“Just one obit tonight.” He took a big swig, swallowed hard and wheezed. “We don’t need to be ratcheting up expectations on any permanent basis. It’ll just make life tougher for the next generation.”
After another drink, Bullock hopped off the deck, walked to the Dodge and returned with his 30.06 and an infrared scope. “I’ve been looking for a good time to see how this baby works,” he said, screwing on the scope and attaching his miniature tripod. He aimed at the swamp and peered through the eyepiece. “Damn,” he said. “Check this out.”
I squatted and looked through the red lens. A grainy raccoon sauntered unaware of our surveillance along the top of a fallen cypress in the swamp.
“No need to kill him,” I said hopefully.
“Hadn’t planned on it.”
To the left of the swamp, a light—yellow and diffuse through the low-hanging fog—moved slowly across the horizon. I couldn’t tell if it was traveling on the ground or through the sky.
Bullock spotted it, too. “UFO. Maybe swamp gas.”
“Then it’s swamp gas movin’ at sixty miles an hour.”
The light moved toward us and soon diverged into two beams, a car bouncing up the road toward Brad Hall’s modern plantation home. A white Range Rover emerged from the mist and stopped in the driveway.
The headlights snapped off. Two doors of the Rover opened and slammed shut, one right after the other. Everett Hall and J. Rutledge Buchan crunched double time across the gravel driveway. They wore identical uniforms of camouflage pants tucked into boots and khaki field jackets cinched tight at the waist. Beyond their hunting clothes, I was amazed at how much alike they looked—tall, tan, mid-sixties, silver hair glinting in the moonlight. Hall wore glasses. Buchan carried his crop.
“What is the meaning of this?” Everett Hall bellowed, waving one of the notes we had left.
“Mr. Hall, I’d like you to meet Ronnie Bullock,” I said, ignoring his question and his anger. “Mr. Bullock is my colleague at the Charlotte Times. Ronnie, this is Brad’s father, Everett Hall.”
Bullock stepped forward smartly and thrust out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Hall ignored Bullock and glared at me. “I said what is the meaning of this?”
“The note was not intended for you, sir,” I said evenly. “It was intended for Judge Buchan.” I turned to Buchan. “Judge, I’m Matt Harper and this is Ronnie Bullock. We met several weeks ago.”
Before I could finish, Everett Hall lunged forward, grabbed my tie, and pulled me close to his face. “You’ll talk with me and you’ll talk now, you little prick.” I could smell liquor on his breath.
I jerked my tie out of his hand. “Keep your hands off me!”
“What in hell do you mean bringing Rut Buchan into this cockamamie investigation of some dead nigger kid?” Everett Hall snapped.
“Easy, Everett,” Buchan said. “I’ll handle this.” Buchan turned to me. “We must do things a little different down here than they do up in Charlotte. If we have business with a man, around here, we go see him. We don’t write him a note. Mr. Hall was a bit offended by you leaving notes for me all over town.”
“A bit offended, hell!” Hall yelled. “I’ve never been so pissed off. Where the hell is my son?”
I felt the sting of a father’s anger, as painful as if it had been from my own. I didn’t need another fight with Everett Hall. “New York,” I answered. “He told us we could stay.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to Buchan, particularly regretting the copy of the note we’d left with Patty Paysinger at Town Hall. “We looked all over for you. We’ve been on this story a long time. We were just trying to move things along.”
Buchan relaxed. “We’ve been bird huntin’ all day. We’re tired. We got skunked so we were already upset, even before we got your note. And we’re thirsty. Now go fetch two more glasses and let’s sit down. I don’t know what I can tell you about whatever it is ya’ll are looking into but I’ll try.”
For the next hour, the four of us sat on the deck and talked. Mostly, Bullock, Buchan, and I did the talking. Everett Hall got drunker.
“I know we own that building,” Buchan acknowledged when I asked about the place that housed De Sto. “I don’t know how long we’ve owned it. I think if you’ll check, you’ll find we own a lot of the property around town.”
“Your family has been here a long time,” Bullock offered.
