Plain Heathen Mischief

by Martin Clark

  “As was mentioned earlier, it’s a piece of cake to get a bogus set of papers and a receipt, claim you’ve been shanghaied by unscrupulous dealers if you’re ever caught. The ring’s easy.” Hobbes appeared eager to showcase his insight and let everyone know he was as schooled as his fellow agent.

  “Gotcha,” Woods said.

  “So we find ourselves, Mr. King, in a position where you really can’t do much for us,” Hobbes concluded. “We want the painting, and you can’t take us any closer to Van Heiss.”

  “I would assume the FBI has an interest in halting widespread, systematic insurance fraud,” Lynette remarked. “This guy Sa’ad and his buddy apparently are very significant operators.”

  Anna Starke looked at her. “Not at the expense of my painting,” she said, the first time the two women had addressed each other. And—suddenly, instantly—it became obvious to Joel who was calling the shots, despite Hobbes’s insistence that he frame the questions and sit at the head of the table and proclaim himself prince of the investigation. Joel envisioned him seated on Anna Starke’s knee with an opening in his shoulders for her to insert her hand and manipulate his wooden lips and notched chin.

  “I agree,” Hobbes said.

  “So why am I here?” Joel wondered.

  “For us to have a look at you,” Hobbes answered. “See if there’s anything else you can tell us.”

  “You know what I know,” Joel said, his spirits flagging.

  Lynette focused on Anna Starke. “Let me make sure I’m understanding you. You plan to ignore Sa’ad and Brooks and punish Mr. King, who’s helping you, because you’re afraid of alerting Van Heiss or losing the trail of this painting? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  Anna Starke met Lynette’s stare and responded in her textured voice. “I want the Chagall. How does arresting Sa’ad take me there? We have a disconnect here, Ms. Allen. I have a global problem, whereas you’re concerned with a couple of con men ripping off an industry that hardly has a history of clean hands. We often turn a blind eye when the bad guys shoot each other. If we apprehend Sa’ad and Abel Crane along the way, good for us. If we don’t, but recover the art, I’ll nevertheless be delighted. And right now I’m not about to roust this Crane guy and pin the ring on him so Van Heiss can see me coming from a mile away and stash the grand prize.”

  “But you still intend to prosecute Mr. King? Slay the minnow while the sharks swim out to sea?” Lynette packed the question with disapproval.

  “The fact Sa’ad and Brooks are guilty doesn’t make Mr. King any less guilty, now does it, Miss Allen?” Hobbes said, his air self-satisfied and conceited. “Let one murderer go free because the other two happen to escape the scene? You good people in state court going to stop prosecuting speeding tickets because everybody does it and you don’t catch them all?”

  “It’s the good people in state court who are doin’ the dirty work, diggin’ the trenches and risking our lives while you guys jet around hunting for a damn hoity-toity painting,” Woods snapped. “When’s the last time you and the professor here got to arrest a crackhead with a pistol or sat up all night in the woods freezing your butt off doin’ surveillance?”

  “No one would ever discount the importance of and danger in what you do, Agent Woods,” Anna Starke replied. She puffed the “of” and “in.”

  “There’s no need for us to be having this debate,” Lynette said. “Mr. King has broken the law and deserves to be punished. I merely hope you will honor your commitment to him and see that he’s treated fairly.”

  “He’ll get what he deserves,” Hobbes said.

  Anna Starke focused again on Lynette. “I will see to it our attorneys are aware of his cooperation. I’ve never hinted to the contrary. I will recommend he receive appropriate consideration.”

  Months ago, tending to the predictable problems of his congregation, writing sermons, visiting nursing homes, scheduling bake sales and congratulating new mothers at the hospital—sealed inside the protective boundaries of the cloth—Joel could never have imagined how rough and tumble the secular world really was, how truth frequently took a circuitous route to arrive at its destination, leapfrogging, doubling back, hopscotching, detouring, sometimes becoming lost for days, sometimes disappearing altogether. “Call if you need me,” he said to everyone at the table, then walked out of the room and through the gloomy building, by himself until the custodian let him out and wished him a good night.

