Reach the Shining River (12 page)

“How long have you been there?” he said.

She had her hands on either jamb, one bare foot lifted behind her. Through the cotton sundress he could see the outline of her body. Her face was cold and blank.

“If it isn’t Sherlock Holmes,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged. “Sounded like high drama on the phone.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t eavesdrop.”

“Eavesdrop? The dogs in the street could hear what you were saying.”

Her voice was like bad weather.

“I’m doing what you said you wanted me to do. Looking into a case that’s important to
us
, remember? What your dad asked.”

“Good boy.”

“Fuck you, Fay.”

For a moment her face lost the dull sheen of mockery and flashed bright with anger. But she recovered. “I love it when you talk dirty.”

He pushed his chair back and gathered his notes. Without looking up, he said, “I heard you were at the Westport yesterday.”

“Is that what you heard? So it’s more than murder you’re investigating.”

“What were you doing there?”

She bared her teeth. “I could tell you I had an appointment with Henrietta Kincaid. I could tell you the Nelson Gallery patrons were holding their monthly meeting. I could say I was shopping downtown and simply
dying
for a cold drink.”

“You don’t shop downtown.”

She plucked at the material of her dress so that the hem lifted, exposing a softness of leg. “Bought this in Fields. Their fall sale.”

“Stop it, Fay. Please stop it.”

“Just answering your question. Be careful what you ask.”

He gripped the desk.

“I have work to do,” he said.

“I’m sure you do.”

She held his gaze with purpose before walking away lightly on bare feet. He watched her hips sway down the hallway, the hem of her dress twitching. 

20.

First day back at grammar school, Wardell sat next to Jesse. Usual spot in the third row. Same classroom, same old desk with the stained inkpot, same broken windows patched with brown paper.

But he felt different. He was in the sixth grade. The teacher was a man, first time ever. Mr. Lewis wore glasses and a bow tie and had a tiny mustache. He wrote each student’s name on the blackboard and passed out schoolbooks. The books were hand-me-downs from white schools and had the old signatures on the first page: Otto Schrier, Max Larsen, Albert Reeves. Cross them out, Mr. Lewis said, and write in your own name.

On Sunday, nobody in the district had left home, except to go to church. No women or children were allowed anywhere without a man. Jesse’s Uncle Josh moved in with Wardell and his mother for the curfew hours. He slept on a camp bed in the kitchen. The boys hoped that school would stay closed, but Reverend Jones decided to open on Monday. Monarch cabs brought the children back and forth to school. They weren’t doing much business anyway.

From the get-go, Jesse pestered Wardell. “You got it?” he whispered.

Wardell nodded.

“Show me.”

“No.”

“Go on.”

“I said no.”

Mr. Lewis paused in the aisle.

“You sayin’ no ‘cause you ain’t got it.”

“Do too.”

“No you ain’t.”

Wardell felt in his pocket for the piece of paper. It wasn’t there. He twisted in his desk and saw it on the floor. He reached through the seat slats and picked it up. Mr. Lewis stood above him.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Wardell Gray, sir.”

“What’s that you got there, Wardell?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Awful lot of discussion over nothing, wouldn’t you say? Give it up.”

Wardell handed him the slip of paper. Mr. Lewis squinted and pushed out his lower lip. “What is this?”

“Autograph, sir.”

“Who I think it is?”

“Satchel Paige, sir.”

“What I say!” Jesse shouted.

The classroom stirred. “Y’all quiet down, now,” Mr, Lewis said. He looked at the signature like it was a thousand-dollar bill. “How long have you had this?”

“Since Saturday.”

“You were at the Monarchs game?”

“Yes, sir.”

He handed back the paper. “Put that away. Later we can all talk about what happened on Saturday. How we must conduct ourselves during this difficult time.”

At recess the boys clustered around Wardell. They wanted to see the signing. These were the rough boys, with torn knickers and socks one-up one-down. Usually they teased him. Today he was the man.

“Tell ’em, Wardell. Tell ’em about Satch.”

But he couldn’t tell them anything. The memory was like a loud noise that drowned out his own voice. Satch cocking an eyebrow and licking the pencil tip. Jewbaby Floyd massaging Satch’s shoulder while he signed. Satch asking Wardell to spell his name.

“You play ball, Wardell?”

“Yes sir.”

“Pitcher?”

“Yes sir.”

“You call me Satch, you hear. What’s your money pitch?”

“My what?”

“Gots to have a money pitch. The one that get you out of trouble.”

“You have trouble, Satch?”

Satch
. The name was like honey on his lips.

