Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (8 page)

    
He
was not in either of those places, but could be forgiven for having a weird
sense of geographical dislocation. Raszer was a scant forty minutes out of
Hollywood by way of the eastbound 210 freeway, but no drifter left here without
bearings would have recognized the place as California. Azusa is part of the
Los Angeles no one knows.

    
The weather abetted his disorientation. The
foothills were ghosted with mist and heavy with new growth. Raszer had spent
time in San Gabriel Canyon, had even fished here once with a girlfriend, but
the skies had been brilliant blue and the mountains their usual toasted brown.
He’d stopped for lunch in Azusa and noticed its Rotary Club retro look, but that
was in summer. Now, after three weeks of rain, the little shopping district had
the storm-swept air of an Oregon fishing village; the whole town looked as if
it were awaiting fulfillment of a biblical prophecy. On every streetlight,
posted like yard-sale signs, were handwritten placards bearing the names of the
town’s war dead. The names were mostly Hispanic: R
odriguez
, D
ominguez
,
E
scobar
.
And when the signs weren’t advertising patriotism, they were advertising
religion.

    
Near the
intersection of Foothill and Alosta, Raszer pulled up to the curb to consult a
weathered sign of the sort once erected at the entrance to all American small
towns. Its painted centerpiece read: W
elcome to
A
zusa
—G
ateway
to the
S
an
G
abriels
.
On the two-by-four crosspiece above it was written an invitation to all comers:
W
orship
at the
C
hurch of
Y
our
Choice
. On either side, whitewashed pickets hung from
rusted chains and pointed the way to the sanctuaries, among them the Kingdom
Hall.

    
Rising
to the north, like the last standing wall of Jericho, was the big screen of the
abandoned Foothill Drive-In Theater. No Wal-Mart or Costco had yet claimed the
real estate occupied by its sprawling lot, still marked off by the posts that
had once done double duty as loudspeaker cradles and soft-drink holders.
It’s still 1962 here
, Raszer thought.
He’d been born in a town that looked like this.

    
As he’d
expected, the Kingdom Hall was nowhere near as majestic as its name,
recognizable as a church only by its stark, white-framed exterior and a flight
of concrete steps leading to a double-door entrance. It took a few moments for
Raszer to apprehend the incompleteness. The roof came to the usual apex, but
there was no crucifix. The absence of the cross, with its associations of blood
sacrifice and redemption, made the place feel something other than canonically
Christian, and in fact, the Witnesses departed boldly from scripture on this
score. According to them, Jesus hadn’t assumed his heavenly throne until 1914,
when the New System of Things was declared. Raszer stepped from the car,
crushed out his cigarette, and crossed the wet street.

    
Entering
the unlocked hall’s foyer, Raszer found himself in darkness. The door shut
behind him with an echo off polished floorboards and hard surfaces, barely
visible as gray half forms in the empty meeting room. This was the very space
allegedly trashed by Katy Endicott and her pals, and though it wasn’t hard to
feel for her father’s shame, something at Raszer’s core registered all the
reasons a teenager might feel driven to raise hell here. It was a cold, utterly
humorless room. In place of the fragrance of incense was the caustic odor of
Pine-Sol. In place of music, there was only the rain.

    
Yellow
light spilled from behind a half-open door in the rear of the hall. Through the
crack, Raszer glimpsed an old Frigidaire, the droning of its compressor masking
the sound of mingled male voices until he’d drawn very close. Suddenly, the
door opened fully, and on its threshold stood a silhouetted figure as short as
Silas Endicott had been tall. It registered almost as a child until it spoke as
a somewhat tightly wound man.

    
“Mr.
Raszer?” he said. Now the voice seemed almost thrown.

    
“That’s
me,” Raszer answered. “Am I early?”

    
“No,”
said the man. “Please join us. We’ve just been discussing what little is known
of your work.”

    
“Well,”
said Raszer, stepping into the kitchen, “I’ll try to fill in some blanks.”

    
The
short man offered his hand and said, “My name is Amos Leach. I’m Presiding
Overseer of this congregation.” He had a common, gray face, the impression of
which was made indelible only by a Reagan-esque cockscomb of reddish hair that
came to a widow’s peak midway down his forehead. He wore a plaid shirt and dark
sans-a- belt trousers. The trousers’ vintage was the only thing that recalled
Silas Endicott’s sartorial antiquarianism. Otherwise, Leach and the other
elders might have been a group of merchants meeting to discuss the pressing
need for a stoplight on Main Street.

    
There
were six men seated at the Formica-topped table, one chair at the far end
conspicuously empty. Raszer was introduced around and invited to take the
folding chair nearest the door, directly in the path of a chilly draft from the
Hall.

    
“This is
Jim Bidwell,” said Leach, placing his hands on the broad shoulders of the beefy
man on Raszer’s left. “He’ll be taking over Silas’s duties as Ministerial
Overseer.”

    
“Big
shoes to fill,” said Jim Bidwell. “Big shoes.”

    
“From
what little I saw, Mr. Bidwell,” said Raszer, “I’d say you’re right about
that.” He scanned the table. “I’m very sorry for your loss, gentlemen. It must
have come as a great shock.”

    
“No,”
said Leach. “Not in truth. Silas wasn’t well. Hadn’t been since the, er,
desecration two summers ago. I think he died to the world that day.” Leach
dropped his chin solemnly and the others followed suit, leaving Raszer to
ponder his daughter’s words. “There is no shame as deep as the shame of a
disobedient child.”

    
“Amen to
that,” said the man on Raszer’s right.

    
“And
this,“ said Leach, following the voice, “is Sam Brown. He’s our Ministerial
Servant. He runs the office, and he’ll be your main contact should we decide to
proceed with this, uh, matter.”

