Chiefs (18 page)

“Just doing my job, Foxy.”

“Seems to me like you’re doing more than that. This fellow was shot in Talbot County, I believe. I live in Talbot County, Seems to me you’re doing Jim Goolsby’s job. Jim’s a friend of mine. I think he’d like to know about this.”

“By all means. This is purely an unofficial visit, Foxy. I’m sorry if I’ve troubled you.”

“The only thing troubles me is that there have been two killings here and you’ve come to see me twice. Well, I’ve got nothing to hide. You want to search my house?”

“No, no, Foxy, I’m sorry I bothered you. I—I do want to thank you again for the puppy. The children just love him, we all do.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Will Henry drove away from the house feeling he’d made a fool of himself. He went back to the station, wrote a note to Jim Goolsby about how and where he’d found the cartridge case, slipped the note and case into an envelope, stamped it, and put it with the outgoing mail. There was nothing more he could do about this. It was out of his jurisdiction, and there was nothing to connect the two killings, except their proximity to Foxy’s house, and that was just a coincidence. The hobo theory held up even better in this case than in the last. He went home and made a determined effort that evening to put the thing out of his mind. He remembered how he had become obsessed with the last killing and what it had done to him. He slept well that night.

The following morning he went to the office as usual, opened the mail, and discovered that he was depressed. He stared at the wall for a few minutes, telling himself not to get involved with this one; then he picked up the telephone. “Estelle, could you talk to the operator in Waycross and get me the names and numbers of all the funeral homes in town, all the white funeral homes?” He hung up and waited impatiently for her to ring back.

There were four, and he found the right one on the second call.

“Underwood Funeral Parlor.”

“May I speak with Mr. Underwood, please?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Underwood, my name is Lee, I’m the chief of police up in Delano, in Meriwether County. Could you tell me if you’re in charge of funeral arrangements for, uh, Charles Collins.”

“Charles Collins is the father. Frank Collins is the deceased.”

“Yes, the young man who was shot up in Talbot, County?”

“I buried him an hour ago.”

Will Henry’s heart sank. He thought for a moment. “Mr. Underwood, did you embalm the body yourself?”

“Yes, I do all my own work.”

“Could you tell me, please, sir, apart from the gunshot wound, were there any other injuries or marks on the body?”

“Well, the feet had some cuts and bruises, as if he’d been running barefooted.”

“Yes, that sounds right. He had no shoes on when found. But was there anything else, any sign of bruises on the body, as if the boy had been beaten?”

“No, nothing like that.”

Will Henry slumped in the chair. He didn’t realize how tense he had been. “Well, thank you for your help, Mr. Underwood, I—”

“There was something else a bit odd, though.”

“Yes, what was that?” He was tense again.

“Well, I didn’t notice it until I was dressing the body, but his wrists—his wrists were bruised, like he had been tied up. There was some skin scraped off, too.”

“Mr. Underwood, I wonder if you’d do me just one further favor. Would you write down a description of the boy’s injuries as you remember them, especially a description of his wrists, and send it to me?” He gave the man his name and address and hung up.

He was elated, but why? What did he have? Only one real connection between the two deaths, and all he could do was pass that on to Jim Goolsby, along with the cartridge case. He had nothing but his own reopened wound. He slammed his fist down on the desk nearly hard enough to split the wood.

Chapter 24.

WILL HENRY telephoned Sheriff Goolsby and told him about the marks on the Collins boy’s wrists and that he was sending on the cartridge case. Goolsby, as Will Henry had feared, was as miffed by Will Henry’s unauthorized investigation as he was glad to have the meager evidence, and he did not take kindly to the interrogation of Foxy, who had telephoned him immediately after the event. Will Henry apologized profusely, pointing out that his only interest in the case was in the possibility of a connection with the earlier murder, and he admitted that there was no significant connec tion, not one that any reasonable law-enforcement officer could proceed upon.

He hung up thoroughly humiliated and more depressed than he had been since the period following the first killing. Will Henry’s depression was anger turned inward, and before the day ended he found an outlet for his anger in Emmett Spence, son of Hoss.

