Trip Wire (14 page)

“Because of the keys. Some key on Wilton’s key ring opens something up in Kent.”

“Lot of trouble to go to for house keys,” he said. “Why not just break down the door or go in through a window?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the key isn’t for the house. Maybe it’s a safe-deposit box at the local bank. Who knows? I just know the man who assaulted me and took those keys was a cop.”

“You’ll never be able to prove that, Cass. You didn’t see him. Besides, anybody could’ve been wearing a jacket like you talked about.”

“I know. But I’ll bet anything I’m right. Who else could have had such an easy time of it? Just slip into the building and wait for one of us to show. For days after the killings, there were uniformed officers all over the neighborhood. One of them was told to get those keys, but not to hurt anybody in the process.”

I don’t know if Woody was buying everything in my version of events, but at least he was firmly back on my side. And he was in a cold rage about Norris being so filthy to me. I knew he would figure a way to get even with him, which made me really happy.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MONDAY

1

“What is this place?” Sim asked.

“The Wobbly hall,” I said.

“Wobbly?”

“Industrial Workers of the World. They’re anarchists. You know—Joe Hill and all that.”

He still had no idea what I was talking about.

“Like a labor union, but more than that. It’s complicated. Just wait down here. I won’t be long.”

On the way up the stairs, I thought about the Halloween party Nat had taken me to at the hall. I went as Emma Goldman. We drank jug wine, listened to Paul Robeson 78s, and sang “Solidarity Forever” about a hundred times.

The place was as ghostly as ever. Glorious old bowed windows, greasy with dirt, looking onto Lincoln Avenue. Rickety wooden chairs thick with dust in neat rows facing a makeshift stage. Except, few of the meetings or events at the hall drew enough people to fill even a quarter of those seats.

Nat was standing across from his friend Torvald at one of the long tables. They were collating mimeographed pages. Tor saw me before Nat did, and raised a welcoming hand.

Nat stared at me for a long moment. There didn’t seem to be much anger in his eyes anymore. What was I seeing there instead? Perhaps just indifference.

I kept a few feet of space between us. “Hi.”

He didn’t respond right away. But then he said, “Tor, can you excuse us for a minute?”

“No, don’t,” I said. “I was hoping to talk to both of you.”

That made Nat a little suspicious. “What about?”

I handed over the single sheet of stationery I’d found in Wilton’s copy of the Fanon book. “Any idea what this is?”

He looked for a minute at the two black fists in the logo, then up at me. Then he passed the paper to Tor.

“August 4,” Torvald said.

“What?”

“The August 4 Committee.” I guess he thought that was an explanation.

“They’re Vietnam vets. They’re a service organization for guys who come home from ’Nam.”

“Is that all?” I said.

Tor cast a quick look over at Nat before speaking again. “Not exactly.”

Nat spoke up finally. “They’re a covert group, Cassandra. They organize to get black soldiers to desert or defect to the Cong.”

“I see. So what does that word under the drawing mean—
Turnabout
?”

“I don’t know. What are you doing with that flyer anyway? You about to take up arms now?”

“No. I—I found it.”

“And that’s all you came here for? Satisfy your curiosity?”

“No. Not really. I have more than that to say to you.”

He waited. But I didn’t speak up. “Guess you don’t have more to say, after all.”

I looked at Tor then. “Maybe you could give us a minute alone.”

He backed away.

“You’re making this hard, Nat. Which I understand. I do, really. But I’m trying to do something here that’s pretty important.”

“Trying to find out who did Wilton in.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head in disgust. And for a second there, my fondest wish was to be a Bengal tiger, because I’d have leapt on him and clawed him to death. But I managed to push that impulse down. My God, I thought I had stopped resenting poor Nat for being alive. I guess I hadn’t yet.

“Look, Nat. I actually just want to ask you to forgive me.”

“That was nasty, the way you acted, Cassandra.”

“I know it. Inexcusable.”

“I thought me and you were—”

“We weren’t, Nat. That’s what you wanted, but we weren’t.”

“Sure, you’re right. We couldn’t have much of anything together as long as Wilton was alive. Now he’d dead, you’re more in love with him than ever.”

I knew for a fact now that wasn’t true. But I let it stand.

“And the useless cops still haven’t found who did it?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “They know.”

“So how come you’re still asking questions?”

“It’s too hard to talk about now. I have to go soon,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get together sometime. As friends, I mean.”

