Memphis Noir

by Laureen Cantwell

  “Probably the .38 found at the scene.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Emily, where were you last night? Why do you care what gun killed her?”

  “Stephen, I couldn’t sleep last night and went for a ride along Riverside Drive. Parking on the cobblestones is amazing, especially at night. You weren’t with me so I took my .25 automatic for security . . . You used to drive me down there in the cool of the evening, didn’t you, Stephen?”

  “What are you saying, Emily?”

  “Ask your mother. See what she tells you.” Emily laughed and threw her hair about her shoulders. She moved toward her closet.

  Stephen approached and grabbed her. He shook Emily. “Don’t play games with me.”

  “When I was at the cobblestones, a car drove onto the lot and parked near the water. It was Sol Cooper and Mae. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but I heard shouting. He hit her about the head and face. Mae jumped from the car. Sol started to follow her, but another car pulled up so he drove off. Then the car pulled up to Mae.”

  Emily squirmed, and Stephen released her.

  “Stephen, it was your mother. Mae was in her face through the car window. I heard Mae shout, I’m gonna tell everybody ’bout my baby! She turned to walk away, but I heard two shots. Mae fell to the ground, and in a few seconds Mrs. Carter drove away.”

  “Did Mother see you when she left?”

  Emily wiped her face and nodded.

  “What happened then?”

  “I left too, drove around awhile before going back to my mother’s.”

  A knock startled them.

  “Yes,” Stephen said.

  “Mr. Stephen,” Aaron said, “can I speak with you?”

  “Be right there.” Stephen whispered, “Emily, does anyone else know this?”

  She cried some more and looked away. Stephen grabbed her arm.

  Emily said, “Sergeant Smith knows.”

  “How does he know?”

  “He was with me, in my car.”

  Stephen released her arm, patted it. He stood there looking at the floor. “I will see you downstairs.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Stephen glanced back, but gave no answer. He stepped into the hallway, closed the door behind him, and walked to where Aaron stood.

  Aaron whispered, “Dr. Walls and Sergeant Smith are downstairs.”

  “They’re here?”

  “Yes sir. Mr. Stephen, that .38 found on the scene belongs to me. Sol ended up with it when I fought with him.”

  “Where and when did this happen?”

  “At Club Hippodrome around nine. I was there at the bar until the dispatcher called me to come to the murder scene just before midnight . . . Mr. Stephen, there’s more. This morning I found two spent .25 caliber cartridges in Mrs. Carter’s car. Who was driving your mother’s car last night?”

  “You know Mother does not drive.”

  “Well, who drove her car last night?”

  Stephen Carter did not answer.

  “Mr. Stephen, what are you going to do when you get downstairs?”

  “One thing’s for sure—neither my mother nor my wife is going to jail.”

  “Fine, but what about Sol?”

  Stephen put his hand to his chin. “Aaron, events like these cause race riots.”

  “Yes sir, they do.”

  “What if Solomon Cooper gets eleven months and twenty-nine days for manslaughter?”

  “He deserves that for hitting Mae.”

  “Aaron, I am indebted to you.”

  The two men shook hands.

  * * *

  Stephen Carter entered the screened porch. “Hello, Dr. Walls.” He shook the doctor’s hand. The sergeant extended his hand, but Stephen moved away. “Perhaps we can get together tomorrow morning.”

  Sergeant Smith said, “Mr. Carter, Dr. Walls has completed the autopsy, and his findings cause a bit of a problem that you should know.”

  “Is that a fact?” Stephen replied.

  Smith stepped through the porch door and called out, “Officer Washington . . . Officer Washington. Would you join us out here?”

  Aaron entered and closed the door behind him.

  Smith continued: “Doctor, why don’t you explain your findings?”

  “Mr. Carter, the gun we found, the .38 Special, is not the murder weapon. That gun has not been fired in quite some time. In fact, two .25 caliber bullets killed Mae Clark.”

  “I thought Solomon confessed last evening. Said he shot her with the .38,” Stephen said.

  Smith said, “Well, yes sir, he did, but he’s backpedaling on us now.”

  “There’s another problem,” Dr. Walls said. “Officer Washington touched the weapon at the scene, so I knew he would have some fingerprints on the gun; however, I did not think his prints would be on the bullets.”

