Standing at the Scratch Line (56 page)

“Since we’re having this talk,” Serena said as she stared up into his eyes, “let me say one other thing. If we get married there’s no divorce. I’m only getting married one time and I’ll never get a divorce.”

“Suits me. I don’t see no use in foggin’ things up with a lot of legal complications.”

“Is that all marriage is to you, a legal complication?”

“Marriage is just a legal way of recognizing what you’re supposed to be feeling in yo’ heart.” King put his big hands on Serena’s shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Just for yo’ information, there ain’t no doubt in my heart.”

“Good, because I don’t want a halfway Henry bringing pain into my life. I don’t want the pain my mother suffered. I’m looking for happiness.”

“What’d you say, halfway Henry?” King laughed as he watched the hawk that had been circling high over the meadow peel off into a steep dive. It had sighted its prey. King continued, “I can’t promise you happiness, but I can guarantee you some happy times. Happiness depends on your spirit, can’t nobody give you that. As for pain, well it seems to me,” King gestured in the direction of the hawk as it stabbed down at the earth with its talons and rose slowly with powerful wing strokes, carrying a squirming rodent, “seems to me like pain and death as much a part of livin’ as birthin’ and laughin’.”

They stood in silence and watched as the hawk became a dwindling silhouette in the growing purple of the evening sky. A breeze, originating in the low hills to the west, caused the grasses of the meadow to bow before it like devout supplicants before the messiah. The breeze also brought the smells of livestock and damp, fermenting fodder. It was a strong, penetrating odor for which there was no relief as long as the wind stayed constant.

“Smells like the Piersons didn’t keep their hay covered during the rains,” King commented knowingly.

Serena said nothing. For her the smell epitomized everything that was wrong with life on a farm; it was an indication of work that had not been done well, as well as the work yet to be completed. It seemed to her that even in a happy family, the endless demands of farming could suck the juice out of life. More than ever she was committed to leaving despite the sorrow that it would cause her in terms of leaving her siblings and the house in which she was born.

The sky was beginning to darken into a deep navy. Only a few stars were visible. The sound of crickets began to dominate the quiet landscape. Serena said quietly, “King, I can handle the pain that comes from natural causes. I just don’t want any pain that comes from deceit.”

King stuck out his hand and said, “Then we got a contract.”

There was no kiss, only a simple handshake between the two of them. There would be rituals later, but they would be purely for form. King and Serena had already sealed their agreement to be husband and wife and only death would cause the agreement to be broken.

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Church bells pealed from spires across the cityscape, tolling the eleventh hour of the morning and signaling the commencement of church services. Major William Fulton Harley unlocked the door to his place of business and climbed the narrow stairs to his second-floor office. He was wheezing a bit when he reached the top of the stairs; he reminded himself to get more exercise. He stopped to catch his breath and thought he smelled a trace of tobacco originating somewhere on the second floor.

Harley called out loudly. “Rastus! Rastus! I told you I’d have you whipped if I found you sitting around smoking your pipe on my time!” He headed to his office with indignation. The door opened just as he reached it and Rastus came out carrying a tray with cups and a coffee urn. The smell of tobacco was even stronger with the door open. Harley could not believe that Rastus would be so audacious as to smoke in his office, but the evidence appeared to remove any doubt. Harley raised his hand to slap Rastus across the face, but saw that there were cups of fine china on the tray for which he had paid dearly, and he restrained himself. He brought his hand down and said through gritted teeth, “Find my riding crop! You need a lesson!”

“Suh, I ain’t smoked! It was—”

“Don’t you try to lie to me, nigger!” Harley shouted. “And don’t you say another word or I’ll knock the shit out of you! Bedamned the porcelain!” Harley stared at Rastus and the man looked down at the floor and said nothing. “Now, I’ve tried to work with you. Lord knows I’ve tried, but this is too much. I’m going to have to call in one of the boys from the klavern to teach you a lesson that you won’t forget!”

Rastus quailed noticeably and began to plead. “Please, suh. It weren’t me that smo—”

Harley swung and hit Rastus high on the side of the head with his fist. Rastus fell backward, tipping the tray and its contents. Only the presence of a wooden cabinet stopped him from falling to the floor. “Goddamn it,” Harley bellowed, holding his hand, which was stinging from the impact with Rastus’s head. Harley looked down at the broken porcelain on the floor and shouted, “Look what you’ve done! You’re going to work a long time to repay the cost of what you’ve broken and it might need to be on a chain gang!” Harley wanted to hit Rastus again, but the stinging pain in his right hand made him think better of it.

“William Fulton, leave that boy alone and come in here so we can talk!” Corlis Mack laughed as he came to the door of the office. His still-smoking pipe was clasped between his teeth.

Harley dropped his jaw. “You’re alive!” he said with surprise. “Captain Hennesy said you were dead. What’s going on?”

“Let him clean up and get out and we’ll talk.”

Rastus stooped and began cleaning up the mess on the floor. Harley stared down at him and indicated some small shards with the toe of his boot. “Get those pieces under the bureau too!” Rastus picked up all the pieces obediently and wiped the floor clean of spilled coffee and cream. He stood up and tried to ease past Harley. There was blood oozing from a small cut above his eyebrow.

“Looks like we had a misunderstanding here, Rastus. You don’t have to worry, I won’t be calling the klavern. Take care of that eye and bring some fresh coffee up, okay, boy?” Harley patted Rastus on the arm and went on into the office, closing the door after him.

