Memphis Luck

by Gerald Duff

  “Who’s that? LaPearl?”

  “Naw,” J.W. said. “LaPearl wouldn’t have bothered to holler before she knocked the piss out of whoever just grabbed her by the ass. She don’t give no warning. That’s got to be one of them new enough to still be surprised when a colleague disrespects her person.”

  “Yeah,” Jim Drake said. “You’re right, but listen, J.W. I got to tell you this story about Major Dalbey, if you ain’t already heard it. That’s why I come over here in the first place and disturbed your meditations.”

  “What? You mean about the Atkins Diet when he was on it that time?”

  “No, better than that. The major’s off that now anyway, and he’s found something better, he believes. I never thought that story about him and the Atkins stuff was funny, anyway. Who gives a fuck about diet humor?”

  “All right, fire away,” J.W. said. “I’m about to get sleepy enough to call Tyrone on his cell phone, anyway.”

  “It was Dan Mayfield that did it,” Jim Drake said, beginning to laugh at what he was about to tell, “right before he pulled the pin and retired.”

  “Where’s he living now, Mayfield?” J.W. said. “Where’d him and Carroll move to?”

  “Bells, Tennessee, where else? He hates it so much he was bound to go back yonder. Anyway, Mayfield calls up Major Dalbey at home see, one night, and he says, ‘Are you Marlon Ray Dalbey, sir?’

  “The major goes ‘yes.’ From near Holly Springs, Mississippi? Mayfield says. ‘Yeah,’ says the major. ‘So what?’

  “Did you go to high school there in Holly Springs?”

  ‘Yeah, who are you?’ says the major.

  “I’m getting to that, sir. Did you date a girl when you were at the police academy in Memphis, name of Jenny Lucille Brady?”

  ‘I don’t remember no Jenny Lucille Brady, no, I don’t. Who’s she?’

  “I remember her, sir, and I remember her well. She’s my mama, and she’s in a care facility now, young as she is, all disabled to work and her mind about two-thirds gone. All Mama remembers is a few things.”

  “Why you telling me this stuff? I’m sorry for your mama if she’s in the shape you’re talking about and all, but I don’t know her.”

  “Sir, Major Dalbey,” Dan Mayfield says, all solemn and his voice just low and quiet like he means everything he’s saying. You know how Mayfield can be.”

  “Yeah,” J.W. said. “He could lie better than any cop I ever knew on the force. And did, too. But what happened then?”

  “Well, Mayfield says to the major, ‘Sir, I’m telling you this for one reason, and here it is – it’s because you’re my daddy.’

  “Jesus H. Christ,” J.W. said, almost knocking his new beer over, “I bet Major Dalbey had a instant stroke. I bet the side of his face went all numb on him.”

  “Wait, J.W., wait,” Jim Drake said. “It went on and on. Mayfield kept calling from cell phones he borrowed from people on the street, and pay phones and convenience stores that let him use the phone, and it got to the point where Major Dalbey would recognize his voice and just slam the damn phone down, and Dan Mayfield would call right back and try to keep on talking, like the connection had been broke or some shit.”

  “God Almighty, I never heard any of this before,” J.W. said.

  “Course not. Mayfield never told nobody about it until he retired and went back to Bells.”

  “He was afraid the major would get him fired.”

  “He was afraid the major would get him killed,” Jim Drake said.

  “Anyway, the next to last time he called him to talk about being his son and all that horseshit, Mayfield told the major he had gone to the care facility and picked up his crazy old mama and had her in the car and would bring her to Major Dalbey’s house. Said all she would say over and over was Marlon Ray, Marlon Ray, Marlon Ray, and then kind of cry a little bit and look happy, smiling and all.”

  J.W. was laughing so hard that a few of the drunk cops at the bar of the Owl looked around to see who was causing the disturbance.

  “And J.W.,” Jim Drake said, “Mayfield had taped this shit, a lot of it, and he let me listen to this part. I guess he lost the rest of it or something. And when the Major heard this unknown son of his was going to bring his crazy mama by the house for a reunion and to meet Gladys, Major Dalbey said, you do, and I’ll kill your ass with ordnance you never heard of. You’ll be a dead motherfucker, and so will your nutty old lady.”

