One More Sunday

Book 423: Murder Room

by John D. MacDonald

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Traditional Mysteries; Noir

Synopsis

Welcome to the Eternal Church of the Believer, where devout workers operate state-of-the-art computer equipment to process the thousands of dollars that pour in daily and where hundreds of prayers are offered by armies of believers.

Roy Owens arrives there after his journalist wife disappears while doing an exposé on the Eternal Church of the Believer. Embroiled in a desperate search for her, it is not long before he uncovers a multimillion-dollar organization that hides the vices and human failings of the people behind the church.

Release date: June 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 224

Sample

THE REVEREND DOCTOR JOHN TINKER MEADOWS stood
silent and motionless at the pulpit of the great Tabernacle of the Eternal Church of the Believer, staring at the stained-glass window at the far end of the building, listening to the murmur and
rustle of the enormous congregation as the sounds slowly diminished.

Once again the vast space was filled for an early-morning service, even in the heat of the sun belt in August. The three broad aisles which sloped down toward the altar rail at a slight angle
cut the congregation into four equal portions, fifteen worshippers wide, sixty rows deep. Another thousand were over in the University theater, watching him on the big screen in closed-circuit
color, and he knew that up in the control booth to the left of the stained glass, high above the entrance doors, the production manager and the director were watching the monitor sets, cueing the
camera stations. The sound was being mixed with due regard for whichever camera was being used.

He felt a trickle of sweat on his ribs, under the cassock and surplice, and reacted with familiar exasperation toward the so-called experts who had designed the subterranean air conditioning. It
had proven ample for the giant space even in midsummer, but had a built-in low-frequency rumble which made it impossible to use at full throttle when taping. Finn Efflander had someone working on a
filter that might keep the rumble off the recording. But even were it working properly, he knew that by the end of the sermon his clothing would be sodden. He perspired heavily whenever and
wherever he preached. His face would be wet and shiny in the closeups, partially defeating the efforts of makeup to give him the look of a younger Charlton Heston.

He was aware of a slight change of the light off to his left and realized that someone in the control booth had pressed one of the buttons which controlled the movement of the huge translucent,
fire-resistant draperies, to move one of them slightly to cut off an edge of morning sun, making the interior light whiter and more luminous.

He heard a smothered giggle forty feet behind him, and he could imagine the stare his sister would direct at the offender. The choir of fifty young women, the Meadows Angels, was a constant
discipline problem. Had they been selected more for voice quality and less for beauty, he guessed the problem would be lessened. But the Reverend Mary Margaret Meadows exerted an iron control which
kept disorder at a minimum.

John Tinker Meadows knew that many in the congregation were seeing the service in person for the first time, after years of faithful membership and television viewing. To them the thrill of
being in the same space, breathing the same air, as the famous elderly Reverend Matthew Meadows and his two talented children was only slightly dimmed by their being such tiny figures, so far away.
And as the service proceeded, they would begin to realize that it was a lot longer than the fifty-minute version edited for broadcast.

It was time. When a child coughed, the church was so silent the small sound could be heard by everyone. He looked then at the congregation, feeling the tension and the expectation. He was a tall
slender man with gray-blond hair worn long at the sides, brushed back.

“O MIGHTY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU TURNED YOUR BACK ON THIS GOOD EARTH AND ON YOUR PEOPLE?”

The rich and resonant voice inherited from the old man filled the Tabernacle with a ripe and startling sound, perfectly amplified.

“What do we see around us?

“We see a sickness, a cancer, a corruption on every side.

“Through the same wondrous technology which allows us to send this service up to the satellite and back to the cable stations and into your homes, filth is being broadcast across the land.
Squalid garbage, rated with Xs, showing exposed genitalia, scenes of rape and incest and torture. Any child who can reach the dials on the television set can be immersed in this
soul-stunting dirt.

“And we see this same seeping corruption in the books on the shelves of our libraries, paid for with public monies, with the tax money they demand from you as your ticket of admission to
this wonderful culture around us! Cynical men in universities, in national magazines and newspapers, and on talk shows, praise novels which contain scenes that would gag a hyena.

