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

by Danny Gardner

  “He was able to take the big shot’s cars when I needed to travel out to catch a show that was far away. Swanky wheels. Always a different one. Sometimes friends of his tagged along. Some of these guys were rough characters, like his work friend. Charley somethin’-or-other.”

  “Chauncey?”

  “Kind of a tough guy? Doesn’t smile much?”

  “Sounds like him.” Willow leaned up to finish her beer. Elliot let his lie.

  “At first, it was cool. After a while, Alistair always brought him along. Figured they were just runnin’ buddies. When the heavier party favors came out, frickin’ Chauncey got all bent out of shape. He wouldn’t party.”

  “You keep mentioning good shit. Dope?”

  “Of course. How old are you?” Willow laughed. She touched Elliot’s cock.

  “Old enough.”

  “He’d get rare shit. Hash, opium, military stuff like amphetamine. A lot of it. I put out the word I was having a party. He showed up carrying this big cake of hashish. I knew what it was because cats from New York would have it when their bands came through Chicago.”

  “What is he like?”

  “Alistair? He’s kind of a bozo. Speaks uppity. That Chauncey fella seemed like a flake. The real nervous type, talking in that funny east coast accent of his.”

  “East coast?”

  “Yeah. Said he was from Connecticut. The two of them, sounding like Audrey Hepburn.”

  “Were they always together?”

  “Not always. I imagine they fell out after the last time they were here together. Alistair brought over some smack. It wasn’t our normal kink. First time. Anyhow, when he pulled it out of his satchel, Chauncey was livid. Started going on about how they had to be careful and whatnot. They stepped off into the kitchen, speaking all hush-hush. It seemed pretty heated.”

  Willow rolled over on her side and put her face on Elliot’s lap. She ran her index finger up his thigh.

  “So what happened?”

  “There was a knock at the door. I went to get it, but Chauncey stepped in front of it. He was really afraid. Alistair was too high to care. Whoever showed up started beating on the door. Alistair begged me to tell whoever it was that they were gone. They cut out the back, I answered the door, but no one was there. It was very strange.”

  Elliot went to that place inside himself where he was all alone, sorting information, playing out scenarios in his mind. Willow could feel he was no longer present.

  “Hey, Elliot,” she cooed in his ear but Elliot wasn’t home. “Hey!”

  Elliot looked into her face.

  “Where’d you go?”

  Elliot touched her chin.

  “Are you using me?” she asked, in mounting sadness. “If so, you can tell me. I can take it.”

  “I’m not using you. It’s just this is all very important. It’s the reason I came here.” He held her face in both of his hands. “But not the reason I’ve stayed this long.” He kissed her again, deeper than before. She straddled him. He hugged her tight. She sighed, wrapping her arms around his back. It all moved so fast, as did everything in his life when he wasn’t careful. His erection returned. It wouldn’t be long before caution once again went out the window.

  “I can get it for you.” She kissed him again. “Later.”

  “Get what?”

  “The satchel. The one Alistair left here.”

  Elliot released his end of their embrace.

  “Go get it.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  He was terse. It killed the mood instantly. Willow’s smile fell into a scowl.

  “Fine.”

  She snatched one of the blankets off the floor to wrap herself. Down the long, dark hall to her single bedroom she went. As she loudly rummaged through her closet, Elliot got dressed. He was already buckling his boots when she returned to throw a leather attaché case at his feet and storm off, disgusted. He felt guilty. Perhaps he could’ve handled it better, but appeasement was never his forte.

  “Willow, honey.”

  “Don’t bother.” She hurried back down the hall.

