My eyes had been opening since a friend of mine got kicked out by a kangaroo court.'
And apparently all in the name of saving the human race.
* * *
I looked at my watch then. It was 9:37, and I'd rather get somewhere early than late, so I left. I got there early enough that I sat in the car and listened to KFWB News Radio for a few minutes. At 9:58 I knocked at Molly Cadigan's door. A young woman opened it, wearing blue jeans, a red-and-white checkered blouse, and a small apron. I decided she must be family. 'My name is Seppanen,' I told her. 'I have an appointment to see Ms. Cadigan.' She took my card and peered at it, then turned.
'Molly!' she shouted, 'it's Mister—' She stumbled and looked harder at the card. 'Mr. Seppanen to see you.' She said the syllables well enough, but put the accent on the second, even though I'd said it for her. That happens a lot. 'Come right in, sor,' she said and, turning, led me through a foyer and the living room, then into a hall, chattering as we went. Her speech was so Irish, I could hardly believe it. She gestured me into what had probably been a large bedroom originally. As no one else was there, she waited with me. It was an office now, with a big heavy table, desk, built-in bookshelves, and a Hewlett-Packard Executive VIII, about right for the Mount Wilson Observatory. Wide old-fashioned French doors stood open, with a balcony outside. The morning haze had burned off, and beyond the wrought-iron railing was a long view across the L.A. Basin, burnished by April sun and framed by the tops of eucalyptus trees lower on the ridge.
The spell was broken by the sound of flushing, and a moment later Molly Cadigan stepped out of her private bathroom. Behind me the girl left the room, leaving the door ajar. 'Nice view, eh, Sweetbuns?' Molly said.
Not exactly a formal opening. 'Yeah,' I said, 'it's beautiful.'
Molly didn't sound Irish any more than most Americans who have Irish names. I decided I'd been met by a domestic instead of her daughter or niece. Cadigan was a big woman—six feet and 240 pounds, at a guess, and maybe fifty years old. With red hair that would have been carroty before it was diluted by encroaching gray. 'Sit down,' she said, and motioned to a chair. 'You like coffee? Or tea?'
I sat. 'Coffee,' I told her.
She went to a stainless-steel urn on a sideboard. One of the spigots showed coffee in the glass, the other hot water, both near full. This, I thought, is a serious coffee drinker. The Insulmugs she filled held about a pint; she put one down in front of me. 'Cream and sugar?'
'Both.' My diet needed a break.
She put them on the table by my mug. 'Doughnuts?'
I hesitated.
'They're good for you,' she honked. 'Chockful of vitamin sucrose.'
I poured cream in my coffee—real cream by the look of it, and decided what the hell. 'A doughnut would be nice.'
'KATEY!' The abrupt volume almost made my ears ring. 'BRING SOME DOUGHNUTS FOR MY GUEST!' Then to me: 'You like chocolate?'
I sipped my pale brown coffee. It had hair on its chest. 'Chocolate's my favorite,' I told her.
'CHOCOLATE, KATEY!'
She looked at me again and sat down, picked up her own mug, and sipped the strong brew straight. Her eyes were interesting. Redheads most often have blue eyes, or green. Hers were chestnut brown, almost the color of Gerald Williams'.
'So you're interested in what might have happened to Ray Christman.' I almost missed what she said. I was trying to picture what she might have looked like maybe twenty-five years earlier, to attract the sexual interest of the young guru. He was still a good-looking guy in news pictures as recently as a year ago.
'Uh, yeah. I'm accumulating a lot of information, but none of it points anywhere yet. One informant says Christman may simply have blown with a ton of money, and be living somewhere as an anonymous rich American.'
She snorted. 'Not likely. Ray was broad-spectrum greedy. He wanted a lot of things in life, and one of them was admiration—or ad
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. 'Try this one for size. Ray liked to live well—good food, good booze, good- looking women, and he smoked like a fireplace with a dead buzzard in the flue. He stayed in halfway decent shape with steam baths, vitamins, massage, occasional dieting, and periodic fits of riding an exercise bike while reading.
'He may have just dropped dead. Stroke, heart attack, something like that. If he did, and it wasn't in public, Lonnie and Evanson would sure as hell try to hide it. Ray Christman, dying of a physical illness? It would ruin his mystique! The church would have to cover it—smuggle the body out, dispose of it, and release some kind of cover story.'
Katey came in with the doughnuts, each about five inches across and loaded with chocolate frosting, a whole damn platter of them, about a thousand calories each, mostly fat. She set them down between Molly and me, then left. I eyed them carefully, then took one, broke it, and dunked. I was pretty sure Molly Cadigan wouldn't mind my dunking. It tasted as good as I'd known it would.
'What do you think of the theory that someone inside the church killed him?' I asked.
'Hell, honey, anything's possible, but that's one of the less likely. I knew Ray when he was still young. Knew him well; you could even say we were close friends. People were already claiming he was psychic, but that was bullshit. He ran a bunch of interesting procedures on himself after that, but I'll bet you dollars against rabbit turds he wasn't any more psychic a year ago than he was in 1990.
'What he was was damned observant. He noticed things that even I didn't, and I'm one of the most observant
