“Chief,” I said, “I’d like to help you find the killer.”
“That’s a weird thing for you to say. What makes you think I’m looking for a killer?” he said.
“I just thought … ”
“For all I know this boy beat himself in the back of the head with a bat. You want to find yourself a killer, go ahead.” He looked at the ceiling and over at the disassembled Plymouth. “There ain’t nothing here that makes a difference to nobody. Do what you want.”
The face of the dead man haunted me. I stared at the closed lid of the deep freezer.
The Chief yawned. “Can we get out this way?” He pointed to the wide garage doors.
Donald hit a switch on the wall and one of the doors rolled up. The sight of the late afternoon turning to dusk terrified me. There were people out there looking for me, wanting my fifty thousand dollars. I knew they would kill me for it and I wondered if in fact they already had. As we stepped out of the makeshift morgue I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of logic and double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier. I was Sidney Poitier.
“When we get back to your office, may I use your phone? Collect call. After all, I never got my one. Don’t prisoners usually get one call?”
“Yes, you may. One,” he said. “One call. Collect.”
Back in the dimly lit police station I placed a collect call to Podgy, who again reaffirmed his absolute refusal to come to any place called Smuteye. “What even does that mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know. You don’t have to come. Just call Ted and Professor Everett and tell them that I need them here.”
Podgy said he would, and I hung up. I looked around at the station walls, at Horace in the corner watching me, at the dispatcher who might have been sleeping, at the calendar with a woman leaning over an Oldsmobile beside the passage to the cells, at the open door to the Chief’s office. I wanted to ask if I could spend the night there, but I knew what that answer would be. Hell, they were probably tied in with the people who were after my money. I stepped over to the Chief’s door.
“This might be a stupid question, but is there a motel in Smuteye?” I asked. I leaned against the jamb.
“No,” he said, “there’s no motel, but I do know where you can rent a room.” He looked at his desk and nervously rearranged some papers. “I just now got off the phone. That was the state police over in Montgomery, and they told me that them boys up in Washington want this murder solved or they’re gonna come down here and go through all of our drawers, the ones in my desk and the ones I’m wearing. They say this is a matter of civil rights. I say it’s a matter of a boy being dead. I don’t want no suits down here crawling up my ass. You think you can figure this out?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“You’re a smart guy. You don’t think you can help the dumb crackers?” He smiled smugly at me. “Don’t you want show up us peckerwoods?”
“I can find out who killed him.” I didn’t know why I said that, except for the fact that I somehow believed I would be investigating my own murder. I wanted to know who would kill me.
“You didn’t think that man over there looked just like me?” I asked.
“You all look alike to me.”
I felt stupid for having set that one up.
“Stay around and show up the poor white folks,” he said.
“I think I will,” I said. “I’ve asked some friends to come here. They’ll help.” Truth was I didn’t know whether either of them would come, and I certainly didn’t know whether they would help or whether they could help. But I wanted someone to know that someone knew where I was. I was, in effect, trying to cover my ass, my tremendously exposed and vulnerable ass. My black ass. “Where’s this room that I can rent?”
“My house,” the Chief said.
The Chief’s house was a clapboard box set on cinder-block footings stuck far off the road in the center of a clearing of thin pines. The slow night drive there in his somewhat less foul-smelling police car was a bit nerve-racking. The idea of this white, rednecked, little southern town sheriff, or whatever he was, driving an unarmed, naïve, and solitary and stupid black man into the deep woods was unsettling at best, surreally terrifying at worst. The headlights panned across the yard and settled on the house. It was predictably dark, and it had the look of a man who lived alone.
“It ain’t much, but it’s paid for,” he said.
“How much for the room?” I asked. “We never talked about that.” I was afraid of what he might say. He knew that I had a thousand dollars on me. I wondered again if he knew about the rest of the money. Even if he wasn’t involved with the people trying to get my money, perhaps Scrunchy had told him on the phone about my business in Montgomery.
“You know the kind of money you’re carrying around is enough to get a boy killed,” he said.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
We walked into the front room. The Chief walked through the darkness to a standing lamp in the corner and switched it on. There was a saggy sofa, the original color of which was a mystery, and a matching stuffed chair. There was a rolltop desk under a window. There were no curtains on the windows. There were no rugs on the linoleum floor.
“You never told me how much the rent is.”
“You don’t have to pay me anything,” he said. “Have a seat.” He moved some magazines from the sofa, but I sat on the chair.
I sat.
“You want a drink?”
“I guess.” I was uncomfortable. I was especially uncomfortable with the fact that he was all of a sudden acting cordially. “What are we drinking?”
“Rye whiskey,” he said. He took a bottle from the desk and brought two glasses to the coffee table in front of me. He sat on the sofa, leaning forward. He poured the whiskey. “You like rye?”
“Never tried it,” I said.
He laughed. “Drink it slow.”
