by Ross Thomas
Quickly, the two attendants loaded the whimpering Morze onto the wheeled stretcher. I moved over to Jones and helped him up. “You’d better go with him,” I said. Jones nodded and grimaced at the pain as he stood on his wounded leg.
“Here,” I said, and took his left arm and draped it around my shoulder. We moved slowly out of the house, past the four cops, and into the crowd which by now numbered at least a thousand. It was a sullen, too quiet crowd. They pressed in close to the wheeled stretcher and there were some gasps and oh mys when those near enough caught sight of Morze’s bloody, blinded face. I helped Jones limp close behind the stretcher.
Morze suddenly popped upright and screamed: “Nick! I can’t see, Nick! Where’s Nick?” Then he collapsed on the stretcher as I helped Jones to kneel down by him.
“I’m here, Bill,” Jones said softly. The man on the stretcher nodded and stared wildly about with his sightless eyes. “You gotta do some thing, Nick, you gotta do something for me.” He said that loudly enough for those who pressed close to hear it.
“Come here,” Morze said, “come here, Nick.”
I helped Jones go closer. “You gotta do it, Nick.”
“Whatever you say, Bill.”
Then he whispered his dying request and there were only two who heard it, Nick the Nigger and me. “Burn it, Nick, burn the fucking place down.” Then William Morze whimpered once more and died.
I helped Jones rise. He looked at the crowd of dark faces that encircled him. “What he say, Nick?” one large black man demanded. “What Saint Billy tell you t’do?”
The word spread quickly through the crowd—Saint Billy done told Nick what to do. Other voices near the stretcher started demanding the instructions. Nick the Nigger looked around carefully at the encircling black faces. Then he looked at me and smiled faintly. “This one’s for you, Dye.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” I said.
“Help me over to that one,” he said, indicating the large black who had first asked what Morze’s final request had been. I helped him over. He looked at the man for several moments. The man stared back patiently.
“You want to know what Bill said?”
“We gotta know,” the man said.
Nick the Nigger nodded several times, not taking his gaze from the man’s face. “Bill said cool it. That’s all. Just cool it.”
I helped Jones limp the rest of the way to the ambulance. The word had already flashed through the crowd and it was beginning to disperse by the time I helped him into the rear of the ambulance where he sat next to the dead William Morze.
“We’re even now, Dye,” Jones said, just before they closed the doors.
“We always were,” I said.
CHAPTER 42
By three o’clock that Friday afternoon Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux was pounding on Necessary’s desk and demanding that Swankerton’s police force be withdrawn from Niggertown. “They got the First National for fifty thousand,” Robineaux yelled and slammed his fist down on the desk for the ninth time in forty seconds. “Fifty thousand!” he yelled, “and it was forty-eight goddamned minutes before a cop showed up. Forty-eight minutes!”
Necessary leaned back in his chair with his feet propped up on the desk. He nodded at the mayor. “The FBI’s looking into it,” he said. “They’re pretty good at bank robberies. I think they catch about half of them.” He looked at me. “Or is it a third?”
“I think it’s half,” I said.
The mayor sputtered and pounded the desk again. “You got a crime wave going on, Necessary! A goddamned crime wave!” Boo Robineaux, the mayor’s son, looked up from his copy of The Berkeley Barb and smiled at his father. A little contemptuously, I thought.
Necessary took his feet down from the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “Now you can take your pick, Mayor,” he said coldly. “You can have yourself a full scale race riot that can wreck this town or you can put up with a few extra holdups.”
“A few!” Robineaux yelled, his face taking on an apoplectic shade of red. “You call eighty-nine armed holdups a few?”
“Better than watching the whole town burn,” Necessary said and put his feet back on the desk.
“Listen to me, Necessary. Listen to me now! If you don’t get those men out of Niggertown within the hour and back to protecting life and property over here, you won’t be wearing that badge by sundown.” The mayor pounded his fist on the desk again. “I’ll have your ass, by Christ, I will!”
