“Of course it’s been unlocked.” Bay sounded offended. “All right, Mr. Goodwin,” he went on, trying halfheartedly to mask his irritation, “you can go ahead. I don’t like this business, but I believe you to be both honest and well-intentioned.” He pushed a button, and within seconds, Diane entered, wearing her ever-present smile.
“Mr. Goodwin wants to have a look at Roy’s office,” Bay told her. “Take him, please, and show him where everything is, and then you can leave. He’ll probably be in there for an hour or so.”
I followed Diane across the hall. Meade’s office was slightly larger than Wilkenson’s or Reese’s, but not as elaborately decorated. Bookshelves covered one wall, floor to ceiling, and papers were stacked up in two neat foot-high piles on his desk.
“Mr. Morgan and Mr. Reese and I have sorted some of Mr. Meade’s correspondence and his other papers, but we’ve got an awful lot more to go through, mainly the stuff in the filing cabinets,” Diane told me. “And I don’t know what we’ll do with all the books he had. Just look at them!”
“Quite a library,” I agreed. “What’s in these stacks on the desk?”
“Mostly things we’ve gone over that don’t need immediate attention, or that we don’t know what to do with. It’s here for Mrs. Meade to go through when she wants to. A lot of it we probably could have just tossed, but Dr. Bay thought it best that we should save it for her.”
I agreed and said thanks, and Diane left, closing the door behind her. My first stop was the bookcases. Meade kept his Bibles on the lowest shelf, six of them in all. I sat at his desk and paged through each one. Wolfe had said to look for marginal notes and underlinings, but there weren’t any. Either the guy didn’t use the Good Books much, which I doubted, or he didn’t like to mark them up. He probably was one of those kids who always gave the teacher a birthday card and never underlined in his school texts.
After a quick scanning of the rest of the shelves — most of the books had “Christian” or “Christianity” in their titles — I started on the piles on the desk. There were brochures about upcoming Silver Spire conferences and seminars; fliers advertising new religious books; a dozen magazines, most of them church-oriented; some letters from ministers around the country who apparently corresponded regularly with Meade; and a couple of thick mail-order catalogs filled with pictures of church furniture and paraphernalia like candle holders and preachers’ robes in white and black and purple.
There also was a pad of white notepaper with Meade’s name and phone number printed at the top that had some scribbled notations to call various people, none of whom was familiar to me. Tucked into the pad was a sheet of yellow lined paper, folded once, that also had some scribblings, in the same handwriting. I looked closer and realized they were Bible verses, then set the sheet aside and finished rummaging through the stacks without finding anything else that seemed even vaguely promising.
Diane was typing when I popped my head into the office. “Is there a copying machine I can use?” I asked. She gave me a bright-eyed nod and steered me to a sterile, fluorescent-lit, windowless room at the far end of the corridor. “This is our printing center,” she said proudly, gesturing to the three personal computers and several other pieces of high technology, one of which I recognized as a mainframe.
“We’re set up to do almost all of our own typesetting and printing,” Diane went on, “including the bulletins for our Sunday services, the weekly newspaper that goes to every home, and the reprints of Dr. Bay’s sermons that we send to TV viewers who request them. Some weeks we mail out several hundred of those, free. The only thing that has to be printed outside on a regular basis is our monthly magazine, SpireTalk. Have you seen a copy?”
I said I hadn’t, and she promised to give me one to take home. I thanked her, and while she waited I used the copier to duplicate the page listing the Bible verses and the sheets of Meade’s notepaper with the names and phone numbers on them.
“Okay, I’ve made copies of what I wanted. Come to Mr. Meade’s office with me and watch while I put these originals back on his desk.”
Diane grinned sheepishly and reddened. “Oh, now that’s really not necessary.” She giggled.
“It is for me. I want you to be able to tell your boss that I didn’t walk off with anything. Of course, you weren’t in there with me while I was going through the papers, so heaven only knows what I might have lifted and tucked away. Want to search me?”
She blushed again. “Oh, Mr. Goodwin, you are such a kidder.”
“Guilty. But I insist you go into Meade’s office with me. If you do, I promise to take a copy of your magazine home — and even read it.” She shrugged and smiled and tagged along as I returned to the office. “Is that Meade’s handwriting?” I asked, gesturing to the sheets as I put them back on the stack where I’d found them.
She squinted at each of them and nodded. “Yes, no question. Mr. Meade wasn’t much for dictation. He’d give me scribbled letters to people all the time that he wanted typed, so I know his writing very well. That’s it, all right. You can see that he never got an A in penmanship. I used to have a terrible time trying to read what he put down. I’m surprised those Bible verses are so neat.”
“But they are his writing?”
“Yes. For once, he must have slowed down a little.”
I thanked her and stopped at her desk long enough to get an issue of SpireTalk. It had a color photograph of the choir on the cover, with the line “The Spire’s Singers Prepare for a European Tour.” Maybe Wolfe would find some interesting reading inside, although I wasn’t about to bet on it. In fact, I wouldn’t even bet on his opening the thing.
As I was leaving the church, Roger Gillis blew into the lobby from the parking lot, his carrot-colored hair tossed by the wind. “Hello,” he said stiffly, trying to flatten the orange mop with his hand. “Learned anything yet?”
“Nothing that would get the newspapers excited,” I answered.
He snorted. “I’m not surprised. You’re still trying to find somebody to pin Roy’s murder on, aren’t you? When that’s not the mystery. Everybody knows who did it, and the police have already got him. The real question is, who wrote the notes to Barney? But you don’t even care about them — you just want to find some way to get your pal off. And you also don’t care who gets hurt in the process. Roy was right, rest his souclass="underline" You guys really are sleazy.”
Having thus put me in my place, Gillis strutted off in the general direction of his office, no doubt thinking I would lick my wounds and slink out. I didn’t slink, though, I strode, after first smiling at the redheaded receptionist, who gave her dimples another workout by smiling back.
The drive to Manhattan was a little slower than the morning trip, and by the time I got the car tucked in at the garage and climbed the front steps of the brown-stone, it was ten after four, which of course meant Wolfe was playing in the plant rooms. I went to the kitchen, where Fritz worked on dinner. He gave me a sorrowful look and reported that there were no lunch leftovers. “He ate all of the veal, Archie. I am sorry.”
“Hey, don’t be. Having feasted on your cutlets for years, I can’t blame him. I’ll make myself a sandwich.”
Fritz started to protest, but I stilled him with an upraised palm, built myself a ham-on-rye, poured a glass of milk, and went to my desk in the office. As I ate, I looked at the photocopies of Meade’s writing. The names and phone numbers I set aside, figuring the Bible verses were more promising, although I didn’t know the hows and whys.