“Perhaps we should be grateful that our public education system has been so gutted by the bureaucrats and unions, national and local, that the teachers no longer have time to teach
reading. They are too busy turning out reports no one ever needs or reads. They are so busy our children can graduate without ever being able to write a sentence in acceptable English, or being
able to read anything more difficult than comic books. Rejoice that much of the filth in our libraries is well beyond their abilities to comprehend.

“Perhaps teachers are being paid not to teach in the same way farmers are paid not to farm, able-bodied men paid not to work and politicians paid to pass legislation favoring themselves
and the special-interest groups which bribe them.

“Once upon a time our nation was great. Now we sag into despair. The climate changes, the acid rains fall, the great floods and droughts impoverish millions, taking the savings of those
who thought they could be provident in these times. We see all our silent factories, all the stacks without smoke, like monuments to a civilization past. Selfish owners refused to spend for
modernization. Selfish unions struck for the highest wages in the world.

“We see rapists and murderers and armed robbers turned loose after a short exposure to that prison environment which gratifies all their hungers and teaches them new criminal arts.

“We see an endless tide of blacks and Hispanics entering our green land illegally, taking the bread out of the mouths of those few of us still willing to do hard manual labor.

“We see the abortionists slaying the people of the future.

“We see what little remaining wealth we have, squandered by the huge costs of maintaining lazy and overfed armies in distant lands where they are hated by the populace, and squandered by
the Pentagon thieves who waste four dollars out of every five appropriated.

“Our air, rivers, lakes, land, bays and oceans become ever more toxic as the wastes of a plastic culture are dumped into them without authorization or control.

“We are afraid to walk our own streets at night, knowing that our police officers do not dare leave their cars to patrol on foot the shadows where hide the hoodlums, muggers, whores,
addicts, drug vendors and maniacs.

“Rich men get richer in businesses which produce nothing tangible or useful—only bits of paper. Documents. Bonds and warrants and options and money management accounts. Mergers and
spinoffs and liquidations.”

He stopped and let the silence grow. He leaned forward and clasped his hands around the front edge of the lectern on the pulpit. His hands and wrists were outsized, larger than one would expect
on a man of such leanness. He glanced down at the script and saw the margin notation indicating an extreme closeup, meaning that at that moment one of the cameramen was slowly zooming in on him
using the longest lens on the TK–47 RCA computerized color camera.

“Do you think this is all something new in the world?” John Tinker Meadows asked in a half-whisper that carried to the remote corners of the Tabernacle. “Do you really think we
live in exceptional times?” The sarcasm was clear.

“In Habakkuk’s vision, the oracle proclaimed, Outrage and violence, this is all I see, all is contention and discord flourishes. And so the law loses its hold, and justice never
shows itself. Yes, the wicked man gets the better of the upright, and so justice seems to be distorted.

“And the oracle said, Trouble is coming to the man who amasses goods that are not his and loads himself with pledges. And the oracle said, Trouble is coming to the man who
grossly exploits others for the sake of his house, to fix his nest on high and so evade the hand of misfortune.”

Beginning with the hoarse whisper, he had been slowly increasing the volume and resonance of his voice as he straightened, knowing the long lens was slowly, slowly backing away from the extreme
closeup.

“Trouble is coming to the man who builds a town with blood and founds a city on crime.”

He looked at them from on high, gazing from side to side at the thousands before him. In a striking change he switched to a conversational tone of voice. With a troubled look he said, “So
what do we do, my friends? Here we are, decent God-fearing people in a culture, in a world, going right down the tube. Do we pray and hope to inherit the earth? Do we grab guns and head for the
hills? Do we tell ourselves things have to get better?”

After a pause he shouted, “NONE OF THE ABOVE!” He saw some of them jump. You could tell if you had them by the way some of them jumped. This was one of the good Sundays. Sometimes it
worked better than other times. He had never achieved the consistency of the old man, who always made it work.

“We do not really live out there amid all that garbage. We live in the great peaceful country of the spirit. We live in the love of God and His only begotten son, and we live in the
confidence that beyond that transition we call death there is eternal life for us who BELIEVE!

