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  Obadiah smiled and tried once more not to look at Lena, who was now thoroughly engrossed in part two of the “halftime show.” It appeared that Rucker Hemphill’s entrance wasn’t enough. Never mind that he had on a leopard stole, it just wasn’t enough. Because as soon as the bishop had taken his seat at their table, Ernest Brown rolled Bishop Larsen Giles into the room while Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You” blasted out of the sound system.

  Denzelle couldn’t stand that song—especially when Whitney started belting out, “tonight is the night for feeling all right… we’ll be making love the whole night through…” It was just ridiculous to him that a woman would get all excited over the thought of spending stolen time with another woman’s husband. That was just plain stupid—not to mention dead wrong.

  But what was beyond stupid was what Marcel Brown’s dad was wearing. The buzz of voices came to a halt as soon as folks got an eyeful of Ernest’s tuxedo. Whereas Rucker had on a leopard stole, Ernest Brown, never one to be outdone, not even by a bishop, was wearing a black silk tuxedo with a zebra cape, zebra-skin shoes, and a matching zebra fedora.

  At the point when Bishop Percy Jennings was about to say, “I think I’ve seen it all,” they all laid eyes on Bishop Larsen Giles. It was just as Theophilus would later describe to their folk who did not attend this banquet: “Never in this lifetime could I have wrapped my mind around the mere possibility of seeing what we all saw.”

  First, Larsen Giles was in a wheelchair, when just hours ago he’d been seen walking around the grounds of the hotel wearing a bishop-purple jogging suit and moving with considerable pep in his step. So folk thought it odd that the bishop was in a wheelchair—especially since no one had seen him get hurt, or heard about any recent health problems. Folk also thought it odd that he was being wheeled in by Rev. Ernest Brown instead of his wife, who they suddenly realized had not been seen since they had come to the conference.

  It was practically church protocol for all the wheelchair folk with wives to be wheeled into anywhere by those wives. In fact, many of those wives would have been wheeling those men around with such haughtiness that folk would have thought it was a new status symbol among the crème de la crème in the denomination to wheel your man around a church conference in a wheelchair. And a few of the serious and determined social climbers in the ministerial ranks would have hoped for an occasion to wheel somebody through a Gospel United Church event.

  No one knew why Bishop Giles was in a wheelchair but everyone was dying to find out. Some thought it curious that the bishop, who wore only the most expensive suits fashioned by a man who ran his shop out of the basement in his home, deep in the hood in Detroit, was dressed in only half a suit. The top was super-sharp—deep purple with lavender chalk stripes, lavender shirt, and deep purple tie with black and pale gray stripes in it.

  This fifty percent of this outfit was the perfect “bishop’s suit.” But the remaining half of the outfit was problematic. While Larsen Giles was sporting silk on his torso, his bottom half was adorned with purple velour jogging-suit pants. Now, they were very expensive jogging pants but they were still jogging pants.

  Murcheson got up to get some more deviled eggs, so he’d have an excuse to get a better look at Larsen in that wheelchair. When he came back, the others were sitting there waiting on the report. He popped a deviled egg in his mouth and said, “Y’all do know that Larsen is wearing fancy patent leather bedroom slippers.”

  The band started playing an upbeat and jazzy version of the gospel hymn “Blessed Assurance.” It sounded good enough to get the attention off Bishop Giles—which is what Marcel had hoped for when he gave the band director a hundred-dollar bill to play this song. It worked for all of ten seconds. Once the folk got used to hearing the groove of the song, they immediately refocused their attention back on the bishop.

  “Why is he in public like that?” Willis asked. “He is all covered up with that thick blanket like something is wrong with his legs.”

  “And he stiff, too,” Thayline added, wondering why the man had such limited control over his joints, especially in the lower part of his body. She’d noticed that Bishop Giles’s feet had remained in the same L-shaped, upward-facing position on those metal wheelchair foot rests for the entire time he’d been in the banquet area.