“Wardell, all God’s children know trouble. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Satch handed him the autograph and pencil. A man in a white shirt and suspenders came into the locker room. He held his hat in his hand and hopped from one foot to the other. “We got to get out to the bus.”

There was shouting outside the door. The man waved his hat at Wardell and some other kids, like he was herding sheep. “Go on now, all of you. Out you go.”

He’d lost Jesse and Uncle Josh. Or they lost him. Outside the locker room, ballplayers and stadium folk ran back and forth. A policeman stood guard, hand on his holster. He told Wardell to scoot. As he ran down the corridor, country boys came hollering, waving clubs and bricks. He ducked into an equipment room.

The room was dark. He felt his way across and found another door that opened onto a cinder track behind the outfield fence. There was gunfire. He ran along the track until he found an opening in the canvas and crawled through. His head bumped into someone’s legs. The man hauled him to his feet.

“What the hell you doing here?”

“Nothin’.”

“Goddamn it! Richie, look what crawled out of the woodwork.”

He shoved Wardell towards a man in a light blue suit. His jacket was wet at the armpits and his hat pulled low on his face. This man dragged him to a break in the canvas and pushed him back onto the track.

“Where’d you come from?”

The voice was familiar.

“Nowhere, sir.”

The man held him by the chin. “You again?”

Wardell shook his head.

“Stop blubbering, boy. What are you doing down here?”

“Ain’t doin’ nothing’, sir.”

The man gripped harder. “Tell me.”

“I saw Satch. I done got his autograph.”

He waved the piece of paper. The men let go of his face and examined the signature.

“You remember me?”

Wardell nodded.

“You remember what I told you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“OK, boy, let’s find your people.”

When he tried to tell his schoolmates about Satch, it was like the man in the blue suit held him back.

All
God’s
children
know
trouble
.

“Go on, Wardell,” Jesse said. “You tell ’em.”

The rough boys pressed in on him. Across the playground Mr. Lewis stood in the doorway, arms folded. He was looking past the boys and his face was dark. Wardell looked in the same direction and saw a long black car behind the broken picket fence. Two white men got out. They wore derby hats and dark overcoats buttoned tight across the chest. One of them had a beard.

The clean-shaven man kicked two loose posts from the fence. They passed through the gap and towards the group of schoolboys. Mr. Lewis made a little strangled sound and ran across the schoolyard. One of the men cut him off. The other said, “Which of you kids is Wardell Gray?”

The boys pointed him out. The man dragged him by the arm to the car. A third man was behind the wheel. The engine was running and smoke puffed from the exhaust pipes. He threw Wardell into the back seat and sat beside him. The car smelled like a tavern. Mr. Lewis shouted, but Wardell could not make out the words. The man with the beard raised his hand and hit Mr. Lewis in the face with something shiny. He fell to the ground. The man ran to the car and jumped into the front passenger seat.

They drove off with a spray of dirt. Wardell scrambled up and looked out the back window. As the man pulled him back he saw his schoolmates milling around like small animals. Mr. Lewis lay in the middle of them like a pile of dirt.

21.

The weather had turned. After Labor Day, the heat lifted, the pressure rose, and cooling breezes flowed down from the north. Fay put away her sandals and summer whites and drifted in and out of the house in clothes that Emmett hadn’t seen before: leather jacket and flared skirt, tight black dress with a scalloped collar, crested blazer and flannel slacks. Something about her make-up had changed; her eyes were darker, her lips more pronounced.

Anger could roll in like a fog, blinding him. Treat it like a case, he told himself. Gather evidence. Create a record. Build a narrative.

She was out of the house most of the day, and her schedule was always different. It would be easy to carve out an hour or two that couldn’t be traced. Easy, too, to find a place. Even respectable downtown hotels did a brisk afternoon trade in married couples named Jones or Williams, who arrived at different times without bags and left by separate exits.

She tracked his movement, he knew that. Not that it was hard. He was a person of routine. His court appearances were a matter of public record. He had stopped noting appointments in his home diary, but Fay had Ophelia phoned his secretary several times a day with useless information and unnecessary requests. And he could not pretend he wasn’t in his office. It would look suspicious and would change nothing anyway.

But the facts were never just facts.

He imagined her infidelity. The scenes were as clear in his mind as Eddie Sloan’s killing: dressing carefully to be undressed; orchestrating meetings that appeared accidental; food left untouched, drinks nervously consumed; quickened breathing, loosened silk and lace, stifled cries in curtained rooms. Everything she denied him, she gave, freely and fully, to another man.

