Business was good at this hour: more than half of the spaces were occupied by a mixed-race and mostly poverty-level clientele. There was the low buzz of conversation, but none of the punctuations of laughter you heard in better restaurants. Eating was serious business here. And not a particularly enjoyable one, judging from the samples of the fare I saw in passing and the expressions worn by the diners.
I found an open spot at the counter, and when a tired-looking Latina waitress got around to me I said I was there to see Charles Anthony Brown. Her expression of surprise indicated he had few if any callers, but she didn’t ask questions. “Down past the johns,” she said, gesturing. “Last door on the left.”
Kitchen and bathroom smells were strong in the dimly lit corridor. The two doors on the left were unmarked. I stopped at the last one, knocked, and pretty soon it opened and he peered out at me. Recognition put a look of hope in the rheumy eyes—and I took it away quick because there was no other, more merciful way to do it.
“Hello, Moses,” I said.
He stood frozen for half a dozen beats. Other emotions flickered briefly in his eyes and on his deeply seamed face; the one that remained, I thought, was resignation.
“So you found out,” he said.
“Did you really believe we wouldn’t?”
“Figured you might. It don’t matter much anymore. You gonna take me to the po-lice now?”
“Let’s talk a little first.”
He backed up slowly into the room. I stepped inside, closed the door against the dish rattle and voice murmurs out front. The room was a windowless, fourteen-by-fourteen box, dimly lit by a low-wattage ceiling bulb, that had once been used for storage; still was, to an extent, judging by the cartons stacked along one wall. In the remaining space were a cot covered with an old army blanket, a rickety chair, a small table, and a kind of open, makeshift closet that contained Moses Arceneaux’s meager belongings. I wondered if he realized how much the room looked and felt like what he’d spent fifty-one years avoiding—a prison cell.
His trumpet lay on the cot. He caught it up when he sat down, held it on his lap. It was old and a little dinged here and there, but the brass surfaces still shone from myriad polishings. The one thing he owned that he cared about, I thought.
He said, “You find Robin Louise?”
“Yes, we found her. She lives in Shreveport.”
“Knew she was still alive. Knew it for sure.”
“She may not want to have anything to do with you,” I said. “You must know that, too.”
“I believe she will. Got some money saved for her, like I told you yesterday. Got to talk to her one last time before I die. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I never stopped loving her. Tell her the truth.”
“What truth?”
“About what happened to her mama and Marcus Dupres that night in ’63.” Arceneaux ran his long, gnarled fingers around the rim of the trumpet’s bell. “Tell you the truth, too, you want to hear it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I didn’t kill Lily or that piano man,” he said, “neither of ’em.”
I said nothing. The number of men and women charged with capital crimes who profess their innocence to the bitter end are countless. Nearly all such claims are self-serving obfuscations or outright lies. Ninety-five percent, at a reasonable guess. But it’s the five percent that make a cry of innocence worth listening to.
“Swear it on a Bible,” Arceneaux said. “I never done it.”
I stayed mute.
He put the wrong interpretation on my silence. “You like everybody down in N’Orleans,” he said, “you don’t believe it.” Surprisingly, there was no discernible bitterness in the words.
“Suppose you tell me the way it was.”
“I loved that woman, that’s the way it was. Even after I found out she was cheatin’ on me with that piano man. I might’ve whipped her ass some if I’d had the chance, but kill her dead? No, sir. Never.”
“She was shot with your pistol. Both of them were.”
“Not by me. Didn’t happen the way it looked.”
“All right. How did it happen?”
“Kind of hard to remember exactly, after so many years.” A bunch of seconds went by while he either worked his memory or built a framework of lies.
Then he said, “Horn man in Dupres’ band told me about her and him. Drunk, and he let it slip out. Man, it cut me deep. I was half outa my head, I admit that, when I went harin’ over to Dupres’ place that night.”
“With your pistol in your pocket.”
