A Negro and an Ofay (The Tales of Elliot Caprice Book 1)

by Danny Gardner

  Elliot couldn’t trust Margaret. She wasn’t naive. If anything, she tholed the stigma of the suspicious widow for far too long. Her resentment was palpable. No way she’d allow the entire ordeal to be a trip for biscuits. This Alistair seemed like a dandy. She wouldn’t likely abide one in her bed. Not without an agenda of her own.

  Something else stunk. How was it the family allowed one of the help to be the linchpin? They didn’t care about the money. Power and influence were their aims. As long as no one found ol’ Alistair, the board remained in control, so if his pieces weren’t feeding Chinook out in Lake Michigan, why was he still alive? Did he have something on the McAlpins? Were they hiding him to bring down their father’s wife? The whole affair was a tangle.

  Elliot returned to the office. The sign painter’s work had been completed. Strips of vellum, taped to the glass, protected where Elliot’s name was set. He walked in to the sound of soft snoring coming from behind Mike’s office door. He looked inside to find Elaine seated in the large leather chair, leaned backward, her feet on the desk. She was fast asleep after another all-nighter. Elliot closed the front door quietly. He turned his attention to the stacks of file boxes along the walls. Careful not to wake Elaine, he found the McAlpin file. He quietly closed Mike’s door and got to work.

  Jonathan McAlpin’s life read as a schizophrenic mess of reneged decisions. Almost every child in the family had been written out of his wills at least once, just to be written back in on several conditions. Amendments were filed in response to simple marital discord. At the slightest disagreement, it was call the lawyer. Make certain she doesn’t get anything. Protect the family. His wives’ wills, however, weren’t present in the files. Either they had their own preparers or, more likely, they didn’t have wills at all. Why would they? Their world was on loan from the McAlpins. Elliot remembered Uncle Buster’s warning: “Folk what change they mind all the time will white on ya, sho’ as the day is long.”

  Jonathan McAlpin was certainly a creature of his family’s intentions. On paper, he seemed soulless. Change orders involving women and children. Amendment after amendment about personal affairs. He went through the front of the file to find the earliest document. Esme Ross McAlpin was not his first wife—that was Diana Kostopolous, a foreign national of Greek extraction. The first will on record detailed how Diana and their son, Jonathan II, would only receive McAlpin’s personal holdings. The bulk of the estate would remain in the hands of the McAlpin family. There were additional orders to allow one Stavros Kostopolous to repurchase Jonathan’s interest in a company called Costas Cartage, Limited. It was an arranged marriage to be sure. Elliot dug deeper. Jonathan II was written out of the will after the divorce from Diana. That decision was consistent, until his marriage to Esme. Jonathan II was written back in, though without stipulation. Elliot scanned the trust board roster for names. Jon McAlpin was listed as Chair, Endowments. Obviously the new wife loved the guy enough for her husband to welcome him back to the fold.

  Then the switch of all switches. Esme McAlpin dies in a freak boating accident. Her personal holdings are distributed amongst her five children, stepson included. Six months later, just as Mike Robin called it, McAlpin orders a new will that gave Margaret the whole schmear, including his stake in the family estate. Mike communicated his vehement disagreement in writing. Jonathan McAlpin heeded nothing. He found the love of his life. Everyone was going to accept her, or else. Good thing for Margaret the bastard died in his own bathtub before he could change his mind again.

  Elliot combed through the laundry list of ancillary beneficiaries: the children of his estranged siblings, a few old friends, a singer he admired, outside endowments for the arts, a few pennies for colored folks’ charities—which made Elliot wretch. Finally the help were named. No household employee, past or present, was omitted. It went back to nannies, butlers, maids, bookkeepers, family physicians, bodyguards and, of course, Alistair Williams. He would receive a job for life, should he choose. Plus funds for the completion of his education. Rather generous. Of Margaret.

  Theories ran through Elliot’s mind like mustangs. He scribbled notes. So many angles had come to him that he had to sound them out to himself.