“Who you working for now, Boo?” I said.
The mayor’s son jerked a thumb at his father. “It,” he said.
“Well, now, Mayor, just calm down a little,” Necessary said. “As soon as the feelings about old man Morze’s death sort of simmer down over in Niggertown, I’ll call the men back.”
“Goddamn it, Necessary,” the mayor yelled, “there ain’t no trouble in Niggertown! The trouble’s all over here.”
“I’m exercising my professional judgment, Mayor Robineaux,” Necessary said coldly. “Law and order is my business—not yours.”
Robineaux pranced over to the black tinted window and waved at it. “Look out there! They’re robbing the fucking city blind and you sit there and call it law and order!”
The idea had come to Necessary on our way back from Morze’s house. When he was through explaining it to me, I turned to him and said: “Homer, Orcutt would have been proud of you.” I’d never seen Necessary look happier.
At nine o’clock that morning he canceled all leaves and ordered ninety-five percent of the Swankerton police force into Niggertown. They patrolled it—every square block of it—on foot and in cars. By eleven o’clock they had made two arrests. Doris Emerson, twenty-three, was booked for soliciting. Miles Camerstane, thirty-seven, was taken in for drunk and disorderly.
On a normal day the white section of Swankerton experienced between two and three armed robberies. By eleven o’clock that Friday morning, forty-six had been reported—not including the First National Bank which had been hit by a lone white gunman with a stocking mask over his face.
In Niggertown, the citizens strolled along the sidewalk and goodmawnined and lifted their hats to the patrolling police. And then they smiled broadly and used their hands to stifle their giggles. By noon, the frustrated cops were looking for jaywalkers without much luck. Niggertown had cooled it.
Necessary yawned when Robineaux, his eyes bulging, once more crashed his fist down on the desk and screamed: “You’re fired, goddammit!”
“Pete, you know you can’t fire me,” Necessary said calmly. “The city council’s got to do that—a majority. And I understand that most of them are partying over in New Orleans.”
“Throw him out,” I said. “You’re wasting your breath.”
“By God, I think you’re right.” Necessary buzzed for Lieutenant Ferkaire who popped in looking harassed and a little forlorn. “Show the mayor out, Lieutenant,” Necessary said.
“I’m not going,” Robineaux said and took a tight grip on the edge of Necessary’s desk.
“Throw him out.”
“The mayor, sir?”
“The mayor.”
“The press is out there, Chief.”
“Fine. He can make a statement on his way out.”
Ferkaire approached the mayor and tentatively put a hand on his arm. “If you’ll just step this way, sir.”
“I said throw him out, Ferkaire. You’re a cop, not a goddamned wedding usher.”
Ferkaire looked first at the mayor who still clung to the desk, then at Necessary who glowered at him, and then at me. “Throw him out,” I said.
There was a brief struggle, but not much of one. Ferkaire got a hammerlock on the mayor and marched him across the room. “I’ll get your ass for this, Necessary,” Robineaux yelled. “I’ll get both of you for this!”
“Get the door for your father, will you, Boo?” I said.
“My pleasure,” Boo said, opened the door, and made a low sweeping bow as his father was frog-marched from the
room.
“Thanks,” Boo said to me.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. And then, because I’d promised myself that I would, I said: “How’d you get those scars on your face?”
Boo nodded his head at the closed door. “Him. He did it to me when I was twelve. With an old piece of chain.”
“For what?”
“For what do you think? For jerking off in the bathroom, what else?”
“What else,” I said as he closed the door behind him.
Ferkaire popped back into the office and stared around, a little panicky, I felt. “You got any coffee out there?” Necessary asked him.
“He’s making a statement to them,” Ferkaire said. “They got pictures of me throwing him out and now he’s making a statement to them.”
“I think I’ll have a drink instead,” Necessary said.
“I’ll join you,” I said.
