Reach the Shining River (5 page)

9.

“The police have done nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“What did you expect?”

“I expect justice.”

“Then you’re in the wrong town, Reverend.”

Arlene listened as the men held forth. Cal Watkins. Bill Carter, the editor. And the Reverend Lucious Jones, talking like he was in church but looking like the devil himself with his black suit and flaring eyebrows and neatly trimmed goatee.

“All this talk about reform. A change coming on. A great
change
.”

“Reform is like a bus, with the Negro sitting at the back.”

“
That
bus done left the station.”

Laughter, but Lucious kept scowling. The scowl of anger. Of righteousness.

Leonora Watkins had talked Arlene into coming to the Watkins house for the meeting. Concerned citizens from the district, she said. Bill Carter had written Eddie’s obituary and an editorial in the
Call
demanding an open police investigation of the murder. Reverend Jones had thundered from the pulpit on Sunday and on his neighborhood rounds. Time for the community to rise up. Time for the Negro people to respond to the gravity of the crisis with responsibility.
Com
-
mun
-
i
-
ty
.
Re
-
spon
-
si
-
bil
-
i
-
ty
. The big words rolled from the reverend’s lips syllable by syllable.

The Watkins parlor had chintz curtains on the mullioned windows, crocheted antimacassars on the armchairs, and oak shelves lined with books by Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois. Masks from Ghana and Senegal hung above the fireplace and copies of the
Call
and
The
Journal
of
Negro
Education
lay on the coffee table. Cal was president of the Colored Chamber of Commerce. He and Leonora had two sons at Howard. Good people, educated people, but careful about who they had round.

Eddie wouldn’t have shown here in a month of Sundays – not that he would have been invited.

Arlene hadn’t sung at the Sunset since the funeral. Piney had given her full pay for the weekend she missed. Every day, he or one of his bartenders came to the house with food and iced tea, kept her company, and looked after Wardell when she had to run errands.

“Take your time ‘bout coming back, chicken,” Piney had said. “No hurry.”

“I have to work.”

“You don’t got to do nothin’ but mind yourself and that sweet chil’ of yours.”

There was Piney’s world and there was the Watkins’. Cal knew that Arlene sang in the clubs but also remembered that she was a graduate of Spelman College and a church-goer. Or used to be. Though if she’d known Reverend Jones would be here she would have made her excuses.

“An upstanding Negro citizen,” Jones said dramatically, “killed in cold blood.”

Leonora touched Arlene’s arm. “Arlene worked with Eddie Sloan,” she said.

Leonora meant well, but the weight of the room’s attention shifted to Arlene. Faces severe but curious.

“He was my accompanist,” she said quietly.

The reverend peered over the rims of his spectacles. “At Emmanuel?”

Arlene stared him down. “At the Sunset Club.”

“And you met with the police, Arlene, didn’t you?” Leonora said.

“No. With the coroner.”

“Coroner?”

“I identified Eddie.”

“Ah.”

Piney knew about her and Eddie. No one else. It was not something the people in this room would understand. She stared at her folded hands while the others held their breath, coffee cups poised, waiting for more detail.

“Have the police spoken to you?” Reverend Jones finally said.

“No.”

“What about Wardell?” Leonora said.

“Who is Wardell?”

“My son.”

“Didn’t he…?”

Too late, Leonora saw the pain in Arlene’s face.

“What’s this?” Bill Carter said, sniffing news.

Arlene drew herself up and smoothed her dress against her legs. “My son was the one who… who found the body. He led the police to the scene.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“What about the report?”

“I did not see any report.”

Bill set his cup on the table. “How come I didn’t hear about this? What’s your son’s name?”

Arlene couldn’t speak.

“Wardell,” Cal said.

Bill Carter looked at Cal. “But the boy, did he provide evidence? He must have been interviewed.”

