William Lashner - Bitter Truth

I waited for about a half an hour, growing steadily more impatient, when I heard a knock at the door. I stood.

The door opened slowly. In came Gaylord, looking unusually somber, his hands pressed one to the other before him as he entered and stepped to the right. Behind Gaylord was our Steven Seagal wannabe friend Nicholas, still wearing his black outfit. No robes for Nicholas, I guessed, while he was in his bodyguard mode. He glared at me as he bent to enter through the low wooden door and stepped to the left, forming a sort of honor guard at the doorway. Then through this guard of honor walked a small white-robed woman.

I gasped to myself when I saw her because she might have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, strong yet delicate features, like those on a statue of a Greek goddess, green eyes that literally sparkled. Red hair circled her face like a halo and from her slim ears dangled a shimmering pair of silver and pearl earrings. Looking at her was like looking at a soft shot in a movie. Even from a distance I could smell the scent of her musk. I found myself embarrassed by my reaction to the loveliness of her face and I tore my gaze away from it, down, to her bare feet, slim and gracefully arched, the toes even and slightly curled. They were prettier in person then in bronze and I had to stifle the desire to fall to my knees and bow until my forehead rested on her flesh.

I looked back up at her face and Oleanna smiled at me, a smile I felt viscerally, like an old song that echoes with the sadness of lost love.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Carl,” she said. “I am extremely grateful that you agreed to meet with me.”

I had assumed it was I who had arranged for the meeting but I was too dazzled to care.

“We at the Haven,” she continued, “are in desperate need of your help.”

WHEN I CAME HOMEfrom the Haven, Caroline was waiting for me in my apartment. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her face was free of makeup, and my first reaction upon seeing her was wondering why I had never considered her dowdy before. It was an unfair thought, really, but it couldn’t be helped, still under the thrall, as I was, of Oleanna.

Caroline was at my apartment because as soon as I learned that Eddie Shaw had borrowed a load of cash from Earl Dante I realized that she was in utter danger. The way I saw it, Eddie had borrowed cash from Dante, the loan shark, to relieve the pressure from Jimmy Vigs and had arranged for his sister’s death at the same time. The Seventh Circle Pawn, your one-stop shop for shark loans and murder-for-hire and mayhem. Dante had gladly lent Shaw the money, at three points a week, with the expectation that he would be repaid by the insurance policy on Jacqueline’s death along with a lucrative bonus for the murder itself. Eddie had visited his sister’s building the day of her death not to ask for money, as Kendall had suggested, but to tape open the lock of the Cambium’s stairwell and wedge the wood in the Cambium’s roof door, opening the passageway for Cressi’s murderous visit. When Dante discovered that the money from the policy was not going to Eddie but instead to some New Age guru he must have turned a pleasant shade of green. Now Eddie Shaw was missing, probably running for his life, and the only way Dante would be getting his loan repaid in the near future was by killing off another Shaw. So I had warned Caroline, told her to make herself scarce and to suggest the same to brother Bobby. Bobby, I figured, had lifted off to some exotic locale but Caroline insisted on staying in Philadelphia. Insisted, in fact, after making a quick trip back to Veritas, on hiding out at my place. I had left a key for her before I visited the Haven. I guess our vague relationship was vaguely entering a new phase.

“What did you find out from the chant-heads?” asked Caroline as soon as I entered my apartment.

I looked at her for a moment and then stepped around her, toward the bedroom. “They didn’t do it.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Did you meet with that Oleanna person?” she asked as she followed me through the bedroom doorway.

I squinted into a mirror as I untied my tie. “Yes.”

“Well, what did she say? How did she explain the life insurance policy?”

“They didn’t do it,” I snapped. “All right?” I sat on the bed and started untying my shoes. “It was someone else. If you want my thinking, I’d bet it was your brother Eddie that hired the killer.”

“But the cult is where the money went,” she said. “Aren’t they the most likely to have hired a hit man to get five million dollars?”

“They’re not a cult and they didn’t do it.” With my shoes off I stood and undid my belt. “Do you mind, Caroline, I’m getting undressed here.”

“Yes, I do mind,” she said. “You suspect my brother of killing my sister, you suspect some deranged descendent of Elisha Poole, you suspect everyone except for the mob bookie, who you represented, and this wacko New Age church, which stood to gain a swift five million dollars from my sister’s death. There is no logic in any of that. So tell me, Victor, how are you so damn certain? How?”

How indeed?

It was hard to remember the whole of my meeting with Oleanna, it still was more like a dream than reality. We had a fairly normal conversation on the surface but it felt the whole time I was with her as if a current of some sort was being passed through her to me. I found it difficult to concentrate, to keep my place in our discussion. Being with her was like I remember reefer to be, without the paranoia or the intense desire to stuff my cheeks with Doritos. She looked at me with a penetration I had never experienced before, as if she was looking at something not connected to my physical body. She wasn’t reading my mind exactly, it was more like she was keeping visually abreast of my emotional state. There was a power to that woman, it was undeniable, and for the time we were together I felt it reaching out to me. And I guess I succumbed, because by the end of our meeting, when she took my hand in hers and I felt the pulsing warmth beneath her skin, by the time she said good-bye I was not only certain that the Church of the New Life was not involved in the murder of Jacqueline Shaw, but I was also pledged to find out exactly who had hired her killer and to prove it to the insurance company so that the death benefit would be promptly paid.

It wasn’t like I didn’t ask the questions I had prepared, because I did. I asked her how she had convinced Jacqueline to change her life insurance policy and she said she hadn’t, that Jacqueline had volunteered to make the church her life insurance beneficiary, as do many of the church’s followers. I asked her how important the five million dollars was to her church and she indicated, with a smile, the architectural drawing of the building on the wall and said the bequest from Jacqueline was the great bulk of the funds that would be used to construct their new ashram in the suburbs. When I remarked on her expensive taste in real estate she shrugged and said simply that they were outgrowing the house in Mount Airy. I asked her if she knew an Earl Dante or a Peter Cressi or a Jimmy Vigs and the answer each time was no. “Ever hear of a man named Poole?” I asked, but still the answer was no. I asked her how she had found out I was looking into Jacqueline’s death in the first place and she said that Detective McDeiss had called the insurance company to ask some further questions and the insurance company had called her lawyers asking why a shady criminal defense attorney would be so interested in a suicide. And then I asked her the most puzzling question: why, if she hadn’t been involved in Jacqueline’s death, had she sent Gaylord and Nicholas to threaten me off the case? She apologized profusely for their behavior, though not as profusely as Gaylord, and explained that at the time the insurance company was on the verge of disbursing the death benefit and she was certain my investigation would raise alarms that might delay still further the payment. “And, of course, I was right,” she said, a sweet smile on her face, “and so we have been forced to sue.” Those were her answers to my questions and they were pretty good answers, not great answers maybe, but good enough, I guess, though to be truthful, it wasn’t the content of the answers that convinced me of her innocence.