  “What are you saying?” Stephen asked.

  The coroner said, “If Solomon Cooper killed Mae Clark, he used a different gun. And Officer Washington has handled this .38 revolver on a previous occasion.”

  The three men looked at Aaron, who said, “I lost that gun in a fight with Solomon Cooper earlier in the evening. He must have picked it up.”

  Smith said, “Washington, what you doing on duty with a pistol?”

  Aaron glared at his superior. “The Colt Detective Special .38 is a standard gun for police use.”

  Smith edged closer to Aaron.

  Stephen said, “Sergeant, it is not illegal for Officer Washington to carry a gun. Be careful that we do not end up becoming a public spectacle when one of our Negro policemen gets hurt because he’s not armed. My guests are beginning to arrive. Let’s focus on the business at hand. Doctor, have you written your report?”

  “No sir, I have not.”

  “Gentlemen, many moving pieces may make or break my campaign.”

  The two visitors nodded.

  Stephen went on: “For this situation to go away, the .38 must be the murder weapon. And,” he looked at Aaron, “Officer Washington never touched the gun prior to his visit to the murder scene.”

  Dr. Walls said, “Judge Carter helped with my first appointment as Shelby County coroner. The appropriate wording will be in my report. How do you plan to charge Sol Cooper?”

  Stephen looked at Aaron, Dr. Walls, and Sergeant Smith. “Solomon Cooper will be charged with manslaughter. I will press for a conviction and sentencing of eleven months and twenty-nine days.” He found their eyes. “Why don’t you both stay for the party, mingle with our guests?”

  Sergeant Smith said, “Don’t mind if I do. There might be someone here for me to speak to. What about you, doctor?”

  “Is that fried chicken cooking?”

  Someone knocked on the door. The servant opened it and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Stephen, Miss Anna Jean wants you and Aaron to come to Miss Esther’s room.”

  Stephen led the way, and Aaron followed.

  In the bedroom, Miss Anna Jean said, “In here, in the bathroom. No matter what I do, every few minutes Miss Esther tries to wash her hands.”

  Mrs. Carter peered at Stephen and Aaron, her green eyes filled with tears. “I got something on my hands last night.” She held them out. “Can’t you see it?” She reached for the soap and turned on the water.

  Stephen said, “Anna Jean, can you keep her in her room today? I’ll get our doctor to bring over a sedative.”

  “Yes sir,” Anna Jean said.

  Aaron and Stephen stepped into the bedroom.

  “I guess you now know who drove Mother’s car last night.”

  Aaron nodded.

  “Looks like Mae’s killer paid . . . Pardon me, Aaron, my guests are waiting.”

  Miss Anna Jean joined Aaron in the bedroom several moments later. “She’s very sick.”

  “I been saying that for years.”

  “She needs my help.”

  “Mama, I can’t stay.”

  “Go on home, Aaron.”

 
“Mama, I mean I’m leaving town. I cannot live like this. She killed Mae, my Mae. And I can’t do anything about it!”

  “Aaron, stay. If you leave now, you can never do anything about it.”

  Miss Esther called, “Anna Jean!”

  Miss Anna Jean hugged Aaron and whispered in his ear, “You’ll be surprised at what we can do. I’ll get on the phone. Stephen Carter ain’t gonna win no election now or ever. Son, go home. Just you wait.”

  Aaron kissed her cheek and walked away.

  Chain of Custody

  by LEE MARTIN

  Orange Mound

  I’m sleeping when the phone rings, and it’s Laura, and she’s whispering, and it’s after midnight, and part of me wants to go back to sleep, and another part of me wishes she’d come and crawl into my bed.

  “Hey, Sexy Socks,” I say. “Want some dirty talk?”

  I call her Sexy Socks, because the few times we’ve done the baby-oh-baby she’s kept her knee-highs on: lime green with purple and red butterflies, black with white polka dots and white lace at the top, black and red argyle—in that order, first to last.

  “Cappy,” she says to me, still in that whisper, but more urgent now. “Cappy, listen to me,” she says. “You have to come get me. Now.”