“Come on, Bill,” Cal said. “You of all people asking that? Arlene was working that day, and Wardell went to the Jenkins’s. Lester came and told me and I went over. Nothing for it but to call the police. Anything else would have put the boy at risk. But you know how these things go.” A few throats cleared. “White detective. Senior man by the look of him. Drove the boy out there and back. By himself. I asked along but no – no discussion.”

“Cal,” Arlene said. “Do we have to go into this?”

The men acted as if Arlene hadn’t spoken.

“No discussion and no case,” the Reverend said. “A cover-up. A member of our congregation has been murdered, and nothing is being done.”

Jones’s voice was so loud his cup and saucer buzzed. Leonora said, “Let’s be calm, Lucious.”

“How can we be calm? An outrage. An indignity!” The Reverend’s hair, brushed into a wave that rose straight up from his forehead, quivered. “We must talk to the boy.”

“No,” Arlene said.

“
No
?”

“It’s not possible.”

Leonora stood up. “Who would like more coffee?”

Bill Call leaned over his coffee, peering at Arlene. “When was the last time you saw Eddie?”

Without answering him or even excusing herself, Arlene rose and went to the bathroom. She locked the door, splashed water on her face, and sat on the toilet. On the back of the door was a framed photograph of Paul Robeson. Leonora had placed little baskets along the rim of the wash basin, each filled with a different colored soap.

She covered her face with her hands and cried noiselessly. There was Eddie in her mind’s eye, standing tall in her front doorway on that last evening, molding the crown of his hat with forefinger and thumb, wearing the dark suit with pencil stripes that he favored when the sun went down.

“I’m not inclined,” he had said.

“Well, then, don’t bother,” she answered. “Don’t bother on my account.”

“Tomorrow night be better. Our customary evening.”

This last phrase Eddie spoke with a sly tone, his way of offering to end the spat on friendly terms.

But she was angry. “You rather spend time with Virgil than me then you go right ahead. See if I care.”

He frowned, put his hat on his greased head, and wandered into the night.
See
if
I
care
. Her last words to him. Words he carried into the next world. Words she would carry through the rest of her earthly life.

And Virgil gone missing. Maybe murdered as well. What had they done? Who had they crossed?

She and Eddie had rarely argued. He was a peacemaker, even when he was unhappy with something (her wedding ring, not being able to come by the house when Wardell was home). The secrecy of their affair suited them both, and was easy to disguise because of their musical partnership. He liked to slide along the easy way, Eddie did, and keep his head low.

But lately he’d been prickly. He had to borrow a few bucks from her once or twice, which hurt his pride, and couldn’t find work outside the weekend gig at the Sunset (Emmanuel Baptist didn’t pay). His needs were modest, but he liked his reefer and new threads when he could get them, and bought her flowers every week. He was feeling the bite of hard times, she knew that.

Their songs would not leave her alone. Lyrics took on sharper meanings:

I
don’t
know
why
but
I’m
feeling
so
sad

I
long
to
try
something
I
never
had

Never
had
no
kissin’

Oh
,
what
I’ve
been
missin’

Lover
man
,
oh
where
can
you
be
?

She wiped the tears from her eyes, flushed the toilet, and washed her hands. In the hallway she could hear the righteous voices of the men and the clink of cups and saucers. Overpolished, too neat and ordered, Leonora’s house was not homey. And there was no music. No piano or phonograph, in spite of all the culture. No radio.

Bill Carter’s voice drifted from the parlor. “If we want the truth, we’re going to have to take action.”

She could not go back into that room. She crept to the front door.

“There’s this man from Chicago I told you about,” Bill continued. “Someone who knows the appropriate methods and procedures.”

Leonora appeared. “Arlene.”

“Leonora, I’m sorry. I’m not feeling the best. Please pass on my apologies.”

Leonora was flushed. In spite of her sympathy for Arlene, the meeting excited her. “They want to hire a private detective.”

“Do they? Well, I don’t care what they want. I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

Arlene trembled. “I have to go.”