  The following morning was unseasonably mild, and Joel decided to visit the country church he’d discovered upon first arriving at his sister’s, embarked on the trip mindful of how satisfying it was to be outside in the sweet winter air, aware that he might soon be returned to jail. He paused at the neighbors’ pasture to pet the horses, and crouched and beckoned their skittish mutt to come nearer and have its stomach tickled. The sun had gotten the better of the cold by the time the church came into sight, and a pair of eagles sailed from a stand of trees, beat their wings to gain altitude, then commenced a languid, stately glide.

  When Joel got close enough to read the church’s sign, its black vinyl letters delivered the week’s wisdom: DON’T GIVE UP. MOSES WAS ONCE A BASKET CASE, TOO. A pickup was parked near the entrance, and the door was unlocked when Joel tried the knob. He went inside, waited for his vision to adjust to the middling light.

  It felt as if the heat wasn’t working; the sanctuary was chilly, still held the aftertaste of the previous night’s cold, the trapped air no warmer than the day outside. Joel didn’t remove his coat and took a seat on the front pew, bowed his head, closed his lids and allowed his mind to drain until there was nothing left in his thoughts. He remained on the unyielding oak for some time, pensive and meditative, emptying himself of every notion and impulse, making space for the Lord to alight and suffuse his spirit.

  He didn’t know how long had passed when he noticed a vibration, a trembling shock in his feet that connected him to the building and made him aware of his arms, legs, and hands again, wrestling him back from his worship. Next there was a boom and then a rough banging, metal colliding with metal, rising from the bowels of the church. He listened for more sounds, cocked his head toward the floor. He waited but didn’t hear anything else. A brass cross and two collection plates were arranged on a table beneath the pulpit, the cross’s glossy finish muted by the dim surroundings.

  The banging started again, this time fierce and sustained, and Joel was able to pinpoint where it was coming from. He left the sanctuary through a side door, followed a set of steps into an ample finished basement and startled a man propped on his forearm and rib cage, repairing an ancient oil furnace. The man was using a monkey wrench to adjust a fitting, and pipes, tools, couplings, a soldering iron and several smeared rags were scattered next to him. He had thick brown hair and was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, and he fumbled his wrench when Joel spoke.

  “Oh my. You gave me a heckuva scare,” he said, holding a hand to his chest. “I didn’t hear you come in.” He stood up and wiped both palms on his pants, slap-brushed the dirt on his shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” Joel said. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

  “No problem. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Harlan Hunter, the pastor here. I’d shake hands, but I’m so filthy I’d make a mess of you.”

  “I’m Joel King. I live down the road with my sister, Sophie. The door was open, so I came in. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course it is. You’re welcome anytime. Everyone’s welcome in the Lord’s house.”

  “I was upstairs praying and meditating, and I heard the noise. I take it your furnace is on the fritz.”

  “Yes sir,” Hunter replied. “And I’m not sure I can fix it.”

  “Shame,” Joel said sympathetically.

  “Yep.”

  “Can I do anything to help?” Joel asked.

  “I might have you grab that tank line while I take a hacksaw to it, keep it from floppin’ around.”

  “I’d be glad to
,” Joel said.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “No problem,” Joel told him.

  “And I guess I should properly welcome you to our church and see if I can do anything for you,” Hunter said. “Not often we have newcomers stoppin’ by to pray on a weekday. Hard enough to get folks here on Sundays.” He laughed at his own observation.

  “Uh, well, no. I just enjoy the walk from home and the silence and appreciate having a church close by.”

  “Come anytime,” Hunter said, and Joel noticed his eyes were watery, irritated. Probably from the fuel oil or squinting to do fine work on a wire or motor part.

  “What kind of congregation are you?” Joel asked. The sign above the slogan board noted the church’s name, the TRUE VINE GOSPEL CHURCH, and stated there were services on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings, visitors welcome.

  “We’re a ‘Word’ church, independent, open to anybody who loves the Lord and believes in the absolute, unerring truth of the scriptures.”

  “Good.” There was a little too much charisma and salesmanship in the description for Joel’s taste. “Good for you.”

  “Are you churched, Joel?” Harlan Hunter asked. “Saved?”

