Tampa Bay Noir
- Автор: Аткинс Эйс, Bancroft Colette
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Akashic Books
- ISBN: 978-1-61775-951-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Tampa Bay Noir». Краткое содержание книги:
Now he lived with his mother. I unfriended him and messaged her to ask about Buck. I wondered whether she knew him personally or just followed his ministry.
I used to call his program for prayer in the late nineties, she responded. She asked me why I wanted to know, and I explained that I was thinking of writing a story about him. I asked her if she’d noticed that he was no longer broadcasting. She hadn’t thought about him in years, she admitted.
But listen, Andrea, I hope you’re doing an exposé that’s compassionate, trying to find the answers, she said. What could have contributed to this great man’s fall? What were the factors? And you know what? He may tell you. If you say, “Listen, I really want to paint a vivid portrait of what can happen, and the pressures, and what led you to these decisions,” he might tell you.
The mansion was peaches-and-cream, bordering a golf course. In September, Hurricane Hermine had knocked the pool enclosure down, and it had yet to be repaired, so it sat crumpled in a heap on the deck furniture. A cluster of potted plants waited at the edge of the driveway beside bags of potting soil and an ash-gray Toyota Camry. The front door was open. I knocked on the screen. Mi-Seon appeared in a nightgown. She was a petite Korean woman with a kind, open face. She made no move to open the screen while we talked, so we spoke through it. She was convinced at first that someone had put me up to writing the story, and demanded to know who had tipped me off. I assured her that I was writing it as a matter of personal interest. She told me she didn’t want to talk about Buck. “If I talk about Buck, I have to talk about myself,” she told me. “And I don’t want people to call me up and ask me about it.” She told me they’d divorced. He was no longer living there. She’d been living on Buck’s alimony payments, which he’d stopped sending. She didn’t know where he was. “Nothing good can come of this,” she said. “I know it’s public record, but it’s personal.”
“Buck is a public figure,” I said.
“He’s been through enough.” She smiled at me. I saw she was crying. I wondered about his new wife, if he had one — I suspected she would be the blonde I’d seen in the Souls of Gold infomercial. In it, she was dropping her old jewelry with French-tipped nails into a padded envelope, and walking it out to the mailbox behind me, at the end of the driveway.
“Do you think Buck has been persecuted unfairly for his beliefs?” I said.
“Well, he would say things, and people would get offended, but it’s just his opinion.” Mi-Seon told me again that she didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’re not Christian, you’re against Christians.” She began to shut the door.
“Wait, Mi-Seon...” I’d been attempting to make contact with her for days. She wasn’t listed publicly and wasn’t on social media. She no longer used e-mail. I told her that I had recently been attending church. “First Methodist, in Largo.” This was a lie but it worked.
She cracked the door. She told me that life with Buck had led her to want to “cocoon.” Pressure in the televangelism industry to maintain a facade had become exhausting. “People say they’re your friends and then they turn around and they’re not your friends,” she said. She was a private person. The screen door didn’t have a knob on it, I now noticed. I asked her if she found it hard to live in the public eye, given how opinionated Buck is.
“No, it’s not that. I don’t trust secular media. Buck paid a lot of money to the secular media and then they kicked him off. And you journalists pad the story, make it more dramatic, fictitious.”
I reminded her that she didn’t know what I would be writing.
“You print lies.”
“The Tampa Bay Times has fact-checkers.”
“I don’t like the Tampa Bay Times,” she said.
“Buck used secular media to reach nonbelievers.”
“That’s what got him into trouble. He made mistakes.”
“What mistakes?”
“With money. And in his personal life,” she said. They had separated a year into his investigation by the IRS. They’d been married twenty-six years. “He wasn’t praying about it.”
“How did you meet?” I asked, knowing my time was running short.
Mi-Seon smiled. She opened the door wider and stepped toward the screen. “He saw me at the mall. He approached me and spoke to me in Korean. Then he wrote my name.”
“How did he know it?”
“He’d followed me.”
I can’t say I was surprised to see an Aston Martin parked at the Gateway Motel when I got home. The clouds had lifted, revealing a silver sun, and Buck sat in the folding chair outside my room with his hands in his coat pockets. I wondered which hand had the gun in it.
His red-ringed eyes were drunk and crying. I walked to the check-in window, though it was abandoned, pretending I didn’t see him. I dropped my night’s pay into the rusting mailbox. The skinny girl came around the corner, her face bruised. I asked her how long Buck had been there.
“All day,” she said. “He rented the room next to yours.”
“Did he say what he wants?”
“He asked me if I was a hooker.”
I took out my recorder and turned it on, then tucked it into my pocket and thanked her. If he shot me, at least there would be a record of who had done it. He followed me with his eyes as I crossed the lot back toward him. He sat forward on the chair, a mordant smile on his face, then he rose and came into my room behind me without saying a word. I closed the door.
We sat at the particleboard table across from each other. I placed an ashtray between us. He reached into his coat pocket and my heart lit up, expecting to see a gun, but he pulled out a flask and offered it to me.
“No thanks,” I said, “I’m working.”
He shrugged. “The IRS will never see a dime due to the fact that I have nothing,” he told me. He pulled at the flask. “The investigation into Live Crusade was started by Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit. Heard of her? In 2013, she was investigated for unfair probing of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. The IRS knew they would never see a dime. They knew the settlement would never be collected. They just wanted to ruin me. They pick and choose targets based on their own biases.”
His face became red. I thought he would cry, but he didn’t. He closed his eyes, as if praying. I looked away, embarrassed.
“Are you asking me to feel bad for you?” I said. “Because I don’t.”
“No, I’m asking you to leave me with some dignity.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I have a gun.”
He opened his eyes. My gut turned to liquid. I reached up and pulled back the curtains next to us. The window looked out on the parking lot. I made eye contact with the skinny girl. She nodded.
“You also have a luxury car,” I said.
“Don’t be an idiot. I’ve had that car for six years.”
“And?” I lit a cigarette. I ashed in the tray, blowing my smoke in his face. I didn’t believe he had a gun. I chose not to, or was unable.
He cocked it beneath the table. I felt it pointed at my uterus. His forehead was wet with sweat. He got off on his power. “The Times isn’t paying you enough to risk your life,” he said.
He was right about that. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled my nostrils. The crack rang in my ears. The wall’s plaster crumbled into my lap, and I laughed, but the laughter was my overwhelming sadness and fear.