Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3)

by Gary Earl Ross

  “This is all so beautiful.” Drea raised her voice to be heard above the cacophony as we strolled along the boardwalk. “So alive. The last time I was here—”

  “Forty-some years ago,” Sam said. “You were maybe twenty, visiting me and Ruthie on a school break. All around here looked terrible then. You couldn’t call it a waterfront ‘cause you couldn’t get to the water. It was dark with the old auditorium so close to the elevated highways. I think we took you to a circus there.”

  “That’s right,” Drea said. “I had never been to a circus before.”

  “Good thing you came in summer. The way the aud was, right by those highways, the winter wind used to cut through there hard and fierce.” Sam winced and shivered. “After the Sabres stopped playing in it, that old building was empty for years ‘fore they tore it down. Things are so much nicer around here now.”

  “Up through the end of the nineteenth century all along here were saloons and shops and brothels,” I said, echoing what I had heard Bobby say to out-of-town visitors. “Now it’s all part of the city’s renaissance. In summer and fall they have concerts and music festivals, arts fairs, street entertainers, ghost walks, sometimes theater. In the winter Liberty Hound and the military museum close for a few months but there are other attractions—winter sports, ice carving, youth hockey exhibitions. The reflecting canal under the bridge back there, where they have the kiddie paddle boats? It’s used for ice skating. Of course, the children’s museum is open all year.”

  “I’d like to visit that one, if there’s time.”

  “Of course.”

  In my vest and jacket, I was grateful for whatever wind rolled off the water. The sight of decorative banners along the railing snapping in the breeze had a placebo effect, making me feel cooler even though sweat soaked through my shirt.

  The last one to finish her food, Drea took a final swig from her Coke can and dropped it in a receptacle. Then she moved to the railing across the water from grain elevators used for nighttime laser light shows. She rested her forearms on the top. “You know, sometimes it’s hard to remember there’s joy in this world and real beauty.”

  As we positioned ourselves around them, Sam stood beside her. “Long as you’re in it, the world is still gonna have some beauty. And a whole lot of brains. You were always the pride and joy of the Wingard clan, baby girl.”

  Drea laughed and turned to him. “Baby girl. You haven’t called me that since I was a kid and you took me to playgrounds and movies.”

  “Because of my old man,” Sam said. “He used to drill it into my head it was my responsibility to look after his brother’s baby girl every time she was with me. Family was love, he used to say, and love meant protection, especially for those who would do the family proud. So I had to do whatever was necessary to keep you safe. He was always real serious about that.”

  Drea nodded. “Uncle George came from a serious time. I guess family was the upside he needed to keep on keeping on.” She turned back to the river. “Now you’re still trying to protect me. Hiring a private guy who puts the coverage I usually get to shame.”

  “Yeah, that crazy boy’s got the hotel room looking like something out of a movie.”

  “You know I can hear you, Sam,” I said.

  “You’re good crazy, G. Good crazy. But, man, it feels like you dropped us inside Mission Impossible.”

  “Except Tom Cruise never gets tired,” Drea said. “I’m ready to head back now so I can take a rest before tonight.” She turned away from the railing and came to me. Gently, she clasped my forearm. “Thank you, G, for accepting this mission.”

  Excerpt Four

  From In the Mouth of the Wolf by Drea Wingard, with Grant Gibbons (4)

  After four sessions with Dr. Clay, you discard the notion of buying another gun, of tracking down Wally Ray Tucker and putting a bullet in his forehead. Even as the investigation leads nowhere, you have begun to imagine other means of destroying Liberty Storm—maybe giving enough interviews to become the public face of opposition to the alt-right, maybe testifying in Congress, if not in a trial. But first, you must regain control of who and what you are.

  Calm, kind, and insightful, Dr. Clay has listened to your recollections of thirty-plus years with Grant and your pride in and love for Miranda. When you wander too far afield in the past as if avoiding present pain and future fear, he steers you, ever so gently, back to matters at hand—your still acute loss, the clothes you step inside Grant’s closet to inhale, other decisions you have yet to make, the unforged path that lies ahead. When periodic anger at investigators increases your heart rate and speaking speed, he helps slow you down with a sympathetic look, a comment that reflects your feelings, or guiding you through the deep breathing technique he has taught you. The day you tell him you tried to shoot yourself with the gun now in his office safe, he nods as if he has known all along.

  “You needed a little time,” he says later. “Every hour, every day, every week you hold off doing something hurtful, the better your chances of not doing it at all.”

  “But I can always get another gun,” you blurt out.

  “Not Grant’s gun,” he says

  You think about that for a long time.

  At the start of your sixth visit, you begin by asking Dr. Clay if he has any idea why you chose him as your therapist.

  “Usually insurance or blind referral,” he says. “My assistant handles all that so I’m not influenced in our sessions by who or what brought you to me.”

  “Then I won’t say who it was, but I got a list of ten possibilities and I researched all of them.”

  “I’d expect nothing less from someone who knows her way around the Library of Congress.” He offers one of his rare flickers of a smile.

  “Do you know why I chose you and not a woman or a black person?”

