The door was opened before he could knock. A bull-necked man held his gaze for several seconds before he said, “You can’t come in here with guns.”
Dett nodded, holding his hands away from his body.
“Put them on that table over there,” the man told him, his marble eyes unblinking.
Dett took off his overcoat, held it by the collar to indicate it was heavy, and draped it carefully across the table.
“That’s all,” he said, not offering to remove any of the weapons within the coat.
The marble-eyed man nodded. “Go down that way, there,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
* * *
1959 September 30 Wednesday 13:59
* * *
If Dett was surprised to see the man who hired him sitting in a wheelchair, it didn’t show on his face.
“My name is Royal Beaumont,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Have a seat.”
Dett took the indicated chair. The marble-eyed man positioned himself at a sharp angle, so that Dett would have to turn his head to see him.
“Sorry about all the precautions,” Beaumont said. “The times we live in . . .”
Dett nodded silently, his face impassive.
“Red Schoolfield says you did a hell of a job for him.”
“I don’t recognize the name,” Dett said.
“Hah!” said Beaumont, more of a bark than a laugh. “This one doesn’t put his cards face-up, huh, Luther?”
“No, Roy,” the marble-eyed man said, mechanically.
“You’re wrong,” Dett said, not a trace of aggression in his tone.
“How’s that?” Beaumont asked—curious, not annoyed.
“Some other man’s name, that’s not my card to play. Not even to hold.”
“Huh!” Beaumont grunted. “That’s cute.”
“That’s true,” Dett said, leaving the multiple interpretations of his response hanging in the air between them.
Silence like a fine mist dropped over the three men.
Beaumont studied the man seated across from him, making no secret of it. Dett never dropped his veiled eyes.
“There’s a lot of work I need doing,” Beaumont finally said.
“Okay.”
“Just like that, ‘okay’?”
“If you called a bricklayer out to your house, told him you needed some work done, that’s what he’d say, right? I mean, you’d have to tell him what kind of brickwork you wanted done, but, if he was good at his trade, whatever kind you wanted, you asked him, he’d say ‘okay.’ ”
“You’re no bricklayer.”
“You’re the one who put word out that you wanted me; you know the kind of work I do.”
“I don’t actually know anything,” Beaumont said. “I heard things. I’ve been told things. But I don’t know anything for myself.”
“I don’t do auditions,” Dett said, opening his antenna for tension from Luther, picking up none.
“What’s that mean?”
“If you want to see a sample of a bricklayer’s work, you go look at a wall he’s built for someone else. If that’s not enough to convince you to hire him for a big job, maybe you ask him to build you something first. But a small job. Like a barbecue pit, say.”
“So?”
“So, the kind of work I do, I don’t make samples. You ask me to build you a barbecue pit, just to see how good I am, it costs you the same as a brick wall.”
“You always talk like this?” Beaumont said. “In big circles?”
“Talking’s not what I do,” Dett answered him.
Beaumont, no stranger to edged ambiguity, nodded without changing expression. He reached for his cigarette box, tapped out a single smoke, and lit it with a gunmetal Zippo.
Not like some, snap their fingers for a flunky to light their smokes for them, show you what a big shot they are, Dett thought, appraisingly. And the other one, he calls him “Roy,” not “boss” or “chief.”
“You don’t smoke?” Beaumont asked him.
“I wanted to keep my hands where Luther could see them.”
This time, Beaumont’s laugh was genuine. “You know what, Mr. Dett? You know more about Luther in ten minutes than some of the boys I’ve had working with me ten years. All they ever hear out of Luther’s mouth is ‘Yes, Roy,’ or ‘No, Roy.’ So they think he’s . . .”
“Dumb.”
“Right,” Beaumont said. “But . . . ?”
“He’s a professional,” Dett answered promptly. “No, wait. He’s more than that. More than just that, I mean. He’s kin, isn’t he?”
“Not by blood. You understand what that means?”
“By what he’s done.”
“Yeah. By what he’s done. By what he’d do. And what I’d do, too.”
“I understand.”
“I believe you do,” Beaumont said, exhaling a thick stream of cigarette smoke.
* * *
1959 September 30 Wednesday 15:03
* * *
“I could get myself killed, talking to a goddamned reporter,” the man in the moss-colored coat said to Procter. His eyes were wary behind the thick lenses of his glasses; his hands gripped an aluminum clipboard.
The two men were in the front seat of Procter’s ’54 Hudson Hornet, a rust-wormed brown coupe that was on its ninth owner and last gasp.
“All I want to know is where the new interstate is coming through,” Procter said. “That’s not too much to ask.”
“Not too much to ask! Information like that’s worth a—”
“It’s worth whatever Beaumont paid you for it,” Procter cut him off.
“I never said—”
“You know what, Yancey? You’re making me tired. You and me, we’ve had a deal. A working relationship. I’ve held up my end of the bargain, haven’t I?”
“I’m not saying you haven’t,” Yancey said, sullenly. “But when am I done paying that off?”