  “How drunk are you crazy bastards, anyway?” Tyrone Walker said, sliding into the other chair at the table where J.W. and Jim Drake were reared back laughing. “I heard y’all out in the parking lot before I even hit the door. I could hear you outside hollering over that bunch in the vice task force up yonder at the bar.”

  “That makes me proud of myself, Tyrone,” J.W. Ragsdale said. “Being louder than vice. But you got to wait a minute here. I got to get the end of what Jim’s been telling me.” Then, shifting back to Jim Drake. “You said that was the next to last time Mayfield called him. Something else must’ve happened. What?”

  “Well, of course, there didn’t nobody show up at the major’s that night, and Mayfield left it alone for three or four days. And then he pulled the last stunt during that big summit meeting of all the brass with Mayor Herrenton and that bunch of suits he runs with.”

  “You mean the congressman with his fact-finding committee and the big report on progress against crime they working on making and all that shit?”

  “Yeah, Harold Ford, Jr and a bunch of aides and you name it, every damn big dog and hanger-on in Memphis and West Tennessee, they was all in that big meeting. And Dan Mayfield said it came to him like a gift, what to do, when he heard they were taking questions and e-mails and calls at the press conference at the end of the thing.”

  “Aw, naw,” J.W. said. “Nuh uh.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jim Drake said, leaning across the table to speak directly into J.W.’s face, the flecks of yellow paint in his hair glittering like Mardi Gras makeup. “Mayfield know Myrtice Watson was screening the calls and like everybody that’s been around her he knew her soft spot.”

  “Old folks in nursing homes in Raleigh,” J.W. said.

  “Mayfield said he was a concerned senior in the Golden Sunset Gardens facility in Raleigh, and hell you know that’s where Myrtice’s old lady stays. Mayfield said he wanted to say one thing to Major Marlon Ray Dalbey of the Midtown station, and Myrtice patched him through on the loudspeaker, announced who the senior wanted to talk to, and the Major says yes sir, how can I help you, and Mayfield says one thing.

  “Say it,” J.W. said. “Tell it on out.”

  “Mayfield says real pitiful and like he was asking something, you know. He said, ‘Daddy?’”

  After J.W. and Jim Drake tailed off a little from their fit of laughter and table-slapping, Drake rose to leave.

  “I got to go, y’all,” he said. “Be careful out there, like it says on the TV.”

  “Don’t tell me what led up to this, J.W.,” Tyrone Walker said as they watched Jim Drake head for the remnants of the vice task force still drinking at the bar, “I don’t want to know, and I won’t listen to it.”

  “All right, Tyrone,” J.W. said. “I won’t bother you with frivolity. I know you’re a serious man. What’s the deal tonight you got me into?”

  J.W. knew what it was, of course, having read Tyrone’s e-mail six hours earlier, just before he left the Midtown station for his little house on Tutwiler, supper, and a two-hour nap in front of the TV. Time was when he could have grabbed something to eat, drunk beer at the Owl for two hours, joined Tyrone for a stakeout for the rest of the night, and then showed up for work in the morning, not that happy but functioning. These days he had to shoehorn in a couple of hours of lie-down time somewhere along the way. That fact he kept to himself.

  “So you believe Ronnie Katz is back in Memphis?” J.W. said.

  “I do, J.W., and I got it on good authority.”

  “Who’d that be?”<
br />
  “His ex mother-in-law, that’s who,” Tyrone said. “Marianne Felder and I have been keeping in close touch for over three years now. I talk to her, or she talks to me, I ought to say, a couple of times a month, sometimes more.”

  “Three years, huh? Ever since Ronnie Katz fled the wrath to come.”

  “Yeah, as soon as he got on that first leg of his flight, and Marianne realized it, she started letting every cop and every politician know about it, from the bottom to the top.”

  “But Mrs. Felder settled on you, finally, for sure, didn’t she? Why’d she do that, you reckon?”

  “I expect it’s because I got a capacious soul, J.W., and I know how to listen.”

  “Capacious, huh?” J.W. said. “I wish I’d had the opportunity for schooling you had, Tyrone. I could sling them words around, too.”

  “You got to take opportunities, J.W. You can’t just stand way off at a distance and admire them. You got to get mad at them.”

