A Visible Darkness

by Jonathon King

  Now I suppose I felt lucky.

  By noon the next day I was driving a rental down a secondary highway in south Georgia. Billy had found me an early flight out of West Palm Beach and he’d also made a call to his prosecutor friend in Atlanta. The lawyer balked at first, but because he owed Billy, he made the request for a visit.

  The warden at Haverford said he could not figure why a private investigator from Florida would want to talk with Moticker. The inmate was one of the better behaved and more trustworthy of his 612 convicts. But in the spirit of cooperation, he didn’t object.

  Well out of the city, the road I was on split an open forest of scrub pines and occasional patches of hardwood, and there were leaves on the forest floor. Here it was true fall. Colors not natural to South Florida dripped and fluttered in orange and red in the trees. Both the temperature and the humidity were under sixty. I rolled the windows down and inhaled the odor of sun-dried clay and slow- rotting leaves. It was almost idyllic—until I saw the flat sign for the prison and turned off onto a slowly curving blacktop road.

  There were no buildings visible from the highway. It was just a well-maintained country road until I hit the guard gate to the parking area. I gave the man my name and while he checked I watched the sun glitter off a high, razor-wired fence in the distance. I had been inside prisons before and never liked the feeling.

  The guard handed me a pass and pointed the way to administration. I parked, and as I followed the sidewalk I could see down the fence line to a guard tower where the silhouette of a marksman showed in the open window. Inside the offices I stood in a waiting area with uncomfortable cushioned chairs and a portrait of the new governor.

  The warden’s name was Emanuel T. Bowe and he greeted me with a firm handshake across a state-issue desk. He was a tall black man with gray hair cut in a flat top and a beard that was carefully trimmed to follow the edges of his jaw line. He looked more like a college professor than a southern prison warden.

  “So, Mr. Freeman. You were a detective in Philadelphia when our Mr. Moticker was convicted, do I have that right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And you are now working as a private detective on a case in South Florida?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s in the very preliminary stages, sir,” I said, the lying coming easily since it was marginal.

  “Well, I will be up-front with you, Mr. Freeman. I asked Mr. Moticker if he had any objections to speaking with you and although he said he remembered you and was willing, he seemed, as I am, perplexed as to what information he might have to help you.”

  I only nodded.

  “Frankly, I have only been the warden here for eighteen months, but Mr. Moticker has been here quite some time and has earned a certain respect from both sides out there on the pound. I would not like to see anything change that.”

  “And neither would I, sir. I’m not sure he can help, but if he’s willing, I’d like to give it a try,” I said, giving nothing up, and hoping it was enough.

  The warden stood up.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  An open walkway led out to the first gate, chain-link, with a guard dressed in brown with a radio clipped to his belt. No gun. No nightstick.

  He greeted the warden, looked at me, and the first snap of dry metal let us through to a cinder-block control room. Inside a fishbowl of two-inch shatterproof glass another guard said hello to Bowe, and I was quickly run over with a security wand and had to hand over my keys. When we were ready, the guard hit the electronic lock on the second metal door and we were back outside.

  “Warden on the pound,” a loudspeaker announced.

  The compound was a low-slung collection of dull yellow buildings with wide grassy areas between. Spokes of sidewalks led from one to the other. No bushes, trees or other vegetation. Nowhere to hide. There were a few men moving about, obviously inmates because they were dressed in faded blue instead of the guard’s brown. They were not being escorted. One might think of a poor man’s college campus until you lifted your eyes to the towers and the sight of long-barreled rifles reminded you.

  “We’re headed to the machine shop,” Bowe said, moving swiftly, but not hurrying. “Mr. Moticker has been the senior mechanic for some time.”

  The warden’s long legs made it difficult to keep up without looking like you were trying.

  “One never runs across the pound,” he said over his shoulder. “The sharpshooters are trained to sight in on anyone running and the guards are taught to run toward the towers if they are in danger so the shooters can take out any assailants.”

