“To run?”
I nodded.
He was quiet a moment thinking about it.
We passed by the ornate, opulent, and lushly landscaped Oak Cove and I thought of Gladys all alone in her hospital bed––the way her husband of over thirty years was in a different room in a different building across town, and it made me sad. Life is loss, I thought. We lose everything eventually, everything in the end.
I should stop and see her, should check on her and hug her and let her know she’s not alone, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t have the time right now. I couldn’t do anything but search for Lauren.
Gladys alone in her bed made me wonder what kind of bed Lauren was in and if anyone was in it with her. Was De Grasse telling the truth? Was she being viciously and repeatedly violated right now?
“You act like he already took you out,” Clip said.
“Huh?”
“Him punchin’ your ticket inevitable?”
“He could’ve done it tonight,” I said. “I’d’ve never known he was there. Never known what happened. Just be dead. Flame burning one second. Snuffed out the next. I’m no match for him.”
“And you think I not either,” he said. “That why you say don’t try to square anything, just find Lauren and take care of her.”
“Burke’s the best,” I said.
“Best what?”
“Shooter.”
“So I challenge him to a chess match.”
“Hear he’s pretty good at that too.”
He laughed. “How you get a day out of him?”
I told him.
“He know you a stand-up guy,” he said. “You willing not to be for love confused the little fucker.”
“Guess it did.”
“You willing to … to not be you, to be somethin’ you disrespect––hell, that you detest––for Lauren.”
I nodded. “’Cept … guess that means it is me.”
He seemed to need a moment to think about that one. I gave it to him.
“What that thing ’bout honor you say?”
Instinctively, nearly involuntarily, I let out a harsh, humorless laugh.
“The Lovelace line,” I said. “‘Yet this inconstancy is such as you too shall adore. I could not love thee, dear, so much loved I not honor more.’”
“What about that?”
I thought about it.
“Thought you believed that,” he said.
“I did too.”
“You don’t?”
I thought about it some more. “Guess I don’t.”
I was confronted with being a hypocrite, with being full of shit, with abandoning my code, and I tried to figure out why. Were there things I wouldn’t do for Lauren, for love? There were. This just wasn’t one of them.
“What do you believe in?”
“Lauren,” I said. “Love. That love matters more than honor, that love is honorable, a higher honor.”
“Actin’ dishonorable for love is honorable?” he asked.
I thought about it.
“How?” he said.
“Huh?”
“How dishonorable you willing to be? How far you willing to fall?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. Sort of making this up as I go along.”
He laughed. “You’ll run,” he said. “Will you back-shoot Burke?”
Before I could respond, before I could even think about what he was asking me, I had a sudden and jarring jolt. A flash of an image. I thought of love and honor. I thought of what we do for love. I thought of Lauren and what I was willing to do to find her. I thought of the gangster in his pajamas in his comfortable hotel room, Henry alone and lonely in his simple, serviceable hospital bed, Gladys alone and confused in her nice nursing home one. I thought of the dead and how they haunted us, the living, if we are living at all, of Dana Shelby and Vanessa Patrick. I thought of what each of us is capable of, of what we will do out of necessity and self-preservation and how they can’t compare to what we will do for love. I thought of all this and I knew. I knew where Lauren was. I knew who had her. I knew who was behind it.
As quickly as I could I found a phone box and called Collins.
“I need Sam’s phone number,” I said.
“You mean Detective Smith?”
“Yes,” I said. “He went home, right?”
“I have some bad news for you,” Collins said, “or haven’t you got time for it?”
“The number. Please. It’s an emergency.”
He covered the receiver with his hand and yelled to someone for the number.
“We found out who bribed the inmates to fight,” he said. “You’ll never guess who it was.”
“Dana Shelby,” I said.
“How the hell did you know that?” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“What’s going on? Why do you want Sa––Detective Smith’s home number?”
“Things are starting to come together in my mind,” I said. “Got a quick question for Smith. If I’m right or I’m not I’ll call you back.”
“Why did Detective Shelby do it?”
“For love,” I said.
“Huh?”
“For a man’s great love for a woman. Why else?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The number. Please. I’ll call you back. I promise.”
He gave me the number. “Call me right back,” he said. “I mean it. Right back.”
We hung up. I dropped some more change and dialed Sam.
It took a few minutes but he finally answered. It took a few more minutes but he finally woke up enough to understand who I was and what I wanted.
“Huh?” he said. “Riley, what the hell? I just got to sleep.”
“You said Vanessa Patrick was a prostitute, right?”
“Right.”
“For who?” I said. “Who does she belong to?”
“The black market guy,” he said. “Lee Perkins.”
Chapter 31
“I know,” I said.
“You know what?”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked.
“Why’d I do what?”
“Did you make just enough to put Gladys in Oak Cove or did you get some money to retire on too?”
