by Lewis Shiner
“I guess it wasn’t but 20 minutes or so, longest 20 minutes of my life, and during that time the Captain never got out of the cab of that cement mixer. When we was done, Mr. Antree got in the driver seat and drove away, didn’t say a word, not even a thank you. Leon rinsed down the vibrator and I put the ladder in the back of the truck, and when we got in he started the motor and he looked at me and he said, “Tommy, you ever say one word to me or anybody about this ever again, as long as I live, you are no blood of mine. You understand?’
“I nodded and that was the end of it. We went home and we both of us pretended to sleep. I heard him in there the rest of the night, that old metal bedstead creaking every time he tried to find a comfortable spot. I could have told him not to bother, because there ain’t any.” He looked up and met Michael’s eyes for the first time since he started the story. “There ain’t any.”
They were silent a long time. “I’d take that cup of coffee now,” Michael said at last.
“I imagine so.” Coleman got up and poured it. “Anything in it?”
“Just like it is is fine,” Michael said. “Who do you think killed that man—Barrett Howard, is it?” Coleman put the cup in front of him and nodded. “Was it Antree?”
“I don’t think he had it in him. He liked his jazz, and he liked his wine, and he liked the ladies. Ladies of color, from what I heard. He was not a violent man. I never saw him angry. Everything was ‘cool,’ you know what I’m saying? I think he admired Barrett Howard. Used to quote things he said in the Carolina Times. That was the black paper back then, published out of Hayti, and Howard would write for it sometimes. Mr. Antree wanted real bad for black people to like him, so he would say a lot of things he thought we might want to hear.”
“If it wasn’t Antree, who was it?”
“I expect somebody wanted it done, and they got somebody else to do it for them, same way they got Antree to cover it up. Same way Antree got us to pour the concrete. Maybe it was the Durham Select Committee, the same bunch of old white men that got the idea to do RTP, same ones that decided who got the contracts to ‘rebuild’ Hayti. Same ones that always has run everything and always will.”
“And what about my father? How much do you think he knew?”
“You want the truth? I think he knew everything. I think they all did. I think whatever they intentions was, no matter how good, they ended up doing what they was told to do, and nobody heard another word out of their mouths but ‘yes, sir.’ ”
Michael drank some of the coffee. “So,” he said. “What happens now?”
“You’re asking me?”
“It’s your story. You have to make the decision.”
“About calling the cops, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“If this goes to the cops,” Coleman said, “it could come back to your daddy.”
“Maybe that’s what he wants.”
“He’s dying. How could he want that?”
“The same way you do.” Michael pushed back his chair. “Why don’t we ask him?”
*
Michael drove. Belatedly he asked after Coleman’s health, and Coleman said, “I’m all right. I got the cholesterol, I got some blood pressure, but I quit smoking years ago, don’t drink too much. I should have a few good years left.”
“Are you working? I didn’t know if I would find you home on a Monday or not.”
“Been working nights on highway repair crews, supervising. I’m off tonight. It’s good work, just not steady, is all. The construction business, it’s mostly Mexicans now. They’ll work all the hours you want, don’t ask no overtime. You can’t compete with that.”
Coleman didn’t ask any questions of his own. It was a short drive to the VA from Coleman’s apartment, most of it in silence.
The sixth-floor rooms were semi-private. Michael’s father shared his with a black man in his 40s, a veteran of the first Gulf War, who was suffering from an undiagnosed lung ailment. When Michael and Coleman walked in, the roommate was watching CNN and Michael’s father was sleeping. Michael’s mother was sitting against the wall, crocheting Christmas ornaments for a charity in Dallas.
“Where have you been?” she asked when she saw Michael. “Where are your things? I didn’t know what happened to you.”
“I moved out,” Michael said. “We can talk about it later.”
She looked past him at Coleman.
“I don’t know if you remember me, Mrs. Cooper,” Coleman said. “I’m Tommy Coleman. I used to work with your husband.”
Michael’s mother blinked at him, looking puzzled, then smiled brightly and took his hand. “Of course I remember you,” she said. “How kind of you to come.”
“I’m very sorry to hear of his condition,” Coleman said.
Michael said, “Look, we need to talk to Dad alone for a few minutes.”
“Alone? What do you mean, alone?”
“It’s just some personal business of my own, Mrs. Cooper,” Coleman said, with the perfect touch of embarrassment.
Ruth looked at Michael, then at Coleman again. On the TV, a commentator noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had endorsed George W. Bush in the upcoming election. Blushing, she gathered her things and stood up. “I’ll be down the hall if you need me.”
“Thank you,” Coleman said.
The commotion woke Michael’s father. Lately he’d been having trouble remembering where he was when he first woke up, and the sight of Coleman seemed to frighten him. As Ruth left the room, he struggled up onto one elbow.
“Relax, Dad,” Michael said, moving in to put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s Tommy Coleman, come to see you.”
“How you doing, Captain?” Tommy said. Tommy himself did not appear to be doing well. He couldn’t seem to find a place for his hands.