Sometimes, without warning, his whole body would burn with jealousy. The things about her that had once enraptured him – the curve of her lower back, the feel of her thigh, the catch in her breath before she moaned her pleasure – stung him unbearably when he remembered them. Peter Lawson, that hawk-nosed son of a bitch with his dim-witted mug and family fortune on the shelf, kept popping into his head. He pictured beating him bloody in a rage as pure as any orgasm. Or maybe it was one of the married guys, Joe Lister or Bill Treadway or Alton Parrish. She had known these men since girlhood. They could move in and out of her company without suspicion, screened by friendship and reputable standing, happy to provide her with excitement and escape. Emmett imagined the cold joy of shoving the barrel of a nickel-plated .38 under their chins.

But the fantasies were a distraction. The man, whoever he was, wasn’t the problem. And Emmett was a prosecutor, schooled in legal recourse and rules of evidence.

Proof, he needed proof.

*

The mood in the colored district was ugly. Though curfew didn’t apply until nightfall, cops kept an eye on the streets all day and didn’t allow any groups to gather, especially young men. Business was light. Eighteenth Street had none of its usual gaiety, no music from the barrooms, closed doors and muted lights. In the residential areas, idle men glared from the safety of porches. An eerie quiet lay over everything.

“This way,” Mickey said.

He led Emmett down a narrow dirt street lined with unpainted shacks and broken fencing. Soon they were in a warren of sagging chickenwire, piles of debris, and slum dwellings stacked three high. The stink of sewage and the sound of a baby crying.

They were headed to the Friendship Brotherhood.

“Down
here
?” Emmett said.

“This is the cross street. The office is on Cleveland.”

“How’d you find it?”

Mickey’s limp was noticeably worse. A light wind ruffled his dirty hair. Above, the sky was the color of mud.

“It wasn’t easy. No record in City Hall, and my colored CIs, they’re gone underground since the curfew. But church registers lists fraternal affiliations. Emmanuel Baptist had an address.”

At the next intersection Mickey stopped and checked the paper. “This is it.”

The two-story brick building looked like a foreclosed bank, with a wooden sign that said
Bibb
Funeral
Home
. The windows were dusty and backed by ramshackle blinds. Broken gutters hung above a water-stained façade.

“Not much better,” Emmett said.

“Don’t forget where we are.”

They knocked on the door. No answer. Across the street, a little girl in an organdy dress stared at them from a collapsing porch.

Mickey rubbed dirt from a window and peered inside. “Someone’s in there,” he said.

He rapped on the window and motioned with his fingers.

“Hey,” Emmett said. “Look.”

Taped to the inside of the window were pictures of four men – two photographs and two pen-and-ink drawings – with their names in Gothic script beneath the legend
In
Memoriam
:
9
/
7
/
35
.

An old man in a serge suit opened the door. “Thought you was local boys up to no good.” He laughed nervously, flashing a row of gold teeth. “All the peoples round here on edge, so to speak. Hear a rap on the door, we don’t know who be causin’ trouble, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“We have a few questions we’d like to ask you,” Emmett said.

With a limp so broad it made Mickey look nimble, the man led them through a tiny chapel to a paper-strewn office at the rear of the parlor.

He sat behind a desk and said, “How can I help you gentlemen?”

“Is this the headquarters of the Friendship Brotherhood?”

He pointed at the ceiling. “Second floor.”

“How do you get up there?” Mickey said.

“Stairway out back. Near where we stack the coffins.”

“You got a key?”

“It’s open.”

“Is anyone up there right now?”

The man cocked an eye. “They meet on Tuesdays. Eight o’clock. Nobody tell you?”

“Who would tell me?”

“Whoever it was sent you.”

Emmett nodded at Mickey, who slipped out the back door. They heard him climb the stairs.

The man licked his lips. “What he doin’?”

“Just having a look around.”

“Nothin’ up there but a table and a bunch of chairs.”

Emmett sat on the edge of the desk. “Who do you think sent us?”

The man smelled of wintergreen and old tobacco. He pushed himself away from the desk and sharpened his gaze. “How would I know?”

Emmett stared him down.

“I make my payments regular,” the man said. “I ain’t no fool.”

“What’s your name?”

“Charles Bibb.”

The ceiling creaked as Mickey walked around. “Mr. Bibb, what’s your connection with the lodge?”

“No connection. They just rent the space.”

“Did you know Eddie Sloan and Virgil Barnes?”

“Same as everybody in the district.”

“They were members.”

“So I believe.”

A raw, chemical smell tainted the air. Emmett felt the presence of corpses. “I take it you arranged the funeral for Sloan.”

“Sloan and the four boys from Saturday.” He paused. “Funerals was yesterday. Ain’t but one parlor in the district.”

“Let’s talk about Sloan for now. Was Barnes at his funeral?”

