But here, at least, here she felt at peace and welcome and loved. Everyone said good morning, even people whose names she didn’t know, courtly gentlemen and polite young men and lovely young women and hovering mothers and sweet old white-haired women. Maxine Blake was dressed all in white, wearing an ornate hat that looked a little like an upside-down bucket with white tendrils coming out of it and encircling it like rings around a planet. She threw her arms around Audrey, pressing Audrey to her enormous bosom, bringing her into a cloud of perfume and warmth and love. “God is good,” Maxine said.
“All the time,” Audrey responded.
The service started a good twenty minutes late. “Colored people’s time,” the joke went. The choir, dressed in their magnificent red-and-white robes, marched down the aisle clapping and singing “It’s a Highway to Heaven,” and then they were joined by the electric organ and then the trumpet and drum and then Audrey joined in along with most everybody else. She’d always wanted to sing in the choir, but her voice was nothing special—though, as she’d noticed, some of the women in the choir had thin voices and tended to sing out of tune. Some had spectacular voices, it was true. The men mostly sang in a rumbling bass, but the tenor was more off-key than on.
Reverend Jamison started his sermon as he always did, by calling out, “God is good,” to which everyone responded: “All the time.” He said it again, and everyone responded again. His sermons were always heartfelt, usually inspired, and never went on too long. They weren’t particularly original, though. Audrey had heard he got them off the Internet from Baptist Web sites that posted sample sermons and notes. Once, confronted on his lack of originality, Reverend Jamison had said, “I milk a lot of cows, but I churn my own butter.” Audrey liked that.
Today he told the story of Joshua and the armies of Israel fighting the good fight, battling five of the kings of Canaan for the conquest of the promised land. About how the kings played right into Joshua’s hands by joining the battle together. About how it wasn’t the Lord who fought the battle, it was Israel. The five kings tried to hide in a cave, but Joshua ordered the cave sealed up. And after the battle had been won, Joshua brought the kings out of their cave, out of their hiding place, and humiliated them by ordering his princes to place their feet on the kings’ necks. Reverend Jamison talked about how there’s no hiding place. “We can’t hide from God,” he declared. “The only hiding place from God is Hell.”
That made her think, as it had so many times, about Nicholas Conover and the graffiti that had been repeatedly spray-painted on the interior walls of his house. No hiding place.
That could be frightening, as no doubt Conover found it to be. No hiding place: from what? From a faceless adversary, from a stalker? From his guilt, his sins?
But here in church, “no hiding place” was meant to be a stern yet hopeful admonition.
In his most orotund voice the reverend recited from Proverbs 28: “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.”
And she thought, because every single one of Reverend Jamison’s sermons was devised to mean something to each and every one in the congregation, about Nicholas Conover. The king hiding in his cave.
But no hiding place. Andrew Stadler had been right, hadn’t he?
Reverend Jamison cued the choir, which went right into a lively rendition of “No Hiding Place Down Here.” The soloist was Mabel Darnell, a large woman who sang and swayed like Aretha Franklin and Mahalia Jackson put together. The organist, Ike Robinson, was right up front, on display, not hidden the way the organist usually was in the other churches she’d seen. He was a white-haired, dark-skinned man of near eighty with expressive eyes and an endearing smile. He wore a white suit and looked like Count Basie, Audrey had always thought.
“I went to the rock to hide my face,” Mabel sang, clapping her hands, “but the rock cried out, ‘No hiding place!’”
Count Basie’s pudgy fingers ran up and down the keys, syncopating, making swinging jazz out of it, and the rest of the choir joined in at the rock and my face and cried out and no hiding place no hiding place no hiding place.
Audrey felt a thrill coursing through her body, a shiver that moved along her spine like an electric current.
And the instant the choir had finished, while the organ chords still resounded, Reverend Jamison’s voice boomed out, “My friends, none of us can hide from the Lord. ‘And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man’”—his voice rose steadily until the sound system squealed with feedback—“‘hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains.’” Now he dropped to a stage whisper: “‘And said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’”
He paused to let the congregation know that his sermon had concluded. Then he invited anyone in the congregation who wished to come up to the altar for a moment of personal prayer. Ike Robinson, no longer Count Basie, played softly as a dozen or so people got up from their pews and knelt at the altar rail, and all of a sudden Audrey felt moved to do it too, something she hadn’t done since her mother’s death. She went up there and knelt between Maxine Blake and her enormous rings-of-Saturn hat and another woman, Sylvia-something, whose husband had just died of complications from liver transplant surgery, leaving her with four small children.
Sylvia-something was going through a terrible, terrible time, and what did Audrey have to complain about, really? Her problems were small ones, but they filled her up, as small problems will until the big ones move in and elbow them aside.
She knew she had allowed her anger at Leon to fester inside her, and she recalled the words from Ephesians 4:26–27: “Let not the sun go down upon your anger: Neither give place to the devil.” And she knew it was time to let go of that anger and confront him once and for all.