  “No, but why is unimportant if we—”

  “It’s important to me,” you say, interrupting him for the first time and pausing for a sharp reaction that doesn’t come. “I want you to understand.”

  “I would like to understand.”

  “Our professional and social circles,” you begin. “Grant and I had so many friends from so many different backgrounds, so many different walks of life. You see, I had just about forgotten—” You hesitate before continuing but the guarded honesty with which you started therapy has in the past several weeks begun to give way to an unconditional honesty that is both surprising and liberating. “Please understand I was brought up in Buffalo by parents and grandparents from the Deep South who couldn’t bring themselves to trust white people.”

  “Mistrust no doubt born of experience,” he says.

  “Yes, but getting scholarships to a girls’ prep school and then Columbia opened my eyes to a more educated, more cosmopolitan world than my family knew in the early and mid-Twentieth Century. Grant and I knew and liked, and in a few cases loved, men and women of various races, nationalities, occupations, faiths, sexualities, and even political persuasions. It’s not that I forgot hatred exists but I was too comfortable in my environment. What I had forgot was that hate could touch people of color at any time. Oh, I knew it on an intellectual level. Hard not to with reports of voter suppression, shootings of unarmed black men, and talk radio folks losing their shit over immigrants at the southern border. But like many nonwhite professionals, I thought my level of success insulated me.”

  “Insulated you in what way?”

  “Not only was I a somebody, I had been trained well. I knew how to act to minimize threats. Carry your ID at all times. Dress modestly, for business. Put professional markers on your car—official parking tags, membership bumper stickers, other things to show your level of accomplishment. Remain calm in all encounters—at work, in stores, during traffic stops. Use the King’s English and modulate your voice. Keep your hands visible at all times.” Abrupt tears no longer surprise you and you reach for the tissue box. “I hope you have stock in Kimberly-Clark,” you say after a moment of silence
spent wiping your eyes and blowing your nose.

  “Since grad school,” Dr. Clay says. Another smile.

  You laugh briefly and take a breath before continuing. “When those bastards pushed their way inside, they changed everything.” You reach for more tissue, dab, and take another deep breath to steady the flutter in your voice. “You know, it’s taken me a bit to realize how much more than Grant they took from me. My freedom to love and trust others. My comfort around folks I don’t know. My ability to see people in personal terms, not race and politics. I need to get all that back.”

  Dr. Clay nods.

  “If I had gone to somebody black or female, I think they might have identified with me. Maybe without even thinking about it they would have used their own experiences to reinforce my fears. Especially my new fear… of white men. I don’t want to be afraid of anybody.” You look off for a moment and then turn back to Dr. Clay with what you hope is a mixture of apology and your desperate need to make sense of things. “I’m not qualified to say this, but in America it feels like racism is a kind of metastatic psychopathology. A national madness embraced by so many it affects all of us, and there’s no chance for anybody to escape.”

  “Unless we create one,” Dr. Clay says. “Together.”

  A few days later, on Christmas Eve, it strikes you the best gift you can give your late husband is to keep his work alive, not to kill the racists who killed him but to take a shot at the racism that inspired them. That night, with his file folders and notebooks on the floor and the nightstand and one open on your lap, the bed feels a bit less lonely. By morning you have decided to continue his research on white supremacy until you have enough material for a major magazine feature or series.

  Weeks later, early in the New Year, Grant’s editor Marcy is the one who convinces you his work and what happened to you both should become a book. She invites you to bring a proposal to her as soon as you can.

  The comfort you find in having Grant’s papers around you wanes long before you take your ideas to Marcy. At first, so soon after his clothing went away in a Salvation Army truck, the spiky handwriting that used to annoy you on his post-it notes, the partial thumbprints in smudged copier toner, and the doodles on the flip side of pages in his reporter’s notebook brought him back to you in ways that made you smile. But the deeper you delved into his research, the more he retreated into the background. Now, as you make your own notes and use a pink highlighter on his, you chide yourself not only for failing to recognize how much all this must have disturbed him but also for knowing so few specifics of this history yourself. Unsure whether to be grateful or angry he shared so little with you, you realize the term you used in Dr. Clay’s office—metastatic psychopathology—is a more apt description of bigotry than you had imagined. By the time Marcy tells you to write this book, you know a book is exactly where Grant was headed with what he had compiled.

  However uncertain you are about finishing such a project, the more people you meet in your husband’s notes, the greater your resolve to try. Founding Father and Declaration of Independence signatory Dr. Benjamin Rush believed black skin was a type of leprosy spread only through reproduction and would infect the future if intermarriage were permitted. Thomas Jefferson wrote of black inferiority in body and mind, even as he fathered six children with his slave Sally Hemings. In 1900 U.S. Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman boasted on the Senate floor of leading marauders to kill blacks during the 1876 South Carolina elections and declared the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments null and void. Tennessee state librarian John Trotwood Moore was a lynching supporter whose 1929 funeral was notable for having black pallbearers dressed as Confederate soldiers.