  I knew the philosophy, but the feeling of gunsights on my neck still made the muscles in my back tingle.

  “Besides, it makes the inmates uneasy to have to wonder where you are running to and for what reason,” he said with a smile that did not indicate anything funny. “Information is a valued thing inside.”

  It sounded like a warning, and I took it as such.

  The machine shop was made up of three open bays and part of a second floor with glass-fronted classrooms. There was a yellow fire engine parked in the far bay and a handful of men were clustered around a rear bumper intently watching an inmate with a welding torch.

  The guard who came to meet us was in a brown uniform but his sleeves were rolled up and there were black grease marks on his forearms and hands. He and Bowe spoke for a minute, too low for me to hear. The guard nodded and walked back toward the group.

  “Thirty minutes is all I can give you, Mr. Freeman,” Bowe said. “There’s an inmate count at two o’clock and we keep a very tight schedule. I will collect you when you’re through.”

  I thanked him and watched the guard tap the man with the torch on the shoulder. The inmate raised his face shield and turned to look our way. He handed his tools to another inmate, gave some instruction, and walked across the shop. He was a thin, jangly man. The points of his joints stuck out at his shoulders, elbows and knees. When he got close I could see the gray in his hair and a jagged white scar that crawled through one eyebrow and then over the bridge of his nose. I knew that he was thirty-seven years old. He looked fifty.

  “Warden, sir,” Moticker said, addressing the superintendent first and then turning to me. “Mr. Freeman, sir.” We shook hands and his grip seemed purposely weak.

  “Can we do this outside, sir?” Moticker said to the guard, who nodded his head. Only then did the inmate lead me out to a concrete slab just outside the raised, garage-style door. We sat on our heels in the sun but also in full view of the bay.

  “How you doin’, Harlan,” I started.

  “I’m okay, sir,” he said, taking a single cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighting it with an old-style book of cardboard matches. He took a drag and cut his eyes into the bay.

  “How’s the family?”

  “I see my son on occasion. He’s got hisself close to graduatin’,” he answered, letting the smoke out slowly. “My wife, well, we got divorced a few years back.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I never did get to thank you for helpin’ with the transfer, though,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time.

  We were both silent, having run out of manners.

  “I’ll just get to it,” I finally said. “I’m not a cop anymore, but I’m working a case out of Florida that has to do with an insurance investigator named Frank McCane.”

  I watched his eyes jump to mine without a movement of his head.

  “I know he was a bull here for some time and your years overlapped some before he was, uh, dismissed. I was hoping you might tell me something about him.”

  “Ol’ Milo,” he said, a grin coming to his face. “An insurance man, you say? Ain’t that a hoot.”

  Moticker took another slow drag and smiled with a set of bad teeth.

  “You’re familiar?”

  “Oh, anybody who was around then is familiar with Milo,” he said, lowering his already soft voice. “Mean sombitch and king of the pound, to
o. But that’s a sore subject round here now, Mr. Freeman.”

  “I can appreciate that. But the record isn’t too clear on his dismissal,” I said. “I need a sense of the man without going to someone who might have been a friend or might get back to him.”

  This time Moticker’s pale eyes stayed on mine, the eyes of a man with nothing to lose, but also one who rarely came across the opportunity to gain anything close to payback.

  “McCane ran every damn thing in here at one time,” he started. “He had a piece of the inside drug trade. He decided whose homemade buck got confiscated an’ whose got sold. He controlled the inventory coming in and out of concession.

  “Anybody had money, he squeezed ’em. Anybody had anything, he dealt it. Didn’t matter what color or what kind. Pure mean and pure greedy, Mr. Freeman, that’s the sense of that man.”

  Moticker finished the cigarette, carefully snubbed it out and put the butt in his pocket. He cut his eyes to the shop again.

