Inside, we could hear boards being ripped up. A couple of guys in jeans and T-shirts went by us, carrying shovels into the house.
“My name’s Lt. Marvin Hanson,” said the black cop. “I guess I should have already told you that. My manners are short. You two might want to hang somewhere else for a while. They’re gonna be digging and looking for a time… You fellas want to go with me and have lunch? I’ll make the city pay.”
“Thanks,” Leonard said. “We’ll do that. OK, Hap? I wouldn’t mind getting out of here.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“What about me?” said the white cop.
“Blow it out your ass, Charlie,” Hanson said.
Charlie chuckled and slipped his notepad inside his coat. Hanson stood up and I heard his knees pop.
“Be a minute,” he said.
He went in the house and we stayed put. Charlie didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at us. He just leaned on the porch post and did battle with his fly.
Over at the crack house, a pizza delivery truck pulled up at the curb and a nervous black kid wearing a cockeyed paper cap got out and carried half a dozen large pizza boxes up to the porch.
Some jive talk and some dollars were passed around. The kid got off the porch without his paper hat. I noticed Mohawk was wearing it. It was too small and made him look like a black Zippy the Pinhead. Charlie looked over and saw him. He yelled, “Give it back, asshole.”
“Ah, man,” Mohawk said.
“Give it back.”
“That’s all right,” the pizza kid said, one foot in the truck, one foot out. “They got another one they can give me.”
“Naw,” Charlie said. “You look good in that one.”
“Whatch y’all got over there?” Mohawk said. “Dead people?”
“Butane leak. Give him the cap back.”
“Yeah, sure,” Mohawk said. “Come get it, kid.”
“Naw,” said Charlie. “You take it down to him. And be polite. Or we might have to look your place over. See if you got any illegal substances behind the commode.”
“You got to have some cause,” Mohawk said.
“A stolen paper pizza hat.”
“I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it.” Mohawk looked around at his porch buddies and smiled, and they all smiled with him. Parade Float came out of the house and let the screen door slam like he meant some kind of business.
“That’s right, ain’t it, kid?” Parade Float yelled to the kid. “My man just borrowed that hat, didn’t he?”
“That’s all right with me,” the kid said. “Damn. You know I don’t deliver this other pizza quick, I’m gonna have to pay for it. I better rush.”
The kid got in the truck and started to close the door.
“Naw. That’s all right kid,” said Charlie. “Keep your spot. I got money. And you, Melton. Let me give you some cause to give that hat back. You don’t, I’ll shove a pipe up your ass. One shoots bullets out the end of it.”
Mohawk – or rather, Melton – smiled. “Well, since you’re talking sexy, Sergeant. I’ll give it back.”
Mohawk went down the steps and toward the kid. He walked slow and cool, like he was styling his duds. He threw the hat at the kid and the kid grabbed at it and missed it, picked it off the ground, put it on his head, got in his truck, and cranked it up. He rolled away from there bent over the wheel.
Mohawk gave us a hard stare, like any minute he might move over and whip all of us. Leonard got up and stood at the end of the porch and looked at him, said, “Why don’t you come over for coffee, later. I’d like to visit… Melton.”
Mohawk smiled loosely and went back to the porch. Some talk floated around over there and the word motherfucker came up. Mohawk went inside and slammed the screen door. The little crowd on the porch shuffled positions like dogs looking for the right place to shit, and finally settled down.
“One day, that place over there might have a fire,” Leonard said.
“Yeah, I’d hate that,” said the white cop. “Me being friends with Melton like I am.”
“I could tell he liked you too,” I said.
“We can’t get enough of each other,” Charlie said. “We see each other time to time at the station. Melton Danner’s who he is, but he goes by Strip to them guys. I went to high school with him. I was a couple years up on him. He was OK then, I guess.”
I said, “What I can’t figure is why you can’t just take those fucks off the street for good.”
“We’re figurin’ on that one ourselves,” Charlie said. “We’ve asked Uncle Sam about it, but he don’t have any answers, and I guess we’re not smart enough to come up with any on our own. Shitasses like that, they got rights, you know? And they got expensive lawyers ’cause they got lots of dope money. Kind of makes us feel inefficient, running them in at night so they can get out in the morning after a hot meal and a shower.”
Hanson came out of the house. He took his chewed cigar out of his mouth and flicked it gently and put it back inside his jacket. He walked to the edge of the porch and spat out a little hunk of tobacco. He looked at Charlie and he looked at us. “What?” he said.
“We were just talking to Melton,” Charlie said.
“Sweet boy, that Melton,” Hanson said. “And already got his door fixed from last time we knocked it off the hinges.”
“He’s a beaver, all right,” Charlie said.
Leonard said, “Find anything else?”
“Not yet,” Hanson said. “Come on. Let’s go. Don’t fuck things up, Charlie.”
“Hokeydoke,” Charlie said, and we followed Hanson out to his car.
12.
A burger joint was Hanson’s idea of fine dining. I got coffee, a cheeseburger, and fries. The coffee tasted as if a large animal had crapped in it, but the burger and fries had just the right amount of grease; you wrung out their paper wrappers, there was enough oil to satisfy a squeaky hinge.
Hanson said to Leonard, “You doing OK?”
“Not really,” Leonard said, “but another hundred years, things will get better. You didn’t just invite us to eat so you could cheer me up, did you? You got something on your mind?”
Hanson experimented with his coffee. His was good too – I could tell the way his upper lip quivered. He put the cup down and got out his cigar and put it in his mouth, talked around it. “I knew your uncle. He’d been down to the station.”
“For shooting my neighbors in the ass,” Leonard said.
“And he reported them a half-dozen times. We take them in, they get out, they start over. It’s like fighting back the Philistines with the jawbone of a hamster.”