“What’U I do with them?” Ferkaire asked.
Necessary poured Scotch into two glasses before he answered. “Send them in here about five minutes from now,” he said. “I’ll have a statement.” Ferkaire nodded and went out quickly.
Necessary walked over and handed me a drink. “I can’t keep them out there in Niggertown much longer,” he said.
“You probably won’t have to.”
“When do you think Schoemeister will try it?”
“It could be any time now.”
“You think it was Luccarella who got Nick and old man Morze?”
I shrugged. “Luccarella or Schoemeister. Does it matter?”
“I guess not,” Necessary said. “I thought he’d stay in the hotel though. He’d’ve been smarter to stay in the hotel.”
“You mean Luccarella?”
“Yeah. Luccarella.”
“No back way out,” I said. “That’s why he moved to that old house of Lynch’s.”
Necessary took a long swallow of his drink and smiled. “Well,” he said, “we found what we were looking for anyway.”
“What?”
“Something to stir it up with.”
“You mean the long enough spoon?”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s only one thing wrong with it,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s a little longer than I’d counted on.”
There was no reason to be polite to the press anymore and Necessary wasn’t. A dozen reporters crowded into the office and we ignored them until the television cameras were ready.
“This live?” Necessary asked.
“That’s right.”
“I got a statement to make.”
“We want to ask you some questions, Chief. Why did you throw Mayor Robineaux out of your office?”
“What’s your name, sonny?” Necessary asked his questioner, a prominent local TV personality. It hurt his feelings. “Campbell,” he said. “Don Campbell.”
“Well, Don Campbell, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to throw you out just like I did the mayor.”
Two newspapermen and a wire-service reporter tittered.
Campbell whirled quickly to his camera and sound men. “You get all that? Did that go out?”
“We’re getting you right now, stupid,” the cameraman said.
Necessary stood up behind his desk. “I have a statement. It’s not prepared, but I’ll make it and then you can ask some questions.” He cleared his throat and stared into the lens of the nearest camera. “Through the efforts of the men of this police department, the city of Swankerton has been spared the horror of a serious riot. The brutal murder of William Morze could have provoked a tragic disturbance— the kind they have up North. It didn’t. And we can thank the good common sense of our colored population—and the efforts of Swankerton’s policemen—that it didn’t. I would like to announce that we know who the killers of William Morze are. They will be arrested within a few hours. In the meantime, law and order will prevail in Swankerton.” Necessary started to sit back down, but instead came back to the microphone, said “Thank you,” and then he sat down.
“Why did you throw the mayor out of your office?” Campbell asked.
“The mayor is ill. He was helped out of my office.”
“He said that he was going to have you fired.”
“Like I said, the mayor is ill and isn’t responsible for what he says. Next question.”
“How long have you known who killed William Morze?”
“Not long.”
“Can you reveal their identity?”
“No.”
“How many armed robberies have been committed in the white section of Swankerton today?”
“More than usual.”
“How many?”
“The last figure we had was one hundred three.”
“Jesus Christ!” a wire-service man said.
“Would you call that a crime wave, Chief?”
“I would, but I’d rather have a crime wave than a race riot and that was the choice we had to make.”
“What’s been the total take so far?”
Necessary looked at me. “Close to a quarter of a million,” I said.
The wire-service man said Jesus Christ again.
“The mayor says you’re more interested in protecting blacks than you are in protecting whites and their property.”
“The mayor’s sick,” Necessary said.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Ask his psychiatrist.”
“Has he got one?”
“If he doesn’t, he should.”
“He says he’s going to call the National Guard in.”
Necessary smiled and circled his ear with a finger. I watched the cameras zoom in on that for a close-up and then I rose and said, “That’s it, gentlemen. The press conference is over.”
“Hey, Dye,” a wire-service man called to me, “You think the mayor’s nutty?”
“As peanut brittle.”
“Can I use that?”
