"We only want to ask a few questions," Eleanor said.
"I'm out of answers," he said. "I was just going to run down to the store, pick up a few. You want to tell your mechanic here to let go of the door?"
Eleanor laughed. "He does look like a mechanic, doesn't he?"
"He doesn't look like a reporter."
"And I'm not," I said. "I'm a detective." Eleanor looked startled.
"Better and better," he said. "You two ought to talk it over. Ring the bell again when you decide who you are. If I'm anywhere near the door, I'll answer." He tried to push the door closed again, but I shouldered it back. The chain snapped tight and held.
"What we are," I said, "is a double-whammy. A reporter and a detective. We're everything you don't want camped on your doorstep."
"Leave me alone," he said desperately.
"How would you like to be in People magazine? 'Church Prophet's Father Living in Poverty.' Then, of course, there'd be the National Enquirer. How would you like to be called as a witness in a murder trial?"
'This isn't poverty," he said. "And I don't know anything about any murder. And also, don't talk to me about the fucking Church. Beg your pardon," he said to Eleanor.
"I'm used to it," she said.
"You have a security clearance out there at Miska, don't you?" I said. "What are you cleared to? Secret? Top Secret? Eyes Only? How wide is your need-to-know scoop?"
"Hey," he said. "What do you got in your head, bugs? You can't stand out there and shout that kind of stuff."
"Then let us in."
"What do you got to talk about my security clearance for?"
"How long do you think you'd keep it after you got famous?"
"You wouldn't do that."
"I wouldn't even have a hard time sleeping."
"You must be some guy."
"A very nice lady has been killed. The Church is in the middle of it-not Angel and probably not Mary Claire, but the Church. I'll do anything I have to do to figure out why. Now, are you going to let us in, or do you want to practice your signature so you can sign autographs in supermarkets?"
He tilted his head back, toward the rear of the house, like a man listening for something. Then he said, "And if I let you in?"
"We ask some questions about the Church and then we go away and leave you alone."
"You'll never see us again," Eleanor said.
His mouth twisted. "You come in," he said, "you gotta be quiet."
"We'll be quiet," Eleanor said.
"Okay. You want to move your big fat hand so's I can get the chain off?"
"If you lock it," I said, "I'll kick it in."
"Breathe a little more fire," he said. "It's a cold day." He pushed the door closed and the latch rattled. Then the door opened again and he stood there, a small wiry man whose clothes were too big for him. "Come in and wait here," he said. "I got to check on something." He turned and shuffled off down the hall. He wore battered leather slippers.
We went in. The house was dark and smelled of food and an elusive chemical taint. Sickness. On a little table next to the door was a pile of unopened junk mail, computer-generated trash addressed to three or four misspellings of his name.
"This is awful," Eleanor whispered. "Half his mail is from Ed McMahon. It doesn't even feel like a house. It's just, I don't know, indoors."
"It's not going to get any better," I said. "Don't turn into the Problem Lady."
Caleb Ellspeth appeared at the end of the hallway and beckoned to us. "In here," he said, "in the living room."
The living room was a cramped little cubicle with so much furniture that it looked like a couch convention. The furniture had seen too much wear. Magazines written by, and for, engineers and machinists were scattered across the two coffee tables. Reader's Digest book condensations marched in uniform across a small bookshelf. War and Peace democratically shared a volume with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
"So what do you want?" he said. "Wait a minute. If we're going to do this, we might as well do it. Coffee? All I got is instant, but I could use a cup."
"Sure," I said. "Black."
"How about you, miss?" he said with an unexpected sweetness that made Eleanor's eyes widen. "Some tea? A Coke, maybe?"
"Coffee," she said. "That'd be fine. Black, like his."
"Okey-doke," he said, shuffling off in his slippers.
"Gee," Eleanor said, blinking.
"You softy."
"You're really not as nice as you used to be," she said. "I don't know, with everybody else, I have the feeling that the plumbing fixtures are going to stay put. How come with you I feel like they're always pulling away from the wall? Why do I always feel like you're poking around under the plumbing?"
"Because that's where the bugs are."
We spent several moments in silence. The room was cluttered and threadbare but as clean as Sally Oldfield's front seat. A picture of a woman in a beehive hairdo turned out, on closer examination, to be Mary Claire, squinting into the California sunshine as if its dazzle obscured her future. Finally Caleb Ellspeth came in carrying an invalid's tray. On it were three cups that were even worse-matched than the ones I used at home, a sugar bowl, and a creamer. He looked too frail to carry the tray, and Eleanor started to get up to help. I had to grab her wrist to keep her down.
"Just in case anyone changes his mind," he said, putting the tray down in front of us. "Me, I can't drink this stuff without a little help." He began to spoon sugar into his cup. "Okay," he said, "let's get it over with."
"I want to know about the beginning," I said. "How you got into the Church. How Angel became the Speaker. What happened to you and Mary Claire."
He snorted. "Me and Mary Claire," he said.
"Anything," I continued, "about how the Church works inside."
He stirred his coffee. "Is this going to be in the papers?"
"Not with your name in it," Eleanor promised.
"If you tell me," he said to her, "I'll believe it."
Eleanor took out her pad. "When did you join?"
He shrugged. "Mary Claire joined first. About eight years ago. This was in New York, where Angel and Ansel were born."
"Ansel?" Eleanor said.
"My son. Anyway, she liked the Church pretty much, gave her something to do when Ansel got her down, which was most of the time." He put down his spoon and studied the surface of the invalid's tray. "Ansel's brain-damaged," he said flatly.
"I'm sorry," Eleanor said.
"Me too. Where was I?"
"In New York," she prompted.
"Yeah. So she joined and she kept at me to join, and I wasn't that hot for it but Ansel got me down sometimes too, more than I could tell her, so finally I went with her and wound up hooking into a Listener."
"Did it help?" I asked.
He looked at me reflectively. "Didn't hurt," he said. "Nah, that's not right. Sure, it helped. I couldn't talk to Mary Claire because she always wanted to believe that it'd all be hunky-dory in the end and that I was the one who could make it happen. Anyway, it wasn't as hard on me as it was on her. I was in the Navy and I was gone a lot, you know? And she was always home, always having problems with the kid." He took a sip of coffee. "Ansel, I mean," he added. "Ansel was pretty rough on her. It's not easy when you're a woman, knowing that something came out of your body that probably ought to be dead. Anyway, that was how we felt at the time. So, yeah, it helped. It gave me someone to talk to."
"And when did you come to California?"
"Not long after that. Mary Claire wanted to come, she was crazy about little Anna, who was the Speaker then, right? And I managed to get a transfer, and we came. The four of us," he said. He swallowed once. "You're not drinking your coffee, miss."
"Sorry," Eleanor said, taking a brave pull at it. "Just listening."
"Listening," he said with an unamused smile. "Let's hear it for Listening."