by Lewis Shiner
“I think Charles would welcome a confrontation with the NRC.”
“No doubt. Tell me what you know.”
Michael told him, in detail, about the secret room under Wilmer Bynum’s house, the date on the calendar, the opening of the American Tobacco Campus.
“That’s the only evidence you have? An X through a date on a calendar? I can see why the police were not impressed.”
“It all fits. The Black Star Corporation is billing itself—”
“Yes, I know. Hayti rises again. The NRC would love to make it fall all over again. I don’t doubt you. And I don’t doubt that Charles would, as you say, welcome a confrontation. It would help if we knew what they’re planning. Maybe it’s not a demonstration. Maybe it’s something more…explosive. Like in Oklahoma City.”
“Can you find out? Don’t you have people in high places? Like in the cops?”
“We might. We’ll look into it. Now what’s your end of the bargain?”
“If my father had a last wish, it was that Randy Fogg go down for killing Barrett Howard. I want enough proof to put him in jail.”
Harriman shook his head. “We’d like nothing better than to prove the same thing. We have no love for Randy Fogg. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence to tie him to the murder. He was in Washington when it happened, with dozens of witnesses. Believe me, we checked. And there’s no way to prove he ordered it.”
“Prove the NRC did the killing and that he was Grand Poobah of the NRC.”
“Dragon. They use many of the same titles as the Klan, but without all that precious K-L nonsense—klaverns and klockards and such. We’ve tried for thirty years to prove Fogg was Grand Dragon of the NRC and never succeeded.”
“We know he and Wilmer Bynum were practically blood brothers, and Bynum was hosting his NRC meetings for him.”
“You’ve made a long chain of suppositions and provided no facts.”
“I want to see what the Durham police got from Barrett Howard’s autopsy. I want to see the whole file on Howard. I’m the one that brought Tommy Coleman in. They would never have found that body if not for me. I’m entitled.”
“You expect me to smuggle you into police headquarters and get you a few hours alone with Barrett’s file? You can’t be serious.”
“You must have somebody in the department. I want them to make a copy of the file.”
Harriman’s eyes shifted as Michael watched. Michael leaned forward, ignoring the pain in his ribs. “You already have a copy, don’t you?”
Harriman looked away.
“Where is it? You have it here, don’t you?”
Harriman sighed. “If I show you the file, will that satisfy you? Will you then go away and let us handle this?”
“No,” Michael said. “In the last few days I’ve lost everything. My father, the woman I thought was my mother, my girlfriend, my job. There’s nothing left. I want to be part of this. I am part of this.” He stopped and took a breath. “But we can start with the file.”
*
Harriman’s study was expensively and impersonally furnished, like a high-dollar law office. A dark rolltop desk held a green blotter and a banker’s light. A swivel chair in matching wood sat on a forest green Persian rug that ran to the baseboards in all directions. Small African carvings and masks filled in the spaces in a floor to ceiling built-in bookshelf.
Opposite the shelves stood a brass-handled combination safe the size of a refrigerator.
“I must ask you to wait in the hall while I get the file out,” Harriman said.
“What have you got in there, guns?” Michael had intended it as a joke, but Harriman’s scowl told him he’d guessed correctly.
“I must insist,” Harriman said, and Michael backed out as Harriman closed and locked the study door. Through the door Michael heard the sounds of tumblers and handles and the sigh of the opening safe. When Harriman let him in again, the safe was locked, and a plain manila folder lay open on the desk.
Rather than the chaotic pile of odd size papers he’d reflexively pictured, it consisted of a tidy stack of 8 1/2 × 11 photocopies.
It opened with an incident report by Sgt. Bishop, followed by transcriptions of his interviews with Tommy and Michael. Tommy’s interview held no surprises, though Michael couldn’t help noticing the haste and errors in the transcription.
Reports followed on the excavation of the corpse and the attempted bombing. He paged through expense reports for the ground-penetrating radar, the jackhammers, the food and beverages consumed by the student workers. Another report summarized 1960s newspaper stories by and about Barrett Howard from the Carolina Times, followed by pages of barely legible printouts from a microfiche reader. Michael had heard about the asphyxiating quantity of reports involved in police work, and this was worse than he’d imagined.
He skipped forward to the autopsy. The State Medical Examiner, who worked out of the UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill, had handled the case personally.
The report ran to 11 pages of word-processed text. Page one summarized the contents, listing the probable cause of death as a “single sharp force injury” to the chest, penetrating the heart.
Most of the rest of the report followed the course of the autopsy, step by step, with a detailed description of the mummified remains, what was left of Howard’s clothing, his injuries, and the lack of toxicology results due to the dehydration of the body. After 30 years the internal organs were barely recognizable and could not be weighed.
Essentially what remained was dried skin shrunken down over a skeleton. However, the mummification had preserved a remarkable amount of detail beyond what would have been found in a body that had been buried in the ground for the same period. For example, a skin defect was visible on the back of the head, with an underlying skull fracture. The indications were consistent with blunt force trauma from an object such as a bottle.
