She didn’t talk religion much during daylight hours. She was unfailingly polite, always quick to ask after someone’s health or the health of their loved ones. She never forgot a name. And she remained, even as the hard year of her “trials,” as she called them, had aged her, a strikingly beautiful woman. And beautiful in a conspicuously American way—full lips the same color as her burgundy hair, eyes honest and blue, skin as smooth and white as the sweet cream at the top of the morning milk bottle.
The fainting spells began to occur late in ’31 after the European banking crisis sucked the rest of the world into its vortex and killed all remaining hope for financial recovery. The spells came without warning or theatrics. She would be speaking of the ills of liquor or lust or (more and more lately) gambling—always in a quiet, slightly tremulous voice—and the visions God had sent her of a Tampa burned black by its own sins, a smoke-wisped wasteland of charred soil and smoldering piles of wood where homes had once stood, and she would remind them all of Lot’s wife and implore them not to look back, never to look back, but to look ahead to a shining city of white homes and white clothing and white people united in love of Christ and prayer and earnest desire to leave behind a world their children could be proud of. Somewhere in this sermon, her eyes would roll left and then right, her body swaying with them, and then she would drop. Sometimes she convulsed, sometimes a small amount of spittle leaked over her beautiful lips, but mostly she just appeared to be asleep. It was suggested (but only in the lowest circles) that part of the surge in her popularity stemmed from how lovely she looked when she lay prone on a stage, dressed in thin white crepe, thin enough so you could see her small, perfectly formed breasts and her slim, unblemished legs.
When Loretta lay on the stage like that, she was proof of God because only God could make something that beautiful, that fragile, and that powerful.
And so her swelling ranks of followers took her causes quite personally and none more so than the attempts of a local gangster to ravage their communities with the scourge of gambling. Soon the congressmen and the councilmen returned to Joe’s bagmen with “No,” or “We’ll need more time to consider all the variables,” though Joe noted the one thing they didn’t return with was his money.
The window was closing fast.
If Loretta Figgis were to meet with an untimely end—but in such a way as to be plausibly considered an “accident”—then after a respectful period of mourning, the casino idea would reach full flower. She loved Jesus so much, Joe told himself, he’d be doing her a service by bringing them together.
So he knew what he had to do, but he had yet to give the order.
He went to see her preach. He stopped shaving for a day and dressed the part of a man who sold farming equipment or possibly owned a feed store—clean dungarees, white shirt, string tie, a dark canvas sport coat and a straw cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He had Sal drive him to the edge of the campgrounds the Reverend Ingalls was using that night, and he made his way down a thin dirt road between a small stand of pines until he reached the back of the crowd.
Along the shore of a pond, someone had built a small stage out of crate board, and Loretta stood on it with her father on the left and the reverend on the right, heads bowed. Loretta was speaking of a recent vision or dream (Joe came too late to hear which). With her back to the dark pond, in her white dress and white bonnet, she stood out against the black night like a midnight moon in a sky swept of stars. A family of three, she said—mother, father, tiny baby—had arrived in a strange land. The father, a businessman sent by his company to this strange land, had been instructed to wait for their driver inside the railway station and not venture outside. But it was hot inside the terminal and they had traveled far and wished to see their new land. They stepped outside and were instantly beset upon by a leopard as black as the inside of a coal bucket. And before the family had so much as its wits about them, the leopard had torn open their throats with its teeth. The man lay dying, watching the leopard slake itself on the blood of his wife, when another man appeared and shot that black leopard dead. This man told the dying businessman that he was the driver who had been hired by the company and all they’d had to do was wait for him.
But they hadn’t waited. Why hadn’t they waited?
And so it is with Jesus, Loretta said. Can you wait? Can you not give yourselves over to the earthly temptations that will tear your families asunder? Can you find a way to keep your loved ones safe from the beasts of prey until our Lord God and Savior returns?
“Or are you too weak?” Loretta asked.
“No!”
“Because I know that in my darkest hours, I’m too weak.”
“No!”
“I am,” Loretta cried. “But he gives me strength.” She pointed at the sky. “He fills my heart. But I need you to help me complete his wishes. I need your strength to continue preaching his word and doing his works and keeping the black leopards from eating our children and staining our hearts with endless sin. Will you help me?”
The crowd said Yes and Amen and Oh, yes. When Loretta closed her eyes and began to sway, the crowd opened its eyes and surged forward. When Loretta sighed, they moaned. When she fell to her knees, they gasped. And when she lay on her side, they exhaled as one. They reached for her without stepping any closer to the stage, as if some invisible barrier lay between them. They reached for something that wasn’t Loretta. Cried out to it. Promised all to it.
Loretta was its gateway, the portal by which they entered a world without sin, without dark, without fear. One where you were never alone. Because you had God. And you had Loretta.
“Tonight,” Dion said to him on the third-floor gallery of Joe’s home. “She’s gotta go.”
“You don’t think I’ve thought about it?” Joe said.
“Thinking about it ain’t the issue,” Dion said. “Acting on it is, boss.”
Joe pictured the Ritz, light pouring from its windows onto the dark sea, music flowing through its porticos and out across the Gulf as the dice rattled on the tables and the crowds cheered a winner, and he presided over all of it in tux and tails.
He asked himself, as he had so often over the past few weeks, What is one life?
People always died during building construction or laying steel tracks in the sun. They died from electrocution and other industrial accidents every single day, the world over. And for what? For the building of something good, something that would employ their fellow countrymen, put food on the table of the human race.