by Ed Gorman
Only when she turned and walked back to the porch did I notice that all three people in the gazebo were watching me. I wondered if they’d been able to hear what Ellen had said. The way Anderson and Hannity were smiling, I assumed they’d heard every word.
Karen Porter, my one friend here, waved good-bye to me, smiling as always.
Our town likes to claim that its jail once held Jesse James, well-known psychopath and shooter of unarmed people, for a few days back in the bloody prime of the James-Dalton gang. While it’s true that the James boys favored Iowa as a hiding place, they did most of their hiding just inside the Iowa-Missouri border. The man we got, close as we could figure, was a man named Niles Wick, who was a gang straggler.
Of course, in my growing-up years, none of us kids accepted the Niles Wick story. We preferred to believe that the name was simply one Jesse used. In those days, our jail was located one block east of the Royale Theater, the best second-run movie house anywhere, so we could load up on popcorn and a couple of flicks about Jesse—in these Jesse was a persecuted saint of course—and then we could run to the jail and stand on the corner and imagine Jesse looking down at us from behind the bars on the second floor. He looked like either Tyrone Power or Roy Rogers, take your pick. Both men had essayed him in film.
There was a new jail now, and it was located on the third floor of the recently built county courthouse. The design was severely functional, the material was a step up from cinder block, and the overall look was so dreary that you felt the prisoners could be sprung on a charge of cruel and unusual just for having to stay inside.
Cliffie’s uncle, a man named Merle who had formerly been an auctioneer, laid out the plans and used his own construction company to build this monument to civic corruption.
There were at least a dozen Harley motorcycles in the parking lot. Ellen had been right. A biker had been arrested for the murders.
Inside, I said hello to Cliffie’s sister, the receptionist; and the same to Paul the elevator operator, Cliffie’s second cousin; and finally to Norman, Cliffie’s first cousin and the front-desk day man at the police station on the third floor.
“No call for you to be here, Sam,” Norman said, pushing his thick glasses back up his short nose. “My cousin’s got everything under control. Case is all wrapped up.”
“I was just wondering if the accused man has a lawyer yet?”
“He’s guilty, Sam. Why would he need a lawyer?”
“You mean he’s confessed?”
Norman grinned with gray teeth. “He will, time my cousin gets done with him.”
“Misceg—damn, I can never say that word.”
“Miscegenation.”
“Yeah, that’s the hot one now. Forbidden love. Black men and white women. Misceg—”
“No black women and white men?”
“No sizzle.”
“‘Sizzle’?”
“That’s the word my editor always uses. ‘Sizzle.’”
In case you’re wondering, the writer I was talking to was not F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway.
The writer I was talking to was Kenny Thibodeau, the official pornographer of Black River Falls, and not least of all, my best friend since we made our First Communion together nearly twenty years earlier.
On a trip to San Francisco four years ago, where he hoped to set eyes upon his idols Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Kenny read some of his poetry one night at a coffeehouse. Believe me, Kenny is to poetry what I am to astronomy—nowhere.
But this guy came up afterward and said, “I really like your poetry.” I’m sure that Kenny was secretly as shocked as I was when he told me the story. Even he knows his poetry stinks.
But the guy wasn’t finished. “You ever thought of writing novels?”
“Sure. Who hasn’t?”
“How’d you like to make four hundred dollars for a novel?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not. You ever hear of the Midnight Secrets line of books?”
“The ones they keep under the counter in cigar stores and like that?”
“Yeah, in hick burgs they keep them under the counter. Where you from by the way?”
“Iowa.”
“Iowa. I went through there during the war. You’ve got some nice-lookin’ broads back there.”
Kenny didn’t mention that almost none of those nice-looking broads would have much to do with him. Or me. We had yet to grow into the charming, witty Cary Grant-like figures of our later years.
“You know how they work, don’t you?”
“‘How they work’?”
“No dirty words. No explicit descriptions. We generally like it when breasts are compared to fruit and when orgasms are compared to tidal waves. The thing is to make them think the stuff is really dirty. But we know better, don’t we, Kenny?”
“We do?”
“Sure. Because if it was really dirty we’d all be in prison.”
“I guess that’s something to keep in mind. Prison.”
“So anyway, Kenny, tell you what. You walk out to my car with me and I’ll just give you copies of our two latest books, Pagan Pussycats and Niagara Nymphos. You take them and read them and before you leave town you give me an outline and three chapters. If I like what I see, I give you a hundred fifty on the spot and you go back to Iowa and write the rest of the book. How do you like the sound of that, kid?”
“Can I still write my poetry?”
“Kid, you can write all the poetry you want as long as you meet our deadline.”
“How much time will I have before I turn my book in?”
“Three weeks.”
And thus was born, among many other Kenny Thibodeau pseudonyms, Brace Bryant, Cal Cavalier, and Jack Hoffman.
But those were the days of jocularity when you could smirk at the ridiculous business Kenny was in, exploiting serious topics such as civil rights to idiotic ones such as how many stewardesses you could shove into the arms of a studly airline pilot.
But today neither of us was in a joking mood. Kenny said, “I’m thinking of driving down to Birmingham with my .45. Wanna ride along? You see that TV special last night?”
