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“I can’t argue with that logic. I probably would have done exactly the same thing,” I said reassuringly. “Anybody else hang coats in that alcove?”

“No, at least not while I was there. They’ve got a small auditorium just down the hall, and I guess those hooks are used mainly when they’re having some sort of function in the auditorium. The staff all probably hang their own coats in their offices.”

“Do you know who might have spotted you using that alcove as a parking place for your trusty blunderbuss?”

Fred shrugged. “I guess anybody could have. To be honest, I didn’t pay a lot of attention, though. I suppose anyone who noticed me come into the building could have figured out from the bulge under my suitcoat that I was carrying a gun.”

“No doubt. How did you learn Meade had been shot?”

“Well, I’d been sitting in that stuffy little office for close to the fifteen minutes. Bay had asked us to do our meditating, but I was mainly thinking about what I was going to say when we all sat down again in the conference room. There was a knock at the door and Elise Bay came in, looking as pale as skim milk in a glass. She asked if I’d been sitting there the whole time — since Bay had dismissed us, that is. I told her I had. ‘Something terrible’s happened,’ she told me then. ‘Roy is—’

“I didn’t give her a chance to finish the sentence. I was up and out the door. Meade’s office is about thirty feet down the hall to the left of where I was, and both Morgan and Wilkenson were standing just outside his door, looking grim. As I walked toward them, Wilkenson held up his hand like a traffic cop. He told me to stop right there, that the police had been called and were on the way. As it turned out, Bay himself was inside, trying to administer CPR to Meade, which was futile. The guy had taken two shots to the head. Apparently, either one was enough to finish him. They found my thirty-eight and two shell casings from it on the floor in the office. Meade had been sitting at his desk when he’d been shot — from the front.”

“Hard to make a case for suicide,” I observed dryly.

“Yeah. And my prints were the only ones on the gun,” Fred muttered. “I’ve been set up. Screwed.”

“It sure looks that way. Who found Meade?”

“Wilkenson. His story is that he’d left his own office after fifteen minutes of meditating or whatever, and was walking down the hall toward the conference room. Said he came to Meade’s door and knocked to tell him it was time to reconvene. He got no answer, knocked again, opened the door, and found the body slumped over the desk.”

“Had anybody else emerged from their meditating places yet?”

“Wilkenson says no, that he was the only one in the hallway at the time.”

“Mmm. And each of them had gone alone into a room?”

“Presumably. From what I could see, we all went into offices except Bay, who stayed in the conference room. Some — Meade, Morgan, Reese, Gillis, Marley Wilkenson — used their own offices. Those of us who didn’t have an office, that would be the two women and me, got directed to other rooms.”

“Who did the directing?”

“In my case, Meade. As we were leaving the conference room, Bay asked him to show me to an empty office — it’s used by a membership secretary. And he told his wife and Carola Reese that there were a couple of other rooms down the hall that weren’t being used. Apparently, nobody locks their offices.”

“Trusting souls. Care to name a culprit?”

Fred gave me a helpless look, turning his palms up. “I wish I could, Archie, but I don’t know what the devil the motive would be. For that matter, what’s my motive?”

“Well, Meade was pretty rough on you, both in that meeting and earlier.”

“Yeah, that’s what the police said, and with the heat on them, they’re looking for somebody to toss to the wolves, namely me. But both you and the cops know damn well that rudeness and name-calling don’t constitute a motive for bumping somebody off.”

“They do if you’re a cop or a D.A. feeling the heat, as you just pointed out yourself. And what better target than a P.I. You know what slime we’re supposed to be. And an Irish P.I., no less. You know what they say about Irish tempers — you made that comment about yours a minute ago.”

Fred looked at me like a dog might look at the master who just kicked him. “That’s a low blow, Archie.”

“Hey, that’s not me talking,” I said, holding up a hand. “I’m just parroting the law-enforcement mindset.”

“Thanks for cheering me up.”

“Look, as I said before, you’ve got Wolfe and Parker in your corner, as well as your humble servant. Against us, the combined might of the N.Y.P.D. and the District Attorney’s office doesn’t have a chance.”

Fred responded to my brave words with a weak smile. He knew he was up to his armpits in alligators, and so did I.

Six

When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, he found the latest edition of the Gazette folded neatly on his desk blotter. I’d been through it already, of course. The headline, in two-inch-high capitals, screamed MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL! The secondary head, in only slightly smaller letters, read PRIVATE DETECTIVE CHARGED. There was a three-column picture of the Silver Spire tabernacle, and under it head shots of Bay, Meade, and Fred Durkin, along with a story that ran ten inches on Page One and jumped to the back of the first section, where it took up another two full columns. It didn’t tell much that I didn’t already know, except that the deceased was forty-seven and married to a Wall Street executive, had one child, and had been with the church since just after Bay founded it. Durkin was described as “a longtime New York free-lance private investigator, often employed by the legendary Nero Wolfe. In this instance, however, Durkin was operating independently, although he had been recommended to the church by Wolfe’s associate, Archie Goodwin, himself a private detective.”

An adjoining article by Tom Walston, the Gazette’s religion editor, described Meade as “second only to Barnabas Bay as a dynamic figure at the Silver Spire church. Insiders have said that Meade was clearly the anointed successor, if and when Reverend Bay decided to step down as spiritual head of the large and internationally known church and its affiliated television ministry.”

I kept quiet while Wolfe read, and when he finished I gave him a verbatim report of my session with Fred, which earned me a scowl, nothing more.

“Any instructions?” I prodded after he had retreated behind his book. I didn’t get an answer — not then, obviously not at dinner, and not when we were back in the office with coffee.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to stop in and see Fanny and the kids at least once a week, to try to keep their spirits up,” I said. “Or maybe Saul and I can alternate. I’ll take an orchid each time I go, to help brighten the place. I seem to recall that Fanny’s partial to yellow, so maybe the Oncidium varicosum will be—”

“Confound it, what are you blithering about?” Wolfe set his book down and glared.

I answered the glare with raised eyebrows. “I was just thinking about what the Durkin household is going to be like after Fred goes to Attica. Even with Parker in his corner, he’s a three-to-one shot to get life, of course, and I suppose—”