by R. D. Rosen
Chance was the glue without which all the infinite bits of experience would go flying off in all directions. It was the mortar with which we built the stories of our lives. Chance was like the cheap single without which a hitting streak would have ended, denying history another story.
Harvey, who was closer to the window than Coffman, heard a car approaching from down the street and coughed to cover it. “What was it like, Snoot?”
“What’s that?”
“Lynching a man.”
“There’s a trick to everything,” Coffman said, slurring his words now. He finished the miniature and threw the bottle at Harvey’s head, missing him by a foot. The little bottle hit a bookshelf behind him. “I want to hurt you,” Coffman said, pathetically.
“So what’s the trick, Snoot?” Harvey heard the car get closer and slow.
Coffman was busy fumbling for another miniature in his pants pocket while he struggled to keep his gun on Harvey. “It’s like what that guy Gordon Liddy said about putting his finger in a flame.”
“What’s that?” Harvey said loudly. “What did Gordon Liddy say?”
“Keep your goddamn voice down,” Coffman said.
“What did Liddy say, Snoot?”
“Maybe it was Lawrence of Arabia. You know that movie?”
“That’s a great movie,” Harvey said. “I think I know what scene you’re talking about.”
“Do you have to talk so goddamn loud?” He swigged the Seagram’s. “Keep your goddamn voice down.”
“It’s the scene where Lawrence is putting his finger in the fire, and the journalist—who is it? I think he’s played by George Kennedy—asks him how he stands it.” A car door opened on the street in front of the house.
“Unless it’s Gordon Liddy,” Coffman said. “I think he tells the same goddamn story.”
“Right. Whoever. George Kennedy asks Lawrence how he stands it, right? How he stands keeping his finger in the flame. Isn’t that right, Snoot?”
“Jesus, you talk loud.”
There was a tiny sound downstairs. “Sorry,” Harvey said. “Don’t shoot us, okay?”
“Shut up, will you?”
“Snoot, what did Lawrence say?”
“He said, ‘The trick is not to mind,’ or some shit like that.”
“And that was the trick for you?”
“What trick?”
“The trick to lynching a man, Snoot. What the hell do you think I’m talking about?”
“I didn’t lynch anybody.”
“Yes, you did. You and old Ed Felker and Clay Chirmside.”
“But I’m saying no one person did it.”
“Of course not, Snoot. It took all three of you.” Harvey thought he heard a little sound on the stairs. “What was your part, Snoot? What part did you play in the lynching of Isaac Pettibone?”
“I just put that big old noose around that nigger’s neck.”
“How about Ed?”
“Well, by the time I got that noose around him, he was half dead from being whacked around by Ed’s putter. That’s the only humane way to do ’em, you know. You’ve got to beat the tar out of them first. That way, they’re too disoriented to fight you when you string ’em up.”
Moss Cooley moved well for a big man, and it didn’t surprise Harvey to see his motionless form standing now on the landing a few feet outside the bedroom, just standing there, a black mass in the dark. He seemed to be staring at the back of Coffman’s head as Snoot continued to hold forth in Cubberly’s chair.
“Yes, sir,” Coffman said, “I’m certainly not proud of it now, but I can guaran-goddamn-tee you that we showed that nigger every possible courtesy. He was more than half out of his misery by the time we put him in the back of Clay’s pickup. Ed and me, we had to stand him up on top of an old sawhorse in the back so we could get enough drop clearance to break his neck when Clay tore out of there.”
Clay drove. Harvey hadn’t quite understood.
“I was so full of hate back then,” Coffman said, raising the miniature to his lips.
“How’d you meet Ed and Clay?” Harvey asked.
“People who hate enough have a way of getting thrown together. Actually, I met Ed at a softball tournament.”
Moss came slowly out of the shadows on the landing into the faint bedroom light. Harvey thought it odd that Moss didn’t look at him or Cherry Ann, but seemed completely focused on the back of Coffman’s head.
“I expect people’ll understand I was a figment of my habitat, a creature of my time.” Coffman sucked on his miniature. He was no longer sober, no longer a middle-aged broadcaster, an upstanding citizen of Providence, Rhode Island. He was already half out of his misery. “I expect they’ll cut me some slack.”
Moss now stood only a few feet behind Coffman, and Harvey couldn’t understand what he was trying to do until he raised his right hand.
In it was Cubberly’s unsheathed Confederate officer’s sword. Harvey grabbed Cherry Ann’s ankle and held it tightly.
“I like the black man, Harvey. I’ve done a one-eighty.”
Harvey wanted to speak Moss’s name, tell him not to, but he knew that if he did speak his name, all bets would be off again.
Coffman wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand. “My own great-great-granddaddy was killed by cannister shot at Chancellorsville. Cut him in two. Terrible thing, to have to die just to preserve your way of life. Why the hell do you think everybody came to America in the first place, Harvey? To live the way they wanted to.”
Moss, large behind the chattering Coffman, gripped the sword in two hands. Like a bat.
“The Africans didn’t come here to live the way they wanted to,” Harvey said.
