“Hitler as Jesus, huh?”
“I told you, man. Nothing’s quite so cheap as belief.”
Sometimes insights hit you so hard, so fully and completely, that your IQ drops through the bottom of your boots. How could I be such an idiot?
“And let me guess,” I said, my scalp prickling. “Their cardinal sin is…”
Albert said all he needed to say. “Miscegenation. “ People get all fucked up about purity. I dated this chick, Brenda Okposo, who was a social psychology professor teaching religion at New York University. Bitter and beautiful-my kind of girl. A “sessional,” she called herself, which led me to crack innumerable jokes about our “sessions” together. Anyway, she said that humans have specialized regions of the brain dedicated to avoiding contaminants. Apparently even before we knew about germs, we had evolved instinctive aversions that helped us avoid them. Then along comes culture, and the ability to train children to attach aversions to this or that, so that we can be utterly revolted, out- and-out nauseated, by pretty much anything.
We get all fucked up about purity.
The ironic thing was that it was a small disagreement about condoms that festered into the blowout that ended-or “Brended” as I joked to my buddies at the time-my relationship with Dr. Okposo. She got it in her head that condoms were simply another expression of our culture’s pathological addiction to purity. So, of course, the best way to slip this obsessive noose was to submit to a battery of clinicians and blood tests and throw the rubbers out the window. I was busted at the time, flat- fucking-broke, and too proud to take her up on her offer to pay.
The last words I heard were literally, “I can’t believe you’re choosing cock balloons over me!”
That was October 3, 2002-what should have been a bad day, but was just too weird to be anything… really. “Caleb,” I said, leaning forward to talk through the slot in the safety glass. I fixed his eyes in the rear-view mirror. “I just have a couple questions.” He was enough of a nervous Nellie that I could tell he knew what I was about to ask him. He had caught my conversation with Albert-or as much as he needed, anyway.
“Shoot.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about the Church of the Third Resurrection?”
When he failed to answer, I glanced at Molly, saw the twinge of sudden apprehension.
“Yeah… “ he finally said, his eyes bouncing back and forth from the street in the windshield to me in the mirror. “What about them?”
Evasion. Plain and simple. This was when it dawned on me that Molly and I were pretty much trapped in the back of his cruiser…
I blinked and saw him sitting behind his desk-our first meeting. “I know how it sounds. But you live here long enough and you begin to take a dim view of things, you know? There was just something about her that made you think she was, well in danger. Like she was an endangered species or something. “
You would think double takes would be part and parcel of a career like mine, but the fact is, they’re not. I mean, I didn’t simply get into the business because I was tough, charming, and didn’t need to take notes. Thanks to all the retards in Hollywood, I also thought private investigating would be filled with surprises. Wrong. Like I said, people repeat, even when they’re busy fucking each other over.
I had been had. Despite all the goofy precautions I take, all the little anti-social gimmicks I use to remind myself there’s always more than meets the eye, I had willingly jumped into the jaws of what could be a lethal trap. People take things at face value, especially when those things gratify the old ego. So when a cop calls you at 11:38 EM. to say that he needs your help with the latest twist in your case, what do you do? Apparently you leap to your feet like the stooge you are, shout, “Hurry, Watson!” and jump into the back of his police cruiser.
Motherfucker.
“That wasn’t my question, Caleb. I asked you why you never said anything about them?”
But the fact was, he had, only in ways that had made me think he was soft in the head. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I had purposefully antagonized Reverend Nill in the hope of goading him into action. And then, true to form, I had let the prospect of getting laid derail everything. As bad as James fucking Bond, only minus all the class. I mean, with all those references that Nolen had made to bigotry in our first talk… All I had to do was rehearse that conversation and all the obvious questions would have asked themselves. And now here I was, trapped in the back seat of Nolan’s cruiser, with every reason to believe that the turd actually belonged to the Church of the Third Resurrection.
Why else would he have worked so hard to put verbal distance between himself and bigotry that first meeting?
“I don’t understand,” Nolen replied with an oh so phony smile. He braked at one of Ruddick’s few stop lights. I could see Molly covertly trying her door. Locked, of course.
“Well, Caleb, let me put it this way, then. You have this beautiful white girl, named Jennifer, who likes going out dancing with her best friend, who happens to be a handsome black man, at a bar that happens to be frequented by several fanatic members of a white supremacist religion, which is not only run by a cadre of ex-cons but also happens to be actively recruiting in your jurisdiction, and then suddenly, poof, this beautiful white girl disappears, vanishes… “
While I was saying this, I pulled my cell out of my belt clip and handed it to Molly, who snapped it up like a fat kid with chicken nuggets. Caleb didn’t reply at first, so the sound of Molly leaving a “detailed message” for her editor at the Post-Gazette seemed to grate with sham intent…
“Yeah,” she was saying, “so I’m, like, with Chief Nolen right now, Chief Caleb Nolen, and we’re heading to the station…”
I glared into the rear-view mirror with violent intensity, watched Nolen’s face from the angle of out-of-body experiences and guardian angels. His eyes clicked to meet mine once-twice…
“I have a daughter,” he fairly blurted. “Cynthia. She’s seven, more beautiful than… I don’t know. About eight months ago I get this call, an anonymous prowler tip… over on Ross and Maitland. Turned out to be nothing… except that I was almost forty-five minutes late picking Cynthi up from her swimming classes. When I finally arrived at the school, I find out that someone’s already driven her home… her coach’s assistant, a woman who just happens to belong to Nill’s church… “
His eyes flash up to the mirror, and for the first time I glimpsed real fury. “Thirds,” he says, staring at me for a heartbeat. “We call them Thirds… “
His gaze bored on down the road.
“They own this town.”
He pulled up in front of the white-glowing station, dropped the cruiser in park. A call crackled across his radio-some small-town nonsense that he completely ignored. My hackles had smoothed somewhat, but I wouldn’t breathe easy until he cracked the fucking back doors. He had fairly admitted that Nill had leverage, that he was frightened for his family. Maybe that explained his emotional outburst at the motel.
Nolen turned in his seat, continued explaining in a more apologetic tone. After the incident with his daughter he had researched Nill, discovered that he was in fact an ordained minister. Nolen had toyed with the thought of discrediting him before his congregation. But he was a former convict as well, one with connections that ran deep into the Aryan Brotherhood and the Hells Angels. This was why the man leapt to the top of his list when Jennifer went missing.
“I went and talked to him,” Nolen said in defensive tones. “To Nill. He was pious… furious… Said that there’s no one in his church who would dare cross his word. And his word was to keep everything quiet, to express nothing but Christian charity, to do everything they could to see the Thirds grow… “
He turned his face to the white gleam of his station, hesitant and brooding.
“Maybe I was afraid. Hell, I know that I was afraid… And why shouldn’t I be, when both you and I know I’m just a grocery clerk playing cops and robbers.” Even without seeing his expression, I knew that this admission cut him deep.