She knew that her hurt and disappointment over Jack Noyce might never heal, but it would not get in the way of her doing the right thing.
She thought of that poor little daughter of Nicholas Conover, fumbling at the piano, that beautiful needy face. That little girl who had just lost her mother and was about to lose her father too.
And that was the most wrenching thing of all, knowing that she was about to orphan that little girl.
She began weeping, her shoulders heaving, the hot tears running down her cheeks, and someone was rubbing her shoulder and consoling her, and she felt loved.
Outside the church, in the gloomy daylight, she took her cell phone out of her purse and called Roy Bugbee.
101
The throaty growl of a car coming up the driveway.
Leon? No, Leon’s car didn’t sound that way. Out catting, Leon was. And on a Sunday. She felt a swell of resentment, of resolve.
She parted the sheer curtains in the front parlor. Bugbee.
His leering grin. “Finally decided to do it, eh?”
She invited him into the front parlor, where he took Leon’s chair and Audrey sat facing him on the couch. Bugbee’s foot jostled something, and a couple of brown glass bottles clattered.
He glanced down. “Hitting the sauce, Aud? Pressure getting too much for you?”
“I don’t even like the taste of beer,” she said, embarrassed. “So what’s up?”
“One complication.”
“Oh no.”
“A good complication. Our friend Eddie’s rolling over on Conover.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“He wants to deal.”
“How much did he tell you?”
“Not a fucking thing. Just that he might have some information of interest to us.”
“He’s got to show us the wares.”
“He wants a deal first. I’m betting he’s the coconspirator.”
She thought a moment. �
��What if he’s the shooter, not Conover?”
“Them’s the breaks. If he gives up Conover for aiding and abetting, we got ’em both.”
“He knows about the gun match.” Another car engine, had to be Leon.
“You tell him? I sure as hell didn’t.”
She shook her head and told him about the call from Grand Rapids.
“Fucking Noyce,” said Bugbee. “What’d I tell you?”
“What did you tell me?”
“I never liked him.”
“That’s because he doesn’t like you.”
“Touché. But not my point. Him and Eddie Rinaldi both have something on each other. Now looks like we have something on Noyce.”
“I don’t play that game,” Audrey said firmly.
“Christ,” said Bugbee. “The fuck is the point of being a church lady, time like this?”
“How about I put it in terms you might understand? You want to be up front and open with Noyce, I have no problem with that. But I’ll bet you he knows that we know.”
“You think?”
“He knows I’ve been talking to Grand Rapids. He knows I dig deep. Anyway, you want to play games with him later, I really don’t care. My heart breaks for him, but right now I’m just thinking about this case and how we make it work. My way is to ignore him, work around him, put through this arrest paperwork on the down low so he doesn’t have a chance to tell Rinaldi.”
Bugbee shrugged, accepting defeat.
“And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t want to make a deal with Rinaldi.”
“That’s fucked up,” Bugbee protested. “He’s our way in.”
“You’re the one who kept saying we have this case nailed, right? Why do you want to give up so easily?”
“It’s not giving up,” Bugbee said.
“It’s not, huh? I want to charge them both with open murder. That way we have maximum bargaining room. We sort it out later.”
“So now you think we’ve got it nailed, that it?”
“Just about. Tomorrow morning first thing, I’m going to talk to Stadler’s psychiatrist again.”
“A little late for that, don’t you think?”
“Not at all. It’ll strengthen our hand considerably with the prosecutor’s office if he’ll agree to testify that Stadler could be deranged, even dangerous. If we get that, we’ll get the arrest warrants for sure.”
“I thought he already refused to talk to you.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“You can’t force him.”
“No, but I can persuade him. Or try, at least.”
“You believe it?”
“Believe what?”
“Believe that Stadler was dangerous.”
“I don’t know what to believe. I think Conover and Rinaldi believed it. If we have the psychiatrist on board, we have motive. The slickest lawyer Nick Conover can find’s going to have a steep hill to climb on that one. And then we sure don’t need any deal with Eddie, understand?”
“Roll the dice, you mean?”
“Sometimes you have to,” she said.
“You don’t want to roast Noyce’s balls over a campfire like I do, huh?”
She shook her head. “I’m not angry. I’m…” She thought. “I’m disappointed. I’m sad.”
“You know something, I always thought you Jesus freaks were kidding, on some level. But I think you’re serious about all that do-the-right-thing stuff. About being good. Aren’t you?”
She laughed. “It’s not about being good, Roy. It’s about trying to be good. You think Jesus is some…” She searched for the word. “Some wimp? No. He was a real hard ass. He had to be.”
Bugbee smiled, his eyes crinkling. She tried to read his expression, wasn’t sure if she detected the tiniest glint of admiration. “Jesus the hard ass. I like that.”
“So when was the last time you went to church, Roy?”
