“Oh, he wasn’t home at all last night,” she replied involuntarily, the sound of sobbing in her voice.
Returning from the kitchen with the glass of poison concealed in a handkerchief at his side, the second detective winked. Neither questioned her further until they had escorted her to the police car. Then before starting the motor, the first detective asked: “Wasn’t your husband the young fellow who claimed he was assaulted by deputy sheriffs a short time ago?”
“Oh, that was what started everything,” she sobbed. “He was beaten awfully.”
“Never was anything done about it, was there?”
“He couldn’t prove anything, but he knew who did it.”
“Yes, that’s it,” the other detective said musingly. “A thing like that can start a man to brooding, especially when he feels he’s the victim of an injustice.”
“Oh, it was awful,” she related. “It changed his whole attitude.”
“You mean affected his mind?”
“Not so much his mind. It seemed to take the run out of him. No one could do anything and then the man with him lied about it. He didn’t seem to care about anything after that—” The sobbing suddenly overwhelmed her and she cried: “Oh, Lee!—Won’t you please take me to him now?” she begged.
They drove out Exposition in the early sunrise, and the detective in back with her continued softly: “It’s too bad he got mixed up with those Communists. That won’t do him any good.”
“Oh, what has he done? What was he shot about?”
“We don’t know yet. He turned up at the hospital with a bullet in his shoulder, and we haven’t got him to say who shot him yet.”
“She shot him! I told him she would try to hurt him!”
“You mean the white girl?”
“She didn’t want him! She never wanted him! All she wanted was just to use him. Oh, Lee, you’re such a fool,” she said, sobbing.
“Is that what you and him were arguing about?”
“We didn’t argue. He wasn’t at home.” She began crying as if her heart was breaking all over again. “He’d gone back to her.”
“Did his buddy Luther tell you where he was?”
“Oh, Luther wasn’t his friend. He hated Luther.”
“Almost as much as he hated the deputies who beat him up, eh?”
“Oh, he didn’t want to kill Luther. He just despised him.”
“But he sure would have killed those deputy sheriffs who sapped up on him?”
“Oh, he didn’t really want to hurt them. He was just so torn up all inside.”
“So he got Luther to help him?”
She turned her tear-filled eyes on him in a puzzled look. “Luther?”
“Then when he came home and asked you to help him get away, you didn’t know about his deal with Luther?”
“Deal with Luther—”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, I haven’t seen him since I went after him.”
“At the white girl’s?”
“He came out and took me home.”
“That was when he pulled his knife on you?”
“Oh, no! We didn’t fight. We were both too upset to fight.”
“He told you then?”
“He said he loved her. But I knew he didn’t mean it. He was so upset he didn’t know what he was saying.”
“He tell you what he was planning to do?”
“No, but I knew he was going back to her. I knew he was going to get hurt—Oh, Lee!”
“I see, that was night before last.”
“Night before last—” she said. It seemed a million years in the past.
“Then it was last night he came and asked you to help him get away?”
“He didn’t come home at all last night.”
“But you didn’t help him, did you? You told him to go back to the white woman and get her to help him, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t see him at all last night.”
“You knew she was going to turn him in, didn’t you? You knew that when you sent him back to her, didn’t you? It was just as if you’d turned him in yourself, wasn’t it?”
“Turned him in? Oh!” From the engulfing terror, her voice was smaller than a whisper. “What did he do?”
“He told you what he did,” the voice went on relentlessly.
“You’re confusing me!” she cried. “Oh, please, please tell me what has happened!”
“And you sent him to his death as surely as if you’d turned him in yourself.”
“Please!—please!—” she begged, as the world began to turn, drowning her in tears.
“Then after you did it, you couldn’t bear to think of what you’d done. So you tried to kill yourself.”
“Please!—”
“You’ve been afraid ever since they beat him that he’d kill one of them.”
And now the world was gone in sudden nausea.
When she came to, she was lying on a cot in the prison infirmary. The detectives and a policewoman stood about her.
“Mrs. Gordon, we are going to give you a chance to help your husband,” one of the detectives began again. “As you know, extenuating circumstances tending to prove temporary insanity do a lot of good in a murder defense.”
But now, even through her terror and exhaustion and the blind white headache burning out her mind, she realized that she had already talked too much. She made no reply.
“We want you to give a detailed account of your husband’s activity from the time he was attacked by unknown persons on the highway until last night.”
“But he didn’t come home at all last night,” she said, beginning again to sob.
“We know all about last night, Mrs. Gordon. What we are interested in now is what he did before last night.”
She closed her eyes and refused to answer.
“Do you want to help your husband?”
If they would only go away and give her time to think—
“So you still want to send him to his death?”
“Oh, no!”
“Then tell us what he did after these people beat him. After all, Mrs. Gordon, it’s not unnatural for a man to want vengeance.”
“Please give me a little time to think,” she begged.