“Maybe.”

“How are things going with the free school?”

“Okay. Still got that picture of you one of the girls drew. It’s up in the coatroom.”

I had helped Nat when he first organized the free school/preschool. Most of the children were needy and sweet, and some of them had already been plowed under at age four or five.

“Thanks for the info,” I told him as I left.

“Watch yourself, Cassandra.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just watch it. You messing with something you have no business doing. Think I don’t know you at all?”

On the way out, I called my thanks to Torvald, who told me to wait just a minute. He brought me a thin sheaf of papers wrapped in tissue. “Little present for you,” he said.

I removed the wrapper, saw what he had given me: the new anarchist calendar for the year ahead. It was a little beauty featuring an exquisite line drawing for each month and noting the milestones in leftist history for every day of the year. Tor had been hand-lettering and reproducing calendars for years. Nat’s collection of them dated back to 1951. I thanked him for the gift as I flipped through it quickly. March 7, 1942—Lucy Parsons dies. April 6, 1931—the trial of the Scottsboro Boys begins.

2

I made out a little in the front seat with my chauffeur, then he drove me over to the
Rising Tide
office, where I figured one of Taylor’s co-workers could help me with some research on the August 4 Committee.

The office was a mile-high mess of manuscripts, empty soda bottles, denim jackets, LPs, manila folders, ashtrays, books. I could smell traces of tacos and grass as I walked past the empty receptionist’s desk.

Actually, just about all the cubicles were empty. On the one other occasion I’d visited Taylor on the job, the place was wild with activity. Where was everybody? I made my way back to the big space the staff used for meetings. I found them all watching television in a kind of group trance.

An assassination.
Another
one. These days, that was the first thing you thought when you saw a crowd of people staring intently at a TV.

But that wasn’t the explanation.

A daytime TV series about vampires, called
Dark Shadows,
was hugely popular with heads. In fact, a lot of Debs College students who were hooked on it would flock to the Sears Roebuck just across Wabash Avenue to catch it every afternoon. Sometimes the electronics department in the store was so jammed with freaks, the straight people couldn’t even move.

But no. The
Rising Tide
people weren’t grooving on that vampire soap opera, either. They were looking at the local news, and a few people were booing the face in close-up. Taylor grabbed me by the arm and pointed me toward the screen. The star of the show was our own vampire-torturer, Detective Jim Norris.

He was announcing proudly the breakup by authorities of a dangerous cadre of radicals. The black man found shot to death several days ago, who had rented a transient apartment under the fictitious name of Larry Dean, had now been identified as one Alvin Flowers.

Flowers, the ring leader of a group that aimed to foment revolution among black servicemen, had apparently been killed by another member of the group.

“Bullshit,” Taylor said. “I bet the cops killed this Flowers guy in cold blood.”

There was a chorus of right on’s from the staff.

Two core members of this group, calling itself the August 4 Committee, had been apprehended as they attempted to leave town by bus, Norris said. The group was wanted by the feds on sedition charges. Moreover, they were responsible for a string of murders from Maine to Louisiana.

Murder. The blade or the grenade, I thought. Whatever will kill. Turnabout. So this Alvin Flowers was Wilton’s hero, the authentic black man who was so outtasight.

But Norris wasn’t finished.

He took my breath away with the next part: This same Alvin Flowers, he said, was behind last week’s shocking hippie murders in a North Side apartment. Authorities had determined that Wilton Mobley, a member of the August 4 Committee, had defected from its ranks, so his colleagues had assassinated him to keep him from informing on them. Mobley’s female companion, Mia Boone, had been an innocent bystander.

“That’s ridiculous. Wilt was in some outfit that was fucking killing people?” Taylor said. “What a load of crap.”

He was vibrating with righteous indignation. I wasn’t. I was hollow, speechless.

“I underestimated you, Sandy. You’re good.”

I looked back at the television, saw a preening Norris. “So are they,” I said.

“Who? The cops?”

“Yeah. I wonder if they murdered Wilt, too.”

3

The newspapers had the story by now. All the details.

No justice. No beauty. No truth.

In my dirty room, I was affirming those words, droning them like a mantra. I was also trying to obliterate the reality of them with marijuana and music turned up so loud the jars on my bureau were dancing with the vibrations. But it wasn’t working.

