“You found Meade.”
He snorted. “Correct. After fifteen minutes were up — actually it was a little longer than that — I got up and poked my head out in the hall. It was empty, so I figured, since other than Barney I was the farthest one from the conference room, I’d work my way back, getting everybody to return to the meeting. Roy’s door was the first one on my side of the hall, so I knocked twice and got no answer. I opened the door, and he was... face down on the desk.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
He sighed irritably. “Come, come, Mr. Goodwin. We’re all indulging you with these cursed interviews. There’s not a person under this roof right now who doesn’t think Fred Durkin shot Roy. And, of course, that includes Barney. I commend you for your loyalty to a comrade in trouble, but it’s a sadly misplaced loyalty. Do everyone a favor and give it up.”
“Call me a lover of lost causes,” I told him. “What do you think about those notes that Barnabas Bay got?”
Another grumpy sigh. “The work of some oddball. We get a few weird ones occasionally. That’s to be expected considering the number of people who worship here every week. But I hope you’re not trying to somehow tie those notes to Roy’s death — that would be ridiculous. Now, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me,” he said, rising. “I have a meeting in less than ten minutes with the woman who oversees our Sunday-school choirs.”
Never one to stand in the way of meetings, I got up, too, figuring I’d gotten about all I was going to out of Wilkenson, at least for the present. He walked with me to the door and shook hands, unsmiling. “I’d wish you luck, Mr. Goodwin, but in this case, I’m not sure what that would mean, so I’ll just say good-bye.”
I didn’t much like the guy, but at least he was honest. I said good-bye, too, and returned to the main office, where only one of the two secretaries, Diane, was at her desk. “Oh, hi again, Mr. Goodwin,” she said with a lilt, looking up from her typing. “I guess you’ve talked to Mr. Wilkenson now, haven’t you?” I told her I had.
“That just leaves Mrs. Bay for you to see, right?” I nodded. “She’s in the conference room, catching up on some paperwork. She said to just go right on in; she’s expecting you. It’s way down the hall, almost to the end on the left, just beyond the drinking fountain.”
Thanking her, I went back along the corridor to yet another door — I’d opened almost all of them in the last couple of hours. Even though the plaque said CONFERENCE ROOM, I treated it as if it were a private office and knocked on the oak, waiting a discreet few seconds before pulling the door open.
I like to think I’ve been around enough beautiful women through the years that I don’t behave like a stage-door Johnny anymore, but Elise Bay almost made me want to rush out to buy a dozen roses. Even though I had seen her once before, almost exactly forty-eight hours earlier, I wasn’t quite prepared for the face framed in dark hair that smiled up at me from the conference table where she was sitting with papers spread out around her. Chances are she didn’t hear the catch in my breath as I stepped in, every inch the sophisticated big-city detective.
“Mr. Goodwin,” she said in a quiet, warm voice that had just a touch of the Carolinas in it, “please sit down. I apologize for the conference-room setting, but this becomes my office when I stop in three or four times a week.”
I said I didn’t mind a bit and slipped into a chair across from her, wondering what adjective would best describe the shade of gold in her eyes. I mulled that over while catching a scent from her that I didn’t recognize but wouldn’t mind getting more familiar with. “I didn’t realize you had a formal position here,” I said as an icebreaker.
She smiled and spread manicured hands, palms up, in a movement similar to one I’d seen her husband make. “Oh, I don’t, not really. I guess I’m what you’d call an almost-full-time volunteer. I oversee the calling teams the church sends out to visit our homebound members, which means a lot of paperwork and a lot of telephoning.” She gestured to the phone next to her. “Say, I’ve seen you before. Yes — on one of Nella Reid’s tours of the church. Day before yesterday, wasn’t it?”
I grinned. “You’ve got a good memory, Mrs. Bay.”
“You’re easy to notice, Mr. Goodwin.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment until I hear differently. And please call me Archie.”
“It was meant as a compliment, and I’m Elise. Is that Archie as in Archibald, or as in Archer?”
“As in just plain Archie. Your husband told you why I’m here, didn’t he?”
She nodded. “Yes. And I’ll help if I can, although I really don’t know how.”
“First off, what was your opinion of Royal Meade?”
Her eyes moved around the big room, as if she was forming an answer. “That’s a more complicated question than it sounds, Mr. — Archie. I had several opinions about Roy.”
“I’m interested in all of them.”
She gave me the same smile that probably turned Bert Parks’s knees to jelly in Atlantic City years before. “Roy was a very complex person. I don’t think any of us — even Barney — knew just how complex he was. First and most important, he was a tireless worker. My, what a worker,” she said, throwing up her hands and shaking her head. “We all had a hard time keeping up with him. I never saw a man with so much energy, and believe me, Barney himself is no slouch in the energy department.”
“There can be too much of a good thing,” I said.
“Yes, and I’m afraid that was sometimes the case with Roy. He was so terribly, terribly intense. I think that’s why he’d get carried away and get cross with people sometimes.”
“You among them?”
Pink showed in her cheeks. “Once in a while. Roy was very detail-oriented, and I’m not really always as good on details as I should be. That irritated him occasionally, although it was really pretty minor. There was never what you’d call a real out-and-out argument between us.”
“How did his irritation manifest itself toward you?”
She sawed her lower lip with TV-bright teeth and frowned. Even her frown was worth committing to memory. “You know, I’m probably blowing this up into too big a deal. I don’t mean to make Roy out to be an ogre or anything.”
“Believe me, you’re not. Go on.”
“Okay,” she said, trying to smile. “I guess it’s just that I’m a little nervous. I’ve never talked to a private detective before, and I’m worried about what to say.”
“What’s to be worried about? After all, the police interviewed you after Meade’s murder, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but they seemed so sure that Mr. Durkin had shot Roy, while you think it was somebody else — which would have to make it one of us, wouldn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. You were starting to tell me how Meade showed his irritation toward you.”
She cocked her head and shot me another smile. “No, I wasn’t, Archie, but I will. Roy was clever about it, or at least thought he was. If we were in a meeting with other people, he would say something patronizing like, ‘Given your schedule, I can understand how you might have overlooked such and such.’ He did that all the time, trying to make it appear that I was spread too thin.”
“Were you?”
“We have four children, although they’re not really children anymore — two are in college, two in high school. But when they were growing up, I was at home most all of the time. I only came in here a day a week or so. Now they’re gone and I have more flexibility. I serve on the board of one of the shelters for abused women that we support, and I’m in here three or four days a week. I don’t see that as an overload.”