Black and White

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  William “Willie” Sheehan had aged twenty-five years in the last eleven. His slack, splotchy skin and broken capillaries were a testament to his heavy drinking, and he’d shed at least twenty pounds from an already-slim frame. His green eyes were rheumy, and his graying brown hair badly needed cutting. He was wearing baggy trousers and a formerly-white T-shirt underneath an open short-sleeved shirt. He looked like dozens of men that she had arrested.

  “Jennifer,” he said quietly. There was surprise in his eyes, though perhaps less than there would have been if he had been sober.

  “Dad,” she said politely. She glanced behind her and saw Messer watching them from where he stood leaning on his open door.

  “You look really good, hon. You look fine,” he said. “But you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Well, I am,” she answered, and looked pointedly at her watch.

  “You should go back wherever you were,” he said. “You’re too good for this place, and it’s not safe for you here.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Aw, no, you know it’s not safe for you here. I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you, too.”

  Jennifer blew out a breath. By the looks of him, he wouldn’t be able to stand it if anything happened to anybody.

  “I have to get back to work,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

  He had his mouth open to answer, but didn’t have a chance to do it. She turned on her heel and got into the car. Messer got in after her.

  When they pulled away, Jennifer glanced in her side mirror and saw her father, looking pitiful, watching them go. Messer didn’t say anything right away, so she addressed the issue first, to keep it from becoming more uncomfortable for Messer than it already was.

  “My father,” she said unnecessarily.

  “Yeah, I know him, but I didn’t make the connection.”

  Jennifer looked over at him and tried to smile. “Don’t feel too bad. I’m used to people knowing my father is an alcoholic. He has been since I was pretty small.”

  “That had to be tough,” he said sympathetically.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes. He and my mother split when Jonah and I were nine. My mom said he was never really the same after he came back from Korea, but I do have some good memories of him. Mainly from before the war.”

  She got a picture in her head of standing on her father’s feet as they waltzed in the living room of their old house. She did have some good memories, and that one was one of the few.

  “Your mom ever remarry?” Messer asked.

  “No, she was too busy with marches and petitions and sit-ins and whatnot,” she answered. “I don’t think she trusted her own judgement, anyway. She had really fallen for my dad, when she was nineteen. But she realized pretty quickly that he was handsome, but he was also insecure and stupid with money and drank a little more than she’d realized. When he came back from Korea, I guess it was worse. So, we moved in with my grandmother and Mom got a divorce.”

  Messer nodded. “That’s too bad. Maybe one of these days he’ll straighten up.”

  Jennifer smiled. “Maybe.”

  But she doubted that very much. Her father had still been living in their old house when Jonah died, but she had no idea how he’d hung onto it, since he couldn’t keep a job. At Jonah’s funeral, his state had actually frightened her. He had been completely broken, and Uncle Ray had taken him home before the service was over. Willie didn’t make it to his ex-wife’s funeral. He’d been in the hospital, recovering from a three-day bender.

  If there had been any promise left in her father, she never saw it after he lost his son and his wife within two weeks of each other.

  Daniel hadn’t come back to the station yet when Messer and Jennifer finished up their paperwork for the day. Apparently, he was hung up with a bar fight across town at a dive called Lester’s.

  Jennifer politely declined Messer’s offer to stop by and meet his wife, and Ray’s offer to go home with him for dinner.

  As she unlocked her car door and stood there waiting for the interior to cool off, she stared at Daniel’s truck parked several spaces away. When she finally got in her car and drove away, she felt a hollowness in her gut. It wasn’t just loneliness, but a feeling of utter aloneness, one that wouldn’t have been eliminated by hiding herself away for an hour in the more populated lives of others.

  When they got into their cruiser the next morning, Messer spent the first fifteen minutes griping about the ribbing he was taking from the other guys about having Jennifer for a partner. Jennifer felt a little badly about it, but he seemed to take it in stride. A little complaining got it out of his system, and he assured her that he enjoyed her company and saw quite a few benefits in having her as a partner.

  “The thing is, I can talk to you about female stuff, stuff that’s going on with Michelle, you know, like that, and you’ll actually get it.”

  Jennifer laughed. “Are you sure? Some men, especially cops, think that if a woman’s a cop, she’s probably not a real woman.”

  “That’s a load of crap.”

  They turned onto Claiborne Street and drove slowly past the elementary school. School was out, but there were quite a few kids on the playground, and a few riding their bikes in the parking lot.

  “So, why are you so liberal?” Jennifer asked him

  “Me? I don’t think I’m all that liberal. Maybe compared to Patterson or Whitney or a lot of other guys, but what kind of comparison is that?” He pulled a stick of Fruit Stripes gum from the well under the dash. “You want some?”

  “Sure.” Jennifer took the gum and he grabbed another for himself. She held a hand out for his wrapper, and put both wrappers in the ash tray.