Emmett Spence had been a troublemaker most of his sixteen years. As a small child he had horrified his mother by burying two dozen baby chicks up to their necks in the front yard and running a lawnmower over them; on a later occasion he had managed to throw a switch in the M&B railway yard that, had it not been discovered in the nick of time, would have caused two switching engines to collide. His father had taken a perverse pride in many of these incidents, preferring to think that in committing them the boy had showed “spunk/’ The local populace thought of Emmett as not quite right in the head and tolerated him only because his father was a rich man in a poor county.

On this evening, after supper, Will Henry received a telephone call from Smitty, who ran the grocery store in Braytown, saying that a white youth was breaking windows in the colored schoolhouse. Will Henry arrived on the scene to find Emmett Spence firing through the school windows with a .22 rifle, while a group of black adults, who had been attending a club meeting, huddled inside, trying to protect themselves from flying splinters of glass.

Emmett froze when he saw the police car pull up; he was too frightened even to run. Will Henry strode to him, yanked the rifle from his hands, unloaded it, and battered it to pieces against a nearby telephone pole. That got some of the rage out of him, but not all. He whipped off his belt with one hand, grabbed Emmett’s wrist with the other, and delivered a proper hiding to the boy, urged on by the blacks, who had recovered themselves and come outside to watch their juvenile tormentor running in a circle, chased by a wide piece of leather and screaming like a frightened chicken.

Will Henry apologized to the people, promised them that the damage would be paid for, and dumped the shrieking Emmett into the car. He drove the three miles to the Spence farm, dragged Emmett out of the car, and knocked on the kitchen door. Hoss Spence himself came to the door.

Will Henry was breathing hard from anger and exertion. He shoved the boy into his father’s hands. “Hoss, I caught this boy of yours firing a rifle into the colored schoolhouse, which was full of people at the time. I broke that rifle into a lot of pieces, and I took my belt to him. I should have locked him up and thrown away the key, but I’m bringing him home to you instead. But I’m telling you right now, Hoss, if I catch him at anything— and I mean
anything
—again, I’ll have him under arrest, and he’s big enough for the county camp now. Do I make myself clear?”

“Shut up!” Hoss shouted at the boy, who was still sobbing loudly. “Now you get yourself out to the barn, and I’ll tend to you directly.”

“Daddy!” the boy shrieked hysterically. “He whupped me in front of all them niggers!”

Hoss’s eyes narrowed. “He whipped
you
in front of a bunch of niggers?”

“Yessir!”

“Get out to the barn right now, or I’ll knock your head off!” Hoss yelled. The boy fled. Hoss wheeled on Will Henry. “You whipped
my
boy in front of niggers?”

“You’re damned right I did, and I whipped him good! And I’ll tell you something else. If you aren’t down at the city hall before the close of business tomorrow with a checkbook to pay for the damage, I’ll come out here with a warrant, and I’ll throw his ass in jail! Do you understand me?”

Hoss’s face glowed nearly purple by the back porch light, but he held himself in. “I’ll be there,” he said; then he turned on his heel and started for the barn, unbuckling his belt as he went.

Will Henry watched him go, surprised at his own behavior. He could not recall shouting at anybody in his adult life. As he drove away from the Spence house, he could hear terrible screams coming from the barn. Will Henry shuddered, his anger spent. “Lord, I hope he doesn’t kill the boy,” he muttered to himself. “But I hope he can’t sit down for a month, either.”

And as he drove toward home, he again felt the glow that came from having done justice, from having been effective.

Chapter 25.

JESSE COLE was wakened by Nellie at three-thirty in the morning; he struggled into his clothes, half-awake, while Nellie fried some bread in fat for him. This had been the hardest part of coming to work for Hoss Spence, this getting up in the middle of the night. He had risen at dawn all his life, but cows demanded to be milked twice a day, and that meant getting up at three-thirty, there was no way around it. He ate the hot bread and drank milk from a tin cup. There was no cash to buy coffee now, and Jesse missed his morning coffee mightily. Nellie was asleep again before he finished eating. Willie never cracked an eye.

