Still River

by Harry Hunsicker

  We were in a long hallway, and Aaron was already at the end, motioning me to hurry up. There were six or eight offices off the hallway, each with an occupant or occupants on the phone or banging away on a computer. Several looked at me as I passed, faces impassive.

  Aaron sat behind his desk when I finally entered his office. It was surprisingly small, not much larger than my converted bedroom on Reiger Street. Just nicer, newer with better furnishings. Windows overlooking Second Avenue covered one wall. A map of the southern sector of Dallas, up to downtown, covered the opposite side. Stick pins of various colors and sizes dotted the surface. A bookcase dominated the wall behind the desk. It was half books and half plaques and awards, various recognitions for civic activities. It contained a great deal of community recognition for a man who appeared to be barely forty.

  A complicated stainless-steel apparatus sat on a counter against one wall. Aaron hopped up, talking to me as he moved. “Espresso, Mr. Oswald? Maybe some cappuccino?”

  “Coffee’d be good. Nothing in it.”

  “Black coffee it is.” He twisted and turned and tweaked things, and a few moments later brought me a steaming mug emblazoned with the Young Realty logo, a Y and an R intertwined. “That’s a special roast, from northern Sumatra.”

  “Oh.” I blew on it and took a small sip. It had a unique taste, a cross between something left on the burner too long at Waffle House and shoe polish. I tried not to frown and said, “Good coffee.”

  Aaron took a long pull of his and then leaned back in his chair. “That’s quite a bruise you got there; looks like it’s better than yesterday. Got anything to do with the guy that died?”

  “Indirectly.” I took another small swig of the Sumatran blend and placed it on the edge of his desk, on a Texas-shaped coaster superimposed with a silhouette of Martin Luther King. “So what’s that with the kids out there?”

  Aaron chuckled. “It’s a thing I do with several of the schools in the area. A private reward system I developed. They need a pattern of reinforcement for making good choices. Also, it’s important to provide the kids in this section of Dallas with positive role models.” He took another sip of coffee. “I don’t want to bore you with the statistics but over half the families fall below the poverty line. Two-thirds of the children in this neighborhood come from a single-parent household. That means no daddy at home. If they see me, somebody who came from their same background and made something of themselves, then maybe, just maybe, the allure of the street life, the gangs and the drug dealers, won’t be as strong.”

  I didn’t want to get into a discussion of the socioeconomic factors in the North Texas area, so I said, “You from Dallas?”

  “Born in New York City, raised here, though, grew up near Redbird Airport.”

  I picked up my coffee but didn’t take a drink. “New York City? That’s quite a change.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” Aaron smiled. “My mother had dreams of dancing on Broadway, really making it big up there … until I came along. My father took off, and she moved back here to be near family.”

  I nodded politely but shifted gears. “Tell me about the house where Charlie Wesson died. Who had access to it?”

  Aaron pursed his lips. “No one, really. It was boarded over. Plywood on the windows and doors. But as I mentioned, it’s an old place, scheduled to be demolished, so it’s not like we keep it guarded or anything.”

  “So nobody could get in or out?”

  Aaron pursed his lips. “Well … there’s my head of maintenance.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Guy named Marvin Jones. Been with me for years. Good man.”

  I nodded and tried to look thoughtful, while filing the name away. It was those good ones you had to be careful about, kind of like an unloaded gun. “Would you mind if I talked to Mr. Jones?”

  Aaron Young sighed. “I don’t mind, really.” He paused a moment. “Besides, I’ve talked to the police and it’s their understanding that Charlie Wesson committed suicide.”

  “That may very well be so,” I said. “But the family has hired me to determine the particular details of this case.”

  Aaron didn’t say anything for a long period, just stared at me without blinking. I made no move to fill the void. Finally he said, “And would you be this conscientious if I’d owned the house that Charlie Wesson had died in and it was in North Dallas? And Marvin Jones was a white man?” His voice was soft but firm.