I sipped the drink. It burned my throat, but I didn’t gag or cough, thus surprising myself, and so I think I let go a little smile.
“Good, ain’t it?” he said.
On top of the desk was a dark lamp and a photograph. I stood and took the glass of whiskey with me. I was determined to nurse the three fingers he had poured for as long as possible. I walked over to the picture, looked at it without switching on the lamp. It was of a woman.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“My mama,” the Chief said. “She’s dead now.”
“Did she live with you here?”
His eyes narrowed. “No, she did not live with me here. Does this look like the kind of house a decent lady would live in?”
I looked around at the bare windows, the dingy walls. “This house isn’t so bad,” I lied.
He knocked back the rest of the whiskey in his glass and automatically poured himself another. “How you doin’?” he asked. “That’s enough whiskey for you, boy. Your judgment is already impaired.” He laughed.
“Maybe so,” I said. I sat back down.
“What do you do back there in Atlanta?”
“Nothing,” I said, quite honestly.
“How do you make your money?”
“Inheritance.”
“So, you’re rich.”
“You could say that.”
“Well,” the Chief said. “Around here, we’re poor, dirt poor.”
I nodded.
“You got a girlfriend?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
His curiosity was strange and a bit annoying. I watched his lids get heavy. “I don’t. Do you have a girlfriend?”
He laughed. I must have looked as if I were pitying him because he said, “No pity, now, boy. I don’t need your pity. Nosiree, I do not need your pity.” He poured himself another glass.
“Do you drink like this every night?” I asked.
“What if I do?”
I shrugged. “Expe
nsive habit,” I said, pretty much because I could think of nothing else.
He knocked back that glass and glared at me before closing his eyes, either because he could no longer stand to look at me or because he couldn’t keep them open. I was trying to figure out where I was and why. I understood that I was in his house because he had more or less arranged it, but it was also clear that I was there because I was afraid to be anywhere else. I didn’t know whether he was aware of my hidden money. He certainly knew I had a thousand dollars, which seemed to be a fortune to most of the residents of Smuteye, though he seemed unimpressed enough. Certainly this man didn’t believe that I could help him solve a crime. However, I in part had chosen to remain because I needed to solve the murder; I believed somehow that the body I had seen in the freezer was my own. I sat there through the night as the dust and mustiness bothered my nose, the policeman’s snoring filled the room, the sick light from the lamp at once too harsh and too dim.
The morning came with my stupid ass still sitting in that same lumpy chair. Watching. Watching the red, puffy, snoring face of the Chief. Watching the rain. As soon as there was light, there was rain—a hard-driving rain with wind that bent the pines severely. While he continued to sleep I got up and walked into the kitchen. To my surprise, it was not the sty I expected. It was in fact spotless. The sink was extremely white and the short curtains above it were crisp, bright yellow, and pulled aside evenly. One cup and one saucer were left on the drying rack. I actually turned to look at the doorway to the living room to be sure I was still in the same house. It was so strangely clean that I felt uncomfortable and so returned to my chair.
“Storm,” the Chief said, waking, rubbing his eyes. He sat up and poured himself another drink. “You sleep?”
I shook my head. “What now?”
“You’re the one that wants to find a killer.”
“What do you know about me?” I asked. “I mean what did the bank man tell you about my business with him?”
“He just told me he remembered seeing you.”
I wanted to believe him. “He didn’t tell you what my business was?”
The Chief just looked at me.
“Do you think that dead man looks like me? And don’t give me that shit about how we all look alike.”
“A little.”
“A lot.”
“Okay,” he said. “A lot. What’s your point?”
“I was in Montgomery picking up fifty thousand dollars,” I told him and then waited for a reaction to show on his face. None appeared. This I found odd. “That doesn’t surprise you?”
He drank from his glass. “What do you want me to say, Sidney? You want me to say, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money’? What do you expect?”
“I don’t know what I expect.”
For whatever unfathomable and idiotic reason I decided to level with him further. “I became afraid that I was followed from the bank, that somebody was going to steal my money. And then when I met that Thornton Scrunchy, you know with the same last name as the guy from the bank, I got really scared.”
Still, he listened without showing any reaction.
“Why so much cash?”
“It was for the sisters. It’s for their church. They seemed to think god sent me down here to build their blasted temple. I don’t know how to build anything, so I had some money wired to the bank in Montgomery. The money was for them. I would have given it to them, but that Scrunchy was there.”
“So, you’re one of them good Samaritans.”
I laughed. “An idiot.”
“Where’s the money now?”
“I hid it.”
“Good move.”
“Is this where you point a pistol at my head and make me take you to it?” I asked, half smiling.
He swallowed the last of what was in his glass. “No, this is where I close my eyes and sleep for another five or ten minutes. You think about this killer you want to catch. Maybe I’ll dream about your kind of money. Fifty thousand good ol’ Uncle Samuel Greenbacks. Man oh man.” He laughed softly as he seemed to drift off.