“Oh, no. Don’t fucking start on me. Let’s get one thing clear. That’s not going to happen.” He paused. “Besides, sounds to me like Jesus’s got some work to do in your own household.”
Stung, Audrey didn’t reply.
“Sorry,” Bugbee said after a few seconds. “That was out of bounds.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “You may be right.”
102
A chill was in the air, the fall days tinged with the coming winter. The sky was steel gray and ominous, threatening to rain at any moment.
In the living room, however, where Audrey sat reading, it was warm almost to the point of stifling. After Bugbee left, she’d made a fire in the fireplace, the first of the season. The fatwood had caught right away, which pleased her, and now the logs crackled loudly, making her jump from time to time as she lingered over a passage that wouldn’t let go.
She opened the Bible to the book of Matthew and wept for the man who’d been her friend. She thought, too, about Leon, about how she’d have it out with him. Now she was all the more determined to somehow rise above anger and recrimination.
Noyce and Leon: they were nothing alike, but both were men with feet of clay. Leon was a lost man, but he was a man she loved. She knew how quick she was to judge others. Maybe it was time to learn forgiveness. That seemed to be the whole point of the parable of the unmerciful servant in the book of Matthew.
A king was owed a great sum of money by one of his servants and was about to sell the servant and his family in order to raise the money. But when the servant pleaded, his master took pity and forgave him his debt. Not long afterward, the servant met a fellow servant of the king’s who owed him some money, and what did he do? He grabbed the man by the throat and demanded payment. The king summoned the ingrate and said, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?”
A key jangled in the front door lock.
Leon. Back from wherever he went without telling her.
“Oh, hey, Shorty,” he said as he entered. “You made a fire. That’s nice.”
She nodded. “You’re out and about early.”
“Looks like it’s about to pour out there.”
“Where’d you go, Leon?”
He immediately looked away. “Gotta get out of the house sometimes. Good for me.”
“Come sit down in here. We need to talk.”
“Uh oh,” he said. “Those are words no guy ever wants to hear.” But he sat down anyway, in his favorite chair, looking supremely uncomfortable.
“This is not going to continue,” she said.
He nodded.
“Well?”
“Well what?” he said.
“I’ve been doing some reading in the Bible.”
“I see that. Old Testament or New?”
“Hmm?”
“As I recall from my churchgoing days, the Old Testament God’s a pretty judgmental sort.”
“None of us is perfect, baby. And the Bible tells us about when Jesus refused to condemn an adulterer who was about to be stoned to death.”
“Where’s this going?” Leon said.
“You going to tell me what you’re up to?”
“Ah,” he said with a low chuckle that began to grow. “Oh, yeah,” he said and his chuckle grew into an unrestrained guffaw. “My sister been putting crazy ideas in your head?”
“You going to explain yourself? Or is this going to be the last talk we ever have?”
“Oh, Shorty,” Leon said. He got up from his chair and sat down on the couch next to her, snuggling close. She was astonished, but she didn’t hug him back, just sat there, stiff and angry and confused. A bottle rolled around under the couch. She reached a hand down and grabbed it. A brown beer bottle. She held it up.
“Is it this, or is it a woman?” she said.
He was laughing, enjoying himself, and she grew steadily more furious. “It’s funny to you?”
“You’re some detective,” he finally said. “That’s roo
t beer.”
“Oh, so it is,” she said, embarrassed.
“I haven’t had a drink in seventeen days. You haven’t noticed?”
“Is that true?”
“Forgiveness is Step Nine. I’m nowhere near that.”
“Step Nine?”
“The Eighth Step is to make a list of everyone I ever harmed and be willing to make amends to them. I should do that too. You know I was never good about lists.”
“You—how come you didn’t tell me you’re doing AA?”
Now it was his turn to look sheepish. “Maybe I wanted to make sure it would take.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Hey, Shorty, don’t go getting all proud yet. I still haven’t gotten past step three.”
“Which is what?”
“Hell if I know,” Leon said. He put a big callused hand on her face, brushed away her tears, and leaned in to kiss her, and this time she kissed him back. She’d almost forgotten what it was like, kissing her husband, but she was remembering now, and it was nice.
The two of them got up and went to the bedroom.
Outside it began to rain, but it was warm in their bed.
In the morning she would get up early and arrange the arrest warrants for Eddie Rinaldi and Nicholas Conover.
103
On her way to the prosecutor’s office, Audrey heard Noyce’s voice calling to her.
He was standing in the door to his office, waving her in.
She stopped for just a moment.
“Audrey,” he said, something different in his voice. “We need to talk.”
“I’m in a rush, Jack. I’m sorry.”
“What’s up?”
“I—I’d rather not say.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Audrey?”
“Excuse me, Jack. I’m sorry.”
He put out a hand, touched her shoulder. “Audrey,” he said, “I don’t know exactly what they told you about me, but…”
Company Man Page 44