  I met his gaze. “Until you mentioned it, I had no clue as to Marvin Jones’s race. But I assure you that since I have taken this case, I’m going to give it my best shot, no matter what part of town it may take me to.”

  He had a point. Things happened differently in the southern part of Dallas, where most of the black population lived. Crime was higher, police response slower. Disease ravaged more people, but fewer doctors practiced there. Unemployment was higher but there were fewer jobs available and less money to buy cars to get to the work centers in other areas. Which would have been okay if there were decent public transportation. Then there was the school system, an antiquated district full of overworked teachers, too-full classrooms, and test scores falling somewhere between ditch digger and assistant ditch digger.

  “Do you have any other leads at the moment?” Aaron said. “Other than me and my house?”

  “I’ve got a couple of things to follow up.” The bruise on my cheek started to itch. I resisted the urge to scratch it. “The place had been a drug house before you bought it. Any idea who used it?”

  “At the risk of sounding trite, I believe drug users were the ones using it for drug purposes.”

  “What I mean is, who was the supplier, the dealer?” I tried another sip of the rank coffee.

  Slap. Aaron Young’s palms hit the desktop as he leaned forward. A vein in his temple throbbed. “What are you trying to say, Mr. Oswald? Just because I’m black, you think I know all the crack dealers in Dallas? Does your last name mean you know a lot of presidential assassins?” His café-au-lait complexion purpled with rage.

  I kept my voice calm and even. “No offense meant, Mr. Young. I’m just looking for information.”

  As quickly as it erupted, the storm passed. Aaron sank back in his chair and said, “I am sorry if I seem to have overreacted. I value my position in the community very much.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and leaned back in his chair. “I also have … I am—” He seemed unable to find the right words and stopped for a moment. “I have a number of projects under development at the moment. All of which require my personal attention.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I appreciate the time you’ve given me.” I stood up and put my coffee cup back on his desk. “Could I get a contact number for Marvin Jones?”

  Anger flashed across his face for an instant. Then he smiled and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “Sure. This is his cell phone. Tell him I said it’s okay to talk to you.”

  I took the piece of paper. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” I gestured toward the hallway. “How many people do you have in your operation?”

  He jumped out of his chair, energized by my question. “We’ve got sixteen here, and another thirty people on site at various properties. Most of them are managers and maintenance people at our apartment projects.” He turned to the map across the room. “The majority of the apartments are west of here, in Oak Cliff.” He pointed to a series of red pins, south of downtown and the river, and west of Interstate 35.

  I walked over to the map. It started in DeSoto and Lancaster, at the extreme southern portion of Dallas County, and ran to the Oak Lawn and uptown areas north of downtown. In the process it covered the entire wall. I spotted the location of my house and office, about eye level on the right side. There were several different-colored pins a few blocks south of me. “What are the green pins?”

  Aaron beamed, that deep, broad smile he’d shown the children. “That’s for retail properties, shopping centers, things like that. We have ten of them now, over
six hundred thousand square feet of retail property, new shopping in the southern sector. We’ve put grocery stores back in neighborhoods that had been without a place to buy food for years. The red pins, as I mentioned, are for apartments. We’ve got more than sixty complexes, almost eighteen hundred units, of clean, decent, affordable homes.”

  “And the blue pins?” There were eight or ten, scattered about in no particular concentration.

  “Those are offices or miscellaneous properties we own or manage. I have a couple I am particularly proud of here on Jefferson.” He pointed to the map. “These were two older buildings, long since written off by most investors. I took them and cleaned them up; now they’re ninety-five percent full and cash flowing.”

  “That’s impressive,” I said. Jefferson Avenue was the main thoroughfare of Oak Cliff, the largest section of the southern half of Dallas. The street was a vibrant but run-down little nugget of the city, all but unknown to the people north of the river. “What’s the gold pin?”

  Aaron laughed. “That’s headquarters, where we are right now.”

