Chiefs (26 page)

Patricia’s mouth fell open. “This was your father’s place? The cotton farm?” She looked around her. “You never told me it was so beautiful.”

“To tell you the truth, I never remembered it as being beautiful. I haven’t been out here since I was thirteen. It is beautiful though, isn’t it.” His eyes swept the trees and meadows. “My God.”

“It’s for sale,” said Holmes.

“Who owns it?”

Holmes looked embarrassed. “Well, I do.”

“You
do?”

“I bought it from the bank. Hoss Spence wanted it, but your daddy said to me once that he’d rather the bank have it than Hoss Spence. I leased the grazing rights to Hoss after Will Henry died, but I couldn’t bring myself to sell it to him. He could never figure out why. He’s mad at me for it to this day.”

“How much land is there?”

“Six hundred and forty-one acres. Your great-granddaddy owned more than three thousand when the War Between the States started. Reconstruction was hard. You can have it for what your daddy owed on it, plus interest from that time. You’ll be assuming his debt, sort of. Works out to about twenty thousand. I reckon a house will cost you thirty. Materials are short, but there’s good timber on the place, hardwoods. There’s a sawmill three miles down the road. I know a fellow over at La Grange has got a wrecking business. He’s got a lot of old brick. Pretty when it’s cleaned up. We’ll find you some cement and copper pipe somewhere. Roofing’s a problem, but we’ll find some.”

“Twenty thousand’s too cheap.”

“I’ll have got a reasonable return on my investment. You forget, Hoss has been paying me for the use of the land. The bank’ll be getting your mortgage business, too. I’m no fool.”

Billy looked at Patricia. “Say yes to Mr. Hugh, or I’ll divorce you,” she said.

He turned back to Holmes. “The bank has itself a customer.”

“There’s just one condition,” said Holmes. “I want to make you a wedding present of the brick. I want to give you something that’ll last.”

Billy started to protest. “Shut up, Billy Lee,” Patricia said, then put her arms around Holmes and kissed him, making him blush. “Thank you, Mr. Hugh,” she whispered in his ear. “Thank you so very much.”

On the way back to town Holmes asked where Billy had found the Ford convertible. Billy told him.

“You should have checked with me,” Holmes said reprovingly. “Still, I know a fellow could probably fix it up for you.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Billy replied.

Chapter 5.

OFFICER SONNY BUTTS strolled out of the Delano police station and into the bright June morning. This was his favorite time of day and his favorite thing to do. He threw a leg over the big Indian motorcycle, flipped out the kick starter with a toe, rose into the air, and came down with all his weight. The engine roared the first time, and he throttled back for a moment as he kicked up the stand and adjusted the aviator sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. The black leather seat was hot from the sun and felt good against his genitals as he pulled smoothly from the station’s parking lot into Main Street and headed unhurriedly through the business district. People waved, and he waved back or gave a little two-fingered salute from the bill of his cap, if the recipient was a city councilman or a storeowner.

At the traffic light at Main and Broad, Hugh Holmes waved him to the curb. A young man in a blue suit, very tall and skinny, stood with him.

“Morning, Mr. Holmes.” Sonny was instantly on his most correct behavior. Holmes always made him a little nervous.

“Morning, Sonny. Meet the new preacher at the First Baptist Church. Brooks Peters. Preacher, this is Officer Sonny Butts, one of our combat veterans, joined the police force about three months back.”

“Glad to meet you, Sonny.” The preacher sounded as though he really were glad.

“Welcome to Delano, Brother Peters. My mother and I go over to West Side, so we’re not in your congregation, but maybe we’ll get to hear you at a revival sometime.” Sonny knew exactly how to talk to Baptist preachers, just as he knew how to talk to most kinds of people.

“That’s a powerful-looking machine you’re riding, there.”

“Yes, sir, I guess it is. We picked it up for just about nothing at a war-surplus sale down at Fort Benning last month. Only had seven thousand miles on it. Real good buy for the city, I reckon.” He shot a look at Holmes, who said nothing, but gave a low grunt of indeterminate meaning. “Well, Preacher, Mr. Holmes, I better get going on my rounds. Nice to meet you.”