“Don’t give me that shit, Harvey. It was a better life than most of them niggers had ever known. It was better life than most of ’em ever would know. You don’t think blacks were enslaved up North? Just because you couldn’t see the shackles? Democracy was built on the goddamn back of slavery. Only reason they ever got rid of it was capitalism finally outgrew it. Morality had nuthin’ to do—”
Moss swung the sword and Coffman’s neck provided little resistance. His head stayed on his neck for the briefest moment before falling to the floor with a repulsive thud. It rolled over on Cubberly’s carpet and looked wide-eyed at Harvey, lips poised for the next syllable he would never utter, the whole pale face trying to comprehend what had happened. The rest of him remained on the chair, his carotid and vertebral arteries pumping slurpy fountains of blood that quickly drenched his clothes and began pooling on the floor.
Violence ruptures reality. It stops the clock of being. Only later would Harvey be able to piece together a version of what he had seen, and done. He turned away with a gag, wanting to vomit. It was Cherry Ann who couldn’t stop herself, and he quickly ripped the duct tape off her mouth, or else she would have choked on it. He ran into the bathroom, returned with a dampened towel, and carefully cleaned Cherry Ann’s face. She had to tell him to undo her bound hands and feet.
Moss, still holding the sword, had dropped to his knees in the sticky maroon pool of Coffman’s blood. His eyes were closed, and he was mumbling something to himself, perhaps a prayer.
Although he wouldn’t remember doing it, Harvey took the comforter off Cubberly’s bed and threw it over Coffman’s body. He took Cubberly’s bathrobe off the back of his closet door and covered Coffman’s head on the floor. Then he turned his cell phone back on and called Linderman.
“I’ve got Coffman here, and he’s dead,” he said, and told him where. “Everyone else is alive. We need medics.”
“Don’t move anything.”
“Come in alone, Josh. Everything’s under control, but I want a moment alone with you before all hell breaks loose. We’re on the second floor, and there’re some elements of the situation that we need to discuss.”
“Be there in five minutes.”
“Thank you, Josh.”
Moss was standing now, getting out of his cl
othes. Leaving his pants in the pool of blood. His shirt. Yanking off his shoes and socks and slipping out of his underwear. He stood naked in Coffman’s blood with the sword by his bare feet.
“C’mon, baby,” Cherry Ann said, standing just outside the lake of blood and extending her hand toward him. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“Let’s do that,” Moss mumbled mechanically. “Let’s get cleaned up.” He turned slowly, curiously, to Harvey. “What have I done?”
Harvey, who had been gazing into the black hole that was at the end of every case, turned to Moss. “When he turned on you with the gun, Moss, you had no choice.”
“He turned on me… with the gun?”
“Moss, why the hell do you think you did that? It was you or him.”
“Where’d I get the sword?”
“You got it on the stairs, Moss. It was Cubberly’s, I think.”
“And he turned on me?”
“Anybody would’ve done what you did.”
“Really?”
“What else could you have done?” The revolving cherry of an approaching Providence squad car sprayed the bedroom with red light. “Now go get cleaned up.”
23
IT’S SAID THAT A HITTER’S strength is an inch away from his weakness. That the fastball he likes to swat out of the park with some regularity will prove unhittable if you throw it an inch farther inside.
It was inconceivable that a man like Moss Cooley would actually kill Snoot Coffman, and in that way, so it helped to think that his pride and patience had been pushed an inch too far, transforming him into a different person.
And in the days following Coffman’s death, Harvey kept thinking that the broadcaster’s fate had been an inch away from his redemption. Had Coffman done nothing in the wake of Chirmside’s report that his photo looked familiar to Moss and Cherry Ann Smoler, he might still be announcing Jewels games. But the suggestion that he had been recognized in an old photo of Isaac Pettibone’s lynching had pushed him a fatal inch into panic.
Had Coffman not left Moss a headless lawn jockey, there would have been no former baseball players to ask questions and pursue the case to its bitter end. Had Coffman sat tight, which he had been doing for three decades, chances are Cherry Ann Smoler would have forgotten the old photo. Moss Cooley already had. And as long as Snoot Coffman continued to find his second-rate sexual pleasures at a place other than Teasers on a night Cherry Ann was working, the threat to his freedom would have blown over.
Information that was no longer needed trickled in, like fight fans arriving after the knockout. The computer age-imaging group that Jerry Bellaggio had recommended sent Harvey a printout of Coffman’s projected appearance at fifty, based on the photo at GURCC. It was close enough. Charlie Fathon of GURCC reported that Connie Felker’s car and two houses were both in her name, suggesting a standard of living well beyond the income reported on her tax returns.
More productively, GURCC investigators sifted through Chirmside’s garbage, finding records of several phone calls to Coffman’s office extension at Pro-Gem Palace. Armed with affidavits from Harvey, Cherry Ann, and Moss Cooley—who had heard it from Cubberly’s landing—that Coffman had admitted Clay Chirmside’s role in Pettibone’s lynching, a contingent of investigators from GURCC, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, and the FBI showed up at Chirmside’s house in early August. By the following day, he had confessed to his role in the lynching and was being held without bail pending formal charges.