  After her bedroom door slammed, he opened the front flap. Inside was an unbound stack of official-seeming paperwork. Included were cargo manifests from Costas Cartage, Limited, the shipping company from the senior McAlpin’s dowry. Each form listed vast items delineated in rows labeled quantity, worth, agent, dealer, tariff, et cetera. From the thick cotton bond paper, to the foil stamping, down to the customs forms bearing official seals from different nations, they seemed plenty legit. He’d heard stories from cops assigned to the docks along the far South side that U.S. Customs in Chicago was fanatical. Postwar smuggling had increased a hundredfold. Washington was smart enough to distrust Chicago locals to protect the integrity of international commerce. If every scrap of paperwork wasn’t tip-top, even legitimate business operations would grind to a halt. Massive investments would dwindle to nothing. The feds took months, just because they could. He spent a few minutes skimming through the forms. Recent shipments had been attested by Alistair as the agent of process. What’s more, many of these shipments occurred after Jon McAlpin met his end in his own bathtub.

  Elliot returned the paperwork to the satchel. He turned it over to inspect the bulge underneath the opposite flap. Inside were rolls of small bills, no larger than a sawbuck, but what concerned him more was a foil square wrapped in cellophane, a bit less than the size of half of a brick. He didn’t need to open it to know what it was.

  He realized he left Willow alone. She must have thought him a jagoff. He put the contraband back in the satchel before he walked down the hall to her bedroom. She was the kind of cute he could appreciate for long periods of time. Quirky. Chatty. White, yet relatable. Plus she was great in the sack, though what attracted Elliot more was how she laid out that goon back at the Green Mill. She took no shit.

  He wanted to see her again.

  He opened the door to her bedroom. There she was, sitting on the floor, propped against her closet. A dropper rig lay at the base of her foot. She had shot up between her toes, which is how he missed the tracks when they were making love. His heart broke at the contradictions. A young, courageous, artistic white lady, injecting herself full of the white man’s poison, all to emulate her colored Jazz heroes. Had they cared enough to tell her the truth, they would have warned her to stay off horse. He kicked the crude syringe away, picked her up, and put her in her bed. He left her apartment broken-hearted over the short lifecycle of their union. A relationship that bore the commonality of years played out in only a few hours. As he slipped out the back door, he was greeted by the faint light of daybreak. He needed to hightail it back to Southville. Part of him mourned that girl. A greater part of him wanted to kill Alistair Williams. Killing his running buddy Chauncey would be a bonus.

  Elliot returned to the flop house well after the sun rose. He shambled up the stairs just as Uncle Buster was walking toward the bathroom. He was dog-tired and had that look in his eye. The old man learned through the years to let him be when his feelings were written on his face. Had they spoken, he would have asked Elliot what he was doing walking in at such an hour, looking crazy, wearing that get-up, but Buster had never understood how to reach Elliot, not even back when he was in short pants.

  By the time Buster returned from the commode, Elliot was already asleep, right there on the bed, in his HBTs and boots. He softly murmured in his sleep, his face contorted. It was in those moments that Buster Caprice wished he had the words to say the farm wasn’t worth more to him than the boy’s well-being. That they should take care to ensure the cost to reclaim it would not be too great. Sure, the old man missed his land, though not completely for himself but for the center it provided to their tiny two-person family. The center they now lacked through the bank’s shuttering of their familial sovereignty. If asked, Buster would say that all he wanted to do was take Elliot home, find a way to keep him from leaving ever again, but no one ever aske
d old colored men like Buster about their deepest desires. It’s not necessary to understand the heart of a man to lay a burden upon his shoulders. As he watched his nephew dream, he wondered if sleep was just another life in which a Caprice was doomed for daring to live free. He wished he could enter that world his adopted baby was trapped. He’d free that little boy. Instead, all he could do was watch him suffer. All he could do was pull up a chair, light-up a hand-rolled, and wait until he returned from the personal hell.

  If only they fell down dead after the first shot like they do in the picture shows. Perhaps then Elliot wouldn’t have to run screaming down the middle of Western Avenue, bleeding out his shoulder like a stuck pig, firing his gun at the bastards who shot him in the shoulder and killed his friend. Rage is what fueled him. For Bill Drury’s murder sure, but more because they expected to get away.