“Are you all right?”

“I just need to get home.”

“Of course. You go on home. Come by tomorrow. When Cal’s at work.”

Jones’s booming voice filled the hallway. “A detective? A
white
detective?”

She hurried out the door. As she left, Bill said, “Call him what you will, Lucious. But we need someone on
our
side.” 

10.

Friday was payday in West Bottoms, and the saloons were jammed from four o’clock. By the time Emmett got to Billy Christie’s it was well after midnight, and the place was a pool of sweat and whiskey, a roaring party with a pall of smoke as thick as London fog. He elbowed his way through the din and found Mickey in a back-room booth with Jem Boyle and Fat Jack Harte. Not the boys he would choose to meet on a night like tonight, especially with a few drinks on them. At least Emmett’s dad wasn’t with them.

“The counselor,” Fat Jack said, sticking out his lower lip. He sat squat and pear-shaped in the booth, a raw, nicked hand around his pint.

“Mr. Harte.”

“Don’t Mister Harte me, Sonny Boy. Man of your station needn’t stand on ceremony.”

He took a long slow pull of his stout and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Boyle smirked at Emmett’s old neighborhood nickname. Sitting beside him, Mickey watched carefully.

“How’s Jem?” Emmett said.

He got back the barest of nods.

“Burning the midnight oil?” Fat Jack asked.

Emmett was aware of the cut of himself: dark suit, silk tie, red-leather briefcase. Aware, too, that Jem was a street cop and reputed bagman for George Rayen, head of the car theft bureau. Word was, you wanted a deal on a second-hand Packard, you went to Jem.

“Doing what I have to,” Emmett said.

“Hard work keeping the county clean.”

“Hard enough.”

A lot harder than drinking and bullshitting all day, Emmett wanted to say. Or shaking down gas station owners and tow truck companies at twenty bucks a pop.

“Young Mickey here has been regaling us with details of your storied success,” Fat Jack said with old-country sarcasm. “Your climb up the social ladder. Your palatial workplace.”

Mickey looked like he had swallowed a worm.

“A soft chair doesn’t make the work any easier,” Emmett said.

Boyle laughed out loud. He and Emmett had been rivals since high school, on the football field, with the girls, in the classroom. He had dropped out of law school and entered the police academy on the rebound. Out-distanced Emmett as a drinker only and carried his resentment like a shillelagh.

“Soft chair makes for a soft arse,” Fat Jack said.

“All the better for taking a swift kick,” Boyle added.

“Jesus, Boyle, I was beginning to think you were doing us all a favor and keeping your dirty gob shut.”

“Fuck you, Whelan.”

“And as for a soft arse,” Emmett said to Fat Jack, “that leather you’re sitting on is fucking
groaning
.”

Boyle had his hands on the table and was trying to get up. Mickey, on the outside, kept him pinned. Fat Jack laughed. “Ah, don’t be like that young Whelan. What would your old man think?” He cleared his throat and spat into a dirty handkerchief. “He was in earlier. As it happens.”

“My dad?”

Fat Jack took another long pull of the pint. As if he knew Emmett hadn’t seen his dad in nearly a month. “Always here of a Friday. You’d know that if you spent as much time with your own people as you do in niggertown.”

“You lazy fat prick.”

“Such language, counsellor. That the way they talk in Mission Hills?”

Fat Jack stared, daring him to do something. Mickey was quickly between them, hands pressed against Emmett’s shoulders.

“Emmo and I have to see a man about a dog.”

“Don’t let us keep you,” Fat Jack sneered. “To the
spalpeens
belong the spoils.”

Mickey guided him to the other side of the room.

“Goddamn it,” Emmett said, “what are you gabbing with
them
for? Talking about me behind my back.”

“Hey, cool down. You were supposed to be here an hour ago. O’Malley’s watch ends at two, and if I don’t have the jacket back by then, we’re both in trouble.”

