Parker moved away from the window, ran around to the front of the house, leaped up the steps onto Henry Jerome’s front porch. He tiptoed in, without knocking or ringing, entered the living room as Jerome was placing his carefully folded slacks over the back of a chair under a lamp.
From the doorway, Lee Parker said: “I’ve come for the letters.”
Henry Jerome turned, blinking, his gaunt face drained gray. Pussy-willow like tufts of eyebrows raised over his deep set blue eyes. His small mouth pursed. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you, Parker. You gave me a fright.”
Parker said, stolidly: “You found the letters on the floor, while you were waiting for Janie to come to. You read one of them. You knew what they would mean to Janie’s case. You were going to blackmail me for them.”
A vein stood out at the side of Henry Jerome’s high forehead. His Adam’s apple moved in his long neck. “Well,” he said, “why don’t you sit down. Maybe we can talk it over right now.”
Parker’s eyes moved to the tweed slacks on the chair, then back to Jerome. “Those letters don’t mean a damn anymore,” he said. “They won’t make a case against Jane for McCreery’s murder, because she didn’t kill him.”
Jerome glanced at the tweed slacks now, too. “Look,” he said, softly. “Maybe I’ve changed my mind, Parker. Maybe I’ve decided to play square with you. After all, I don’t want to—” He stopped abruptly.
Lee Parker’s face was dark with anger. His fists began to open and close. A choking was in his throat so that he could hardly talk, but he made it.
“Tonight,” he said, “you heard Janie scream. You rushed over, but Dade McCreery wasn’t dead when you entered like you said. He was still choking Janie. He turned on you and in the fight that followed, you grabbed the bronze statuette, Jerome. You hit McCreery with it, not Janie.”
Outside, night wind rustled the trees, flung rain against a window.
“You got scared, then,” Parker went on. “But Janie was still out, didn’t know what had happened. You put the murder weapon in her hand after wiping your own prints off. You saw the letters, over which Janie and McCreery had been fighting and got that bright idea.”
Jerome said, hoarsely: “How do you know all—”
Parker cut in. “The cat gave you away, Jerome. In your fight with McCreery, you kicked Spooky out of the way, killed him. Long haired cats shed this time of year. You got black cat hairs all over your trousers, Jerome. You’ve been brushing them off all night. But there’ll be a few left for the police microscopes to find.”
He stopped talking, suddenly. Henry Jerome was staring over his shoulder. Parker turned, saw Dade McCreery’s girl standing in the doorway, watching them.
“So you’re the one who murdered Dade,” she said to Jerome. “I can see it, now. What Parker said is true.”
She took two steps into the room. “I’m glad I followed Parker over here, now. The other business is all out, I guess. But I’ve got something left.”
There was a rush of movement behind Parker. He turned just as Henry Jerome reached a nearby desk, yanked open a drawer and whipped out a Colt .38. He covered Parker and the girl.
“You—you’re McCreery’s girl?” Jerome said.
“Yes.”
Henry Jerome fell back. His head swerved from the girl to Parker like a man watching a ping-pong game.
“Stay away from me!” he cried.
But she kept moving toward Jerome, obsessed. Parker watched her, and the old man, with that gun jerking in his fist. He had to do something to stop this. His eyes searched the room, came to rest on a nearby table. He reached for a package of cigarettes and matches there, casually.
Parker struck a match, but didn’t take the cigarette from the package. He put the flame to the cellophane around the cigarettes. He hurled the sudden puff of white flame across the room at Jerome.
Jerome screamed as the fiery package hit his chest. He knocked it away in a shower of sparks. Parker hit him around the knees in a headlong dive. They crashed back to the floor and the .38 went off with a sharp clap of sound.
Parker’s ears rang but he held down Jerome’s squirming figure. It took several seconds for his hands to find Jerome’s skinny neck. Jerome’s head thumping the floor took all the fight out of him.
Lee Parker stood up, slowly, flexed his fingers. He turned toward the girl. She was standing in the same place, posed, almost. She was looking into space.
Parker felt suddenly all let out—he walked toward the phone...
Dawn was bright-hot in the sky when he and Janie left Police Headquarters. On the way home, she explained that she had never told Lee about McCreery and her prison record because she was afraid of how he might react.
They didn’t talk about it after that and Lee Parker knew that he would never write another murder novel. There were other things a man could write about.
HERO, by John L. French
Originally published in Hardboiled, January 2004.
Darnell grew up with heroes. He had found them in a forgotten crate in the basement of his parents’ newly rented house. Exploring shortly after moving in, he discovered them in a storage area under the basement stairs. The books that contained their stories opened to him a world of flying men and dark avengers, of chaos and evil, of order and justice. Seven years old, he did not wonder why none of the heroes were black, or why none of his neighbors were white.