“We have. But it’s not so much that. You see, my daddy was the magistrate before me and his daddy was the magistrate before him. And my daddy got in the habit, maybe it was his granddaddy’s, too, of buyin’ up a piece of property if it went into auction after foreclosure. If he could rent it out, well, that was good business. But he also felt it was good for Hirtsboro. Kept property on the tax rolls. So we own a lot of little things here and there. None of it has ever amounted to much.”
From where he slouched in his deck chair, Everett Hall jolted to life. “I’ll tell you boys this. I’ve known Rut Buchan and his family . . . How many years is it, Rut? All my life. Done more for Hirtsboro than any man alive. And I mean for everybody. Especially the blacks.” He pulled himself up and walked unsteadily over to where Bullock had left the 30.06. He hefted it, sighted through the scope, tested its balance. “Damn fine weapon. Whose is it?”
“Mine,” said Bullock.
“You a sportsman?”
“All my life.”
“You should go with us sometime.” He stumbled back to his deck chair still holding the 30.06.
“You leased the building to Raeford Watson for De Sto,” I said to Buchan.
“We did. Ol’ ‘Do What.’ That’s what we used to call him. No matter what you said, he’d always say, ‘Do what?’ He ran it until he got sick. Then it was more trouble than it was worth. Watson was the only one willing to go in there and sell those people groceries. He was doing them a favor. The thing is, they didn’t always seem to appreciate that fact. There were cuttings, shootings, holdups. All that stuff that comes from being in that side of town. Wasn’t hardly worth it.”
“I understand someone threw a firebomb at the building one time,” I said.
“Buncha hot heads. That’s what I’m talking about. Probably all hopped up on dope.”
“Judge, did you ever hear about any prostitution going on in the back of the building, the part behind the store?” Bullock asked.
“Never had a case like that.”
It was an obvious dodge. I sensed it and Bullock did, too. “I’m not talking about a case,” Bullock said, his tone just a touch tougher. “I’m talking about whether it was happening.”
Buchan stiffened. “Mr. Bullock, I don’t believe I appreciate your tone.”
So, I thought, it’s true.
“And I don’t believe you’ve answered my question,” Bullock pressed.
Everett Hall stood up and staggered from his chair, still holding the 30.06.
“I’ve about goddam heard enough,” he said. He raised the gun to his shoulder, squinted through the scope, aimed at the swamp, and then swung the rifle so it pointed directly at me. My heart stuck in my throat. My eyes wouldn’t leave the trigger.
“Put the gun down, Everett,” Buchan said calmly.
“I’ve heard enough of this bullshit. You boys need to get gone,” he said. The barrel of the gun traced small circles. I couldn’t seem to avoid it.
From nowhere Bullock sprang like a panther, applying a headlock to Everett Hall with his left arm while grabbing the barrel of the rifle with his right hand. Bullock wrenched the rifle away and released Everett Hall from the headlock. Hall stumbled backwards into Buchan who grabbed him by the elbow and steered him toward the Land Rover. “C’mon, Everett,” He said. “Time to go.”
Hall shook him off and stepped in front of Bullock.
“What the hell are you doin’ stick
in up for the goddam niggers? You’ve been around long enough to know better. What kind of a Southern boy are you, anyway?”
“One who doesn’t care about the color of murder victims.”
“You’re a goddam traitor to the South.”
Drunk as he was, Everett Hall was a sitting duck for Ronnie Bullock’s powerful right uppercut, which struck him squarely in the gut. Hall pitched forward, his glasses flying, and he melted to the ground like a snowman in a heat wave.
“Nobody calls me a traitor,” Bullock said evenly.
We helped Buchan load Everett Hall into the backseat of the Range Rover.
“I think it would be good if you boys were gone in the morning,” Buchan said stiffly.
In my mind I heard Walker say, “Stick your hand into the wound.”
“Judge, there are people in this town who believe Wallace Sampson was killed in retaliation for the firebombing or maybe because someone thought he was the one who had tried it the first time and was coming back to try it again.”