He left the shack with a kerosene lantern and walked a quarter mile to the gate across the Warm Springs road, where the herd waited patiently to be let through to the dairy. He stood with the lantern while they crossed the road, then walked slowly behind the cows, their bells thudding softly in his ears. He was about as close to sleep as a man could get and still walk a straight line, and he did not hurry the animals.

The cows entered the dairy barn and went into their stalls like ladies arranging themselves at an ice-cream social. Jesse milked his dozen still half-asleep, resting his head against soft flanks while his hands automatically coaxed the milk from the teats. He and the others emptied their pails into the big, five-gallon cans, and he drove the emptied herd back to its pasture, with the sun rising before them, huge and red. Already the air was heavy and hot, and the day promised to be a scalder.

There were the cement floors of the dairy barn to be hosed down and disinfected, the stalls to be cleaned, then the milk to be fed into the pasteurizer, cooled and bottled, while a portion went into the big mechanical churn. By ten o’clock Jesse was replacing a rotting door jamb at the main house, by now fully awake and doing his carpentry steadily and skillfully.

When Hoss Spence came back to the house at noon for his dinner, Jesse was just finishing up with the door jamb. He did not speak to Jesse, and the black man was aware that something was wrong. He finished the work, packed his tools, and started home for his own dinner, and as he left he was aware of Spence staring at him. He had heard about the incident with Emmett and the chief the day before, and he suspected Hoss’s attitude had something to do with the Cole family’s having once worked for the Lees.

Jesse was still eating when he heard Hoss’s truck pull up outside.

“Jesse!” Hoss had a tendency to yell when he was angry.

Jesse walked out onto the porch. The truck’s engine was still running. “Get in. I’ve got some work I want done.”

Jesse swallowed what he was chewing. He was annoyed. He normally got two hours for dinner and a nap, to make up for the early rising. What did the man want now? He reached for his toolbox on the porch.

“Never mind the tools. You won’t be needing ‘em.” Jesse got into the truck and sat silently while Hoss drove down a rough dirt road toward the middle of the farm, then turned off across a field toward Pigeon Creek. Hoss said nothing, but Jesse knew he was mad as hell about something the way he jerked the truck around.

They drove over a small rise and started downhill. As they moved along there appeared ahead in the distance a small forest of tall, topless tree stumps, bare of bark, thrusting from water like elongated tombstones in a flooded cemetery. They were headed for several acres of swamp that bordered Pigeon Creek. Something inside Jesse recoiled. There were only two things on earth that truly terrified him, water and snakes, and a swamp was the worst possible combination of the two.

Hoss stopped the truck at the edge of the water, where there were two truckloads of sandbags stacked, waiting for drier weather before being fashioned into a levee which would allow the land to be drained. Hoss got out and motioned for Jesse to follow him. The white man pointed over the water.

“See that tall trunk there, and, on along, that one with the limb sticking out?” The two stumps were about where the creek bank would be in dry weather, and about thirty yards apart. “I want you to start laying them sandbags between them two trees. I want ‘em a in straight line, stacked so they’ll stay, you understand me?”

Jesse’s breath was coming quickly now, and his words tumbled out. “Mist’ Spence, don’t you reckon be better to wait fo’ the creek go down a lil’ bit fo’ stackin’ them bags down there?”

Hoss turned his head slowly and stared at Jesse. “I don’t want no back talk from you. I want them bags in there today.”

Jesse was near panic now. “But Mist’ Spence—” Hoss turned back to the truck, lifted a double-barrelled shotgun from a rack behind the seat, broke it and looked at the twelve-gauge shells inside, then snapped it shut again. He walked back to where Jesse stood and stopped, the shotgun held across his chest. “You and me are all alone down here,” he said softly. “Now you start shifting them sandbags, or I’ll blow your fucking head off right where you stand.” His eyes were bright with something beyond anger.