  Drury was a peacock. Elliot tried to warn him away from the spotlight. Parading around as the wronged, avenging ex-cop, signing autographs for readers of his columns, snapping photos for fans outside gangland landmarks, all meant the end of him. When Creamer left Elliot out in the cold after Kefauver’s committee on organized crime fell out of favor in Washington, Elliot offered Drury an inside scoop, only the idiot turned right around and handed the same evidence over to Kefauver himself. He should’ve known the crusading dandy of the Senate couldn’t resist attaching himself to the hero of American crime journalism. They were all fools, but that didn’t mean Bill Drury’s family deserved to find his body in their garage the next morning. If only he had taken him up on dinner. If only he could turn back time and accept that drink. Bill wouldn’t have been murdered in a place where he thought he was safe. That’s why Elliot was out for blood. It was wrong. It happened in front of him. There was no way Elliot could let it go. Not even to save himself.

  Since that night in the atrium with Creamer, Kefauver and Wiggins, he knew he was dancing on the precipice of doom. Yet Elliot was slick, trained by the slickest. He used his dual race to play into their affectations of grandeur. The colored political elite gossiped like schoolgirls. The white brass ate up his code-switching deference. They always underestimated the savvy of Negro cops. The more he advanced in his job—due to John Creamer’s political influence—the more evidence he harvested for Kefauver. They told him not to contact Bill, which was like giving Elliot his phone number. They had gotten to know each other and even did one another a few favors here and there. Once Creamer screwed him, Elliot offered to be Bill’s insider. The fame-seeker was more than happy to pay him for his information, but Elliot did it out of spite. Drury wrote some real hum-dingers for the Chicago Herald. Most wound up nationally syndicated. The unlikely team really shook things up. It was easy.

  So easy that Elliot didn’t foresee Drury screwing everyone, including himself.

  The younger one that got him in the shoulder was faster on his feet. Elliot fired his first shot mid-stride, catching him with a hot one in the back, just above his left hip. It rattled around and exited out the other side of his pelvic bone. The man teetered. Elliot let off two more, catching him between the top of his spine and the base of his skull. He went down tumbling like a kite that fell from the sky once the wind stopped blowing. Elliot stood over him to watch as the last bit of life left his convulsing mortal coil. He took the man’s .38 out of his dead hand before he chased down the older one. He was top heavy. Out of breath. Perhaps he hadn’t figured on running anywhere while carrying a twelve-gauge. Elliot emptied the barrel of the young buck’s gun into the fat bastard’s thighs until he crumpled onto the thoroughfare. He crawled to the curb and used it to prop himself up as he fished through his pocket for more shotgun shells. Elliot followed the fat man’s trail of crimson, walking slow, as if he had a lifetime to get there. He kicked his assassin in the chest, which laid him flat on his back, but before he put a hot one in him, Elliot beheld his face in the amber streetlight. That push-broom mustache. A high and tight haircut. The beer-barrel physique from years of sitting more than walking. A younger accomplice. Each indicated deep grooved habits. Goddamn it. If he wasn’t consumed with bloodlust, he may have put it together earlier. Elliot looked at the gun he took off his partner. It was police issue; standard checkered walnut grip, “CPD #8141” etched across the side of the barrel.

  “Fuck me, right in the face.”

  Elliot bled from his shoulder at the rate of a broken spigot. His mouth was dry. Sweat poured from his panicked brow. The adrenaline rush that helped him ignore his pain had long passed. He’d have to finish the task with cold awareness. Elliot put a hollow-point from his own gun into the old fat cop’s forehead, then another for punctuation, and a third out of spite. Dogs barked. Pulled shades cast light upon him through apartment windows. Sirens grew louder from the distance.

  “I called the cops!” went a voice from an unseen busybody.

  He had to run. He’d run ever since.

  Buster carefully took off Elliot’s boots. He rolled him out of his jacket without waking him. He raised the boy, yet he was forever opaque. He wanted to know what happened back in Chicago. He wanted to know what hurt him beyond being a child of fate. He’d have to ask another time, for now, wherever he was, Elliot wasn’t there in that single room. He was set adrift on a sea of grief.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Southville County Sheriff. Deputy Reilly speaking.”