“Yeah. I’d like to kick Bull Connor around for three or four hours and then set him on fire.”
“Right after I get done whipping him, man.”
“Son of a bitch. I had to turn the set off. I couldn’t take it.”
Eugene “Bull” Connor was the Birmingham, Alabama, commissioner of public safety who had turned not only fire hoses but dogs on civil rights demonstrators. It was hard to watch the barrage of water and brutal cops pounding, kicking, and stomping people. And then he’d added those dogs.
The problem was that it was all being laid on Southerners. We lived close enough to the Missouri border to know that not all folks of the Southern persuasion were anything like Bull baby or his henchmen. And discrimination and violence were hardly limited to the South. Try walking down the street hand in hand with a Negro girl in Cicero, Illinois, sometime, or in parts of Chicago or border towns in my state. Or a hundred other northern towns.
Kenny said, “You think the biker killed that Leeds kid?”
“Too early to know.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. Couple of them beat up those two Negroes at the county fair last year.”
“Yeah, and got a weekend in jail for it.”
“Surprised Cliffie went even that far.”
We sat on the front steps of my office. A sleepy burg; a sleepy, hot afternoon. Turk had called and decided to break up with poor Jamie again—this generally happened once a week—and since neither Kenny nor I could take her sobbing, we sat out here with Pepsis and Lucky Strikes, just like the high school kids at least a part of us would always be.
“What’s funny is that Lucy’s old man seems to think nobody knew she was seeing Leeds.”
I’d told him what the judge had told me. Kenny knows most of the worst people in town, so he helps me investigate sometime
s by seeing what’s going on in the Black River Falls underworld, if there is such a thing.
“So a lot of people knew?”
“Not a lot. But you know how gossip gets around.”
“Then the senator is way behind if he thinks he can keep his daughter out of this.”
Kenny, with his little tuft of chin beard, his long dark hair, and his dentist-deprived teeth, still and forever an honorary citizen of City Lights Bookstore in old San Fran, said, “Hell, I want him to lose anyway.”
“So do I. He’s a robber baron. But I hate to see Lucy dragged through this. And all the people who’re gonna put her down.”
“It’s gonna be a bitch.”
Jamie, bless her, still sniffling, came to the door and said: “It’s the judge. She sounds really mad.” She instantly began bawling again.
“Catch you later,” Kenny said.
“Ask around, see if you hear anything.”
He grinned. “Philip Marlowe is on the job.”
I followed the sobbing Jamie inside, lifted the receiver from where it rested next to the phone. “Hello?”
“How professional of you to have a weeping girl answer your phone.”
“I was going to call you first chance I got.”
“I’m too angry to even talk about how you’ve been avoiding my calls all day. We’ll deal with that later. Right now I need you to get out to Reston Park at the big pavilion.”
“A picnic?”
“Lucy Williams called me. She said I wasn’t to tell her parents about this. She wants to talk to you right away. Now get out there.”
She slammed her receiver down.
“Do you think Turk and I’ll get back together, Mr. C?”
I went over and put what I hoped was a brotherly arm around her and kissed her tear-warm cheek. “Sweetheart, you go through this every week. Of course you’ll get back together.”
She looked up at me with those guileless eyes and said, “Really?”
“Really.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. C. Now I feel a whole lot better. Thank you so much.”
I was going to ask her not to be sobbing when she took the next phone call but who was I to interfere with, as Buddy Holly called them, true love ways?
FIVE
THE PAVILION OVERLOOKED THE river and a stretch of limestone cliffs that gleamed in the sunlight. The latest chromed and finned Detroit pleasure mobiles crowded around the structure itself. The smell of grilling burgers, the ragged laughter of three- and four-year-olds, a large portable radio playing Darlene Love’s “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Going to Marry.” America, of Thee I Sing.
Lucy sat on a small boulder far upslope, where a fawn stood watching her from the woods. Instead of tennis whites she now wore jeans and a yellow blouse, her blonde hair long and loose in the wind sweeping up from the river below. She smoked a cigarette with great intensity and once, just as I approached and frightened the fawn away, touched a gentle hand to her temple, as if a headache had just struck.
“Lucy.”
I didn’t want to frighten her. But my call was worthless. She hadn’t heard me.
I walked closer. She turned, startled, and for just a moment seemed not to recognize me.
“Oh, God, Sam. It’s you.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She pointed a finger at her lovely head. “Migraine and—don’t ever tell my mother I mentioned this—my period. How’s that for God’s wrath?”
She’d meant the last as a joke. She’d even given me a momentary smile. But there was no humor in the tone or the smile.
“Why would God be punishing you, Lucy?”
“Because I killed David.”
Wind and the sound of a grass mower somewhere and downslope the delighted screams of the pavilion kids.
“You shouldn’t say things like that, Lucy. It could be dangerous.”
“It’s true, Sam.” Her eyes coveted my face, searching for even a hint of wisdom. But I was twenty-six-year-old Sam McCain and I had no wisdom.
“It’s not true, Lucy.”
