Wherever There Is Light

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Wherever There Is Light Page 31

by Peter Golden

“The mayor—”

  “Jarvis Scales?”

  “That’s him. He wants to buy mom’s land, and one night he came to the house. My bedroom’s above the library. I could hear everything. . . .”

  “Girl!” Jarvis snapped. “You got to be the stubbornest black bitch ever drew breath!”

  Hurleigh was laughing. “She be nicer if’n I tear her lil pussy up.”

  Kendall screamed, “Get away from me!”

  Upstairs, Bobby removed the small automatic pistol from the night-table drawer beside his mother’s bed. Kendall had taught him to use it weeks ago and ordered him not to touch the pistol if she weren’t there—except in an emergency.

  As Bobby stepped between the partially open pocket doors of the library, he saw his mother on a loveseat and Hurleigh slapping her across her face. Blood trickled from her nose.

  “Stop,” Bobby said, raising the pistol.

  Two other men behind the loveseat retreated to where a portrait of Ezekiel Kendall, illuminated by a brass picture light, hung above the fireplace.

  Mayor Scales said, “Hurleigh.”

  The policeman, in a hat and sunglasses, sauntered toward Bobby. “Boy, put that down.”

  “Hurleigh,” Kendall pleaded, “don’t hurt him. I’m begging you, Hurleigh, you want me, Hurleigh, don’t you, Hurleigh?”

  The policeman got closer. “Boy, I’ll shoot yoah pickaninny ass.”

  Bobby stared at Ezekiel’s burning eyes, and when he felt his great-grandfather staring back, he pulled-pulled-pulled-pulled the trigger.

  The policeman fell. The other men dove to the floor. Kendall shouted, “Bobby, lâche ton arme! Va-t’en!”

  Bobby followed her instructions, dropping the pistol and running to Lucinda’s, where he stayed sometimes when Kendall traveled. Lucinda had some clothes for Bobby in a suitcase, and her neighbor drove them to Lucinda’s sister in downtown Miami. In the morning, they left for New Jersey.

  Julian felt sick: Bobby had used the Beretta he’d given Kendall when she moved to Greenwich Village. And he was angry with himself: he should’ve strangled Hurleigh on the beach and then taken care of the mayor.

  “How come you’ve been saying your mother was dead?” Julian asked, confused, struggling to parse the details of Bobby’s story.

  “Because Lucinda told me if those men didn’t kill her, Mom would come for me in a couple weeks, and that was forty-six weeks ago.”

  “You didn’t see anyone kill her?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t,” Julian said, but he was talking more to himself than to Bobby.

  Chapter 64

  The following afternoon Julian and Eddie flew to Miami and, after checking into a two-bedroom suite at the Eden Roc, changed into Florida wear—pastel sea cotton, pale linen, Italian calfskin. Then Julian placed a call to the Goldstein brothers. They had quit the rackets a year before the Kefauver Committee got going, and Julian hadn’t seen them since Abe’s funeral.

  When he hung up, Eddie asked, “We squared away with Looney and Gooney?”

  “We’re meeting Looney.”

  “They quit dumping gas on people and lighting them up?”

  Julian laughed. “As far as I know.”

  “I always figured them two firebugs would own filling stations.”

  “Once they moved to Miami Beach, the gun-shop opportunity fell in their laps.”

  Julian and Eddie were sitting in a booth at Wolfie’s on Lincoln Road when Looney plowed through the crowd at the entrance like a fullback busting into the end zone. He was carrying a shopping bag from Burdine’s and decked out in a Hawaiian shirt, striped Bermudas, and sandals with gray athletic socks. He waved for the waitress, a young Latin woman with a black ponytail.

  “The usual,” Looney said to her.

  Julian asked for a brisket sandwich, Eddie for corned beef, and Looney said to the waitress, “Honey, scoop some cabbage on that corned beef, he’ll sing ‘Danny Boy’ for ya.”

  The waitress tittered like a bashful schoolgirl before she went to put in the order.

  Eddie said, “Looney, you must be some tipper; she likes your jokes.”

  “And you must still be the mick schmuck don’t know my first name.”

  “Morris, but Looney’s . . . more fitting?”

  Looney, scowling at Eddie, held out his hand to Julian, and they shook.

  “You look well, Morris,” Julian said.