Henry Folsom opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
If possible he looked even older now, his face and ears even more oblong, his features even more feeble, his world-weary eyes even more sunken.
“What is thirty pieces of silver with inflation?” I asked.
“I don’t care about money,” he said. “You know that. Only Gladys. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. You understand that. I know you do. You don’t know how bad it’s been, the hell I’ve been through with her. You don’t know because you’ve been so wrapped up in your own little world you don’t know what’s going on in the real one. Hell, there’s a war going on. People are dying all around us.”
“You tried to make me one of them.”
He shook his head. “I never did.”
The room, the hall, the entire hospital was as quiet as death, only our tense, dry voices piercing the veil of silence.
“How can you say that?”
“What is it exactly you think I did?” he said.
“Why don’t you tell me.”
“I let the mayor get Gladys a place in Oak Cove.”
“Buy her a place,” I said. “Buy you.”
“I knew what that would mean.”
So this was the sound of idols falling down, I thought. The end of mentors and once great men was no different than the end of anything else. Paltry. Pathetic. Kind of quiet. Whimpers not bangs. What a pitiable piece of work a man is.
“That he was buying you,” I said again.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not. That there might come a time when he’d want me to turn a blind eye to something or do him a small favor. That’s all. And that’s all I did.”
“Guess you and I have different definitions o
f that word small.”
“I made a phone call,” he said. “I kept my mouth shut. Nothing more.”
“A phone call?”
“He calls me middle of the night says he needs a cop in Tallahassee.”
“Not just any cop,” I said. “A compromised cop like you. A cop for sale.”
“I gave him Dana Shelby.”
“And it got him killed.”
“That’s not on me.”
“Is Lauren being kidnapped? All of Harry’s crimes? De Grasse’s dead girls? Is anything? What do you take responsibility for?”
“For doing what I had to for my wife,” he said. “And I’d do it again.”
“What was Harry Lewis’s connection to Lee Perkins?”
“What connects all men like them? Money and power. Black market stuff. It’s big business––biggest since hooch during prohibition. You think I care about that? You think I want one dirty dime from their treason? I don’t. And I haven’t taken any.”
“Except the dirty dimes paid to Oak Cove,” I said. “Where you think they came from? It’s blood money and you know it.”
“You wouldn’t do the same for Lauren?”
I didn’t say anything.
The lack of light in the dim room seemed to have changed somehow, as if shifting shadows had––as if everything had shifted.
“You haven’t killed for her and worse? And she’s just your girlfriend––actually, another man’s wife. Gladys is my everything. Has been for thirty-three years.”
“Do you know how many people have died?” I said. “What about De Grasse’s victims?”
“A hundred of Harry’s whores couldn’t come close to my Gladys, but I had nothing to do with any of that. And I tried to arrest Flaxon tonight.”
“You tried to kill him to cover up your crimes, but he was faster.”
“I …”
“Do you know what Perkins is doing to Lauren?”
“I have nothing to do with any of that. I told you. All I did was call Dana. Nothing else.”
“And since I found out Lauren’s alive?” I said.
“Nothing. What?”
“Trying to cover your crime. You dropped a dime on me and Clip. Have tried a few times to have us killed. Out on Highway 20, at the Panther Room, the bus station.”
“No. That’s Perkins. Not me.”
“Who told Perkins we were heading to Tallahassee? Who let him know we were going to the Panther Room? At least, you thought we were, but we split up so you only got Shelby.”
“I haven’t … I didn’t do any of that. I just …”
“You sounded so shocked when I called you after the shoot-out at the bus station diner. You thought I’d be dead. So stop lying. You’re more involved, knew more, did more, than you’re saying.”
He didn’t respond.
“Who put Perkins in touch with Burke?”
“You don’t think a man like Perkins knows a hundred men like Burke?”
“There’s only one man like Burke in this area,” I said. “And you put him onto me and De Grasse and––”
“I’m sorry, son,” he said. “I really am. I didn’t intend any of this. I just … I was just doing what I could for my wife, what I had to for the love of my life.”
He had been like a father to me. His use of the word son reminded me of that. It also triggered something inside me. Shook loose an image––actually several of them. In quick succession I saw my dad, Darryl Collins, Henry Folsom, and Ray Parker. Since Dad’s death and Collins’s cold control and indifference, I had been searching for a father figure and I had chosen badly. Twice. The hole inside me left by my dad’s departure had left me vulnerable and blind and had cost me plenty.
“You ever call me son again I think I will have to kill you,” I said.
“Jimmy.”
I shook my head and turned to leave.
“I’m a good cop,” he said. “Think about all the good I’ve done, all the people I’ve helped, all the criminals off the streets because of me.”
“You were a good cop,” I said. “At one time. No more. You were the best. Now, you’re a criminal. You’ve become the very thing you hate. You’re compromised, corrupt. You’re no different than Harry and Perkins and all the rest.”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“Get Lauren back,” I said. “Or die trying.”
