Prime Suspect

by A. W. Gray

  He grabbed the laces on his second shoe and jerked the ends into a bow, then raised up and rested his forearms on his thighs. “I still can’t believe all this.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got to admit I didn’t think you’d get away with it. Probably you wouldn’t have, either, if it hadn’t been for that contractor guy.”

  “I’d feel better with him in jail,” Percy said.

  She sat back on the vanity bench, reached for light blush makeup and applied it with a brush. Marissa’s makeup. Christ, Percy thought. “Are you kidding?” Betty said. “As long as he’s a fugitive it looks even worse for the guy.”

  Percy studied her, her back straight as a ramrod, her legs crossed in a finishing-school posture. “I suppose that it does,” Percy said. “But what if he should come here?”

  “Then he’d scare you shitless,” Betty said. “Why don’t you hire the apey-looking guy as a bodyguard?”

  “That man makes me shudder, just thinking about him,” Percy said. “Christ, getting involved with somebody like that.”

  Betty paused with a lip brush inches from her mouth. She laughed, a silvery, tinkling sound like crystal. “Why, you haven’t paid the apey guy, either.”

  “Now why would you say something like that?”

  “Because I know you. You’d do anything for a bodyguard, you’re so afraid of the contractor, and the only reason you wouldn’t call the apey guy for protection is if you owe him money.” Betty dabbed rouge onto her lips.

  “I take care of people,” he said. “I can afford it.”

  “Could afford it,” Betty said, “before you pissed your father’s money off.”

  He stood abruptly and went to the door. “I don’t have to listen to any more of this.”

  “Well, you’re going to until the money comes,” Betty said. “Once you pay me off and I can get the hell gone from this town again and not have to depend on daddy for anything, well, then you can listen to whatever you want.”

  He pulled the door open. “I’m going down and fix a drink.”

  She screwed the tiny brush back into the cylinder of lip rouge, watching his reflection in the mirror. “Nothing for me, thanks,” Betty said.

  “I didn’t offer you anything,” he said. “Christ, how can you go on like this?”

  She picked up her small purse, came up with a vial of white powder, a mirror, a razor blade and rolled-up dollar bill. She sprinkled powder on the mirror and scraped it into a line with the razor blade. “Because I’m decadent,” she said. “Just like you’re decadent and my father’s decadent.” She used the dollar bill to snort powder up her nose. “Decadence, that’s what keeps us going. Come to think about it, I do want a Scotch. Fix it for me, will you, love?”

  17

  Frank Nichols had a pretty good afternoon playing pool. He collected eight different times from Rock Man Bentley and four times apiece from a couple of mulatto dudes over from Stop Six. Man, Frank had that cue ball walkin’ and talkin’, and times like this were what convinced him that the parole people were full of shit when they said that everybody needed a job. Frank thought that the parole people needed a job because they didn’t have no talent to do anything else, but for a first-rate pool-playing man a job only got in the way. Things were panning out in spades, and as long as the hard-ass parole dude kept Frank from working the construction job, Frank was going to keep his pockets full. End of discussion.

  The only trouble with playing pool in the afternoons was that a man needed a few beers to stay loose, and drinking beer in the afternoon gave Frank a headache. But the headache was nothing a nap wouldn’t take care of, so around five-thirty Frank hung up his cue stick and called this girl Monette that he knew. Monette worked the day shift, delivering meals and handling bedpans at John Peter Smith Hospital, and had her own place off Rosedale near I-35. Her brother Stu had been a pretty good hand in the tractor shop, Eastham Farm Unit, TDC, and Monette and Frank had met in the visiting room. She wasn’t the only girl he was fooling with, not by a long shot, but Frank guessed that you could call her his main squeeze for now. He told her over the phone that he’d made a score playing pool, and that as soon as he went home, took a nap and cleaned up, he’d be over and take her out to get something to eat. Finally he bought a round for Rock Man and the Stop Six mulatto dudes, rapped with them for a few minutes, and went out to where his Buick was parked. There was an ugly white dude with a sloping forehead sitting in a Volvo across the street, but Frank was so busy thinking about Monette’s smooth milk chocolate skin and proudly stuck-out ass that he didn’t pay the white dude any mind. The Buick’s battery was getting slightly low, and Frank was afraid for a moment that the car wasn’t going to start. Finally, though, the engine caught, and Frank drove east toward Miller Avenue.