  “I expect that middle-aged lady with all that blonde hair took to you because she thought you was cute. Maybe wanted to change her luck.”

  The last few cops at the bar of the Owl had paired off, male and female, the ones of them that were going to or felt like they were still able, and the noise level had dropped enough to make the building seem more like what it really was, a big empty space surrounded by concrete block walls with no windows and poor ventilation. J.W. felt a need to move beginning to rise in his viscera, and he looked Tyrone in the eye and gestured toward the door.

  “Yeah,” Tyrone said, and the two homicide detectives left the Owl Bar and got into the unmarked city car Tyrone was driving and pulled out onto Central Avenue headed east.

  “Best thing about my personal vehicle is I can leave it almost anywhere in Memphis and nobody will mess with it,” J.W. said. “It’ll be right there when I get back.”

  “That old Buick would be right there if you were to leave it parked for a month with the keys in it,” Tyrone said. “And it wouldn’t be out of respect for property rights, neither, J.W.”

  Neither man spoke for the next several minutes as Tyrone drove the deserted streets of Midtown, a little wet after a rain shower, working his way deeper into the upscale residential area near Cherokee Gardens, J.W. thinking about Ronnie Katz who’d located himself safe and unknown and now returning to a place where people were bound and determined to put him under the jail if they ever got the chance.

  Tyrone switched off the car lights, drove for a couple of blocks on a side street called Pebble Brook, parked under the dark overhang of two big oak trees, and switched off the ignition.

  “This spot must be a place where rich kids stop after a date and work on each other,” J.W. said. “Nice and private.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Tyrone said. “I ain’t interested in making out, and besides, rich kids in this part of Memphis don’t have to do their thing outside in a car, and they sure as hell don’t go on what you call dates anymore, either.”

  “Is that right? They don’t know what they’re missing, then. They never had the chance to grow up in Batesville, Mississippi, learning all their night moves like I did.”

  “You are so out of it, J.W.,” Tyrone said. “It’s pitiful listening to you trying to live in the past.”

  “This is where Ronnie Katz’s kids stay, I guess,” J.W. said. “I remember the street name.”

  “Yeah, after Ronnie had their mama killed and then hauled ass for Belize, this here is all the poor little things had left to get by on.”

  “Looks like the governor’s mansion,” J.W. said. “Over yonder in Nashville.”

  “It’s better than that,” Tyrone said. “It’s new and up to date in every respect and in every way. We’re parked by the tennis court, for one thing, in there behind all these trees and shrubs and stuff.”

  “You really think Ronnie Katz would put himself in range to come back here and see his young’uns?”

  “Not the first time he’s done it,” Tyrone Walker said. “Mrs. Felder says he’s been back at least twice in the last fourteen months.”

  “Why?”

  “Pure dee love, J.W. It is a strange and powerful force, love is. It’ll make a man take all kind of chances. Besides, Ronnie Katz doesn’t want to miss out on the key times of his kids growing up. The magic moments, you understand.”

  “Which one is this?” J.W. said. “A sweet sixteen party?”

  “No, little Ronnie has just graduated from M.U.S. He’ll be off at college here in a couple of months.”

  “He will? Where’ll he going? University of Memphis?”

  “No, hell, J.W. Ronnie Katz’s boy’s not going to some redneck place like that. He’ll be in Lexington, Virginia, come September. W and L, J.W. That’s where the young scholar’s headed.”

  “W and L,” J.W. said. “What’s that mean? Whips and leather?”

  Tyrone started to answer, but fell silent as up ahead the low beams of an automobile appeared around a picturesque bend built into Pebble Brook Way by a high-dollar environmental contextualist J.W. couldn’t summon up the name of. He knew he’d read about the man in a feature story in the MidSouth Life section of the Commercial Appeal several years back one Sunday morning in his rent house on Tutwiler. He had given the Commercial Appeal piece his attention in a weak moment, he remembered. He promised himself now he’d ask Tyrone if he knew about the man and his wonderful way with natural space, as the lady Commercial Appeal writer had called it, after this business with Ronnie Katz was over. Probably Tyrone hadn’t seen the story, and that would give J.W. a little leverage for hoorawing his partner. Something to do.

