One night Fred and I were there, both armed. The warehouse was a block square and as dark as the tunnel of love. Around midnight, I thought I heard something. I was right, but slow. I’d found one of the hijackers, or rather, he found me. I still remember the moment when the flashlight beam played on me. “Say your prayers real fast, because you’re gone,” he hissed, and I heard a shot and tensed, but didn’t feel anything. The flashlight banged onto the floor, followed by moaning. When I got to the guy, he was lying there, clutching his right arm. His sleeve was beginning to show a stain, and his pistol was next to his open hand.
I leveled my Worthington on him and played my flashlight cautiously around the warehouse. Fred came barreling into the halo of light, panting, his own gun drawn. “You okay, Archie?”
“Yeah. Did you fire?”
“Uh-huh, once.”
“My God, what a great shot! You nailed him in the arm.”
“Not so great, Arch,” he wheezed, looking at the hijacker as he writhed on the floor. “I was trying to kill the bastard.”
Okay, that’s a long way of saying it, but Bay wasn’t the only one around who had a big debt outstanding. I was still scolding myself for thinking even for an instant that Fred might have shot Meade, when the phone brought me back to the present.
“Oh, Mr. Goodwin — I’m glad I caught you in.” Carola Reese sounded tense. “I need to talk to you.”
“This is as good a time as any. Go ahead.”
“No, I mean I... well, I need to see you. I’d rather not talk about this over the phone. I’m in Manhattan — at the ferry terminal. I can meet you anyplace you say, as fast as a taxi can get me there.”
I thought about having her come to the office, but figured Wolfe could walk in on the middle of our conversation. She sounded nervous enough as it was, and having him around wouldn’t help that any, to say nothing of what it would do for his disposition. He tolerates women in the brownstone, but only when there’s absolutely no alternative.
I looked at my watch. “Tell you what. It’s four-thirteen. There’s a coffee shop at Twenty-ninth and Third, southwest corner. It’s quiet, it’s clean, and it’s got booths. I’ll meet you there at, say, quarter to five. That should give you plenty of time.”
She thanked me more than was necessary, and I hung up, going to the kitchen to tell Fritz I had an errand but would be home for dinner. Fritz did not greet the news with enthusiasm. “Archie, you are away for too many meals,” he said as soberly as if I’d just told him a relative had died. “That’s not good.”
Assuring him I was not about to miss his lobsters with white-wine sauce, I ambled into the outdoors. The skies had turned gray, but I bet against rain and walked, heading east on Thirty-fifth. At Third, I made a right turn, landing in the coffee shop at twenty to five. Carola wasn’t there yet, so I took a booth near the door and ordered coffee.
I was on my third sip when she walked in wearing mauve-framed sunglasses and looking as though she’d just landed in a country where she didn’t speak the language. Then she saw me and took a breath, smiling. “Thank you for seeing me on short notice,” she said, sliding in across from me. “I hope you aren’t angry.”
I grinned. “I save my anger for bigger calamities, like the Mets’ bullpen and cabbies who don’t know how to find their way from Herald Square to Rockefeller Center. Now tell me, what is the agenda for today’s meeting?”
She smiled weakly. “I feel very stupid about this, but I don’t know what else to do. I guess I should start by saying my life hasn’t always been, well... lived right, if you know what I mean.”
“Mrs. Reese, I have yet to meet anybody whose life has always been lived right.”
“That’s nice of you to say, Mr. Goodwin,” she replied, drinking from the cup that had just been set in front of her. “But in my case, I really mean it. Really. Before I started coming to services at the Silver Spire, and then met Sam, I was on the wrong track, in a lot of ways.”
“Why are you unloading now?”
She looked down at her coffee, pulled off the big sunglasses, and aimed green eyes at me. “Because of what Roy Meade said to me.”
“You’ve got my attention.”
“This is hard to talk about, but I knew this morning, when you were with Sam and me, that you were somebody who would... listen. I don’t know anything about Mr. Wolfe, but you — I don’t believe that you are judgmental.”
I couldn’t think of a suitable response, so I didn’t say anything. She allowed a smile to escape, this one first-rate, and then went on. “After Sam and I got married — that was almost six years ago now — I felt like I’d been given a second chance. And the truth is, I had. It really started when I joined the Spire Choir, not long after I became a member of the church. I’ve got a good voice, Mr. Goodwin; I was a nightclub singer for years — here, the Poconos, the Catskills, even a couple of the smaller spots out in Vegas. Which gives you some idea of the kind of people I was hanging around with in those days.”
She stopped for breath and more coffee, and the cup shook in her hand so much that I thought the java was going to spill onto the table. “Anyway, you don’t want to hear all this stuff. I—”
“I want to hear whatever you choose to tell me.”
That earned Doctor Archie another smile. “I’d been singing with the choir for, oh, maybe three months when I met Sam,” Carola said. “It was at a coffee-and-cake reception in the main lounge after one of our Sunday-afternoon choral concerts. He’d been a widower for about four years, and — well, things just developed, you know?”
I nodded. “What about Roy Meade?”
“Oh, yes, what he said to me. Well, about a year or so after Sam and I got married, Barney formed the Circle of Faith. I was surprised that he asked me to be part of it. I figured it was just because I was Sam’s wife, and I told Barney that it was a nice gesture, but I knew it was Sam that he really wanted in the group.
“‘No, Carola,’ he said to me, ‘I want you there, too, every bit as much as I want Sam; your faith journey is an inspiration, and don’t ever, ever sell yourself short because of what you may view as a tarnished past. The life experiences you’ve had give you a far better perspective on the world than many people — and I believe those experiences have strengthened you greatly in your Christian walk.’ So I became part of the Circle, and I could tell almost from the first Circle meeting that Roy resented my presence there, although I didn’t know for sure why.”
“Did you ever ask him?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ve always gone out of my way to avoid confrontation. But I thought maybe it had something to do with my marrying Sam. Roy had known Sam’s first wife, and I figured maybe I didn’t measure up to her. Or that maybe he disapproved of the kind of life I’d lived before I found the Lord, which I guess would be easy to understand. Anyway, Roy and I hardly ever spoke to each other, except for the occasional ‘Hello, nice weather, isn’t it?’ kind of pleasantry. And then, about eight months or so ago, I was stuffing envelopes for a mailing in one of the unoccupied offices — I do volunteer things like that around the church a couple of days a week, whenever they need an extra pair of hands. The door to the office was open, and Roy was walking by in the hall. He looked at me, and then came on in and shut the door behind him.”
“A little unusual, wasn’t it, given your relationship with him up to that point?”