  “Milo was running the drug trade. Had other guards bringing the stuff in and then flushing the packages down the toilets before they came on the pound,” he started, barely whispering.

  “He knew the pump station. Would plug the thing by flushing an inmate shirt at the same time. Then he’d order one of the cons down into the station to clear it. Guy would go through the shit while the shooters and assistant warden just watched him get down in there and he would stuff the drug packages in his pockets and then come up with the shirt.

  “Hell, nobody was gonna frisk that boy all covered with stink, and he’d get sent to the showers and later pass the dope off to Milo for a cut.”

  He refocused his eyes on the group of welders inside and seemed to reshelve the memory. “He was the kind of man who knew how to use people and still make them feel inferior,” he finally said.

  “The kind of man who might be involved with murder for money?” I asked.

  The inmate seemed to roll his answer around in his mouth for a while.

  “Not by hisself,” he said. “Milo wouldn’t be that dumb.”

  Moticker stood up and for the first time I could see a con’s deviousness in his face.

  “They’d be hell to pay if that ol’ boy came back here as an inmate,” he said, a crooked grin playing at his lips. “Hell to pay.”

  I could tell the possibility left him with a vision that could keep him warmly amused for a lot of boring nights on his bunk.

  “One thing,” I said. “Why Milo?”

  He looked quizzically at me.

  “The nickname?”

  “Oh, hell, that was his own,” he said. “Character out that old war movie Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder was the guy that was doin’ all the underhanded dealin’ getting’ hisself rich off the war. McCane loved that.”

  We went back inside the shop and I shook his hand.

  “Hope things work out,” he said, and I wished him the same.

  21

  I sat on the hood of my truck, waiting for twilight, second-guessing my trust, and shooting holes in my own plans.

  I’d ground out the possibilities during the flight back from Georgia and wasn’t sure I hadn’t wasted a bunch of time and Billy’s money just to satisfy my need for logic. As the plane had lined up its approach several miles to the west of the West Palm airport I’d stared out on the unbroken sawgrass of the Everglades. Acres and acres of still untouched land glowing gold in the low sunlight. I missed my river. I wondered why I was not back on it, paddling, listening to it.

  I had used the river to try to bury the memory of two bullets fired during a stickup on Thirteenth Street in Center City, Philadelphia. The round fired by a sixteen-year-old punk on the sidewalk had caught me in the neck, boring through muscle on its way through. The second round, mine, dropped a twelve-year-old accomplice as he bolted out the door behind his friend. The sidewalk vision of his small face and skinny, quiet chest had gouged my dreams ever since. Out of the hospital, I’d taken a disability buyout and moved from the city streets where I’d grown up the son of a cop. I wanted out and I wanted different. I’d sworn off the cops, but today I was back out in the northwest section of the city, watching the light leak out of the alley and then the trees. I’d turned another corner and wasn’t sure why.

  When the strings of cloud in the west turned a burnt orange on their edges and the sky went to a cobalt blue, I climbed into the truck and drove toward the dope hole.

  I knew from my time on the beat how much the landscape and rhythm and people of a place change when the light seeps away. When I patrolled the downtown areas of Center City on the graveyard shift I would get up in the daytime and patronize the same delis and music shops along Thirteenth and Arch when the real people dominated the sidewalks instead of the hustlers and bums of the night. More than a few times I questioned which world I felt more comfortable in.

  I turned at a light with a hanging street sign labeled Thirty-first Avenue in large letters and M.L. King Boulevard in smaller script below. On either side of the road were one- and two-story apartments, arranged like old cheap motels with long, grassless courtyards down the middle and the doors and single windows facing in. They had been painted a bilious green and you could tell from the texture of the paint that there were uncounted layers underneath. Down the street a sign stood in front of an identical block of buildings that read, FOR RENT. HOUSING AUTHORITY. SECTION 8 UNITS AVAILABLE. INQUIRE AT HOUSING OFFICE.

