Too Black for Heaven (8 page)

Dona tried to be casual, “That’s right.”

“Mighty pretty place. I fish it at least twice a month.”

Another deputy clomped down the stairs, followed by two laughing colored youths and four older sullen-faced white men. All of them were hand-cuffed in pairs. A second officer followed the sextet of prisoners down the stairs, cradling a double-barreled shotgun in his arm.

“What did they do?” Dona asked Ransom.

“Them first two stole a car,” he told her. “Drew six months apiece on the road gang an’ two years probation. The white boys is in more serious trouble. The red-haired one forged a check, his third offense. The man he’s cuffed to set fire t’ a cotton barn an’ drew three years fo’ arson. An’ them last two, the Davis brothers, killed a cattle buyer durin’ an armed robbery attempt an’ the jury come in with a verdict of murder in the first degree.”

Other white men followed the second deputy.

“That first one, the one laughin’ so hard, is County Prosecutor Yarnell,” Ransom said. “Jack Ames pinned his ears back on the Peabody case but he come out pretty good on the Davis boys.”

Carrying an expensive pigskin brief case under his arm, Jack Ames followed his fellow attorneys down the stairs. He looked tired.

Ransom thrust out an arm and stopped him. “I want you to meet a friend of mine, Counselor. Pretty newcomer to town. Miss Santos, meet Jack Ames. Jack, please to meet Miss Santos.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Santos,” Jack Ames said, soberly.

Chapter Fifteen

A
MES WALKED
Dona out of the courthouse and down the worn stone steps.

The groups of people standing on and just off the walk were swollen by the addition of friends who had managed to get seats in the courtroom. The old colored man was still selling peanuts. Both the ice cream man and the soda-pop man were doing a good business. The asthmatic wheeze of the carousel organ sounded shriller than it had. The swarms of children still raced across the lawn, screaming with undaunted vigor.

Ames stopped beside a group of dull-eyed men and women in which a flat-chested young woman was attempting to console a weeping older woman. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Davis,” he said. “I did the best I could.”

“You got Sam Peabody off but my boys got to die.”

“I did the best I could,” Ames repeated.

“Your best wasn’t very good, was it? An’ we paid you five hundred dollars, even put a mortgage on the place.”

A gaunt man laid a gnarled hand on her arm. “Now, now — ”

She brushed his hand away. “Take your hand off me, Art Davis. They’re your boys as well as mine.”

He said, “Happen so. But we’ve no call to throw off on Mister Ames. Like Jack said, he done the best he could.”

The woman continued to cry, her grief too strong for words.

“Check with me in the morning, will you, Art?” Ames asked the man.

“I’ll do that,” Davis said.

Ames and Dona walked down the walk to the curb. As they waited for a break in the snarl of traffic caused by mud-splattered cars and farm trucks pulling away from the curb, she asked, “Did they do it, Jack?”

“Did who do what?”

“Did the Davis boys kill a cattle buyer?”

“Who told you that?”

“Mr. Ransom.”

Ames cupped her elbow and guided her through a hole between two stopped cars halted by the traffic light. “Between us, they’re guilty as hell. They got just what they had coming.”

“Then why did you defend them?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Oh.”

“Now you tell me what you’re doin’ in town.”

“I came in for groceries and to buy a bathing suit.”

Ames patted his face with his breast pocket handkerchief. “I could use a lake full of cold water. I could even use some water in a glass as a chaser for somethin’ stronger.”

“You’ve had a hard day?”

“One down an’ two to go. Would I be presumin’ if I offered to buy you a drink?”

“You need one, don’t you?”

“I’m dead on my feet.”

“One drink then.”

They walked up the street toward the hotel cocktail lounge. “How come you were in the courthouse?”

“I got a ticket for over-parking.”

“Cost you a dollar?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Chief Simpson tore up the ticket.”

Ames laughed softly.

“He and Sheriff Early were very nice to me.”

“They’re nice fellows.” Ames opened and held the street door of the cocktail lounge open. “After you, Miss Santos.”

Most of the lawyers and court attachés Dona had seen in the courthouse were standing at the bar. All of them removed their hats and several of them raised their glasses to Ames, as he led Dona into the lounge.

County Prosecutor Yarnell said laughingly, “You whopped me good on the Peabody case, Jack.” He eyed Dona with approval. “An’ it would seem, to the victor belong the spoils.”

“So it seems,” Ames said. He waited for Dona to choose a chair, then sat across from her.

Dona realized, embarrassed, she’d chosen the same chair in which she’d sat the night she and Jack had met. And they had gone directly, if separately, from the lounge to her room. She hoped Jack didn’t put a wrong interpretation on her choice.

“What’s it going to be?” he asked her.

“A tall Collins and light on the gin.”

