68

Paul Plowright was in a coma.

A blood vessel had broken in his brain. Nobody knew if he would live or die. The longer it took for him to come out, the closer he would be to a vegetable.

All the congregation’s prayers were with him, as were those of millions in his viewing audience, in addition to special prayers being led by other preachers and televangelists. If he recovered, they would all take credit for the prayers that produced the miracle. If he ended up like Terry Schiavo, they would pray some more. If he died, nobody would take that as a sign that prayers don’t work.

If he woke up, and if the powers that be decided to believe my version of events, then he would be charged with a wide ranging assortment of crimes.

If he then went to trial instead of cutting a deal, holy hell would break loose.

It wasn’t just about Plowright. It touched the governor, the city police, the warden at the state penitentiary, the DA’s office, and the whole Christian community. And if you have police who can do things in secret, how can you ever be sure there aren’t fake cops doing the same things under cover of the same secrecy? Or real cops doing the wrong things with no way to make them accountable?

“What are your goals here?” Max asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Personally,” Max said, “I was a lukewarm Catholic. Now I’m a lukewarm lapsed Catholic. But some of my friends are angry lapsed Catholics, and they cheer every time an altar boy wins a million-dollar lawsuit. Is it important to you to tell the world that they’re hypocrites and criminals, that the whole thing is a big lie? Do you want to tear the temple down?”

“You don’t understand,” I said, frustrated, even angry. No one seemed to understand. Maybe because I didn’t really understand it myself. “I was lost,” I said. “Then Jesus saved me. Through Paul Plowright. It is not that I believed in him; it’s that he believed in me. I was drunk when I went down that aisle. I was worthless. But not to Paul Plowright. To him, I was worth saving.”

“I’m not the only one,” I said. “And I’m not the last one.

“Maybe it’s a lie. All of it. But . . . I don’t know how to say this because . . . I guess because I don’t understand it. Even though it’s not true, it is true. It’s false, but it saves people.

“If you take it away, what’s going to replace it? Philosophy 101? Prozac?

“And that’s not all. Most of the people there, they’re good people. They were my friends. You think I want to tear their world down?”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Do you want to make money?”

“How so?”

“Go after CTM with a civil suit?”

“I don’t know.”

“I saw a little glimmer of attention there. Everybody wants money.”

“Not like that,” I said.

“Well, put the thought in your back pocket. If you decide later, let me know. We’d be happy to handle it, no money down. We take thirty percent of the gross. I think Nicole Chandler wants to sue. Which is good for us because that’ll help keep her on the side of the angels, or antiangels, or whatever we are in this one.”

“Let’s get through this first,” I said.

“Do you have a political agenda? Want to tell the truth about corruption and for the perversion of justice to come out?”

“Max, I don’t understand how this matters.”

“If you did, I’d try to find someone who has it in for the governor or Plowright and offer you up as a star witness in return for immunity for everything, and you could spend several years helping them make cases.

“If you wanted to go after CTM and the whole Christian thing, we would talk about going to trial. Get you on the stand, tell your story, find Plowright’s other girls, everything we could get hold of. Every day a new surprise, a new scandal. There’s a chance we might not win, but you’d have the bully pulpit.”

“Max,” I said, “I just want to get out of this clean. I did the right thing. It was justifiable homicide, and I want the record to say so.”

“Fine,” he said.

He looked at his notes.

“Fine,” he said again. “Here’s our strategy.

“Of the seven judges this could get assigned to, three are born-again. The others are a Methodist, two Catholics, and a Jew, a devout one as it happens.

“Let’s assume the jury pool is the same as the general population. That means eighty percent or more believe in God, seventy-three percent believe in miracles, seventy percent believe Jesus is the Son of God, and sixty percent believe in the Devil. A certain number of jurors will want to serve so they can act in defense of Jesus. They’ll be quite happy to lie about that. They may even get coached on how to mask it because, after all, they’ll be serving a higher master than the law.

“We do not want to bring your case to trial.

“We want the grand jury to no bill it.

“Which, as we have discussed, means we want the DA to want the grand jury to kick it. Which is easy, if it’s what he wants. He brings in you, Gwen, and Nicole as his only witnesses. You tell it like you told it to me, clean and simple; it’s clear-cut self-defense.

“We have to convince him that it does him more harm than good to bring you to trial. And that the good things he might be hoping for by putting away the man who shot someone at one of our great religious institutions, he can get somewhere else. Make Hobson the scapegoat or indict Plowright, even though he’s in a coma. We’ll guide him to that.”

“There’s one more thing,” I said.

“What? I just made a terrific speech, laid out a great strategy. I have it all figured out, and you want to throw in one more thing?”

He was joking, but he wasn’t joking.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Ahmad Nazami. I made a promise to Manny. All this, it was for nothing, including his death, if I don’t get Ahmad Nazami out.”