“Oh, stop it,” Kerry said suddenly. “I’ve had enough of this myself.”
Daybreak and I both looked at her. She sneezed, blew her nose, snuffled, and said to him, “You win, Reverend-you and my ex-husband both. I can’t fight it anymore. I’ll go back to him.”
I gawked in disbelief. Daybreak beamed. “The Reverend Dunston will be pleased to hear that, my dear,” he said. “Surely the Almighty will be, too.”
I said, “Kerry…”
She ignored me. “Does Reverend Dunston live here at the church?” she asked Daybreak.
“Oh yes. He has an apartment in our main house.”
“Then that’s where I’ll be living, too?”
“Yes. You’ll find it quite comfortable.”
“But you know, I’m not going to remarry him.”
“There’s no need, my dear. You’ve never been un married.”
“Oh, I understand that,” she said. “But I wonder if everyone else will.”
“Everyone else?”
“Everyone in your flock. And everyone in the Bay Area, not to mention other parts of the country. And especially NOW and the other women’s organizations. Oh yes, and let’s not forget the American Civil Liberties Union.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Well,” she said, “the Church of the Holy Mission may not believe in divorce or the individual freedom of women or the laws of the land, but a lot of people do. I’ll bet the newspapers will be delighted to hear from me.”
“Newspapers?”
“Yes. As soon as I move in with Ray… I mean the Reverend Dunston
… I’ll call half a dozen papers and tell them both your church and your so-called moral crusade sanctions the keeping of women in religious bondage.”
“Bondage?”
“Exactly. When the women’s organizations hear about it they’ll come here in droves and picket the church and disrupt your activities. Then there’ll be national wire service stories and all sorts of television coverage. The church and the Moral Crusade will get a lot of publicity, Reverend Daybreak. Won’t that be nice for you?”
He sat there blinking at her. Me too, only my blinks were ones of admiration. She had succeeded in doing with a few well-chosen words what I hadn’t even come close to doing with a barrelful: rattling him right out of his sanctimonious self-assurance. He said lamely, “My dear Mrs. Dunston…”
“I can see the headlines now,” Kerry said. “ ‘Church Forces Woman to Live with Ex-Husband.’ ‘Church Condones Bondage of Women in the Name of Religion.’ ” She let him have a sweet, guileless smile. “The whole thing will probably become a nationwide cause celebre, ” she said. “In fact, I’ll make sure it does. I’m in advertising, you know-the Bates and Carpenter agency in San Francisco. We’re very good at saturation promo campaigns, the manipulation of public sentiment. Even better than you are.” Another sweet smile. “That should help no end when the lawsuit comes to trial.”
“Lawsuit?” he said. “Trial?” he said.
“Oh, I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? If I can get the right lawyer-and I’m sure I can-we’ll ask as much as, oh, ten million dollars in punitive damages. We’ll settle for less, of course. It all depends on the church’s assets at the time.”
Daybreak got jerkily to his feet; the look on his face was one of pure horror. He seemed to realize that, because he wiped it off and then turned his back to us and stood staring out through the venetian blinds, his hands washing each other just above his tailbone.
I looked at Kerry and mouthed the words You’re terrific. She wrinkled her nose at me, snuffled, and sneezed again.
For about two minutes it was very quiet in there. Then Daybreak turned around, slowly, and looked at Kerry; I might not have been there anymore. He had the mask of serenity in place again. He even managed to work up a faint nervous smile as he said, “You’d go through with it, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Dunston-everything you said?”
“Yes, Reverend, I would. And my name is Wade, not Dunston — Kerry Wade. Please remember that.”
“As you wish.”
“As it is. ”
“What do you want from me, Ms. Wade?” “I want you to have a nice long talk with my ex-husband. I want you to tell him to leave me and my friend alone from now on. I want you to explain to him exactly what will happen if he doesn’t.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, do you?”
“I will speak to Reverend Dunston,” he said.
“Immediately?”
“Immediately.”
“Good.” She stood, and I bounced right up alongside her. “I do hope you can make him understand,” she said, smiling. “If not… well, I’ll have no choice but to pack my bags and move right in.” He smiled back at her-there wasn’t a trace of humor in his smile-and she said, “Goodbye, Reverend Daybreak,” and went to the door and I followed her out like a puppy.
Neither of us said anything until we were clear of the now-deserted church grounds. I said then, “You amaze me sometimes, lady. Where did you get all of that stuff in there?”
“It just came to me.”
“Good thing it did. I wasn’t doing too well.”
“No, you weren’t. Another thirty seconds and you’d have been calling him a crook and a charlatan.”
“He is a crook and a charlatan.”
“Maybe. But he doesn’t think so.”
“I thought you’d gone nuts at first. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing.”
“Women’s wiles, my dear.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, that put an end to it; you hit him right where he lives. We won’t have any more trouble with Dunston.”
“Lord,” she said fervently, “I hope not. I would hate to have to follow up on all those threats.”
“You don’t mean you’d actually move down here?”
She gave me an enigmatic smile, and then sneezed in the middle of it. “What do you think?” she said as we reached the car. “You old fornicator, you.”
Chapter Nineteen
It was after two when we got back to San Francisco. I was pretty hungry by then, but there was no time to even grab a sandwich; I would be cutting it close as it was, getting to the Fairmont in time for my three o’clock appointment with Margaret Prine. I dropped Kerry off at her apartment and hurried downtown and up onto Nob Hill and parked more or less legally on Taylor Street, opposite Grace Cathedral and around the corner from Mrs. Prine’s fancy apartment house. I was exactly one minute late when I walked into the hotel.
The Fairmont has been a San Francisco landmark for close to eighty years and is still one of its finest luxury hotels. It has posh bars and restaurants and shops, a couple of suites that would cost you a grand a day if you had the right pedigree, a twenty-nine-story tower addition built in the early sixties, and a lobby notable for its late- Victorian elegance: dark, brownish marble pillars and staircases, ornate wood-paneled ceiling and walls, antique furnishings. If you’re wearing a hat when you walk in there you invariably find yourself taking it off. It has that effect even on lowbrows like me.
The lobby was moderately crowded at the moment; I walked the length of it, feeling out of place and looking for an elderly woman with a gold-headed cane. There were plenty of elderly women and even a couple of canes, but none of the latter had a gold head. I made another circuit and then decided I ought to sit down somewhere, before