  Then there are the scientists who went to great lengths to prove the superiority of Nordic peoples. Samuel George Morton measured cranial capacities in skulls from around the world to justify a racial hierarchy, despite work by others that refuted his conclusions. Physician Samuel Cartwright coined the term drapetomania to describe the mental illness that made slaves run away. Statistician Francis Galton’s term eugenics led to an academic discipline and numerous professional societies but also to forced sterilizations in America and crematory ovens in Europe.

  The connections between racism of the past and white supremacists of the present are direct. From early Southern Baptists citing dark skin as the Mark of Cain and the Curse of Ham to justify slavery to Brigham Young telling Utah legislators descendants of Cain were destined for servitude to imprisoned LDS fundamentalist and child molester Warren Jeffs proclaiming black people are the vessel used by the Devil to carry evil into the world. From Nineteenth-Century pseudoscience to Twentieth-Century eugenics to Shockley and Jensen’s ideas of genetically limited black intelligence. From the publication of Mein Kampf to a New Jersey man who named his son Adolph in 2008 and later changed his own surname to Hitler. From the Ku Klux Klan and Germany’s Nazi Party to more than seventy supremacist groups, racist churches, and political parties in America today.

  Online you find videos targeting young white men: exercises to build healthy white bodies that will make white women swoon, combat training with white men showing off their martial arts prowess for subduing mud people and drug users and taking back America from inferiors, instructions that range from taping the hands to protect them during street fighting to designing and hiding weaponry that may save precious lives, from guides to concealing identity during public demonstrations or civil disobedience to living room lectures on the importance of having white babies.

  Underscoring everything are printouts from racist internet joke sites, the search having produced two million page hits:

  What do you call five niggers hanging from a tree? An Alabama wind chime.

  Why do niggers use clear plastic garbage bags? So Mexicans can window shop.

  What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A pizza doesn’t scream in the oven.

  What’s the best blindfold for chinks? Dental floss.

  What is black and white and rolls off a pier? A nigger and a seagull fighting over a dropped hot dog.

  Feeling soiled and sad but full of rage, you now want to write this book for more than Grant’s memory. You want to write for all those shunned because of Rush’s beliefs, for a slave girl of fourteen pulled into bed by a future president thirty years her senior, for those who died at the hands of Tillman’s Red Shirts, for Moore’s humiliated pallbearers, for the thousand-plus whose empty skulls were filled with pepper seeds or lead shot to estimate the value of their descendants, for the slaves caught and returned to a bondage that included whipping as a therapy for the madness that made them flee, for those who went under the knife or into gas chambers, for those whose churches demanded adherence to a faith that demeaned them, for students condemned to high rates of failure by the low expectations of those who teach them, for children raped by a charismatic monster masquerading as yet another voice of God, for everyone diminished by a hatred with roots so deep the venom of its fruit is heated by hell. You understand, at last, that this is bigger than Grant and you.

  This is evil.

  Evil that must be stopped.

  19

  To my surprise, Judge Marlo Vassi opened the door to James Torrance’s penthouse. With ash-blonde hair styled to sweep across one side of her forehead and deep red lipstick freshly applied beneath the thin vertical creases that betrayed her smoking habit, she wore a black dress, a three-layered pearl choker, and open-toed shoes. The polish on her fingers and toes matched her lipstick.

  “Good evening,” she said, smiling. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Rimes.”

  “Judge,” I said, nodding. “This is Drea Wingard.”

  Judge Vassi took hold of Drea’s hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you at last, Ms. Wingard.” She glanced at me. “Let’s forego titles tonight, Gideon. My name is Marlo.”

  “Then the pleasure is mine, Marlo,” Drea said. “Please call me Drea.” In a burgundy cocktail dress and sensible flats, she smiled as she shook the jud
ge’s hand and let herself be drawn into the entryway.

  Marlo looked back at me again. “Jim’s on an overseas call out on the terrace. He should be joining us any moment.” She returned her attention to my companion. “I loved your book, Drea. We both did, especially the way you put your reader right in the middle of things with you.” She narrowed her eyes, as if in pain. “Yours is a sad but remarkable story.”

  “You’re too kind,” Drea said.

  Free of my vest and wearing a fresh sports jacket, I followed the women from the entryway into a cool, pristine white dining room large enough for a basketball game. The ceiling was sloped and held four square skylights. Running lengthwise through the room was a table that could have accommodated twenty but held only twelve place settings, six on each side. In the far corner was a raised platform with four black chairs and four hardshell instrument cases, one larger than the other three, which suggested our dinner entertainment would be a string quartet. To the left of the small stage was a sliding glass door through which I could see a terrace and beyond it the Lake Erie horizon. James Torrance was out there, clad in a white summer jacket and hand to his head as if holding a mobile phone to his ear. He seemed unaware of our presence on the other side of the tinted glass—likely because the glass was reflecting early evening sunlight.

  I remembered he had sat beside Judge Vassi at the Alliance for Public Progress meeting. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, perhaps because Matt Donatello and I were sizing each other up. But now my mind began to assess what it might mean if the two were more than acquaintances—a conclusion I still had insufficient evidence to reach. Even if they were simply friends, it seemed likely one had brought the other into the Alliance. Their relationship, whatever its nature, could be a pivotal factor in where the conference was being held if not why.