Burning at the Boss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery) Read online

  And that was it. I couldn’t really say that the pastor sounded especially worried. Perhaps on careful listening I could detect a slight tone of concern in his voice. Perhaps. But what was it about? I couldn’t help but interpret it as a threat.

  I went to the next program, his second-to-last, from Thursday, and right at the end heard another message. “Last night I mentioned a financial advisory company here in Yarra Boss called Go-Go Greene Financial. I was hoping they might respond with some goodwill. But they didn’t. I must repeat what I said before—what happens when the regulators understand what is happening?”

  What on earth was this about? Would his final broadcast enlighten me? I sat back and listened. Again, I had to wait right until the end.

  He was playing some music, an orchestral rendition of the wonderful hymn How Great Thou Art, when the music came to an abrupt halt. For a short instant there was silence, as if my computer had frozen.

  But then the pastor spoke, in a slow, hard and deliberate voice. “For the past two evenings I have been talking about the firm of Go-Go Greene Financial. I have been urging that firm to display justice. But they will not relent. That firm is going to be judged by the regulators. But more than that, they are going to be judged by God.”

  Again he paused. But when he spoke again he seemed almost to be shouting. “It is going to be judged by God. Listen to the words of the Bible. ‘The Lord is coming with fire, his chariots are like a whirlwind; he will bring down his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.’”

  I recognized this as from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah.

  He continued: “‘With fire and with his sword the Lord will execute judgment upon all men, and many will be those killed by the Lord.’ This is the fate that waits those who disobey the word of God. This is the fate of Yarra Boss.”

  I shuddered. Here was the pastor pronouncing doom and destruction on the financial planning firm. Not only on them, but, apparently, on the whole of Yarra Boss. Destruction by fire. This broadcast was on Friday night. Just three nights later the pastor himself was to perish in a murderous firestorm.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The pastor’s strident words of judgment—“rebuke with flames of fire”—were still buzzing in my ears the next day as I walked through the verdant streets of Box Hill to the home of another pastor—my own, Pastor Ron Thomas of the Box Hill Community Church. It was only nine o’clock in the morning and already the temperature had hit twenty-five degrees. No wonder the fire at Yarra Boss caused such swift damage.

  I rounded a corner and smiled at a couple of kids playing under a hose in their front garden. A schoolboy, late for class, sped past me, dragging a large green schoolbag behind him on the footpath, making a sound like a heavy barrel rolling across gravel. I could never understand why Aussie schools resumed at the beginning of February, often the hottest month of the year. It was one day in February 2009 that the Melbourne temperature hit one hundred and fifteen degrees and bushfires killed one hundred and seventy-three in the Yarra Valley.

  The Box Hill Community Church occupied an old clothing factory, just a five-minute walk from my apartment. The pastor and his wife lived by the church car park, in a run-down weatherboard home. I was about to walk up the steps to the landing at the front of the house when I heard a scream from somewhere inside. I rushed to the front door. It was unlocked. I ran inside. “Is everything all right?” I shouted.

  “Johnny, is that you?” I recognized the pastor’s wife Esther. I strode down the hallway into the small room that served as the pastor’s study.

  “He tried to stand up to reach for a book,” said Esther, looking at me. “He knows he shouldn’t do that.” She turned back to her husband. “Darling, Johnny’s here. He’ll help you up.”

  “Leave me,” said the pastor, his rough voice carrying only a little less power than normal. This was the voice that placed the fear of God into the hearts of church members each Sunday morning and on many other days as well.

  I looked at him lying on the floor, contorted like a hit-and-run victim and struggling to rise. Esther was kneeling beside him, trying to help. “Darling, please…” She looked back up at me. I saw tears in her eyes.

  Three months earlier the pastor suffered a stroke. It was minor, but he was in his seventies, and now he was confined to a wheelchair. Fiercely independent all his life, he bitterly resented his new circumstances. I was part of a roster of church members who visited regularly to keep him company, to do any heavy chores and to give Esther a break.

  We both watched helplessly as he pushed himself up with his arms until he was kneeling on the floor. Then he grasped the sidebars of the wheelchair and with a power that even some younger men might not manage he dragged himself slowly back into it, twisting his body until he was seated. The pastor had lived for decades in outback Australia and was still an extraordinarily strong man.

  I almost wanted to applaud. But I knew that this effort had probably exhausted him. He sat slumped, unaware of what an awkward picture he presented. His tall, gangly body was all-askew, like a marionette with the strings loosened. I couldn’t believe that he was comfortable. But I knew that he wouldn’t let me try to interfere.

  Now with his large bony hands he propelled the wheels of his wheelchair until he was seated at his desk. He maneuvered slightly to face me. “Thank you for letting me know about Jim Reezall,” he said, almost as though nothing had happened, although he seemed unable to raise his head sufficiently to look at me and his voice was strained. “It is sad when someone is taken in those circumstances. How is his daughter?”

  “Miriam? She’s pretty shaken up. As you’d imagine.” I sat in a chair near him. Esther gave me a smile and a thank-you pat on the shoulder and left the room.