  “Yes. I attend the Baptist church in town and was baptized at nineteen.” The preacher’s pushiness was making Joel uneasy.

  “Well, if you’re ever of a mind to pay us a visit, the doors are always open. We’d love to have you and your sister, too. Excitin’ things are happening here. The Holy Spirit is conquerin’ Satan and claimin’ lives.”

  “Maybe I will. Thanks.”

  Reverend Hunter positioned himself on the floor again, and Joel knelt beside him and held the copper line that fed oil from the tank. Hunter had to access the pipe from underneath, and he was on his back, peering up at Joel. He began sawing into the metal, made cramped half strokes back and forth across the copper while Joel kept it braced. After a few moments, Joel smelled something odd over the pungent scent of the oil, caught a powerful whiff of alcohol, a stray scent that became stronger as Hunter exhaled and continued to labor and sweat. The surprise popped into Joel’s eyes and became obvious in his features, and Hunter halted his cutting, wriggled and wormed and said, “Oh, that. That’s cough syrup. I’ve been sick with the flu.” The smell of whiskey got stronger when he spoke, belying the hasty fib, and Joel held fast to the pipe, nodded and told the preacher it had been a bad season for sickness.

  As Joel departed the building, he assured himself it was meaningless in a sense, this man’s drinking, and there was—for Joel—a definite profit gained from the alcoholic minister’s plight and transparent lie. Harlan Hunter had an Achilles’ heel, sure, but he was nevertheless fighting the fight, not succumbing, not yet. He was where he was supposed to be, tending to a cranky, antiquated furnace, skinning his knuckles and ruining his clothes, and the drinking could have been anything, from a palmed collection-plate twenty to a crack in his faith, but the flaw was still servant to his determination, only an ugly habit or a few stitches in his overall humanity, a petal, a capillary, a piston, a brush stroke, a piece but hardly the whole. Joel drew a guilty comfort from the man’s foibles, was able to shed a measure of his own self-loathing, realized that he and the poor fellow and everyone else were alike, clay and dust, forever imperfect, hamstrung by the Fall and a snake’s beguiling charm but still precious in the Lord’s eyes.

  The walk home to Sophie’s was pleasant, brightened by a complete stranger coasting to the side of the road and offering him a lift, which he declined. The furnace was operating when he’d left, fixed good as new, and that cheered him as well, knowing that he’d helped warm the church and taken some of the load off Harlan Hunter.

  Upon arriving home from True Vine, Joel found Baker’s clothes and sheets deposited in front of the washer and dryer, the clothes heaped into a pile, the sheets stretched their full length across the basement floor, lugged by a corner to their destination and dropped, white carcasses that extended ten feet along the cement, the tail ends barely missing the last stair step. Even though his sheets could have used more effort, the boy had turned his pockets inside out, bless his heart, just like Joel had asked him to. It was Sophie who was careless in that regard, left bottle caps, coins, ink pens, tissues, napkins and credit card receipts in her pockets so Joel often wound up with Impressionist loads and saturated specks of paper clinging to every garment in the wash. He’d kidded her about it several times, prodding her to be more attentive. “It would help Mr. French,” he’d joked, “if Sissy could perhaps empty her pockets and unroll her socks before tossing everything in the laundry.”

  “Why don’t you check for yourself, Joel? It’s not like I have nothing else to do. How difficult is that?”

  “I always try, but sometimes I forget or overlook a pocket. It’s no big deal—I didn’t mean to start a fight.”

  She’d stared at him, entertained and vexed at the same time. “Damn, Joel, you can be such an old maid. I can do my own clothes if it’s going to weigh on you so heavily. I’ve made it okay by myself so far.”

  “It was only a suggestion. I’ll continue to chimp-pick the clots and paper fleas off entire baskets. Not a problem. It’s my responsibility to double-check.”