  Folks call me Cappy because of the Stars and Bars skull cap I always wear. Few know that I’m bald underneath, Laura being one. For the record, we’re not a couple—friends and on-again, off-again lovers I guess you’d say—and yet, times like this, we count on each other. For any number of reasons, we’ve never been able to fully sync up our lives and make that final I-do-I-do-I-really-do. Sometimes she seems too dangerous to me. She’s a nurse at the Shelby County Jail, and she’s been known to pocket a few Vicodin and Percocet and OxyContin and smuggle them out to share at parties. Sometimes my own bad sense gets in the way. I’ve just put a ten-year marriage in the rearview, and I’m not ready for the ever-after. Still, Laura’s the one I rely on to keep me wanting to wake up every morning. Sometimes all it takes is the sound of her voice, or a glimpse of her walking down the street, or, better yet, her hand closed around mine, to convince me that I want to take care of her, and I want her to take care of me. “All right, be a snooze,” she’d said to me earlier this evening when I’d refused to go to the party with her. “I’m not about to tell you what you missed. Remember that, mister.”

  That’s where she is now, a house in Orange Mound, in the bathroom, whispering into her cell phone, pleading with me to come get her because there’s this guy and he’s had his eye on her and she’s afraid and she can’t just walk out because she’s too high to drive and too scared to hoof it.

  “Please, Cappy.”

  I can hear someone pounding on the bathroom door and a man’s voice saying, “Nurse Laura, I think it’s time for my meds.”

  “Hurry, Cappy,” she says. “Please hurry.”

  “I’ll be there,” I tell her. “Just keep your socks on.”

  * * *

  I know the house, a shotgun on Saratoga just a block north of Park. Concrete-slab porch out front, dried-up rhododendron vines hanging from the wrought-iron supports. Brick chimney rising up from the center of the peaked roof. Security bars on the front windows. Unpainted clapboards, weathered gray. Old Dr Pepper thermometer tacked up next to the front door. It’s this house where a dude they call Hercules lives. A party house on the weekends, and I’ll lay money this Hercules is the one who’s got Laura spooked.

  He’s a dick, plain and simple. A lunk who doesn’t have time for any work, because he’s too busy with his barbells and his muscles.

  I met him at a party my friend Richie was throwing at the cottage he rented a few blocks east of me on Spottswood. No one knew who he was, this dude in a tank top and cargo shorts even though it was January. Dude was cut. Biceps and delts and pecs and quads and calf muscles. Dude just wandered in and made himself at home.

  “I just started lifting,” I told him.

  He took a step back and looked me up and down. I knew he was sizing up my lanky frame, taking note of my lack of bulk.

  “Yeah?” he said. “And how’s that working out for you, my brother?”

  “Good,” I said. “Just dandy. I’m taking it slow. Wouldn’t want to turn into a musclehead, you know. Guys like that . . . ?” I let the question hang there a few beats. “Well, they tend to lose all sense of perspective. Wouldn’t know shit if they stepped in it. I’m sure you get what I’m saying. I can tell you’re a thinker.”

  For just a moment, he thought I was sincere. I could tell from the smug grin he gave me, like—wink, wink—he and I were simpatico. Then the grin faded and his brow furrowed and his eyes narrowed, and I made tracks, disappearing into the crowd, out the front door and on to the safety of my apartment. I didn’t need to be there when the full realization hit him, when he knew I’d called him a bonehead.

  Since then I’ve avoided him, but now, as I point my truck west on Spottswood and head down into Orange Mound, I imagine we’re about to get intimate.

  Richie’s on the porch when I get there, looking all down in the mouth. “Fucker broke my sunglasses,” he says. He holds out his hand, and I see his retro Wayfarers, the ones he said gave him his juju, snapped in two at the bridge, half on his left palm and half on his right. “Fucker,” he says again. He throws the pieces of the glasses out into the grass. “Let’s get him, Cappy.” He unzips his white hoodie, the one with red letters that say, I’m Kind of a Big Deal in Memphis, and pats the shoulder holster he always wears, the one for the Glock 17 pistol he packs. “I mean it. Let’s get him good.”

  “Cool that shit,” I say. Through the front windows, I can see candles burning inside the house and the shadows of people moving about. “I’m here to get Laura.”