He looked me dead in the eye. “There are people in this town who believe in voodoo. When one of them gets shot, ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s by their own kind.”
“Judge, we’re trying to find Billy Bascom—used to live in Hirtsboro.”
“Can’t help you,” he said. He started the engine and nodded at Everett Hall lying in the backseat. “I need to get this ol’ boy to bed. Mr. Bullock, I want you to know I’ll do everything I can to keep him from pressing charges. Like I said, I think it would be good if you boys were gone in the morning.”
“Nobody calls me a traitor,” Bullock repeated as we watched the red taillights of the Range Rover snake through the fog.
With Brad Hall in New York, Bullock and I decided there was no practical way to appeal our eviction. The next morning we loaded up our Dodge and went in search of the nearest, cheapest motel.
“This is coming out of our own pocket,” Bullock pointed out. “I suggest we share a room.”
“The good news is, we’re running out of stuff we can do down here.”
“Right. With any luck, we’ll only need to stay a few more days.”
“With any luck, we would have been done already.”
“We won the Employee of the Month Award. Our luck’s starting to change.” And maybe it was. In our search for a place to stay, Bullock and I stopped for gas at Ray’s Amoco on the outskirts of town.
“Ray here?” I asked a gangly teenage boy who rolled a tire from the station’s double-bay garage.
“Ain’t no Ray here,” he grunted, hoisting the tire into the back of a pickup. “Owner’s Larry.”
“Larry here?”
“In there,” he said, motioning to a pair of legs in overalls that stretched from beneath a blue 1965 Impala SuperSport in one of the garage bays. While Bullock pumped, I walked into the garage’s atmosphere of oil, hot rubber, and exhaust. A light cord stretched from the ceiling into the open hood of the Impala. A Snap-On toolbox lay open on the floor nearby. I heard the chug of a compressor out back. The legs in the coveralls, attached to a torso that was lying on a creeper, whipped around like those of an overturned insect trying to right itself.
“Yo. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute. I’m trying to find a guy who used to live around here, maybe twenty years ago. He worked on cars. Maybe you know him. How long have you owned this place?”
“Longer than that.” I waited for him to push himself out from under the Impala but the creeper didn’t move.
“Ever know a guy named Billy Bascom?”
The creeper shot out from underneath the Impala and an old man appeared. He deposited a wrench in the toolbox, brushed a strand of sweaty hair from his forehead, and looked up at me from the crawler. “Possum?” he asked.
“Maybe. I didn’t know he was called that.”
“Who’s looking for him?”
“Matt Harper. I’m a reporter with the Charlotte Times.” I stuck out my hand. Larry stood up, looked at his grease-covered hands and shrugged. We shook and I nodded in the direction of Bullock at the pumps. “We’re working on a newspaper story and someone told us Mr. Bascom might be able to help us with it.”
“The story must be about huntin’ or women or cars. Because that’s about all Possum was ever interested in. ’Cept drinkin’. Lord, it has to be twenty years since he worked here. Good mechanic. He knew his way around a car.”
“What happened to him?”
He chuckled. “Possum had a habit of ramblin’. Just take off and disappear for days at a time. One day, he just picked up and moved on. Never did come back. Haven’t seen or heard of him since.”
Instinctively, I reached for my notebook but thought better of it. Instead, I made mental notes that I could recall and write down as soon as I was alone. Bullock walked into the garage and I introduced him. Finished pumping gas, he started pumping Larry for more information. But together we got no further than I had alone.
“Why’d they call him Possum?” Bullock asked.
“You obviously ain’t never seen him.” He led us into the office and pointed to a framed picture on the wall. In the photo, a crowd of people stood around a race car. In front of the car, a young man in a driver’s uniform was accepting a huge trophy from a scantily clad blonde with a sash that read Miss Summerville Speedway.
“That’s him,” Larry said pointing with a bony finger to a thin-faced man with a shock of black hair and a dark tan who stood in the crowd beside the race car. A cigarette dangled from his lips. His head pointed away. But his eyes stared directly at the camera, dark and beady over his sharp-pointed nose, and his smile stretched back on just the left side of his face so that he looked guilty, like a kid caught in a lie about missing homework, and, unmistakably, like a possum.