  “Ain’t at the shop but three days a week. Me and my brother got brand-new apartments across the street from here. Lots to do. Gin rummy, shuffleboard, adult education classes at the library. Miami Beach’s changing some. With all them Puerto Ricans comin’ over from Cuba.”

  Eddie said, “Morris, how’s that geography class goin’?”

  “Geography, O’Rourke? Are—”

  Julian asked Looney, “You get everything?”

  “The road map’s marked like you wanted; I got the papers from the recorder’s office to my lawyer in Fort Lauderdale—he can straighten out that Lovewood deal—and you need me and my brother, we’ll help. And I got you them Nambus.”

  His voice low, Eddie said, “Them Jap pistols are junk.”

  Looney hissed, “Can’t trace nothing nobody knew was here. I just got Nambus ’cause if cocksuckers try and sell me Lugers—or any Nazi peashooter—I throw ’em the fuck out.”

  Julian drove the rented Impala along the ocean to Lovewood, the light spreading like pink-and-violet satin over the sand and water. When he saw the gates of the college he expected to tumble back into his past, but seeing the deserted campus only made him sad. Bobby had given him directions to Lucinda’s, and he passed the shacks of the tenant farmers, with the handbill advertisements peeling off the exteriors like mildewed wallpaper, and parked by the streambed Bobby had mentioned. Black faces eyed them suspiciously from doorways and porches, and less than a quarter mile down a dirt road, Julian recognized Lucinda. She was rocking in a chair on a porch and smoking a corncob pipe.

  She said, “Been wonderin’ when I be seein’ you.”

  Julian said, “Miss Watkins, this is my friend, Eddie.”

  “Sit yoahselfs down.”

  As Julian and Eddie sat on the edge of porch, Lucinda disappeared into the shack and brought out two Mason jars of clear liquid, handing one to Julian and the other to Eddie, then picking up the jar beside her chair and taking a seat. She drank. Julian and Eddie joined her. The liquid tasted like fruity varnish.

  Lucinda said, “Now g’wan and tells me ’bout my Bobby.”

  “Doing well,” Julian said. “Wishes his mom was with him.”

  “Gon’ be wishin’ foahevah. That Mayor Scales done kilt that girl. Or had her kilt.”

  Julian felt his hope draining out of him. He asked Lucinda why she was certain Kendall was dead.

  “Kendall done loved that child, and if she be alive, she be comin’ foah Bobby.”

  “Miss Watkins, could you start at the beginning?”

  Lucinda struck a wooden match with a thumbnail and fired up the corncob. “The day Kendall tell me about it be so hot the trees beggin’ the dogs to cool ’em off. The college broke; been borrowin’ foah years; all them siddity Negroes teachin’ be gone. Onliest ones feelin’ good be the sharecroppers. Ain’t nobody collectin’ nothin’ from them.”

  Julian said, “So no one’s met the new owner?”

  “No, suh. But Kendall had to sell the land to pay off the bills or she gon’ go bankrupt. The mayor, his daddy owned the land, and he offer to buy it. Kendall say she can get more from men want to build a hotel and golf course. So Kendall say she gon’ sell to the highest bidder. The mayor’s brother, Hurleigh, come ’round—mean as a snake with piles, that boy—and let Kendall know Bobby might could have hisself a accident. The mayor, he sick with the emphysema and done made Hurleigh deputy chief of po-lice. And after Hurleigh start talkin’ ugly ’bout Bobby, Kendall say I’m gon’ have to bring him north.”

  Julian said, “And Bobby shot
Hurleigh before you were ready to go?”

  “The night before. And Hurleigh don’t die. I seen him out to the Wakefields’. I check on it Wednesdays and Saturdays, and Hurleigh be askin’ me and other folks they seen Bobby.”

  Julian said, “Bobby says there were two other men at the house.”

  “Don’t know ’em.”

  Eddie, who had been gazing at his loafers while Lucinda spoke, looked up, and Julian saw a flicker of rage in his eyes that had nothing to do with the moonshine. “And nobody’s looking for Kendall?”

  “Mister, you a northern boy, and you be hearin’ ’bout all them new laws they got make us equal. But whites down heah like them Scales brothers, they ain’t hearin’ that good. So even when a highfalutin colored girl like Kendall disappear, she stay disappeared, and if’n you colored, you best not ask nobody nothin’, or you disappear too.”

  Julian said, “Eddie and I’ll ask them.”

  Lucinda puffed on her corncob. “The Lord won’t forgive me none foah this, but I hopes you send them crackers to hell.”

