Midnight Lullaby

by James D F Hannah

  Teller curled back his lips to show his teeth. "The Brotherhood is the only hope our race has. While the niggers and Jews and sand monkeys are out there blowing up the society white Christian people built, the Brotherhood is working to preserve what we have, what we created. These niggers—"

  Woody slapped him, and Teller’s head snapped back hard. Much harder and it would have spun a full 360. Teller's tongue flicked out, tasting the blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.

  Woody clinched his hand into a fist. "Use that word one more time, or another one like it, and I'll throw you in a hole in the backyard, but I'll make sure you're still breathing when those first shovels of dirt hit you." To me, he said, "Get his clothes back on him and let's get him back to whatever hole he crawled out from. I'm tired of looking at him."

  I'm not sure who was more scared shitless of Woody: Teller, or me. My sphincter pulled so tight it wouldn't let a whisper of air pass, though.

  “Agreed, but one last thing for Einstein here,” I said. “The other goon with you; who was he?”

  Teller slumped his body inward and ducked his head, as if embarrassed, as if he had the capacity for embarrassment . He said something so quiet, a mouse farting on a cotton ball would have drowned it out. I leaned in closer.

  “Repeat that,” I said.

  It came out as a mumble. “Jeremiah Mayhew.”

  From the other side of the room, Woody said, “Goddammit.”

  20

  The election of a black man as president saved the National Brotherhood and the white supremacist movement. Watchdog groups said interest in the groups skyrocketed, post-Obama . That was especially clear with the National Brotherhood, which had crumbled apart like dried-out Play-Doh after the death of Dr. Carl Mayhew.

  The National Brotherhood had been one of the first hate groups that embraced Internet technology, and they used it to play into white suburbanite fear. They revitalized their website, posting daily video screeds on the "impending race war" and the dangers of multiculturalism. They sold angry tomes, ranging from shitty teen romances that vilified race mixing, to Mayhew’s own novel, "The Masters Chronicles," a bullshit fever dream advocating violent revolution. It became "The Catcher in the Rye" for the intolerant; three separate racially-motived spree killers cited it as inspiration in their massacres. The National Brotherhood sponsored a yearly musical festival on the compound, filled with proto-punk hate screamers with bad haircuts and simple lyrics that proclaimed white power. The organization restarted a music label it had during the Nineties. This time, alongside the punk and death metal, they signed a bunch of muttering white guys and called it "rap." Irony didn't seem something these guys appreciated fully.

  Numbers for the Brotherhood grew, as they held rallies, went viral on social media, did whatever imaginable seemed necessary to become a viable presence, to make being a white supremacist palatable and something you could talk about with the neighbors at the HOA barbecue. What they failed at, though, was noticing how many of them looked like the adult versions of those kids who ate paste in school. You remember those kids. Did you want to associate with them then? Why the fuck would you want to associate with them now?

  The game-changer for the Brotherhood, though, came with Monica Mayhew. The daughter of Dr. Carl Mayhew, Monica became the public face for the Brotherhood, a photogenic facade to push the group's platform into the public debate. The news shows loved her because she was attractive, with master's degrees in economics and art history. Well-dressed, well-spoken, easy on the eye, she excelled at selling the Brotherhood's message, which on the surface focused less about the perceived evil of Jews and blacks and Muslims and more about embracing "European culture" and "living within the cultural divide."

  Pundits and politicians shifted the conversation and made it about "an illegitimate presidency, with a foreign-born Muslim in the White House," or “securing the borders to stop the influx of terrorists and disease,” though, and Monica Mayhew stopped sounding crazy so much as just another voice claiming to speak for "the forgotten man, the disenfranchised, the sons and daughters of the first Americans." The world caught up with the white supremacist, it seemed.

  There was a younger brother, too. Jeremiah Mayhew. Where Monica became a familiar face on TV, Jeremiah remained more mysterious, existing behind the scenes and away from the publicity. Word was how Carl Mayhew groomed Jeremiah early on to take over the reins of the National Brotherhood, to allow Monica to become its ambassador to the wider world. But no one had seen him in years. The skinny in government circles, the ones that monitored hate group activity, was that he was in hiding, maybe in the stages of planning an action that would bring the Brotherhood back to the forefront of the white power movement.

