“Yet you are a highly visible representative of a faith in which forgiveness is among the most exalted of virtues.”
Bay chuckled and slapped his thigh with a palm. “I like your direct approach, Mr. Wolfe,” he said without resentment. “You are right, of course. My failure to come to terms with the anger I felt at my father has pained me for years. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to work my way through it, at least to some extent. But,” he added with a slight smile, “after all these years, I’m stuck now with the name I gave myself in seminary. I know you didn’t ask me here to talk about my past, though.”
“Indeed. Our business is very much of the present. It is my intention to prove that Fred Durkin did not dispatch your associate.”
“The evidence would seem to indicate otherwise,” Bay said, lowering his voice theatrically.
“How would you describe your relationship with Mr. Meade?” Wolfe asked after giving Fritz Bay’s drink order and requesting beer for himself.
“We were close, of course.”
“One of the newspapers suggested that he was your heir apparent.”
Bay, folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes for several seconds. I wondered if he was always onstage. “Mr. Wolfe, it’s difficult for me to even talk about Roy right now, so soon after... well, so soon after what happened. And you can’t believe all the newspaper and TV people that have been in the church the last few days. Lights and cameras everywhere. And of course the police. I wasn’t even going to come here when you asked, but given that Lloyd approached you originally because of those notes, I felt that in a strange way I owed it to you.”
“You owe me nothing, sir. But since you have raised the subject, what is your opinion about the origin of the notes?”
“My guess is, an eccentric. Sad to say, every church gets them once in a while. I even had a few back in my little parish in New Jersey.”
“Have you received any other hostile missives since you’ve been in your present location?”
Bay looked at the ceiling as if in contemplation, then leveled his blue eyes at Wolfe. “Oh, just a handful, mostly complaining about the content of a sermon, or about the hymns we sang, or my theology. But never a whole series like this. And never so threatening. I suppose that’s the underlying reason I agreed to let Lloyd come to see you. But honestly, they — the notes — didn’t concern me much. I’m not easily frightened, Mr. Wolfe. And after all, we get more than twelve thousand worshipers at the Silver Spire every Sunday; a few of them are bound to be, well, unusual.”
“What do you think of Mr. Durkin’s theory that the notes came from someone on the church staff?”
“Unthinkable!” Bay snorted, waving the idea away as if it were a gnat. “That outlandish comment of his is what started the whole furor. If he hadn’t said that, Roy would be alive today.”
Wolfe drank beer and dabbed his lips with a handkerchief. “Was Mr. Meade in fact your designated successor?”
Bay calmed himself and shifted in the red chair while his television smile returned. “As I told that police inspector, Cramer, we’d never actually established a formal succession,” he said.
“Was there a tacit understanding?”
Bay frowned and tilted his head to one side. “If so, it wasn’t because of anything I said or did, although I can see where, given his duties, Roy may have made some assumptions. And possibly others made them, too. The truth is, though, I simply haven’t started thinking about a successor. That’s probably not good management on my part, but I’m not even forty-nine years old, Mr. Wolfe, and I feel like I have a lot of good years left in parish ministry, which to me is what the Silver Spire really is, despite our TV network and the national publicity and the books I’ve written.” If that last reads to you like a rehearsed speech, join the club. That’s how it sounded when he said it, too, although the guy really knows how to use his voice for maximum effect. I found I was almost enjoying hearing him talk.
“Assuming you were ready to step down, would Mr. Meade have been your choice as a successor?” Wolfe asked.
Bay waited several beats before answering, studying his hands and glancing at his elegantly simple wristwatch. “Roy has — had — been with me a long time. As Senior Associate Pastor, he functioned more or less as my chief of staff. He was loyal and devoted to our work — a real soldier for the Lord.”
“But not a general.”
Bay unleashed a self-effacing smile. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to,” Wolfe remarked. “How did the members of your Circle of Faith relate to Mr. Meade?”
Bay took a drink of water, returning the glass carefully to the small table at his side. “Mr. Wolfe, Roy had many fine qualities. He worked day and night — in fact, I had to urge him to ease off sometimes, to go home to his wife and son. He was a fine preacher, with a strong delivery and well-prepared, well-organized sermons. He often filled in when I was away if we didn’t have a high-profile guest minister lined up. And he always wanted everything to be just right — he was a perfectionist, which you must realize isn’t always conducive to popularity.”
“What comes to perfection perishes.”
Bay raised his eyebrows. “That’s not from the Bible; is it Shakespeare?”
“Browning,” Wolfe said. “Have you in fact answered my question?”
An earnest nod. “As I’m sure you’ve gathered from what I’ve said, Roy tended to be rigid. Some of the others chafed at this from time to time.”
“Did you intercede when there were differences?”
“Oh, Mr. Wolfe, indeed I did, indeed I did. Roy and I talked — and prayed — about his, well, I suppose abrasiveness is the best description. He was aware of the problem, and I feel he honestly tried to improve.”
“But still you received complaints?”
A shrug of the gray-suited shoulders. “Occasionally.”
“From whom?”
“Mr. Wolfe, we’re getting into an area of confidentiality here,” Bay said, rippling his brow. “I don’t feel I can answer that.”
“A man has been charged with first-degree homicide. I am not indulging in hyperbole by stating that his life is on the line.”
“There is no death penalty in this state.”
“Come, sir, that is a quibble. A long prison sentence spells the end for an individual as surely as does the hangman’s noose or lethal gas.”
“All right,” Bay said, reaching for the glass of water. He did not raise it to his lips. “Every one of the Circle of Faith, and that includes even my wife, has complained at one time or another to me about Roy.”
“What was the nature of the complaints?”
“Well, most of them centered on Roy’s abrasiveness, as I mentioned before. He could be extremely curt with people. To give you a bit of background, I assembled the Circle of Faith as a somewhat informal advisory council, sort of like those ‘kitchen cabinets’ that presidents used to have years ago. All the people in the Circle have been part of the Silver Spire ministry just about from its beginnings. Elise, of course, has been with me a lot longer than that; we’ve been married almost twenty-five years. Anyway, the Circle has been extremely important to me, both as a spiritual support group and an advisory body. They’re encouraged to be very close-knit and supportive of one another, as well as of me. Unfortunately, Roy tended to strain relationships, rather than bond them. He’d always been somewhat that way, and in the last several months, I’d gotten increasingly concerned about his divisive nature.” Bay let out air loudly, as if exhausted by his short monologue.