an umbrella.”
Davanelle blew a kiss and the screen went dark. Jeremy changed his khakis and sport shirt for a sky-blue seersucker suit, cream shirt, red-accented tie, slipping bare feet into cordovan loafers, stopping at the entryway closet to select a cream Panama and large sunglasses. He opened the door to a day bright with promise, and walked toward the milling crowd. The police had blocked half the thoroughfare to give people room for their various enterprises, from open-mouth stares to prayer to lugging a wooden cross. There were impromptu singings of hymns, prayers, candles dribbling wax all over the street. Jeremy watched until bored, ten minutes. He yawned and started back to his house, but paused as a stretch limousine with blackout windows passed the cross street at the end of the block. Normally, a stretch limo was not worth a second glance, another celebrity vacationing in the Keys, but this one was pulling an eight-foot trailer.
A limo with a trailer?
Jeremy reversed direction, jogging down the street to see the vehicle pull into the gated drive of a house two doors down, the house directly behind the home where Reverend Schrum lay. Two men stepped from the vehicle, dark suits, sunglasses, sized like football linemen, one was a buzz-cut redhead, the other had dark hair and Jeremy knew he was seeing bodyguards, security, whatever. Small minds, large muscles, no creative resources.
The day was getting brighter.
Jeremy retreated around the corner and stationed himself midpoint on the block, looking down the back yards. After ten minutes his conjecture was rewarded. The new arrivals at the house whose backyard abutted the Schrum backyard were now crossing between houses.
Why not park in front? Jeremy wondered. The crowds a problem? Or did they not wish to be seen?
Jeremy saw the two security types, plus another of the same rugged stature, a third who doubled as a driver, perhaps. With them were two others, one a man in a motorized wheelchair with tall tires – obviously carried in the rental van – and an auburn-haired woman, tall and slender and walking precariously between the yards, the effect of high heels sinking in to sandy ground. At one point she teetered sideways and when the red-haired bodyguard put out his hand to assist, she slapped it away.
Though Jeremy had seen the wheelchair man and auburn-tressed woman for three seconds and from two hundred feet distant, he knew their names and occupations.
He’d made money from them.
The quintet disappeared into the lush foliage at the rear of the Schrum home. Jeremy slipped his hands into his pockets and, whistling a jaunty air, strolled back to his home to ponder the meaning of the visitation.
Eliot Winkler’s motorized chair buzzed to the bottom of the steps to the back porch of the Schrum residence. The rear door was opened by Andy Delmont, a gospel singer and one of the Crown of Glory network’s most popular celebrities, his five albums in wide distribution. Delmont was in his early thirties, with red-blond hair, emerald-green eyes, freckle-dappled cheeks, and a bright, engaging smile that bordered on childlike. As always, Delmont looked dressed for a performance, white country-and-western-style suit with embroidered lapels and mother-of-pearl buttons, sky-blue shirt with a bolo tie, silver-tipped leather straps through a silver, cruciform fitting.
“Mr Winkler. Ms Winkler,” Delmont said, his face eager to please. “So good to see you. We didn’t have time to install a ramp, but I’m sure a couple of your men can lift you up to—”
Winkler scowled and pressed a lever on the wheelchair’s arm, the customized Viking all-terrain-wheelchair climbing the steps as the seat adjusted to keep Winkler upright. He reached the top and rolled across the threshold, Delmont having to jump back to keep his toes from being run over.
“Where is he?” Winkler demanded as he whirred past. Vanessa Winkler followed, then paused at a full-length hallway mirror to freshen her lipstick and pat her elegant coif.
“The Reverend is upstairs,” Delmont said, stepping quickly to catch up. “The doctor is with him.” Delmont nodded to a latticed metal door down a short hallway. “There’s an elevator, sir.”
Winkler rolled to the metal grate, pressing the button and rolling inside before the door was fully open. He craned his head toward his sister.
“You coming, or you gonna primp all day?”
Vanessa Winkler dropped the lipstick into her purse. “You don’t have to do this, Eliot. Let’s get back in the limo and—”
“Get in the elevator, Nessa.”
An audible and dramatic sigh and Vanessa Winkler entered, pressing between her brother and the operation panel. Winkler grinned wetly and nodded toward the rounded feminine derriere at eye level.
“You reckon that’s a good ass, Andrew?”
Delmont looked stricken. “Pardon me, Mr Winkler?”
“You think Vanessa’s ass is a nice one? Speak up, son.”
Delmont colored with embarrassment and forced a smile to his face. “I … uh … don’t believe I should be the judge of—”
“Closing in on fifty,” Winkler continued, “and she wears pants tighter than wallpaper. How much it cost to keep that butt so high up, Nessa?”
“I’m not listening, Eliot.”
“Nessa could buy her own gym, Andy boy – hell, a hundred of ’em – and keep that machinery tuned up in private, but instead she goes to some sweaty club. Why, you ask. Cuz Nessa loves showing off for the young bucks. Now and then she brings one home and drains him dry.”
Vanessa Winkler remained expressionless. “You’re reaching new levels of disgusting, Eliot.”
A bell bonged and the door slid open. Eliot Winkler rolled out into a hallway, followed by his sister and Delmont. “Where you got him hid?” Winkler said, looking both directions.
“To the left, Mr Winkler. Toward the front.”
Winkler passed through a set of wispy curtains, pushing them aside and finding a small room holding a half-dozen mismatched chairs.
“He ain’t here.”
“That’s the visitor’s waiting room, sir. Keep going.”
A door on the far side was open and Winkler’s chair rolled into a large, high-ceilinged room, his sister in his wake. Just inside the room was a desk with a computer monitor and several files. Dr Roland Uttleman, the preacher’s private physician, was at the desk. A slender, sixtyish man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and round silver-framed glasses, he stood and nodded at the incoming trio.
“Hello, folks. How’re you, Eliot?”
“What’s this set-up?” Winkler said, pointing at the desk. “Checkpoint Charlie?”
“It’s my medical station, Eliot,” Dr Roland Uttleman said, coming around the desk with outstretched hand. Winkler ignored the gesture, rolling past, the chair’s rubber tires hissing over the polished wood flooring.
The