  “Why are his hands and fingers so stiff?” Essie whispered to Theophilus, who shrugged. Right now he wasn’t as interested in Larsen Giles as he was in what was happening in two corners of the room. Theophilus couldn’t understand why Eddie’s mentee, Denzelle Flowers, was so interested in that no-count boy who was supposed to be one of Bishop Giles’s new assistants, Rico Sneed.

  Theophilus was even more perplexed when he saw Denzelle sneak and check the shoulder holster inside his suit coat.

  Thayline’s husband, Willis, came up to and stood next to his wife’s baby brother. He stared at that young preacher who worked under Eddie for a moment, and then said, “Baybro, what is that young buck doing walking around this hotel with an FBI-issued gun?”

  “Man, how you know that from way over here?”

  Willis just stared at Theophilus as he had when Theophilus was a skinny teenager and tried to jump bad with him for dating his sister. He rolled his eyes and said, “The way he handling that gun and the way he packing it is like somebody with training. Not some negro who trained himself or got some good directions from the so-called gun expert on his street. No, that brother is trained, and he learned that stuff up in northern Virginia. You hear what I’m sayin’, Baybro?”

  Theophilus nodded and then turned back toward Eddie, who also had questions about that Rico boy’s presence at the conference. He’d heard that Sonny’s crew had hired a computer hotshot from the area to help them. There was more to that boy being here than that.

  Eddie came and stood next to his best friend. He said, “You think anybody else has picked up on that Denzelle is FBI?”

  Theophilus shook his head and said, “Eddie, Willis, and Thayline will see stuff long before everybody else.”

  “That there boy is a good cop and even better preacher,” Murcheson James said. “How many Gospel United Church preachers do you know of that are capable of having that kind of firepower up on them and not find a way to broadcast it at an affair like this one?”

  They all nodded. Murcheson was on the money with that observation. A lot of the preachers they knew with a license to carry the smallest pistols had the biggest mouths in the denomination. They talked big junk, walked around big-time, told themselves they were big shots, and as a result always found themselves embroiled in some of the biggest messes going on at any time. The ones with the sense and authority to carry the greatest firepower were always very low-key. The last thing that group wanted was for folk to know just what they had on them.

  When Ernest wheeled Bishop Giles near their table, Essie, Thayline, and Johnnie got up, intent on easing over to where they were to get a better view. But they stopped when they remembered that all of Sonny Washington’s supporters were at the table, and that they needed to find a better way to get in Bishop Giles’s business.

  Johnnie plopped back down in her chair.

  “Dang!” she exclaimed. “Why did Marcel’s daddy roll that sucker over to the table with all of those ‘original’ black people from Bishop Hemphill’s district? Shoot! I don’t want to sit here watching them talk. I want to know what is wrong with Bishop Giles.”

  “I know what’s wrong with the bishop,” a very familiar and proper voice said, as two welcome sights approached their table.

  Essie hopped up and ran to give both Saphronia McComb James and Precious Powers a big hug. She said, “Lawd knows we glad to see y’all big butts. This is the most messed up preelection banquet that I have ever been to. And it started off so right.”

  Saphronia grinned and hugged her friend and homegirl. They had come a long way from when they were young back in Charleston, Mississippi, and couldn’t stand the air each other breathed. But
that was then, and this was now. Essie Lane Simmons had always been cool people. Saphronia had been too silly and stuck up to see it. It had taken her other good friend, Precious Powers, to help set her straight. She was glad that Precious had done that. Otherwise she would have missed out on a tremendous blessing.

  “Essie, I don’t know why you thought this banquet was going to be right. And I don’t care how well it started out,” Saphronia said.

  “See,” she continued evenly, “if you are so busy staring at the mess—as in that mess over there”—Saphronia pointed to Larsen Giles sitting in that wheelchair as if he were ten seconds short of full rigor mortis setting in—“then you will miss the mess going on over there.”

  Saphronia directed their attention to Rico Sneed, Kordell Bivens, and a skinny white boy talking near the door, right before money changed hands between Rico and the white boy.

  “They just passed some money over to that white boy, didn’t they?” Thayline asked, tempted to go over there and get a closer look.

