Sweat bloomed on her brow and dripped down her cheek and fell onto the ring of ice. After a moment of puff and pant, she stopped turning the crank and lifted the lid on the canister and inspected the mix. “Shit. This stuff is as bad as Johnny—it won’t get hard no matter what I do.” She shook her head and looked at me. “What’s your rap, mister? What are you pushing? Dope? Porn? What?”
“Salvation, maybe.”
She shook her head and laughed. “I’d have never pegged you for a Bible beater. Sorry to break the news, but you’re out of your jurisdiction. The only god I worship is sleep.” She put the lid on the canister and cranked with renewed ferocity. “I got to get this done,” she muttered through clenched teeth.
“My kind of salvation is pretty focused; a boutique evangelism, you might say.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I’m out to save a single soul. Its name is Colin Hartman.”
Her eyes jumped off the ice and onto me. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“He’s in trouble. And he’s scared.”
“He’s got lots to be scared about.”
“Like what?”
“The same thing we’re all scared of.”
“Which is?”
“That there’s no place to hide.” She brushed a lock of greasy hair away from her shiny forehead. “What I don’t get is what difference it makes to a white-body like you.”
“You know about Colin and Bedford and the Alliance for Southern Pride?”
She shrugged. “I know about Bedford the way I know about diarrhea.”
“He tried to set Colin up for a fall last night.”
“What kind of fall?”
“Bedford tried to get Colin to commit a major crime, so he could use it as leverage against him.”
“What kind of crime?”
“Murder.”
She coughed. “Who was he supposed to murder?”
“Me.”
I walked to her side and nudged her out of the way and took the crank from her hand and turned it. The ice rattled against the sides of the wooden crock like a carcass passing through a pulverizer. When I looked back at Broom, she was crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You might as well tell me—I’m not leaving till I get some of this.”
“It’s not your problem.”
I shrugged. “Whose birthday is it?”
She hesitated. “My mom’s, I guess.”
“How old is she?”
“How the hell should I know? Forty-five, maybe.”
“Where does she live?”
“Battery Street.”
“When’s she coming by?”
“Never.” She bit her lip and swore.
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Two years yesterday.”
“I didn’t think Charleston was that big a place.”
“It is when you want it to be.” Broom cocked her head and watched me work. “I still don’t know what you’re doing here,” she said as I warmed to my task.
“I’m trying to get Colin Hartman out of trouble.”
“How?”
“By putting Bedford out of business. To do it, I need to know who’s bankrolling him. Any ideas on the subject?”
She shook her head.
“Is that true? Or are you one of the Israelites?”
“As far as I’m concerned, the Israelites are all in Israel. Or maybe Scarsdale. I still don’t see how this is my problem.”
“I heard you and Colin were friends.”
“Emphasis on were. Once in a while, I let him cry on my shoulder.”
“Why?”
She paused to watch me crank. “’Cause I owe him.”
“For what?”
“For being there for me when I needed him.”
“When was that?”
“In school.”
“Bishop England?”
She nodded. “Some heavy stuff went down for me at home. Colin was the only one who understood what I was dealing with. One of the few good things I’ve managed to do with my life is not forget that.”
“That doesn’t sound much like the Colin I know, to be so sympathetic.”
“Yeah, well, Colin’s a little fucked up.”
“Why? What makes him so unhappy?”
“Because he cares what his daddy thinks, and his daddy thinks he’s straight.”
She’d said it without thinking, then quickly wished she hadn’t. “Fuck,” she breathed. “I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Colin’s gay? Is that what you’re saying?”
She tried to be offhand. “I don’t think Colin’s all that involved with the issue, actually. I’m not sure he’s ever been laid.”
“He attacked the girl he took to the senior prom. Wrecked her dress and everything.”
“Maybe he does that for a reason.”
“Which is?”
“So they’ll put a fence around themselves, and he’ll have an excuse to bail out. So he won’t have to face whether he is or isn’t.”
“Is or isn’t what?”
“Queer,” she said dully.
“He’s still in the closet?”
“He’d better be.”
“Because of Bedford, you mean?”
“Bedford, his old man—on that issue, they’re coming from the same place.”
I kept cranking while we measured each other. When she reached some sort of decision, Broom relieved me on the handle. “Hey. This is getting real. Way to go.” She paused long enough to give me a high five.
“Tell me about Jane Jean Hendersen,” I said as she turned the handle furiously. “What’s her connection with Bedford?”
“She’s his lawyer, is all I know.”
“What does he want with a lawyer?”
“Advice.”
“About what?”
“How much trash he can talk before he gets busted, I suppose.”
“Is Jane Jean a racist?”
“She’s a lawyer. She’s whatever she gets paid to be.”
Broom opened the ice-cream canister, ran a finger through the mix, nodded in satisfaction, then found a spoon in a drawer and offered a bite to me. The icy nugget was slick and peachy on my tongue.
After I complimented the chef, we exchanged some weary smiles. “I got to go to bed before I die,” Broom said.
