Highway 61 Resurfaced (v5)

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “Did he confess?”

  “Didn’t have to,” Henry said. “Sumbitch had the murder weapon on him. That pretty much cinched his sack as far as the jury was concerned.” Rick chuckled at that, and Henry didn’t seem to appreciate it. He said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” Rick said, waving it off. “Something made me think of Blind Boy Grunt all the sudden.”

  “He one of them blues players?”

  “Yeah,” Rick lied. “One of them.”

  Blind Boy Grunt was actually the pseudonym Bob Dylan used when he recorded for the Broadside label in the early 1960s. One of the songs he cut under that name was “The Death of Emmett Till,” a folky indictment of the all-white Mississippi jury that refused, in 1955, to convict the men who had proudly admitted to the brutal murder of a fourteen-year-old black boy who, in their estimation, had failed to show the proper respect for their cherished way of life. So Henry LeFleur’s solemn claim that a jury in that same time and place had been persuaded of a black man’s guilt rang somewhat hollow. When it dawned on Rick that it was entirely possible Henry LeFleur knew every last man on that panel, he said, “Of course, juries back then were fairly predictable, especially when a black man was on trial for killing a white one.”

  Henry squinted suspiciously. He pointed at Rick and said, “Where’re you from, son?”

  “Jackson.”

  “Wyoming?”

  “Mississippi.”

  “Huh.” Henry shook his head. “Sure don’t sound like it.”

  Rick wasn’t sure if he was talking about what Rick was saying or how he was saying it. “I guess I lost my accent, all these years in radio.”

  “I guess.” Henry shrugged, but he’d made his point. “Anyway, what’re you gettin’ at, talkin’ about juries?”

  “Not gettin’ at anything,” Rick said. He was thinking about Ruby Finch’s comment that Pigfoot was probably a scapegoat. “I’m just talking about the way things used to be.”

  “Yeah, well, thangs change,” Henry said as he picked up his pistol. He admired it in a way that he hoped was intimidating before he slipped it back in his pocket. “And not always for the bettah.”

  They sat there for a moment without speaking. Henry’s comment reminded Rick of something a Mississippi senator had said not that long ago, but he couldn’t see any reason to bring that up. The dog scratched under his chin and the cubes in Lollie’s glass melted and tumbled down on themselves. She was afraid that if she didn’t say something to guide the conversation, it would lapse into a debate on race relations that wouldn’t solve a thing. So she said, “I take it Cotton, Jefferson, and Tate were the main witnesses?”

  “Woulda been, they’d shown up,” Henry said, again with a slight smirk. “After we took their sworn statements, we sent ’em on. Told ’em they was witnesses and had to be available for the trial, but they skedaddled like they thought their friend wouldn’t be convicted if they weren’t there.” He shook his head at their foolishness. “Prosecutor read their statements into the record and that satisfied the jury. They weren’t out for ten minutes ’fore they come back with a guilty.” Henry slapped the table and pointed a finger at Lollie. “You know, I bet that’s where that story about them tapes comes from. Those three jigs weren’t nowhere to be found till long after that trial was over, and I bet you that was the story one of ’em made up, said they was off making a record up in Wisconsin. After that, story just took on a life of its own.”

  Lollie poured some more tea and recounted her conversation with Ruby Finch. She asked Henry if he remembered whether the defense entered her testimony at the trial.

  “Testimony about what she heard from some jig locked up in my jail?” Henry shook his head. “Tell you the truth, her name don’t ring a bell. Anyway, I was only there on the days I had to testify. But it would appear that if it was read into the record, it didn’t help Mr. Morgan none.”

  By now LeFleur had worked his way under all three layers of Rick’s skin with all his “jigs” and his smug inferences about how a good, honest jury of Pigfoot Morgan’s peers had found him guilty. On top of that, there was something about Henry’s story that didn’t quite pass the sniff test. Rick said, “So when you came across the body in the road and all that, there must’ve been another car there.”

