Salvation Boulevard Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  ALSO BY LARRY BEINHART

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 - SOUTHWEST MAGAZINE YOUR BEST GUIDE TO AMERICA’S BEST REGION

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Copyright Page

  Nominated for the Shamus Award

  PRAISE FOR SALVATION BOULEVARD

  “This book probes and pokes and provokes more deeply than most so-called serious novels, forget the qualification of genre. This is smart, snappy and unsettling enough to keep a bar discussion going well into the night.”

  —Chicago Sun Times

  “A surprisingly tasty dish. Beinhart’s complex thriller, with its underlying theme of the dangerous convergence of religion and politics in today’s society, seems certain to provoke controversy. It seems equally certain that most readers, whatever their spiritual posture, will find it absorbing.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “This is a perfect novel for fans of the political thriller or mystery genre, with current issues interwoven smoothly into the mix.”

  —Daily Kos

  “Beinhart does a fine job describing the treacly paradise of the Church of the Third Millennium and a finer job ratcheting up the pressure on his fragile hero.”

  —Booklist

  “Splendid religious legal thriller.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A very atypical witches’ brew of sex, religion, hypocrisy, and evil in which the war on terror is cynically manipulated to subvert America’s basic values.”

  —Penthouse

  “A born-again Christian private eye’s faith is shaken to the core when he takes the case of the Muslim student suspected of killing his atheist professor.”

  —Kirkus

  “Pretty darned funny.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Larry Beinhart’s Salvation Boulevard, like his Wag the Dog and The Librarian, is a wild ride indeed. Intelligent, provocative, often outrageous, it pits a tough excop turned born-again Pl against what only looks like innocence, covering a dark world of power and treachery and deceit. It will grip you, first page to last.”

  —Donald Westlake

  “A gripping, page-turning tale that takes one through bad lawyers and good ones, treachery and faith, pornography and preaching, torture and Homeland Security. Salvation Boulevard is a great and memorable read.”

  —Vincent Bugliosi

  “Salvation Boulevard is dramatic and highly provocative. Larry Beinhart expertly crafts a tempestuous philosophical personal drama that will unquestionably motivate intense discussion, debate and critical thinking. Read Salvation Boulevard and you will be consumed in a thought-provoking whirlwind. It’s quite a significant read.”

  —Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “In Orwellian times, fiction is often the only way to get the truth out. We are approaching such times in the United States, and Larry Beinhart masterfully alerts us to what depths our government has sunk. Salvation Boulevard is a quick paced and heart wrenching call to arms against the excesses our government has foisted upon ‘we the people.’”

  —Ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir

  “Larry Beinhart’s Salvation Boulevard pulls off one of the toughest tricks in modern literature: a sharp, high-energy whodunit that will disturb you with how closely it is based on real life.”

  —Clarence Page

  “Larry Beinhart’s Salvation Boulevard is the kind of pop-fiction detective story that could fundamentally transform the consciousness of Red-state America. And it’s a fun and often quite provocative read for the rest of us! I couldn’t put it down!”

  —Rabbi Michael Lerner

  ALSO BY LARRY BEINHART

  Fog Facts

  The Librarian

  Wag the Dog

  No One Rides for Free

  You Get What You Pay For

  Foreign Exchange

  How to Write a Mystery

  Wag the Dog

  The basis for the film with Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman

  Selected by Capital (the German version of Forbes)

  as one of The Top 1,000 Books of the Last 1,000 Years

  Selected by Tempe, Arizona,

  as one of The Great Books of the 20th Century

  Selected by the Wall Street Journal

  as one of The Five Best Books on Public Relations

  To my family:

  My father and mother, who taught me to think,

  My wife, who inspires me and holds me to the highest standards,

  My children, who taught me that there are far deeper currents

  than mere thought.

  1

  Ahmad looked like hell.

  He also looked like a kid. I knew he was twenty-one. But if he’d been cleaned up and had civilian clothes on, and I saw him in the hallways at my daughter’s high school, I could’ve believed he was sixteen, seventeen years old.

  That was what Manny wanted me to see. Manny had a cause. And for some reason, he wanted me to join up. I didn’t understand why. It was unnecessary. Pay me; I do my job. Causes are dangerous; everyone knows that.