  “Yes, I can certainly imagine that.” Now he was able to raise his head to look at me and again I was struck by how he seemed to have aged a little more each time I visited. His eyes seemed just a little more sunken than before, his face was paler and thinner and new blotches seemed to be marring his skin. He was already lean and bony but increasingly he just looked skeletal.

  “There’s a lot of guilt there, as well,” I said. “I think Miriam’s feeling now that she wasn’t always the prefect daughter.”

  “Jim unfortunately was far from being the perfect father. There’s another daughter too, I think.”

  “Yes, Sarah. I don’t know her. She lives in Sydney.”

  I looked at the man I respected, who had been my friend when I most needed it.

  I had arrived in Australia as an illegal immigrant, smuggled in by an Aussie friend who went and set me up in business as a private detective. My friend was then murdered by terrorists, handing me my first major investigation.

  But that initial year was rough. My English was fluent, thanks to my upbringing in East Timor by American missionaries. But I was an illegal immigrant with few friends and little money. And somehow I had expected that on arrival in Australia I would quickly locate my father—the father I had never met. But of course that didn’t happen.

  Thankfully, in the midst of my bouts of loneliness and self-pity I stumbled across the pastor and his church. He took me in hand, helping me, testing me, even protecting me at times, while also shaking me out of my lethargy. At times he seemed to understand me better than I understood myself and he certainly knew how to get under my guard with probing questions and challenges.

  He had also shown himself able to assist me in my investigating work, especially when the church was involved. At a crucial stage in my first major investigation he somehow procured for me the cellphone number of a prostitute I needed to interview. He once flew to Alice Springs just to protect me because he discerned—correctly—that I was under spiritual attack.

  So I knew now to discuss with him any difficult cases, for his perspective and possible guidance. “Did you know Pastor Reezall well?” I asked.

  “We’re the same generation. Both pastors here in Melbourne. So our paths crossed. B
ut I spent most of my time in the outback, working in the Aboriginal communities.” With a vague sweep of one arm he indicated the Aboriginal paintings and artifacts that adorned his desk, his shelves and the walls of his office. “Meanwhile he was becoming famous. Preaching all over the world. Setting up all those orphanages in Asia. Including East Timor, if I’m correct.”

  I nodded.

  “That needed money. Big money. He became something of a powerful fundraiser.”

  My pastor’s tone suggested that becoming something of a powerful fundraiser wasn’t necessarily the appropriate career trajectory for a pastor.

  “He was very successful,” I ventured.

  “He was successful,” agreed my pastor. “In worldly terms he was very successful. He raised a lot of money. In Christian circles he was famous.”

  He paused, and I waited. The pastor did look tired. I could see that talking with me was an effort for him.

  “You said on the phone that you’re investigating his death?”

  “Miriam has asked me to. I’m doing it as a favor to her. But this is almost certainly murder. The police will be all over it. I doubt that I can find anything they can’t. But she has asked me, and I do want to help her.”

  “Jim was a hothead,” said my pastor.

  I inclined my head forward, eager to hear more.

  “A hothead,” he repeated. “That’s why he had such a bad name among the public. A good name among Christians, for all his work with the orphanages. But he couldn’t help speaking his mind. He said what he thought. If he thought you were a sinner he said so. If he thought you were condemned to a life of torment in hell he said so. And if the papers or the TV people asked, he’d happily tell them as well.”

  “And so they asked.”

  “Constantly. The papers love that. It’s the image of Christians they’re trying to portray. Intolerant. Judgmental. Condemning. And sadly, Jim fit the bill.”

  “So why didn’t he just keep quiet?” Through the window next to the pastor’s desk I could see a couple of gorgeous red, blue and green lorikeets sitting on the clothesline.

  “He loved being in the news. He relished it. That’s what happens when you acquire a bit of celebrity. It may be for something good, like starting a chain of orphanages, but then it becomes a drug. So you respond to the media whenever they come calling. And you start your own late-night program on some obscure radio station that no one’s ever heard of.”

  I smiled.

  “But there’s more. When you’re a hothead and you see yourself in the media you start to think that you can do it all yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You start to take matters into your own hand. You stop relying on God. You think that maybe God’s plans aren’t working out the way they should. You think you need to hurry God along. You become impatient with God. Impatient for the victory of Jesus.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I’m not going to say more about a deceased brother in Christ. But be aware of what I have just said. I stopped giving to his charities many years ago.”

  I waited. I wanted to hear more. Why did he stop giving? But the pastor pulled a sheet of paper from a stack on his desk and began writing, as if I wasn’t in the room. He was presumably working on one of his sermons. He still preached each week, despite his wheelchair confinement.

  He wrote his sermons in a florid longhand, little curlicues at the bottom of some of his letters. I doubted that he ever learned to use a typewriter let alone a computer. I sometimes felt someone should send these documents to a museum or gallery. They were works of art.

  I tried a new tack. “Right now the only clue I really have is that the pastor seemed to be angry with a financial planning firm named Go-Go Greene Financial.”

  For a moment it seemed the pastor hadn’t even heard. But then he answered: “When raising big sums of money becomes one of the main parts of your ministry you’re going to run into problems. You become dependent on the income flow. You don’t dare let it falter.” He turned slowly and looked up at me, though again with his head slumped to one side. “But I’ve never heard of that company.”