“No, sir. Lily was the one brought the gun. Dupres been stringin’ her along, told her they was gonna run off together. She believed him, must’ve wanted him bad, more’n she ever wanted me, but then she found out he had him another woman besides her, stringin’ that one along, too. She had a bad temper, Lily did. Didn’t go to Dupres’ place for screwin’ that night, went there for a showdown—make him choose between her and his other woman. That’s why she took the pistol with her.”
“How do you know all this?”
“They was yellin’ it at each other when I got there,” Arceneaux said. “Bastard must’ve hit her ’cause I heard a sound like a slap, and she screamed, and next thing I heard was that gun goin’ off. Door wasn’t locked. I got it open and run inside, and Dupres was on the floor with blood all over his face and Lily standin’ there with her eyes crazy wild. She swung around on me wavin’ the pistol like she was gonna shoot me, too. I tried to take it away from her, we grappled some, and … Lord, it went off again and she fell down dead as Dupres. Somebody come runnin’ in then, must’ve been one of the neighbors, and somebody else outside was hollerin’ for the cops, and there I was holdin’ the pistol that killed ’em both.…”
“So you panicked and ran.”
“Yeah, that’s what I done. I threw the gun down and hauled ass outa there. I didn’t have no other choice.”
“Sure you did. You could’ve stayed and told the police what you just told me.”
He laughed, a hollow sound that morphed suddenly into one of his coughing fits. It took a little while, once the spell subsided, before he was able to go on talking.
“Man, you don’t know what it was like down south in them Jim Crow days. Black man in a room with his dead wife and her dead lover and his own pistol smokin’ in his hand. You think they’d of believed me? No way. They’d of thrown me in jail, likely beat on me, then put me in prison and the ’lectric chair. I wouldn’t of stood a chance in hell. Sure, I ran. Ain’t been closer to N’Orleans than five hundred miles since.”
“Fifty years of running and hiding,” I said. “What’d you do all that time?”
“Stayed out of trouble. Swear that on a Bible, too—I ain’t never once broke the law, nor even been tempted to. Mr. Good Citizen everywhere I went, one end of the country to the other. Never stayed too long in one place until I come out here to San Fran, been here seven years now. Worked to put food in my belly and clothes on my back, any kind of job I could get where I didn’t have to show identification. Pickin’ crops. Washin’ dishes. Diggin’ ditches. Janitor work, handyman work.” He ran his hands over the trumpet again, fingered the buttons. “Played and sang on the streets. In backstreet bars now and then, when I could get a gig and I was sure wouldn’t nobody recognize me or my style. Guess I been lucky.”
Yeah, I thought. Lucky.
I said, “And you have no regrets?”
“About runnin’ off the way I done? No. My music … yeah, some there, but the band I played with in N’Orleans wasn’t goin’ nowhere and neither was I. Only wrote one song that was any good, ‘Who You Been Grapplin’ With?’ Leavin’ and losin’ my daughter, that’s my only regret. But I knew she’d be all right, I knew her auntie’d take care of her.”
“You could have at least tried to find out.”
“Did once, year or so after. Man I knew, only one I figured I could trust, I got in touch with him and he told me Jolene and Bobby was gonna adopt R
obin Louise. I asked him to keep an eye on her and he said he would, but he went and got himself killed in an accident.”
“And you never tried to contact her until now?”
“Thought about it plenty. Come close a dozen times, but I never could nerve myself up to it. Too scared of the po-lice, dyin’ in prison for something I never done. Never stopped bein’ scared until just a little while ago, when I come to know for sure my time was almost up. Funny thing. Now I ain’t scared anymore.”
I had been watching him closely as he laid out his story. When you’ve been lied to as often as I have over the years, by all sorts of people good and bad, you develop ways to separate the truths from the untruths, a kind of homespun lie detector. Body language: nervous gestures, facial tics, shifty looks, or too-direct eye contact. Statements too glib or overly earnest, points glossed over or omitted or contradictory, voice inflections that don’t ring true. I’d neither seen nor heard any of those telltale indicators in Moses Arceneaux or his account of what had happened that August night in 1963.