A stab wound in the chest pointed to bony injuries in the rib cage. A sharp instrument appeared to have penetrated the ribs in an area over the heart. The location and angle of the blow was likely to be fatal. No indications of post mortem lividity survived.
Through a happy accident, the ME happened to have a copy of Paleopathology in Peruvian Mummies on his shelves, and he’d used the rehydration techniques in the book to restore several skin samples. A photograph showed the Four Moments of the Sun tattoo, the skin remarkably smooth and the pattern clear; the harsh lights of the autopsy room and the high contrast of the photocopy had bleached Howard’s skin to a pale gray.
A second photo showed the deformation in the skull from the blunt trauma, and a third showed the patch of rehydrated skin that included the stab wound. The skin wound did not show much detail, but a fourth photograph showed the impression of the sharp force instrument as it nicked a rib in passing. It looked like the planet Saturn in profile—circular, with a fine cut extending slightly to each side.
The incidental findings on the last page of the report identified small particles of leather clinging to Howard’s clothes.
The next document transcribed an interview between Sgt. Frank Bishop and the ME where Bishop had pressed for more detail on the murder weapon.
“Given the extraordinary conditions,” the ME said, “and the fact that the date of death was over thirty years ago, we can’t do much more than make a few wild guesses.”
Bishop had asked him to do so.
“The findings are contradictory. The weapon could have been an ice pick, or it could have been an extremely thin-bladed knife. Frankly, it looks a bit like both.”
Michael stood up.
“What is it?” Harriman said.
Despite the pain in his body, Michael felt like dancing. The sensation was so delicious that for a moment he didn’t want to share it.
At last he said, “I know what the murder weapon is. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“Go on.”
Michael poked the file with his index finger. “It’s a shoemaker’s awl. That’s why
the leather particles. Some of the NRC thugs lured Howard into an abandoned shoe repair shop in Hayti and hit him over the head. Then they brought him out to my grandfather’s farm, along with a cobbler’s awl they found in the shop. And my grandfather killed him, and then he had the nerve to go and put the awl in a trophy case in his living room where he could look at it for the rest of his life, whenever there was a time out in the Duke basketball game.
“Then he called his best pal Randy Fogg to tell him the good news, and Fogg pulled Mitch Antree’s strings. The thugs put the body in the form, and Antree buried it in concrete.”
Harriman frowned. “You say the awl is still in the house?”
“It was two weeks ago, when my cousin Greg showed it to me.”
“Greg Vaughan?”
“You know him?”
“He’s on one of our lists somewhere. Was he involved in the murder?”
“No. He was in California, in basic training, about to ship out for Vietnam. Look, I have to call Sgt. Bishop and tell him.” He pulled his phone out and was switching it on when Harriman grabbed his wrist.
“Wait,” Harriman said.
Michael looked at him.
“How are you going to explain having seen the autopsy report?”
“It doesn’t matter. I saw it, that’s all.”
“It does matter. Bishop isn’t stupid. He’ll know there’s a leak in the department, and it won’t be that hard for him to figure out who it is.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m asking you to wait. Wilmer Bynum has been dead a long time, and Barrett even longer. You don’t need to close the case tonight. You said you wanted to be part of this group. Is that still true?”
Michael thought about it. Solving Barrett Howard’s murder was well and good, but the threat against American Tobacco was immediate. “Yes,” he said.
“Then you have to place the needs of the group ahead of your own. Are you willing to do that?”
“What are you asking?”
“We do have, as you suggested, people in high places. We will see to it that Barrett gets whatever justice he can at this late date. I assure you that I have a personal interest in seeing that done, perhaps greater than yours. As for American Tobacco, we have been training and disciplining ourselves for many years to be ready for a major confrontation. If this is it, we will be there, and we will know what to do.”
“And you want me to stay out of it.”
“If you’re serious about joining us, then your day will come. But not yet.”
“In other words, I should go back to Texas.”
“I don’t agree with the way that message was delivered. And you don’t need to go as far as Texas. But I would advise you to stay well clear of the American Tobacco Campus on Saturday.”
Michael turned toward the door.
“Michael,” Harriman said.
Michael stopped, his back still to Harriman.
“We owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. First for bringing Barrett’s murder to light, and for everything you discovered about the circumstances. And for the warning about American Tobacco. Please know that.”
Michael nodded, once, and let himself out.
*
As he got in his car, his emotions were upending themselves. Beyond his disappointment was a sense of relief, a readiness to go back to picking up the pieces of his life and career. Beyond that was something darker, a sense that he had forgotten something, as if he’d left home with the stove on. Nothing he tried to match against the feeling seemed to fit—the unanswered calls from Denise on his cell phone, the unresolved situation with Ruth, his need to find work. The very attempt to figure it out depressed him.
He picked a new hotel, a Holiday Inn Express on Miami Boulevard. It was a few miles east of his previous location, equally close to the Durham Freeway. This was a tall brown building so new that Michael thought he might be the first to stay in his room.