  Henry didn’t appreciate Rick’s suggestion that he hadn’t told the whole story, and he didn’t do much to hide his irritation. He said, “If you’d been liss’nin’, you’da heard me say there was a car on the horizon, heading for Memphis fast as it could go.”

  Rick figured he was starting to get under Henry’s skin too, and he was enjoying it. “No,” he said, “I mean I don’t understand what Hamp Doogan was doing out in the middle of nowhere. Did his car break down? And if it did, I’m trying to imagine the series of events where these four guys stop to help, yet one of them ends up killing him.”

  Henry didn’t like the tone of Rick’s voice or his questions, but he didn’t want to say anything because of how it might look. He snorted a chuckle and then, for emphasis, spoke slowly. “Like … I … said, this was a long time ago. I don’t recall if there was another damn car. Maybe there was farther up the road and he was walking away from it. Maybe Hamp Doogan was in the car with them to start with and they got in an argument and that led to it. I can’t remember every last little detail.” He waved a hand at a fly circling his tea. “ ’Sides, don’t much matter, far as I can see.”

  “But wouldn’t it have been unusual for a white man to be riding in the car with four black men?”

  “Well, like … I … said, that Doogan was trash, and a Yankee to boot, involved in bringing marijuana and cocaine into the county.” He sneered and shook his head. “Man willin’ to do that don’t care who he rides with, now does he?” He shooed the fly away again and drank his tea.

  Lollie tapped her fingernails on the glass-topped table and said, “Somebody told us Doogan was a photographer.”

  The comment seemed to take Henry by surprise. He froze for a moment as he went to set his glass on the table, then he put it down and said, “Yeah, that’s right, I’d forgot about that. Had a studio that was his front. Fact, we executed a search on it once but didn’t find what we was lookin’ for, and we tore that place up, I’m tellin’ you. Figure he got tipped off beforehand, you know, probably somebody in the judge’s office what was buyin’ from him. That kinda thing happened.”

  Rick and Lollie exchanged a glance, surprised that Henry either didn’t know about Doogan’s sideline as a pornographer or that he didn’t mention it.

  “Now that I think on it,” Henry said, “lotta folks said we might shoulda let that Morgan boy off for doing the community a service killin’ ole Hamp, but the judge didn’t have any wiggle room on that, so …” He gave a shrug. “Off he went.”

  “And since you still got your feelers out,” Rick said, “I guess you know Pigfoot Morgan got out of Parchman two days before Mr. Woolfolk was killed.”

  This was news to Henry LeFleur, and it showed in his eyes. Something that looked a lot like fear flashed across his face and he said, “No. I can’t say as I was aware of that.”

  TURNING ONTO HIGHWAY 82, Rick adjusted his rearview mirror and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our little journey back to the nineteen-fifties.”

  Lollie held up a stiff index finger and shook it. “I swear, I thought if he said ‘jig’ one more time, I was gonna grab his pistol and shoot him.” They rode in silence for a moment before she gestured behind them with a hitchhiker’s thumb and said, “You know, it’s people like him that made me want to be a teacher in the first place.”

  “It wasn’t because you just wanted your summers free?”

  She shook her head. “I was in fifth grade. We were at recess, out on the playground, and this white kid named Kenny pushed this little black girl to the ground and kicked her, called her a ‘no-good nigger.’ Then he just walked away, like he was entitled to do that sort of thing. To this day, I’ve
never been so mad at anything as I was at that moment. But I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there and cried. When our teacher, Mrs. Powers, heard about it, she canceled our normal classes, saying there was no point in teaching anything else until we learned one thing, that the only reason people hate that way is because they were taught that way. She got Kenny and Wanda—that was the little girl’s name—Mrs. Powers had them sit next to each other and talk for an hour in front of the class. At first Kenny tried to act all tough, but Wanda was so sweet and sincere he caved after about ten minutes. Finally, he said he was sorry. Wanda forgave him, and after that, they were best buddies.” Lollie smiled in admiration as she said, “In one hour, Mrs. Powers polished up what someone else had spent ten years tarnishing. That’s when I knew I wanted to teach.”

