armed with truth.”
And a lot of heavy firepower, I thought. Pepper was just getting warmed up.
“There will come a time,” he said, “when our Savior returns and those who have believed in him will be saved and shall sit in the house of the Lord and bask in the warmth of Christ.”
And what about the Jews? I thought, but Jack Pepper let it hang in the air.
Cortez Village, on the Gulf of Mexico, still has a few small fishing companies and some independent fishermen making a living pretty much as fishermen have been doing there for more than a century. The air was salty with the smell of fish.
The radio station was a little hard to find. It was about thirty yards down a narrow dirt street, at the rear of a small frame church on a white pebble-and-stone parking lot. Four cars were parked in the lot. A four-foot sign indicated that I was indeed not only in the parking lot of the Every Faith Evangelical Church but, that, if I followed the arrow pointing toward the rear of the church, I’d find radio station WTLW, THE LORD’S WORD.
There was a seven-foot-high mesh steel fence with three strands of barbed wire surrounding the lot. Inside the fence there was a patch of crushed white stone and shell about the size of my office. About twenty yards beyond the enclosure was a three-story steel radio tower.
On the patch of grass on my side of the fence was the door with a freshly painted white cross about the size of an ATM machine. Next to the cross was a gate with a button and a speaker just above it. I pushed the button. The clear but speaker resonant voice of a woman said, “Who is it?”
“Lew Fonesca. I’m here to see Jack Pepper.”
“Reverend Pepper,” she reprimanded.
“Reverend Pepper,” I said.
“Why?”
“Philip Horvecki,” I said.
Long pause. Long, long pause.
“Why?”
This time it was a man’s voice, the same voice I had just been listening to on the radio.
“Detective Viviase of the Sarasota Police suggested I talk to you,” I lied.
Another long pause.
“I do not wish to testify,” he said.
“Ronnie Gerall may not have done it,” I said.
I could hear the man and woman talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. One of them must have put a hand over the microphone. I could tell that the woman sounded insistent and Pepper sounded resigned.
“Come in,” said Pepper. “Close the gate behind you.”
Something clicked and I pushed the gate open.
The door at the end of the path was painted a bright red. It looked as if a new coat of paint had been applied minutes earlier. The station’s call letters were painted in black in the middle of the door with a foot-high brown cross under them.
“Come in,” came the man’s voice.
I opened the door.
“Take off the hat please,” the man said. “This station is part of the House of the Lord.”
I took off my Cubs cap, stuffed it in my back pocket, stepped in, and closed the door behind me.
The room was about the size of a handball court. There were three desks with chairs lined up side by side on the left, and on the right stood a narrow table with spindly black metal legs. The table was covered in plastic that was meant to look like wood, but it looked like plastic. On the table there sat a computer and printer and boxes of eight-by-ten flyers I couldn’t read from where I stood. There were eight folding chairs leaning against the wall. Beyond all this, through a large rectangular window, I could see a studio barely big enough for two people. In fact, two people were in there. One had a guitar. One was a man. One was a woman. They were obviously singing. They were smiling. I couldn’t hear them.
I looked over at an ample woman of no more than fifty whose dark hair was a study for one of those “before” pictures on early morning television.
“Speak,” she said.
I looked at the man behind the second desk. He was gaunt and had red hair and an almost baby-like face. He could have been any age.
“You’re Reverend Pepper?”
“I am,” he said. “And you are?”
“An investigator hired to see if Ronnie Gerall killed Philip Horvecki. Want to go someplace more private?”
“Whatever you have to say to me can be said in front of Lilly.”
“Philip Horvecki,” I said. “He was not a good man.”
Lilly closed her eyes and nodded her head.
“He wasn’t punished for what he did to you,” I said.
“It was my word against his. The police said that wasn’t enough,” Pepper replied.
“He wasn’t punished,” I said.
“Yes he was, but not by the law. His punishment was delayed, but the Lord was not in a hurry.”
Lilly was slowly nodding her head to the rhythm of Pepper’s voice and the eyes of Jack Pepper vibrated back and forth.
“Where were you Saturday night?”
“What time?”
“Evening, at about ten.”
“In my home, my aunt’s home where I live. She looks after me. Lilly was there too.”
“I was,” Lilly said.
“Lilly came to dinner and to talk about a tour I have been planning. I’m sorry. I have to get back in the studio. Gilbert and Jenny are almost finished with their song.”
“And today, about eleven in the morning?” I asked.
“Another crime?”
I said nothing.
“I was here, doing the morning call-in show,” he said.
Before I could question Lilly, the theory I had been putting together about recorded shows and lying alibis seemed to come apart. Maybe I had just seen Laura too many times.
Jack Pepper rose with the help of two aluminum forearm crutches. He leaned forward as he slowly came out from behind the desk.
He looked up at me with what may have been a touch of pain and said, “MS. Multiple Sclerosis. The Lord has chosen to touch me with this affliction. Would you like the name and number of my doctor to see if I’m telling the truth?”
“No,” I said.
“Fonesca? Italian. You are a Catholic?” he asked.
Lilly was shaking her head yes. She was either answering for me or at the brilliance of Jack Pepper’s observation.
“No,” I said.
“Lapsed?”
“No. I’m a lapsed Episcopalian.”
“We are all one in Christ,” he said.
“Except for the Jews and a long list of others.”
“They are welcome to join the faith and be embraced as brothers and sisters and be saved,” he said.
“Amen,” said Lilly softly.
“You believe that in spite of what God has let happen to you?”
“Because of what God has let happen to me.”
“Philip Horvecki sodomized you,” I said gently.
