Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) (24 page)

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 turn 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 kidded 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.”

“It sure doesn’t.”

“And anyways, he tole me that when a friend of his got sent up, he quit doin’ bad stuff and buckled down and got himself a partial scholarship.” Clink of bottle neck on glass. This time he didn’t offer me any. He sat back and started rocking in his chair. “I think he knew something was comin’.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“That white girl, Lucy. He said she was all tensed up lately. So many people on them. Her folks and that rich boy she used to go out with. And then them bikers always following him around and makin’ fun of him. She told him she had nightmares about something terrible happenin’ to him.”

“How did
he
feel about it all?”

“Oh, it was getting to him, too. Reason he always liked our town here was because folks were nice to him. He said he never seen so many nice white folks. The bikers and them like that, they didn’t like him. But I mean most folks—we got a nice little town here, Sam. Still is. Even when he was goin’ out with Lucy, people still hired him for the jobs he did. And was nice to him and everything. But there’s always a few—”

I stood up.

“I’ll find them, Cy, the ones who did it.”

“There you go soundin’ like Marshal Dillon again.” He’d allowed himself the one joke. Then: “The colored, we’ve had to put up with shit like this all our lives. I want you to get ’em, Sam, and get ’em good and don’t let that stupid bastard Cliffie get in your way, either.”

Rage and tears, rage and tears. Job was the only book of the Bible that held any meaning for me. Rage and tears against the unfathomable ways of God. Or as Graham Greene put it, “the terrible wisdom of God.” If there was a God. And if not, rage and tears against the unfathomable randomness of it all.

“You do me a favor and go in there and turn up Nat for me?”

“Sure.”

Cole was singing “Lost April,” one of my favorite songs of his. The wan melancholy of it matched my mood exactly.

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