When the waiter came, Ames said, “A tall Collins fo’ the lady light on the gin. An’ the usual fo’ me, John.”

The waiter wiped the spotless service table with a clean linen towel. “Yes, sir, Counselor.”

Ames unbuttoned the top button of his shirt and loosened the knot of his tie a trifle. “You don’t mind?”

“Of course not.”

“Everything all right at the cottage?”

“Everything’s fine. I was even interviewed this morning.”

“By whom?”

“A reporter from the local paper, a man by the name of Kelly.”

“How come?”

“He said he’d checked the hotel register, found my name and wondered if I was related to Estrella Santos.”

“Are you?”

“She’s my mother.”

Ames bowed without rising. “Your highness. So we’ve been entertaining royalty unawares.”

“Don’t be silly.”

The waiter set a frosted Collins and a bottle of bonded bourbon on the table. Then he placed two glasses, one filled with water, next to the whiskey. “Do you want me to pour, Counselor?”

“I can manage, barely.” Ames filled the empty glass half-full of bourbon. “So you’re the daughter of Estrella Santos. Tell me, how does it feel to be the daughter of one of the country’s highest paid entertainers?”

There was a strained quality to his voice that reminded Dona of Charles just before he’d walked out of the apartment.

Dona hoped Jack wasn’t thinking the same thing. “Like being anyone’s daughter, I imagine.”

Ames lifted the drink he’d poured. “Well, here’s to crime. May it flourish. At least in Blairville.”

Dona touched her glass to his. “You’ve seen Estrella on television?”

“Also in person. At the Chez Paree in Chicago. Is she really Spanish?”

“Her parents were.”

“I see. An’ your father?”

“I don’t know anything about him. He died when I was a baby.” The old story came easily, even though she knew now that it was a lie.

“I see,” Ames repeated. He finished his drink and poured more whiskey into the glass.

Dona had the impression that he wanted to say more. Her laugh was forced. “Don’t tell me Blairville doesn’t approve of show people?”

“On the contrary. We go to everything that comes to town, even the annual play at the high school. Although I will admit the kids seem to be in a sort of a rut. No matter what they start to put on, fo’ some reason, it always comes out
The Mikado
or
Pirates of Penzance
.”

Dona changed the subject. “I went to your office this afternoon.”

“So?”

“And a very pleasant white-haired woman told me you were in court.”

“That was May, my sister, the one I told you keeps house for me. You see, my regular receptionist also acts as my secretary an’ on court days I need her with me. She’s the only one who can decipher my notes.”

“Oh.”

“Anythin’ special you wanted?”

Dona wished she knew what she’d said or done. The relationship between them had changed. Ames was polite but detached. She said, “Well, nothing urgent. I just stopped by to see if you’d gotten that gun permit you mentioned.”

“Oh, yes, the permit,” Ames said. He unzipped his pigskin brief case and took two printed forms from one of the compartments. “I got the forms this mornin’ but couldn’t fill ‘em in because I forgot to take the serial number of the gun.” He took a fountain pen from his pocket. “You chance to remember it?”

“I didn’t even know it had a serial number. But I have the gun in my bag.”

“Do you carry it with you wherever you go?”

“That’s why I bought it.” Dona opened her bag and passed the revolver across the table.

Ames copied the serial number on both forms, returned the gun to her bag, then pushed the forms across the table. “Now if you’ll sign your name attestin’ you’re white and of legal age, eighteen in this state, an’ have never been convicted of a criminal breach of the law.”

Dona signed the forms and gave them and the fountain pen back to Ames. “Thank you. Thank you very much, Jack.”

He creased one of the forms and gave it to her. “I’ll file the other with Sheriff Early.”

Ames looked at his empty glass. “Funny how this stuff evaporates. Must be the heat.” He poured another drink. “Look, sugar — ”

“Yes?”

“Sure you can’t tell me what’s eatin’ on you?”

“What makes you think anything’s eating on me?” Ames gestured with his free hand. “Skip it. You happen to see Beau today?”

“For a minute.”

“Where?”

“In the drug store. I was having a coke and he stopped behind my stool and thanked me.”

“Publicly?”

“No. No one heard him but me.”

Ames licked a bead of whiskey from his upper lip. “I thought he was passed out cold when we left him in front of his house last night but he must’ve had some glimmer of consciousness ‘cause he also stopped by the office this mornin’ an’ thanked me. He apologized all over the place for what he’d done an’ tried to do. Frankly, it rather sickened me.”

“Why should it?”

“Because, while I’ve known Beau fo’ years, it was the first time I ever heard him really crawl. And crawlin’ doesn’t become him.

“You bein’ from the North wouldn’t know. But down here, the first thing a colored father teaches his children is how to get along with white folks, how to crawl. The advice is usually like this, ‘Remember, a white man is always right an’ you’re wrong. In your dealin’s with them be brief, be polite, say what you have to say an’ get away fast.’ In other words, never forget you’re colored.”

