didn’t you tell me Johnson built a shaky company and sold it for eleven mil? That explains the Taj.”
“There’s a fly in the ointment.” Monroe grinned. “It seems three million dollars went to an ex-wife who divorced Johnson eight years back, a problem Mr Johnson has with women not his wife. Several million more went to settle suits with franchise owners who felt Johnson’s sales pitch had been deceptive. The amount is hush-hush, but a Wall Street Journal article speculates it was around seven million. Between the wife and the legal problems, Mr Johnson is no longer a wealthy man.”
“So where’s the money coming from?” I mused.
53
Greta was kept in the broken-down motel Nautilus had seen while driving, and wanted to meet behind the unused wing, in an acre of cane and scrub brush. He brought Rebecca – Greta’s condition for appearing – and they parked a block distant and walked to a thicket of vegetation less than two hundred feet from the motel. The pair sweated in the hot sun for ten minutes until hearing a rustling through leaves and feet over sand, Greta.
The girl looked beaten down and frightened, eyes darting every way but at Nautilus.
“How did you end up at Hallelujah Jubilee,” Nautilus asked. “Can we start there?”
Hands with chewed-to-the-quick nails pulled a rumpled pack of Marlboros from her jeans, lit one. It took three deep sucks of smoke before she could talk.
“My step-dad, in Bratton, West Virginia. We … didn’t get along. He was …” her eyes closed and Nautilus thought she was fighting back tears. “I hated him. So I run off for Florida. I saw an ad in the paper that they had jobs here. I didn’t have but one set of clothes and when I came in to apply I smelled like it. I figured they’d spray me down with bleach and throw me out, but it was Tawnya I talked to and she was real nice. I didn’t know that she was on their side, and after a month got some of us to start doing things. I mean more than working at the park.”
“Like what, Greta?” Nautilus prodded gently.
A long hit on the cig. “They make us give shows. Dance and things like that.”
“Who makes you do this?”
“Two men, sometimes three. It’s like a party.”
“Are there drugs there? Drinking.”
Greta looked away.
“If it’s just a party, Greta,” Nautilus said, trying to pry loose more information, “and if you’re happy with it, then I made a mistake. You and Tawnya were just having a spat.”
The girl hit the cig, finger nervously tapping the filter. “They make us do more than dance, mister. We … have to touch one another.”
“Do you have your clothes on, Greta? When you’re touching?”
Greta swallowed hard, like fighting nausea. Rebecca stepped in and took the girl’s hand, pulling her over to a far section of the clearing. “Come with me, Greta,” Rebecca said. “Harry … why don’t you take a walk for a few minutes. I’ll meet you back at the car.”
No way was Nautilus leaving the girls alone behind the Florida version of the Bates Motel. He shook his head. “I’ll be on the other side of the cane. But out of earshot, so you ladies can talk.”
Ten minutes later Rebecca pushed through the green stalks. “Greta got scared she was gone too long and they’d come looking for her. She’s back inside.”
They walked to the Jetta in silence. Nautilus turned on the AC, but stayed parked. “The men make the girls kiss and make out, Harry,” Rebecca said. “It’s gross. The men do it to the girls. They put their things in them and other stuff. Don’t give me that look, I’m sixteen.”
“Why doesn’t Greta leave?”
“This is where she can have a place to live and eat. But if she ever tells, the men will have their lawyers attack the girls.”
“The lawyers?”
“Greta says the lawyers can make it look like the girls are lying. The girls will get put in jail.”
Nautilus suddenly understood. The legal realm was a complete mystery to most poor folks, a realm of absolute power and privilege. To folks from the underclass, lawyers seemed to know everything, control everything – and he expected the girls had been screened for just such a distinction. Naive, poorly educated, prone to shame about their situations …
“Why did Greta get hired?”
“It’s like there are two kinds of workers. Most are real churchy and love the place. The others are Greta girls … they’re in trouble, or don’t have anywhere to go. If they leave, they can’t ever come back. Or tell about what happened.”
“If they tell,” he said, “the lawyers will get them.”
Rebecca nodded. “They’re super mean, the lawyers. No one will believe the Greta girls.”
“Tawnya. She’s in charge,
right? In control?”
“She comes to the parties, too. But more to make sure the girls do like they’ve been told.”
“Did Greta talk about drugs?”
“Tawnya gives the Greta girls pills and stuff to drink. Greta says it makes her feel all floaty and she hardly knows she’s at a party.”
Drugs for compliance, Nautilus thought. Plus they blunted memory, the girls barely able to recall what happened. Nautilus heard a lawyer bloviating in his head: “The women making these scurrilous allegations, Your Honor? They’re drug users, outcasts from their own families. The park gave them jobs and a fine place to live and these tragic women repay kindness with lies and ridiculous allegations. I demand this senseless case be thrown out of court, a slander on the reputations of fine men …”
“Has Tawnya been here long?” Nautilus said.
“For about a year. One of the Greta girls is named Deely … she’s been here the longest. Greta says Deely remembers another boss girl before Tawnya. I think her name was Sissy.”
“These men? Do they have names?”
“Bobby and Stevie and Tommy. They’re old. One’s real fat. Greta hates them.”
Bobby, Stevie, Tommy … Nautilus figured he was hearing pseudonyms.
“Just the three men?”
“Greta says there used to be another one. She never saw him, just heard from one of the girls before her. He was real old, like a grampa. His name was Teddy, but the girls called him Whitey behind his back.”
“Whitey?”
“Yeah,” Rebecca nodded. “Because of his hair.”
54
Amos Schrum was staring at the floor as if it might rearrange itself into the solution to a problem. He blew out a breath and pushed back a shock of overhanging hair, turning to his visitor.
“Tomorrow’s Pentecost, Andy. It starts at midnight.”
Delmont was sitting beside Schrum and strumming chords on his guitar. Above the white slacks he wore a red-and-white checkerboard shirt with a blue paisley bandana around his neck. He set the instrument aside.
“Yessir, I know.”
