The young man shook his head, as if in frustration. “It’s just so different than what I’ve heard from other ministers. Especially different than things I used to hear at my last church.”
“How long did you go there?”
“A few years…I really liked it there. I never really wanted to change, but my girlfriend had been coming here.”
Patrick Weingarten parked his car along the curb in front of the house and got out. He looked up and down the quiet residential street; it was lined with red and white brick houses, all probably about forty-five to fifty years old. It was a nice day, breezy, and just enough clouds to keep the sun from beaming directly on a person.
He turned and looked at the house he was about to enter. It wasn’t much different than the houses all around it. The yard was well kept, with neatly groomed shrubs and trees, and the house looked as if it had a new roof and had been pressure-washed recently. The curtains on the windows were all drawn, except for one small window to the far left of the house. He scrutinized that window, and thought he might have seen someone looking out at him. But it could have been his imagination…
The man he was going to interview, Anthony Green, had filed an inventory loss with his insurance company; Weingarten was an investigator hired by the company. It had started out as a routine investigation, but then he had discovered, quite by accident, that several of the phone numbers used by the business Green owned seemed to be disposable cell phones that one could purchase from any large retail store. After doing further checks, Weingarten had discovered that an address for the business, down in Alabama, didn’t really exist.
Weingarten knocked on the door and waited. He turned around casually and looked out on the street behind him, scanning the houses across the way. He thought he saw a curtain move in a house about two doors down on the other side of the street, and at the house next to it a woman paused as she got out of her car, and looked in his direction, before walking up the front steps to her door. A car passed by slowly, the driver looking intently in his direction.
He heard footsteps behind him, on the inside, and turned to wait for the door to open. Instead, a voice inside asked who he was. Weingarten gave his name, the name of his company, and the reason he was there—at least that he was there to take a recorded statement for the insurance carrier involved in the claim. He tried to say all of that loud enough for the person inside to hear, but not loud enough for anyone even a house away to understand.
There was a long pause before the door opened. A short, dark-haired man pulled the door back enough to take a look at Weingarten, and Weingarten waited on him to make a move or say something. The man had relatively long, dark, dirty hair—black in color but with a tinge of grey. He was a little bit on the chubby side, and his heavy appearance was accentuated by a tight tee-shirt. He wore faded blue jeans that looked as if they hadn’t been pressed in some time.
“What’s this all about?”
“I’m here to take a recorded statement. I spoke to your attorney two days ago, and he got back to me and told me to come by today.”
The man pulled the door back slowly, backing into a dark narrow hallway. Weingarten entered slowly, alertly, his eyes darting to the left and to the right, and then behind the man. The man hesitated, then as Weingarten shut the door behind him, he led Weingarten further into the house, down the hallway, until they came to a larger, open room.
The room was a mess. Clothing, folders, and paperwork were scattered or piled up here and there. A dirty blanket lay on the floor next to a chair, and paper plates and Styrofoam cups half-filled with liquids sat on coffee tables, chair arms, and the floor.
I wonder why so many criminals, those who engage in fraud, live so sloppily, so filthily, Weingarten wondered to himself. They must like luxury, or easy money, or something they don’t have; why didn’t they regard cleanliness and orderliness as a luxury that could be bought if they didn’t want to provide it themselves? He had seen the pattern over the years, and he knew there were striking exceptions, sometimes obsessively so, in the other direction, but still a very large portion of those engaged in fraud also lived in squalor. Perhaps they weren’t really functioning properly inside.
Clara Wilson pulled her car under the canopy of a gasoline super-pumper on the north end of Dickerson Pike. It started to rain just as she opened her door, and within seconds became a massive downpour. The wind wasn’t blowing badly, though, and she was far enough under the canopy that it wasn’t really so much of a nuisance. It probably couldn’t have bothered her, anyway. She had just heard from her brother, an assistant professor at the University of California-Berkley, that he was getting married toward the end of the year. She and her parents had wondered about her brother; he was almost forty, and had never seemed to have a serious relationship. Now he was getting married.
And her mother had called that morning from Chicago, saying that her sister, Clara’s aunt, was coming from Detroit to visit for a week. Her mom had sounded really happy, and the two of them had a long conversation before Clara drove to work, one of the best conversations she could recall since she had moved to Nashville.
Clara was a risk manager for a large hospital conglomerate headquartered in Nashville. She had broken ground within the company for African-American women over a ten-year period, taking jobs that no one of her race had taken before, and distinguishing herself in those positions. She was highly thought of in the company as an independent-minded, hardworking, team-playing corporate star. She had had some doubts about moving to Nashville from Cincinnati, where she had worked for five years, but having been in Nashville for three years, she had never regretted the move.
She removed the gas cap from her car and set it on top of her trunk. She fumbled in her wallet for a credit card, removed it, and inserted it in the pump. She placed the nozzle in the gas tank and began to insert her credit card in her wallet. As she turned to reach inside of her car and place her wallet in her purse, she sensed—even before she had fully turned around that way—that someone was standing between her and the car door.
