by Ed Gorman
The raccoon was still jabbering as I surveyed the place. The exterior of the cabin was brown-painted sheets of plywood. A large window had been cut into the front of it, exposing the darkened interior.
Somebody, probably during one of Richie’s notorious parties, had torn the door off the outhouse. Nobody was sitting in there reading Playboy in the dark.
Night birds and the sad solemn cry of an owl. The raccoon had fallen into a peeved silence. Screw them if they didn’t want to answer back.
I wanted to make sure that nobody was around before I approached the door. It looked safe. I walked through the grassy space that served as yard. Before I touched anything, I slipped on the brown cotton gardening gloves I’d bought earlier at the A&P. Not for nothing was I a reader of hard-boiled paperbacks.
Despite the cool night breeze that carried the smell of pine, I felt myself sweating. Something was wrong here. I’d learned never to make assumptions, but I couldn’t ignore the subconscious warning signals my body was sending me.
I reminded myself of my earlier decision. If the door was locked, I wouldn’t go in. And I was assuming the door would be locked, what with all the expensive photography equipment inside.
I stabbed a finger at a piece of mid-level door and damned if the pine slab didn’t swing inward.
The gods had decided.
Before going in, I played the light across the first few feet of scuffed and cracked linoleum inside. No evidence of blood.
I went in and played the beam across the destruction that somebody pretty angry had left behind. Neville’s cabin was usually orderly. I’d done some legal work for him and he’d let me fish off his small pier. But the cabin was orderly no longer.
Neville’s pride was his collection of blues records from the thirties and forties. Seventy-eight rpms and forty-fives, flung, broken, and smashed, lying across the debris that had once been a couch. A stuffed armchair, a nine-inch TV, as well as books, magazines, ashtrays, beer cans, Pepsi bottles, and smashed framed photos that had probably meant something to Neville littered the floor.
You always see rooms tossed on the silver screen. What you don’t get is the violence of it, the jagged pieces of glass, the splintered thrusts of wood, and the stench of various liquids mixed together.
The beam revealed the chaos that extended from inside the front door to Neville’s “church,” as he called it. His darkroom. He was a local photographer of weddings, rodeos, and various civic and cultural events. People admired his work and he was always in demand.
I worked my leery way across the cabin, stumbling here, tripping there. The darkroom ran the length of the far wall. The door stood open.
The darkroom was more of a mess than the living area. An enlarger, a print washer, a print dryer, several lenses, a negative carrier, pans, and numerous other darkroom fixtures had been hurled to the floor. The chemical stench filled my nostrils.
Time to get out of here.
I’d just about worked my way across the rubble to the front door when car headlights swept across the front of the cabin.
Company had arrived.
The slight man who emerged from the white Valiant sedan was maybe thirty. He was dressed in the kind of tight dark suit you saw in dance clubs where everybody did the twist—the slash pockets, the pegged pants, and the porkpie hat that the better grade of Chicago hood was wearing this year—and he was altogether as sleek as a stiletto.
But the shades were the startling part of his ensemble. Who the hell wore sunglasses out in the country at night? He leaned in through the open car window and doused his lights and cut off the engine. But he left the shades on.
I stayed inside, hiding. I wanted to see who he was and why he was here. This time when I took a quick look out the window, I saw he’d added one more piece to his outfit. A .45 that he’d just slid out of a shoulder holster.
This was Black River Falls, Iowa, where the worst violence we generally have is limited to high school kids getting into shoving matches after football games with fans of rival teams and engaging in that favorite working-class pastime, bar fights.
A gun?
I decided to step into the door frame rather than wait for him in here. Scare him less than if I was lurking inside the cabin.
I held up the badge I got as a court investigator. “I need you to identify yourself.”
“Shit,” he said.
He was turning and running back to his car before I was able to speak even one more syllable.