  “Studying hard?”

  Elliot looked up to see Elaine standing in the doorway of Mike’s office, still looking exhausted.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t,” she said. “I had been working all night helping with a brief. Mike’s assisting the Ruby McCullum case.”

  “The colored side-piece in Florida what killed her beau?”

  “The same one. I put him on the train a couple hours ago. Hope he makes it there in time.”

  “I gotta tell you, Elaine, she sounds guilty as they come.”

  “Of course she is. That’s not the point. By limiting the charges to a money dispute, they’re restricting her right to a fair defense, only to protect the reputation of the deceased.”

  “She killed the fella who kept her on the side.”

  “A dead white man’s honor doesn’t outweigh a Negro woman’s right to a fair trial,” Elaine said. She pointed in the air as if she was trying the case herself. Elliot felt guilty at how attracted to her he was at that moment.

  “I got the McAlpin documents signed. They’re ready to be recorded.”

  “Really? I figured she’d hold out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I couldn’t imagine being married to a man for any length of time, just to be cast aside by the family once he died. I’d sleep in a cardboard box underneath a viaduct before I’d give in to that bullshit. What’s in the file?”

  “McAlpin’s estate. Considering the motivations of folks named in the will.”

  “Mike have you doing that?”

  “No. It’s more of an elective.”

  “An elective. Sure.”

  Elaine turned around to give Elliot his space.

  “Elaine, wait. I got Margaret McAlpin to sign off on the condition that I’d do what I could to find Alistair Williams.”

  “The driver.”

  “Yeah. She gave me a lead. I plan to follow up on it. I figure it’ll be a dead end, but I accepted her offer to find him.”

  Elliot stood up, reached into his jacket pocket for an envelope and handed it to Elaine.

  “It’s eight hundred.”

  “Whoa.”

  “That’s half of my advance. If I find the guy, or prove he’s no more, it’s twenty-five hundred in it for the office.”

  Elliot sighed.

  “One minute, I’m a hard ass, shoving some papers in front of her to sign. The next, we’re drinking. By the time we’re walking through the garden, I’m accepting an offer for more money than I need to find some fella who, if’n he ain’t dead, ain’t tryin’ to be found.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “I just want my uncle to be back at home where he can be happy. I won’t allow it to get in the way of work.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  “I do need a favor.”

  “Okay.”

  “This Williams fella is taking me back to Chicago. If I uncover a solid trail, I’ll get the next third of my fee. Added to the money I have saved, I can settle up on the farm.”

  “What’s changed about Chicago?”

  “Nothin’. I’m gonna make out very lucky or very dead. If it’s the latter, please protect my uncle from the bank.”

  “Mike’s looked into stopping the easement. He thinks he can challenge the veracity of the loan. Perhaps claim coercion due to your uncle’s age and circumstances.”

  “It has to be you, Elaine. Mike is a good man, but my uncle is old Mississippi.”

  “Colored to colored.”

  “Besides, you’re good lookin’. He’ll listen to you. Allow you to help him.”

  Elaine looked deep into Elliot’s eyes. She handed the envelope back to him.

  “We won’t let Mike know about this just yet.”

  �
�I don’t mean for you to be keeping secrets from him.”

  “You think our life together runs as smooth as it does because I tell Mike Robin everything?” She touched Elliot’s shoulder. “So, is this what you’re doing now? Investigations?”

  “I’m just in it for the dough.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Elaine had a way of cutting through Elliot’s bullshit. He could go for a girl like her, if it wouldn’t drive him nuts.

  “Why do you delight in disarming me?”

  “Is that why I make you uncomfortable?”

  “What makes me uncomfortable is you’re fine as May wine.”

  “I’m flattered. Why do you pretend that what you want isn’t important?”

  Elliot sighed.

  “I’m afraid if I show how much I want a thing, the world will take it away.”

  “That doesn’t have to happen.”

  “When doesn’t it?” Elliot policed up the contents of the McAlpin file.