  This is all what Woody told me after I’d taken Teller to his car and driven back to the farm. He had made calls to people. That's how he said it, too: “I called some folks.”

  “What folks?”

  “Just folks. Folks who know things.”

  “Oh.”

  “And they said there’s been a noticeable influx of cash into the organization, but nothing they can trace to anything illegal.”

  “What about the meth?”

  “Irrelevant if no one will talk.”

  "I might have someone in mind."

  "Think this person'll have anything to say."

  “It never hurts to ask.”

  Browne's Hardware was eight aisles of product, with most items kept behind the counter. Bennett Browne was talking to another old man when I walked in, the bell over the door ringing as I came in.

  "What about Sunday?" the old man said to Browne. "My grandson, he's wanting to go out, and we might on Sunday, if you wanna go with us."

  Browne was barrel shaped, wearing a collared shirt and no-iron slacks and an apron with "Browne's Hardware" printed on it. He wore Coke bottle lenses and what little remained of his white hair tufted out around his head like cotton. He smiled at me. "Be with you in just a minute."

  I nodded back and drifted down the paint aisle. The old man said good bye and left and Browne was behind me.

  "Whatcha thinking about painting?"

  I didn't hear him, and I jumped a little. He laughed as I did a slow spin toward him.

  "Sorry for scaring you," he said. "There anything in particular I can help you with?"

  I looked over the old man. He cast a curious look at me and raised his eyebrows.

  I took a deep breath and said, “I’d love if you’d tell me why you’re helping the Brotherhood cook meth.”

  The casual smile never left his face. "Well fuck-a-doodle-do," he said softly.

  He flipped the sign to "Closed" on the entrance and we moved into the office in back.

  The cork board behind his desk was covered with photos of a little girl, ranging from infancy to about six years ago. There were pictures of farm animals, of Santa and Jesus, of a little girl and a man fishing with the words "Me and Grampy" written over the figures, drawn in crayon or magic marker.

  "My granddaughter's work," he said when he saw me looking at them. He took a seat behind the desk and I took the visitor's chair opposite him. "She lives in Pittsburgh with my son and his wife."

  "See her much?"

  "Not as much as I want to. I can't imagine there's a grandparent alive who says they see too much of their grandkids. They say grandkids are your reward for not killing your own children." He said it with a laugh meant to bury to discomfort of the situation. There wasn’t enough heavy equipment to bury this shit.

  The part of being a cop I had always hated was asking the painful questions. I opted to plunge in head first. “How’d this start, Mr. Browne?”

  He tapped his fingers across his desktop. “About a year ago, I got this call from Denny Fitzgerald, who owns Fitz’s Pharmacy.”

  I had memories of Fitz's from my childhood. I remembered picking up prescriptions there as a kid with Billy. We’d get lunch at the counter. Tuna salad and milkshakes. Don’t judge; it had
seemed like a good idea when I was eight.

  “Anyway, he told me that someone from the Brotherhood had come to him, told him he wanted to buy boxes of Sudafed from him, off the books. Not just boxes, but whole cases. Denny, he’s not stupid. No one’s buying cases of Sudafed because they’ve got allergies. Denny asked me what I thought he should do, and I told him he should go talk the sheriff, make him aware of the situation. I’d no sooner got off the phone with him when a man walked into the store and told me he wanted to talk.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Regular looking guy. Beard. Dark hair. On the youngish side of things.”

  Jeremiah Mayhew. “Go on,” I said.

  “He handed me a list, told me these were things he's to send people to buy. And I saw what he was buying, and it was ingredients for a meth lab.”

  “This is when you called Sheriff Simms, right?”