“Ever borrow money from a loan shark?” Procter asked him, smiling without showing any teeth.
“No. Why should I—?”
“It’s the principle I’m trying to make you understand, Yancey. That’s a play on words, you get it? The principle of principal and interest. A six-for-five man makes his living from when you don’t pay him off. He doesn’t want his money back; he wants you to keep paying the juice.”
“You’re saying I’ll never get those letters back?”
“Right, Yancey. That is what I’m saying.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“It was blackmail the first time I did it,” Procter said. “Now it’s just a habit.”
“Jesus, Jimmy; we went to school together!”
“Lots of guys went to school together. You, me, Carl Gustavson . . .”
“It’s not what you think it is . . . was. Those letters, they don’t mean what you—”
“I’m tired,” Procter repeated. “You think I’m bluffing, go ahead and call my hand.”
Yancey pulled up the top sheet from the clipboard, revealing a road map with a number of red lines hand-drawn across it. “Yeah, you’re the great investigative reporter, Jimmy,” he said bitterly. “Big crime-buster. You know what? You’re no better than the people you’re going after.”
“That’s what it takes,” Procter said.
* * *
1959 September 30 Wednesday 15:40
* * *
“I’m not doing nothing like that, Rufus Hightower. Stealing is no different than whoring; you can’t do no ‘little bit’ of it.”
“Did I ask you to take anything, honeygirl? Did I? No, I sure didn’t. And I wouldn’t. I know what kind of woman you are. Kind of woman a man marries, he gets lucky enough.”
“Kind of man wants a fool for a wife, you mean,” Rosa Mae said, not mollified.
“You supposed to be in the man’s room, Rosa Mae. That’s your job. You said you had to come back, do the vacuuming, right?”
“I supposed to be cleaning his room—not searc
hing it, like some thief.”
“It’s not thieving if you don’t take nothing. There’s no crime in looking.”
“Why you so interested in this man, Rufus? I know he never did nothing to you.”
“Now who’s playing someone like a fool, girl? You know it ain’t me that’s interested in that man. What I’m interested in is—”
“—money. Pastor Roberts says—”
“Think I give a damn what some high-yellow, straight-hair pretty-boy says? Every man got to have a hustle of some kind. You know how the song goes: if you white, you all right; if you brown, stick around; but if you black, get back. That’s me, Rosa Mae. I don’t have that nice paper-bag complexion; I ain’t got good hair; and my nose is spread all over my face. So I don’t apologize for none of what I do. I may be about money, but I got a good use for it.”
“And what’s that?”
“Someday, I’ll tell you, girl. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. But, for now, I tell you what it’s not for—it’s not for no big white Cadillac, like your jackleg preacher got.”
“You just jealous, Rufus.”
“You want to say I’m jealous because that man get you all big-eyed, you be telling the truth, girl. When I see you sometimes, just standing there, I say to myself, ‘Damn, I wish that woman was waiting for me.’ But I don’t care nothing about that nigger otherwise.”
“Rufus!”
“What you think he is, to all the white people, Rosa Mae? You think a colored man ain’t always a nigger to them? Doctor, lawyer, preacher—don’t make no difference.”
“That’s all changing now. If you went to church sometimes, you might learn about it.”
“If you went to . . . Never mind.”
“Rufus, you are the most downright . . . confusing man I ever met.”
“Rosa Mae, if I was to tell you taking a look around that man’s room, it would be doing something for our people, would you believe me?”
“For our people? You mean, like for integration?”
“For our people, girl. Not for mixing. I ain’t about that.”
“You . . . what? Rufus, why shouldn’t we have the same rights as any—?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Rufus said. “Someday . . . maybe, I’ll talk to you about all this. But not now. This ain’t the time. This is the time to make some money.”
“Well, I’m not going to—”
“That’s all right,” Rufus said, shrugging his shoulders. “You only work six days.”
“Of course. I wouldn’t work on—”
“I know. But you think the man don’t want his room cleaned, just because it Sunday? Don’t worry about it no more, girl. I’ll get Big Annie to do what I need.”
Rosa Mae stepped back a pace from Rufus, widening her lively amber eyes. “You’ll get caught, Rufus,” she said. “Annie’s like a cow in those rooms. The man will know as soon as he—”
“Then I guess I lose my job, pretty Rose. Because I got no choice. I got to do this.”
He looked Rosa Mae full in the face for a long moment. “I’m sorry I asked you,” he finally said.
Rosa Mae closed her eyes and stepped close to him, her voice just above a whisper.
“You be here at five-thirty,” she said.
* * *
1959 September 30 Wednesday 15:59
* * *
“I guess what I need is an outside bodyguard,” Beaumont said.
“I don’t understand what that means,” Dett replied.
“I mean, not a bodyguard who stands right next to me. Only Luther does that. A bodyguard who works . . . at a distance. Let’s say, just to be talking, there was this guy who, I don’t know, threatened to kill me, all right? Now, the kind of bodyguard Luther is, a thing like that was happening, he would never leave my side. You couldn’t make him go. But the other kind of bodyguard, the one I’m talking about here, he might go out and look for the guy who was making the threats.”