“Fat bastard. Ass like a handball alley and he has the gall to say that.
Was
my old man here?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“Fucker.”

“It wouldn’t do to make an enemy of him. He knows everybody in this town.”

Emmett stared across the crowded room. Boyle stared back.

“Give me the jacket,” Mickey said.

“Hold your horses. What did you tell them about the case?”

“Fuck all.”

“So where did the niggertown comment come from? Last thing I need is fucking Boyle catching wind of this. Company he keeps.”

“The Sweeney case. The cop who killed the colored kid.”

“I remember the case, Mickey. I tried it.”

“Yeah. So don’t be surprised when you’re called a coon-lover. No one knows about the other thing. Not unless you told them.”

“I didn’t tell anybody.”

“That makes two of us.” Mickey pointed at the briefcase. “C’mon. The jacket.”

“Wait. Few things we have to discuss.”

The singing had started. “The Croppy Boy.” Next it would be “A Nation Once Again” or “Four Green Fields”. Emmett bought Mickey a whiskey and chaser, and they pressed through the swaying mass and out the back door. Billy kept a quiet courtyard for conversations more back room than the back room itself. Picnic tables. Candles stuck in beer bottles. A juniper bush. The night was warm and clear and the stars were dense. Emmett sipped his soda water to calm himself. Mickey grinned.

“What are you laughing at?” Emmett said.

“Like the old days. When you used to drink and get pissed off. ”

Emmett opened his briefcase, took out the manila file, and handed it across the table.

“So?” Mickey asked.

“Fuck all use.”

“What did you expect?”

“More than a token report and a near-empty log. We’re supposed to believe there was no ballistic evidence at the crime scene? No footprints, tire tracks, bloodstains? We don’t even know where the crime scene
is
. South bank. That’s ten miles of riverfront. If it
was
the south bank. This guy didn’t even go through the motions.”

“Why would he bother?”

“To avoid raising the suspicions of guys like me who might come across it, for one.”

“You weren’t supposed to come across it.”

“And he wasn’t supposed to forget a lifetime of police training. But he did.”

Mickey drank his short in one go. “Let’s say he dressed it up with phony witness statements and planted evidence. You would have bought it?”

“Doubt it. I got the autopsy straight from Joe Healy. He found three .38 slugs in the body, but they’ve since disappeared.
Slugs
have gone missing.”

“I heard you the first time.”

Emmett opened the jacket, glanced at the name. “You know this dick? Timmons?”

“Richard Timmons, a.k.a. Richie T. One of Otto Higgins’s vice boys. Inner circle.”

“Has the ear of the North End lads.”

“He would.”

“Not a guy you’d expect to be doing a river run at two in the morning. It’s like he was specially chosen.”

“Emmo. Can we cut to the chase here? I’ve got a half hour. Tops.”

Richie T. The moniker rang a bell. Emmett trawled through his memory and came up empty while Mickey lit a cigarette from the candle flame.

“OK. So tell me about your week.”

Mickey blew smoke at the stars. “Station-wise, even worse than the jacket. No bulletins on the case. No field reports that I could scare up. I talked to a pal in the crime lab, and the boys haven’t come near him.”

“Sloan have a record?”

“Clean as a nun. I checked vice sheets, Records and ID, even Motor Vehicles. Not so much as a traffic ticket. Far as downtown goes, the guy was a choir boy.”

“He smoked marijuana.”

“If he did, he was careful. He was never caught.”

“Unless his files were wiped.”

Inside the saloon the singing swelled.

“What about elsewhere?” Emmett asked.

“I visited the club where Sloan played piano. Singer there, name of Arlene Gray, she worked close with him. She was the one ID’d him at the morgue.”

“You talk to her?”

Mickey shook his head. “Not back on the job yet. But she’s worth a conversation, I’m sure. Had a walk around the colored section while I was down there. Not being on the inside, I don’t have many sources. The snitches I do know weren’t talking.”