He ground the ignition key until the motor exploded into life and then he backed up like a bullet, never turning the lights on. His tires found the gravel road and he fishtailed away with his porkpie hat, and the .45 I doubted he had the legal right to carry. I took my nickel notebook from my back pocket and wrote down the number of his Illinois plates.
I was walking to my car when I heard the whimpering in a wooded area west of the cabin. A dog. I remembered Neville’s beautiful little border collie. Princess had one of those sweet faces that you want to carry in your wallet for emergencies. When the blues get bad, her face could help you get through.
The wooded patch was so dark I couldn’t see anything resembling a path. I let her voice guide me into maybe three feet of undergrowth and then into the woods itself. A half dozen creatures crashed away from me in the bramble. Princess’s whimpering never wavered.
The mournful sound of it scared me. I was afraid of what her voice was leading me to.
And it turned out my instinct was right. I had a damn good reason to be afraid.
TWO
“THIS MUST BE LUCY’S BOYFRIEND,” Police Chief Cliffie Sykes said after arriving at Neville’s cabin. “The Negro kid who was seeing Lucy Williams.” He raised his flashlight high enough so that the edge of the beam washed across my face. “Or didn’t you think I knew about that? I bet the judge and the senator sure didn’t want that to get around.”
It’s hard to say which of us Cliffie hates worse, the judge or me. Probably Judge Whitney because he knows that she represents all he and his kin will never be—intelligent, reasonably open-minded, and eager to serve the greater good, the latter stemming not from virtue so much as simple patrician obligation. The best dukes always took care of the peasants.
This particular branch of the Whitney family fled New York due to a bank scandal created by the judge’s grandfather. They came to what was little more than a hamlet and created the town of Black River Falls. They frequently took the train back to New York for a few weeks at a time. I imagine they needed respite from the yokels, my people. Various Whitneys served in all the meaningful town and county offices and ruled, for the most part, wisely and honestly.
But then the Sykes family made a fortune after winning some government construction contracts. They were rich and dangerous. And they moved fast. Before anybody quite understood what was going on, the Sykeses had planted their own kin in most of the important political offices. Within two election cycles all that was left of the Whitney clan was the judge’s office.
She hired me for a simple reason. She wanted to do her best to humiliate Cliffie. Whenever a major crime occurred, she put me on the case. After law school I’d gone back and taken night-school courses in criminology and police science, something, it is safe to say, that neither Cliffie nor his hapless staff had ever done.
We usually identified the culprit—bank robber, burglar, arsonist, and the occasional murderer—before Cliffie did. And thus the animus.
“Somebody had it in for these two,” Cliffie said.
About that, he wasn’t wrong. I’d found two bodies in the woods, Neville and the Negro whose name, Cliffie assured me, was David Leeds. Neville had been shot in the face twice. Leeds had been shot in the neck.
A voice from behind us said: “You think he was sleeping with her, Chief?”
The one and only Deputy Earle Whitmore, who said, on local radio, that if “those freedom marchers ever come up here,” he wouldn’t just use dogs and water hoses, he’d tur
n poison gas on them. Even for Cliffie that had been a bit much. Earle the Pearl had been forced to apologize to “the law-abidin’ colored people of Black River Falls who know to not stir up no trouble lessen they get trouble right back.” Probably not the apology Cliffie had in mind but it was better than the threat of poison gas.
“I just hate the idea of a colored man gettin’ together with a white gal,” Earle went on. “Makes me just want to go over to them bushes and puke my guts out.”
“Straight from the KKK handbook,” I said.
“Watch your mouth, Earle,” Cliffie said, “or McCain here’ll run and tell everybody what you said.”
“Can’t a man speak his mind?”
“Earle, goddammit, shut up—and I mean it.”
A few months ago Cliffie, in an act of true bravery, had hauled two people from a burning car. He not only got written up admiringly by Stan at the paper, he’d even been interviewed on television. Even though most people still thought him incompetent as a police chief, they no longer laughed about him as a joke. The way he was treating Earle tonight indicated that he was enjoying his well-earned admiration.