  I nodded and turned to leave. Something on the map caught my eye. It was an outline, not a pin, and it was in the Trinity River bottom, between North and South Dallas. “What’s that?”

  Aaron’s voice took on the same intensity as when he’d chastised me about drugs, only without the anger. “That parcel there, Mr. Oswald? That’s going to be my crowning glory. That’s the Trinity Vista, something that will finally link North and South Dallas.”

  “What do you mean?” I moved closer to the map.

  “White Dallas has done its best to keep us separate.” He traced the Trinity River channel with one thin finger. “But not equal.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “But this will be the bridge.” The phone on his desk rang. He moved toward it. “You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  I nodded as he answered the phone and slipped out, smiling as best I could at the woman at the front. She managed not to frown at me as I left.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The thin cloud cover present since early morning had burned off, leaving a heated layer of smoggy air blanketing the street. Something else was different too. I felt my skin tighten and knew it wasn’t from the change in temperature after Young’s cold office. I’ve always had that ability, even as a child, to spot trouble long before it becomes visible. One of my earliest memories involved a man robbing a liquor store, near the small central-Texas town where I was born. Our home at the time was a four-room shack on the ass-end of some property my father’s people owned in western McLennan County. That branch of my family was a dour lot, creased and dusty from the sun, the earth, and the fatalistic attitude that whatever waters they tried to fish, someone had long since been there and caught everything worth keeping. Still, that was where they threw their line.

  One August afternoon, when the sun made the air shimmer and each breath felt like an oven blast in your lungs, Daddy and I stopped at a bottle shop after putting out a new salt lick for the cattle in the south field. I was probably three or four years old, and remember holding a pack of those candy cigarettes they had back then, waving them at my father in hopes that he would buy me a treat. He ignored my pleadings and stood there at the counter, talking to the owner of the store.

  As I waited in front of the candy display, the cowbell hanging over the front door jangled and a young man entered. He was ordinary for the time and place, dirty jeans and a denim shirt with a greasy baseball cap. To this day I remember the way the bill of that cap had been creased and the name of the seeds advertised on the front. I’d like to say that the eyes gave him away but those too were unremarkable. I knew, though, as soon as his boots squeaked across the hardwood floor, he was there for trouble. My insides felt still and nervous at the same time, as butterflies fluttered across my stomach. The man walked to the rear of the store and grabbed a six-pack of beer. As he returned to the front I tottered my way to the other side of the candy rack, some portion of my cerebellum already wired to seek cover.

  By the time he reached the counter, he had a firearm drawn, an old Colt .45, a John Wayne gun. After that, things moved slowly, like they were underwater. There were shouts and yelling and hard, strange movements from the adults. My father stepped back, looking for me but keeping his eye on the robber. The owner held his hands up as the man grabbed money from the register. Daddy dragged me to the rear of the store, away from the danger at the front. It became very quiet; the only sound I was aware of was our feet scuffling on the floor as we made our way down the aisle. I had a clear view of the man with the gun. The hammer cocking back sounded like a piece of dry kindling breaking on a cold morning. The sound of the gun firing was loud and soft at the same time, kind of like the feeling I had in my stomach when the man entered the store. There was no mistaking the thumb-size hole that appeared in the owner’s chest and the way he fell backward into the rack of cigarettes. After that, I don’t remember much.

  My skin was clammy and those same butterflies skittered in my diaphragm when I walked out of Aaron Young’s office. The street felt different than when I had entered, only twenty minutes before. There were fewer people milling about. Those that were out weren’t smiling anymore. They kept their eyes down and hurried along. Before I could reach the parking lot, Nolan pulled my truck up to the curb. She rolled down the passenger’s window. “Get in.”

  I complied and she drove away. “Two Cadillacs been making the circuit for the last few minutes. Four people in each one. All the windows rolled down.” She had a revolver resting in her lap. “They’ve been checking out this truck.”