He unpacked his shaving kit and change of clothes and eased his aching body onto the bed, trying to remember his Aunt Esther’s married name, which he’d read out of Ruth’s address book a few days before. Not Peterson but Pedersen, with a D and Es all around.
Information found a listing in Richmond. Michael dialed it and immediately recognized the voice that answered—feminine, but harsh and low. “It’s your nephew Michael again,” he said.
After a long pause, Esther said, “Michael, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again so soon.” The tone had softened, and at the same time grown wary. “It’s not Ruth, is it?”
“Ruth is fine as far as I know. She’s gone back to Dallas. I need to ask you some questions, for my own piece of mind.”
“Oh dear. What sort of questions?”
“It’s about your father.”
Esther sighed. “When Jack got transferred to Virginia, I almost didn’t come with him. I was afraid of being as close as a day’s drive from the farm. I knew that some day it was going to come back to haunt me.” Unlike Ruth, Esther had shed every trace of her Johnston County accent.
“Did the Night Riders of the Confederacy meet in your basement?”
“Yes,” she said. “Once a month, unless they had to go burn a cross or an innocent man’s house down somewhere. From the time I was old enough to know what was going on until I was old enough to leave.”
“Was Congressman Randy Fogg head of the NRC?”
“Randy Fogg?” She sounded amused. “Wherever did you get that idea?”
“Fogg is a racist, he was close to your father, he had virtually the same agenda as the NRC—”
“Fogg is a completely political monster. He knew better than to associate himself with the Riders. It was too risky, and Fogg never took a risk, never showed an ounce of courage in his life.”
For a moment Michael was confounded. Finally he said, “If Fogg wasn’t the Grand Dragon, then who was?”
“You really don’t know? You knew about the basement and you don’t know that?”
“No,” Michael said. “Please tell me.”
“My father was. Your grandfather. For forty years.”
“Did everyone know it?”
“All the other Riders knew it, as you would expect. Unlike the Klan, however, the Riders never went out in public without their hoods. One of the catchphrases that they bandied around to intimidate people was, ‘We could be anyone.’ Anyone white, that is.”
“And you’re sure about Fogg? He wasn’t in the background somewhere pulling strings?”
“It was Fogg’s strings getting pulled. My father practically had to call him in the morning and tell him to wake up. The heart went right out of Fogg when my father died. I guess ‘heart’ is not the word. The clarity. The clarity of his intentions. He’s been like one of those radio controlled cars with nobody driving it ever since. Bumping into the furniture, spinning his wheels. People are only afraid of him now by force of habit.”
“Did you hate your father that much?”
“Words cannot convey the depth of it.”
“Because of the NRC?”
“That, and so much more.”
“Tell me.”
“No.” Her voice was flat, final.
“I beg your pardon?”
“There are things that I have never talked about, and never will. I don’t expect I have all that many years left, and I plan to exit with my last few shreds of privacy intact. This conversation has been more painful for me than you can possibly know, and now I’m going to have to say goodbye.”
“One more question, please. A simple yes or no.”
“Go ahead.”
“Did your father kill Barrett Howard?”
“Who?”
“He was a black activist in Durham in the 1960s.”
“That would have been after my time. As far as I know, my father never killed anyone with his own hands. But I would not have put it past him.”
“And there’s nothing more you’re willing to tell me?”
“If you want to know more, ask your mother.”
Michael played his last card. “Ruth is not my mother.”
“Ah.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“She was not supposed to be able to have children. I always wondered how it happened that she did.”
“You never had any children yourself.”
“No. Nor did Naomi. We didn’t have the examples of child-rearing that would incline someone to try for themselves.”
“But Ruth did want kids. And she didn’t hate her father.”
“Each of us deals with what life throws us as best we’re able. I wish you luck, Michael, with whatever it is you’re searching for. I would be happy to hear from you again if the subject matter were different.”
“I’m sorry this hurt you, Aunt Esther.”
“I expect I’ll survive.” She paused, then said, “Talk to Ruth.”
*
The TV failed to hold his attention. He got a sketchpad out of his bag and let his subconscious dictate a few faces at random. Wilmer Bynum, Randy Fogg, his father. The desire came to draw Denise, and he pushed it away. Finally he found himself sketching a face that he could not at first put a name to. Then he remembered the hospital cafeteria and her story of living across the street from Mercy. He’d scrawled her name across an earlier page of the book: Camilla Prentiss.
He turned to a new page and let her face completely fill it, blanking his mind so the details would come on their own. At first he worked in his usual clear, strong lines, then suddenly found himself using the side of the lead and blending it with his fingers, picking out highlights with a corner of his eraser.
It got to be eight o’clock. On the freeway outside his window, red taillights shrank and faded into the cold and dark. Denise was probably wondering where he was. Or maybe she wasn’t, which was enough to keep him from calling.
He phoned Southwest Airlines instead. They had his luggage and offered to send someone out with it. He told them he would pick it up himself.
He stopped on the way to the airport for a sandwich, parked in the multistory lot by Terminal A, and got his luggage at the service desk. Then, without conscious plan, he stopped by the main ticket desk and put himself on a flight to Dallas the next morning.