Four hours, one Twinkie and two Peeps later, we landed at a bright and shiny small airport along the west coast of Oregon. Sounding not so bright and shiny was Sergeant Bohler, who had left eight messages on my cell phone. I called her back.
‘What are you up to, Elstrom?’ she asked, by way of an enthusiastic greeting.
‘Yielding to the herd of folks giving you tips about my murderous ways. Leaving my Jeep with you makes it more efficient for them to plant evidence. You just have to walk outside to collect it.’
‘We were done with your Jeep.’
‘What about the most recent evidence?’
‘What new evidence?’
‘The green top, of course. Surely you knew about that.’ I stopped short of asking her how long she’d watched Booster’s garage from her fat-tired, black pickup truck.
‘Pick up your Jeep, Elstrom.’
I hung up on her. It was no risk. Our relationship was already damaged.
Reeder was tiny, a meeting of two side roads along the Oregon coast set in tall pines so dense they cast everything in shade. The intersection held a mini-mart gas station, a long-abandoned ice house and two thickly wooded lots that had resisted development since the dawn of mankind.
The clerk at the mini-mart pointed to the steeple a hundred yards down the one road. ‘That’s Dainsto’s church, though he took off.’
‘You call him Dainsto? Not Pastor Runney or Reverend Runney?’
‘He tried preaching for about a year but the man was mostly interested in money.’
Amanda and I agreed to split up. She’d park the rental at the ice house, where a man as old as the building was perched at the top of the steep stairs. I headed down to the church on foot.
The Church of the Reawakened Spirit was small, more of a chapel than a full church. Its white paint was faded and peeling but still stark against the dark green backdrop of the enormous pines. Two cars were parked on the gravel lot in front. One was a new four-door sedan and the other was an old hatchback, faded like the church. Two men came out as I walked up, each carrying a cardboard box filled with hardware. They got in the hatchback and drove away.
Large cartons of miscellaneous cooking utensils, printed church envelopes and office supplies were set out on folding tables inside. Plastic chairs, more folding tables and boxes of mismatched dishes were laid out on the floor against a side wall. The pews had been unbolted and pushed against another wall. Everything was affixed with a price on a yellow Post-It.
A woman at the far end, where an altar might once have been, noticed me and walked up. She was about forty years old, well dressed in a matching gray sweater and pair of slacks. ‘No reasonable offer will be refused,’ she said, waving a hand at the stuff for sale. She might have been the woman I’d talked to when I’d phoned from the motel in Laguna Beach, before I knew Marilyn Paul was dead.
‘Is Dainsto Runney in?’
‘Long gone,’ she said. ‘We’re recouping.’
‘You’re with the bank that holds the mortgage?’
‘I conduct their foreclosure sales.’
I handed her a card.
‘This is about insurance?’ she asked.
‘An old friend of Runney’s named Willard Piser,’ I said.
‘I don’t know his friends.’ She made a smile but there was resignation behind it. ‘Look, I suspect Dainsto Runney is too broke and owes too many people to ever show his face in Reeder again. He disappeared in the night.’
‘Suddenly?’
She nodded.
‘When did he leave?’
‘We think the week before last, though no one’s quite sure. He didn’t have any friends left to say goodbye to. He threw his clothes and some food into his car and took off, though some say he won’t get far.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Apparently he drives an old white police Crown Victoria he got at an auction, back when he was trying to sell used cars. It was the only car he had left, some say, because it barely runs.’ She put my card in the pocket of her slacks. ‘If you do find him, tell him he’d make things a whole lot easier on us if he’d just sign some papers.’
I walked back down to the intersection. Amanda sat at the top of the ice-house stairs, laughing with the old man we spotted driving in. His clothes were worn but clean. He had a full gray beard, combed gray hair and looked like he’d been adorning those steps ever since ice boxes were common a hundred years earlier.
‘Dek,’ she called down, ‘this gentleman has been telling me fascinating stories about Dainsto Runney.’
The man looked doubtfully at Amanda, then down at me. ‘She finds that fool interesting. I was just telling her about his arm.’
‘His arm?’
‘I been telling your gorgeous associate here about Dainsto when he first came to town, and the backside of the church.’
He gestured for me to climb up and sit down. Likely the man didn’t enjoy much company, perched as he was so high on the ice-house steps, and the story was going to be told his way, with every detail he deemed necessary.
‘Dainsto blew into town twenty years ago, maybe intending good works,’ he began. ‘He bought the church and began holding services.’
‘I thought preachers were hired by a board of church parishioners.’
‘Nobody thought Dainsto was much of a preacher at all, him being so young, but there was no question he was rich, paying cash for a church that had sat empty all those years. He gave sermons but they were rambling affairs and attendance dwindled soon enough. Folks around here couldn’t put much in the collection plate anyway, so he quit that altogether after a few months. When spring came he began fixing the place up, probably to sell, and that included a new paint job. It’s peeling now but it was quite nice when he got it almost done.’
‘He never finished painting it?’ I asked, like I was really interested.
‘Never did the backside. If you walk around you’ll see the wood back there is raw. It ain’t seen paint for fifty years, and that brings us to Dainsto’s arm.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘The damned fool fell off a ladder and broke his arm. It was crooked ever since.’ He turned to Amanda. ‘Why is all this so interesting?’
‘I thought if he was looking to sell the place he could have hired someone to finish painting that last wall,’ she said.
‘No; I meant why do you good-looking women find Dainsto so interesting all of a sudden?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Amanda said.
‘There was this other babe, said she was a reporter from San Francisco. Built like a brick sh—’ He stopped, moved his eyes away from Amanda.
‘Outhouse?’ Amanda said, laughing, offering the more acceptable word.
He nodded, relieved. ‘She was asking the same exact things you’re wondering on.’
‘Television reporter?’ Amanda asked and turned exaggeratedly raised eyebrows toward me.
‘Could have been,’ he said. ‘We don’t get San Francisco stations up here.’
‘What did Dainsto do after he quit preaching and painting?’ I asked.
‘He was a hustler, that Dainsto. Chock-full of schemes. After he quit the sermonizing business he got the idea to build a pee-wee golf course, but he lost a pile on that and ended up stiffing more than one lumber yard for the wood he bought on credit. He mortgaged the church some more to try buying and selling used cars, then switched over to selling them on consignment, right there in the church parking lot, but he was stiffing folks there, too, never giving the old owners money for their cars after he sold them.’ He laughed. ‘That Dainsto, he tried a hundred schemes, lost money on every one and screwed everybody in the process. No wonder he slunk off in the middle of the night. I’m going to miss him. Pure entertainment, that man.’
‘I heard he left town in a heap,’ I said.
‘Clapped-out old cop car,’ the man agreed. ‘White Crown Vicky with black doors that he painted over with aerosol cans of white paint that didn’t match and puttied up holes in the roof where the bubble light bar was. Been sitting at the back of the church for three or four years.’
‘Nobody knows where he went?’
‘Plenty of people want to,’ he said, ‘but I don’t guess they’ll ever see him again.’
It wasn’t a guess to know he was right.