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  Selma or Clara or someone replied, "Oh thank you, Ashton."

  Clara, you see, always called me Mr. Ford. And it was Clara who struggled from the car and onto her feet, wincing with the discomfort in those tired old legs. But I had to ask her one more.

  "Is Reverend Annie one of your pilgrims?"

  "Who?"

  "Ann Farrel, pastor of the Church of the Light."

  "Oh, you mean Ann Marie. Maybelle's daughter. No, no—heavens, I don't know about that girl. Sometimes I wonder if—never mind, never mind. I always say if you can't speak well of a person then you should not speak at all."

  The subject was obviously closed. I walked Clara to her front door, kissed her on the cheek, and got the hell away from there.

  I had about ten thousand questions trembling at the front of my brain but not tongue enough to utter a single one. And I did not know where the hell to go from there.

  Chapter Eight: Life at the Surface of the Planet

  Possibly I had stumbled onto the "tie" that David Carver was looking for when he died. If so, then, it was a very untidy package and the string was running everywhere. Clara had seemed very emphatic that Reverend Annie was not involved in the group of pilgrims, which however did include three of those who had died. If it was true that the late Maybelle Turner was Annie's mother, then there was a tie of sorts—and the fact that Milhaul and McSweeney were tied both to the pilgrims and to the Church of Light, if true, provided another loop to the knot. Certainly Reverend Annie appeared to be the common denominator in all of that, but I was not ready to leap to that conclusion, not yet.

  Had Carver become entangled in that string? Or was his death exactly what it appeared to be, a grisly but innocent misfortune which could befall anyone anywhere?

  And what about Annie's unfortunate past? Could any woman get that unlucky in love—four times a widow? Of course she could, any woman could. Just because it does not happen to all the people all the time does not mean that it cannot happen. It does happen.

  So what did I really have?

  Hell, I had nothing except some unlucky people, some very unfortunate people, and some kooky people. You can get that mix/match anywhere you go. What I actually had was a cop's gut suspicion... and those have been known to be fallible.

  Also, of course, I had a nervous financier with possibly an overactive imagination and the means to go to any idiot length to protect an investment.

  So I found myself tilting toward disengagement. I had other things to do with my time and I really did not have a sponsor here anyway. That is about where I was at in my head—the rest of me sort of drifting toward the Beverly Hills Hotel and lunch at the Polo Lounge—when the car phone rang and I received another summons from Francois. He wanted me to "come quickly" to his offices in Century City. It is very difficult to say no to Francois, especially when he is in an emotional state, and I was only a few minutes away from there anyway when the call came. So I dropped on down to Avenue of the Stars in Century City and left my Maserati at the Century Plaza Hotel—because I won't leave that car just anywhere and I like their valet service. The plaza is a small city within a city—though a very uptown small city with one of the area's plushest hotels, dozens of shops and restaurants, theaters, Playboy Club, the ABC Entertainment Center, and of course the Towers, twin monolithic high-rise office buildings, site of the suite of offices maintained by the incredible Francois. Not too long ago, the whole thing was part of the 20th-century Fox back lot. Now it is about as uptown as you will get in Southern California, Beverly Hills notwithstanding.

  I hoofed it across from the hotel to the towers via several different escalators and stairways—it's no small distance and the plaza is multilevel—then straight up like an arrow via express elevator to a point beyond sanity along the San Andreas fault. I like to think of myself as a sophisticated modern but I still believe that any structure above a hundred feet in earthquake country is the height of folly and no pun intended. So I wanted to make this visit quick and clean but that was not in the cards.

  I went in past bubbling fountains and Corinthian leathers and hopeful starlets masquerading as receptionists to find Francois buried in a turret of video-phone monitors and in conference with the financial centers of Europe. He waved me to a chair and went on uninterrupted with dialogues in several languages but none in English. I had been there before. I went on back to the bar and helped myself to a drink then took a chair at the windows overlooking Century Park East which was much too far below. Heights have never bothered me except in California where it is particularly unnerving to be seated at a wall of glass hundreds of feet above a very unsteady earth. But there was no place else to sit so I repositioned the chair with my back to all that and tried to relax with bourbon while Francois bought and sold Europe.

  I was building my second relaxer when Francois joined me at the bar. He poured a thimble of Cognac into a snifter, sampled it with his nose, then told me without further preamble, "Our Annie is in trouble."

  I said, "No!" very sarcastically, I'm afraid.

  "But yes. Even now she is with the police. I have send my best lawyers to guarantee her rights but this yet could be not enough. Do you have influence at the police?"

  I replied, "None I've ever noticed. Has she been arrested?"

  He gave me an exasperated look and said, "Arrested or not arrested makes no difference. Merely the hint of wrongdoing is enough to ruin her. Can you stop this?"

  I said, "I don't know what to stop or where, Francois. Settle down and tell me what's going on."

  He belted the Cognac without removing his gaze from mine. "Going is this Lieutenant Stewart at the Gestapo. He orders that she present herself for questioning. So I have send my best lawyers with her to make sure she is not violated. But still I worry."

  "Questioning about what?"

