“Literally.” I pushed past her, massaging my wrist.
“You didn’t do anything to him?”
“No, I didn’t do anything to him. But I might have if I’d had a straitjacket handy.”
“I didn’t let him in,” she said.
“Good for you. Did he tell you God sent him?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
“Me too. He’s driving me as crazy as he is, you know that?”
“You think he’s not driving me crazy?”
“This is the last straw,” I said darkly. “Tomorrow we quit pussyfooting around. Tomorrow we put an end to this one way or another.”
“How?”
“By paying a visit to the Church of the Holy Mission,” I said. “By having a talk with the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak, with or without God’s permission.”
Chapter Eighteen
I don’t much like San Jose.
This is no reflection on the people who live there-not on most of them, anyway. Everybody’s got to live somewhere, and in California these days, with the economic situation being what it is, your options are pretty much limited to areas with a reasonably high employment rate. There are some nice little communities near San Jose-Los Gatos, for instance; I have nothing against those. Just San Jose itself. It’s like a big overgrown kid who sprouted up too fast, seems bewildered by his sudden wild growth, and doesn’t quite know what to make of himself. It can’t make up its collective mind if it wants to be a big metropolis or a small city, or if it’s really just a little country town at heart. It has no real identity because there are too many opposing components in its makeup: part agricultural, part industrial, part Silicon Valley hype, part Mexican barrio, part Vietnamese refugee resettlement center, and part mindless, tasteless urban and suburban sprawl. It has some cultural attractions downtown, and the local Yuppies have begun renovating and restoring some of the old mid-city Victorians; but the downtown area is just a pocket surrounded by slums, industrial areas, cheap apartment buildings, and seemingly endless strings of tract houses and shopping centers. The city also has a high crime rate and harbors more than a few bizarre institutions, not the least of which are the Winchester Mystery House, a model of lunatic construction built by the widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, who believed she would die if the house was ever completed and therefore kept adding on things like doors that open on blank walls and stairways that lead nowhere; the Rosicrucians, a leading candidate for the Weirdest California Cult award; and now the Church of the Holy Mission, not to mention the Moral Crusade, the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston, and the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak.
When Kerry and I got to San Jose a little past noon on Sunday, it was the first time I’d been there in more than a year. It seemed much more sprawling and congested than I remembered it, even on a Sunday-not that that surprised me any. I took the downtown exit off Highway 17, and we drove around for twenty minutes looking for Langford Street; if Kerry were a better map-reader we’d have found it in ten because it was not far from either City Hall or the San Jose State University campus. The neighborhood was neither well-to-do nor shabby: Langford was that vanishing breed, a lower-middle-class inner-city residential street shaded by leafy trees and featuring a dozen different architectural styles, from wood-shingled cottage to big gabled Victorian.
The biggest lot and the biggest Victorian on the fourteen-hundred block belonged to the Church of the Holy Mission, which announced its presence by means of a six-foot, billboard-type sign on its front lawn. It was three lots, actually, on a corner; in addition to the Victorian, freshly painted a sedate white with blue trim, it contained a low modern wing, a separate box-shaped outbuilding, and parking facilities for maybe thirty cars. The parking area was full at the moment, although it wouldn’t be for long: services must have just ended because people were streaming out of the modern wing, most of them young, some with small children in tow.
“They look normal enough, don’t they,” Kerry said as I drove by hunting a place to park.
“You can’t tell a fanatic by his appearance.”
“They’re not all fanatics,” she said, and sneezed. She was getting a cold and she’d been snuffling and sneezing all morning. “A lot of them are disillusioned or have emotional problems.”
“Yeah,” I said. And a lot of them, I thought, will drop out later on even more disillusioned and with even greater emotional problems. There had been an article in the Sunday Examiner-Chronicle not too long ago-the Sunday paper is usually the only one I read — that dealt with dropouts from fundamentalist and ultrafundamentalist religious groups. Things were so bad with these people after experiencing a cultist dependency on leaders like Daybreak, authoritarian types who practice a kind of religious mind-control, that an outfit called Fundamentalists Anonymous had been formed to help them deal with the real world again. Maybe the Church of the Holy Mission wasn’t quite one of the wild-eyed ultrafundamentalist sects, but like the Southern Baptist Convention and other mainline fundamentalist churches, which Daybreak seemed to be patterning it after, it would bring more harm than good to some of its followers.
A car was pulling out of a space in the next block. I waited patiently while the driver, an elderly lady wearing a hat that looked like the rear end of a rooster, maneuvered her way clear; then I wedged us into the space. We passed several members of the flock as we walked back to the church. None of them was smiling; they all had a solemn mien. Services at the Holy Mission were serious business, no doubt. There aren’t many chuckles in fire- and-brimstone religion.
We went along a path toward the wing. Kerry said sotto voce, “What do we do if we run into Ray?”
“Ignore him. It’s Daybreak we want, not nightfall.”
She didn’t think that was very amusing; neither did I, for that matter. There was something about the place, now that we were on the grounds and breathing its sanctified atmosphere, that made me feel solemn and cheerless.
A middle-aged guy in a dark-blue suit and tie was standing at the entrance to the wing. Beyond him, through an open set of doors, I could see a plain raised altar, a podium with a microphone on it, and a section off to one side that contained an organ and some chairs for the choir. The rest of the space was taken up with rows of unpainted wooden pews. There were a few people in there, none up around the altar; Dunston, happily, wasn’t among them.
We stopped alongside the middle-aged guy and I said, feeling a little foolish, “We’re looking for the Right Reverend Daybreak. Can you tell us where he is?”
“Of course, brother. He is in the Sanctuary.”
“The which?”
“The Sanctuary.” He gestured at the boxy-shaped outbuilding. “For his hour of meditation. Perhaps I can help you? I am Reverend Holloway.”
“Thanks just the same, but we need to talk to the Right Reverend. It’s very important.”
“In what way, brother?”
“It has to do with money,” I said. “My wife and I are thinking of making a substantial donation to the Moral Crusade.”
That perked him right up. He said, “Come with me, please. If the Right Reverend has not yet begun meditating I’m sure he’ll be pleased to give you an audience.”
Audience, yet. As if he were right up there with the Pope.
We went with Holloway to the Sanctuary, and he took my name and disappeared with it inside. When we were alone Kerry said, “Why did you lie to him?”
“Quickest way to get results. If I’d told him the truth, do you think we’d be getting a fast audience? We’d be getting a fast runaround instead.”
“You’re not going to lie to Daybreak, are you?”
“No. We’ll be paragons of indignant virtue. Just let me do the talking.”
The Reverend Holloway was back in less than two minutes. He smiled at us gravely and said, “The Right Reverend Daybreak will see you,” as if he were announcing a miracle at Lourdes. “This way, please.”
We followed him inside. Some sanctuary; it looked like a glorified office building-no doubt this was where the