  Life on the streets plus a couple of beefs at TDC had taught Frank not to truck with anybody else’s problems, but he was making an exception where Lackey Ferguson was concerned. Lackey was an okay dude, pretty different from the usual honky boss, plus Frank was pretty sure that Lackey was taking a bum rap where the dead woman was concerned. No way had Lackey Ferguson done that woman, and helping Lackey out was going to make Frank feel pretty good about himself.

  Frank steered the Buick into the driveway of the duplex where he rented on Miller Street, bumping slowly over raised cracks in the cement, and wondered whether his landlord had come by. The rent was due today, Wednesday, every week, but sometimes the landlord didn’t come until Thursday, depending on which of the days he could get his nephew to drive him around. The landlord was an old white dude, eighty if he was a day, and the state had revoked his driver’s license because he’d had a couple of wrecks and didn’t see too good. But Frank knew that the lack of a driver’s license didn’t have anything to do with why the old dude brought his nephew along on rent collection days. In fact, just that Sunday, Frank had seen the old landlord driving his Cadillac on Berry Street, going about twenty miles an hour and straddling the median with two Stop Six colored whores in the front seat along with him, so not having a license didn’t keep the old dude from driving. The reason he brought his nephew along to collect rent, though, did have to do with the landlord’s eyesight. The nephew would stand beside the old man and examine each and every bill handed over by the renters, just to make certain that the renter didn’t try to slip the half-blind landlord a ten and claim it to be a twenty. Old fucker don’t trust nobody, Frank thought. Today Frank was hoping that the landlord showed up to take the rent on time, because Frank’s pockets were full of pool-playing money, and he’d as soon not have to hang on to enough bread to pay tomorrow in case tomorrow at the pool hall didn’t go so good.

  Frank left the Buick and ambled across the rock-strewn yard, tilting his Yankee baseball cap forward and shoving his hands into his back pockets, all the while whistling the opening bars to “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” by Stevie Wonder.

  Across the street, a porch swing was suspended from the limb of a tree, hanging by two rusty chains. Two hookers that Frank knew were sitting in the swing with their legs crossed and their leather skirts hiked up. As Frank climbed the two steps onto his own porch, a Volvo cruised slowly by on Miller Avenue. A white dude was driving, and Frank did a double-take. It was the same guy with the sloping chin who’d earlier been parked across from the pool hall. One of the hookers climbed down from the swing across the way and whistled at the Volvo. The driver ignored her, continued up Miller and disappeared around the corner. Weird dude, Frank thought, if I’d been the hooker I’d have thought the dude was out to buy some pussy, too.

  He pulled his screen door open and entered, let the screen slam shut, and dropped the latch through the eyehole.

  Frank passed through his sitting room, skirting a faded green sofa and a standup TV which operated off a rabbit-ears antenna with tinfoil wrapped around its stems, and entered the kitchen. In the kitchen stood a stove with grease-encrusted burners which smelled of bacon and cooking oil. Frank looked in the icebox. Two
open six-packs were sitting on a shelf, one empty, the other holding one lonely Pearl. He opened the beer and dropped the cartons on top of the overflowing garbage underneath the sink. The cracked linoleum needed mopping, and Frank decided to let Monette spend the night with him so that she would clean up the place in the morning. Sipping beer, feeling woozy, he left the kitchen and entered his bedroom.

  The bedroom contained an iron bed with filthy sheets and grease-stained pillows, a nightstand, and a rocking chair with one back-slat broken. There was an old Amana window air conditioner which hissed and creaked but blew frigid air, and above the window unit the Venetian blinds were closed. Frank set his beer on the nightstand, lay down on the bed, and watched a small brown spider crawl on the ceiling. He thought about finding a newspaper or magazine with which to swat the insect, then changed his mind. Fuckin’ spider wasn’t hurting nobody and wasn’t no poison spider anyhow. Frank’s mind wandered and his eyelids drooped. He began to snore, dreaming of Monette, the way she’d looked the other night in a red shortie gown. Suddenly, a faraway banging noise shocked him awake.

