Michael Lister - Soldier 03 - The Big Hello (4 page)

When we walked back in the joint, Clip withdrew his Walther and fired a round into the ceiling.

In an instant the place went still and silent, the band stopping, the dancers halting, everyone looking at us.

Interestingly, no one screamed or ran. Just stood there giving us their full attention.

It was just me and Clip, Charlie deciding not to come back in with us. We were standing just inside the open double doors of the entrance.

“Guess I wasn’t clear before,” Clip said. “Sorry ’bout that. Sometimes I is just too damn subtle. We looking for a missin’ white woman. We think a nurse named Bernice Baker might have some information we need to find her. That’s all. Miss Bernice, you here?”

No one said anything. No one stepped forward.

“Anybody here know Bernice Baker?”

Again no one said anything.

“I know you a dead nigger,” Deek said.

Even back a little ways in the crowd with a couple of rows of people in front of him, he was still visible, his enormity unable to be completely hidden.

“Well, look here,” Clip said. “If it ain’t sucker puncher motherfucker. Why you so far back, boy? Quit hiding behind them women and step up so I can hear what you gots to say.”

He didn’t move.

“I here to do two things,” Clip said. “Extinguish that big nigger’s flame and find Miss Bernice Baker. Preferably in that order. Y’all move out the way so I can see his ugly ass since he too big a coward to come out hisself.”

The people in front of him began moving away.

We stepped further inside, nearly to the center of the room.

“Who here know Miss Bernice?” Clip said.

No one indicated that they did.

“Y’all go on and git from in front of him,” Clip said. “Don’t want nobody gittin’ hurt on accident.”

They began moving a little quicker.

“Oh, you a big nigger now you got a gat in your hand?” Deek said.

He was standing alone now, no one within five feet of him in any direction.

“What you say, coward?” Clip said. “Step up here and die like a man.”

“I’a step up there,” Deek said. “Drop the rod.”

Clip immediately dropped the gun on the floor, the heavy thud sounding like a shot ricocheting around the room.

He’d die before letting anyone take his weapon, but he’d drop it instantly if it suited his purpose––which at the moment was beating or killing the big negro in a fair fight.

At that I had expected Deek to rush him, but he didn’t move.

“Thought the rod was keeping you away?” Clip said.

“Man, I ain’t got time for this,” he said.

“Oh, I’m keeping you from something?” Clip said. Then turning to me added, “He got somewhere to be.”

Deek began slowly moving toward the door, giving Clip a wide berth as he did.

“You gonna have to shoot me in the back,” he said. “I ain’t standing around playin’ the fool for you.”

I hoped revealing Deek for the bullying coward he was would be enough for Clip, but I knew better.

“Probably best for you to die outside like a dog anyway,” Clip said. “Not mess up this dance floor and these people’s good time tonight.”

When Deek was nearly parallel with us, he lunged at Clip, coming up with a small handgun as he did.

Firing as he ran, Deek missed Clip and me, but managed to wing a guy leaning on the wall behind us.

As he got closer and his empty pistol began dry firing, he lowered his shoulders and ducked his head down, crouching to tackle Clip, but just as he reached him, Clip shimmied and twisted, avoiding Deek altogether, then sticking his foot out and tripping him as he stumbled by.

Deek went down fast and hard, his thick, muscular body smacking the wood plank floor with such force it cracked a board.

“Once a motherfucker sucker puncher,” Clip said, “always a motherfucker sucker puncher.”

Stooping down, Clip picked up his pistol then walked over to Deek, holding the gun down beside him as he did.

Still facedown, Deek was just beginning to roll over.

When he did finally manage to get on his back, he began pushing away from Clip in a kind of awkward crab crawl.

When he reached him, without saying a word, Clip raised the gun and pointed it at Deek’s huge head.

As Clip began to squeeze the trigger, a middle-aged woman stepped over and said, “Wait. Don’t shoot. I’m Bernice Baker. Don’t shoot him.”

