good luck.
I reached for the knob on the door that led into the church’s main auditorium. The knob didn’t budge. My luck had hit reverse.
Reverend Al had locked me in the office.
Chapter Nine
I got out my iPhone and punched Maury Samuels’s number.
It gave four rings before Maury picked up.
“This isn’t a good time, Crang,” he said. Maury never bothered with hello when the name on his phone’s screen was somebody he knew.
“You’re the man for a rescue job I need done, Maury,” I said.
For decades, Maury made his living as a break-and-enter specialist, the guy who went into hotel rooms while the guests were asleep in their beds. But three or four years earlier, crowding seventy, Maury hung up his Bally shoes. Bally, he once told me, was a brand that practically guaranteed no squeaks in the leather. Sound-free footwear was essential to a B&E practitioner. Maury quit the business, but retired or not, he could still pick the lock on any door.
“I’m making my shrimp dish,” he said on the phone. “It’s special for my friend Sal.”
“Tell him he can come with you,” I said. “Probably find it educational.”
Maury’s sound of small disgust came down the line. “You’re thinking I got a guy named Salvatore over here for a shrimp dinner?”
“It’s somebody with a different given name?”
“It’s a different sex, for crissake,” Maury said. “I’m cookin’ for my lady friend, Sal, which is short for Sally.”
“Okay, let me pitch the job to you in different terms,” I said. “During all your time breaking and entering, did you ever go into a building given over to religious observance?”
Maury paused. “You talking about a cathedral?”
“Smaller size but same principle.”
“No, I never did a church,” Maury said after another pause. “This place of yours, it’s got gold, art work, frankincense and fuckin’ myrrh?”
“Couple of original oil paintings.”
“Not that I’m thinking in terms of loot.”
“You’re retired,” I said. “But consider the challenge.”
“If I had a résumé, it’d look good to put a church on there.”
I told Maury my situation in a short and quick version.
“Crang,” he said, “when this is done, you’re gonna owe me.”
Maury hung up.
The sun had dropped out of the sky. The only illumination in the place came through the two skylights in the church’s main room and another window at the back of Reverend Al’s private quarters. Turning on lights in Reverend Al’s office wouldn’t be a smart move. Neither would anything else that might draw attention to any part of the Heaven’s Philosophers building while I was locked inside.
In the gloom of the office, I opened the Reverend’s computer. It was shut down. I tried the computer on the conference table. It was still in sleep mode. Whoever regularly used the machine had forgotten to turn it off. Or just didn’t give a damn. I went to Documents. Getting out my iPhone, I typed in the names of the eleven guys who appeared on the Document titles. Robert Fallis, who was the guy nicknamed Squeaky, and the rest of them, William Sizemore and so on. When I finished, I strolled over to the peephole and watched for Maury.
Twenty minutes later, I caught the faint sound of somebody tinkering with the lock on the door into the auditorium. In no more than ten seconds, the door swung open. Maury’s large but trim figure stepped in. Maury always dressed in tweed jackets and nice pleated slacks from Harry Rosen, and he was attired as usual tonight. He was using a small flashlight to guide his way down the church’s centre aisle.
“Back here, Maury,” I said, my voice pitched no higher than a conversational level. Sound carried easily in the room. Reverend Al could whisper his sermons, and nobody would miss a word.
Maury needed ten more seconds to unlock the office door.
“A blind guy could pick his way into this joint,” Maury said. “Or out of it.”
“I’m grateful to you, Maury,” I said. “Your friend Sal waiting in the car?”
“She’s carryin’ out a diversionary tactic downstairs.”
“The travel agent’s still in the building?”
“I sent Sal in first,” Maury said. “Keep the guy’s eyes involved on her while I slid past. But I don’t want to leave her with him too long. Sal’s new at this.”
“Just one more detail I need you to look at,” I said.
I led Maury to Reverend Al’s desk.
“You mind opening the top left drawer?” I said.
Maury handed me his little flashlight.
I aimed its beam at his fingers while he sorted through a ring holding many picks. He chose a particularly slim one. It fit the lock first try, and Maury slid out the drawer. I ran the flashlight over the contents, which appeared to be a stack of paper for the printer
“Nobody keeps printer paper under lock and key,” I said.
“Look some more,” Maury said. “And will you for crissake make it fast.”
I riffled through the stack, and a third of the way down, sheets covered in typing turned up. Two repeated words stood out on the first page. “Semen” and “blood.”
“This is what I came for,” I said to Maury. “Among other things.”
I folded the pages with the song lyrics into my jacket pocket, nine pages in all. Unless there was something wrong with my math, I now had the only two existing versions of Flame’s hateful song lyrics. The copy that the Reverend had given to Jerome was in a file at my office, and this one, the original, from Reverend Al’s drawer, was in my jacket pocket.
Already, by recovering the Reverend’s nine pages, I’d completed a large part of my assignment for the Flame Group. But the way I saw things unfolding, I could maybe use my possession of the pages to pressure the Reverend into spilling the beans about how he got his mitts on them in the first place. I gave myself a mental pat on the back.
Maury and I left the Reverend’s office, and eased down one of the curving staircases to the lobby. The travel agent had his back to us. He looked intent on Sal. I’d be intent on Sal if I were him. She had a lot of blonde hair and an outstanding set of knockers. Maury and I crossed the lobby and waited on the sidewalk a half block east of the church’s front door.
When Sal came out of the building a few minutes later, she was carrying two file folders. She had on a flowery summer dress,
