Page 16 of Go First
"There's a meeting.Downtown.In your interests, maybe.Trust me.”
“I don’t know why I do, O’Malley.But I do.”
+ + + + +
O’Malley drove the Bureau-issue sedan along a stretch of cracked asphalt where the streetlights gave out halfway down the block.Kate studied the sagging porches and the boarded-up storefronts, their windows blind with plywood.Trash rustled in the gutters, caught by the autumn wind.The neighborhood smelled faintly of damp concrete and stale cooking oil, the ghosts of fried food lingering from a closed-down diner.
“This where you bring all the ladies?”she asked, dryly.
He gave a low chuckle.“It’s not what it looks like.There’s a meeting here.”
“Meeting?”
“A support group.Victims of financial fraud.”
Kate angled her head, intrigued.O’Malley kept his eyes on the road, but his jaw tightened slightly.
“You’re attending?”
“Been attending for years.I… got cleaned out.Eleven years back.A woman I trusted.Thought I loved her."He gave a humorless shrug."Turns out she loved my bank account more."
Kate was startled by the disclosure.O’Malley wasn’t the confiding type.But something about the simplicity of his voice—flat, matter-of-fact, not self-pitying—struck her.“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, well.It took me too long to admit it happened.And even longer to admit I needed help dealing with it.That was the battle.Me.Not them.”
"Do you… Sorry, have I given you the impression that something like that happened to me?"
He blinked, as if surprised.“Not at all.I just think you might benefit from a change of direction.”
“How so?”
“I can see the logic of looking at the Pastor’s congregation.It’s Murder Investigation 101, isn’t it – start with those closest.But it depends on the situation.And in this situation, you’ve got a highly charismatic leader, believed by many to have the Almighty on speed dial,worshippedas a kind of teacher and prophet…”
“So the congregation aren’t going to dish the dirt.”
He cleared his throat.“I haven’t discussed what happened to me with anyone in the office.”
“Nobody will hear anything from me,” Kate said.“I understand what you were saying about needing help.”She looked out at the passing blocks.“I couldn’t bear the idea that Elijah Cox was using me, that he’d forced this relationship onto me.I knew I had to report it to Winters, but to do that, I had to admit that it was real.And I was very good at pretending that it wasn’t.”
O’Malley glanced at her briefly, then back to the road.“That’s the thing about people like that.Particularly con-artists like Whitfield.It’s less about them telling you lies.Far more about making you lie to yourself.”
The car rolled to a stop in front of a church basement hall with a flickering neon cross above the door.Paint peeled from the brick walls.A handful of men and women were already milling outside, smoking, the fruity tang of vapes mixing with the rain-soaked pavement.As Kate and O’Malley walked up, another group shuffled out of the building—thin faces, darting eyes, twitching hands.Narcotics Anonymous, dispersing.A few of them looked Kate and O’Malley up and down, not exactly narrowing their eyes, but not exactly welcoming, either.
“Don’t all smile at once,” Kate muttered.
“They made us, that’s all,” O’Malley said, with a grin.“C’mon, Valentine!You know junkies can smell law enforcement from a hundred yards off.”
Inside, the place hummed faintly with the buzz of old fluorescent tubes.Folding chairs were set in a circle on a scuffed linoleum floor.The scent was of burnt coffee, wet coats and air freshener.Sporting a whistle on a green lanyard, a woman in her fifties clapped her hands three times, calling the meeting to order.The guest speaker, a wiry brunette, stood up and told her story: how her business partner had bled her company dry.But the worst part, she said, wasn’t the theft.It was what she did to herself afterward.The lies, the shame, the isolation.“You fight it with honesty,” she finished.“Truth is the only weapon that works.”
A murmur of agreement moved around the circle.Others offered their stories in short, jagged bursts.A man with a rich, deep voice like an actor described his reaction to the news about Pastor Whitfield.
“I can’t celebrate the death of another human being,” he said.“That’s not in my nature.I just prayed that, in the aftermath, there will be some kind of reckoning.And I’m not talking about the money.Because that’s gone.That’s all gone.”
There were murmurs of agreement and support from around the circle.The man continued.
“It’s about acknowledging that we allow this to happen.We create men like Whitfield because we’re a society that’s fixated on wealth and the trappings of wealth.We count a person’s worth by the size of their bank balance!My father always used to say that a nation gets the government it deserves.Well, I’ve come to realise that we get the criminals we deserve, too.Without greed, without gaping inequality and grinding poverty, there would be no Whitfields.”
“That sounds like you’re saying we deserved to be ripped off!”interrupted a woman with long silver hair and a husky voice.“Iwasn’t greedy, James, I just thought I was making a shrewd investment for my grandbabies.I didn’t want six gold Cadillacs, or whatever they’re saying Whitfield had in his garage.I wanted my daughter’s children to know they could go to college without running up a huge debt.”