“Where does Bedford live? Just give me that. So I can get to him before he does any more damage.”
“Why should I care what he does?”
“Because we both know Colin doesn’t belong with those people. And because right now I’m the only one who has a chance to shut them down.”
It took her a while to decide. “Folly Beach,” she said finally. “Squats in a concrete house that got squished in the hurricane and left for dead by whoever owned it. Lives down there with his pets.”
“Dogs?”
“Guns,” she corrected. “He’s got about fifty of them. Just in case you think he’ll go easy.”
THIRTY-ONE
It felt like midnight, but it was only 7:45 A.M. Folly Beach was a long way away. Because I doubted Bedford would be up and at his lunacy this early, I decided to make a stop before I went after him. A phone book told me the Morrison Mortuary was on Rutledge Avenue, and my map told me it was just north of Sumter Street. I got there in ten minutes, a counterweight to the morning rush.
By the time I pulled to a stop, I had come off my high of the ice-cream social and was feeling morbid myself. The world seemed diseased and deformed—Colin Hartman was a mess both physically and psychologically; Broom missed her mother to the point of deep despair and belabored symbolism; Seth had been oblivious to his son’s religious and sexual confusions for years; the ugliness of ASP lingered in the morning air like pestilent dust that invades your pores and poisons you through your flesh.
The mortuary and its environs only curdled my m
ood. The dour brick structure was so wounded by time and the winds of Hugo it had sprouted a tangle of vegetation in order to hide its scars. The gutters in the street were piled high with scrap and rubbish that had been waiting too long for collection. The people walking down the block seemed reluctant to get where they were going. If Morrison had a spare coffin around, I might decide to rent it. The front door was open behind a concave screen; I walked through it tentatively, bewaring not the dead but those they’d left in charge.
The foyer was large and high-ceilinged, ringed by a line of folding chairs broken only by a coatrack and an urn of flowers. Beyond it, a formal parlor preened like a Victorian diorama behind a pair of sliding doors. The furnishings were an eclectic collection of stolid antiques arranged in an irregular circle to ease the act of consolation. The music in the air was a fugue from a recorded organ; the book lying open on a stand beside the door was a place to prove my presence. Since it was early for a visitation, the room was empty of all but portent.
I returned to the foyer and followed the hall that led to the rear of the house and knocked on the first door I came to. When nothing happened, I turned the knob.
In the center of the room was a coffin, its lid raised to display the earthly remains of a man wearing a blue suit and a big smile. Arranged around the oaken box, as though the currency of some strange contest, were scores of floral tributes, ferns and blossoms so abundant they threatened to engulf the woman who sat in a straight-backed chair in the center of the displaced nursery. Gowned in black satin, veiled in black net, gloved in black leather, she was throwing something at the man who lay in state atop the white lining of his sculpted bed. I guessed she had been there all night; the things she was throwing were pennies.
Despite my misgivings, I repeated the procedure at the next door I came to. This time I was invited to enter, by a voice that was more piqued than grief-stricken.
The room was less a public parlor than a private sitting room, with more clutter on the surfaces and less grandeur in the furnishings than in the professional chambers up front. A man wearing white silk pajamas and a black silk robe sat in front of a large bay window, sipping coffee and reading the morning paper in the carbureted light that squeezed through the white gauze curtains at his back.
In keeping with the decor of the establishment, a number of floral bouquets shared the room as well—voluptuous arrangements of everything from orchids to mums to iris, stuffed into vessels that ranged from cut-glass carafes to galvanized milk cans. I expected to sneeze or at least have a need to, but when I looked more closely, I discovered the plants were plastic.
The man on the love seat lowered his paper and scowled at me. His features were fine and handsome, his eyes dark and direct, his hair cut close and splashed with trails of gray. He reminded me of a darker Belafonte, except the pinch in his forehead and the squint in his eyes hinted at a status somewhat less transcendent.
He was in need of a shave and some peace and quiet, but he wasn’t going to get either for a while. “These are private quarters,” he grumbled in a reedy chord. “If you’re part of the Prideaux party, wait out front until the service. If you need bereavement counseling, I won’t be available till nine.”
“My name’s Tanner,” I said. “I’m looking for Monroe Morrison.”
“For what purpose?”
“Information.”
“Concerning?”
“Seth Hartman.”
“Why come here? Why not go to Seth?”
“I’ve already been to Seth. I’m working for him, in fact.”
He raised a brow. “In what connection? My trial?”
“Indirectly, at least.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that what I’m directly concerned about is the Alliance for Southern Pride. If I’m not mistaken, you’re concerned about them, too.”
Morrison folded the paper and placed it at his side. “You seem to know more about my affairs than you should.”
“I’m an investigator in hire to your attorney; the work-product and attorney-client privileges say that without your permission I can’t disclose any information I might uncover to anyone but Seth.”
He looked at me for a long moment. The breeze through the window was cool and sharp, the light in the room was watery and insubstantial, the man who loomed across from me was formidable and aloof; I felt as if I’d entered a cloister.