She looked up into the face of a man who seemingly had appeared out of nowhere; when she had pulled under the canopy, there had been no one in sight outside of the store. The man was over six feet tall, with dark hair cut short and combed rather neatly. His skin was light in color, or so it seemed to her, but when he spoke, he seemed to have a trace of some type of accent, and she wasn’t sure of his ethnicity. His nose was broad and flat, but his ears were somewhat large and pronounced. She soon could tell that he was a little darker than the average white southerner, but nowhere near as dark as an African-American. He wore a pair of blue jeans and an old faded blue tee-shirt that looked as if it hadn’t been laundered for several wearings.
“Can I have some money to buy some gas?” He showed no emotion on his face.
“I—I’m sorry—I just don’t give money to strangers.”
He seemed to take a step closer to her, but at the same time he didn’t, not really. He just stood there and sort of leaned forward, and it was actually she who took a small step back. She was very conscious about over-reacting, and didn’t even want to look around to see if there was anyone in sight who might help her if trouble started. After a tense moment, though, she couldn’t help looking quickly in all directions; there was no one around. The rain seemed to beat down harder, and the noise from it increased.
“I just need five dollars.”
Clara had long been a generous donator to charity organizations, but she had always had a rule about helping people on the street—she never did that. Most of her friends and acquaintances took the same position; they felt it was handled best through a charitable organization, or by steering someone to a government agency. She felt like people should be helped, but she didn’t see the need to give directly to individuals asking for money on the street.
“Maybe I could—give you a dollar or two.”
“I need five.”
She could feel a
surge of a kind run through her entire body, and she knew that her forearms and hands were shaking. She tried to grip her wallet tightly, even grasping it at her waist with both hands and pressing firmly upon it to try to steady herself. She considered whether to turn and walk quickly into the store to get away from him. She turned and looked again; the store was a good seventy-five feet from her, mostly through the pounding rain. She considered taking a firm stand with the man, telling him to accept a dollar, or two dollars, and be satisfied with that, but she didn’t quite have the nerve. His demeanor was so serious, and the look in his hollow eyes gave off the impression of a person who was desperate, who just might do anything in a moment, without even thinking about it.
The man took a step toward her this time, and she took a partial step back. The heel of her shoe got caught in a crack on the pavement, and in trying to steady herself she dropped her wallet; it went in one direction, and her credit card fell in another. She immediately bent down to pick them up, reaching in two directions, and the stranger did the same thing, almost coming face to face with her, a couple of feet above the concrete. He reached for her wallet at the same time that she did, but instead of grabbing the wallet, he took hold of her wrist and tightened his grip on it, and pulled in his direction.
The Church of Mesmenology had opened in Nashville two years earlier in a public, but relatively quiet ceremony. A news release had announced it, but the local media had not really covered it. After fighting the church over a fifty-year period, media had in recent years backed away, almost bending over backward not to give it excess publicity.
The church had started on a very small scale in Grand Island, Nebraska in the early 1950s. It had slowly grown, and had been involved in numerous disputes with governmental authorities over the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of its status as a religious institution ever since that time. By the 1970s, it was at the height of its controversial period, a period that would not subside until the 1990s, when it reached a settlement with Federal taxing authorities and became a legally recognized church. It had finally reached Nashville.
It wasn’t clear how many “members” the church had in Nashville, nor was it always clear to outsiders what the church actually stood for. The guiding manual seemed to have been a book, written by a mystery writer some years before, that some compared to a self-help book, filled with platitudes and loose language that ultimately said very little. No prominent citizens in Nashville were publicly identified with the church, except for a couple of country music stars who lived in the surrounding counties, not in the city of Nashville itself. Those stars publicly talked, at least on occasion, about the benefits of the church, and had become over time, even before the church located in Nashville, national spokespersons of sorts for the institution. However, no one had ever interviewed them at great length about it.
Jake Reynolds, a tough-talking reporter for the local newspaper, who sometimes also did on-air reports for several of the local television stations, had been curious about the church for years. When he had worked for The New York Times in the early 1990s, he had gotten wind of a settlement between the Internal Revenue Service and the church. An anonymous caller had tipped him off about it, but he had gotten no cooperation from the IRS or from the church, so he was never able to convince his editors to let him pursue the story. Several years later, after he had left the Times, another reporter had finally written a very lengthy article about the settlement between the church and the IRS, the one that finally recognized it as a legitimate church under tax law; the article had noted that the settlement had been a secret one that had only emerged gradually over several years.
Reynolds had approached the editor of the local newspaper first, and had been shot down almost immediately. The newspaper, the only major one in the city for at least the last fifteen years, was very cautious about taking on controversial stories dealing with organizations that had a lot of power to fight back. “This damn church is known for slugging it out like they’re fighting a guerilla war,” Reynolds’ editor had said. “Quite frankly, we don’t have the resources anymore to fight a long, drawn-out battle like that. Let’s leave it alone.”
