Southern Cross

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “We hear, O Lord. The Alliance for Southern Pride shall obey Thy clear command.

  “The mud woman will be stopped.”

  The tape hissed to its end. None of us could look at one another, none of us could use the language. Beyond the door, Elmira’s voice chirped cheerily at someone on the phone. That and everything else in the world but the woman sitting stalwart and supreme beside me seemed ludicrous and uninformed, given what had just transpired.

  When I looked his way, Seth’s expression confirmed what I suspected—that the voice on the tape was the same as the one he had played for me the night before, the voice that was owned by his son.

  As if in obedience to unseen command, the three of us drifted toward the door. As Alameda turned to take her leave, Seth reached out a hand to stop her. “I’m sorry,” he said simply, ache like a burr in his voice.

  She touched his arm to comfort him. “No problem, Mr. Hartman. People been trying to keep me from doing what I meant to do ever since I was a child. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “I wish to God you were right,” Seth said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Half upscale shopping mall, half luxury hotel, the Omni at Charleston Place was a new brick structure that occupied the entire block between Meeting and King streets at the point where Market intersected them. Its appointments declared that it aspired to be the commercial center of the city, and from the foot traffic that moved through the arcade that flanked the lobby, it seemed to be meeting its goal.

  After braving a gauntlet of Lauren, Doubleday, The Limited, and yet another store for blazer buttons, I located the hotel desk, which was buried in the center of the building behind such sirens of yuppie commerce. The clerk directed me to the hotel bar with the tip of her index finger and the shine of the standard smile.

  Unlabeled and underlit, the bar was secreted in a shadowy nook behind the staircase that led to the mezzanine. Decorated more in the style of a sitting room than a saloon, it featured easy chairs and occasional tables and carpet that clutched at my shoes; there was nary a barstool in sight. I planted myself in a wing chair and began the search for my quarry.

  Given the hour, there were limited possibilities. Two of them were middle-aged women sitting alone and embarrassed by it, their eyes fixed on the entrance so they would know the instant their companions showed up. Because the woman I sought had once been the mate of Seth Hartman, I concentrated on the more attractive of the two.

  At the moment, she was irritated and didn’t care who knew it. Tapping a fingernail on a marble tabletop, wriggling the toe of the spike-heeled foot that was draped invitingly across the other, steadily sipping her wine, fussing with her excessively blonded hair, she was a model of ire and insult—the former Callie Hartman wasn’t used to waiting, for her offspring or for anyone.

  Above a plaid skirt and white blouse, a blue blazer was draped over her broad shoulders, its lapels drawn discreetly across her heavy breasts. The skirt was slit to expose a foot of silken thigh whenever she crossed her legs—her daughter’s genetic legacy on display. Mine weren’t the only eyes in the bar that were on her, but mine were the only ones that were going to do anything but gape.

  She glanced my way from time to time, though no more frequently than she inspected the others who shared the space and were thus included in the plot to waste her time. I let her stew for a couple of minutes more and ordered a vodka gimlet when the waitress finally swept my way. After placing my order, I asked her to give the lady at the corner table another round of whatever she was drinking. The waitress hesitated, then shrugged, then went to do my bidding—every cocktail waitress in the world has performed that service at some time or other, even in posh places like the Omni. It helped that Callie didn’t look like a woman who was averse to male obsequiousness.

  After the waitress had brought my gimlet and delivered my gift, the former Mrs. Hartman looked my way, gave the occasion some thought, then raised her goblet in a silent toast. I mimicked the gesture, then did what she expected me to do, which was to stroll to her table with a grin on my face, the gimlet in my fist for company.

  “I hope you don’t think it forward of me, but you don’t look as if you’re enjoying spending this nice afternoon alone.” I delivered the pitch without stammering, but barely. “I thought it might ease the pain if I joined you.”

  “I assure you I’m not in pain, Mr. …?”

  “The name is Swenson, Ms. …?”

  “Benedetti.”

  “That’s funny; you don’t look Italian.”

  Her smile was as cool as the drink in my fist. “My husband does.”

  “Of the famous Charleston Benedettis?”

  “Newark.”

  “Ah. The Newark Benedettis.”

  We jousted with our grins for an extra second. “Most men start backing off about now,” Callie remarked when we were finished. “Congratulations.”

  I raised a brow. “I guess I don’t get it—am I supposed to think your husband is mobbed up or something?”

  “‘Connected’ is the way they usually put it.”

  “Well? Is he?”

  She raised a brow as black as a bruise. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She laughed again. “You don’t look comfortable up there, Mr. Swenson.” She gestured toward the chair across from her. “You may sit if you dare.”

  I sank into the seat and broadened my smile. “It would help if you had a name that was less polysyllabic.”

  “Callie.” She extended her hand.

  I leaned forward and took it. “Marshall.”

  “What brings you to Charleston, Marshall?”

  “How do you know I’m not a native?”

  “Your clothes; your accent; your complexion. How many more do you need?”

  “A sore thumb, is what you’re saying.”

  “Let’s call you a welcome relief from the norm.”

  I shoved my pawn to queen’s bishop four. “I’m here to visit my daughter.”