Corlis looked at Harley questioningly. “You’re not going to apologize?”

“I don’t apologize to niggers. I didn’t know that you did.”

“When they live in your house and have the opportunity to poison you, you got to treat them differently than regular niggers. Rastus has access to many things that could cause your death.”

“Rastus?” Harley laughed, indicating that it was foolish to even consider such a thing. “I broke him long ago! He wouldn’t dream of lifting a finger against me. He understands our misunderstandings, but hell, man, I don’t want to talk about him! I want to know why you are letting it be known that you had been killed.”

“Roy Wilcox tried to do me at the Club!”

“What! Not Roy!”

“Yep, I had to kill him. You know I have a cousin who works in the assessor’s office? Well, she told me that she saw Wilcox go into Loebels’s office on Friday afternoon.”

“That must’ve been after we met!” Harley exclaimed. “I knew he was angry, but I had no idea—”

“Yep, it appears he went straight there after he left you.”

Harley’s ruddy complexion paled. “You don’t think that I was involved, do you?”

“No. There’s no benefit to you if I’m dead. As a matter of fact, your deal is greatly jeopardized without me. You see, I have something on the assistant assessor.”

“The assistant? What about Loebels? The assistant can’t do anything without Loebels’s approval.”

“Loebels is dead. I received word this morning.” Corlis lighted his pipe and puffed it to life again. “If you saw the paper this morning, you’ll notice that his nephew, Lieutenant Kaiser, and a deputy were killed on the edge of Storyville yesterday afternoon. I guess Wilcox arranged it to cover the contingency of being double-crossed. He seems to have contracted professionals to do the job.”

“I don’t think he arranged any such thing,” Harley said. “I was at Klan headquarters last night. Nobody knew where Roy was and the men he would have used were there working all day yesterday.”

“Are you sure?” It was Corlis’s turn to be surprised.

“Roy isn’t my only contact in the klavern. If he had made such arrangements, I would have heard about it.”

“If he didn’t kill Kaiser, who did?” Corlis mused. “My men estimate that the killer fired a point thirty-oh-six from at least two hundred yards. Fired four shots and hit the designated targets in the chest with each shot. It was expert shooting.”

“We know lots of men who shoot that well,” Harley countered.

“Not with moving targets,” Corlis said. “One hundred fifty yards at a moving target maybe, but two hundred to two hundred fifty yards? Without a miss? Nope, there’s only a few that can do that and even fewer with a motive.”

“How do you know there were no misses?”

“Because of the amount of time it took. Kaiser didn’t have a chance to run after the deputy was killed. He was cut down within seconds after the deputy. I also had my men search the street for spent bullets. There were none.”

“At that range, point thirty-oh-six-caliber bullets should have passed through their bodies.”

“That’s another thing. My ballistics squad sergeant tells me that the killer cut into the nose of his bullets to make them spread.”

“You’ve really done some research into this case.” Harley marveled.

“We’re treating this as the murder of police officers in the performance of their duty. And it happened on a street populated with colored businesses. In combination with my alleged murder, this case has all the elements of a political bonfire.”

“What was the purpose of having yourself declared dead?”

“I remove the target of the attempts from view and then I have the time to check people out.”

“How are you going to come back to life?”

“I’ll get myself registered in one of the private hospitals and have my doctor contact the mayor. I’ll be recuperating from wounds received from the attack. I’ll explain that my injuries incapacitated me to such an extent that my loyal captains took it upon themselves to save my life. They’ll get medals. It’ll be a big event!”

“What about arresting the real murderers?”

“Well, that brings us back to the tricky issue of who killed Kaiser? You see, I just want Roy Wilcox to disappear. I don’t want to try and explain to some of that Klan trash why I had to kill one of their leaders. I also don’t want the Klan marauding and taking their vengeance out on innocent niggers. It’s bad for business! Night riders scare decent white folks too. People don’t buy liquor when they’re afraid to walk the streets and we have a couple of very big shipments to move. So, I’d like to find a nice fall guy, but I can’t do that until we know who all the players are.”

“Don’t you have some ideas?”

“Yep, I think I know who attacked the Klan headquarters and he could be the one who killed Kaiser as well. But it’s just a guess.”

“Who are they?”

“It’s one man, if my hunch is correct.”

“One man? Is this your supernigger theory?”

“Call it what you want, but when we bring this LeRoi Tremain in, you’ll see what I mean. He’s the grandson of Bordeaux Tremain. If you remember, about four or five years ago we lost a shipment of guns from the pirates and I lost a couple of deputies.”

“I remember, but those men were killed by arrows.”

“This Tremain is the one who is supposed to have killed those men. Do you remember me telling you about a sniper who killed all of Lester DuMont’s sentries?” Corlis lit his pipe as Harley shook his head, indicating that he didn’t remember. “It was sometime in June or thereabouts. About a week after Lester DuMont was killed, we received a call from a colored church just uptown from Storyville that there was a body rotting in the belfry. Now, this church is down the block from DuMont’s headquarters. When we investigated, we discovered four other men’s deteriorating bodies on the roofs surrounding DuMont’s building. The smell and the birds helped us find them. We think we also found where the shooter actually situated himself. Some of the shots were over two hundred yards and they were fired in the darkness of the night.”