Emmett shrugged. “Would you?”

“Also snooped around the hotel,” Mickey said. “Night clerk had nothing but kind words for Sloan. A gentleman, he said. Never any trouble.”

“He let you see the room?”

“New occupant already. Quick turnover in those joints. Besides, Timmons cleaned it out.”

Timmons. Richie T. Where had he heard that name?

“One interesting thing,” Mickey continued. “This guy Virgil Barnes that’s disappeared?”

“Yeah. Mentioned in the Negro papers.”

“Lived in the same hotel as Sloan. Night clerk said they were best buddies.”

“OK. So we scare him up.”

“If he’s still alive.”

“Him and the singer. Not like we’re going to get anything from the cops.”

Mickey dropped his cigarette on the gravel, crushed it with his heel. “If this went down like I think it did, it would be in a lot of people’s interest for the facts to stay fuzzy.”

Emmett shook his head. “But not
this
fuzzy.”

Mickey drummed the table top, thinking. Emmett took a piece of paper from the briefcase.

“There were two cars reported stolen the day before the murder. A ’34 Dodge and a brand new Reo Speedwagon. Here are the details.” He handed the paper to Mickey. “See where they take you.”

“Jem Boyle could help.”

Emmett pulled a face.

“Just kidding.”

“Think you could find the crime scene? I’d like to have a look.”

“Ten miles of river shore? Get me a dozen academy boys to search and
maybe
…”

“I can’t believe nobody even noticed any footprints. Timmons’s report had zip. And who found the body? That information is buried. There’s too much missing. The slugs, the standard detail.”

“I’ll keep looking.”

“Check out the train schedules. Goods trains do the river route on the hour. Maybe a driver noticed something across the water. And no harm to check out the vice district. The way I figure it, the perps grabbed Sloan between midnight and one a.m. The place is buzzing then, I don’t care what night of the week it was. Somebody had to see something.”

Mickey was grinning again.

“Now what?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking you wouldn’t make a bad bureau chief. You know the drill.”

Emmett snapped the buckles on his case and finished his water. “You try as many homicide cases as I have over the years, you learn something.”

“County homicide.”

“Murder is murder.”

Mickey raised his eyebrows.

Emmett said, “And as for Richie T – ”

Saying the name out loud snapped it into recognition. Richie Timmons. Implicated in the scandal following the Union Station massacre. Rumor had it that after the shootout, when Pretty Boy Floyd was being treated for his wounds, Timmons stood guard outside the doctor’s office before escorting Public Enemy Number One to the city limits. Of course. Charges were dropped when the sole witness in the case, a nurse at County General, clammed up. Chief Reppert and three commanders lost their jobs, but somehow Timmons survived.

So now he was getting his hands dirty again. And feeling protected. So much so that he hadn’t bothered covering his tracks. Getting cocky. And sloppy once, sloppy again. Emmett had seen it over and over. Put enough pressure on the chain of events and the weak link will break. Was Timmons the link? He felt a tingle at the back of the neck, a prickle of excitement. Here was a real lead. A way to get to Pendergast and Carrollo and tie them to a capital crime.

“Most of all, dig deep on Timmons. Everything you can find out.”

“Emmo.”

“He’s an accessory. Isn’t it obvious?”

Mickey spread his hands with exasperation. “Of course, it’s obvious. Which is exactly why you
don’t
dig deep.”

“Just do it, Mickey. My gut is this guy didn’t cover his tracks.”

“Emmett. What’s going on here? This a crusade? You against the world?”

“Just doing my job.”

Emmett took an envelope from his inside breast pocket and slid it across the table. It was thick enough to make Mickey drop his guard.

“What’s this?” he said.

“It’s Friday, isn’t it?”

He looked Emmett in the eye, shook his head, and slid the envelope into his own pocket. Inside the bar the rebel songs had stopped and a fight had broken out. Curses, roars, bursts of breaking glass.