“I thought Beau acted different.”

“It must be hell to have to constantly apologize for livin’. Like that case I won this afternoon. Sam Peabody’s a good citizen, a monied man as men, white or colored, go, in this section. He has five hundred acres of good land, a nice house, sound barns, some blooded cattle, even a tractor. He’s worked hard for what he has. But he also has white neighbors, for the most part red-necked poor-white trash who haven’t chopped a bushel of Johnson grass in their lives. But when one o’ them, nasty drunk an’ jealous, came at Peabody with a revolver, usin’ as an excuse that some shoats belongin’ to Peabody got into his peanut patch, an’ Peabody, in defense of his life had to shoot him with a .410 gauge bird gun, because the dead man was white an’ Peabody colored, a coroner’s jury recommended he be tried for murder. An’ ‘cause I got him off, there are folks in town accusin’ me o’ playin’ politics.”

Dona looked at the men standing at the bar. “Your fellow attorneys don’t seem to feel that way.”

“The higher the mentality the less the prejudice. Not that any of the boys would shake a colored man’s hand or call him by anythin’ but his first name. An’ I misdoubt that’s a deep-seated intellectual conviction. It’s more a tradition expected of us. Outside of the real old-timers an’ the illiterates back in the swamps, few of us believe that color, per se, makes an individual inferior to another. Not that discrimination an’ segregation won’t go on for years, no matter what the Federal courts rule. It’s a matter of economics, of survival. But I think, as time goes on the drawn line will grow fainter an’ fainter.”

“What about inter-marriage?”

“Let’s not get off on that subject. The devil can quote the scripture to serve his purpose. So can any preacher or rabbi or priest. So can any good lawyer. But it’s too big a subject for me. You can point out the Queen of Sheba as black but comely an’ Solomon lay all night betwixt her breasts in a green bed, an’ that when Moses was still fairly young and lusty he married an Ethiopian woman an’ when Miriam and Aaron objected, the Lord came down in the pillar of the cloud an’ stood in the door of the tabernacle an’ raised hob with them. But we down here have been raised with this thing. It’s been in our blood for generations.

“I’d say it depended on the individuals involved. Not that I know of any Negroes, outside of an occasional hard-put buck like Beau, who are any more anxious to tear down the racial barrier than we are. All they want is to be recognized as members of the human race.”

Dona picked up her purse. “I’d better get back to the cottage. I have some things I want to do.”

Ames beckoned to their waiter. “I’ll walk with you to your car.”

The bulk of the crowd had left town. Only the normal number of loafers remained in the square.

Ames loosened the knot of his tie still more. “How about me comin’ out for a swim?”

Dona glanced sideways at him. “I don’t think you’d better.”

“Then how about dinner tonight? I know a roadhouse down on the river where they serve
jambalaya
that would make Roy Alciatore gnash his teeth.”

“Who’s Roy Alciatore?”

“The fellow who owns Antoine’s. You know, in New Orleans.”

Dona was tempted but she didn’t trust herself. If she went out with Jack, the evening would probably degenerate into a repetition of the first night she’d met him; this time because she liked him, because she was physically attracted to him.

She put him off. “Not tonight, Jack.”

“Why not?”

“For several reasons.”

“Name one.”

“You’ve another big day tomorrow.”

He tabulated his cases on his fingers. “Two breakin’ an’ enterin’. Two aggravated assaults. A bastardy case. One statutory rape. Could be you’re right.” He lighted two cigarettes and gave one to her. “When will I see you again?”

Dona stopped beside her car. “I don’t know. Are you certain you want to see me?”

“I told you where I stood last night.”

“But you’ve changed since then. You changed in the lounge when you learned I was Estrella’s daughter.”

“How?”

“In the way you look at me, the way you act. What did you start to tell me, then change your mind about saying?”

Ames sucked at his cigarette. “Just a crazy idea I’ve had in the back of my mind for some time. Nothin’ that concerns you.”

“There were only the two of us.”

Ames turned his head to watch a blue sedan that was traveling much too fast for existing conditions. “The damn fool.”

“Who?”

“Beau.”

“That was Beau in that car?”

“An’ drinkin’ again. Anyway, on the prod.”

“How can you tell?”

“By the way he’s drivin’. But to get back to us.”

“Yes — ”

“The longer you know me, the more you’ll realize I have a lot of human failing’s an’ flaws in my so-called character. But I never say anythin’ I don’t mean. An’ I meant everythin’ I said this mornin’ about wantin’ you to meet my sister, takin’ you to church, buyin’ you a box o’ candy. But if I happen to have a few mental reservations as to the wisdom of a small town lawyer payin’ court to the daughter of one of the country’s most famous an’ highly paid singers — ”