“Hardly. I’m just amazed you’re still here. With that kind of harassment, most people would have left.”
She shrugged the shoulders of her stiff police shirt. “I was an orphan. This job had a lot to do with my identity and self-worth, if you’ll excuse the jargon. It was very important for me not to run.”
“I can understand that.” I looked at her carefully. “In fact, there’s only one thing I don’t understand.”
“And what’s that?”
“Why you came over here and sat down.”
“Oh, that’s simple enough. A citizen asked me to investigate you.”
“Would this citizen’s name be Eve McNally?”
“Could be.” She leaned forward into an angle of sunlight. Her eyes were vivid green. “Do you have some ID?”
“Are you serious?”
She nodded. “Afraid I am.”
“My name’s Jim Hokanson. I’m a free-lance writer. Sometimes I do retainer work for Fenroe Publishing.”
I dug out my billfold, extracted a white business card, handed it to her.
She didn’t look at it, just left it lying next to her elbow.
“Anybody can get a card printed. I really need to see some ID.”
To the casual eye, we might have been lovers having a quick lunch at McDonald’s. She looked so sweet and relaxed sitting across from me.
I got out all the Hokanson stuff and handed it over: license, medical-insurance card, Visa card.
She went through it carefully, turning everything over and over in her slender fingers, even bending the Visa card a little.
She handed it back.
“So tell me,” she said, “who are you?”
“You saw for yourself.”
“None of that’s ever been used.”
“What?”
“All brand-new. Your Visa card, for instance. Use that a few times in one of those machines, it gets scratched a little. But it isn’t scratched at all. Same with your license. Not a mark on it. So who are you?”
“You must’ve read an awful lot of Nancy Drew when you were growing up.”
She smiled. “I did as a matter of fact. But you’re not answering my question.”
“Who am I, you mean? That’s a pretty heavy philosophical question for this time of day.” I looked across the small-town street where people stood in twos and threes beneath the shadows of awnings and discussed small-town news and gossip. There was a pizza place named “Mike’s” on the corner. “Does Mike make good pizza?”
“Who?”
“Mike. Across the street.”
“Oh. Yes. Pretty good. So who are you, Mr. Hokanson?”
I smiled. “I’m on the same side you are, let’s put it that way.”
“That’s a very elusive answer.”
“That’s because I’m a very elusive guy.”
Her beeper went off. She frowned. “Excuse me.” She walked back to a pay phone, deposited some coins and talked for a minute or so. She came back, but this time she didn’t sit down. “Bad car accident. I have to leave. I may see you later, whoever you are.” I waggled the Visa card at her. “Says right there that I’m Mr. Hokanson.”
“Right,” she said. “And I’m Katharine Hepburn.”
3
In the driveway sat two matching white Lincoln town cars. Brand-new. There was money in the God business. Far up the drive that curved behind a stand of pine trees, I could see a large white house, new and prosperous-looking against the backdrop of a pasture where cows loitered contentedly.
The church was small and modern in a repellent sense, all sharp angles and juts, like a piece of glass sculpture that had been dropped and smashed and then glued back together ineptly. The message seemed to be that God was a schizophrenic, and a clumsy one at that.
But for all the trendiness of the design, the wailing song that poured forth from its open front doors was at least as old as the famous tent-revival shows that played the Midwest and South back in Depression days, a bit of bayou blues and Jimmy Rodgers white-boy hobo song combined with the stirring religious themes of working-class Baptists.
For all the fanciness of the exterior design, the interior was plain: thirty rows of oak pews and an oaken altar. And on the altar stood a thirtyish man in a singles-bar country-western getup of brilliant red shirt with blue piping, skintight jeans and a pair of Texas boots that were no doubt the real lizard they purported to be. He was good-looking in a chunky Irish kind of way — maybe Edmond O’Brien had been his grandfather — and he was gone gone gone on the song he was twanging out on his electric guitar, Elvis himself having never been more gone gone gone back when he was nineteen and known only in Memphis and signing his name on the top part of ladies’ breasts.
He was singing all about how God understood him and why he did the things he did, and how God would cradle him someday and purge him of sin and loneliness and want, and I couldn’t help it — I actually enjoyed hearing him sing, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling and trailing out the open side windows.
And then he paid it off, a big finale with him working hard on his guitar, eyes still closed, whole body surging with the grief and ecstatic eternal promise of the lyrics.
The church sounded obscenely quiet after he finished, as if its only purpose was to be filled with his song, and now it was spent and empty of reason to exist.
“You’re really good,” I said.
For the first time, his eyes came open and I was almost startled by the clear green fury of them. Oh, yes, this man knew whereof the demons he sang.
“Didn’t know I had an audience,” he said in a young voice that made me slide his age down to twenty-five. “Reverend Roberts says I should bring in an audience even when I’m practicing. I still get stage fright, you know, on our TV shows and all.”
He set his blue Fender down on the carpeted floor of the altar, then walked down to meet me.
After shaking hands he said, “I’m Kenny Deihl. If you ever saw the reverend’s show, I’m one-half of the talent.”
“Haven’t seen the show, I guess.”
Something subtle but serious changed in his startling green gaze. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re not a follower of the reverend’s, either, are you?”
“No. Afraid not.”
“Then just what the heck’re you doing—”
“Kenny, I’ll handle this. No need to get upset We’re all children of the Lord.” He stood in the back of the church, but I had no trouble hearing his greased and mellifluous tones at all.
He looked just about the way you might imagine, $250 worth of moussed dark hair, a face that was youthfully handsome in an almost-diabolical way, like a mask that didn’t quite work, a conservatively cut blue suit that would give offense to no one, and one of those firm-handshake, quick-grin manners that let you know you were in the company of a Psycho for Jesus. He smelled of hair spray, aftershave and chewing gum.
He came over and said, “Kenny, why don’t you run downtown and pick up that case of Pepsi for tonight? You know how dry we get when we cut those radio shows.”
“I’ll bet he’s a reporter,” Kenny said. “I’ll just bet he is.”
“Remember Hebrews 13:2, Kenny. ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware.’ ”
Kenny knew just what look to put on his face. He still hadn’t forgiven me for coming here but he knew how to take his cue from the reverend. “Sorry, mister. Guess I just got carried away. Just after the state paper went after us—”
He looked at the reverend, then quit talking. He shrugged, then walked to the side door at the front of the church and disappeared.