“Tommy and I have been talking,” Michael said. “He told me about the body in the concrete.”
Michael’s father stared at him blankly.
“Barrett Howard,” Michael went on. “Buried in the overpass by St. Joseph’s church.”
Michael’s father closed his eyes, his face registering relief, confusion, fear. “So it’s true,” he whispered.
“What do you mean, ‘true’?” Michael said. “You were there.”
Michael’s father nodded, and didn’t say anything more.
“Dad, we need to call the police. You knew that, didn’t you? This is what this whole exercise has been about, isn’t it?”
“Not all of it,” his father said. “I would have skipped the cancer part if I could.”
“Do you want to talk to me now? Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“No,” he said. “Go ahead. Make your call.”
Michael looked at Coleman. “All right? Is this what you want?”
“Do it,” Coleman said.
Michael called 911 from the bedside phone. “I don’t know if this is exactly an emergency,” he told the operator. “I need to report a murder, a thirty-year-old murder.”
He ended up with a homicide detective named Frank Bishop. Bishop’s manner was kind and unhurried. He let Michael work through a summary of the situation, then said, “First off, I need to get statements from you, Mr. Coleman, and your father. The best thing would be if you and Mr. Coleman can come down to the station, but if that’s a problem I can meet you there at the hospital.”
“No,” Michael said. “We’ll come to you.”
*
Durham Police headquarters was five stories of late 1950s modernism, vertical stripes of glass between concrete panels. It sat on the western edge of downtown, a block from the Durham Freeway. As he drove up, Michael’s eyes went to the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance building on his right. NC Mutual was the most successful of Durham’s black businesses, and the first to “jump ship” from Hayti, as Michael’s custodian friend had put it—initially to Parrish Street downtown, the “Black Wall Street,” and then, in the 1960s, to this new freestanding building of its own, almost ide
ntical to the police headquarters across the street.
He and Coleman had driven mostly in silence, Coleman apparently as lost in his own thoughts as Michael. They parked in the police visitors’ lot as the sun buried itself in clouds at the horizon. The day was cooling and Michael wished he’d brought a jacket. He’d never liked fall. The gaudy colors and lessening daylight seemed like a fatal disease in nature, something from which there could be no recovery.
Inside the glass front doors they found a high-ceilinged reception area with a white terrazzo floor and a tall, semicircular desk on the right. The desk officer, young, with sunglasses on top of his head, called Sgt. Bishop, who arrived five long minutes later. He had sandy-colored receding hair, aviator-style glasses, a blue oxford shirt and striped tie. He was in his late thirties, stood over six feet tall, and conveyed a sense of mass and hardness that Michael associated with serious body builders. He took them to the second floor in a chrome elevator and left Michael in an anteroom. “I need to take your statements separately,” Bishop said. “Sorry to make you wait.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said. In fact he was jealous and did not want Coleman alone with Bishop, for fear of missing something important.
Michael sat and leafed through a copy of People. There were two officers in black uniforms behind a desk, and more file cabinets than comfortably fit. A sign over the door where Coleman and Bishop had disappeared said CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION.
Michael wondered what kind of criminal investigation his father was capable of participating in. Would they even charge him when he was already under a death sentence?
Part of him wanted to see his father taken away in handcuffs, dragging his oxygen bottle behind him. He found a depth of anger and frustration in himself that he had not expected. Lies and omissions—from the details of his birth to the existence of Orpha to the dead man in the overpass—left his entire childhood open to question. What else had they not told him? What sinister meanings lay behind those peculiar, haunted looks his father would sometimes give him, or the sobs he would hear his mother make inside her locked bedroom?
When Coleman returned he looked wrung out. Bishop nodded to Michael, and one of the uniformed cops buzzed them through into a hallway. They turned right and then left into a stark, fluorescent-lit office with windows that looked out onto Chapel Hill Street. A cassette recorder the size of a fat hardcover book sat on a plastic veneered desk, and there was a black PC monitor on a credenza against the wall behind it. Michael sat in a metal armchair facing the desk. Mounted on the wall to his right was a corkboard that held the only personal items in the room, including a photo of a team of officers in black Kevlar body armor and a citation to Bishop from his fellow members of the Special Enforcement Team. Bishop turned on the recorder and listed Michael’s name, the date, and the location.
“I don’t know anything about this except what Tommy told me,” Michael said.
“That’s okay,” Bishop said. He seemed easygoing and friendly despite—or maybe because of—the intimidating physique. “We basically just need a record of your saying that.”
“So what happens after that? What happens to my father if he’s involved in this?”
“I’ll need to talk to him. I understand that you and your parents both have your permanent addresses in Texas these days?”
“That’s right. My parents in Dallas, me in Austin.” The realization suddenly struck him that his father would never see Dallas again. The thought hit him hard and he had to push it away. He gave Bishop the number at the Brookwood, his father’s room number at the VA, and their addresses in Texas.
“You a Longhorns fan?”