“I get it.”
“But what I need done, it’s a lot more than any one single job. You were in the service, right?”
Dett didn’t answer, his face as blank as a career criminal’s in a police interrogation room.
“Never mind,” Beaumont said. “I was never in the army”—he rapped his heavy ring against the steel of his wheelchair—“but I always liked reading about military tactics and strategy.”
Beaumont shifted position in his chair, but his iron eyes never left Dett’s face. “We’ve got a good-sized operation here,” he said. “Been here for a long time. But now there’s some who want what my people have. We know they’re already on the march. So what I need isn’t any one single job. It’s more like a . . . campaign.”
He leaned forward to grind out his cigarette. When he looked up, his head was tilted at a slight angle, his tone almost professorial. “Now they’ve got more men than we do—not right here, but access to them, no more than a phone call away. A long-distance call. But it’s our territory they’re invading, so they have to come to us. And in a million years, they’ll never know the terrain the way we do.
“Still, it’s not that simple. Some of what we do, it’s out in the open. Easy to find means easy to take. Which is what they think. You know what makes a big army just give up and go home?”
“When there’s no end in sight. Like Korea. A war like that, all it does is drain you dry.”
“Right! Winning a war’s a lot easier than trying to occupy the territory you take. If we wanted, we could make it too expensive for them, cost them too much. But there’s something else we have to consider, something even more important. Locke City is a wide-open town, everyone knows that. We’re right on the border of two other states. This is where people come, they want to have a good time. But if we start drawing too much attention, that could all go away.”
“Attention from who?”
“Well, the papers, that would be the biggest problem. We’ve got everything covered locally, but the statewide paper, or, worse, the wire services, that’s another thing.”
“They had gang wars in plenty of cities, and they still kept their operations going. Look at Detroit, Chicago, New York. . . .”
“Sure. Towns that size, there’s plenty of legitimate businesses to keep them running. But Locke City’s only got one way to make a buck. And if people don’t feel safe anymore, coming here to have a good time, they’ll stop coming, period. That happens, there’ll be nothing to fight over.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Do? Well, like I said, you’re the strategist. Maybe you can put up that barbecue pit we talked about?”
* * *
1959 September 30 Wednesday 16:21
* * *
“Front!” Carl’s waspish voice rang more sharply than the desk bell.
Rufus materialized. Despite his overwhelmingly intrusive curiosity about everything that went on within the borders of his domain, Carl had long since abandoned his efforts at discovering how Rufus never seemed to be around, yet was always present.
“Mr. Travis will be staying with us, Rufus,” Carl said, indicating a chubby man in a madras sport jacket.
Good thing you told me, faggot, Rufus thought to himself. I never would have figured out why a man comes into a fucking hotel carrying a suitcase. He smiled at the guest, said, “I’ll take that for you, sir.”
“Mr. Travis will be in 412,” Carl said to Rufus, thinking fat men shouldn’t wear madras plaid, never mind with a tab-collar shirt. He had already sized up—No pun intended, he thought to himself, smugly—the guest as a salesman even before he had seen his business card. A cut above a traveler who carried samples in his suitcase, but a step below the “detail men” who hawked new pharmaceutical products to local doctors and druggists.
Rufus had done his own quick evaluation, and was later rewarded with a quarter for providing the directions to a “high-class” house of prostitution. You that kind of big spender, good thing you don’t be trying your luck
picking up a woman on your own, Porky, Rufus thought behind his dazzling smile and grateful bow.
“You seen Rosa Mae around?” he asked Moses, as he climbed into the elevator car for the return trip.
“She be working somewhere, one of the rooms,” was the noncommittal response.
“What’s up with you, man?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“With the attitude, man. I just asked you a simple question, you get all huffy with me.”
“Rufus, you know Rosa Mae. Her shift starts, she starts. That’s a hardworking young gal.”
“Too good for the likes of me, huh? Just because she call you ‘Daddy Moses’ like the young girls here do, that don’t make you her father for real.”
“Might be lucky for your sorry ass that I’m not,” Moses said, unperturbed.
Rufus burst out laughing. “Our people need more men like you, brother. Square business.”
* * *
1959 September 30 Wednesday 17:28
* * *
“I just want to talk,” Procter said into a telephone receiver.
“No, you don’t,” a man’s voice answered. “What you want, you want to listen.”
“That’s my business, Chet. Listening.”
“Mine, too. Only you, you get a paycheck for it.”
“And you get cash. That’s nicer. No taxes.”
“Paycheck’s better. Regular is always better. Something you can count on.”
“There was a time when you counted on me,” Procter said.
“You don’t forget nothing, do you?”
“I don’t tear up IOUs, either,” Procter said. “I’ll see you tonight. By the water tower.”
* * *
1959 September 30 Wednesday 17:31
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