  Right now, the kid was in an orange jumpsuit, his wrists and ankles manacled, connected by a chain that connected to another chain that wrapped around his waist. He had prison-issue slippers on his feet. He was scared, as scared as I’ve ever seen anyone. And he’d been hurt. He had bruising on the right side of his face, and he had trouble moving, and when Manny reached out to shake his manacled hand, he flinched.

  “Easy son, easy,” I said, soft and slow, talking halfway between the way you talk to a person and a wild animal you’re trying to coax to your side.

  He looked at me, his eyes dark
as the night and wet as the rain. He couldn’t help himself; the tears started to flow. It happens that way, if you’ve been brutalized enough: the first gentle words you hear, the tears start to flow.

  “Come on,” I said and put my hand on his arm to lead him to the yellow plastic chair. They’d provided us with three chairs, no table. They’d even taken Manny’s pens away and given him a felt tip for making notes. Pencils were too dangerous. This was not normal. Usually there was a table—bring your own pen, tape recorder, pads.

  The CO that brought him in was Leander Peale. He was mostly called Lee, sometimes Leap or Leapy. He worked prisoner escort a lot, and both Manny and I knew him. He was born-again. Saved him from a life of crank before he lost all his teeth. He still rode a bike and had a “Born to Lose” tat beneath his uniform. He used to have an imp with an enlarged penis that said “Satan’s Spawn,” but he’d spent some serious dollars having it lasered off. He was an okay guy. Not an asshole. He knew that we all have to live together; we all have our jobs.

  In addition to Lee, in his CO uniform, there were two suits. They didn’t introduce themselves. Manny asked, “Who are you?”

  The older one, a homely man with twenty-year-old pits of teen acne still marking his face and thin straw hair, muttered, “Homeland Security,” from between thin, grudging lips. But who knows what that means. When I put my hand on Ahmad’s arm, he and his younger partner, an iron pumper, thick in the chest, both hunched like they were ready to pounce if the kid went berserk or I tried to spring him.

  “Back off,” Manny said dismissively.

  Ahmad dropped to his knees and put his hands on my leg. He hugged my thigh and wept. “Save me, please save me from these people.”

  That was too much for the Homeland Security guys to accept. No crying, no touching, no accusations. So they moved. They were coming for him. Manny got between us and them. He looked at them with the authority of a man who sues people for a living and wins.

  “They are beating me,” Ahmad said, both hands now on my thigh, holding on like I was a life raft, looking up at me like I was the key to the kingdom of heaven. “They stick things in my ass. I am innocent. Tell my mother, please tell my mother, I’m innocent. Don’t let them beat me anymore. Please.”

  Manny looked at Lee.

  “Not me,” Lee said. We have to parse these things. He didn’t say it never happened. He didn’t even say, “He was resistin’,” like he would have if some other COs had been overzealous. In the circumstances, it was as good as jumping on a pine box, pointing a long-boned forefinger, and screaming, “Yes, they did that to him!”

  “Alright, this is over,” the older of the two said.

  Manny flipped open his cell phone and took the guy’s picture. Then his partner, then one of Ahmad holding my knee and sobbing like a boy who’d just been raped.

  “He’s lying,” the older one said. “He’s lying. They train them to say that. And weep and cry.”

  “He had to be questioned. What if he was planning more murders? What if it was part of a plot? What about that?”

  “Tell me your names,” Manny said. He’s got lots of voices. This one sounded like George Patton on a bad day. “I want names and numbers. Give me some badge numbers.”

  “We don’t answer to you.”

  “Why don’t we all back off, guys,” Lee said.

  “Back way the hell off,” Manny said. “I want to talk to my client. I want the privacy to which he and I are entitled. And I want your assurances this room is not wired. And believe me, if I have any cause to do so, I will see to it that I ask you again under oath. Now, let me talk to my client.”

  “Come on,” I said, trying to lift the kid up. He didn’t want to let go. “Come on, you have to sit down and tell us what’s going on.”

  2

  Islamic warriors martyr themselves in order to kill infidels.

  There’s a born-again Christian ruling the West who says he gets his orders from God and he’s running a Crusade. It might as well be the twelfth century.

  The corpse in this book should be God.

  But He lives.

  The words belonged to the dead man. His name was Nathaniel MacLeod. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of the Southwest, the largest institution of higher learning in the state, the largest between Texas and California, for that matter.