“You can turn your backs on the feckless, stinking, stubborn garbage of the world, its crimes and passions, its stench of victims and predators. I am not saying you cannot be touched in
physical ways. You can. And those dear to you can be victims. I am telling you that you cannot ever be touched in that place where life means the most. This brute world can never touch your spirit,
your soul. It can never defeat those who love God. You are weighed down by the burden of fear and apprehension as this physical world goes downhill in a hand basket. You can shrug off that hideous
burden. You can live in a state of joy. Come down to the rail. You there, way in the back, you start it. Get up and walk down here. My father and my sister and I will receive you here, into the
arms of Jesus Christ. And evil will never touch you. Never!”

He stared back and saw a few beginning to get up, to edge their way out of the long pews.

“That’s right! Come down now! Acknowledge your God. Give Him a chance to heal you. To be saved means to be safe. When a drowning man is saved, he is brought to the shore, safe from
the wild waters. Don’t hang back. Don’t tell yourself you’ll think about it, and maybe try it next time. Will there be a next time? Will you have another chance? This is your
chance. Now! Come on along. Move down the aisles to me, to us.”

The Meadows Angels had begun to hum a cappella a medley of old familiar hymns. On cue they increased the volume as he stepped around the pulpit and followed his father and his sister down the
few broad stairs to the level of the rail. All three aisles were reasonably full now, and all the familiar expressions were there. On some the beatific smile, on others the sidelong look of
self-consciousness. On some a protective smirk. Others were without any expression, as though walking in a dream.

To John Tinker’s dismay and annoyance, the old man was not taking part. He stood on the second broad stair from the bottom, looking up at the big curtains of woven glass fiber on the side
windows, his lips moving as, with his right hand, he scratched the side of his neck. Mary Margaret gave John Tinker a glance and shrug of exasperation. She tugged at her father’s arm and he
pulled away and went back up. John Tinker thought at first that he was going back to his high-backed ornate chair, but instead the old man opened the narrow door under the choir loft and left. As
this was not the first time it had happened, Nurse Minter had been posted at the other end of the underground corridor that led from the Tabernacle under the Garden of Mercy to the basement of the
Manse.

There were a couple of hundred saved. The staff would take care of getting the names and addresses and other identifying information to feed into the master data base. John Tinker and Mary
Margaret worked their way back and forth along the inside of the rail. Mary Margaret, from the pulpit, thanked God for those saved with a prayer which John Tinker felt ran five minutes longer than
required. The collection was taken, swiftly and deftly. John Tinker gave a short and appropriate Bible reading, and Mary Margaret gave the benediction. They then stood side by side, high above the
congregation, out of the reach of those who might want to approach and chat, until the Tabernacle was almost empty.

Then they went back through the narrow door and down six steps to the concrete tunnel which led for one hundred and fifty yards back to the Manse. The Manse, behind the Tabernacle and the Garden
of Mercy, was on the rise of a limestone knoll. The corridor was lighted by fluorescent tubing which, in its effort to simulate daylight, gave off an odd pink glow.

“We should beef up that choir volume after the benediction,” John Tinker said. “That many people always make too much noise leaving. All that shuffling and
yammering.”

“They can do that in the booth, can’t they?”

“Of course they can. Provided somebody tells them to.”

“Look, please don’t get nasty with me just because he got out of control.”

“What was he trying to do?”

“How could I possibly know? I don’t think we can keep including him much longer, John. Maybe we should call a halt right now.”

“All the old-timers expect to see him. And you have to admit, he really does look good, Mag.”

“The doctor said Thursday that right now he’s in better physical condition—blood pressure and pulse and respiration—than he was before his mind started to go. He said
that’s a fairly common phenomenon.”

He pushed the door open and they went into the basement of the Manse. Willa Minter was waiting for them over by the elevator. She was a small square person, and John Tinker thought that in her
uniform she looked like some sort of historical marker or monument. She had round pink cheeks, hair of a chemical yellow, and when she was upset she wore a servile grin that looked like some
variant of guilt.

“He’s settled down now,” she said quickly. “He’s taking a bath.”

“With his celluloid duck?” John Tinker asked.