“In fact, Earle, go back there and direct some of that traffic that’s comin’ in here all of a sudden.”
Earle stomped away, angry.
“You better watch yourself around him,” Cliffie said. “He don’t like you much.”
“I noticed that.”
“But most people—a colored kid and a white girl—I don’t like it myself.”
The medical examiner came then. He wore his usual black topcoat, black fedora, black leather gloves. He carried a black leather medical bag, the type Jack the Ripper dragged around Whitechapel in the fog.
The TV crew had brought enough lights to illuminate a long stretch of woods. The light was almost as lurid as the corpses themselves, that too-harsh glare you see in crime lab photos.
“How come you were out here tonight, McCain?”
“Neville was my client.”
“I suppose it’s gonna be that attorney-client privilege thing.”
“Afraid so.”
“Did he know this Negro?”
“I don’t have any idea. He never mentioned him, anyway.”
“Judge know about this yet?”
“Not as far as I know. Haven’t called her, anyway.”
He nodded. “There’s gonna be a lot of press on this. That’s all you can see on the news these days. Negro this and Negro that. Personally, the government never did a damn thing for me, but if they want to live off the government, I guess that’s up to them.” Then: “I don’t want you working on this case. I’m gonna find the killer and I’m gonna throw him in jail.”
The New Cliff Sykes. He was now looking to score a double public relations coup. Pull two people from a burning car and then solve a racial murder.
“I can’t promise you that.”
“Well, then I can’t promise you that I won’t throw your ass in jail. There’re a lot of laws against interfering with a police investigation.”
“Yeah? Name one.”
He spluttered. This was the old Cliffie, not the new, composed, beloved Cliffie. Well, beloved goes a wee bit too far, I guess.
“I don’t pretend to be a lawyer. I never had the advantages you did.”
Much as I didn’t feel like laughing with two young men lying dead at my feet, I couldn’t help it. “No offense, but your old man owns this town. He could’ve sent you to Harvard if he’d wanted to.”
Then I laughed again for picturing Cliffie storming around the Harvard campus, picking fights wherever he went.
“I’ve given you fair warning, McCain. And I’m going to put it in writing, too. I’m going to write you a letter and I’m going to keep the carbon. So when I take you to court, I’ll have the evidence.”
Four reporters had just spied Cliffie and were hurrying over. Superman had nothing on our esteemed police chief. Clark Kent had to go into phone booths to change. Cliffie could swell up into the hero he’d recently become with virtually no effort at all. And he could do it standing in place.
One of the reporters said, “Do you think the March on Washington is going to inspire this kind of violence?”
Three days from now there was going to be a march on Washington, D.C., that the Kennedy administration was only reluctantly going along with. The national press was obsessed with it. Any local story that had any element of race in it was an excuse to bring it up. There was one hero in the land, at least for me: Dr. Martin Luther King. Despite J. Edgar Hoover’s predictable warning that the march would be filled with “communists and agitators,” Dr. King’s hopes for the march buoyed everybody who believed that race had to be dealt with seriously for the first time since Reconstruction. The march was discussed on radio, TV, at picnics, family meals, church gatherings, fancy bars, blue-collar bars, everywhere. The topic was inescapable.
So of course, as the reporters gathered around him, Cliffie said, “Just what march on Washington are you boys talking about?”
The chest expanded. The campaign hat that was the same tan as the khaki uniform was tilted a more dramatic angle. And of course, his right hand dropped to the handle of his holstered handgun.
Slap leather, pardner.
As I walked back to my car, I heard one of the reporters say, “You mean you haven’t heard about the March on Washington, Chief?”
The grounds were getting crowded. The gathering of ghouls had already begun. The triple features at the drive-in weren’t that hot tonight, why not drive out and stand around a murder scene instead? True, nobody sold popcorn out here, but there was the chance you would get to glimpse a real true corpse. You wouldn’t see nothing like that at no drive-in. No chance.
