Page 89 of Hanging and Burning

The problems were that I couldn’t prove anything and that he was wealthy. He was white while Dalia was a Black performer, and as much as I didn’t want it to be true, there was little equality between the races when it came to the execution of the law. And even if there was some kind of ethnic parity, Dalia didn’t die and the only proof of the plot to murder her rested on the words of Arman, an ex-gangster, and Melton, who was probably a member of the Brentwood Chamber of Commerce.

21.

WE WAITED UNTIL around ten that evening before making it down the back way to the building’s parking lot. Gun in hand, I got down into the well behind the front seats of Leaf’s car. She spread a dark green blanket over me, and I lay there clenching the butt of the pistol, careful to keep my finger off the trigger. We didn’t talk because if someone was watching they might have noticed Leaf saying something toward the back seat, even if she didn’t turn her head.

After crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, she drove to a parking lot I knew on Vesey near Church Street. The entrance to the lot was a deeply slanted descending tarmac ramp.

Three-quarters of the way to the bottom I rose up and said, “Stop here.” And then: “We just passed a space to the right.”

Looking up into the rearview mirror she said, “I see it.”

“Back up into it.”

She did as I asked. Leaf was excellent behind the wheel. She would have made a great getaway driver for any heist team.

The car-wide opening went back a dozen feet and was made to seem dark by the brightness of the ramp’s lighting.

A minute later a car drove down, ostensibly looking for a place to park.

“I’m not absolutely sure,” Leaf said, “but I think that was the Lexus that was behind us on the bridge.”

“Why?”

“The color. It was a dark red that you don’t see too often.”

“This car in your name?” I asked.

“When I go by Sharon Barkson it is.”

“I am a crooked man who loves a crooked girl,” I sang softly. Then I said, “About twenty feet down there’s an opening for U-turns. Get us the hell outta here.”

I dropped her off at Penn Station to take the next train to Philly, where Luwanda lived. We kissed at the west entrance, and she said, “That was the first time.”

“What was?”

“That you said you loved me.”

From the train station I drove to New Jersey and then down until getting to the Goethals Bridge. Once crossing over to Staten Island, I drove east and then south to the outskirts of Pleasant Plains. There I came to the well-fortified compound of the deconsecrated church that Melquarth Frost, and sometimes Oliya Ruez, called home.

At the front gate I was greeted by the growls and barks of half a dozen eighty- to hundred-pound Rottweilers. They were the first line of defense for Mel and those he cared for.

“Joe.” He came out of shadows to the left of the entrance to the church-no-more. Mel was the epitome of lean, wearing loose-fitting trousers and a button-up shirt. I knew he had olive skin and dark eyes, inherited from the man who had raped his mother, a sin that she would never forgive her son.

“Mel.”

“Everybody’s asleep.”

“Good. I just need to make a few calls.”

“Come on in.”

Mel had left the nave as it had been when parishioners assembled there to praise God. There were twelve rows of pews, empty and yet somehow giving the room a feeling of piety. At the far end there stood a dais and lectern that were perpetually vacant.

When I had once asked Melquarth if he was a spiritual man, he said, “Hell if I know.”

After a while Melquarth went down to his torture-chamber basement. I took the opportunity to go to the tiny office on the second level of the sanctuary.

The desk was neat, and I had no desire to riffle through its contents. Mel was trying to be, not a good man, and yet not a bad man either. But, like all of us, he had a deep history, and much of that was, to say the very, very least, nasty.