After a preliminary investigation into the circumstances of Snoot Coffman’s death, the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office declined to pursue any charges against Moss Cooley. It never went to a grand jury. Harvey assured the investigators that Coffman had turned around when Moss entered the bedroom, giving him ample reason to believe his life was in immediate danger. But the press coverage had already done its usual damage, and Moss went home to his mother in Alabama for a week of home cooking. He rejoined the team in Cleveland and promptly homered in his first at-bat against Rick Rusansky, the same man who had ended his hitting streak.
He and Cherry Ann Smoler continued to see each other. She took an indefinite leave of absence from Teasers, but continued her studies at Johnson and Wales. She moved into a campus dormitory, where she felt safer.
Andy Cubberly, who was cleared of any wrongdoing, nonetheless asked Felix Shalhoub to trade him. In the middle of August the team shipped him off to the Astros for another journeyman outfielder.
Harvey kept his promise, giving Bob Lassiter a long interview.
Scott Sipple, who had preceded Coffman as Jewels play-by-play man for WRIX, worked out a deal with his employer, ESPN, to come back to the broadcast booth as Jewels play-by-play man for WRIX.
In turn, ESPN asked Mickey Slavin to fill in for Scott Sipple, which necessitated her living in the Hartford area until at least the end of baseball season.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” she told Harvey in mid-August, walking into the living room where he was eating Doritos, guzzling Gatorade, and watching the Bears-Giants 1963 NFL Championship game on ESPN Classic Sports.
“In other words,” Harvey said without looking up, “let’s not think of it as a new assignment for you, but a trial separation for us.”
“Something like that.”
“I suppose things have gotten too lousy to last.”
She waited for Harvey to look at her. “Let’s just see what happens, okay?”
“You got someone else?”
“No. You?”
“Nope.” He swallowed some Gatorade straight from the bottle. “Relationships wear out, don’t they?” he said. “Like careers and tires.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so attached to a set of tires.”
“I feel like giving you a hug.”
“Well, get off your ass and give me one.”
He rose, and they held each other for thirty seconds in the middle of the floor, swaying like two pummeled prizefighters in a clinch, too tired to throw punches.
A week later, alone in the house, he received a phone call from Snoot Coffman’s widow, Cindy. What could he say to her? Sorry your husband was decapitated? Just about everything in his life seemed better left unsaid. He waited for her to state her business.
“Sorry to bother you, but you’re the only private detective I know.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“My daughter Tara,” she began.
Harvey pictured the two teenagers in halter tops on the field in Providence, waiting for Moss Cooley to get out of the batting cage.
“The older one,” Cindy Coffman said.
“Go on. I’m here.”
“I think she’s run off with her black boyfriend. She’s been incredibly upset, as you can imagine. She’s been in counseling and on sedatives. She left me a note saying, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll call you in a few days. I need some time alone with Bryan.’ That was three days ago.”
The dominoes were beginning to fall. “And you’ve talked to Bryan’s parents?”
“They haven’t heard from him, either.”
“Have you reported them missing to the police?”
“Not yet.”
“Your other daughter?”
“Tiffany’s here with me.”
“Is there any reason to suppose she’s in danger or has no intention of getting in touch with you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m just so worried. So are Bryan’s parents. I certainly don’t want to make the mistake of not acting.”
“Understood.”
“How would you feel about coming down to Providence tonight and sitting down with me and Bryan’s parents? Just to help us organize our thinking. You could decide then if you wanted to do more. Wanted to help us find them.”
“If that would make you feel more comfortable.”
“It would.”
“Under the circumstances, you know, I can’t take any money from you.”
“Of course we�
�d want to pay you.”
The fact was that Harvey didn’t want anything at all to do with Cindy Coffman and her daughter’s disappearance, yet he felt a twinge of obligation. He felt like someone at the end of an unsuccessful blind date: a good-night kiss seemed preferable, even if it falsely implied further interest, to not kissing her at all and hurting her feelings on the spot.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll meet with you and the boy’s parents. Beyond that, I can’t make any promises. Perhaps I can refer you to someone else.”
Later that afternoon, Harvey was getting in his Honda in his garage when a shudder went through him. He spun, feeling that he was being watched. But it was only the lawn jockey’s head, on the shelf where he had put it three weeks ago next to a bunch of paint cans. The head lay on its side, smiling insincerely at him.
He turned the head around so that it faced the wall. Then he got settled behind the wheel of his car, backed out of the garage, and started yet another journey to Providence, the city that, as if by some obscure law of the universe that applied only to him, drew Harvey back again and again.
Author’s Note
AMONG THE MANY WORKS I found helpful in the writing of this novel were:
James Goodman’s Stories of Scottsboro
Stephen J. Gould’s essay “The Streak of Streaks” in DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life
Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic
Joel Kovel’s White Racism: A Psychohistory
Richard Ben Kramer’s Joe DiMaggio: A Hero’s Life
James M. McPherson’s The Battle Cry of Freedom
Karen Simpson’s independent research on the history of lawn jockeys
Bill Stanton’s Klanwatch: Bringing the Klux Klan to Justice
Diann Sutherlin Smith’s Down-Home Talk
Joel Williamson’s The Crucible of Race
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