“I may want to call Seth to confirm this,” he threatened suddenly.
I gestured toward the phone on the table beside him. “Feel free.”
After we traded appraising stares, he motioned for me to take a seat. As I tried to get comfortable in a wing chair, Morrison sipped his coffee. “Does this have to do with what went on out on Johns Island last night?”
“Not directly. Unless you know something I don’t.”
“I only know what I hear,” he said.
“Which is?”
“That Bedford and his bunch finally went too far.”
“Maybe. But don’t bet on it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think ASP was involved.”
He bristled. “What you think doesn’t matter.”
“It does if anyone’s interested in justice.”
“No white man has anything to tell me about justice.”
His look damned both my judgment and my lineage. I cast about for a rebuttal but was too tired to frame one that didn’t amount to an exchange of insults.
“What do you want from me?” Morrison continued roughly, in the tone of a man who had spent too much time feeling subservient and had sworn to redress the balance.
“What does ASP want from you?”
“Same as the FBI.”
“What’s that?”
“Get me out of politics and into jail.”
“By FBI you mean the sting operation.”
He nodded. “Part of the deal Reagan and Bush cut with the evangelicals was that after they got elected, they’d set about putting the black judges and politicians behind bars, just like the preachers wanted. They got Hastings; they got Barry; now they’re after me. But this time they’ll come up short.”
“From the newspapers, it sounds like they have some potent proof. Videotapes and all that.”
“They got no kind of tape on me. I drank their liquor and ate their food, but when they tried to lay some walking-around money on me, I’m out the door.”
I shifted gears. “Do you have any idea who’s behind ASP?”
“Bedford.”
“You think he puts up the money?”
Morrison shrugged. “Plenty of money for racism around. Guy like Duke holds out his hand, and it fills up fast.”
“Why do you think ASP is after you and not any of the other black politicians in the state?”
Morrison became evangelical himself. “My body’s been on the line for black people for thirty years: Selma; SNCC; Freedom School; legislature; black caucus. I make more money in a month than a cracker makes in a year—I’m the scariest thing they’ve ever seen in a suit, and they’ve got to move against me now because by November I’ll be too big to break.”
“Because you’ll be in Congress.”
“That’s right.”
“But isn’t it true that even if you resign your seat and get out of the race, another black man is almost certain to take your place?”
“Just because he’s black on the outside doesn’t mean he’s black up here.” Morrison pointed to his head. “Or in here.” He pointed to his heart. “Man who’ll front for Blackwell got nothing on his mind but graft.”
“What kinds of pressures are being put on you?”
“Tax man’s into my business records; election man’s into my campaign records; U.S. attorney wants me in jail for selling votes. Pressuring me, pressuring my lawyer.”
“ASP wants you to drop Seth, right?”
He nodded. “Call him a traitor to the South.”
“Are you going to?
Get another lawyer, I mean?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what they got on him. Seth a good man, but if he’s going down, I can’t let him drag me with him.”
“What could possibly bring him down?”
Morrison shrugged. “Man with that much money got to have stumbled once.”
“How did this sting thing originate?”
“FBI got an informer.”
“Who?”
“Man named Keystone.”
“Who was he?”
“Used to be a lawyer around town. Lately a lobbyist for the gaming people.”
“The bill to build a casino on the island?”
He nodded. “Bill comes out of committee, Keystone starts spending money to line up votes. Not the first time it happened, but no one took a fall before, so they belly up to the trough again. Only this time they get caught.” Morrison smiled faintly. “Entrapment, they claim.”
“Was it?”
“Not for me to decide.”
“Seth thinks this ASP thing may go back to something that happened the summer he worked for SNCC.”
“Don’t see how it could.”
“I don’t either, but do you mind talking about it?”
Morrison sighed impatiently. “You’re like that man with his book, all the time picking at the old days. Me, I never found it profitable for a black man to look back. Nothing behind him but misery.”
“What made you get active in SNCC?”
“What made me? South Carolina made me.”
“How?”
“Failure to obey Brown versus Board of Education ten years after it supposed to; keeping black people from voting by poll taxes and numbered place laws and acts of violence; trying to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ruled unconstitutional. That’s how they made me.”
“When did you get active politically?”
“When the freedom riders got beat bloody up in Rock Hill back in ’61. Opened my eyes: Prayer and patience weren’t going to get it done. Black man had to demand his rights, not wait for the white man to give them to him. Went to Mississippi to work in Bob Moses’ Summer Project; hung with Forman and Lewis and them, stayed close to a year. Made it to Selma in time for Bloody Sunday.” He smiled wryly. “Got my righteousness activated by one of Sheriff Clark’s police dogs. Came back and helped Septima with the Freedom School. Enrolled at Benedict College the fall of ’65 and opened a SNCC office in Columbia to coordinate the registration project. When my daddy died the next year, it was see his business buried with him or come back and run it myself. So I came home. Worked in the Hollings campaign. Got the business in shape and made some money. Decided I’d get political myself when the time was right.”
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