  “I listened to Pastor Reezall’s final radio shows. He was angry. And he started talking about fire. He used quite vivid language from the Bible. He seemed to think that God was going to judge that company and even the whole town. Through fire.”

  “God certainly uses fire for judgment and for punishment.”

  I wanted to keep the pastor talking. I had so few leads. He might say something that would guide me. “Do you know Miriam?” I asked. “Pastor Reezall’s daughter. Do you know her well?”

  “I’ve probably met her. I think she might even have been working for her father’s ministry at some stage. But I can’t recall anything more about her.”

  “She and her father weren’t the best of friends. It’s sad when a parent and child don’t get on together. Families are important.”

  “Are they?”

  Oops. I knew that the pastor was about to challenge me, just like the old Buddhist monks challenging the novices with unanswerable Zen koans. Whatever my answer, it would almost certainly be wrong.

  “Are they?” he asked again.

  I just shrugged my shoulders.

  “People put their trust in their families when they should be putting their trust in God,” said the pastor. “Jesus said the most important commandment was loving God.”

  “Not a problem for me. I don’t have a family.”

  “You came to Australia to seek out your father. You’ve spent a lot of time looking for him.”

  “I haven’t found him. I think I’ve reconciled myself to knowing that I’m never going to find him. Probably he’s dead.”

  “Jesus said that if we love him we cannot love our families.”

  I wasn’t going to fall for that. “Jesus also talked about removing the plank from our eye. And about passing through the eye of a needle. That’s how he talked. He used exaggeration.”

  “I don’t think Jesus was exaggerating when he said our families are a bar to knowing God. In fact, family becomes god. You’ll hear plenty of sermons at Christian churches about how we have turned material possessions into icons. But sometimes we turn our families into icons as well.”

  “We all need families. Look at me…”

  “We need God more. We can’t rely on people. We all carry baggage concerning our families. The only way we can abandon this baggage is through God. Are you sure your eye is on God? Aren’t you bitter about your father? Hasn’t your bitterness led you to do things that are against God?”

  “I was angry. Very angry. But that’s all in the past.”

  “But what would happen if you suddenly found evidence of your father? That he’s alive?”

  “That would be wonderful. That’s been my dream. I’m not expecting it anymore, but…”

  “And it turned out that your father wasn’t what you were expecting. That he didn’t even care about you. What then?”

  I paused. When the pastor spoke you sometimes felt that it was God Himself speaking to you. And right now something in the pastor’s words was vaguely unsettling. Just as happened when I heard Pastor Reezall call down the wrath of God, I felt a slight shudder.

  CHAPTER TEN

  With trepidation I rang Miriam’s doorbell. Nearly twenty-four hours of investigation had given me little to report other than to confirm what she’d told me the previous day—that her father had been bad-mouthing Go-Go Greene Financial. What would she think of my abilities?

  Oh, and my pastor had reported that her father was a hothead who might not have thought God was working fast enough. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  So I was delighted by the cheery smile I received, almost as if I had arrived for one of our dates together. She even seemed eager to make me a cup of coffee. We sat together in her living room.

  “How did you sleep last night?” I enquired.

  “What do yo
u think? Not well.” She brushed at her hair with one hand. “Johnny, I’m sorry for involving you in all this. I realize I’m being selfish. Asking you to investigate. Just for me. The police will do a good job. I’m sure you have plenty of other things to do.”

  No, I didn’t have much to do at all. That’s another thing that worried me. I could survive on little. But if I was serious about developing my relationship with Miriam, she would expect a husband who could support her and her son. Maybe it was time to find a proper job.

  “I’m happy to do it,” I said. “Speaking of the police, have you seen them again?”

  “You mean apart from being chased by them at my father’s house?”

  “Apart from that.”

  “They came round again yesterday afternoon. Soon after Jonah got home from school.”

  “Any news?”

  “They said they didn’t have much to go on at all. Someone almost certainly poured petrol around the house and set fire to it on Monday night. They haven’t been able to find any witnesses. The house was virtually destroyed, along with just about all of Dad’s stuff, so there’s very little evidence there. They haven’t been able to find anything important. And it seems Dad—his body—was also badly burned. Beyond recognition, they said. They won’t let me see it. Not that I want to. There’ll be an autopsy of some kind, apparently. They wonder if he was in a fight of some kind.”

  “A fight?”

  “They said it’s possible.”

  “Your father’s unlikely to have been in a fight. Not at his age.”

  “He loved a good fight. But with words, not fists or weapons. But he was an old man. He wouldn’t be in a real fight.”

  “A burglar of some kind?”

  “That’s what the police are speculating. Broke into the place. Got surprised by Dad. Knocked him out or something, then burned the house down. But why would a burglar go there? It’s so remote. And Dad had nothing. Nothing.” She paused and took a deep breath. “And they asked me lots of questions. Did I know if my father had enemies? That sort of thing. And they asked about my own relationship with him. That wasn’t pleasant. Do they think I might have done it?”