“The boy goes up for arraignment in a few minutes, lady. There isn’t any time. Either you want to help him or you don’t want to help him. There’s nothing to think about.”
“I won’t make any statement until I’ve had time to think,” she whispered.
“Then we will hold you as an accomplice,” the detective said threateningly.
If it was only what you could do to me, she thought, it would not matter—
When it became apparent that she did not intend to speak, one of the detectives nodded to the policewoman, and with the other one left the room. Ruth was booked as a material witness and taken to a cell.
Chapter 29
SMITTY HAD NOT given up on Lee, nor had he taken Lee’s name from the payroll. For this he ran the risk of censure from the executive committee, but the risk was incidental—it was Lee who worried him.
Deep down Smitty felt a sense of responsibility for Lee Gordon. He liked Lee also, and to a great extent understood him. There was little he did not know of Lee Gordon’s likes and dislikes, resentments and enthusiasms, antagonisms and admirations, his sudden animosities and just as sudden altruisms, and their sources and compulsions. As he had tried to tell Lee once, he did not find the Negro as strange as he did disturbing.
His sympathy for Lee had no bounds. Just to watch Lee’s groping confusion tortured him, and many times Lee’s behavior caused him actual pain. When circumstances forced him to deny understanding of Lee’s attitude, when he fully understood but could not sanction it, he suffered a depressing sense of guilt.
As it happened at the time he had refused to take Lee’s side against Luther, when he had believed Lee’s story implicitly from the first. Watching the slow build-up of Lee’s distrust of hi
m following that incident was one of the tragedies of his life. But, goddamnit, Lee knew the Communists as well as he—how they were trying to get control of the union and fighting him underhandedly every step of the way. Lee must have been completely aware of the expediency of his stand. And yet he knew that Lee had condemned him for it.
Later, he had watched this distrust blossom into full contempt, simply because he had refused to commit political suicide by fighting down the line for Jackie Forks. Of course, he had known, as had everyone, that she was innocent. But Lee had singled him out as her defender, and in his mind demanded that he die for her. And when he had refused to do so nonsensical and impolitic a thing, Lee had gone to her defense himself, knowing full well there was nothing he could do.
He could understand Lee’s infatuation for the girl. He knew many white men with the same sexual curiosity concerning Negro women. But to these men it was simply a matter of going to bed with a Negro woman; while to Lee it seemed a matter of great importance—so much so that he had quit his job and deserted his wife for her. Nor did Smitty believe it was just because Lee loved the girl. No, it was the way that Lee must have her—not as just going to bed with a white woman, but as a mate, as the woman of his preference, with pride and honor and without shame, or not at all. And therefore he had felt compelled to defend her, even to the destruction of himself. Yet Smitty knew that it would be himself, Smitty, whom Lee Gordon would condemn in the end.
He was more puzzled than annoyed. What did Lee expect of people—that they take a stand and die at every minor crisis? But no sensible man could expect for one to make the stand alone and die without even beginning to accomplish that for which he died. Not even a Communist—an American Communist at that—would pick out a single millionaire, for instance, and condemn him for not giving up his millions while none other even contemplated doing so. Nor would it be of any benefit.
Yet, at every minor crisis, when a person failed to take a stand and make the supreme sacrifice, Lee quickly rejected them. It did not make good goddamn sense! No man would do it. Not even Lee himself—or would he?
These were the things about Lee that puzzled him: his seemingly headstrong bent for self-destruction against all reason and his blind revolt against injustice, yet as blind rejection of people working to rectify it. He could not understand how an intelligent Negro could reject and scorn and hold in contempt those who fought the Negro cause just because they did not die for it; or if they did die for it, how could he reject their memory because in some slight manner they had failed to live by it?
For example, there was the time when Lee had tried so hard to explain why the Negro worker must be given extraordinary privileges in order for him to attain ordinary equality. It was not so much that he had missed the point—he had seen quite clearly how this could be. But that a Negro, underprivileged to start, should ask in all sincerity to become overprivileged, seemed ridiculous, since they both knew that the attainment of simple equality and no more was itself an impossible goal.
And this was what he could not understand: a man fighting so blindly and desperately and dangerously toward a goal, and yet rejecting, denouncing, condemning each hand lifted to help him on his way—damning each slow step because he could not make it in one. That was it: if he couldn’t have it all and at once, then to hell with any part of it. But to a man who was himself free, white, and over twenty-one, intelligent, and in an executive position, who seldom got anything he wanted and almost always had to put up with halfway measures, such an attitude was thoroughly bewildering.
What Smitty failed to realize was if he had been a Negro, without any other change, he would himself have lived in a raging fury. He simply did not have the imagination to put himself, a white man, in a Negro’s place.
But though sometimes annoyed, exasperated, and often actually pained, yet deep down he did not condemn Lee Gordon for his attitude, because over all, he vaguely realized that this was Lee Gordon’s way of making his stand for something better. And even though he knew beyond all doubt that in a Negro this was suicide, he had to admire Lee for it.
