Washington nodded. “That’s right, I forgot you met him shortly after Ed was tapped as the mayor’s new adviser and brought him for a tour here. James Finley. As I was saying, I shouldn’t tell you that Finley was said to have, at least at first, appeared quite excited by the tension of the moment. But then he announced to the mayor that he was terribly afraid you actually were about to shoot Cross right there on live television.”
Payne grinned.
“The thought crossed my mind. He deserved it for any number of reasons. But then I realized there’s probably a line of people ahead of me really wanting to whack Skinny Lenny, beginning with his old drug-running pal he ripped off.”
Washington knew the story. The grittier details had been circulated by Cross’s detractors shortly after his appointment to CPOC.
[ TWO ]
A decade earlier—listed in police records as “MUGGS, Leonard Robert, Also Known As ‘Skinny Lenny’”—the Reverend Josiah Cross had completed a year and a day in the slam. His offenses included assault and forgery of a financial instrument—while hopped up on crack cocaine, he’d beaten an elderly neighbor with a baseball bat, then cashed the old man’s welfare check. Cross had, as he put it, “suffered an unfortunate incarceration for a simple misunderstanding at a difficult point in life, and I’ve paid my dues for it,” then returned to society penniless but on a mission and with a new identity.
Having arranged for a money order in the amount of thirty-five dollars to be sent to Utopian World Ministries of Cleveland, Ohio, he had received at the jail by return mail a certificate, suitable for framing, signifying that Leonard R. Muggs was licensed as an ordained minister of the Utopian World Order.
Certificate in hand, he headed straight back to the old run-down neighborhood where his mother still lived—the area known as Strawberry Mansion for its most prominent residence, though the place no longer was a shining landmark—and slept on the threadbare couch in her row house when he wasn’t out looking up his old contacts.
Within days he had convinced, if not coerced, one Smitty Jones—the not very bright but very tightly wound thirty-year-old who was his onetime street-corner business partner—to front him a kilogram of marijuana on credit.
Cross moved the product, and with that cash then rented, for next to nothing, an empty building in the neighborhood that most recently had been City Best Chinese Eggroll for three years, before the owners tired of the regular robberies and fled.
The edifice had a mock pagoda facade, with a distinctive red-tiled roofline that curled out and upward, and a faded crimson red front door, on which he had painted in gold WORD OF BROTHERLY LOVE MINISTRY, REV. J. CROSS PASTOR and, above that, a big crucifix.
When Smitty showed up at the door and said that he wanted payment for the dope, Josiah announced that it had been “the work of a higher power” for the money to go to the new church. Josiah suggested that it might be possible Smitty would be repaid somewhat later, but then again he could make no promises.
“I have been redeemed,” Cross explained, somewhat piously, “and am now a man of the cloth. It’s out of my hands, brother.”
Smitty wasn’t buying it.
“That’s bullshit, bro! I’m gonna snuff your sorry skinny ass out if I don’t get my money back now!”
But about the time he finished making that threat he was staring at the black muzzle of the Reverend Josiah Cross’s Beretta Cheetah .380 caliber semiautomatic, which Cross had instantly produced from somewhere beneath his black robe.
Smitty didn’t think the tiny pistol could do much damage—he knew guys got hit all the time with a 9, which was bigger than a .380 and what mo
st everyone else packed, and even those bigger bullets just went right through them and the ER doctors stitched them up and sent them home the same night—but he figured Skinny Lenny just might get lucky and hit some important part on him.
Wordlessly, hands above his head, Smitty slowly walked backward to the faded crimson front door.
Five years later—with a growing congregation that had come to include, after he put them on the church payroll as deacons, both Smitty Jones and the elderly man who “miraculously” had forgiven the old Skinny Lenny for assaulting and robbing him—Cross had preached himself into a position in the community that, courtesy of City Councilman (At Large) H. Rapp Badde Jr., was considered worthy of an appointment to the CPOC.
—
Matt Payne looked at Jason Washington and said, “It’s no wonder that Badde bought his old neighborhood buddy. They’re cut from the same corrupt cloth. I won’t go into Badde’s—the list is too long—but the quote Reverend unquote Cross’s hypocritical behavior is nothing short of an outrage. As you well know, there are honest to God nuns and monks and others serving in those hard-hit neighborhoods. They’re the real deal, actually doing God’s work. They’re not making a mockery of it all for personal gain like Cross, starting with his shilling for Badde from the pulpit and essentially turning that bogus church into a campaign office.”
“You are aware that Cross got on camera after your interview . . .”
“Yeah, I saw him as I was leaving.”
“. . . and when the reporter asked if he felt what he was doing in a place where a young woman had just been murdered was ‘disrespectful’ or ‘disgusting,’ he dodged the query by stating instead that he felt that three hundred and sixty-two murders was ‘disgusting’ and that ‘a trigger-happy cop contributing to the bloodshed of citizens in the city was despicable.’”
Payne grunted. “I guess he’d rather have those murderers still running the streets.”
“It is anyone’s guess what his genuine motives are . . .”
“Beyond personal gain, you mean,” Payne put in.
“. . . but he then announced that he would be leading a protest rally at his church this afternoon at five. The interview was then drowned out with the chants of ‘No more murder, no more Payne.’”
“Five o’clock?” Payne said, then touched the glass face of his cell phone.