“What about to happen to him got nothin’ to do with you,” Clip said. “Talk to Jimmy. He got a few questions for you.”

“No, don’t shoot,” she said. “This my son Deek. He’s just trying to protect his mama. Please don’t kill him. Please. He’s just lookin’ out for his mama. Don’t make him die for doing that.”

I wasn’t sure if that was enough to keep Clip from killing him. Before this moment, I would’ve said Deek was a dead man, but now there was a slight chance he might actually make it through the night.

Clip continued looking down at the man, who was panting heavily and avoiding eye contact.

Everyone waited.

Eventually, Clip took his finger off the trigger, lowered the gun, and extended his other hand to help Deek up.

Deek hesitated, but then took it.

Clip pulled him upright and the moment he was standing, flipped the Walther around in his hand and hit him in the center of his forehead with the butt of the weapon. He went down hard, unconscious by the time his head hit the floor again.

“You didn’t have to do that to my boy,” Bernice Baker was saying.

We were back in the dark parking lot. Four guys had carried Deek out and he was lying on the front seat of his mom’s car. Both doors were open to accommodate his length, his boots nearly touching the ground on the driver’s side.

Bernice was squatted down in the V formed by the open passenger door, rubbing her son’s head. Clip and I were standing a few feet away.

“You better just be glad he alive,” Clip said.

“I am,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

“Why didn’t you just talk to us?” I asked.

“I’s scared to,” she said.

“But you’ll talk to us now?”

She nodded. “Everybody here already think I am. Might as well. You promise to leave my boy alone?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

She looked up and over at Clip. “Wants to hear it from him.”

He hesitated a moment then nodded. “Long as he leave me alone.”

“He will,” she said. “Here, help me up.”

She held her large, flappy arms up and we each took one.

Bernice Baker was an enormous woman with an ample ass, big breasts, and chubby black cheeks. Even her knees, which were visible just beneath her white cotton dress, were fat. They, along with other joints in her body creaked and popped as we helped her stand up. Her hair came down to near the bottom of her neck, and it, like her coal-black skin, looked oily, its moistness glinting in the little light there was.

“What are you afraid of?” I asked.

“Who you here looking for information about?”

“Lauren Lewis.”

“Then you know.”

She had just the hint of a lisp and her enormous lips, which were painted an extremely bright red, protruded in a kind of puckered pout, which conspired to make her challenging to understand.

“Wait,” she said. “You were with her.”

I nodded.

“You’s in a bad way, fella,” she said. “Don’t look too much better now. Surprised to see you up and about.”

“Tell me about Lauren,” I said.

“Everything happen so fast,” she said. “I was back in the colored section with this boy from Tuskegee when I heard a loud crash and yelling. I ran out to see what was going on. I shouldn’t have. The rest of the hospital is whites only, but … I get out there and I see the car and the rubble and … at first I just stood there, but they’s shorthanded so while the only doc and a nurse took you, I helped get the woman––Lauren––out of the car and onto a gurney. I heard someone say ‘Do you know who that is?’ but I didn’t hear the reply. She was so beautiful.”

“She was alive?” I asked. “You’re sure?”

She nodded. “She’s in bad shape. Same as you. But she was fightin’ awfully hard. Wasn’t studdin’ no dying. Kept mumbling somethin’ ’bout some serviceman.”

Clip said, “Serviceman?”

“Somethin’ like that.”

“Soldier maybe?” he said.

“That it,” she said. “Soldier.”

Deek moaned a little but didn’t stir.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“This all took a while,” she said. “And they didn’t really have nowhere to take her so we worked on her right there on the gurney. I’s mostly watching––there if they needed me, but tryin’ to stay out the way. Then one of the nurses said something to the other about callin’ to let him know, and she left for a while. I helped a little during that time. Directly, she came back. ’Ventually a army nurse showed up and took over. Came in like she owned the place. Told me to return to the colored section. I did, but I was slow to do it, seeing what they’s gonna do next. They rolled her down the other hall, but I didn’t see where they took her from there. I knew there’s somethin’ wrong then, but I didn’t know just how wrong ’til later.”