“He wanted to break it off. He said he was destroying my life. He said that I didn’t have the strength to pull away but that he did. But I wouldn’t let him.” The tears came then, soft, soft as Lucy. “And they killed him. They said they would and they did.”
Face in hands, sobbing now, not soft, hard, hating his killers, hating herself.
“Who said they’d kill him, Lucy?”
She raised her small bottom up from the rock and pulled three small envelopes from her back pocket. As she handed them to me, she forced herself to stop sobbing. For moments, like a child, she couldn’t catch her breath. I didn’t look at the envelopes until I saw that she was all right.
Crude drawings of a stick figure hanging from a noose attached to nothing. And the words “Sambo has defiled the white race and he will die for it.”
All three were identical. The postmarks put them three days apart, all mailed from Cedar Rapids.
“I know who killed him, Sam, and it wasn’t that stupid biker.”
“Who do you think did it?”
Anger. “Goddammit, Sam, I didn’t say that I think. I said I know, all right?”
“All right. You know. Then tell me.”
“Rob and Nick.”
Simply Rob and Nick.
There were all sorts of ways to respond to what she said. But most of them would have just agitated her further. I went with “Tell me some more.”
She dug in the front of her jeans and pulled out a crumpled package of Winstons. She delicately plucked one free and then straightened it out before lighting it. The wind whipped away her first stream of smoke.
She was composed now. Hard, even. I’d never seen her this way. “Well, for one thing, they kept threatening to do it.”
“Both of them?”
“Both of them. Together and separately.”
“Drunk or sober?”
“Both.”
“Did they ever try anything?”
Another drag from her cigarette. “David had a little motor scooter. It wouldn’t do more than thirty miles’ an hour. He rode it back and forth between Iowa City and here on the nights when my parents wouldn’t give me the car. One night, when he was coming back from my house, they were parked in the woods and then they started following. They kept running him off the road. Scaring him. And he was scared. Then another night they got into his apartment in Iowa City and drew all kinds of terrible racist stuff on the walls.”
“You sure it was them?”
“Nick Hannity bragged about it.”
Fun guys, Rob and Nick.
“But killing is a long way from what you’re describing.”
“Nick beat him up in Iowa City one night. Badly enough that he had to stay overnight in the hospital.”
“Did he go to the cops?”
“Coming from Chicago? David wasn’t a big fan of cops.” The sunlight revealed the freckles across her nose and cheeks. A fetching touch of prairie girl. “There wasn’t much he could do. For one thing, we were both scared that the next time Rob and Nick did anything it’d be much worse.”
“You couldn’t tell your parents?”
“Are you kidding? They wouldn’t have taken Rob’s part but they would have nagged me about how this wouldn’t have been happening if David wasn’t a Negro.”
I got out a Lucky and lighted it. “Let me say something and don’t get mad.”
She smiled. A genuine smile. “I’m sorry, Sam. I can be a bitch.”
“You weren’t a bitch. You’re just understandably sad about David. But I need you to be rational and think clearly.”
She nodded. “I’ll try.”
“I have enough to go to Cliffie with, but with the connections Rob has he’ll be able to hide behind a lawyer. And besides, Cliffie has a boss now.”
“Cliffie has a boss?” A half smile. “He’s got to be a relative.”
“He is a she. But she’s not like
other Sykeses. She eats with a fork and knife and never takes her dentures out at the table.”
She was enjoying this diversion. “God Almighty, can such a Sykes exist?”
“Jane is her name.”
“The new district attorney is a woman?”
“Not only a woman but a Brown grad. Honors from Brown and was second in her school class.”
“A Sykes?”
“A Sykes. A cousin. Old Man Sykes would have preferred a Sykes male, but he couldn’t find one smart enough for Dartmouth, which he’s got a fondness for because of some movie he saw when he was a kid. And Old Man Sykes got her elected because he knows how tired people are of Cliffie. Who, by the way, has improved considerably since he became a hero. I’ve got two uncles who were falling-down drunks and they’ve been on the wagon for about fifteen years each. I believe people can change.”
“Even Cliffie?” Then, frowning: “That’s what I meant about being a bitch. We make so much fun of him it’s hard to remember he’s a real human being. I suppose he can change. But he arrested that biker so quickly—”
“His mistake. Jane’s in Chicago right now at a legal convention. She’s back this afternoon. And I’ll bet the biker is turned loose by sundown. And I also bet that Cliffie catches hell from Jane.”
“You sound like you have a lot of faith in this cousin of his, Sam.”
“You will, too, when you see her.”
“That means she must be pretty.”
“I’ve only seen her from afar, as they say. Haven’t spoken with her yet.”
Without warning, she covered her face with her hands. “I’m sitting here on this beautiful day,” she said, the words muffled by her fingers, “and David is dead. I feel guilty about it—every time I see a butterfly or a speedboat or one of those sweet little kids down there, I think it should be me who’s dead—but now I’m tired, Sam. Will you just leave me alone now? Please?”
I walked downslope to my car. As I passed the pavilion, a woman came out and handed me a s’more. I spent the drive back trying to get the marshmallow goo off my fingers. But at least the good taste stayed in my mouth.