I was still fully aware that the police were pulling off an outrageous cover-up, and they were probably going to get away with it. They had tied things up so nice and neat: Wilton was part of August 4 and he wanted to pull out. So Alvin Flowers killed him . . . but oops . . . an innocent white girl got in the way, so she had to die, too.

And who killed Alvin? One of his comrades. Why? They’d argued over money, that’s why. The white comrade, Paul Yancy, had over $100,000 in his duffel when he was apprehended at the Greyhound bus terminal.

Yes, all of that would hold together when they railroaded this fall guy Yancy.

Cliff had been knocking at the door to my room every five minutes for the last half hour, but I refused to answer. Finally he barged in and snatched the plug to my radio out of the wall.

“Get your ass off the floor,” he screamed at me. And when I didn’t move, he took me by the shoulders and shook me.

I had provoked another mild-mannered guy to near violence. Great. I might not be slinky, but I did have a certain power over men.

“I’m getting out of here, Sandy. I’ve had it. I’m withdrawing from school and I’m splitting.”

“So go.”

“I want you to go with me.”

“The only place I’m going is Hyde Park.”

“You don’t have to, and you know it. Are you coming with or not?”

“Fuck off.”

His face crumpled.

“I’m sorry, Cliff. But just leave me alone.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I love you. Why do you think?”

Tears welled up inside me.

He nearly crushed me. “Let go, Sandy. You have to let go. They’re gonna beat you if you try to take them on. You already proved how tough you are. Let Wilt’s people fight them.”

“They’re not going to fight for him. They believe the cops. So do Woody and Ivy. ‘Cass, you’re being ridiculous. We haven’t come to the point where police come into our homes to murder us.’ That’s what my aunt said. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everybody believes the fucking cops. You probably believe them, too.”

“No. But what are we going to do about it?”

I hung on to him. “I don’t know,” I said, and let the tears come.

I didn’t know whether I loved Cliff, either. But when I had dried my eyes, I said, “You want me to go home with you? What’s your mother going to say?”

“What do you mean, because you’re black?”

“Well, yeah.”

“She’s not like that. We’re not like that.”

Nobody—not even Nat—had ever held me that way and told me they loved me. What did you do when that happened? You said yes to them, didn’t you? Even if you weren’t sure you loved them back.

“But why do we have to go to Connecticut?” I said. “Why can’t we get a place here?”

He searched my face. “Is that what you want? You mean you’d live with me if I stayed in Chicago?”

“I’d think about it. Yeah, I’d think about it seriously. And you wouldn’t have to leave Jordan, right?”

He smiled then. “No, I wouldn’t have to leave Jordan.”

“At least nobody’s got to be afraid anymore,” I said. “You know what I mean?”

“Yes. Nothing else can happen now. Everything’s already happened.”

We sat in the dark for a long time. “Cliff?” I said. “Put the radio back on. Low.”

“Okay. But I want to know something first.”

“What?”

“That guy Sim is gone. And Taylor’s working all night.”

“Yeah?”

“Will you sleep with me tonight? I mean the whole night.”

“Yes.”

“Good, that’s what I want,” he said. “And call your aunt Ivy.”

“What?”

“She called you before. But you wouldn’t open up.”

I shook my head. “That can wait. I know what she wants: When will I be coming home?”

Cliff was so sweet, and apparently knew exactly what he was doing. We made love all night. He didn’t rock me to my foundation the way Sim had, but we made a good fit. Instead of hollering and sexy talk, we soothed each other.

While we rested in each other’s arms, he made a lot of promises and asked a lot of questions. I felt like there was almost nothing I couldn’t tell him. He got the Book of Cassandra in installments; I’d talk, we’d make love again; talk, do it again.

“I used to be so jealous of you and Wilt,” he confessed.

“Really?”

“Yes. I know it went against everything we were all supposed to be like. But I couldn’t help it.”

“But Wilton was never in love with me. You knew that.”

“Yeah. Maybe. But you had something with each other that you didn’t have with anybody else in the commune.”

“Because we’re both—were both—black, Cliff. That’s not hard to understand, is it?”

“I guess not. But I still hated it. I hate everything about being black or white that keeps us in these boxes, separate and ignorant. It’s poison, the race thing. If we don’t find a way to get over it, it’s gonna kill everybody.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

“We’re going to take one step toward solving the whole thing,” he said.

“What step?”

“Kids. You know. Children. Medium brown.”

“Cliff,” I said in wonderment, “it takes you a while to make a move, but when you do, you don’t play.”