  Chapter 65

  In the morning, Eddie and Julian left the car by the commons in Lovewood, across from Scales Antiques, and as nonchalantly as tourists, ambled down the white-pebbled alley and cased the rear of the store. The wood-frame garage, with the apartment above where Hurleigh had lived and which Looney and Gooney had torched, had been rebuilt out of cement blocks, indicating that Jarvis wasn’t impervious to the lessons of experience.

  Scales Antiques wouldn’t open for an hour, and they waited on a bench in the commons.

  Eddie said, “Did I ever tell you about my father?”

  “Only that he died before you were born.”

  “His name was Edward. He had a bum ticker—from rheumatic fever. Didn’t have the endurance for laying track. So he worked as a handyman. For the Hooper family in West Orange. One of those palaces in Llewellyn Park.”

  “Thomas Edison had an estate in Llewellyn Park.”

  “Next to the Hoopers. An ancestor of theirs used to sell George Washington his underwear or something, and the Hoopers were famous for their July Fourth shindigs. The day before the shindig, my father’s planting saplings. It’s a hundred degrees out. He gets dizzy and’s taking a break when Mrs. Hopper comes out and yells at him to get busy or get another job. Ma’s pregnant with me, he can’t lose the dough, so he goes to work. He doesn’t make it home for supper. Ma ain’t happy, but he had a habit of holing up at a bar in Vailsburg, except by morning he ain’t home, and Ma’s scared. She checks the bar. He ain’t been there. Maybe he’s at the Hoopers. Three buses for her to get from Newark to Llewellyn Park. They got those gates at the entrance, and the guard doesn’t let her in but calls the house. And the missus gives him a message. My father’s fired. He didn’t finish planting the trees.”

  Eddie dragged on his Camel. “Two days later, a cop comes to give Ma the news. My father was in a toolshed on the Hooper property. He went there to rest and died.”

  Eddie crushed his cigarette under his loafer. “I’m listening to Lucinda, all I can think about is Mrs. Hooper reaming out my father, and him dying in that shed. You wanna ask the mayor and Hurleigh about Kendall, that’s jake with me. If she happens to be somewhere—”

  “You don’t sound too optimistic.”

  “Optimistic’s against my religion.”

  “Catholics aren’t optimistic?”

  “Only if they behaved themselves and the undertaker’s prettying them up for the dance. But if the mayor and Hurleigh got nothing to say, they’re going in the ground. I ain’t never been able to do a lot. But I can stop those bums from chasing Bobby, and maybe make things a little easier for Lucinda and those folks in the shacks.”

  A black-and-white Lovewood Police car came down Main Street and turned into the alley.

  “Here’s your chance,” Julian said.

  Jarvis and Hurleigh were behind the counter and facing away from the door when Julian flipped over the Open sign to Closed. The mayor turned as Julian came toward him, and Julian saw the shock of recognition in his eyes. Most of Jarvis’s flattop was gone, but his face was still all sharp edges.

  “It’s ready, Jarvis,” Hurleigh said. He had been attaching a nasal hose to an oxygen cylinder. In his bluish-gray uniform, Hurleigh seemed paler than Julian recalled, and his blond hair and patchy beard were silvered. Hurleigh didn’t recognize Julian.

  “You don’t know this fella?” Jarvis said, and Julian heard the wheeze of emphysema as he spoke. “The day that boy went upside your head on the beach?”

  Hurleigh sneered, showing off his buck teeth. “I allow that coon learnt to be sorry for strikin’ a white man.”

  Julian said, “His name was Derrick Larkin.”

  The mayor was smiling as Hurleigh, with his hand on his revolver, sauntered around the counter. “I might could make y’all sorry now.”

  “Remember my friend?” asked Julian. “The one with the red hair?”

  The question hadn’t stopped Hurleigh. It was the Nambu—which resembled a slimmer version of a Luger—that Eddie was pressing against the base of his skull.

  Eddie, plucking the revolver from Hurleigh’s holster, said, “That lock you got back there ain’t for shit.”

  Hurleigh said, “Boy, you messin’ with a officer of the law.”

  At the crack of the gunshot, the mayor and his brother flinched. Eddie had fired past Hurleigh into a barrel of stuffed baby alligators.

  Eddie said, “Sit on the floor or the next shot goes in your noggin.”