    
Sam
Brown was a black man in his sixties. He was the only person of color in the
group, but it was a small group. As with many evangelical sects, the growth of
the Witness flock in recent years was owed in large measure to the blurring of
color lines. Raszer sometimes wondered if L.A.’s inevitable armageddon would
come down less to a battle between rich and poor than to one between believers
and nonbelievers. Amos Leach must have detected just the slightest movement of
Raszer’s eyebrow, because he felt obliged to say, “We’re all servants here, Mr.
Raszer. Unlike the world at large, we do not denigrate servitude. Our church is
the faithful and discreet slave of the Lord.”

    
“Amen,”
said Jim Bidwell, and the others nodded their agreement.

    
Leach
took his chair at the end of the table opposite Raszer and laced his stubby
fingers together. He cocked his head, thought for a moment, then said, “We
thought we ought to ask you, Mr. Raszer . . . are you yourself a Christian?”

    
“You
might do better to ask me,” said Raszer, “if I’m a man who can be counted on to
keep his faith—and his own counsel.”

    
“And are
you?” asked Leach.

    
“Yes, I
am,” Raszer affirmed, although something about Amos Leach gave him pause,
something off-kilter about the small body and big hair.

    
“That’s
good,” said Leach. “If we should decide, as a body, to engage your services,
we’ll need to have your complete discretion. We don’t want any headlines.”

    
“You
won’t get any,” said Raszer, having anticipated the concern. “In seven years of
work on six continents, with one exception, I haven’t generated a single line
of copy. I’m not in the Yellow Pages, and whatever’s on the Internet is
currently being swept clean. I prefer to work very, very quietly, and I don’t
leave footprints.”

    
“And
your fee for finding a missing person?” asked Leach.

    
“Ordinarily,
six thousand a week, plus expenses.”

    
Raszer
saw Sam Brown roll his eyes. Jim Bidwell shook his head gravely. Leach looked
from man to man, clucked his tongue, and asked, “And how many weeks?”

    
“Very
hard to say,” Raszer answered. “Six. Eight. Anyway, I don’t waste time.”

    
“I’m
afraid Silas didn’t leave us that kind of money,” Jim Bidwell said.

    
“Maybe
we ought to let the dead bury the dead,” said Amos Leach.

    
“We’re
the trustees of Silas’s legacy,” Sam Brown countered. “And we made a—”

    
Painfully
aware of his empty bank account, Raszer adjusted. “I’ll drop it to forty-five
hundred with a five-week cap. My daughter . . . wants me to find your girl.”

    
“You
understand, Mr. Raszer,” said Leach, “that we’d expect you to return Katy to
her flock . . . spiritually unblemished.”

    
“I don’t
do reconversions,” said Raszer. “Depending on what Katy’s been through—and
assuming she’s alive—she may well want to come back to the fold on her own, and
I’ll do my level best to correct the effects of any coercion, confinement, or
manipulation so that she can make that choice. Despite what you may have read
in the press, I’m not for hire as a deprogrammer. Not in the usual sense.”

    
Amos
Leach leaned forward, his fingers still knitted. “In
what
sense, then?”

    
Raszer
took note that the Overseer’s voice had broken into a higher register.

    
“Deprogramming,
exit counseling—whatever you want to call it—is a little like shock therapy.
Effective in the short term, but the problems remain because only the
brain
has been tinkered with. I try to
approach my strays as embodied souls who may’ve wandered off to follow a star
but wound up out in the cold. I offer them a coat, and the label on the coat
says, ‘
This is Who I Am, more or less as
God made me. This is how I saw the world before anybody told me different
.’
Most people are happy to put on the coat once they see how exposed they are.
But I won’t have it tailor made to fit any particular doctrine or dogma. If I
were in that business, Mr. Leach, somebody could just as easily hire me to
deprogram your son or daughter.”

    
Sam Brown cleared his throat and broke the
tense silence. Amos Leach affected indignation and hammered his entwined fists
on the table. “Are you comparing this house of God to a cult, Mr. Raszer?”
Midway, his voice broke again.

    
“No,” said Raszer. “I don’t use that word
much. Belief in a higher purpose gets channeled into all sorts of streams—big
and small, clean and polluted. They all go to the sea. The
sea
is what I try to show them.” Raszer sat back, and the cold
draft hit him.

    
“What is it, Mr. Leach, that leads you to
think Katy Endicott—wherever she may be—might need deprogramming?

    
“She
left the flock,” said Leach. “That speaks for itself, as far as we’re
concerned.”

    
“You’ve
got an eyewitness who says she was forcibly abducted,” said Raszer.

    
Leach
pressed on, as if oblivious to the point. “And those goats up in the canyon she
fell in with,” Leach replied, “those boys.”

    
“Goats?” Raszer queried.

    
Jim
Bidwell chimed in. “Those who speak against the Witnesses,” he said.

    
“I’m not
clear on this,” said Raszer. “Those were the same boys who—”

    
Leach
continued his thread: “They were dancing to the Devil’s music—”

    
“Raped
her,” Raszer finished. “Again, according to your sole eyewitness.”

    
“And
there’s no doubt in my mind,” Leach went on, “that they pawned her off to pay
their debt.”

    
Sam
Brown spoke up. “I should explain, Mr. Raszer, that we have pondered this
matter deeply and come to the conclusion that the, uh, assault on Katy Endicott
that night was, if I can put it this way, a kind of send-off. That the boys had
already sold her into some sort of white slave ring. Well, that’s our theory,
anyhow.”

    
“It’s
not a bad one, Mr. Brown,” said Raszer, “as theories go. I want to ask you
gentlemen about those boys. Whatever this was, they were also ultimately
victims of it. Are their families still members of your congregation?”