  I open the front door and step inside, and just like that, I forget about Richie. I’ve known him since we were kids in Midtown. Short dude, short fuse. I don’t know how many times I’ve saved him from trouble, but right now I’m thinking about Laura and how she told me to hurry.

  The place is packed with folks either cranked up on meth or chillin’ on pills or weed. The air is skunky with the smoke, and I have to wade into it and the crowd of tweekers doing their herky-jerky dance to Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey. The “Stigmata” track is playing with its repetition of “You’ve run out of lies,” and I think, hell yeah, let’s do this.

  At a table near the fireplace, a blond woman with a coonskin hat on her head is putting a pill on her tongue. She winks at me.

  “You know Laura?” I ask.

  “Bathroom,” she says. Then she nods her head to the right, and that’s when I see Hercules pounding on a closed door. He’s wearing a black tank top, and with each knock I see his delts quiver and flex.

  “Open up the door, bitch,” he says, and, as I make my move toward him, I fear that this is about to get out of hand in a big way.

  “Whoa, hold up there, my brother,” I say. I put my hand on his shoulder, and I feel the muscle quiver. “No need for that kind of talk.”

  With a simple shrug of his shoulders, like he’s slipping into a snug suit jacket, he knocks my hand away. He turns to look at me. It takes him awhile, but then something clicks into place, and he says, “You’re the smart-ass from Richie’s party.”

  “Bingo,” I say. Then I try to slip past him. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  But he grabs me by my arm and whips me around. “You know what they say, my brother. Everyone likes a little ass, but nobody likes a smart-ass.”

  From inside the bathroom, Laura says, “Cappy, is that you?”

  “It’s me,” I say. I hear the bathroom door unlock, and I smell Laura’s perfume, Chanel No. 5 Sensual Elixir. I remember the name, because I bought her a bottle for Christmas. “I’m here to give the lady a ride home,” I say to Hercules, and I try to remove my arm from his grip.

  That’s when all hell breaks loose.

  Hercules says, “She’s not going anywhere.”
r />   He shoves me away, and I bump into the woman in the coonskin cap who’s wandered over to see what the fuss is all about. By the time I get my balance, he’s got Laura shoved back against the wall, and he’s leaning in close, his knee between her legs. She’s wearing a yellow cabana top, the kind with tails like a man’s oxford, only tied at her bellybutton—that and a pair of black leggings, tight on her thighs and butt, clinging to her crotch.

  “Let me go,” she says. “I mean it.”

  And that’s when Richie noses around me, and I see him reach inside his hoodie, and then he’s holding the Glock to the back of Hercules’s head and telling him to back off, motherfucker, and I think, Lordy, lordy, lordy. How did my life come to this?

  Hercules takes a step back, and Laura sees her chance. She kicks him in the balls, and he doubles over and sinks to his knees.

  “Cappy, let’s go,” she says, grabbing my hand.

  Richie says, “Wait for me.”

  But we don’t. We bust ass for the front door and my truck that’s waiting outside. Someone reaches out and grabs the tails of my skull cap, and the next thing I know it’s gone. I don’t even turn around. I keep going, following the tug of Laura’s hand.

  As I head north on Grand Street, I hear a shot. I hit the brake, intending to turn around and go back, but Laura says, “For God’s sake, Cappy. Drive.”

  And I do.

  She doesn’t live far from me. I’m in the Spottswood Apartments just west of Highland and not far from the U of M campus where I work maintenance. She’s in a bungalow a few blocks west of me on Prescott near the C.W. Davis Park. We met in that park one night last summer when neither of us could sleep. I was fretting over my marriage gone bust, and Laura said she always had trouble sleeping. “Don’t ask me why,” she said, just as I was about to. She was sitting on top of a picnic table, still in her nurse’s scrubs—her top had sock monkeys on it. I told her I’d always wanted one as a kid, but I’d always been deprived of the pleasure. “Didn’t anyone love you?” she said. I shrugged my shoulders. “Tragedy of my life,” I said. She asked me my name, and I told her. “Cappy,” she said, “everyone should have what they want.” A few nights later, I walked down to the park, and there she was, sitting on the picnic table, a sock monkey in her lap. “It’s about time you came back,” she said. Then she reached the monkey out to me. “Take it,” she told me. “It’s yours.”