  Browne picked up a plastic photo cube from his desk. Each side was a different photo of his granddaughter. He turned it around and around in his hands. “He had photos of Emily. They were at the zoo up there in Pittsburgh. Denny told me later they mentioned his wife. She’s in a nursing home in Fairmont. Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t even know who he is anymore.” He replaced the cube on his desk. “Found out this young guy was hitting another pharmacy in town, Wilson’s, and more hardware stores. We’re local, so people tell themselves no one notices what we’re buying.”

  “Has anyone noticed?”

  “Not yet. Guess we're like the pharmacies you hear about where they've sell enough painkillers to give a dozen bottles to every man, woman, and child there. People don't pay attention to little town, even if they do, what are we going to say? Guys like Denny and me are at the end of the race. We talk to the police, and what happens to the people we love? I don't want to go into the grave knowing my granddaughter was hurt because I tried to do the right thing?” Browne shrugged. “I woke up one day and realized I'd invested an entire life in one place, and that no one will care when I'm not here anymore. That's everywhere you look in Serenity; there's not the town that used to be here. When it’s all said and done, you think anyone'll notice Serenity’s locked the doors and turned off the lights for the last time? No one sees anything they don’t want to see, Mr. Malone.” He stood and stretched. Joints popped and cracked. "I'm 73 years old. I'm not the picture of who you expect to be involved in a drug ring, am I?"

  "I don’t suppose you are, Mr. Browne."

  “Who’s your family? Who’s your dad?”

  “Billy Malone. He worked for Montgomery Mining and Energy.”

  Browne nodded. “I know him. Don't see him much.”

  “He keeps to himself.”

  Browne walked toward the office door and we headed back into the store. “I remember your mother." His voice dropped to a notch above a whisper. "She was a good woman. Shame what happened.”

  "Thanks,” I said. I'd get that from old folks, people who remembered my mother's death. Nothing I could say there but "thank you."

  We stood at the store entrance. Sodium vapor lights hummed outside. It was after six, and the streets were rolled up in Serenity. The bars were open, but businesses has moved to the big box stores outside of town now. Sidewalks were empty.

  “Where’s this put us, Henry?” Browne said. “What’s next?”

  “I guess next I’ll go home and make hamburgers and feed my dog.”

  He motioned between us with his forefinger. “What about this? What we discussed tonight?”

  I set the flat of my hand on the door, ready to push it open. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Browne. I came in looking for paint.”

  21

  "What the hell, Henry?" Jackie said. "What the hell?"

  We were at the hot dog stand in Serenity, having lunch. Jackie plowed his way through a third hot dog with everything. I had a half-finished hot dog sitting in front of me.

  I shared everything I'd discovered up to this point, excluding stuff about Browne, because I couldn't think of a reason for the police to bust the old man. A week into all this, and I was already making moral judgments. Woot for me.

  Jackie unwrapped the foil surrounding a fourth hot dog.

  "Aren't you on a diet?" I said.

  "Screw that. I'm stressed out. I'm a stress eater."

  "How much stress does one person have?"

  “Back off. You’re already a goddamned boil on my dick as is.”

  “I’m offering you an open door to take down the National Brotherhood.”

  "I need the 411 on that cook house so we can shut it down."

  "It won't close the operation. The best it'll do is stop it for a while. They'll just figure out somewhere new to make product."

  “You have a better idea then?"

  “Richard Walters and the fucking National Brotherhood, Jackie. It's so obvious. They’re the lynchpin in this entire thing. You go after them, you shut down a massive drug shop, take out a scummy group of white power skinheads, and make your career in the meanwhile.”

  Jackie took a bite of hot dog. “I’ve already got a career, and it doesn’t involve a partner in a massive state-wide law firm and trusting the word of a dipshit who joined a group of fellow dipshits just because they were all the same color as him. Besides, there’s been folks going after the Brotherhood for years, and nothing happens. You'd think evolution would take hold, and they'd go extinct, or they’d dry up and blow away like an old dog turd, but they keep going and going, being another thing that makes us look like morons.”

