"One certainly is," said Chantra, who'd been keeping count.
"And after the fourth," Dixie said, glaring at her, "one wallows in mud, like a hog."
There was a silence that embraced the entire room. "That's the punch line?" I said.
"I don't know how to explain this to someone whose idea of a theological authority is Don Rickles," Dixie said loftily, "but this is a sermon, not a joke."
"And I don't know how to explain this to a dinner guest," I said, "but most people in a small, convivial social gathering would prefer a joke to a sermon."
"California is so trivial," Dixie said.
"Boy," I said, "I bet their tongues would be hanging out in New York."
"Anyway, look what happened to poor Noah," Chantra said, coming to her ex-husband's rescue. "His own kid came in while Noah was sleeping it off and cut the poor old sot's balls off, or whatever he did."
"The most mysterious hundred and fifty words in the Bible." Dixie was warming up again.
Chantra emitted a ladylike groan. "I've made a mistaaaake" she wailed.
"So crime doesn't pay," said Eleanor, trying to put a conversational cap on it.
"I wouldn't go that far," Dixie said, taking a tremendous gulp from his bottle. "Look at the first murderer."
"A Bible class," Chantra said to the air. "Fifty-one years old and he has to take a Bible class."
"Fifty," Dixie said. "Fifty-one next week."
"What did happen to the first murderer?" I was interested in spite of myself.
"Say the magic word, win a hundred dollars," Eleanor said resignedly. She'd bandaged my head the evening before and she'd had enough of murderers for one week.
"Cain," Dixie said triumphantly. "Clobbered his insufferable schmuck of a brother in a field. Why? Because Abel's sacrifices-there we go again with the blood and guts-were accepted, and Cain's weren't."
I ran my personal mosaic of the Old Testament through my head and discovered that some pieces were missing. "Are you saying Cain got off?"
"Got off?" Dixie said. "He got the biblical version of overcharging on his Visa and having his credit extended infinitely. Cain was a dirt farmer. Abel was a shepherd, the earliest record of the kind of rivalry that was the basis of every western John Wayne ever made. The shepherd's sacrifices pleased God and the farmer's didn't."
"God's not a vegetarian?" Eleanor said. "Harold would hate this conversation." Harold was her rapidly balding publisher.
"Tofu hadn't been invented," I said. One of the things that most deeply divided Eleanor and me was tofu. "Anyway, why would anybody think God was a vegetarian? Look how many millions of years he spent jury-rigging evolution so it could produce incisors."
"Somehow," Dixie said, "I don't think the smoke from burning tofu would have brought Jehovah lickety-split to Cain's campfire. Anyway, who knows? Maybe Cain invented it. Never underestimate a Jew who needs a moment of God's time."
"Intriguing speculation aside," I said, "Cain got a slap on the wrist."
"A parking ticket in Beverly Hills would have given him a harder time, and this was his own brother that he killed. The Septuagint, the Greek Bible, which is more faithful to the original than the one King James cooked up, even suggests that Cain set Abel up, invited him to drop by some godforsaken field, you should pardon the expression, before he brained him. In a modern court of law we'd call that premeditation."
"A parking ticket in Beverly Hills," Eleanor said. "That's serious."
"So what was his punishment?" Dixie said rhetorically. "God told Cain he couldn't farm anymore, a blessing in disguise if there ever was one. No more scratching in the dirt to raise vegetables that he couldn't even sacrifice, much less gain a little weight on. So Cain threw away his hoe and cleaned up his boots or whatever they wore in those days, and founded a city, probably the first city in fact, a thriving little metropolis called Enoch. And he found a wife somewhere, we won't go into that, and had lots of kids and made it into the social register as one of Enoch's most important citizens, a regular pillar of society. Some punishment."
"What about the mark of Cain?" Eleanor said.
"On the whole," Dixie said complacently, "I'd prefer it to the mark of Abel. A big F, for fertilizer or N for nitrogen, if you prefer."
I thought about Sally Oldfield. "Crime pays," I said.
"You weren't on the job," Dixie said to mollify me.
Eleanor sniffed twice and got up fast. "Oh, hell," she said, "something's burning." She hurried toward the kitchen.
"Let's hope it's the vegetables," Chantra said. "Otherwise you may have to set a place for Jehovah."
Over dinner, which we ate at a rickety card table that usually held the used Macintosh computer on which Eleanor did her writing, the conversation turned to the bandage on my head.
"I got in front of the wrong person," I said.
"If I'd known you were hurt, we would have canceled," Chantra said. Dixie, his fund of biblical insights exhausted for the moment, was chewing. Eleanor was banging pots together in the kitchen and casting resentful glances at me because I wasn't helping. "Simeon," Chantra continued, using a line that Eleanor could have written for her, "are you sure you're in the right line of work?"
"If I weren't an investigator, I wouldn't have met you," I said with shopworn gallantry.
"We were suspects," Dixie said reprovingly around a mouthful of potato. He had gravy on his wrists. Chantra, on the other hand, used her napkin more often than she used her fork.
"Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat," I said. "Sure, you were suspects. Everybody was a suspect in that one."
"No one in this room is sorrier about your head than I am," Eleanor said, putting an unrecognizable dessert on the table more loudly than was strictly necessary. "But I haven't done this much work alone since I was made blackboard monitor. And that was in fifth grade."
"I'll bet you were an angel in fifth grade," I said. "If there are Chinese angels."
"Why wouldn't there be? What do you think, there's a color line at St. Peter's gate?"
"Please," I said. "You'll get Dixie started again."
"Wrong Testament," Dixie said. "If I want fairy tales I'll go to the Brothers Grimm." He inserted a fork experimentally into the dessert. "What is this?" he said.
"Pureed apples and cranberries," Eleanor said defiantly, "with creme fraiche, cinnamon, and raisins. Made without sugar or flour. Flour clogs the small intestine."
Dixie lost interest visibly. "Potatoes were great," he said.
"Lop sop," I said.
"Simeon," Eleanor said. "I speak Cantonese."
"You taught it to me."
"This is not junk."
"It's great," Chantra said with her mouth full. "I want the recipe."
"Nothing would have made me cancel tonight," I said to Chantra. "I need some information on things of the spirit." Things of the Spirit was the name of Chantra's store on Hollywood Boulevard, an emporium of New Age panaceas ranging from cabalistic texts and crystals to aromatherapy.
"The hidden agenda emerges," Dixie said, tasting the dessert. "Apple pie," he said, looking surprised.
"Information about what things?" Chantra asked.
"One thing, really. The Church of the Eternal Moment."
The silence that followed was punctuated only by the scraping of Dixie's fork. Like most skinny people, he could eat for hours. Eleanor sat down.
"Have I said something wrong?" I said.
"I know something about the Church of the Eternal Moment," Chantra said carefully. "Little girls and voices from beyond."
"See?" I said. "Ask an expert."
"It's not something I'd steer my customers to. People in my kind of business have to be careful to keep a distance from the frauds." Eleanor made a wordless noise of assent.
"I'm glad to hear it," I said. "Tell me what you know."
Chantra chewed the requisite twelve bites and I waited to see if her creativity was on the rise. "There are a lot of members," she finally said. "More than you'd think. Not just in L.A., but in Denver and Seattle and Chicago and New York. Anywhere, I'd guess, where there are large numbers of spiritually lost people with more money than sense."