  “Yes. They, as in Rico Sneed and his friend, Kordell Bivens, have been helping Sonny Washington, Marcel Brown, Larsen Giles, and Rucker Hemphill sell something right up under our noses. I don’t know what it is but I know they aren’t selling Bibles and prayer cloths.”

  “Are you telling me that they are dealing crack cocaine?” Essie asked incredulously. She knew that group was bad news. Essie had always hoped that they had some boundaries. But she knew that if a white boy, who was dressed like a stagehand for Aerosmith, came up in here with all of these black church folk, he was coming for a very good reason. And the best reason for a Mötley Crüe type of white boy to come up in here like that was cold hard cash.

  “No, not that,” Precious Powers told them. Back in 1963 she’d been instrumental in bringing Marcel Brown down to his knees and stopping some mess that would have torn the church to shreds. Marcel had been her lover, and he had also been engaged to Saphronia at the same time. Those two women had ganged up on that man and turned him inside out. He’d never been the same, and his ministry, or at least the sham of a ministry he was so enamored of, had crumbled at his feet. From that day on Marcel Brown hadn’t been able to stand the sight of Precious Powers and Saphronia James, and they could not have cared less about what he could or could not stand.

  “Then what?” Thayline demanded.

  “They have some kind of male stuff,” Saphronia told them. “I don’t know all the specifics…”

  “But what she does know,” Precious added, “is that they have come up with this drug that enhances the you-know-what and is supposed to make it work better, and be a whole lot more than what it really is in a short period of time.”

  “They got some ho’ pills?” Johnnie asked, causing Thayline to crack up. That was what she loved about Johnnie Tate—her straight-up, shoot-from-the hip way of putting things.

  “Well, I don’t really know if I would call them whoring pills,” Saphronia said. “But what I do know is that this powder stuff is supposed to be the end-all for a man wanting to act like he is Marvin Gaye and ‘get it on.’”

  “So, how do they take it… not in their arms?” Essie asked, causing the other ladies, including the very proper Saphronia, to turn and look at her as if she had just gone crazy.

  “You know you can be such a little country girl when you want to, Essie Simmons,” Precious said. She had been born and raised in Detroit and always prided herself on having big-city ways.

  “Forget you, Precious,” Essie said. She didn’t care one bit that she was from a small town like Charleston, Mississippi. Precious didn’t know everything just because she was from Dee-troit.

  “Okay, I can see how you would ask that question with this powder stuff,” Precious conceded. She had gone too far but hadn’t meant to be mean. It was refreshing that there were still folks walking around who had not become jaded with worldliness. That was one of the things she loved about Essie.

  “Look,” she went on, “they call this stuff WP21, or Watermelon Powder 21 because it’s made from watermelons. And I’ve heard it’s supposed to make a middle-aged man feel like he’s twenty-one all over again.”

  “How does it work?” Essie asked.

  “Saphronia and I have been nosing around and we only have a little bit of information. But from what we’ve been told, it works real good.”

  They started laughing. Precious and Saphronia were always collecting dirt on bad preachers. And they made it their business to keep tabs on Marcel Brown.

  “Y’all know y’all wrong,” Johnnie said, laughing.

  Saphronia and Precious were cracking up. They knew they needed to leave Marcel and his cronies alone, but wouldn’t.

  “But on a serious note,” Precious said, “that stuff is selling like hotcakes and making your enemies a whole lot of money—money they are going to use to buy themselves some votes.”

  Ernest Brown wheeled Bishop Giles to another table of potential voters. Some of the bossiest and most controlling lay delegates in the church were seated at this particular table. These were the folks who loved to write anonymous letters to their pastors, telling them how they needed to do their jobs. They were the ones who were always accusing their pastors of taking money that didn’t belong to them, even when everybody in the congregation knew that pastors could not just up and take money without going through a series of checks and balances designed to protect the church’s accounts.