“No sir, he was not. Virgil Barnes ain’t been seen in these parts since the day Eddie gone missin’.”

“Is that a coincidence, do you think?”

“I reckon I don’t know.”

“And both of them Friendship men.”

“Like I said, I’s just the landlord. There ain’t been no meetings up there since Eddie Sloan’s passin’.”

“Are you worried?”

Bibb opened a canister of snuff and placed a pinch behind his lower lip. “You a colored in this town, Mister, you always worried. Mess of peoples think what happen out at the stadium some kind of cause to go all
militant
and such. Talkin’ white
an’
colored. Law abidin’ folk like myself, yessir, we worried. No doubt.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“About what?”

“Sloan and Barnes.”

“Didn’t tell ’em nothin’. They didn’t ask.”

“Nobody came poking around?”

“No sir.”

Bibb’s face had glazed over. He was hiding something, but he wasn’t going to open up. Not now.

Emmett asked him anyway. “What do you think happened to Barnes?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“You sure about that?”

“Only knows what I read in the papers.”

Mickey returned, a sheaf of papers in his hand, and nodded at Emmett. Bibb leaned to his right and spat into a tin can.

Emmett laid his card on the desk. “You knew him, so I guess you’d like to see justice served. You remember anything, anything else comes up, give me a call.”

Bibb did not look at the card.

As they were leaving, Emmett asked, “You own the building?”

“Free and clear,” Bibb said.

“And you’re paying the man his due every week.”

Bibb kept his face blank.

“Tell me this,” Emmett said. “If you thought I was collecting juice, why were you expecting me to arrive on a meeting night?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“No, I’m sure you don’t.”

*

In the car Emmett stared ahead, silently. Mickey lit a cigarette and sputtered into a fit of coughing that brought tears to his eyes.

“Jesus, Mick. You OK?”

Mickey waved away his concern.

“Bibb,” Emmett said. “He’s holding back.”

“He’s scared. They’re all scared around here.”

Emmett pointed at the papers. “What did you find?”

“I don’t know. I just grabbed whatever I could.”

They leafed through the pile: receipts, lists of names, meeting minutes, rules and regulations, all written longhand in flowing script.

Emmett slid them into his briefcase. “I’ll go through these later.”

“Look at those guys,” Mickey said, blowing smoke out the window. On the corner of Eighteenth and Vine were four older men in cloth caps and white shirts and ties. They stood with legs set wide and hands on their hips, carefully watching the flow of cars and pedestrians. They were spaced out widely enough not to be seen to be fraternizing.

“Business owners,” Emmett said. “Keeping an eye on things. The last thing they want is trouble.”

“Then why do they all have those pictures in their windows?”

“Are you saying they can’t honor their dead?”

“Whole place feels like a tinderbox to me.”

“Well, Richie T has a lot to answer for.”

Mickey flicked his cigarette butt out the window. “You still thinking that’s a plausible scenario?”

Emmett started the car and drove off. “I’m working with what we have. I’m working off the evidence, which so far is pretty slim.”

“Doing my best,” Mickey said.

“It’s been three weeks. What do we have?”

Mickey ticked off the dead leads on his fingers. “Barnes vanished into thin air, stolen cars that were routine thefts, nobody seeing nothing from the trains, and the vice district shut down. What am I supposed to do?”

“What about Timmons?”

“What about him? Everybody I ask knows he’s in with the gangs and nobody wants to talk about it. It’s a Kansas City secret.”

A goods truck swerved in front of him and Emmett hit the horn. The image of Fay in bed with another man pushed its way into his mind.

“And what about the crime scene?”

Mickey spread his hands. “What do you expect? I’m doing this all by myself.”

“That’s what I’m paying you for.”

“We got seven, eight lines of enquiry going here. Every little detail buried six feet deep by the machine. And I’m on my own.”

By now Lloyd had expected a case against Timmons, a stream of detail and influence that pointed at Pendergast. But Lloyd was a corporate lawyer. He knew nothing about the blind alleys of criminal investigation. The slow construction of a case, the elimination of reasonable doubt, the vagaries of evidence.

“If we don’t have a crime scene,” Emmett said, “we don’t have jackshit. That’s what it comes down to.”

“What am I going to do, Emmo, comb ten miles of shoreline?”

“I’m under some pressure to show results.”

Mickey raised his eyebrows. “Some things you can’t rush.”

“I know.”

Pulling up to a traffic light, Emmett accidentally bumped the horn, and they both jumped.

Staring straight ahead Mickey said, “I need some money.”

“For what? Hooch?”

Mickey rolled down the window and spat into the street. “What I spend my salary on is my business. This is for expenses. You need a blow by blow?”