He’d told me the truth, the whole truth. I would have staked my reputation on it.
The man was not a murderer, not a criminal. Just the opposite, in fact—a victim of circumstance, and racial prejudice, and the kind of crippling fear that overrides all other human emotions.
He sat slumped now, as if the conversation had exhausted him. His dark face was beaded with sweat; that and the glow from the pale ceiling bulb gave it an oddly burnished quality, like a casting in bronze.
“We goin’ to the po-lice now?” he said.
I’d already made up my mind. Sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts and to hell with rules and regulations and strict adherence to the letter of the law. There is more than one kind of justice in this world, even if it’s too little and too late.
“No,” I said. “No reason to, Mr. Brown.”
“… Brown?”
“Our client is Charles Anthony Brown. As far as we know, nobody by that name is wanted by the authorities.”
I handed him Tamara’s printout containing the personal and contact information for Robin Louise Franklin Davis. He looked at it, looked up at me with emotions playing over his face again—gratitude, renewed hope, something that might have been shame.
“Good-bye, Mr. Brown,” I said. “Good luck with Robin Louise.”
I went to the door. I had my hand on the knob when the trumpet notes sounded behind me, tentative at first, then clear and sharp and now familiar. When I turned back toward him, he lowered the instrument and said, “I ain’t played nor sung ‘Who You Been Grapplin’ With?’ in fifty years, ’cept inside my head. Lily’s song, wrote it special for her, but it’s mine now. Been mine ever since I left N’Orleans.”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say.
In a low, age-cracked voice, he began to sing. The melody was the same, but the beat was slower, the lyrics slightly different and with different meaning than the ones Tamara had sung for me—a mournful elegy for a tragically broken life that stayed with me long after I left him.
“Who you been grapplin’ with, Mo-ses?
Since back in ’63.
Who you been grapplin’ with, Mo-ses?
I been grapplin’ with me.
Lord, Lord, I been grapplin’ with me.”
NIGHTSCAPE
Jake Runyon and I were the only customers in the all-night diner near the Cow Palace, sitting at the counter with mugs of coffee for me and tea for him, when the man and woman blew in out of the rain.
Blew in is the right phrase. They came fast through the door, leaning forward, prodded by the howling wind. Nasty night out there. One of the hard-rain, big-wind storms that hammer the California coast during an El Niño winter.
The man shook himself doglike, shedding rainwater off a shaved head and a threadbare topcoat, before the two of them slid into one of the sidewall booths. That was as much attention as I paid to them at first. He wasn’t the man we were waiting for.
“After eleven,” I said to Runyon. “Looks like Maxwell’s a no-show again tonight.”
“Weather like this, he’ll probably stay holed up.”
“And so we get to do it all over again tomorrow night.”
“You want to give it a few more minutes?”
“Might as well. At least until the rain lets up a little.”
Floyd Maxwell was a deadbeat dad, the worst kind. Spousal abuser who owed his ex more than thirty thousand dollars in unpaid child support for their two kids; hard to catch because he kept moving around in and out of the city, never staying in one place longer than a couple of months, and because he had the kind of job—small-business computer consultant—that allowed him to work from any location. Our agency had been hired by the ex’s father and we’d tracked Maxwell to this neighborhood, but we’d been unable to pinpoint an exact address; all we knew was that since he’d moved here he ate in the Twenty-Four Seven Diner most evenings after ten o’clock, when there were few customers. Bracing him was a two-man job because of his size and his history of violent behavior. Runyon was twenty years younger than me, and had a working knowledge of judo learned during his days as a Seattle cop.