  A bullet had gone through his head. It had entered his right temple and exited near the nexus of the left temporal, parietal, and frontal bones.

  The words, which became, in effect, his final words, were on the opening page of a manuscript found in front of him, leaning against his computer screen, the foot of the page stopped by the keyboard.

  This is a great mystery.

  Contrary to popular wisdom, it’s relatively easy to disprove the existence of God. At least of a meaningful, beneficent God.

  Furthermore, we have, during recent decades, accumulated enough new knowledge of the universe, and more particularly of ourselves, to understand why we believe. And why it is so important to us, important enough to kill over.

  A gun had been found on the floor beside the chair, where it would naturally have fallen from his right hand if he had shot himself. It was a relatively rare and unusual gun, and it was owned by MacLeod. The stippling and powder burns around the entry wound indicated that the barrel had been held against his head when the shot was fired.

  In short, it looked like a self-inflicted wound, and when he was first found, the police called it a suicide.

  A dead white man is not quite as exciting as a missing white girl, but it’s big enough. Especially an educated, upper-middle-class white man, not a piece of white trash shot up in a raid on a meth lab. It got a lot of local and regional coverage. The news shows brought in all sorts of commentators to puff out the story: psychologists, suicide counselors, student counselors, spokespersons from the university. Because of the God-and-atheism angle, they brought in religious figures too. Pastor Paul Plowright, who runs the biggest church in the state, got the most air time.

  “Is anyone surprised,” Pastor Plowright asked the anchor of WSVX’s six o’clock news, “that an atheist committed suicide?

  “The despair an atheist must feel is unimaginable to a believer. The emptiness, the hollowness inside. And, of course, atheists have no moral center. To them everything is relative, anything is allowed, so why not commit suicide? They don’t understand that life is sacred. Theirs is a culture of death; ours is a culture of life.”

  The anchor asked him, “What about his statement that it’s easy to disprove the existence of God?”

  Pastor Plowright smiled gently. Viewers could see he was restraining his contempt out of respect for the dead. “Unbelievers have been saying that for thousands of years. And they convince no one.”

  “What about this book of his?”

  “Bob, how can you disprove something that exists?”

  Plowright was far less restrained in his Sunday sermon and in his television and radio broadcasts. The manuscript, he said, was proof positive that there is a war against Christianity. The front lines are at our so-called great universities. The academic elites are Satan’s storm troopers.

  The student newspaper, the USW Clarion Call, said MacLeod had been very popular with his students, that he’d been politically active, especially in the search for peace in the Middle East and most recently in the fight against the privatization of the state-owned university’s $5.3 billion endowment fund.

  It also published the rest of that first page, including this:Morality is always the red flag of believers. If we remove God, they exclaim, everyone immediately dives into a drug-addled orgy of degeneracy, excess, and criminal irresponsibility, and the world goes to hell in a handbasket.

  That’s not true, on the face of it.

  There have been numerous societies throughout history—as there still are today—without a monotheistic god, and some with no gods at all, and they have been quite as moral and orderly as Jewish,
Christian, and Islamic states. Nor is there any correlation within a given society between the fervency of belief and moral conduct.

  Actually, a clear look at morality is the strongest argument against God.

  It was as if there were a debate going on between a dead man and a live one.

  They themselves would have called it something more than a debate, a battle for souls.

  It’s natural to assume that a living man has all the advantages over a dead man. But this certainly hasn’t been the case since the invention of the written word. Nathaniel MacLeod hadn’t done very well against the Bible, a book far older than his own, its authors long dead. How would Pastor Paul Plowright fare against Professor MacLeod’s pages?

  Absolutely, the opening round went to Plowright.

  But then the police suddenly announced that MacLeod’s death had not been a suicide. It had been a murder. A suspect had been arrested.

  3

  Manny was the Goldfarb of Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb, one of the three biggest law offices in the city. The largest was owned by a New York firm, with branches in Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington, D.C. GGW&G was said to be the most profitable. They rolled over billable hours like an electric meter counting watts. Most of their work was corporate. Manny did crime because he had a taste for it.

  “So, who do you have?” I asked.

  “Ahmad Nazami,” he said.

  “Manny,” I said, “you’re not normally the saint of lost causes.”

  “Do you have a problem working on it?”