If I wasn’t digging myself deeper, I was certainly lengthening the trench. The rain was not letting up, but was now smashing into the windows. I couldn’t see the trees clearly anymore.
What I did see clearly was the murder of the doppelganger of Not Sidney Poitier. He was struck on the back of the head by a redneck named Thornton Scrunchy who was subsequently disappointed to find no cash in the dead man’s pockets. Probably every KKK-connected miscreant in a five-county swath of Alabama was in on the murder and the search for the money. Whether the Chief was, I obviously didn’t know. But as he slept there I resolved to attempt to Fesmerize him upon his waking. I thought I might have a better chance and an easier job if I awoke him before he was ready. I perched myself on the edge of my seat and leaned into my stare—my eyebrow arched, my head tilted slightly, and I cleared my throat, again, louder, again. The man stirred, slowly opened his eyes, grew immediately alarmed by my posture, then fell into what I recognized as a successful Fesmerian submersion. He sat there even more like a lump and stared into the space that was me.
“Can you hear me, Chief?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell me your full name.”
“My name is Francis Rene Funk.”
“Really?” I leaned closer to him. “When did you learn about the fifty thousand dollars?”
“When you told me,” he said.
“Do you know who killed the man in the chest?”
“No.”
“Do you suspect anyone?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Whom do you suspect?”
“Thornton Scrunchy.”
“Why?”
“Because of what you said. He thought the black boy looked like you. He does look like you.”
“Do you want to hurt me?”
“No,” he said.
“Will you hurt me?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you believe my life is in danger?”
“Yes.”
“Look into my eyes,” I told him, and when he did, I said, ‘When I say ‘Chief, I need your help,’ you will help me. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You will defend me, protect me if I need you, if anyone is trying to hurt me. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
I told him to go back to sleep and wake up in ten minutes. I sat there just a little less afraid than I had been, convinced at least of the fact the man with me meant me no harm. I was certainly no less confused. I felt terribly guilty for the man who looked enough like me to have been killed. I didn’t know what to do about the money. I had been stupid about it. I should have taken Sister Irenaeus to the bank and simply had her open an account, but it was too late to change any of that. I thought of the money hidden in the satchel and wondered how it was faring in the rain and wind. For all I knew one-hundred-dollar bills were floating all over southern Alabama.
The rain was letting up when Chief Francis Rene Funk awoke, but there was no sign or promise of a blue sky to come. There was only gray, dark clouds, wind, and mud. We got back into the Chief’s car and slipped and slid our way back to the highway. We drove to the diner, and I saw my car in the parking lot, at least what was left of it. It had been stripped and left open and bleeding in the pouring rain. The only consolation to what I saw as the loss of a friend was the fact that the thugs had not found what they were looking for.
“What now, city boy?” the Chief asked.
I shook my head, shrugged.
“Well, let’s eat something.” He parked beside my Skylark. “Need to eat something.”
“Tell me, Chief, what is a Smuteye?”
“You never had corn smut? Come on, boy.”
In the diner, Diana was surprised and pleased to see me. “Sidney,” she said. “They didn’t kill you?”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” I said.
She laugh
ed.
“Give this boy some corn smut,” the Chief said.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Diana asked.
“No. What is it?”
“Corn cancer is what it is,” said the man in the tractor cap who was sitting right where he had been seated when I was arrested.
“It’s a fungus,” she said. “Tastes real good. We eat it with eggs. The Mexicans called it Huitlacoche.”
“What Mexicans?” I asked.
“The two that come through here about three years ago. They said it means raven shit.”
I looked at the Chief’s face and recalled his charge to not let any harm come to me. I nodded. “Okay, let me have some.”
Diana scrambled some eggs in a pan, divided them onto two plates, slapped some toast beside the servings, and the opened a plain jar from which she scraped black matter. She slid the plates in front of us.
“Have at,” the Chief said. “The Mexicans said it’s good for you-know.” He glanced down at his crotch.
“What happened to these Mexicans?” I asked.
The Chief smirked. “Well, we chased them into the swamp, and one of them never come out. We caught the other one, what was left of him, and sent him to the county jail farm.”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“I don’t rightly recall.”
I finally took a bite of the corn smut. I didn’t gag like I thought I might. It was a little like mushrooms. I at once sort of liked it and wanted to spit it out across the counter.
“What do you think?” Diana asked.
I was saved from having to answer by the opening of the screen door. A familiar voice split the room.
“Anybody here seen a fellow who looks just like Sidney Poitier?” It was Ted.
“Ted,” I said.
“Nu’ott?”
“It’s me,” I said.
“If you say so. Podgy told me you needed some help. What are you eating?”
“It’s called corn smut,” I said.
“And you’re eating it? Is it good?”
I shrugged.
Ted looked at Diana. “Hey,” he said.
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