  “But you’re fine with women being police officers, or at least with me,” Jennifer said. “That’s kind of progressive, whether you think of yourself that way or not.”

  “Look, I don’t read Ms. magazine or anything,” Messer said. “But it just never seemed normal to me to treat ladies like that. I mean, I wouldn’t talk to my mom or my sister like she was a prostitute or an idiot, so why some other woman?”

  Jennifer smiled at him. “Well, then, as partners go, I guess you’ll do.”

  “Well, before you go telling people I’m the Dick Cavett of Dismal PD, you should know that fags scare the crap out of me and I don’t have one black friend.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The fags?”

  “No black friends,” Jennifer said.

  “Because not everybody was raised by a civil rights activist that let her white son date a black girl, you know what I mean?”

  Jennifer’s smile dimmed a bit. “You did some poking around. Or was everybody just dying to tell you over at Monty’s?”

  “I don’t have the extra dollar to go to Monty’s,” Messer said as he put on his turn signal. “But some of the guys remembered you, remembered what happened. They were talking about it.”

  “What did they say?”

  He looked at her, his brows pulling together a bit.

  “It won’t bother me,” she said.

  “Okay. Well, they said that back in ’62, you and a black girlfriend were out at the lake with Coach Gilliam’s kid, Ted—”

  “Ned.”

  “Sorry, Ned. And your brother, who some of the guys said was seeing the black girl.”

  “He was,” she replied.

  “That took guts in ’62.”

  “Well, yeah. But at the time, only our families knew about it. And a couple of close friends, like poor Ned. He was such a sweet, funny guy.” Jennifer took the gum out of her mouth, tucked it into the wrapper, and put the wrapper back in the ash tray. “Our family and Inez’s—that’s my friend—were close for years. Her father used to work for my grandfather, and even though they had the race thing and twenty years between them, they were best
friends.”

  “That’s cool. Me, I’ll admit I’m not attracted to black women. I’m not attracted to short women or curly-haired women, either. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s that big a deal. Different strokes for different folks.”

  Jennifer swallowed and nodded, looking out the window, watching for anything out of the way or anyone needing help.

  “Anyway. I heard that both of the guys got shot. Killed. And that a couple weeks later you found your mom…deceased. Murdered.”

  Jennifer nodded. “Yes.”

  “I don’t even wanna know how hard that was.”

  She shrugged. “I got through it.”

  There was no point in boring him, or embarrassing herself, by telling him just how hard that had been, and how lost she’d gotten along the way.

  The rest of Jennifer’s first week was fairly uneventful. There were fewer and fewer nasty comments by the other officers, and there were no more sex toys or other gifts meant to embarrass her. Whether this was due to the stern talk Ray had had with the guys at the end of her first day, or out of respect for Daniel, she didn’t know.

  Jennifer and Messer did encounter quite a few sidelong glances and silly comments about “lady cops,” “girl cops,” and so on, but they both took it in stride. Jennifer had been used to it for quite a while, and Messer just didn’t care a whole lot about what other people thought.

  Outside of morning muster and the shift change, Jennifer didn’t see Daniel again until Thursday.

  She walked into Ray’s office at the end of the day. He was on the telephone, apparently arranging to have his car serviced, and held up a finger. She sat down to wait.

  “Hey, Jennifer,” he said after he’d hung up. “How’d your shift go?”

  “Good. It went fine,” she said. “Quiet.”

  “I think you’ll find policing in Dismal to be a far cry from policing in New Orleans,” he said smiling. “For one thing, there’s no such thing as undercover here. No matter where you go, somebody knows you.”

  “Yeah, I haven’t exactly been invisible this week, either. If it’s not the fact that I’m a woman, it’s the fact that I’m Jennifer Marie Sheehan, come home to rub salt in old wounds.”

  “Ah, there’s some that feel that way, I’m sure. What happened back then, not just to Claire and the boys, but to all kinds of people, black and white, well, lots of people are ashamed. They’d just as soon keep those memories put up. Not that we’re all the way past that, but Dismal is certainly way ahead of where it was then.”

  “I know,” Jennifer said. “And I’m fine. There’ve been plenty of people who welcomed me home, or at least left me alone.”

  “Good, good.”

  Jennifer watched him straighten the papers on his desk. “So, you told me to give myself time to settle in—”

  “Jennifer. It’s been less than two weeks.”

  “I’m settled,” she replied politely. “It’s just a file.”

  “You and I both know it’s not just a file.”

  The murders of Ned Gilliam, Jonah Sheehan and Claire Quindlen had been treated as one case, the obvious connection being Claire’s unpopular activities in support of civil rights.

  “Uncle Ray, don’t you want to know? If you can?”

  “Of course, I do, hon.” Ray stopped clearing his desk. “I did then. I was just a police officer then, and I wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with the case, of course, but I made sure the officers working that case kept me updated.”

  He took his reading glasses off and slid them into his shirt pocket, then rubbed at his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and wistful. “She was like a sister to me, Claire was. You know that.”