  “The bastard’s dead,” a muffled voice said through the phone receiver.

  “Wouldja narrow that down a bit?”

  Ned grabbed a pencil, scribbled DEAD BASTARD on the desk blotter and underlined it twice.

  “Pettingill,” the voice said. “S.E. Pettingill!”

  Ned’s stomach sank at the name. He hoped it was an accident. Farming. Hunting. Anything would have been better than murder.

  “Where?”

  “Up at the house.”

  “What’s your na—” Ned said, but the line went dead.

  George walked in from the car park to see his deputy hang up the phone the Ned way—dropping it from his two fingers atop the carriage, wearing a faint look of disgust. George didn’t even stop. Only checked his gun and turned right back around. Ned ripped the notes from the blotter page.

  “S.E. Pettingill,” Ned said.

  “Lord, have mercy.”

  “Tits-up, after all these years.”

  “Language, Ned.”

  It was going to be one of those days.

  Everyone hated the Pettingills, going back to when Samuel Eugene Pettingill founded the county. Pettingill’s son, S.E., was a fop and never worked a day in his life. He and his sister, Clarissa—the shut in—lived it up in the old Pettingill manse as if they were stuck in an antebellum fantasy. The family handlers maintained appearances and the status quo. Now the colored county sheriff would have to enter their northern plantation, shuffle his feet and figure out what killed the prodigal son.

  They didn’t speak as they drove up Main. The two were on coarse terms over the return of Elliot Caprice.

  “Did you call—”

  “The coroner? Yeah.”

  “You’ll likely need to go in ahead of me.”

  “Buncha assholes behind that gate.”

  “Some things can’t be helped.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Ned said, watching the road, as they turned on Pettingill, named for the family of jerks.

  “We going to talk about it?”

  “Nothing to talk about.”

  “You’ve had an attitude for weeks.”

  “I just don’t like how you’ve been making decisions,” Ned said.

  Once they passed Sugartown, they could see, far in the distance, the Pettingill Manse. They were already five minutes outside of Southville proper. There was a two-mile drive to the front of its gigantic gate left to go.

  “Including my decision to help Elliot,” George said.

  “You shouldn’t have gotten us involved.”

  “Ned, men die in police custody in St. Louis.”

&
nbsp; Ned opened the glove box and rummaged around until he found a pad for case notes.

  “You know what they’re sayin’ about him on the wire? That he was on the scene when two off-dutys from Chicago wound up dead.”

  “He’s our own, Ned.”

  “Nah,” Ned said, as he made notes of the initial report on the blank spaces of the top margin of the pad. “He’s yours. And his uncle’s, who he abandoned.”

  “You’ve seen Buster Caprice?”

  “He’s been friends with my mother since they came here.”

  “How is he?”

  “Stuck in Betty Bridges’ flophouse,” Ned said. “No thanks to his nephew.”

  “Don’t judge.”

  “You give me some song and dance about processing everyone we arrest, just to run off to St. Louis to help him evade the law.”

  “Ned,” George said.

  “Here comes a sermon.”

  “You’re not colored.”

  “What? I gotta be colored now?” Ned waved off his superior officer.

  “The life of a colored man bears its own unique problems.”

  “Pettingill’s dead, no chance it’s natural causes.”

  “Likely not.”

  “He’s constantly surrounded by Negro house staff.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Looks to me the colored people I know abandon their relations, kill their own employers and aid and abet their no-good friends.” Ned shifted in his seat. “Maybe it’s good I’m not a Negro.”

  They spent the rest of the trip in silence.

  The grounds to the plantation were quiet. McWhirter, the family attorney, opened the front door. He was squat, balding, and employed a comb-over to no effect. He wore a suit that was darker than anyone should wear on a Midwestern summer day.

  “I’m Deputy Reilly,” Ned said. “This is Sheriff Stingley.”