“Went home?”
“Dropped out, went home. Least I think she did. That’s what I heard.”
“All right,” I said, “some of the coincidence is down. Let me ask this. You went and you got the DVDs, but you say you didn’t know they were there. That sounds like too much.”
“She mentioned she was making them,” Ernie said. “So I knew there were DVDs.”
“Why do you think she told you?” I asked.
“I think it was part of her chance taking,” Ernie said. “The Geek, when she told us that, he said something like, ‘You wouldn’t want to mention that to anyone.’ There’s a part of me that thinks it was all some kind of game, like he was just wanting us to screw with those DVDs, or say something about them.”
“Do you think Caroline was planning to blackmail all along?” I asked.
“She never said that,” Ernie said. “She just said she had a way to make some people pay, so I think she might have had plans like that. It’s where we got the idea.”
“Where were the DVDs?”
“The big Baptist church,” Ernie said. “It has a big gold dome on top. You probably know it.”
“No shit?” Jimmy said. “North Baptist Church?”
“No shit,” he said.
“What led you there?” I said.
“That’s where Caroline went to church,” he said.
“Church,” Jimmy said. “She never went to church.”
“That you knew of,” Tabitha said. “That was part of her game, jacking everyone around. She went all right. And you want to know why?”
“Of course we do,” I said.
Tabitha turned theatrical, gave us a long pause and leaned forward, said, “She fucked the preacher. Reverend Gus Dinkins.”
Everything Dad had told me about Dinkins and his League popped into my head.
Ernie continued: “She saw him on TV. Has a Sunday show. He’s not as big-time, rolling in the money as some of the God Squad, but for this town he’s rich, and it’s from milking people with his bullshit.”
“Well,” Tabitha said, and her voice took on a confessional tone, “he is good-looking, and he used to play football at the university. He quit because he didn’t like the idea of showering in mixed showers.”
“I never heard that,” Jimmy said.
“And you never will…openly. But he told Caroline that. Pillow talk. She admired that about him. He was always talking about sin, and about how sinners who cheated on their wives, fornicated without the benefit of marriage, and those mixing races would go to hell.”
“But he did all that, except for the mixing races part,” Jimmy said.
“He thinks he’s doing God’s work,” Tabitha said, “and because of that, it’s okay that he does it. That’s what he told her, or at least that’s what she told me. I don’t know why she confided in me, but she did. And in Ernie. Like we were saying, I think she liked playing it on the edge, liked to see where our loyalties were.”
“And Caroline was all right with this guy?” Jimmy asked.
“She was a racist,” Ernie said. “And big-time.”
“I never heard her say anything like that,” Jimmy said.
“Did you discuss race?” Tabitha asked.
Jimmy took a moment to collect his thoughts.
“No,” Jimmy said. “It never came up.”
“That’s because something else came up,” Ernie said.
I looked at Jimmy. He was blushing, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with Ernie’s comment. I think he was embarrassed about how he had been played.
“She probably would have lied had you discussed race, because she had a good idea where you stood,” Tabitha said. “But, Caroline, she said the N word a lot. She called black people nappy-headed and burr-heads. Especially when she was with Stitch.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“She told me she fucked him,” Tabitha said. “I got the impression he might really mean something to her. Maybe not so much as a lover, but as a mentor. You should be glad she’s gone.”
“I don’t know she cared for Dinkins at all,” Ernie said. “That’s how she played things. Made people think she cared. I think Dinkins was just another chump to her.”
“Okay,” I said, “but how did the DVDs end up in the church? Last time I ask, and then I let Jimmy pistol-whip the shit out of the both of you.”
“We don’t really know,” Ernie said. “We aren’t shitting you on that. We chose the church because Caroline talked about the Reverend. I guess we saw it as some kind of interloping against her, especially since she and Stitch were gone. We found the DVDs by accident. But it’s not such a coincidence. We knew her, she knew Dinkins, and she talked about the church and we liked to urban explore. It all just came together.”
Jimmy said, “How many history teachers were on the videos?”
Ernie looked at Jimmy. “All the men on the left side of the front office.”
“The goddamn whore,” Jimmy said.
“Is the preacher on any of the DVDs?” I asked.
“He’s not,” Ernie said. “Unless he’s on one of those we didn’t get.”
“So you decided to blackmail?” I said.
“It was easy for us to sneak notes into the teachers’ boxes,” Ernie said. “We’re up there all the time. They brought money. All of them. You were supposed to be the last. Though we been thinking about going back, getting the rest of the DVDs.”
“And where is this money you got?” I asked.
“We have it hid,” Ernie said.
“All of these guys, were they ten-thousand-dollar pops?” I asked.
“Mostly,” Ernie said.
“That’s a lot of college money,” I said.
“I thought I could pay for college and get a good car and pay off some credit cards,” Tabitha said. “It wasn’t like we were stealing.”
“No,” I said. “It’s exactly like stealing. You thought you were going to end up farting through silk. You ought to give it back some way or another. I’m not going to be the one to make you, but you ought to.”
Neither Tabitha nor Ernie said anything to that.
“Where in the church were these DVDs?” I asked.
“The attic,” Tabitha said. “Behind the Christmas ornaments.”
I smiled at that. I said, “Tell me how you got in the church, what your method was.”
“Who cares?” Jimmy said.
I ignored him, said, “Tell me.”
“You can’t go in from the front,” Ernie said. “There are lots of lights. The parking lot is well lit up, and so are the front and the sides of the church, bright as a floor show. There’s a little stretch of trees behind it, and a creek. You got to come down the creek, go up from the rear. And you still got to be careful. There are lights back there, but no one is going to see you if you don’t stand around, and they aren’t as bright. That’s where they ought to really be bright, but they aren’t. There’s an angle where you can be seen from the highway, but only if you stand around. You get to the back steps, there’s a stone banister on either side, and all you got to do is duck down.”
“How’d you go up the back way?” I asked Ernie.
“We left our car in the little park behind the fire station. You can walk down to the creek from there. There’s a big culvert, and you can get inside of it and go along until it empties out on some gravel. There’s a little run cut there so the excess water trails off into the woods. Some parts of the year, it wouldn’t be a good trip. Water would be rushing through too high and too fast. You come out, you go to the back door of the church, change shoes, go in the back way.”
“Change shoes?”
“Yeah,” Ernie said. “The idea is for them to never know, or at least not be certain, anyone was ever there. No tracks. No clues. Except for the stuff like Caroline did, the paper clip, that kind of crazy bullshit, but nothing that will