  The pounding ceased for a couple of seconds, then resumed. Paper thin walls vibrated and the lampshade on the nightstand wavered. Fuckin’ old landlord, Frank thought, standing out there on the porch while his fuckin’ nephew beat on the door. Old dude waiting until somebody was about asleep and then hassling them for the rent. Frank sat groggily up and checked his windup Baby Ben alarm clock. Quarter after six. About the right time, the old dude usually collected the rent in the early evening, when those with jobs would be home from work and those without jobs hadn’t hit the streets to prowl as yet. Frank took his baseball cap off and scratched his head.

  Just as he did every week, Frank was having second thoughts about paying the rent. He’d never missed ponying up altogether—the old landlord would throw him out in a New York minute, and Frank damn well knew it—but the idea of handing over his pool winnings no longer seemed like such a good idea. Paying the rent would shrink Frank’s bankroll by a half-inch or so, and he’d like to have a wad of money to flash when he took Monette out to eat later on. Women went for that, a fat roll of bills with a couple of hundreds showing. Frank stayed still on the mattress and waited for the pounding to stop.

  But whoever was knocking on the door was more determined to roust Frank than Frank was determined not to be rousted. The pounding continued, hesitating occasionally as though drawing its breath, then resuming in earnest. Shee-it, Frank thought, my Buick’s parked in the fuckin’ driveway; the old dude’s going to know I’m home. Probably half of the people the landlord collected from gave him shit about coming to the door. Frank removed his shirt and shoes and went through the kitchen, yawning and scratching his armpit, doing a pretty good imitation of somebody who’d been asleep awhile. He padded into the living room. The door stood open and there was a squatty white dude standing on the porch.

  For an instant Frank was relieved that his caller wasn’t the landlord after all, but then Frank’s eyes narrowed warily. Shee-it, this dude again, the same white dude who’d driven by ignoring the hookers, and who earlier had been parked across from the pool hall. Come to think about it, Frank had seen this dude someplace, squatty guy with thinning hair, a parrot’s beak for a nose which gave his face a pinched expression, arms hanging to his knees like a monkey at the zoo. Ugly dude with crooked yellowed teeth, wearing a khaki-colored shirt whose sleeves were too short and green army pants whose legs were too long. The cuffs on the pants were rolled up a couple of turns. White dude fucking around in this neighborhood might be the law, might be the census taker, might be the repossession dude, might be any fucking thing. Where the hell had Frank seen this guy. He stepped closer to the inside of the screen.

  “Yeah?” Frank said. “Hey, yeah, bro, I’m hearing you.” The Volvo which he’d seen earlier was now parked in the drive behind Frank’s Buick. A tingling sensation began at the base of Frank’s neck and spread upward into his scalp.

  The squatty man paused with his fist cocked, ready to knock, and eyeballed Frank through the screen. Frank snapped that the guy was wearing rubber gloves. The fuck was this? Didn’t no white dudes come to Polytechnic to rob no black dudes, it was supposed to be the other way around. The squatty man’s lips twisted into a sneer. “Yeah, nigger, I know you’re in there. Ain’t no use to try and hide.”

  Frank cocked his head as anger boiled up in his throat. Crazy white mothafuckah running around Polytechnic hollering racial shit. “I done told you I’m home, man,” Frank said. “The fuck you want poundin’ on my door?” The beer-buzz was wearing off and Frank’s mind was clearing in a hurry.

  The man on the porch pointed a thick, latex-covered finger. “I want a piece of your ass, nigger. Open this fuckin’ door.” He grabbed the handle and rattled the screen.

  Frank’s eyes widened. He had it now, he was placing this dude. Down on Eastham Farm, crazy white mothafuckah they’d kept in the hole all the time. Some kind of baby-raper or pervert, dude that went around acting like . . .

  “Hey. You that Monkey Man, aintcha?” Frank said.

  The man balled his free hand into a fist and rattled the door even harder. “You fucking crazy? Don’t no nigger call me that, boy. You come out here and call me that.”

  If Frank had thought it over he would have known better. Would have known there was a method to this, the racial slurs, the pounding on the door, all designed to keep Frank from thinking straight. But thinking straight had never been Frank’s thing to begin with. He flipped the latch and pushed open the screen.