“I don’t really follow sports that much. What about the body in the overpass? Are you guys going to look for it?”
“We’ll make that decision after I talk to your father, but yeah, most likely.”
“Can I be there when you talk to him?”
“Sorry.”
“No, of course I can’t,” Michael said. “Dumb question.”
“Why don’t we get going?” Bishop said, and turned on the tape recorder. He led Michael patiently through the story, starting with his father’s illness, the decision to come to Durham, his calling Coleman that afternoon, Coleman’s story as Michael remembered it, his father’s reaction. Michael found himself talking more freely than he’d intended to, at one point suggesting to Bishop that there might be a ritualistic aspect to the location of the body.
“What kind of ritual?” Bishop asked.
Michael told him about the vévé on the St. Joseph’s steeple that overlooked the burial site, and Bishop made notes on a legal pad in addition to the recording.
When they finished, Michael said, “Listen, you’ve got access to all kinds of databases, right? Can you check something for me?”
“What do you want to know?”
“I was supposedly born in Durham, but I can’t find any record of it.”
“I can take a look. I need your social and your mother’s maiden name and social.”
Michael gave him the info and watched Bishop work through a series of brightly colored interfaces. After ten minutes, Bishop shrugged. “I’m not finding anything, but we didn’t have computers in 1969. What you’re looking for could be on microfiche, or it could be on paper in some warehouse.”
Or, Michael thought, it might not exist at all.
*
It was seven o’clock and fully dark by the time they came out. Coleman seemed badly shaken. “I should never have talked about this. Bad things going to come of it.”
“You had to do it. You’ll sleep better now.”
It was like he’d predicted Coleman would find a million dollars under his pillow. “You think?” Coleman asked.
“You want to get some dinner?” They were back at the rented Echo, and Michael was looking across the roof of the car at Coleman. “I haven’t eaten all day.”
“I appreciate the offer,” Coleman said, “but I need to forget what I just did. If you don’t mind, there’s a place down the street here that I go to sometimes. You could drop me off. I can get a ride home from there.”
“If that’s what you want.” Coleman’s second thoughts stung Michael like an accusation. He got in and started the car, feeling guilty and rejected.
Coleman directed him to a hole-in-the-wall bar on Holloway Street east of downtown. Two young black men, in sports logo wear from head to foot, loitered on the sidewalk. It was the kind of place that Michael, as a white man, would have been terrified to walk into alone, and he wondered if that was one of its attractions for Coleman. The gulf of race seemed at that moment hopelessly vast.
“I feel weird about going off and leaving you here,” Michael said. He took out his wallet, ignoring Coleman’s suspicious look, and took out one of his business cards. “That’s got my cell phone number. Let me know if you need a ride or anything.” He remembered that it had a 512 area code and said, “Call collect.”
“I’ll be all right,” Coleman said. He put the card in his jacket pocket. He didn’t invite Michael to join him, just got out of the car, held up one hand, and waited for Michael to drive away.
*
He ate dinner at Torero’s downtown, the closest thing he’d found to authentic Tex-Mex in the area, then drove to his hotel. After nearly a month on a foldout couch in claustrophobic proximity to his parents, he felt something like joy at the thought of a place of his own, antiseptic and rented by the week though it was.
He turned on the TV for background noise and settled on the bed with his drawing board. He had occasional nightmares about working in an office, answering telephones, trying to remember something vital he’d forgotten to do. He always woke with a renewed sense of gratitude for his chosen profession. Even now, with so much of his personal history in dispute, he was able to lose himself in his work. When his cell phone rang an hour later, it came as a shock.
“How could you?” said his mother, with no preamble.
; “Hi, Mom.”
“The police just left. Your father won’t tell me what it was about. It was about that black man, Tommy, that you brought here, wasn’t it?”
“What did he say?”
“Who?”
“My father. When you asked him.”
“He said, ‘Ancient history.’ When I asked if this was something you’d done, he said, ‘Not really.’ That’s when I knew it was your fault. Tell me what you did.”
“I found out why he wanted to come back to Durham. He was involved in a murder in 1969.”
“What are you talking about? That’s simply not possible.”
“He helped bury a dead body in concrete. Somebody named Barrett Howard, a black activist.”
His mother didn’t answer, a silence of held breath.
“Mom, what do you know about it?”
“What everybody knows. This Howard was a troublemaker, and he raised a lot of money for some radical cause and used it to run off to Mexico.”
“Apparently he didn’t get that far. While we’re at it, here’s another question for you. Who was Orpha?”
“Orpha?”
“Your sister Orpha, who you never told me about.”
“You certainly did know about her. She died before you were born.”
“And when was that?”
“That Orpha died? I don’t remember exactly, but—”
“No, when was I born?”
“You don’t remember your own birthday?”
“I’m asking you.”
“September 19, 1969.” There was no hesitation in her voice.
“And I was born here in Durham?”
“Yes, here in Durham. At Watts Hospital, which was only a few blocks from our house.”
“Greg Vaughan says I was born in Dallas in July of 1970.”