“John, please!” Mary Margaret said.

“Minter, does he realize he behaved badly?”

“Yes, of course. He was very upset about it. You see, he had a tummy upset and cramps and he had to go so bad he was afraid it would happen right there. It happened right after we got off
the elevator, and the poor darling cried like a child he was so ashamed.”

“Well, you better get back to him before he drowns,” Mary Margaret said.

“Oh, he’s awfully good in the tub. He really is. He loves to be clean. Squeaky clean.”

She hesitated, still grinning, and headed for the stairs.

Once they were in the elevator, Mary Margaret said, “I thought you were very good today, John. As good as I ever heard.”

“I had the feeling it was going well. This time Fred Stubbs did the first draft and then Spencer McKay and I worked it over. We’ll use the original long version in PathWays,
I think.”

“John, could you get off at the third floor with me? I have a problem.”

“Can’t I get out of these clothes first?”

“Just a minute or two, please.”

They got off at three, Mary Margaret moving with her characteristic lightness, agility and grace. She was a big woman, six feet tall, and he knew she outweighed him. Her fatness was a ripe,
billowy, almost intrusive presence. In cassock and surplice she was as imposing as an oversized statue in a public park. She wore her dark gold hair in a glossy braid, curved and pinned into a
regal tiara. Even with her strong features and with no makeup at all, at thirty-eight she gave off a flavor of total femininity, both fragrant and lusty.

He leaned wearily against the wall beside the elevator door and said, “Okay. What now?”

“It’s Joe Deets again. Or should I say the Reverend Joseph Deets? I know you won’t fire him. I really don’t know how he does it, he’s such an ugly little man. But
now he’s nailed another one of my Angels. Doreen Purves. She’s been with us six months. She just turned eighteen. She’s from a farm family near Waycross.”

“You’ve talked to her?”

“Of course I’ve talked to her!”

“Don’t get edgy, Mag. How’d she react?”

“First denials, and then she got very sloppy. Tears and hysteria. She claims she’s in love with him. If we send her home she’ll kill herself. She knows that she and the
Reverend Deets are committing a sin, but she says they can’t help it.”

“Background?”

“She quit high school and went to work in a McDonald’s. She got mixed up with a motorcycle gang and got pregnant and miscarried at five months. Her mother brought her to me.
They’ve been church members for twenty years. She miscarried after her boyfriend got killed sliding under a truck on his cycle. She was in deep depression when she got here. She’s been
coming out of it nicely. Pretty little thing. Lovely untrained voice. And now this.”

John Tinker Meadows sighed. “I’ll tell Joe to cool it, for whatever good that might do. I’ll threaten him.”

“Thanks. I guess it’s too much to hope to ask him to stay away from her. Just please make sure he keeps it very, very quiet. And there are a couple of other things, as long as
we’re talking.”

“Mag! Later. Okay? God is love.”

“Bless His holy name,” she said obediently, and he got back into the elevator and went up to his suite on the fourth floor. It was refuge, a place of blues and grays and clean
surfaces. A place of silence. There was a study, but he seldom used it, preferring either his office over in the Administration Building or, less frequently, the old man’s office, over beyond
the conference room, which he could enter directly from the living room of his suite.

He went straight to the bathroom, peeling off the sweaty white surplice with the broad gold trim and the sky-blue cassock. He kicked the garments toward the hamper, and before he turned on the
shower he lowered himself to the floor and did his twenty fast push-ups, a routine so deeply embedded he seldom gave it any conscious thought. He was breathing deeply as he stepped into the
steaming needles, and as he lathered himself with the pine soap he thought ahead to the private Sunday conference with Finn Efflander, going over the items Finn would bring up.

After he had dressed in sandals, tan slacks and a white knit shirt, he went into the study and accessed his schedule for the week on his personal terminal. The most important item was the
weekday breakfast with the Senators.