“you sure you don’t want no wine, Sam? It’s the good stuff. That Mogen David.”
Cy (for Cyrus) Langtry claimed he wasn’t sure how old he was. He came up here with his grandmother, who had been a slave in Georgia before the war. He had spent most of his fifty years in Black River Falls as a janitor, first at city hall and later at the grade school. I imagined he was at least in his mid-seventies.
I went directly to his place from the cabin where the murders had taken place. He’d known David Leeds well. I wanted to be the one to tell him.
Anytime the temperature was above fifty-five you saw Cy on the front porch of his one-story stucco house so close to the river that, as Cy liked to joke, he could probably fish out his back window if he wanted to.
At night he played records. His vision was so bad television was wasted on him. He’d sit on this thronelike rocker, in a white T-shirt, brown cardigan sweater, and gray work trousers. He usually wore sandals with no socks. He was now a shrunken little man with a raspy laugh and a thick pair of glasses that did him no good at all. I was never sure why he wore them. Next to him on the floor he kept his Mogen David and two glasses, the second one for any guest who might drop by.
When I pulled up, he was playing his favorite singer, Nat “King” Cole. Cy liked to tell the story of how back before the war he used to go to Moline, Illinois, some weekends to see Cole play when he’d make a Midwestern swing of the better cafes.
I’d been around him all my life without ever really knowing him, until two years ago when the city tried to claim eminent domain and seize his property for some sort of warehouse. His daughter, who lived closer to town than Cy did, came to me and asked if I’d represent him for what she could afford to pay me. The way eminent domain is frequently used has always pissed me off. The rich get their way. I took it on for free, not because I was such a swell guy but because I didn’t like the idea of kicking Cy out of the home where he’d lived with his wife and kids for so long.
Sarah, Cy’s daughter, got to know David Leeds when he’d been going through her neighborhood one day looking for yard work. She’d taken him out to Cy’s place a few times. David loved listening to Cy’s stories. And, as Sarah said, he didn’t seem to mind the free wine, either. Cy always kidd
ed David about all the jobs he did to support his college habit. Yard work, car-washing on Saturdays, farm work when he could get it, and employment as a dance instructor a few nights a week. That was the one Cy couldn’t get over. But David was a good-looking kid, he had that big-city patina about him, and he worked for a studio that taught all the dances on American Bandstand, while ballroom dancing and the like were left to Arthur Murray.
The plan was for David to sleep on Cy’s couch all summer. There was a big detasselling operation that worked out of town here. Detasselling paid better than even factory jobs and you damned well earned it. I detasselled for two summers and I rarely had dates. Too tired even on the weekends I didn’t work.
“You sound kinda funny tonight, Sam.”
“Guess I’ll have some of that wine.”
“Help yourself.”
I did, downing half a glass of it in a single gulp. Bombs away.
Crickets and river splashing on rocks and lonesome half-moon and the sound of distant ghost trains.
I spent a minute or so trying to figure out how to tell Cy about it, and then I just said, “Somebody murdered David tonight, Cy.”
I don’t know how I expected him to react. He rocked back and forth. He said nothing, then “Figured it’d be something like that, the way you sounded, so funny and all.”
“I’m sorry. I’m going to find them.”
“You sound like Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke.”
“I’m not tough, Cy. You know that. But I can get things done when I need to.”
“Whites killed him.”
“Probably.”
“Bastards.”
I had never heard him use language like that. It shocked me because it came from him and then saddened me because I heard the tears that overcame the rage in those words.
“Bastards.” A lifetime of anger, frustration, humiliation, fear, and ruined hopes in that single word.
The night birds had never sounded more mordant as we sat in the terrible echoes of that single word, of all the sorrow in that single word.
“He wasn’t perfect. Drank too much. Ran around with white girls too much. He even tole me one night we was helping ourselves to the jug here about how he pulled off a couple robberies back in Chicago. But that don’t give no white bastard the right to kill him.”