So when he read the report of the murder in the morning paper, it was not surprise, but trepidation, that shook him to the core. The report stated briefly that Deputy Sheriff Paul Dixon had been murdered early the night before in his home in Inglewood. Lee Gordon, a Negro union organizer, who a short time back had accused Dixon and three other deputy sheriffs of attacking him on the highway, was being held in suspicion of the murder. Luther McGregor, his accomplice, also his companion at the time of the alleged attack, had been shot to death resisting arrest in the home of his employer in Hollywood. The police attributed the motive to both revenge and robbery, as it was known that Dixon had had in his possession a large sum of money that could not be found. In the next column was a picture of Mrs. Dixon, who had discovered her husband’s body upon her return from a motion-picture theater.
And though he knew that Lee was capable of behavior that would tear the face from reason, he did not believe Lee would murder anyone. His mind would not accept it. So his first conclusion was that Luther and the Communists had framed him in some sort of way, as they had done the Forks girl—or perhaps she had been in with them too. But no matter what had happened, Lee Gordon was still an organizer for the union council. He reached for the telephone.
Half an hour later the union attorney Steve Hannegan came into his office. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think he did it.”
“He could have,” Hannegan said. “He had motive enough.”
“I don’t think the boy would murder, Steve.”
“Let’s get his story first.”
But they could not contact Lee. His name was not on the blotter and the police denied holding a prisoner by that name. Nor would the chief of detectives, chief of police, or police commissioner profess knowledge of the prisoner.
“They have talked to the sheriff,” Hannegan said.
“To hell with them!” Smitty said. “Let’s get a writ.”
“To apply for a writ of habeas corpus, I must present alibis to cover each minute of Gordon’s time for hours before and after the approximate time of the murder,” Hannegan said thoughtfully.
“Then we will present them,” Smitty said.
Hannegan drummed his fingers on the flat desk top. “Sworn affidavits?” It was partly questioning, partly informative.
“I will get them,” Smitty said. “I will go to—”
“I don’t want to know about it.”
“Then you don’t know about it!” Smitty snapped.
For a moment Hannegan looked at him, and then said softly: “You like this boy.”
“I believe in him, and I just don’t believe that he’s murdered anybody.”
“Good luck!” Hannegan said.
Smitty did not find it as easy as he had anticipated. First, he drove to the plant to talk to Joe Ptak.
“To hell with Gordon!” Joe said.
“They’ll execute him, Joe.”
“That’ll be good! The dirty quitter!”
Next Smitty approached Benny Stone because Benny was a Jew. But though Benny professed a desire to help, he pointed out the danger of complicity. So Smitty returned to the council hall and began appealing to the various union officials. He pleaded and cajoled, calling upon their union loyalty and becoming eloquent concerning their obligation to their Negro brothers. But neither the eloquence of his pleas nor the righteousness of his cause moved these hard-boiled unionists.
Finally, he himself was forced to alibi Lee to the union men. By swearing that he had been with Lee from nine o’clock the night before until one o’clock that morning, he finally persuaded eight of them to sign statements that Lee Gordon had been in conference with them at the union hall during that time. But for each signature he received five refusals. It was too risky, they all declared, and no one wanted any part of it. Those who signed the statements did so grudgingly, and with the express reservations that their
statements be used only to secure the writ and not again if the case came up for trial.
If it were known that he had lied, Smitty would have been forced out of the union, he knew full well. He also knew that the risk he took not only involved the future of eight other men, but of the union. And it was not only the honor of these men, but their freedom, their security, and the security of their families. Yet he felt compelled to take this risk, not only just for Lee Gordon, but for the things in which he believed. And he did it quietly, seriously, and without pompousness.
He would not have done this for anyone but a Negro or some other underdog, but he did not know this about himself. All he knew was that he believed in a guy and was doing what he could to help him.
Again he contacted Hannegan, presenting him with the affidavits, and by three o’clock they had cornered a judge who gave grudging consent to the proceedings. But after scanning the affidavits the judge was not satisfied.
“You are forgetting, counselor,” the judge said irritably, “that just a few weeks ago this Negro accused the victim, along with other officers, of criminally attacking him.”
“We made no legal accusation,” Hannegan replied.
“You were his counsel? He needs a permanent counselor, eh?”
“I am the attorney for the union.”
“I see, and you believe this boy innocent of this crime?”
“I present the affidavits to support—”
“I am asking your opinion.”
“My opinion is the Constitutional presumption of innocence—”
“Yes, yes, the stock speech! But you realize this is a charge of murder. If complicity is later disclosed you will be disbarred.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“And the men who have signed these affidavits will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“I don’t like this,” the judge said. “These union men are unreliable; they will swear to anything. How do I know this isn’t just another union collusion to effect this murderer’s release?”
“If it has been proven that the prisoner is a murderer, if there is a single bit of evidence linking him with the murder, then I do not ask for his release,” Hannegan said.
Lonely Crusade Page 38