Though he knew that Finn was next door in the conference room, waiting for him, he went over and stood at the big windows for a little while, looking out at a slice of the Meadows Center. He
could see, beyond an angle of the Tabernacle, a portion of the giant, landscaped parking lot, and beyond it the divided boulevard that led toward the Lakemore interchange five miles away on the
north-south Interstate. On the far side of the highway he could see, in the distance, a segment of the Meadows Mall and the large parking areas. Directly ahead of him were several of the University
buildings—Administration, the Library and the Student Center.

Remembering that someone had mentioned the possibility of adding a wing to Administration, he turned idly to look at the colorful rendering of the whole Meadows Center, done in pastels from an
aerial photograph taken for a magazine article. He experienced a moment of disorientation when he saw the blank wall near the fireplace where it had hung. He remembered that several weeks ago
he’d had it taken down and rehung over in the lounge in Administration.

Over the past two years he had disposed of so many decorations and memorabilia, the suite had begun to look almost completely impersonal, like a suite in an elegant residential hotel. He did not
care to wonder why he was doing this. He suspected it might be a reaction against the old man’s practice of clinging to every possible artifact of success, framing everything frameable,
mounting the mountable. But he did not care to speculate about it at any length or with any intensity. It made him feel uneasy to do so. He told himself he merely did not like clutter.

Without warning a dream edged back into his memory, and he did not know if he had dreamed it only once, or many times. It was a brief dream wherein he was standing on some high place in the same
position as the Christus overlooking Rio, arms outstretched. It was very cold, but it was necessary he keep on standing there, without movement. It was imperative. Snow was blowing and clinging to
his clothing and hair and eyebrows. Suddenly he was back at a distance looking at the statue of himself, watching the snow and the wind turn it white as marble. As the wind grew stronger, the white
figure began to topple. It toppled so very slowly he realized it had to be of an immense size. It fell over onto the left hand and arm. They shattered with the bright clean sound of crystal
smashing, and big transparent disks and segments of the arm went bouncing and rolling over a stony slope down toward the sea.

His eyes stung, and a single tear rolled down his left cheek. It startled him. Everything, he thought, is getting to be too damned much. The old man is going so fast. Every week he is worse. The
days are too short. Privacy is almost impossible. Mag is becoming ever more difficult and contentious. And now Molly has begun making the little boring demands. Too much, too much, too much.

ROY OWEN SAT IN A SMALL DOWNTOWN HOTEL ROOM in a city sixty miles southeast of Lakemore and the Meadows Center. He was drinking coffee and trying
to read the newspaper, and found himself reading the same paragraph over and over without comprehension. He was waiting for Hanrahan, the private investigator, to arrive, and the anticipated
interview was so alien to the patterns of his life that he kept thinking of it as a kind of charade, a game he had agreed, too hastily, to play.

Roy Owen was a small, trim, quiet man, conservative in dress and manner, hesitant in speech. He was in charge of the investment programs of three large no-load mutual funds headquartered in
Hartford, Connecticut, and marketed nationally by General Services, Inc., which was associated in some obscure corporate manner with a large cable television enterprise.

There were twelve mutual funds in the General Services family of funds, five fund managers, with telephone switches permitted and even encouraged. The managers were in competition with each
other insofar as annual fund performance was concerned. But there was not, as one of his colleagues termed it, any chickenshittery about staff meetings, advisers, committees and reviews. Top
management did not care if you used chicken bones, the I Ching, witchcraft or IBM to decide when and what to sell, and when and what to buy. All they wanted was to have one individual on
whom they could pin blame for bad performance, or pin medals for success. You could write your own expenses, visit the corporations, devise your own guidelines. Just avoid any conflict of interest,
or any use of insider information. They would let you have a bad year, if it came after a bunch of good ones.

He had worked for a time with a mutual fund outfit where everybody looked over everybody else’s shoulder, and you could expect to be given more advice than you needed or could use. It had
made him very nervous and had given him a small temporary ulcer. He was content with this outfit.

He had a good assistant, Dave Wager, now watching the store, supervising the daily computation of per-share value, keeping a close and wary eye on the holdings in the three funds, well aware of
how much of an emergency would require his phoning Roy.