  She raised a brow. “I expected something more sinister.”

  “Why?”

  “You have that look. In fact, you remind me of the men my husband—” She snapped the sentence like a twig and looked to be sure she hadn’t been overheard. “What’s your daughter doing in Charleston?” she said, shifting easily.

  “Going to school.”

  “At the college?”

  I nodded. “Transferred from Arizona State last fall. Met a boy at some language thing and followed him out here.”

  “How romantic.”

  “That’s what she thought, till he ditched her a month after she enrolled.”

  “The course of true love—”

  “Usually runs downhill,” I improvised.

  She didn’t take the bait. “But your daughter decided to stay on?”

  I nodded. “She loves it here.”

  Callie made a face. “That doesn’t say much for her intellectual horizons, I’m afraid.” When she realized she’d insulted me, or at least my fictional offspring, she tried to make amends. “I didn’t mean to imply … my son is a student here also.” She shrugged. “The College of Charleston isn’t Princeton. That’s all I meant.”

  I drained my gimlet and motioned to the waitress for another round for both of us. “What’s your boy studying?” I asked.

  “Military history, last I heard. He seems to change majors every week.”

  “That’s not uncommon.”

  “Colin’s rather wayward, I’m afraid; nothing about him is common. He has some developmental problems.”

  “You saying he’s retarded?”

  She shook her head roughly. “Nothing like that. I’m just saying he’s immature, psychologically speaking. He lacks sophistication, which means he tends to be easily seduced by those with more direction than he has. Not by women, I don’t mean, but by … ideas. He spends most of his time with people who do little with their lives but whine.”

&
nbsp; “Sound like typical teenagers to me,” I opined pompously, then pulled out my notebook and wrote in it. “Colin Benedetti. I’ll ask Susie if she knows him.”

  “Colin Hartman. After my first husband.”

  I made the correction. “My Susie is cute as a cub. Maybe we should get those kids together.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Susie got burned real bad by the guy she trailed back here. I know she’s lonesome; she tells me so every time she calls. Be nice if her daddy could fix her up.”

  “Colin is … peculiar. I doubt your Susie would find him attractive.”

  We paused while the waitress brought the next round. “Let’s let her be the judge of that. Susie likes them wild, anyway. Guy she was stuck on before liked to race Jeeps off-road. What’s your boy’s number?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t have my book with me.”

  “Address, then. He in a dorm or what?”

  “Colin has an apartment on Vanderhorst. Six-two-six, I believe it is.”

  “Susie’s in a dorm. When I see her for dinner, I’ll get the ball rolling.”

  Callie started to object again, then shrugged. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Who are some of the kids he runs around with? Susie might know them.”

  She didn’t even consider the possibility. “I’m sure she doesn’t. They’re just twisted little—” She broke off the denunciation and sighed. “Your daughter shouldn’t get involved with Colin’s friends. Most of them aren’t even students.”

  I decided not to press. “Another glass of wine, Mrs. Benedetti?”

  She looked at her watch, then looked out the window, then leaned back in her chair and recrossed her lovely legs, allowing me to audit the procedure. Her eyes were more glassy and her speech more slurred than when I’d arrived at the table—she’d had more than a few before I’d got there.

  “I appear to have been stood up,” she concluded glumly. “My other child—Chantrelle—is obviously too busy wheeling and dealing to talk to her mother for two minutes, my husband’s in Atlantic City doing God knows what, so why the hell not? What’s the harm, Mr. Swenson? What’s the harm in another glass of wine?”

  “Not a thing,” I said, and semaphored the waitress. “Is Chantrelle married?”

  She shook her head. “For years she’s devoted all her time to her business. She’s rarely dated, and even those occasions have been more commercial than romantic in nature. But I have a feeling there have been developments on that front. She’s been quite elusive of late.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll find out, you can rest assured.” Callie watched the waitress do her duty at the next table; the hiatus seemed to sober her. “Why are you so interested in my family, Mr. Swenson?”

  I gave her my most disarming smile. “Just making conversation, Mrs. Benedetti. It’s what I do for a living—I’m a salesman, too.”

  “What do you sell?”

  “Myself.”

  The exchange seemed to disturb her. We took generous samples of our drinks, then appraised each other in light of what was apparently our decision to get drunk together. “Is your husband really a mobster?” I asked, a bit tipsy myself.

  “I’m not sure what he is. He has several local investments—cars, boats, real estate—but … I know very little about him, actually. I married him in a fit.”

  “Aren’t you interested in learning more?”

  “Would you be?”

  I grinned. “Probably not.”

  “Then let’s talk about something else. Anything but this godawful place.”

  “You don’t like Charleston?” I said. “Looks pretty slick to me.”

  “That’s exactly what it is—slick on the outside but rotten as a peach underneath. I’ve been treated like scum for twenty years because I wouldn’t become a hypocrite like everyone else in this town.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, trying to keep her talking.

  Her face flushed with repressed resentment. “What’s a hypocrite? Someone who thinks one thing but says another, right? Well, to get along in Charleston, that’s what you have to do—you don’t dare speak your mind about anything from God to the hired help.”