Reynolds had then approached the television stations, one by one, and was pretty much told the same story; they simply didn’t want to take on the church. One producer told him that the church was more legitimate than it had ever been, and if critical stories about it during its dark days of fighting the Federal government hadn’t derailed it, nothing could stop it now. Another producer confessed that he knew a couple of local members, people who worked behind the scenes in the music business but nonetheless were influential, and they seemed like “nice people.” Another producer flat out rejected it without seeming to even want to discuss it.
One producer, however, agreed to meet with Reynolds and discuss it at greater length. The two met at a restaurant near Centennial Park off of West End Avenue and sat out on a patio in the nice spring weather. Reynolds had come to like Nashville, primarily because of the spring and fall weather, and had surprised himself by not bolting after a couple of years in the city. Now, sitting with the producer, he felt like he might be able to do something that would generate some controversy.
“I still don’t trust this outfit,” Reynolds said. “I don’t know how they did what they did, reaching that settlement back in the 1990s. It gave them a lot of legitimacy, and people think they’re okay now. But I’m skeptical.”
“I don’t know anyone who’s not uncomfortable with them,” the producer agreed. “But they are hardened veterans at fighting off controversy, and I think everyone is just settled into the idea that there’s just nothing that can be done with them. They took on the Federal government, for Christ’s sake! Who else has done that?”
“I know, that’s rare.”
The producer leaned across the table toward him, lowered his voice, and spoke firmly. “Now, listen. I’m up for doing this, or at least recommending it to my boss. But you have to show me something new. One thing I noticed about this outfit is that, in the past, most stories that were done about them, when you really boil them down, they were based upon the assertions of some disgruntled members. Somebody who had been a member for years and years, and got passed over for some position, or something happened to cause them to become unhappy, disgruntled. And they decided to blow the whistle on the organization, even though they had been part of it for years, sometimes decades. It’s like they woke up one day and suddenly saw the error of their waysSo that’s one thing, the disgruntled members who don’t have much credibility. But the other thing is, when you get into most of those articles—and I’ve read a lot of them—and look to what this church specifically is doing wrong, it doesn’t really boil down to much. There have been some loose stories about brainwashing, pressure techniques, conning people out of their money, and so forth. But those are all things that, if true, the law enforcement authorities could crack down on them. There’s no reason they should be given a pass by local law enforcement, or even the F.B.I. So I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there just ain’t much here, at least as far as I can see, and as I say, I’ve read a lot of things about them. There’s just been no there there.”
“What is it I need to come up with?”
“That’s for you to show me. As I told you, I’m open to doing this thing, but you have to show me some substance, something I haven’t seen before. Quite frankly, I doubt you’re going to find it. I think this outfit is offering people something they are seeking at a particular time, combining aspects of the church with a secular outlook, and people go into it knowing what they’re going into. Sometimes, later, some of them get unhappy and leave. Either they’re passed over for a church promotion, or they take a turn back in the religious, the real religious directionShow me where I’m wrong.”
Eric Bernstein, a transplanted Long Islander, had been in Nashville about three years. He had graduated from law school in New York State, worked for a few law firms over the years, then
had settled into corporate law about ten years before. He had transferred from California with his company, an automobile manufacturer, when it had located its headquarters in Nashville. After living in New York and California all of his life, Eric had some trouble adjusting to Nashville, but had settled in after a year or so.
Eric’s parents were both Jewish, but neither was religious. Eric was not religious, either, and had no affiliation with any religious institution. He was generally polite with his Southern colleagues, but he had a confidence about him that some interpreted as arrogance. Most of his co-workers slowly came to like him, however, because he seemed to listen respectfully to their viewpoints, even if he ultimately disagreed with their conclusions.
Eric had been a runner most of his life, and around the time he arrived in Nashville, he began to have some issues with his hips, knees and ankles. At first, he had ignored them as best he could, but recently he had decided he needed to seek some medical attention. He had been healthy all of his life, and had never really interacted with the medical community, except for an occasional visit to a doctor for a virus, or for a physical exam every two years.
Now, sitting in an office in a large complex near the Vanderbilt University campus, he felt very frustrated. He had been in the doctor’s offices since mid-morning, and it was now approaching three o’clock in the afternoon. He had seen at least seven different individuals who had performed some type of test on him, and he had yet to see a doctor. Each person who had entered the room where he sat had asked him the same set of questions about family history, medicines he was taking, and individual symptoms. Each had made notes, but apparently had not shared the notes with the other individuals. He was tired, hungry, and becoming a bit angry.
About half of the individuals who had entered the office had taken him down the hall, somewhere else in the complex, in order to run a particular test or scan. Several of the individuals had simply questioned him in the office, without taking him anywhere. He didn’t know what it all meant, and he had been curious about the process at first, but that curiosity had long since faded. He began to wonder what was piling up on his desk back at work, when he would get out of the office complex, and what the end result would all be.