  The physical structure was different, but it was just another version of the Washington Street projects in Philly, where I once answered a sick-baby call and had dishes and a brick tossed onto my patrol car from some apartment above.

  I turned at another intersection onto the seller’s avenue. There was movement along the sidewalks: people, women and older men, who seemed to have places to go. But there was also a nervousness gathering in the air, an anticipation among the younger men waiting for the early evening trade to begin. I found a spot on the east side of the road in the shadow of a big oak about a block from the action.

  In a few minutes I could pick out the players. The sullen guy with his head down and eyes up had spotted me right off. But he was cool. The long black pants with the ironed crease set him aside from the young ones who were no doubt his runners. The dope would never be on any of them for more than a few seconds and only during the exchange for money through an open car window. The stash would be back in some hidey-hole in the alley or under some fender of an innocent man’s bumper. The customers would pull up—some white, some black—and slow or stop in front of the man, looking for a signal which was not going to come as long as I was parked down the street. Some were bold enough, or desperate enough, to roll down their passenger windows and call out to the dealer. He ignored them, turning his head away in my direction and saying nothing.

  After forty-five minutes I watched a woman of indeterminate age come up the sidewalk, hips swinging unsteadily. She was dressed in a wrinkled summer skirt and a short top that showed her bare midriff, ribs poking out from the bottom. She stumbled once on her blocky high heels. She was trying to look like an unconcerned girl on a stroll. But her path was deliberate.

  When she got to the dealer she stopped, two arm lengths away, and put a hand on her hip. He looked the other way. I could see her head bobbing as she talked, each shift of her hip putting her another step closer. Suddenly, in a movement like a snake strike, the man’s hand flicked out and caught her flush across the face. The violence of it made my own hand jump to the door handle, but I sat still. The girl stumbled back. None of the runners reacted. They kept their eyes to the street as if the bitch-slap was either expected, or a regular occurrence.

  The woman slunk away and the man resettled himself on a tall wooden stool. He pulled straight the crease in his trousers and then looked up in my direction as if daring me to make a move. I couldn’t have done a thing. I wasn’t wearing a badge and had to take a grain of solace that I was killing his business for a couple of hours.

  22
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br />   Momma never said a word. Now Eddie was invisible to her, too.

  He’d sat in the house too long. The drugs were long since gone. He was hungry, both for food and another high. He still had some of Mr. Harold’s money in his pocket. The light was dying through the living room window, so he went out. Under a few bags of bottles and some chunks of aluminum window framing, he found his old winter coat in his cart. He knew it wasn’t winter. He would know when the city started putting up the Kwanzaa banners on Sistrunk Boulevard that winter was coming. But he put the coat on today because he was still shivering.

  Eddie had made a decision in the silence of his momma’s house. He would go back to the liquor store and wait for Mr. Harold to show up. It was either there or the jail where he’d first met him. But he didn’t want to go near the jail. Mr. Harold had told him to never come to the jail or the money would stop. And Mr. Harold had been the only one in the forensics ward who really sat and listened to Eddie. The liquor store. It was the only place he had. But first he’d need a bundle to get through.

  When he got to Thirteenth and Court he stopped at the corner like he always did to watch the place. He pretended to look in the dumpster at Ringold’s but that’s not where his eyes went. There was something different on the street and he could smell it. Eddie knew his days and this should be a busy one. But the runners weren’t moving and the street was cold. Eddie pulled his coat tighter.

  There was only one potential buyer, in a blue pickup parked near the big oak tree, but he couldn’t see from here what color the man was who sat unmoving inside. Eddie pushed the cart forward and saw the girl coming up the sidewalk. He watched her walking hard, her blocky shoes scuffing. She was a junkie. Eddie had tried to lure her to go with him before but she always spat at him and told him to keep his nigger ass away.

  That was all right. Eddie just quietly made the offer. If they accepted, he would give them what they wanted and then get what he wanted. That’s the way it worked.