I took a few steps, then turned back around.
“Oh, and in case y’all do succeed and kill me, forget what I said earlier about you finding Lauren and taking care of her. She’d be better off dead.”
Chapter 32
“You kill ’im on the spot?” Clip asked.
I shook my head.
“Hell’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“Take longer than the drive to Tallahassee to tell you.”
“You think he callin’ Perkins right now tellin’ him we on the way?”
“I honestly don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. Depends on if he has anything else to cover up, if he thinks we’ve told anyone or will. I just can’t say.”
“Could if you’d’a killed ’im,” he said. “Dead man can’t dial.”
I laughed.
“Maybe time to change this shit to the Jones Detective Agency,” he said. “Things be simpler I in charge.”
“No doubt.”
“So we don’t know if we walkin’ into a ambush,” he said.
“Think we have to assume we are.”
He nodded. “You gots a plan?”
“Was hoping to come up with one on the drive over.”
“Do I need to be quiet and let you … ah … formulate?”
“Tell me what you’d do,” I said.
“First I’d’a killed the old cop,” he said.
“For doing what I’m doing?” I said. “Anything for the woman he loves.”
“So you the same as him?”
“Haven’t found a line I won’t cross yet.”
“You coulda shot Burke in the back when he was leaving your office,” he said. “You coulda snuffed out the little bit of life left in that old cop right there in his hospital bed.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m swell.”
“He got bought off by a fuckin’ dirty politician,” he said. “He been lettin’ people get killed to cover it up ever since. He helpin’ a black market motherfucker profiting off the death and misery of others––robbing the poor to fatten the rich.”
We fell quiet.
I thought about what he had said. Maybe he was right. But even if he was, I understood the impulse behind what Henry had done.
We rode along in silence for a long while, our car the only one on the long, lonely highway.
“Got anything?” he asked eventually.
“Not much, no,” I said. “Narrowed it down to a few options.”
“Yeah?”
“We go in alone or we go in with backup.”
“Wow,” he said. “Scary how good you are at this.”
“I know.”
“Thought you said a few?” he said.
“Couple of different options on the backup,” I said, “so I don’t count that as just one.”
“What they?”
“Get Collins to do a raid,” I said. “Or get some private help.”
“Such as?”
“How ’bout the fool you knocked out earlier tonight and some of his friends?”
“Turn the negroes loose up in that whites-only joint?” he said, nodding, seeming to relish the idea. “You invite either group to the party––the cops or the negroes––you lose control of the situation. They both trouble. Just be different kinds.”
“Was thinking of using them only if we already lost control of the situation … as a sort of last resort. Not backup so much as way backup. But you’re right, the risk is too great to Lauren.”
“You think he got her at the hotel, or somewhere else?”
I shrugged. “No way to know. That’s another reason not to involve o
thers.”
“Downside is we outgunned and outmanned, just go in and get our asses killed.”
Chapter 33
“You wake me up twice in one night,” Lee Perkins said. “It’s unprecedented. I’ll give you that.”
We were back in the empty Cypress Lounge of the Floridan Hotel on Monroe. He was still in the same silk pajamas, house slippers, and robe.
Though just having been awakened again, though it was nearly dawn, his dark, oiled hair was perfectly in place, his small, dark, dead eyes, wide awake.
“As early as you go to bed,” I said, “I’d think you’d be about to get up anyway.”
“I go to bed early. What of it. I sleep in. I can afford to. Got nothing to do with you. Like I said, I should have bumped you off for disturbing me the first time––”
“It’s not like you haven’t tried,” I said.
“––and here you are again,” he said, finishing his thought with a small smile twitching at the corner of his thin lips.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“Speaking of bumps,” he said, “the hell happen to your head? You didn’t look so good the first time you woke me up tonight. Now … well, now you look a lot worse.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “About to be great.”
“And you won’t know when I have you rubbed out,” he said, “’cause you’ll be dead.”
His voice was low and flat, monotone and menacing.
“You know why I’m here,” I said. “You know what I want.”
“Forty thousand,” he said.
“What?”
“I could make a lot more, but you told me that sweet story about you two kids and you showed respect by not coming in with cops and guns and threats. And you left your nigger outside this time. I like that. So, I’ll take a loss on my investment and you can have her for forty-thousand.”
“Is she here?” I asked. “Can I see her?”
“She is here. If you’re worried about her being defiled, she is not––at least no more than she already was. She’s still convalescing. Actually, I didn’t even add in my expenses related to that. Well, no matter. I’ll be a fool for love too. Why not? Seems everybody is these days.”
“Can I see her?” I asked.
“Oh, did I forget to answer you on that?” he said. “No, you may not.”
Michael Lister - Soldier 03 - The Big Hello Page 13