“I hope you do,” I said.
It was nearly 5 P.M. before the call came from our man who was watching the Lee-Davis Hotel. “They’re coming out now,” he said, his voice tinny over Necessary’s desk telephone speaker.
“How many?” Necessary asked.
“I counted thirteen.”
“Schoemeister with them?” Necessary said.
“He’s in the first car. They got three cars.”
“Okay,” Necessary said.
“You want me to follow them?”
“No,” Necessary said. “We know where they’re going.”
He switched off the speaker and looked at me. “How long’s it take to get from the Lee-Davis to that old house of Lynch’s?”
“Fifteen minutes,” I said. “Maybe sixteen.”
He nodded. “You’d better tell Ferkaire that I want every ambulance in town there in forty-five minutes.”
“When’ll we get there?” I said.
“When do you think?”
“In about forty-five minutes,” I said.
Carol Thackerty came in a quarter of an hour later and told me: “I didn’t know any place else to go.” She looked at Necessary. “I saw you on television, Homer. You came over well.”
“I know,” Necessary said. “Sincere.”
“Extremely,” she said.
“I wonder if it’ll go network?” he asked.
“Why?” I said.
“Well, I’d just sort of like the wife to see it.”
The second call came from a plainclothes detective that we’d stationed in a house across the street from the Victorian one that Ramsey Lynch had once occupied. It was now home for Giuseppe Luccarella and nearly two dozen assorted friends.
Necessary turned on his desk telephone speaker again. “Okay, Matthews,” he said. “We just want you to tell us what you see—not what you guess. I’m not going to interrupt with any questions except this one: You know what Schoemeister looks like?”
“He’s the one with the mustache and the funny
looking lips.”
“That’s right. It’s all yours now.”
“Well, there’s not a hell of a lot to see. Sometimes one of them will come out on the porch and look around and then go back inside. I figure that there’re maybe a couple of dozen of them in there—at least that’s what I counted since I’ve been here and that’s been since ten this morning. Luccarella got here about noon, I guess. I haven’t seen him since. Wait a minute. There’re some cars coming down the street now—three of them. They’ve stopped in front of the house now. About four guys in each car—maybe five in the back one.
“It looks like Schoemeister in the front car getting out on my side. Two guys are getting out with him. One of them’s got what looks like a pillowcase. He’s waving it around and he seems to be yelling something at the house. Let me get the window open and maybe I can hear what he’s yelling.”
We could hear Matthews’ grunts over the phone speaker as he tried to open what must have been a stubborn window.
“I got it,” he said. “He’s yelling for Luccarella to come out. That they want to talk. The pillowcase must be some kind of a truce flag or something. Anyway, they’re still waving it. Now somebody’s coming out of the house—a baldheaded guy. He’s carrying some kind of white handkerchief or something. He’s yelling something about halfway— that they’ll meet halfway.
“I guess that’s okay with everybody. The door to the house is opening and it looks like Luccarella—let me get the glasses on him. Yeah, it’s Luccarella. Schoemeister’s moving around his car now—the two guys with him. One of them’s carrying the pillowcase. They’re on the sidewalk now and Luccarella’s at the porch’s screen door.”
We heard it then. It was the long crack of a submachine gun. “Oh Jesus Christ Goddamn sonofabitch!” Matthews moaned over the speaker. “Jesus Christ! Oh, God!”
“Quit praying and tell it!” Necessary snapped.
“They shot ‘em. They shot all three of them. Luccarella dove back through the door and they used a submachine gun and they got all three of them. I mean Schoemeister and the guy with the pillowcase and the other one. Schoemeister’s guys are firing at the house now and a couple of them are dragging Schoemeister back to the car. The one with the pillowcase is crawling back. They shot the baldheaded one on the steps. He was one of Luccarella’s. I think he’s dead. I know goddamned well Schoemeister is. They’re dragging him into the car and still firing at the house. Aw, Christ.”