Chapter Sixteen
Night was falling by the time Bullock pulled the Dodge into the dirt and gravel lot of the Travelers Rest Motel, just off U.S. 301, once a major north-south tourist highway that had been bypassed by the interstate.
I surveyed the single-story, twelve-unit cinderblock building with a red neon Office sign on one end and a half-dozen run-down cabins in back. “Nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents a night and it’s only a forty-five minute drive to Hirtsboro,” Bullock said. “We’re on our own dime.”
I agreed. But when I walked into our tiny room, I wished I hadn’t. Twin beds sagged beneath thin and faded brown and orange checked bedspreads. Matching curtains covered a window so filthy that curtains were superfluous. I ran my finger through a coating of dust on a shaky brown desk and a beige rotary phone. A dozen cigarette burns pocked the brown plastic indoor/outdoor carpeting. A crinkled stalk of aluminum foil allowed the black and white TV to pull in one station, from Augusta. The place reeked of dust and disinfectant. I saw myself in the mirror and figured I was the first guy ever in the room wearing a tie.
“We shouldn’t be here long,” Bullock said hopefully.
“We won’t be here long,” I said with certainty.
“We’ve already paid. Let’s settle in.”
I agreed and again wished I hadn’t, especially when Bullock raised the possibility that the sheets in the twin beds hadn’t been changed since the last occupant. I spent a fitful night fully clothed atop the bedspreads, turning over my body and my situation, the dim surroundings an expression of my inner gloom.
Walker Burns, one of the few good things about the Charlotte Times, was looking for a job elsewhere and was surely gone. When I’d called New York to tell Brad about our eviction, I learned the sad news that he and Lindsay were having serious problems and had decided to seek counseling. I was missing Delana more than I had imagined. Phone calls between us weren’t getting it done. Dad sounded okay when I called to check on him but no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t escape the fact that he was dying. I was getting tired of spending so much
time with Bullock.
And, we still didn’t have enough to write a decent story. We could write that Wallace Sampson’s girlfriend had seen a man named Billy Bascom running from the killing. But we didn’t know if he was the killer or simply a man running from gunfire. Bullock and I both believed that Buchan knew about the hookers in the back of his building and we had Mary Pell’s word that the firebomb was thrown to protest them. But the link between the firebomb and the killing of Wallace Sampson was speculative.
My depression didn’t lift until just after dawn when the bathroom door burst open and Ronnie Bullock, khaki pants around his ankles, hopped out shrieking.
“Holy shit! Holy shit! Look at this!” he shouted, waving newspaper clippings that I could see were from the Times. “Bascom’s right here in the damn clips!” He spread the clips out on the dresser and stooped to pull up his trousers. “Look at this. Unbelievable. We’ve had it all the time, right there under our noses!”
Sure enough, in the last paragraph of a story about Raeford Watson’s trial for beating civil rights marchers in Columbia was the following sentence:
“Watson will be sentenced next month along with Leroy Hord, O.O. Mayhew and William J. Bascom, who pleaded guilty before the trial.”
“Jesus, Ronnie, how’d you find that?”
“You can’t buy a newspaper in this God-forsaken place and I gotta have something to read when I’m in the can. I grabbed the file of the clips that Miss Nancy saved for us . . .”
“And which you promised to return.”
“And there it was. I’ll return them once we’ve read every word.”
Thirty minutes later we left the Travelers Rest Motel in a cloud of dust, headed toward Columbia, on the trail of the Possum.
“We might be able to track him through the Department of Corrections,” Bullock said. “Hell, if he served time, he might still be on probation.”
“Ronnie, here’s the low-end story, the story we can write if we get nothing else.” I kept my eyes peeled for cops as Bullock nursed the speedometer up to eighty miles an hour. “Here’s the lede: A man who later pleaded guilty to civil rights charges was seen at the site of an unsolved killing that followed racial unrest in Hirtsboro, South Carolina.”
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