Roy Owen had few illusions about himself. He knew that he did a very good job with the funds. And he did that good job because he relished winning and hated losing. Each year his base salary was
sweetened on the basis of a complicated formula wherein his growth and income records were compared with the records of the Dow, Value Line, Standard and Poor 500, the Wilshire 5000 and several
public funds comparable in size with his. He knew he was the sort of person people had to meet a dozen times before they began to remember his name. He enjoyed playing games and he enjoyed winning
at whatever he played, be it handball, tennis or backgammon. In victory he was gentle and humble and self-deprecatory, carefully concealing the rush of pleasure he felt.

He was a graduate of the Wharton School and the loving father of Janie, aged six. His only concession to a certain independence of thought was a drooping pistolero mustache, shades darker than
his hair, glinting brown-red in direct sunlight.

The investigator phoned and came up from the lobby and knocked on the door. When Owen opened it the fellow said, unnecessarily, “J. B. Hanrahan, Mr. Owen.” He extended a large soft
white hand. He was tall, sallow and thin, with bad posture and a watermelon belly. His thin dark hair was worn long at the left side and combed back across his bare skull and glued in place. He
smelled of cigar. He wore green polyester trousers and a ranch shirt in faded yellow, with pearl buttons. A scar ran from the center of his forehead down through the outer edge of his right eyebrow
and ended near his ear. At first glance the man looked both flamboyant and silly. Then Owen realized that Hanrahan was a chameleon hiding in the flower patch. He fitted into the sun-belt scene, a
sickly old boy retired from almost any kind of office or factory work. The correct message was in the eyes of J. B. Hanrahan. They were a clear, unblinking green, like the eyes of a predatory
waterbird standing in the frog pond.

He carried a plastic briefcase of imitation lizard, and said that, yes, he would like a cup of coffee if there was enough in the pot. Owen said he had ordered up coffee for two.

They sat at the small table by the window. Hanrahan said, “Glad you could come down. This is better than trying to do it by phone or in writing. I did just as good as the police did. I got
nothing too. My inclination is to drop it right now and recommend you do the same. But she’s your wife. Is or was.

“And you’ve put out a lot of money on me and got nothing back except what I told you already. And the police there in Lakemore could have told you that much. What I’m saying,
Mr. Owen, I’ve run out of places to turn. If I knew more about the woman, maybe I could make a better guess about what could have happened.”

“What kind of thing would you want to know?”

“Pretty personal, if you don’t mind. More personal than what you told me at first.”

“Such as what?”

“You and she get along good?”

He shrugged, trying to find the right words. “I don’t imagine there are very many perfect marriages.”

“Planning on splitting up?”

“Oh no! Nothing like that. It’s just that Lindy has a lot more than her share of energy. After Janie was born, she got into a lot of volunteer work in Hartford. Library drive, blood
bank, hospital foundation. Over a year ago she said she was getting tired of playing games where nobody kept score. She said that money is the device people use to keep score. An old friend told
her about a job opening up on that magazine in New York called Out Front. The idea is that it’s about people who are out in front, in the public eye. It wasn’t difficult to
make arrangements about Janie. Lindy’s mother lives in a town house not two blocks from our place.”

“You objected?”

“Look, I didn’t like it then, when it started, and I didn’t get to like it any better. She was going to come back home every weekend, but they have been sending her on special
assignments, like this one. When I met her she was a young reporter on the Philadelphia Bulletin. My work is very interesting—to me. When I try to explain it to anybody except
another market analyst, people begin to yawn. We have been living the same life a couple might live who had a friendly separation. And I don’t like that magazine. It seems to try to make
things sound dirty, no matter how innocent they might be.”

“So she came down to make the Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows seem dirty?”

“She said there was some smoke and she was looking for fire. I don’t like talking about personal things. I’m sorry. I’m not very good at it. Lindy and I were once upon a
time good friends very much in love. Okay, lately I’d thought we were turning into pretty good friends, but I was wrong. I know I still love her. And I know Janie needs her badly, so badly
she can’t even let it show how much.”

“Do you still feel, like you told me in the beginning, that the Church might have had something to do with her disappearance?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I wanted you to find out.”

“The Meadows family has regular contacts with the press. This whole setup has become very important over the years. Why do you think she came down here and used a