“What’d you know then and what’d you find out later?” I asked. “Tell me everything. Every detail.”

“Well, some army nurse gonna come in and take over? And just how funny the other two nurses were acting––making a call in the middle of working on the poor girl? Who she gonna call? Makes no sense. Next day I hear that she didn’t make it––which, with how she looked, I coulda believed, but they say she DOA. I know that wasn’t right. So when I can, I pull the death certificate. They say she arrive dead, that she never regain consciousness. They got time of death a good hour before the last time I saw her alive. Then … you hear what happened to the two nurses what worked on her?”

I nodded.

“One murdered right there in the sanatorium, the other vanished without a trace. Somethin’ ain’t right with the whole deal. So don’t blame me if I don’t step forward when two thugs come looking for me.”

“Thugs?” Clip asked with a smile.

“Thugs, gangsters, whatever.”

“Actually,” he said, “We the good guys.”

Deek moaned some more, beginning to rouse. She looked down at him.

“Bet my baby have somethin’ to say about that.”

“Did you catch the army nurse’s name?” I asked. “What’d she look like?”

“She introduced herself as Nurse Powell,” she said.

That name was as haunted for me as any name I knew, its two syllables bearing with their breathed vibrations open wounds that ran like deep trenches down to some dark part of my unseen core.

“She listed on the death certificate as Valerie Powell,” Bernice was saying. “She a stout white woman. Pale as hell. Light red hair. Heavy makeup she tryin’ to cover freckles with but it didn’t work.”

She may have said more. Probably did. But if she did I didn’t hear it.

We found a payphone a few blocks down from the juke. I was using it to call Henry Folsom. Clip was in the car.

The darkness seemed somehow darker now.

The phone box was on a street corner near a closed service station, situated beneath a streetlamp, which was off.

Clip had the car idling, its half headlights placing the booth in a narrow arc of pale light, the distorted shadow it cast elongating and disappearing into the night. Beyond the booth, past the pallid patch of phosphorescence, there was nothing–– no wide world, no living souls, no nocturnal activities. Nothing but night.

“Hiya Jimmy,” Folsom said. “How’s it going over there?”

I told him.

“So now we actually know for sure she was alive when y’all arrived that night. That’s great news, son. Great news.”

There was no cop I respected more than Henry Folsom. He was the most honest, hardworking, and humble I knew. He wasn’t particularly well liked––turning in fellow cops for taking bribes, telling the mayor to go fuck himself, and following evidence even when it leads to the elite of the establishment won’t win many friends––but he was respected by the honest and feared by the corrupt. He had always treated me more like a son than a subordinate––something that hadn’t changed since I became a civilian again––and though he felt bad about me losing my arm while working for him, nothing he ever did for me felt like pity.

“I’m very happy for you, Jimmy,” he was saying. “Very happy.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m trying not to think about it. Just focusing on finding her.”

What Clip had said earlier was true. She could still be dead. Just because a negro nurse saw her or thinks she saw her alive at a certain point early after our arrival didn’t mean Lauren was still alive.

“All you can do,” he said. “Don’t do anything but. And don’t let your mind wander to what-ifs.”

“Trying not to.”

“You call me, you need to, fella,” he said. “I’ll straighten you right out. And fast.”

“Thanks.”

“You think the murder and the disappearance are connected to Lauren?”

“Hard not to,” I said.

“Part of some kind of cover-up?” he said.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “Tell me if I’m trying to connect things that don’t.”

“No, I agree. I’ll poke around a bit into the murder and see what I can dig up on the missing girl. What was her name again?”

“Doris Perkins.”

