“Yeah, stuff like that. I play computer games and surf the net.”
“I hope you don’t go to any of the bad sites.”
“Aw, Mom got some computer geek to put a lot of controls on the computer to keep me out of those sites. I haven’t found a way to get around all of them yet.”
“Good. It can be dangerous out there.”
“Yeah. Right. Say, are you Mom’s boyfriend?”
Rasa overheard and said, “Tony works with Shahla on the Hotline.”
“You’re too old for Shahla. And I’d say you’re too young for Mom.”
Kirk was still trying to figure out where Tony fit in when Rasa called them to dinner.
CHAPTER 25
“There’s something else I haven’t told you,” Tony said as he and Shahla drove to the church. Actually, there were several things he hadn’t told her, but he figured it was better to spring one at a time.
“How can I ever trust you again?” Shahla asked, but in a way that told Tony she wasn’t serious-or at least not completely serious.
Shahla was wearing a fairly modest dress, which was her version of what to wear to church, along with a light jacket against the chill of the evening. She wore her hair in a bun. She looked good, but then she was one of those disgusting women who looked good wearing anything.
“I have been doing some more investigating on my own,” Tony said, stalling a little. If he opened Pandora’s box, he wouldn’t be able to close it again. “I had some reasons, which I won’t go into right now, to take a look at…my roommate.”
“Your roommate? I haven’t met your roommate. In fact, the only friend of yours that I have met is that woman-what’s her name?”
“You mean Carol?”
“The one who said snotty things about me. Have you seen her recently?”
Had he seen her recently? How could he answer that with a straight face? “Yeah. I ran into her. She’s living with that man who was with her.”
“I guess you won’t be dating her anymore.”
“I guess not. Anyway, as I said, I was taking a look at my roommate, and I happened to search his room. And I found something.”
“What did you find?”
“I found…well, I found a pair of panties.”
“Panties?” Shahla almost screamed. “What did you do with them?”
“Nothing yet. I just found them. I have them with me. They’re in the attache case on the seat behind me.”
Shahla unbuckled her seat belt, turned around and retrieved the case, which she brought to the front seat. She reached in and, after searching briefly, pulled out the white panties. She held them up and looked at them by the light of the streetlights they passed.
“Do you think they could be Joy’s?” Tony asked.
“I don’t know. The size is okay. But they’re a little…”
“Conservative?”
“Yeah. I mean, not all girls wear thongs all the time, but these are, like, for an older woman, or perhaps a style of a few years ago.”
“So you think they might be too old-fashioned for Joy.” Tony was willing to grasp at any feather of hope that would clear Josh, to paraphrase an Emily Dickinson poem that Shahla had recited to him.
“Maybe. I need to see them in a better light.”
“I’ll bring them to the Hotline tomorrow. We can study them there.” Anything to delay taking them to Detective Croyden.
“You didn’t find a bra with them?”
“No.”
“It’s easier to tell whether a bra belongs to someone.”
Tony was immensely relieved about Shahla’s uncertainty. For a few minutes he had been second-guessing his decision to show the panties to her. He made sure that she put them back into his case. He wanted to keep them in his possession.
Parking was at a premium near the Church of the Risen Lord. Tony pulled into the small parking lot, but there was not a space to be had.
“It doesn’t look like a church,” Shahla said. Some of her enthusiasm for the project seemed to have dissipated.
Tony wasn’t willing to double-park and block another car because he wanted to keep a low profile. He carefully backed out of the lot into the street and finally found a space a block away that he could ease the Toyota into. He parallel-parked and then hesitated.
He said, “Do we really want to do this?”
Shahla was also hesitating. Perhaps the reality of walking at night on a dark street in a strange part of town was giving her pause.
“Can you walk that far on your crutches?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Tony didn’t want his infirmities to be the excuse for their failure. He opened the door and carefully stood in the street, with the help of the crutches. He navigated to the narrow sidewalk and laboriously started along it. Shahla walked two steps behind him, staying out of his way. He watched in the dark for cracks in the concrete that might upset him and felt empathy for disabled people who faced these problems every day of their lives.
They passed small, older houses with small but tidy front yards, perhaps built right after World War II. Lights shone in some of the windows, but there was nobody else on the street.
As they neared the church, Shahla said, “I hear singing.”
“The service must have started already,” Tony said.
It was after 7. The singing grew louder as they came to the front of the church and started up the walk to the door. A wheezy organ backed the vocal. Tony thought he recognized a hymn from his youth, but this version of it was livelier and more melodic than he remembered. They must have paid their electric bill. Lights were on inside the church.
When Shahla opened the door, he could pick out distinct voices, from bass to soprano, with some singing harmony to the melody of the others. The notes reverberated off the walls and ceiling and filled every corner of the room. Their religious practices might be suspect, but their music was top-notch.
Tony went through the doorway first. He saw that most of the pews were filled. The congregation was standing. The men and women and a few children swayed to the music, adding the impact of their bodies to that of their voices. The Reverend Luther Hodgkins stood in front leading the singing, and Tony could clearly hear his booming bass voice over those of everybody else. The voices of the robed members of the choir also penetrated to the back of the room. Shahla came in behind Tony and stood beside him, looking awed.
Tony felt a presence on the other side of him. He turned his head and saw a man smiling and holding out a program toward him. Tony nodded his thanks-there was no point in trying to talk over the singing-and took it, being careful not to lose control of his crutch. He led Shahla to the back row of the pews, which, fortunately, was empty on one side. She went past him, and he stayed on the aisle.
They didn’t try to join in the singing. They did find themselves joining the congregation in moving their bodies as the music engulfed them. Tony surveyed the other parishioners. His guess was that the majority of them were of African descent, with a sprinkling of Europeans and at least one woman he could see who looked Asian. He did not