  “I know, Uncle Ray.” She sat forward in her chair. When she did, she saw Daniel pass the open door. He glanced in at her, but kept moving. “Ray, this is really important to me. It’s important for me.”

  “You realize it’s no longer a case, right? Not unless something new comes to light, or someone comes forward after all these years.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  He sighed, then looked at her for a long time. “Give me until tomorrow, so I can remove the photographs from the two scenes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? You don’t need to see those things, Jennifer.”

  “But, I already did, remember?”

  He caught her coming out of the file room. She’d taken three steps down the hall when Daniel grabbed her elbow and steered her in to the supply room.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed at her.

  “Nothing.”

  He looked pointedly at the thick brown case file in her hands.

  “I heard you talking to the chief. What’s wrong with you?” he snapped.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Jennifer snapped back, her voice hushed. “I have Ray’s permission!”

  “I know that,” he replied. “But why don’t you just put an affidavit on the bulletin board, saying that the officers on that case weren’t smart enough or thorough enough to do a good job? Or worse, that they did a crappy job on purpose because these people got what they deserved?”

  “Ray was here then, and I’m not doing this because I think I’m smarter or because I think they swept it under the rug.”

  “Maybe you are and maybe they did,” Daniel said, his hands on his gun belt. “My point is that you don’t need anyone else knowing you’re looking at this file, because then everybody knows, including the officers who had the case, the cleaning lady, and probably the third cousin of one of the guys that did this.”

  Jennifer looked at him a minute. He was right, of course. “I know that,” she said. “I’m not broadcasting it.”

  “You’re not?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  He looked around, then dumped a few packages of toilet paper out of a brown paper bag from Kash n’ Karry. He took the file from her, put it in the bag, and then rolled the top of the bag down.

  “Now you’re not, maybe.” He gave it back to her.

  He stalked out of the room and turned left, toward the locker room. Jennifer went right, took the bag back to her desk, and got ready to leave for the day.

  Two hours later, as dusk was heading in, Jennifer took a break from trying to drill the last two screws on her new slide bolt for the front door. She stood in the doorway, plucking her T-shirt away from her chest as she tried to catch a breeze through the screen door. The sky was gray and looked like it was only five feet off the ground. She welcomed the promise of a storm.

  She was standing there, T-shirt in one hand and drill in the other, when Daniel’s truck appeared on her drive. She sighed as she watched him park. He stalked up the path in jeans and a denim shirt, and his hiking boots thumped loudly as he came up the porch steps.

  He stopped at the screen door.

  “Another thing,” he said. “Don’t even think about going around asking questions about this. If you have a question, ask Ray; he probably knows the answer. But you can’t discuss that case with anybody, you know that, right?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do know that,” she snapped. “And don’t forget that I’ve been a cop for almost six years.”

  “You were a meter maid and a dispatcher for four of those years,” he snapped back. “But it’s not about whether you’re a cop or a civilian; it’s about wandering around a small town where, even if the guys who did this are dead or gone, they probably have friends and relatives here, and those people aren’t going be real excited about you poking around.”

  She let out a breath. “I know that, Daniel,” she said more calmly.

  “Well,” he said. “Then, that’s it.” Instead of leaving, though, he popped his fists on his hips and glanced at the drill. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m putting a bolt on.”

  “Why?”


  “Because I don’t have the round saw thing to make a hole for a deadbolt.”

  “No, why are you putting new locks on the door?”

  “I’ve just gotten used to having them.” She shrugged. “New Orleans is a door-locking kind of town.”

  He squinted at her a bit, then pulled open the screen door and looked at the back of the heavy wooden front door. She had been in the process of trying to unscrew and re-screw the third screw she’d screwed up.

  “You leave those screws like that, and there won’t be any point in sliding that bolt,” he said.

  “I know how to use a drill,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. I’m the one who tried to teach you.”

  He took the drill from her and she had to step back as he came all the way in.

  He reversed the drill and took out the third screw, then gently restarted it, and drilled it in nice and neat. He glanced over at her, then picked up another screw from the packaging on the end table.

  He was too close, though he didn’t really have any room to give her. She watched his profile as he drilled in the fourth screw. She had always loved his jawline, and the way his blond hair got darker at the ends on a hot day, and curled slightly underneath his ears. She stood there watching him from eight inches away, and wished it would have been okay to lean in and put her face in his neck like she used to love to do.

  He was the same Daniel, and not. He was older, with more than ten years of life and memories between the boy she remembered and the man standing next to her. He was also more interesting, and more attractive, than he’d been when they were together. That made her sad. She wished she had watched him become that man.

  He finished with the screw and glanced over at her. She would have loved to have been looking somewhere else, but it was too late. He stood there for a moment, hunched over and eye to eye with her, and the blueness of his eyes, the frank honesty there, made her chest hurt. After a moment, he handed her the drill.