  And another thing, J.W. told himself as he watched the lights on the car ahead go out as it pulled to a stop the other side of the drive leading onto the grounds of the big house which Ronnie Katz, once the pre-eminent real estate attorney in a large part of Memphis, used to call home, it would’ve been interesting to see how Tyrone handled that thing he’d said about whips and leather. That was spur of the moment, and it was pretty damn good for a Batesville High graduate.

  “Whose limo is that?” J.W. said. “You reckon that driver knows who he’s carrying?”

  “He’d say no, and so would the man who owns the car,” Tyrone said. “I guarantee you that.”

  The passenger in the limo was getting out, the two homicide detectives could tell, though no light came on in the limo when one of the rear doors opened.

  “He sees this car,” J.W. said. “He’s not taking a step toward the house yet.”

  “There’s cars parked all along here, J.W.,” Tyrone said. “I can see three other ones from where we’re sitting.”

  “Yeah, but not a one of them’s as shitty as this one, and he can tell that.”

  The figure at the rear door of the dark limousine ahead pushed the door closed, the sound barely audible in the dead quiet of Cherokee Gardens, and took a step onto the expanse of manicured space between the street and the house.

  “That’s a quality machine,” Tyrone said. “You hear that door close?”

  “Like a rat pissing on cotton,” J.W. said. “Like a Lincoln.”

  “Unh uh. It’s a step up from that.”

  “How do you want to do it?” J.W. said. “You going to wait until he gets in the house?”

  “No, I don’t want to have to get through the door and look for him inside. I want to take him while he’s messing with the keys and stuff.”

  “You suppose Ronnie’s packing?”

  “He always was before, J.W.,” Tyrone said, easing the door open, “all the time he was strutting around Memphis. I expect Mr. Katz is strapped all right, but he’s never had the balls to pull trigger on anybody, not even his own wife.”

  “O.K.,” J.W. said, propping his door open, “you go on ahead, do what you’re going to do, and I’ll see to the driver. Ronnie might’ve hired him somebody that ain’t too shy to bust a cap or two.”

  With that, Tyrone Walker was gone, his first two step
s taking him to full speed, and J.W. marveled as he had the first time he’d met Tyrone, all those long years ago in E.H. Crump Stadium where the All-Tennessee, All-Mississippi high school exhibition football game used to be held. The first time Tyrone Walker, the All-Tennessee tailback from Central High of Memphis, took the handoff from the quarterback, he was through the hole inside the right tackle before J.W. could get up on the balls of his feet from his position as inside linebacker for the Mississippi team.

  “J.W. Ragsdale,” Bobby Herbert, the coach for the All-Mississippi squad said at halftime, “the first time that colored boy touched the ball he went by you like an Illinois Central freight train.”

  “Yessir,” J.W. said. “But I got him down the next time.”

  “Yeah, twelve yards up the field,” Coach Herbert had said, looking around the locker room for signs of appreciation for his wit, but as J.W. remembered the scene, no one would meet his gaze.

  As J.W. sprinted toward the driver’s side of the limousine, he could see the man behind the wheel lifting both hands up before his face as though to ward off something unexpectedly thrown toward him, palms out and empty, and that was a relief. No reason in sight to make J.W. have to think about how to dodge fire while figuring out a way to get the limo driver out from behind the door, out of the car, and under control without having to go terminal on him.

  At about the time he put one hand on the door handle and began to gesture with the other for the man behind the wheel to open up, J.W. heard the sound of a collision coming from the expanse of yard toward the house, putting him in mind of the way the breath might sound exiting from a man who’d just fallen off a truckbed and landed flat on his back on hard-packed ground. Deep, sudden, and tailing off into a higher note at the end. Mr. Tyrone Walker had got to where he was going.

  The limo driver was out of the car, turning around with his hands held up to the back of his head, and spread-eagling without having to be told a thing about what steps to take next. Yet people will claim over and over that watching TV doesn’t teach a soul a thing, J.W. thought as he cuffed the driver and helped the man into the back seat of his own limo, not forgetting to put a hand on the man’s head to save it from banging into the roof. He knew the arrestee would expect that. People do pay attention to TV, they can learn, and they like doing things right.