This was our third night staked out here and so far all we had to show for it were sour stomachs from too much caffeine. I had mixed feelings about the job anyway. On the one hand I despise deadbeat dads and spousal abusers and nailing one is always a source of satisfaction. On the other hand it amounted to a bounty hunt, the two of us sitting here with handcuffs in our pockets waiting to make a citizens’ arrest of a fugitive, and I’ve never much cared for that kind of strong-arm work. Or the type of people who do it for a living.
The new couple were the only other customers right now. The counterman, a thin young guy with a long neck and not much chin, leaned over the counter and called out to them, “What can I get you folks?”
“Coffee,” the man said. He was about forty, well set up, pasty-faced and hard-eyed. Some kind of tattoo crawled up the side of his neck; another covered the back of one hand. He glanced at the woman. “You want anything to eat, Lila?”
“No.”
“Couple of hamburgers to go,” he said to the counterman. “One with everything, one with just the meat. Side of fries.”
“Anything to drink?”
“More coffee, biggest carton you got. Milk.”
“For the coffee?”
“In another carton. For drinking.”
The counterman said, “Coming up,” and turned to the grill.
The tattooed guy said to the woman, “You better have something. We got a long drive ahead of us.”
“I couldn’t eat, Kyle.” She was maybe thirty, a washed-out, purse-lipped blonde who might have been pretty once—the type of woman who perpetually makes the wrong choices with the wrong people and shows the effects. “I feel kind of sick.”
“Yeah? Why didn’t you stay in the car?”
“You know why. I couldn’t listen to it anymore.”
“Well, you better get used to it.”
“It breaks my heart. I still think—”
“I don’t care what you think. Just shut up.”
Lila subsided, slouching down in the booth so that her head rested against the low back. Runyon and I were both watching them now, without being obvious about it. Eye-corner studies with our heads held still.
Pretty soon the woman said, “Why’d we have to stop here, so close? Why couldn’t we keep going?”
“It’s a lousy night and I’m hungry, that’s why.”
“Hungry. After what just happened I don’t see how you—”
“Didn’t I just tell you to shut up?”
The counterman set a mug of steaming coffee on the counter. “You’ll have to come get it,” he said. “I got to watch the burgers.”
Neither of the pair made a move to leave the booth. Kyle leaned forward and snapped at her in a low voice, “Well? Don’t just sit there like a dummy. Get the coffee.”
Grimacing, she slid out and fetched the coffee for him. She didn’t sit down again. “I don’t feel so good,” she said.
“So go outside, get some air.”
“No. I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Yeah, well, don’t do it here, for Christ sake.”
She turned away from him, putting a hand up to cover her mouth, and half-ran into the areaway that led to the restrooms. A door slammed back there. Kyle loaded sugar into his coffee, made slurping sounds as he drank.
“Hurry up with the food,” he called to the counterman.
“Almost ready.”
It got quiet in there, except for the meat-sizzle on the grill, the French fries cooking in their basket of hot oil. Outside, the wind continued to beat at the front of the diner, but the rain seemed to have slacked off some.
Runyon and I watched Kyle finish his coffee. For a few seconds he sat drumming on the tabletop. Then he smacked it with his palm, slid out, and came up to the counter two stools down from where we were sitting. He stood watching the counterman wrap the burgers in waxed paper, put them into a sack with the fries; pour coffee into one container, milk into another.
“How much?” he said.
“Just a second while I ring it up.”
Kyle looked over toward the areaway, scowling. Lila still hadn’t reappeared.
“Hope your friend’s okay,” the counterman said.
“Mind your own business, pal.”
The total for the food and drinks was fourteen dollars. Kyle dragged a worn wallet out of his pocket, slapped three bills down next to the two bags. When he did that I had a clear look at the tattoo on his hand—Odin’s Cross. There were bloody scrapes across the knuckles on that hand, crimson spots on the sleeve of his topcoat; the blood hadn’t completely coagulated yet. Under the open coat, on the left side at the belt, I had a glimpse of wood and metal.
I was closest to him and he caught me paying attention. “What the hell you looking at?”
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