  “I’ll put that away. I don’t need you screwing up my filing system any worse.”

  Elliot put the folder on the desk and silently walked toward the door.

  “Elliot?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Friends?”

  “Obviously.” Elliot closed the door behind himself. Elaine stared at the space where Elliot had just stood. She searched for some remainder of him, yet found only emptiness. Elliot was naked, right down to his spirit. That spirit was screaming, yet could make no sound. A lost spirit, marooned on a hostile world.

  Tired of back roads, Elliot burned up 66 back to Southville. There was still time to get to the bank to make a deposit. Perhaps negotiate terms. He had more than half of what he needed to satisfy the loan. That had to count for something. He was so determined to make it there on time, he tried not paying attention to the tail he picked up outside Springfield. It looked like a late-model Chevy sedan, black hardtop, driven by a man in a black hat. He varied his speed until he was certain he was being legitimately shadowed. Elliot dropped Lucille’s hammer and tore ass. The tail gave chase, but Elliot left his pursuer in the dust. He watched him in the rearview, laughing, until he noticed a granary trailer that stopped abruptly, bisecting the stretch of highway up ahead. He hit the brakes, but at over one hundred miles per hour, he needed a quarter-mile to come to a complete stop. He hoped there was a ranch road opposite the granary where he could bank a stiff turn. No such luck. He snatched up on the emergency brake, gave Lucille enough gas to change course, and yanked the wheel hard to the right. He hit an adverse camber at the shoulder and caught air, landing in the stalks. Lucille careened into a ditch. Elliot caught a face full of steering wheel. He saw stars before everything blurred. The familiar taste and smell of his own blood greeted him. Before he could reach the sun visor to use the mirror, his eyes rolled back. Everything went black.

  Without booze, sleep robbed Elliot of peace. Unconsciousness lowered the drawbridge that held back the onslaught of unresolved memory. Years prior, Elliot held post outside the back door that led into the kitchen of the Creamer Family’s Prairie Avenue mansion. It was the cushier part of the assignment, which embarrassed him, as his college buddy John used his influence to score him the gig. He tried to get out of it, but his precinct captain explained how it worked among the politically well-heeled in Chicago. The inclusion of a half-colored officer in the protection detail for a gala held in Senator Estes Kefauver’s honor fit the evening’s agenda. Kefauver’s speech included a special message about the evils of organized crime as it related to colored communities. How egalitarian of him. What the captain didn’t understand is the other cops put Elliot on the spot for it. He also didn’t want to be around members of Chicago’s Negro intelligentsia, all dressed up to pay lip service to the powerful white folks. They had stayed after Elliot for his mixed-race features, brief education, and intelligence. All too often he had to rebuff their overtures to fall in with them. He was from Southville. That made him no Talented Tenth. The common disparagement was, while he may have looked somewhat white, Elliot Caprice was all nigger. He took it as a compliment.

  Later in the evening, after everyone’s highhandedness was finished, he was rolled off by the captain and directed to a winder staircase that led to the third floor. He arrived upstairs to find his old college buddy smiling. Creamer embraced him. Elliot felt he was being measured up. They walked down a long hall to an atrium. Creamer shared that he had been following Elliot’s detective career from his former job as assistant Illinois State’s Attorney. He had a new mission, one which he tapped Elliot to join. It’d prove far more beneficial than slaving as a beat cop in Negro settlements.

  In a small wireframe gazebo, Senator Estes Kefauver and Ted Wiggins, his aide-de-camp, sat at a small table. Elliot was offered no seat, or any nicety for that matter. Kefauver rushed through a well-rehearsed version of his speech on the dangers of organized crime. Elliot wanted to say he heard it all while holding post outside the dining room. Wiggins interrupted Kefauver when he produced a file marked Caprice, E. Southville, IL. Roseland Boys Outfit.

  From their earliest time together, John Creamer kept a record of Elliot’s past. Their late-night story-swapping in the dorms was all fair game. Now, on top of the overwhelming guilt he felt for collecting vigorish from his neighbors, Elliot had to suffer the indignity joining Kefauver’s salvo against the mob.