Over the years, his fascination with his comics and pulps lead to a love of reading in general. This lead to an increased interest in school. And as he learned history and science and math, he grew apart from the friends he had made. Although he still played ball with them after school and hung out with them on Saturday afternoons, when it grew dark he went home to read and study. His friends stayed on the corners and when the darkness settled, they studied different things.
At night, the city became another place. Darnell’s friends learned this quickly. They saw the drug deals go down and watched the dealers get rich. They saw arrests, some of them brutal affairs during which the police were more interested in their own safety than the rights of innocent men. They also saw that the ones who were arrested returned to the streets the next night. They heard of murders, although the second and third hand stories which reached their ears had by then been glorified into tales of bravery and cunning. The heroes of the street became those who could make the biggest deal, defeat and bury their rivals and laugh at the attempts of the police to put them away.
Darnell learned none of this, not then. His heroes remained those who lived in the two dimensional worlds of his books, where justice was always certain, the law always right and the bad guys always lost. His friends never spoke to him about the night time. They liked Darnell, but he was not of their world and they would not share it with him.
But Darnell knew about drugs and crime. He knew about racism and the reported brutality of the police. He knew about the gangs and the murders. He had read about it in his newspapers, and so he was certain that he knew all about it.
In the summer of the year he started middle school, Darnell entered the world he thought he knew. As a teen he stayed out later. The long summer days that bypassed evening and went right into night found him on the streets and corners so familiar to his friends. Brought up on heroes, he could not understand a world where the criminals were successful and unpunished, where the police showed contempt for the law they enforced and where justice was less of an ideal and more of a bad joke.
He tried to make it right. He would call the district police station and tell them of the drug dealers and where they could be found. But when one of them disappeared for a few nights, another took his place. If he heard of a crime, he would call the detective unit he thought would be most interested and wait in vain for a return call. Once, he witnessed a police officer beat a man who had just been
arrested and handcuffed. He called the department’s Internal Investigation Division to offer his observations and testimony. He was assured that the matter would be investigated and resolved. The officer who took his call hung up without taking his name.
* * * *
In July of that year his father took advantage of a pay raise and bonus and the family escaped the city for a week at the ocean. They returned to their home to find its kitchen window broken, unlocked and opened. The VCR and television were gone and the remaining contents of the house scattered. The police officer who came to take the burglary report did just that and no more. He took their names and a list of the missing property and then, after telling them not to touch anything until the Crime Lab arrived, left without talking to any of the neighbors. Two hours later, the technician from the lab showed up. Although she was friendlier than the officer had been, and worked hard in searching for fingerprints and other evidence, she found nothing usable. When asked, she explained that there was little chance that their property would be returned or the burglar identified.
Not much changed for Darnell in the next few years. He continued to do well in school. He still bought and read comics. Detective stories had replaced the hard-to-find pulps. There were still too few black heroes, the ones presented being merely variations on the white man’s themes. It was ironic, he thought, comparing the worlds he read about to the real one he had come to know.
“If anyone needs heroes,” he thought, “It’s us.”
He thought about the role models that were offered his people. Most of the athletes used drugs themselves. And while the ministers, activists and politicians were important to the community and deserved to be respected and emulated, to ten and twelve year olds their lives lacked the excitement and rewards of the outlaw culture of dealing, shootouts and narrow escapes from the law and rival gangs.
When Darnell was a junior in high school, two of his friends wandered onto the wrong street wearing the wrong jackets. Mistaken for members of a rival gang, they were shot down from a moving car. The only evidence found were a few mutilated bullets, none of which were useful for comparison even if a gun were found. Despite the usual public outcry and promises from officials that something would be done, the murders quickly became just two more drug killings, to be solved only if a dealer gave up a name in the hopes of making a deal.
Some people were shocked into action. Support and drug awareness groups found new lives. A neighborhood watch was re-instituted. After a few weeks all but a few students had left the groups, and the pressures and business of daily life soon caused the watch to go back into dormancy. Darnell and the rest of the remaining group members tried to interest their fellow students in the fight against drugs, but most were too busy with sports or school, or too lazy to care, or too involved with drugs themselves. One student wrote a series of articles about the drug culture for the school newspaper. He did not name names, but the pictures he painted were clear enough to most people. The severe beating he received was more of a lesson than the articles could ever be. No more were printed. The groups soon broke up.
A hero was needed. The law had failed. Worse, it had surrendered the streets. The police were now the recorders of crime, not the avengers. The activists and ministers had failed. They could not inspire the people to rise up and expel the demons from their midst. The community itself had failed, giving up and accepting crime as the price you paid when you could not afford to move. Having grown up with heroes, Darnell knew that when everyone else has failed, only a hero can succeed.
At first, it was easy. He had come to know the streets, but had never become part of them. He was as anonymous as anyone could be. A few blocks from his home, his face was not at all familiar.