  “That’s a tall order with so many Kennys and Henry LeFleurs out there.”

  “I tell you what,” Lollie said. “The good people in this state outnumber the bad, always have. Unfortunately, some of the bad folks ran things for too long. But things’re changing.”

  “Moves too slow for my taste,” Rick said.

  “Mine too,” Lollie said. “But we’re working against powerful stuff. There are old things in place here, things that are strong and resist change. And I swear, every time they cut our budget I’m tempted to think they’ve figured out the connection between lack of education and our ability to make those changes.” She looked out the window at a vast cotton field rolling by at sixty miles an hour. “But you gotta try, you know? Just keep chipping away.”

  “Yeah,” Rick said with a nod. “Sort of like what we’re doing. Feels like we’re pickin’ at a scab and we’re starting to draw a little blood.”

  “You think so?”

  “Did you see the look in LeFleur’s eyes when I told him about Pigfoot?” Rick shook his head. “That .38 didn’t seem to bring him as much comfort as it did when he thought he was dealing with crackheads.”

  Lollie said, “I might be scared too if somebody I’d sent to prison for fifty years had just gotten out.”

  Rick shook his head. “Sounds to me like Cotton, Jefferson, and Tate sent him to prison. Which would explain why they might be scared. But neither Buddy nor Willie seemed to care that he was out. And since both of them failed to mention their role in the trial—in fact, didn’t just fail to mention it, they flat out denied knowing anything about it—you gotta wonder who all’s lying and why.”

  “Maybe they felt bad about sending a friend to jail, didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Rick said. “They both acted like they hardly knew the guy. Besides, I can’t think of any reason to deny testifying against a murderer, even if you know him. I mean, I can see why you wouldn’t brag on it, but why deny it?”

  “LeFleur got any reason to lie about that?”

  “None that we know of,” Rick said.

  “And there was nothing in the Delta Democrat Times about the trial?”

  “Three column inches about the murder, the conviction, and the sentence. Didn’t mention witnesses, testimony, or evidence.”

  “So maybe Ruby Finch is right.”

  Rick thought about that for a moment. “Okay, but if Pigfoot didn’t kill Doogan, who did? And why would Cotton, Jefferson, and Tate say he had?”

  “Maybe they had a history we don’t know about.”

  “You mean maybe Pigfoot did something to all three of them that made them mad enough to send him to prison for life for something he didn’t do?” Rick shook his head. “You know, if just one of them had done that, I might buy it, but not all three. I mean, what could he do? Sleep with all their women? I think they’d just go shoot him for that, they wouldn’t wait around for an opportunity to frame him.”

  “Okay, maybe they were coerced.”

  Rick gave that some thought. “It’s starting to look that way, isn’t it?” he said. “And if that’s the case, then we get a whole new set of questions, like coerced by whom? And did someone just need a scapegoat and Pigfoot was in the wrong place at the wrong time or did someone specifically want to frame him? And if so, why?”

  “All of which brings us back to the questions of who really killed Doogan and why and how it connects to whoever killed my grandfather.”

  Rick looked at her with a fractured smile and said, “Ain’t this some fun?”

  They kept batting ideas around as they drove back to Vicksburg. They agreed that Henry LeFleur had raised more questions than he’d answered. They didn’t believe he could be involved from the arrest to the trial and not know what Doogan was doing out on Highway 61 in the middle of the night, and where his car was, especially if he could remember something as trivial as Lamar Suggs driving by. Lollie also thought it was odd that LeFleur acted so certain the tapes didn’t exist. “I mean, that’s like proving a negative, isn’t it? The only thing he could know for sure is whether he saw it happen or not,” she said. “If he didn’t witness them recording together, he still doesn’t know for a fact that they didn’t record somewhere else. So why act so cocksure that he knows what he’s talking about?”

  “He did seem to protest too much, didn’t he?”

  She threw up her hands in frustration. “Everybody we talk to seems to be hiding something.”

  “Except that Ruby Finch. Bless her heart, she didn’t hide a thing.”