  And when all else failed, they were the folk who sat through a highly anointed and charged-up service as if they didn’t have a pulse or a heartbeat. Then, when the service ended, these same dry folk had the nerve to get all up in the pastor’s face complaining vehemently about the service and why he let those people shout and praise the Lord like that. And a few had enough nerve to tell the pastor that if one more person ran around the church, and then started speaking in tongues right before falling out, they were going to call the police and have every last one of those lunatics handcuffed and carted away in the police van.

  It was clear that the table’s head honchos were giving the bishop an earful of all the stuff that had gotten on their nerves during this conference week. Bishop Giles had never been one to approve of a vibrant church service, and he tried his best to avoid the churches in his district with high rates of folks getting saved, getting anointed with the Holy Ghost, and joining the church. So it was clear that Bishop Giles was enjoying the round of conversations at this table far more than he had while parked at the previous one.

  Larsen was more animated than he had been since Ernest Brown had first wheeled him into the banquet room. He laughed and talked and tried to raise his hands to emphasize what he obviously believed were the good points in the conversation. At one point Ernest must have said something very funny because everyone seated in that area was laughing, slapping palms, shaking his shoulders, and hitting at the table.

  Not one to be left out of the fun, Larsen forced himself to raise up an arm, and then proceeded to hit the arm of the wheelchair, right before he hit his knee. The blanket that had been wrapped carefully around Larsen’s body started slipping down below his waist. He didn’t notice or feel the blanket slipping down because his body was stiff and slightly numb from his abdomen down to his toes. His cronies had wrapped his body in that light blanket to protect his body, and to try to get him warmed up enough to charge up his circulation.

  The bishop, eager to get his hands on more WP21, had decided to try a big dose of the newly made powder Rico Sneed had just paid that white boy with the long hair, Grateful Dead T-shirt, overpriced athletic shoes, and very expensive pickup truck for. That white boy, Harold Dinkle, and his younger brother, Horace, were good and efficient at making the drug. But there was a problem with giving these white boys province over the manufacturing of this drug.

  First, they cared even less about the potential customers than the men in this room trying to use this drug to buy an Episcopal seat. And because Harold Dinkle only saw green when his eyes tra
veled across the rainbow of brown faces in the banquet room, he was going to make as much of his own cheap and synthetic brand of WP21 as possible.

  Rico and Kordell were hardheaded and rash. Unbeknownst to the preachers they worked for, Cleotis had come to them with an offer to make the potion from Twilight’s grandmother. It was a better drug, and she was offering a better deal. But Rico had gotten mad and thrown a temper tantrum when Twilight’s grandmother chastised him about his ugly ways, and then called him out on a lie. In his customary manner Rico had talked trash to that old lady, and then stormed out of the house, making a point of slamming the door.

  It had taken Cleotis, Dotsy, and Grady a whole lot of persuading to keep Twilight from smashing in Rico’s face. But they all figured that it was best to leave this alone, and allow this door to close. Twilight’s grandmother would have worked hard to make sure WP21 wasn’t toxic. She’d even figured out a way to lower the amount of ingredients that caused folk to crave the powder. But now those greedy and trifling preachers, along with that rude sociopath, Rico Sneed, would come to regret the pact they had made with the Devil’s little helpers, Harold and Horace Dinkle.

  From the moment that Harold Dinkle figured out what made WP21 work, he and his brother had worked dead into the night to figure out which synthetic additives would increase the drug’s addictive qualities. They knew this could cause an adverse reaction if the user ingested more than what was compatible with his age, weight, and height. But Harold and Horace didn’t care about that type of danger one bit.

  When that blanket slipped off Larsen’s body, it was clear that he was having a bad reaction to something. And whatever it was had done him in. As soon as Eddie Tate saw that blanket slipping, he hurried over to where the bishop was holding court, with Theophilus, Johnnie, and Essie hot on his heels. That tent configuration of the blanket in the bishop’s lap had piqued Johnnie’s and Essie’s interest when Larsen Giles was wheeled in. At first they thought that maybe it was some kind of health care machine he had sitting in his lap. But that thought was definitely a “grasping for straws” explanation. And they would quickly learn what was really jutting out on the bishop’s lap.