  I wasn’t in town to chronicle social conventions, so I decided to change the subject. “What happened between you and your first husband?”

  She frowned. “Seth? Why?”

  “No reason. But I’ve just been through a divorce myself, so I was wondering. It’s still messing with my mind, you know? I’m still trying to figure out what happened.”

  “It’ll keep messing with your mind, believe me. You won’t sleep right or eat right, and you’ll do things you shouldn’t with people you should never have … but what the hell. She dumped you, I take it.”

  “Yep. You?”

  “Welcome to the club.”

  “What’d he do, sleep around?”

  “He slept with me. That’s about the only thing we did together, but fucking, that’s something we could always—” She pressed her hand to her lips. “There I go again. Running my Yankee mouth. Let’s just say that Seth was fascinated by everything in the South but me.”

  I looked her over. When she noticed, she dropped her hands to her lap so I could get a better view. “That’s hard to believe,” I said.

  “Familiarity breeds contempt, and we were damned familiar. But I was rough to handle, I’ll admit. I hated this place so damned much, I bitched about everything.” She sighed. “I suppose we’re both better off,” she concluded, but it didn’t look as if she believed it.

  “How does husband two feel about husband one?”

  “I’m certain he doesn’t feel anything. Why?”

  “Sometimes there’s bad blood in that situation.”

  “Not in this case—Seth isn’t foolish enough to make Aldo jealous, even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. He finally has the woman he’s always wanted.”

  Callie took a lengthy sip of wine. When she lowered the goblet to the table, her body drifted off plumb. “Are you staying at the Omni, Mr. Swenson?”

  It took me a while to decide on an answer I could live with. Finally I shook my head. “Mills House.”

  “They say it’s quite nice there now; they redecorated last year. I’d like to see what they’ve done with the rooms sometime; I’m a bit of a decorator myself.”

  I looked at my watch. “We could run over there now, except I have to meet my daughter in a while. She’s going to show me the campus, then take me to dinner. But if you’re free later on, why don’t you leave a message at the hotel, and we can—”

  Second thoughts swarmed over her face. “I don’t live in Charleston, Mr. Swenson; I live on Kiawah. I couldn’t possibly come all the way back to town for … I couldn’t possibly.” She took a breath and tried to salvage something to look forward to. “Maybe if you have time, you could drive down tomorrow evening. I’d be happy to fix a light supper.”

  “That sounds great, but Susie’s probably going to keep me busy. If I can squeeze in some free time, I’ll let you know.”

  “Fine.” Her surrender was curt and grudging. She finished her drink in a single swallow. “It would have been fun, Mr. Swenson.” She waited until I looked her in the eye. “Wouldn’t it?”

  It didn’t bother me much to admit it.

  EIGHTEEN

  The address Callie had mentioned was on the street just north of Calhoun, a few blocks west of the campus. The neighborhood looked to be a blend of black and white and young and old, with housing dyed to match. The building itself was a white wooden structure, three stories high, which stretched along most of the block. It was sufficiently large and pedestrian to have served as a boardinghouse or transient hotel at some time or other, but now it seemed primarily devoted to students, its doors and windows festooned with anarchist slogans and nihilistic posters and snatches of saccharine sentiment, the artifacts of modern youth. The local variation on the theme were the
Confederate flags that occupied more than one of the windows.

  A directory of sorts, handwritten and heavily edited with line-outs and insertions, had been posted above the mailboxes next to the entrance. It said that C. Hartman lived in apartment 26. It also said, opposite the name, in the jagged, blood-red letters of a manifesto, WHITE CHRISTIAN PATRIOT.

  I climbed the stairs to the second floor and knocked on the corresponding door. Just below the point where I applied my fist, a hand-painted swastika confronted me with nervy insolence, above the words WHITE POWER. As I waited for someone to respond to my summons, I was increasingly conscious that the heat had become homicidal.

  When no one put in an appearance, I stepped to my left and looked in the window. The curtains were sheets of heavy canvas, and the inside of the apartment was dark—not conducive to snooping. The only thing I thought I saw was a flag on the opposite wall that looked more like a souvenir of the Third Reich than of the States of the Confederacy.

  I was debating whether to pick the lock and get a closer look at Colin’s neofascist nest when a young man came out of the apartment two doors down. He was blond and tubby, with a book under his arm and a blue baseball cap on his head. The art on the cap was a rainbow; the book was Under Fire.

  The look he gave me seemed more antagonistic than the occasion warranted. “Y’all need somethin’?”

  “I’m looking for Colin Hartman.”

  The name provoked a scowl. “Ain’t here.”

  “Know when he’ll be back?”

  The young man started to say something rude, then reconsidered. He rubbed his belly as though it were a magic lamp that came complete with genie. “You his daddy?”

  “No.”

  “Cop?”

  I shook my head. “I’m with the college. Dean’s Office.”

  “What you want with Hartman?”

  “I wish to speak with him about some of his … activities.”

  The young man nodded sagely, as though he had already divined my lie. “It’s about time someone clued that sorry sumbitch in—guys like Hartman give school a bad name.”