Money was not a problem. Knowing that he would need a stake, he took the best from his comic and pulp collection and sold it to the book dealers he had come to know. Instead of taking store credit or buying more books, he had other plans for the money.
* * * *
He next made small purchases from several dealers so that each would recognize him when they saw him and regard him as a sometime customer. During the first several buys he was so scared and anxious that the dealers mistook his sweat and anxiety for the onset of withdrawal. Each time he made a purchase he quickly sought solitude, disposing of the drug as soon as he could. His one fear was that he would be stopped by a police officer out to make his quota of arrests by busting users and not pushers. Staying away from places too close to home, he soon became a semi-familiar face, a regular whom no one really knew.
His working capital started to run low. He had planned for that. Having established himself as an occasional user who bought from several dealers, he no longer had a need to buy drugs.
He bought the gun from a “regular” dealer, a small man in a dirty sweat suit who did nothing to disguise his profession. Darnell told him what he wanted, then left. An hour later he went back to the same corner and traded the last of his comic book money for a small .32 caliber semi-automatic pistol.
On the way home, Darnell could feel the weight of the pistol in the pocket of his sweat shirt. He felt different. He felt dangerous. The people he passed on the street were also different. Now, they were his. Some were his to protect—the kids running down the sidewalk, the old men sitting on their marble steps replaying last night’s ball game, the young girls coming home from their honest jobs at the sub shop. Others were his prey. He could pick out the dealers, the gang members, the ones who were the reasons he had bought the gun, the ones he would hunt.
He did not use the gun that night, or that week. The gun lay where he had hidden it, behind a panel under the stairs where he had first found his heroes. Each day he would tell himself that that night he would go out, that tonight was the night he would start the hunt. Each night would be filled with reasons and excuses not to go out. His sleep was broken by disjointed dreams of discharging guns and exploding faces, of being chased through endless alleys by freshly dead drug dealers. He would wake up afraid of the night, afraid of the gun, feeling a failure and a coward.
He would get rid of the gun, he decided, just throw it away, then he would not have to worry about it. Then he remembered why he had bought it. That night he went out.
“Just a test,” he thought. “If the moment is right—a dark street, no witnesses, no police, I’ll do it. And if I can’t, I’ll drop the gun in the dumpster and at least I tried.” He expected to come home unarmed.
It was warm for April, everyone was out. Darnell felt relief that tonight it would end before it could start. He walked the streets, rejecting each dealer as he saw him, willing himself to believe that it was impossible to use the gun without being seen.
“Hey, Schoolboy,” he heard from a dark alley. “Still armed and dangerous?”
It was the dealer who had sold him the gun. “What you do with it? Going to hold up Leon’s Lake Trout?”
Without thinking, Darnell said, “I’ve been looking for you. This thing doesn’t work.” He pulled out the gun and walked into the alley.
“You got the safety of-”
The gun went off. Darnell quickly turned around. No one was looking into the alley. No one would, in that neighborhood, look toward gunfire. He then looked at his victim. The dealer had fallen backward. The hole the bullet must have made was invisible in the man’s dark clothing. His eyes were open, staring at Darnell in surprise and death. Darnell looked at the gun in his hand, the gun he had not meant to fire, the gun he had planned to give back. He ran, praying that the alley had another exit.
He made it home without being stopped. The gun hidden, he hid himself in his room. He did not sleep that night.
“What if he wasn’t dead? He looked dead, should I have checked? Could he identify me? Would he? Did I touch anything?” These thoughts worried at him. He washed his hands several times. He told himself it was
to get all traces of gunpowder residue off of them.
* * * *
That morning, having spent the night at the window waiting for the blue flashes that would signal advancing police cars, he saw the paper thrown onto his front porch. Rushing outside, he had the paper opened before he was back in the house.
He found the article on the second page of the local section. The dealer’s death was one of four that evening. All of the killings were reported in one story, none were given more than two paragraphs. The paper reported the finding of the body about an hour after Darnell had gotten home. The police stated that the killing had obviously involved drugs and believed it was one of several related shootings.
As his worry was replaced by relief, Darnell felt tired. He told his parents that he had been up all night and was too sick to go to school. He went back to bed and slept until the afternoon.
Darnell knew that the police might still have his description, that they did not tell the press everything and that they probably lied to the media as a general principle. Still, the fact that he was home and not downtown at police headquarters meant that he was not an immediate suspect.
Calmer now, he reviewed what he had done. The dealer was dead and had not lived to give a description. He was not a named suspect and too many people matched his general appearance for him to worry about anything but bad luck. He had never been fingerprinted, so even if he had left a print it could not be identified. He was as safe as he expected to be when he planned this.
He killed his next man quite deliberately. Still nervous and scared, he used that feeling as he approached the dealer.
“You selling tonight?”
The Walt Whitman MEGAPACK ™ Page 15