  Lollie smiled and turned on the radio, tired of the endless theorizing. She scanned the dial until she came across a local call-in show from a station out of Yazoo City. The man on the phone sounded incredulous when he said, “What’d they fire him for?”

  The host said, “Well, he mailed a possum’s head to some woman.”

  “What for?” Like there might be a good reason.

  “He was trying to intimidate her over some unionizing activities she was involved with over in their district.”

  “And they fired him for that? Well, that’s just crazy,” the caller said. “Coach Parks was ten and one last season. Had most of his starting offense coming back. They was a lock for conference. Coulda gone to state.”

  The host tried to explain to the distraught football fan how the mailing of a decapitated marsupial head might be considered inappropriate behavior, even in Mississippi. The fan tried a desperate First Amendment argument that the host deflected before going to a commercial break. Lollie laughed as she turned down the volume. Then she said, “What made you go into radio?”

  Rick got a serious look on his face and said, “Well, I wanted to make the world a better place by using mass communication to bring about social justice and equality.” After a pause, he added, “Plus you get free T-shirts and albums, and girls.”

  “So it was the whole Dire Straits thing,” she said. “Money for nothing, chicks for free.”

  “You bet, except I started long before Dire Straits showed up.” He thought about her question for a moment before he said, “You know, I can tell you how I ended up in radio, but I’m not sure I know why. I mean, on the one hand I’ve never had the disposition to thrive in what is commonly referred to as a ‘regular’ job. Radio’s always been irregular enough to accommodate people like me. So that’s one thing, but the music’s what really drew me in. I’ve loved music since I can remember. Can’t play an instrument, but I’ve got an ear for records. There’s a cliché that deejays are just frustrated musicians. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But I know, as a kid, every dime I got my hands on ended up in a jukebox or buying records. And I listened to radio all the time, knew the names of every band and every song and every B side.” He smiled nostalgically. “At night, after I got sent to bed, I had a little crystal radio with an earpiece and I’d listen to WLS in Chicago. I thought that was the coolest thing, to hear that big-city station in my little room in Jackson. By the time I was in junior high, I was the de facto class deejay. If somebody had a party, I was the guy with the records. And there was something about that that I really liked. Still, it never occurred to me that I
might be allowed to do it for a living. But I stumbled into an opportunity when I was in high school and I’ve been living hand to mouth ever since.”

  “You have a favorite song from when you were a kid?”

  “Whole bunch of ’em,” Rick said. ‘In the Year 2525,’ by Zager and Evans. ‘Red Rubber Ball’ by Cyrkle—”

  “I love that song!”

  “Bet you don’t know who wrote it.”

  “I bet you’re right.”

  “Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley of the Seekers.”

  “Really, Paul Simon?”

  “Yep. But my all-time favorite from that era is ‘Walk Away Renee’ by The Left Banke. That was a perfect pop song.” Rick pointed at the radio dial and said, “Now radio’s mostly talk with a little country and lots of rap.” He shook his head. “Just ain’t what it used to be.”

  “Yeah, well, things change.”

  “And not always for the bettah.”

  22

  BETWEEN THE OXYCONTIN and the methamphetamine, Crail got to feeling like he should just drive right through Jackson and get on down to New Orleans to try out for the Saints. But then he got to thinking about Cuffie and his mission, so he pulled off the road at Northside Drive like he was supposed to and went looking for the address Big Jim had supplied. Crail pulled into an Exxon station to gas up and get directions. When he got out of his car, he noticed a barbecue rig smoking on the corner of the service station’s lot. Crail bought a rack of the baby backs, along with a six-pack, and got directions to the place that turned out to be just around the corner, on McWillie Drive.

  The law offices of Jeremy Lynch, Esquire, were located in a one-story cinder-block affair that looked to have been built in the sixties. The street was lined with similar buildings that collectively gave the impression of being a failed prototype for the modern office park. It was around ten when Crail pulled into the dark, empty parking lot. He backed into a space and cased the building to the extent that he could while sitting there eating ribs and baked beans.