  A quarter-sized drop of slaw and chili splattered across the front of his shirt. He flung the hot dog down and tried to wipe the mess off with a napkin, and he just made it worse, smearing it deep into the fabric. He crumpled the napkin into a ball and threw it next to the hot dog.

  "Goddammit!" he said. Then quieter, again, "Goddammit." He huffed out a little breath of air. "Livvie’s gonna be all over my ass about this shit. Stays on my ass, saying I come home wearing more than I eat." A thin smile appeared. "She's got no idea how much I can eat."

  "I'm gonna bet she does." I ate some chips. "There’s a lot going on here, Jackie. The meth house, that’s low-hanging fruit. Walters and the Brotherhood, that’s the heart of all of this."

  “Any chance you’re saying that because you got bitch-smacked by those two white-trash crackers?”

  “Listen, I’ve spent the past two years in Serenity minding my own business, and as soon as I poke around Richard Walters, I got my ass handed to me, so pardon me if that put me in a foul humor. But one of them even bothered to confess that he got told to come smack me around, with Jeremiah Mayhew.”

  “None of that shit you’re telling me would ever last thirty seconds in a courtroom after a judge finds out you and your friend went Guantanamo on that kid.”

  "Which is why you need to come in and get Richard Walters and beat him with a phone book—"

  "'Beat him with a phone book'? The actual living fuck, Henry. How do you think we do things around here?"

  "I don't care how you handle it so long as Walters admits he killed Bobbi Fisher, or had her killed, and he’s involved with the National Brotherhood. That opens the door to take down the meth operation. The fucking point is you’re looking at the cook house, and that's nothing but some shiny thing to distract you from the real prizes here."

  "We can't be for sure Bobbi Fisher is dead. There's no corpse. We’ve got nothing that says she’s dead."

  "Don't be fucking naive, Jackie. We both know she’s dead."

  Jackie sighed and wrapped the remains of his lunch in the foil, shoved himself off of the stool and dumped everything into a garbage can. I followed him outside. The wind picked up, and the bitter freeze cut through me until my bones ached. I was still healing from the beat down, not as quickly as I would have liked.

  We walked in silence back to Jackie's state police cruiser. He leaned against the car's trunk. "Let this go. This isn't me asking, either. This is a straight-up
order. The Bobbi Fisher thing was supposed to your head out of your ass and your ass out of the trailer, but it's moved into a thing well past your paygrade. I'm telling you to walk away from this now. If Bobbi's attached to this somehow, it'll come out, don't worry. But until then, this can't be your worry."

  Jackie was right. The asshole. I had no business keeping my nose in this anymore. It was more than Bobbi Fisher. I should step back and let the professionals handle it.

  “You’re going after the meth house, aren’t you?” I said. “Everything else here, and it’s just the cooks you’re worried about.”

  “It’s more than that, and you know it. It’s dominoes. You gotta knock down the first one to take down the rest.”

  “And what about Richard Walters?”

  “What about him? What do we have so far? Conjecture. There’s nothing that says he had anything to do with Bobbi Fisher, whatever happened to her.”

  “Tell me it’s not because of that law firm.”

  Jackie didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. It gurgled away in the bottom of my gut.

  Fuck. That. Shit.

  I caught Jackie trying to not look at me. Wait a minute. Was that pity in those eyes? Oh fuck you, asshole. Don’t you fucking feel sorry for me. I’ll smack you down like the borderline-Type 2 bitch you know yourself to be.

  "Fine," I said. "You boys have at. Have a great time with it." I pulled up the collar on my coat. "I didn't give a shit about this anyway."

  "You're lying," Jackie said. "That's your problem, Henry, is you do fucking care, and you want to behave like you don't."

  "Yeah, well, you're fat," I said. Oh how clever.

  Jackie called out my name as I walked away. "Go home, Henry! Don't do anything stupid! You hear me? Henry? HENRY! GO HOME!"

  I rounded the corner and found a bar midway down the street. Not much crowd this early in the afternoon. It was safe and warm and anonymous. I ordered a shot, downed it, and ordered another.

  And another. And another. And another.