  Frank was able to say, “Man, you looking for—”

  Before the Monkey Man brought a thick knee up in Frank’s crotch, before blinding pain shot upward through Frank’s belly and paralyzed him in his tracks. Before a leather sap appeared in the Monkey Man’s hand and slapped Frank’s jaw, accompanied by the slight pop of breaking bone. Before Frank tasted his own blood as it ran over his tongue and between his lips, and before Frank went down on the sitting room floor with the Monkey Man on top, kicking and swinging the sap, and before the Monkey Man’s knee jammed into Frank’s ribcage and forced the air from his lungs. As his vision blurred, Frank had a closeup view of the Monkey Man’s ugly face. As Frank passed out, the Monkey Man was showing crooked teeth in a triumphant grin.

  If there was one thing that Everett Wilson knew, it was how to get a nigger to acting dumb. Worked the same way out on the street as down in the Texas Department of Corrections, just call the dumb black bastard exactly what he was, get the bastard to pissing all over himself about how somebody was calling him down for being a nigger. Then when the dumb son of a bitch made his move, lower the boom on the fucker. Worked every single time.

  Everett left the nigger laying on the floor as he went over to peer through the screen at the street. No one stood in any of the yards or porches gaping at what was happening over in the duplex. The two hookers who’d been sitting in the swing across the way were long gone; Everett had seen to that. When he’d parked his Volvo behind the nigger’s old Buick, Everett had gone over and showed the hookers the Smith & Wesson .38 which now nestled in his hip pocket, and the whores had run for cover with their asses jiggling under skintight leather. Nobody was around but Everett Thomas Wilson and this nigger that Everett was fixing to have a little talk with. That was good. That was good.

  Everett grabbed Frank by the collar and dragged him into the interior of the house like a fifty-pound sack of sorghum on Eastham Farm. Everett hauled his cargo through the kitchen (Jesus Christ, Everett thought, but that greasy bacon leaves a stink) and into the bedroom. Halfway into the bedroom, the nigger groaned. Everett released the collar and hunched over his victim, ready with the sap, breathing slowly and evenly. He studied the chocolate-colored face, the swollen lips and jaw, the trickle of blood running from the corner of Frank’s mouth. If Frank’s eyes should pop open, Everett was going to swing the sap and put the bastard back to sleep. Frank rolled over on his side and began to snore. Ev
erett hauled his cargo over to the bed, grunting and straining, lifted Frank onto the bed and spread-eagled his arms and legs. Everett dug in his hip pocket for the nylon rope he’d bought that afternoon in the hardware store. The rope was cut into five-foot lengths. Working fast, his armpits oozing sweat, Everett lashed the nigger’s hands and feet to the bedposts, then stood back. The dumb black bastard was dead to the world.

  There was a nearly-full bottle of beer on the night-stand—Pearl, Everett thought, the cheapshit bastard drinks Pearl—and Everett parted Frank’s lips and poured from the bottle into the swollen mouth. Frank coughed, spewed beer from between his lips, and moved his head around. Everett poured more beer in Frank’s mouth, and Frank opened his eyes. His pupils danced from side to side in his head. Now Everett turned the bottle up and emptied the beer full in Frank’s face. The liquid hit Frank’s nose and mouth and splashed onto the pillow. Frank gagged and spit. His gaze riveted itself on Everett’s face and his swollen lips parted. Everett had the nigger’s full attention. He sat on the side of the bed. The springs creaked under his weight.

  “We’re going to talk, Frank,” Everett said. “That’s you, ain’t it? Frank?”

  “Why you want to come fucking wid me?” Frank said. “I ain’t done shit to you.” His look showed fear. Only his lips moved as his swollen jaw remained rigid. His stretched-out arms were taut and sinewy and tiny hairs sprouted from the chocolate-colored flesh around his nipples.

  “Well, yeah, you did do shit, Frank,” Everett said. “You called me a name I don’t like, and you been out on Lancaster Avenue asking questions.”

  Frank’s eyes widened. He didn’t say anything.

  “And them questions you been asking,” Everett said, “they ain’t really what you’re trying to find out, you and that construction man. Are they? You and that construction man looking to find somebody, ain’t you? He ain’t really looking to hire nobody, is he?” He placed a thumb and forefinger on either side of Frank’s jaw and squeezed. Frank whimpered and his body stiffened. Everett released his hold and picked up the sap. Fresh blood ran from the nigger’s mouth, dripped onto his ear and dropped onto the pillow to mix with the beer. Frank was trembling.