  He shrugged. "What is the difference? To be questioned is to presume guilt, is it not? There must be no hint—"

  I growled, "Cut the shit, Francois. What is Stewart talking to her about?"

  His gaze fell away as he replied, "He is suspicious about the deaths."

  I said, "Well hooray, so are a lot of people. But does Stewart have anything?"

  "This I do not know."

  "Look at me, dammit. Could he have anything?"

  He looked at me but then the eyes flicked away again as he said, "What does it matter? I wish it saved, Ashton."

  I said, "Go straight to hell, Francois. I don't work that way and you know it."

  He knew it, yeah, and I guess that was the only reason he tolerated me. I wouldn't kiss his ass but he knew I wouldn't kiss any others, either. I think he respected that. But a tic began working at his left eye as he quietly told me, "The investment is in millions already. It is secured for her the satellite channels for worldwide broadcast, interpreters in a hundred tongues, a ministry of the entire world and all will love her. You must help us realize this, Ashton."

  I honestly could not have said at that moment whether the guy was asking me to help him con the world or to save it. So I put it directly to him. "What are your projected first- year profits?"

  He smiled, lit a cigarette, went to the window, turned back to me with a sparkle in the eyes. "I will have the profits, yes, but Annie will have the dream."

  "What dream is that?"

  The sparkle turned to a snap as he said, "What is this inquisition, Ashton? And what is this absurd naiveté? Tell me what has moved this world into the modern age, my friend. Is it altruism or personal incentive?—nationalism or commerce? Has the religion made your America the greatest power of all times?"

  I was beginning to suspect that the guy had been conning me all these years or else he'd taken a crash language course since our last meeting. I was suddenly understanding every word he said. I told him, "A strong dollar has helped."

  "But of course. It has helped also the religion in America. Has it not?"

  I said, "The comic, Lenny Bruce, had a line I always liked. He said to show
him a preacher with two suits of clothes while another man had no clothes at all and he'd show you a con man."

  Francois chuckled and extinguished his cigarette. "Did Lenny Bruce perform for free?"

  "Not if he could help it, I guess," I conceded.

  "So did not he too profit from religion? Do the police not profit from crime? And does the priest not profit from sin?"

  He had a point there. I just was not sure how it applied but I conceded it. "You have a point there."

  "Ah yes. So how does it matter what drives the engine if all the passengers arrive at their destination, eh?"

  I told him, "A countryman of yours had something to say about that. Guy name La Rochefoucald. Heard of him?"

  "To be sure. A namesake. He too was a Francois."

  I said, "Yeah. More of a moralist than you, though. He wrote three hundred years ago that no action, no matter how brilliant, is to be considered great unless it is the result of a great motive."

  My Francois shrugged and replied with only a trace of accent, "You speak of greatness while I speak of life at the surface of the planet. The masses do not feed on greatness, Ashton, and even the priests have known this from the beginning. This is why they feed the masses chants and rituals while confining the holy mysteries within locked vaults. So do not moralize with me on the virtues of virtue itself. And do not ask me to engage your virtue. I engage your talent, Ashton. Only that has accuracy in this world of commerce. Do not be confused."

  I was not at all confused. Not at the moment, anyway. I told Francois, "Okay, maybe I'll sell you some talent—but you'll have to take my idea of virtue in the package—and also on one very large condition."

  "What is the condition?" he asked with a smile.

  "That you don't lay the phony accent on me ever again."

  He went right on smiling and replied, "Very well, but you must honor the secret. It is, after all, often a valuable advantage this ability to dissimulate."

  I knew that, yes. And I had to wonder if that ability to dissimulate extended beyond language into more subtle nuances of human intercourse. The guy had a lot more depth than any he'd shown me in times gone by.

  Frankly, I was intrigued by this new Francois. But that is not why I changed my mind about disengagement.

  I changed my mind because Annie joined us near the end of that conversation and she was obviously in deep difficulty.

  Well, she sort of joined us but only I knew that. I saw her reflection in the window glass behind Francois while he was expounding on greatness and the needs of the masses. I say reflection even though she could not have been standing outside, and yet that could not accurately describe what I saw because a window glass cannot reflect that which is not physically present, can it?

  However and wherever, I saw Annie and I knew that she was in high distress. She was asking for help. Not from Francois but from me. I could hardly disengage at that point.

  So I advised Francois to stick close to the telephone and I made a quick departure. I called Stewart from the Maserati and he confirmed that the lady had a problem.

  "We are getting ready to book her," he told me. "The charge is murder one. Three times."

  I don't know why it shocked me so. I croaked, "Three counts?"

  "Right," the cop replied. "And that is just the beginning." It was just the beginning for me too. I should have disengaged right there.

  Chapter Nine: A View with Prejudice

  Apparently Paul Stewart had found a direction for his anger over David Carver's death. By the time I got downtown Annie had already been hustled off to Sybil Brand, the local lockup for women, and her lawyers were scratching at judicial doors for her quick release pending a formal hearing.