Sonny pulled away from the curb and continued down Main, then up Second to Broad and on up the mountain. At forty miles an hour the breeze was downright cool. He felt wonderful. At the top of the pass he swung across the road and parked in the shade of a billboard for the Bijou Theater, advertising the current attraction,
The Best Years of our Lives.
Sonny had seen the picture the night before and had identified strongly with the Dana Andrews character, the former soda jerk who had come back to his home town and been unable to find work. He felt grateful again for his job. All through the film he had kept wanting to say to Andrews, “Apply for a police job, you stupid bastard, then you won’t have any trouble holding onto your women.”

* He kicked the stand down and sat sidesaddle, waiting. A lone mailbox stood not eight feet from where he was—Foxy Funderburke’s mailbox, he knew. He was surprised to recognize a piece of mail protruding from the box. Even though he couldn’t read the whole return address, he knew what it was, because he had opened an identical envelope at headquarters only that morning. It was a catalogue for police equipment. That guy was a real cop freak. The back bumper of his pickup truck was studded with stickers and stars from various police and sheriff groups that solicited memberships from the public. People joined them because they thought they might not get arrested for speeding if a cop saw the stickers. Before he could think further about Foxy, a car flashed past the billboard doing at least fifty.

Sonny caught up with the car before it had gone a mile. It was one of the new ‘46 Fords, and it had a police-association badge stuck to the rear bumper. Sonny pulled up alongside and waved the surprised driver over. The man got out to meet him.

“What’s the problem, Officer?” The man was grinning, friendly.

“I’m afraid I clocked you doing forty-five in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed zone, sir. Can I see your license, please?”

“Sure.” The man pulled out a wallet and opened it. His driver’s license was displayed opposite a card with a big star on it, a police-association membership card. He was still grinning. Sonny noted the license number and began writing out a ticket. The man stopped grinning. “Say, didn’t you see my association card?”

“Oh, yessir, and I want you to know how much we appreciate your contributing to the association that way.”

The man watched Sonny continue to write the ticket. “But don’t members get some kind of special consideration?”

“Sir, we want to give you every consideration we can. So if you’ll just follow me down to the station we’ll try to have you on your way with the absolute minimum of inconvenience.” Sonny handed the bemused man his license and got on the motorcycle. “Just follow me, sir.” He kicked the machine to life and led the way.

At the station the man paid a twenty-five-dollar bond to Chief Melvin Thompson and left in a huff. “That’s three this week, Sonny,” the chief said. “Sure you’re not cutting ‘em too fine? The council likes the income, but they wouldn’t want to get a reputation as a speed trap, like some of those south Georgia towns on U. S. 1.”

“No, sir, Chief. That one was doing a clear fifty, and I only wrote him up for forty-five.”

“Okay, then. You mind the store for a while. I’m going home for my dinner.” It was only just past eleven, but the chief had a bad back and liked a nap at midday. Sonny knew he wouldn’t be back before two. Thompson was relying more and more on him to run things, and that was just the way Sonny wanted it.

“Yessir, Chief. Enjoy your meal. Say, if I clean up that old roll-top desk, can I use it regular?”

The chief glanced at the disused piece of furniture across the room, piled with old notices and circulars. “Sure, Sonny. Time some of that stuff was cleared out of here, anyway.”

Sonny spent half an hour sifting through papers, throwing away most of them, then another ten minutes dusting and polishing the old desk and oiling the roll-top. Didn’t look bad, when it was done. He sat down and began rummaging through drawers. The debris of half a dozen past small-town policemen filled most of them—notebooks, wanted circulars, a rusty old handgun taken from some drunk years before, some loose rounds of ammunition, various calibers. Sonny dumped it all into a cardborad box.

In the bottom drawer, though, he found a neat bundle of files, tied with string. There was a note with them: “Files of Chief of Police William Henry Lee, Deceased,” it read, and was signed in an indecipherable hand. Sonny was about to put the bundle on the chief’s desk for him to check before discarding, when the aged string broke and, before he could recover, some of the files spilled onto the floor. A corpse stared up at him from a photograph.