  “So, it’s snitch on other cops or you ruin my career.”

  “Career,” Wiggins said, snidely. “You have no business wearing a badge, Caprice.”

  “You ever wore a badge, Wiggins?”

  Wiggins snickered. “I went to Yale.”

  “It’s really simple,” Creamer said. “You pass to me all the evidence you can get. You don’t have to testify.”

  “It doesn’t need to be hard evidence,” Wiggins said. “Just anything to help validate suspicions. The more sensational, the better. Stuff for the cameras.”

  “How is that legal?”

  “These are congressional hearings, Caprice,” Kefauver said. “The law isn’t important. Only the headlines.”

  Creamer motioned for Elliot to join him off to the side.

  “Listen, I was assigned to this by the State’s Attorney,” Creamer said, in a whisper. “I tried to keep you out of it.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “They’re looking at Rabinowitz. Hard. They think he’s a way into Lansky.”

  “John, running errands for him when I was a teenager doesn’t put me in Murder, Incorporated?”

  “Characterize it however you like, Caprice,” Wiggins said. “You either help us or we tell everyone you helped us anyway. Consider it penance.”

  Elliot wasn’t sure what hurt worse; the end of the delusion he could ever be on the straight and narrow or the betrayal of the only white boy he ever allowed himself to trust.

  “Thanks for having my back,” Elliot said. John’s eyes turned cold.

  “This isn’t a hoe-down after a speech competition. You broke the law. People in high places know about it. I’m giving you a chance to make it right.”

  They rejoined Kefauver and Wiggins.

  “Guess I’m your man.”

  “John Creamer will be your contact,” Wiggins said.

  “We’ll correspond weekly, on your day off.” John couldn’t look at Elliot. Elliot wouldn’t look at him.

  “We have a budget,” Kefauver said.

  “You’ll receive some pay,” Wiggins said.

  “A couple of coins to cover my eyes once I wind up dead.”

  “No one can know,” Creamer said. “No matter what happens to your reputation, on or off the job, you have to keep this operation a secret.”

  “Or we will lock you away for life,” Wiggins said. “And have that piece of shit small town razed.”

  Elliot was so angry he could feel his eyes throbbing, but no way would these bastards see him sweat.

  “Anything else while you have me by the balls?”

 
“One more thing,” Kefauver said. “Neither make nor accept any contact from former police Lieutenant William Drury.”

  “The writer in the crime rags?”

  “He is not a friend to this operation,” Kefauver said.

  “Imagine that.”

  “Hey, boss! You alive in there?!”

  Elliot’s pained remembrances were pierced by the harsh rays of the western sunset. He couldn’t see but the voice sounded familiar.

  “I said, you okay?”

  Enough of Elliot’s vision returned for him to be able to look out the window. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Frank Fuquay?”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  Elliot blinked to focus.

  “You a little far from Yazoo County, ain’cha?”

  “Lucky fo’ you, yeah.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Elliot opened the passenger’s side door and tumbled out onto the dusty track of soft soil churned up by a grain harvester. Frank helped him to his feet. Lucille sat atop a mound of loose dirt plowed forward by her front end. The driver’s side was stuck in the ditch. The right front wheel was free-rolling. Without a winch, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Steady, boss. Make sure you got ya wits ’bout cha,” Frank said.

  “Weird meetin’ like this, huh?”

  “I picked up some day work over at the granary yonder. Was at it a week, befo’ I git laid off. I was just walkin’ ta the train station when I seent a car hit the ditch. Surprised it wuz you.”

  “Likewise.”

  Elliot dusted himself off, mumbling curses to himself. Frank didn’t find him as quietly cool as he did when they were both stuck in the Meat Locker back in St. Louis. He looked Elliot up and down, surveying the blood stains on his dress shirt, the wild look on his face, his left eye bloodshot more than the right. He pulled the blue paisley bandana from around his neck and handed it to him.