  Stewart had the easy, relaxed look of a man who knows he's right but there were flaws in that self-satisfaction, small tremors of doubt here and there that were evidenced by the body language as he outlined the case to me. I was a bit surprised to discover that the deaths charged against Annie were not the latest three in the series close to her but the deaths of three of her husbands. And though it was comforting to learn that all of the evidence in the case was purely circumstantial, it was a bit distressing to see that an imaginative prosecutor could weave it all together in a damning indictment.

  "That woman is a black widow," Stewart said confidently. “And a very clever one, at that. The insurance companies paid off on each one without a murmur but it was the last one that undid her—the last insurance company, I mean. They paid, sure, but one of their investigators began having second thoughts several months ago, after learning about the first two. I turned the guy over to Carver—we get a lot of that. By and large any insurance company hates like hell to pay off on any policy, so they'll go after any little hook they can find to get out of it. So we get a lot of private investigators crawling through here and you can't take them all seriously. I palmed the guy off on Carver. I think our black widow intrigued him, really got into his belly. The more he looked at her the more he began to see the outlines of the red hourglass on her underside. He came in here two or three times a week every week for the past two months wanting to bring charges but hell...”

  "You weren't buying it."

  "Nothing to buy," Stewart said, with a giveaway twitch of the lip. He massaged the back of his hand and went on. "But he kept digging. And he found a sympathetic ear at the D.A.'s office. The Milhaul thing was the log that broke the jam. Just yesterday the D. A. decided to take the thing to the grand jury. David did not live to see that development." His eyes fell, then came back hard and demanding on mine. "But now I want you to tell me something—and I don't want a lot of hedging and double-talking when you tell me. Is there a way to project psychic power? And could that woman be doing something like that?"

  I said, "You're thinking of Carver's death."

  "Bet your ass I am," he shot back.

  "Your answer is yes," I said, sighing. "But you'd never prove it in a court of law."

  "Has it ever been scientifically validated? I mean, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions?"

  "Yes, it has," I replied, "but not everyone in the scientific community believes it. It's a very difficult thing to nail down conclusively. So there's always an angle of attack for those who feel compelled to attack such things. Your problem, I think, would be to conclusively prove that Annie has that kind of power."

  "That's where you're wrong," he said. "The woman claims that kind of power. We can fix her on her own petard if I can get twelve men and women to buy a reasonable presumption that it is possible, that Ann Farrel has it, and that by God she's been using it."

  I muttered, "Shades of Salem."

  He said, "Come on. I—"

  I said, "You come on. Do you actually have someone at the D.A.'s office who's willing to take on—"

  "No I haven't," the cop said angrily. "But she did it to her husbands the old-fashioned way. We'll prove it, and that establishes her character. She is willing to kill. Okay. I want a by-God presumption working in our favor to say that she's found a neater way to kill, a safer way, and that she has killed at least four more times that way. I'll get it, too."

  I said, "Well, for what it's worth, I think you could be right. Not that you are, especially, but that you could be. Your problem will be to find respectable expert witnesses to back you up in court."

  "You think that might be a problem?"

  I told him, "I know it will be a problem."

  He studied my face for a moment, then asked, "What about you?"

  "I said respectable," I replied. "I have no credentials to present to a court. I really feel obligated to advise you against this. How many times can she swing? If you've already got—"

  "I'll keep in touch," he said sullenly, ending the debate. "You do that too. And let me know if something develops for you."

  I said, "I need to tell you that I have been asked to enter the case in her defense."

  Stewart snapped me a hard look. "Who asked?"

  I
told him, "She did."

  "Going to do it?'

  I said, "I'm already in it to my ears. Guess I'll stick around to see how it falls. You can cancel my voucher. I didn't turn anything for you. But I will keep in touch."

  He stopped me at the door and turned me back with a harsh aftershot. "We have a saying around here, Ford."

  “And that is... ?”

  "If you're not for us, you're against us."

  So I gave him mine. "If truth be for you, why then fear the false witness?"

  He snickered and replied, "I'm not afraid of you."

  I said, "No reason you should be. Unless..."

  He scowled. "Unless what?"

  "Unless I can project too."

  He lost a couple of beats before replying. "Can you?"

  "Anybody can," I told him, and went on out.

  So maybe I'd made an enemy. But not nearly so emphatically as had Reverend Annie. This just did not seem like the Paul Stewart I'd always known. It was as though all of David Carver's guts had been transplanted into his boss and done so with rage and vindictive purpose. So maybe there really was a case against Annie and maybe not.

  You tell me.

  Here is what Stewart had.

  Annie's second husband was a Donald Huntzerman. He was sixty, a successful retail merchant, she was twenty-one and working as a cocktail waitress when they met. Huntzerman had already suffered two heart attacks and was under close medical supervision when they married. He owned a $100,000 life insurance policy which had been written many years before his heart condition became evident. He bought Annie a new home in an exclusive neighborhood and made her the beneficiary of his insurance, but all other assets he brought into the marriage were set aside by will for his grown children by two previous marriages.

  Huntzerman's family regarded Annie as a fortune hunter. Why else would a beautiful girl many a sick man three times her age? Others, though, noted that the pair always seemed very happy and in love, and Annie apparently devoted herself to his care. He had several moderate attacks requiring hospitalization during the first two years, then died of a massive hit just two months short of their third anniversary.