  Hurleigh sat, and Julian said, “Where’s Kendall Wakefield?”

  Hurleigh said, “I tolt you, Jarvis, I—”

  The mayor said, “Quiet, boy.”

  “Secret’s out,” Julian said to the mayor. “I got the record of sale from the recorder’s office, and a lawyer tracking down everyone involved. Kendall’s son saw you, Hurleigh, and the two others with you. I’ll dig them up, and when I get done with them, somebody’ll talk. You cared about your father’s land, the others care about money. They won’t die for money.”

  Hurleigh said, “If’n I catch that pissant Sambo done shot me, he dead.”

  Eddie smacked the side of Hurleigh’s head with the butt of his revolver. Crying out, Hurleigh fell on his side, moaning. Eddie removed the cuffs from Hurleigh’s duty belt and locked them on his wrists.

  Julian said, “Jarvis, you’re old and sick. Who you gonna leave the land to? Your wife?”

  Hurleigh whined, “The bitch done lef’ him. Her and them two brats in California. The land go to me, ain’t that how you done, Jarvis?”

  The mayor said, “Hurleigh, you dumber than a sack of rocks.”

  Julian nodded at Eddie, who yanked Hurleigh up to his feet and shoved him toward the back door. Julian withdrew his pistol from under his sport jacket.

  Julian said, “First choice. If Kendall’s alive, you live and keep some land.”

  “And Hurleigh?”

  “Didn’t think you cared.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Good. He threatened Kendall’s son, and I doubt Eddie cared for that.”

  “Second choice?”

  Julian raised the Nambu and retracted the cocking knob. “Friend of mine—the one who set your garage on fire—gave me a map with some swamps marked on it.”

  Jarvis wheezed, “She’s alive.”

  Julian, relief flooding through him, lowered the Nambu.

  Jarvis said, “Ain’t done it for money. I ain’t collected a cent from the sharecroppers. But I kept seein’ a glittery, whorehouse hotel where my daddy’s farm used to be.”

  “You got the papers for the deal?”

  “Back in the office.”

  “We’ll get them on the way out.”

  “Wasn’t intending to hurt no one. I just . . . Did you ever want somethin’ so bad it take over every waking moment of your damn life?”

  “Yeah. Kendall Wakefield.”

  Chapter 66

  Julian
and Jarvis got into the back of the Impala. Eddie was at the wheel. The police car was gone. So was Hurleigh.

  Heading west out of Lovewood, Eddie said, “Hurleigh gave me the lowdown. They had this Dr. Evarts, a headshrinker, declare Kendall incompetent. Then a judge, Evarts’s cousin, assigned a lawyer—another Evarts cousin—to handle her affairs. The lawyer’s the one sold the land to Scales. Jarvis had to pay these characters fifty grand. The doctor got twenty-five.”

  Jarvis was breathing heavily. “I paid that young woman fair.”

  Julian, going through the survey, deed, and appraisal in the envelope, said, “Except if she’d sold to developers. They’d’ve paid more.”

  “Them crooks maybe might. But Miz Wakefield done told me herself: Lovewood College had almost two million in debt, every dollar secured by Wakefield property. And with them civil rights laws and guvment loans, colored kids be enrollin’ in the white schools. But she wouldn’t sell. Say she felt like she was betraying her mama and granddaddy. I say, ‘Miz Wakefield, the banks takin’ it one way or t’other, and the only difference between a banker and a ignorant, no-account thief is a banker can write his name.’ “

  Eddie was driving on a paved, two-lane road through an area of the state Julian hadn’t seen before—green countryside of marshes and cypress trees.

  “So you helped her,” Julian said, controlling his anger.

  Before Jarvis could answer, Eddie said, “Then threw her in a mental hospital.”

  Jarvis was wheezing up a storm. “Mental hospital’s a damn lie. It’s Shady Isle Rest Home. Dr. Evarts has the patients exercisin’ and eatin’ good. It wasn’t gon’ be but another month. Lawyer say after a year, it harder to reverse the deal in court.”

  Reaching back with Hurleigh’s handcuffs dangling from his fingers, Eddie said, “We gotta stop.”

  Julian cuffed Jarvis’s hands behind him while Eddie glanced at Looney’s road map and veered off through saw grass toward a pole with a triangular white sign that warned, in bold red letters, Danger: Keep Out! Below the warning was a picture of a green alligator, his jaws open wide enough to chomp on an elephant.

 

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