  “When’s the last time they went by?” I pulled my Browning from its holster.

  “About thirty seconds ago.” She stopped for a light. “There. In the next block. There’s one of them.” A ten-year-old Seville, dented and colored half gray and half rust, idled in front of a liquor store fifty yards ahead. The tires were new, bigger than normal for a car that size. Nolan put one hand on her gun and said, “How do want to do this?”

  “I want to get the hell out of here is how I want to do this.”

  “Okay then.” The light changed and she punched the accelerator. “Hang on.” We blew past the Cadillac at forty miles per hour. At fifty we hit a pothole and our heads banged the roof of the truck. The Seville followed on our tail, no more than two car lengths behind. The driver avoided the potholes that we seemed to hit. Nolan swerved to miss a battered Pontiac and almost collided with two small children crossing the street. “You want me to hit a side street, see if I can lose them?” She held on to the wheel with both hands. We were going sixty, as fast as we could on a narrow, cluttered roadway.

  I looked back at the pursuing car. “This is their turf, we’d be goners on the back streets.” So far the occupants of the Seville hadn’t flashed any artillery, just given chase. We entered a stretch of Second Avenue where there was nothing, just vacant land pockmarked every few hundred yards with the occasional abandoned building. “Keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe they’re just trying to run us out of their neighborhood.” I didn’t believe that even as I said it.

  “I think we’re gonna need a new option.” Nolan’s voice made me turn back around, just in time to see the front windshield star-burst from a bullet. The second Cadillac, an early eighties Coupe deVille, blocked the road ahead. I could just make out a figure in the backseat, poking a handgun out the window. I saw a flash and heard a pop but the bullet went wild.

  “Hold tight,” Nolan said, her teeth clenched. Before I could respond or grab anything, she stood on the brakes and jerked the wheel around. Pickups aren’t Porsches and balk at moves like that. Mine was no exception. We went up on two wheels before plopping back down. The force of the impact knocked me into Nolan so that my head was in her lap. I figured that was what saved my life because the next shot from the Coupe hit the rear windshield, right where my skull would have been.

  “Hope you don’t mind if
I stay down for a while. It’s a little dicey up top.”

  A horn sounded and Nolan wrenched the steering wheel. Her elbow hit me in the ear. “How about you get up here and do something constructive, like shoot back.”

  “How am I supposed to aim, with you driving like this?” I sat up and punched out the rest of the rear window. Wind whipped through the cab of the truck as the two Caddies raced behind us. We were about to be out of the deserted section of Second Avenue and back where we started. The Seville led and a hand holding a pistol snaked out of the passenger-side window. Two flashes but both shots missed. I steadied my right arm as best possible and let loose four rounds in quick succession, aiming for the radiator. Good luck shined upon us because a cloud of steam billowed from the front of the car. The engine seized and they pulled to the side. “That’s one down.”

  With a screech of the tires, we were on two wheels again, turning left onto a side street. I slammed into the passenger’s door, where my bruised cheek connected with the glass.

  “Traffic up ahead. Didn’t have a choice,” Nolan said. The street was narrower than Second Avenue, lined now with small houses. Cars and trees speckled both sides of the road. Nolan slowed down to about fifty, still way too fast. It was a matter of time before we wrecked. The Cadillac followed but not as closely. We blew past a sky blue house on a corner, the trim a fresh white. A thirty-year-old Chevy sat in the driveway with an old man behind the wheel, adjusting his seat belt before driving off. As we passed, he eased the antique into the street. The Seville hit the gas and tried to make it, but got clipped by the Chevy. It wobbled, sideswiping the cars on either side of the street. We gained ground, rounded a curve, and were out of sight of the car.

  “Make a turn,” I said. “Let’s lose ’em.”

  Nolan hung a right, then immediately another right. I was looking out the rear window so I didn’t understand why she had stopped. “Why are you—” I turned around and saw the dead end.