“And I’ll find an address on the Powell woman right away. You think she’s even a real nurse?”

Like the first time I had heard her name, hearing reference to Valerie Powell reminded me of three dead people––Dorothy Powell, my old partner Ray Parker, our secretary July––and the events that seemed now to have happened a lifetime ago.

“Bernice didn’t seem to doubt it.”

“I’ve got a friend on the force over there. We should probably get him involved. I’ll give him a call. He can help track this down for us and fill us in on where they are with the investigations.”

“As long as it doesn’t involve Collins,” I said.

“Doesn’t. Name is Dana Shelby. Detective. Good cop.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Speaking of friends, the thing in Liberty County squared away?”

“Spoke with the sheriff. We’re gettin’ it all straightened out. And working on identities for the two shooters.”

We were quiet a moment. I wanted to thank him again, but felt like that was all I was saying to him these days and it was taking away from what I was actually trying to convey somehow.

“How’s Clip holding up?” he asked. “Didn’t look so good this morning.”

It had been Folsom who had backed my play against Whitfield and Dixon when I intervened to keep Clip from getting framed and executed, and he had kept up with him ever since.

“He’s okay,” I said. “I think. Hard to tell with him.”

“Let me know what y’all need, and keep checking in. I’ll be here through the night. Not leaving.”

“What about Gladys?”

It was the first time I had ever referred to his infirmed wife by her first name. I was taking a liberty, a leap of intimacy that felt warranted.

He had always been the one to care for her at night, never allowing anyone else to even lend the least bit of assistance, so I couldn’t help but wonder who he was letting help him tonight.

He was quiet a long moment, and I thought I had crossed a line until I heard the way he cleared his throat.

“I finally had to put her in a place,” he said, his voice discernibly weaker. “Got no one to go home to.”

I had been so wrapped up in my own little affairs I hadn’t even asked after her lately. If I had, I would’ve known.

“Oh, Chief,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“She’s better off,” he said. “They’re doing far more for her than I could. I just …”

I waited a long moment, but he didn’t say anything else.

Eventually, he said, “We’re chasing down a few leads on De Grasse but they’re long shots. Be surprised if anything comes of them.”

“We’ve got to find her before he does,” I said.

“You think he’ll go after her?”

“The girls he killed were patterned after Lauren,” I said.

“But wasn’t that because Harry chose them?”

“It was,” I said. “At least in part. But she’s the ultimate end of what they were doing, the raison d’être, meant to––”

“The what?”

“The reason for the entire thing,” I said. “I think she was also meant to be the pièce de résistance.”

“What’s with all the French, fella?”

“Sorry,” I said. “They’re just the best phrases to express what I mean.”

“All that readin’ you do’s got you so I don’t understand you much of the time.”

“I’m just saying she was the beginning and the end,” I said. “As least as far as Harry was concerned. Does that change anything now that he’s dead? I’m afraid that for someone like Flaxon De Grasse it doesn’t. I see him as this obsessive collector who won’t stop until he has the entire set of something. If that’s true, Harry’s death doesn’t change anything. Lauren is still the denouement.”

“There you go again.”

I started to apologize, but heard the laugh in his voice and was glad for it.

From a few blocks down the street, headlights appeared. They were the first I’d seen since I’d been in the booth.

“We’re gonna find him,” he said. “Got roadblocks everywhere. He’s not getting out of our town. We’re gonna find him and we’re gonna find her.”

“Yes we are,” I said.

The way I sounded bothered me but good. My words were weak and hollow, like empty bravado.

When the headlights arrived they were attached to an unmarked police car.

There were two cops in the car, neither friendly, both looking like they were looking for a fight. Both looking like they were pretty sure they had found one. They had pulled up beside Clip and shown a light at him, eyeing him suspiciously as they did.

“Can you call your friend in the force over here now?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said “Why?”

“’Cause,” I said, “I’m pretty sure we’re gonna need him.”