Sonny had seen many corpses in various attitudes, but he could not remember ever having seen a photograph of one. There were several photographs, in fact, taken from different angles. The kid had been beaten up. Sonny noticed a quickening of his pulse, then dismissed it. He started to read a typed report clipped to one of the photographs. When he finished that, he read another report, neatly handwritten on ruled notebook paper. As he read, he referred frequently to the photographs, connecting the boy’s injuries to what had been written about them.

He looked at the signatures on the reports. He had never heard of the doctor, but he remembered the chief—Colonel Billy Lee’s old man. He must have been six or seven when that nigger killed him with the shotgun. He remembered that the nigger had been tried two or three times before they finally got the conviction to stick. It had been the first execution in the electric chair; he remembered talking about that at school.

He had no memory of them finding this kid, though. Shit, old man Lee had had himself an unsolved murder on his hands when he died. How about that? Sonny leaned back in his chair and had a sudden fantasy about going around and checking for clues and solving this old murder that went back to … when was it? 1920. More than twenty-five years. There was no statute of limitations on murder, he knew that. Maybe it was some solid citizen did it. A headline: “Butts Pins Murder on Banker Hugh Holmes”. He laughed aloud. He’d be a fucking hero all over again, no doubt about that. He stacked up the photographs and the two reports neatly and was just turning to a second report in the same handwriting when there was a commotion in the hallway outside the office. He stuffed the bundle of files quickly back into the desk drawer—he would keep them to himself—and walked into the hallway to see what was going on.

His fellow officer, Charley Ward, was pushing a black man, obviously drunk, down the hall toward the cells. It was a local,
^//
Pieback
^,/
Johnson, so named for his reluctance to do any heavy work. The man was in jail overnight at least twice a month. Charley gave him a kick to move him toward the cells faster.

“Jesus, Pieback,” Sonny said, “you getting tanked up in the middle of the week now? I thought you was a Saturday night special.”

“Caught him panhandling right in the middle of Main Street at high noon,” said Charley. “Can you believe that?” Pieback groveled his way into a cell, dodging another kick.

“Naw, suh, I ain’t really drunk. I jes’ had a little nip or two of shine; I ain’t what you’d call true drunk.”

Sonny slammed the cell door, not bothering to lock it. “Well, you can just get yourself true sober in there for forty-eight hours. The JP ain’t holding no special sessions for something like you.” Sonny remembered that Pieback had stayed out of the draft by showing up for his physical drunk as a skunk. He’d been classified a 4-F because of his chronic alcoholism. “You just sleep it off, and if you start snoring I’ll come in there and kick your ass up around your ears, hear?” Pieback flopped onto a bunk and heaved a deep sigh. He might have just come home to his own bed after a hard day’s work.

Then somebody came in about a lost bicycle, and there were a couple of phone calls, and Sonny didn’t get back to the old files. The boy’s murder stuck in his mind, but he had not read Will Henry’s account of the second murder.

Chapter 6.

BILLY LEE sat on a Coca-Cola crate in the shade of a pecan tree and watched his wife charm and bully a variety of carpenters and other building tradesmen into doing things exactly as she wished to their half-finished new home. He had forgotten, after nearly four years in England, how hot it could be in Georgia in July. Patricia loved the heat. She had been cold all her life, she said, and it couldn’t get too hot for her. In the distance he could see two black men repairing a barbed-wire fence.

He had not really had a hell of a lot to do with the planning and building of the house, because his new clients, the bank and the cotton mill, were working his tail off; because Holmes was marching him to every Kiwanis, Rotary, and Jaycee meeting in the Tri-Counties, and to every church social and barbecue they could find; and because Patricia had said she didn’t want him in the way. She had, to his astonishment, produced a finely rendered set of plans for a two-story Georgian house from her trunk, based on one she had known in England, and had proceeded to assemble the materials and people necessary to construct it in record time, considering the postwar shortages. Thus, in a few weeks more, they would be living in a four-bedroom, three-bath house all out of proportion to their needs or income. When he had protested, she had, reluctantly, revealed to him that she had a bit of money of her own, that she would spend it as she pleased, and that she pleased to spend it on a house they could live in for the rest of their lives, since she had no intention of moving about like a gypsy. He had gone back to work and campaigning and left her to it.