  Joel decided to do a load of whites and his own sheets, poured in bleach and ran the water hot. He piddled upstairs and rested on the couch while the machine clicked through its cycles, then tossed the wet lump into the dryer and filled the washer with dark pants and shirts. Immediately after he set the dryer and it began to tumble the sheets and underwear, he heard a scraping inside, and he thought of Sophie, wondered what it could be this time, hoped for quarters or dimes and not another tube of lipstick. He interrupted the machine, reached in and groped along the bottom, didn’t discover anything. It occurred to him that the machine might be broken, the knocking from a screw or bolt sheared loose and rattling in the drum, because what in creation could she have left in her undergarments that was causing the racket? He removed the clump of saturated cloth, placed it on the floor and began searching for the problem, separated panties, bras, T-shirts and Baker’s briefs from the sheets.

  It took a minute—his hands were moist and his knees had begun to ache from squatting—but he found the source of the noise: a hard bump at the margin of the fitted sheet, concealed just under the elastic. He flipped the edge and then stood up, staring at his discovery the entire time. A little head rush hit him, but it really wasn’t much, sort of a blip or two, and that was it, all he felt at first even though he was excited. He bit his lower lip, twice, to make sure he wasn’t still supine on the sofa, dozing, dreaming, his mind spawning impossibly good fortune.

  Returning to the laundry, he bent over and quick-touched the tiny stones and damp metal, used only his index finger and jerked away instantly, as if the ring were scalding or toxic to anyone foolish enough to come in contact with it. The ring. There it was, the ring, the missing ring, the green sister, the gash along its side caught on an elastic thread in the crinkled, bunched lip of the sheet, a thousand-to-one shot, barely snagged. Joel thrust a fist into the air and thanked the Lord. “Hallelujah,” he shouted, and couldn’t stop smiling. This was a start, he was convinced, the beginning of his delivery, the godsend that would take him away from Pharaoh and out of Egypt. “Hallelujah!”

  When he finished his celebration, Joel placed the ring in a sock and taped it to the top side of a drain pipe that bisected the basement’s ceiling. He knew the discovery was important, that it held the genesis of his restoration and the answer to his miseries, but he wasn’t certain what he needed to do. He’d learned a lesson though, yes he had, and this time he simply hid the jewelry and waited for inspiration, didn’t go off half-cocked and by himself, armed only with falsehoods, deceits and his own inadequate devices. He finished the laundry, listened to an NPR story about the cold war and reported to work early, humming a Baptist hymn as he entered the Station’s kitchen.

  A table of Hollywood producers and movie pe
ople visited the restaurant for dinner and ordered every appetizer on the menu. They took drunk and distributed intoxicated cash among the waiters and kitchen staff and paid Sarah to let them remain until three-thirty in the morning. Joel stayed, too, made eighty dollars extra and helped cook late-night hamburgers for the road, packed the food in a lettuce crate and led the drunkest partyers to a cab. As he and Sarah were returning to the entrance, walking side by side across the parking lot, he sneaked a glance at her and got caught, and she told him to cut it out, that it was never going to happen for him. Joel laughed and apologized, said he didn’t mean to be a nuisance.

  The climate reverted to normal for February, cold during the days and frigid when the sun disappeared and the blue sky turned to pitch with swaths of pinprick stars. Joel heard nothing else from Lynette or the FBI, went about his routine and took Baker to a movie with the extra cash from the Hollywood party at the Station, bought the boy a Cherry Coke and a mammoth vat of popcorn. He’d been at work for an hour on a busy Thursday evening when Sarah appeared in the kitchen and told him someone was asking for him and he needed to follow her. They went into Sarah’s unorganized office, not much more than a closet with a minuscule desk and a phone, and Lynette Allen was waiting there, dressed in her work clothes, a gray suit and a blouse fastened at the neck. Lynette was standing, and there was scarcely enough room for the three of them.

  She thanked Sarah for the help and apologized for the interruption, and Sarah left, pointedly remarking as she stalked off that it was a hectic night and they were already lacking a waiter.

  “I didn’t expect to see you,” Joel said.

  “No?”

  “I was betting on Hobbes and handcuffs.” He smiled.

  “Sorry to disappoint you.” Lynette sounded tired.

  “What brings you to the Station?” Joel asked.

  “What brings me here is my friendship with Dixon Kreager, my empathy for your sister, my ethical duty as an attorney and my mild dislike of the federal government.”