“A game,” Leonard said.
“Yep,” Hanson said. “And there’s a nasty, persistent rumor that some of the cops take bribes.”
“Naw,” Leonard said. “Say it ain’t so.”
“All I got to say on the matter is I’m not one of them, and you damn well better believe it. As for your uncle, he fancied himself something of a policeman. You know about that?”
“I know he was a security guard. That he wanted to work in law enforcement. Wanted to be a detective. I remember he read a lot of true-crime magazines and books, read mysteries. Anything associated with crime. I know he tried to get a job on the police force, but by the time he tried he was too old, and before that, they weren’t gonna have no black man on the LaBorde cops.”
“Trust me,” Hanson said, “it ain’t no bed of roses now. We still got the legacy of Chief Calhoun.”
“As I remember,” I said, “in the late sixties the first Chief Calhoun gave his cops six feet of looped barbed wire with a wooden handle and told them to use it on some civil rights folks, a peaceful assembly downtown. He had his cops hit the protestors with the wire. Women and children. The town council was so broken up about it, they issued all the cops new batons and brought some martial arts guy in to show them how to use them. The batons left more legitimate marks.”
“That Calhoun was before my time,” Hanso
n said. “But his heritage lives on. Fact is, except for the rhetoric, chief we’ve got now, his son, makes the original Calhoun look like a liberal. I’m the only black on the police force, and it’s not because they want me. Calhoun sees me, his stomach hurts and his dick shrinks up. A nigger with a gun makes him nervous, makes him dream of white sheets and burning crosses. Worse, I’m a former city nigger, a concrete and neon jigaboo. Add insult to injury, I been here nearly ten years and I’m still an outsider, and last but not least, I’m a good cop.”
“And modest,” I said.
“That’s my most pronounced trait,” Hanson said.
“You didn’t invite us to lunch for this either,” Leonard said, “to tell us you knew my uncle and the department thinks you’re a nigger. You damn sure didn’t bring us here to tell us what a good cop you are.”
“I’m not sure I brought you here for any reason makes sense. I wanted to ask some more questions, kind’a.”
“The sphinx would make more sense than you do,” Leonard said. “You haven’t asked a question one.”
Hanson sipped the bad coffee without removing his cigar, said, “I don’t have any reason to doubt your uncle committed this murder.”
“Hey,” Leonard said, “thanks for the news flash. But I’m gonna tell you something. My first impression was same as everyone else’s. But I’ve thought on things some, and my uncle could be an asshole, but he didn’t kill any kid. I knew him better than that. There’s something else to all of this, I don’t care how it looks.”
Hanson shrugged and spread his hands. “Chester came to the station talking about child killings not so long ago. You know that?”
“No,” Leonard said. “What do you mean he talked about child killings?”
“What I’m saying, is there may be more murders, more bodies than this.”
“Didn’t think you were ripping up my flooring looking for nickels had fallen through the cracks,” Leonard said, “but you still haven’t answered my question.”
“And if he was murdering children,” I said, “why would he tell you?”
“Frankly, everyone thought he was nuts,” Hanson said. “I think he was too, toward the end there. As to why would he tell us? Throw us off. A cheap thrill. Or he was trying to prove what a good cop he could be. Uncover the murders, but not turn up the killer.”
“Which you think was him,” Leonard said.
Hanson shrugged again.
“A friend of ours thinks Chester may have had Alzheimer’s,” I said.
“Could be,” Hanson said. “But Chester said there were child murders, and now there are. One, at least.”
“Didn’t you guys check into what he said?” I said. “You do that sort of thing, don’t you?”
“When we’re not at the doughnut shop… All Chester said was there were child murders going on in the black neighborhood, and that no one outside of the neighborhood gave a damn.”
“Was he right?” I asked.
“There were reports over the years of missing children.”
“How many years,” I said.
“Ten at least. And according to the files all those cases had been looked into, but nothing had been solved. According to written remarks made by a couple of officers no longer on the force, they felt the parents had done the children in because they were too much trouble to care for, but they couldn’t prove it, and they didn’t give a damn. In fact, written at the bottom of one report was ‘One less nigger won’t hurt anything.’ That was just ten years ago. Civil rights is sinking in slow here. At least in the area of law enforcement.”
“There’s always a difference when a crime is a black crime,” Leonard said, “especially if it’s against another black and done in the black section. Black man killed a white, cops’d be on the case like hogs on corn. Listen here, Lieutenant, this lunch is scrumpdillyicious and all, but you’re trying to be too clever. You’re talking, but you’re not saying anything. You’re trying to see if I’ve got any strings you can play, aren’t you? Think maybe I’m holding something back, something could help your case?”
“Could be you’ve forgotten something,” Hanson said. “Could be you know something about him from the past might have something to do with now, the murders.”
“Knew anything, I’d tell you. Him being my uncle or not. Maybe ’cause he is my uncle. You don’t have to burger-and-coffee me to find things out. I told you about the keys, the coupons, the paperback of Dracula. Turned the skeleton in, didn’t I?”
“That’s what you’re doing?” I said to Hanson. “Trying to see if Leonard knows more than he’s told?”
“He ain’t hip,” Leonard said to Hanson. “He can’t see the signs they’re on his face.”
“Yeah, hip’s a problem,” Hanson said. “But you may not be so hip yourself, Leonard. I’m merely being polite here. Getting you away from that place, feeding your face and your partner’s too. I mean, I got a few questions, but they’re all routine.”
Leonard smiled at Hanson.
Hanson smiled back.
A couple of sharks trying to outflank one another.
Leonard said, “Why don’t you run your program by me one more time, and you can leave out the cryptic stuff that’s supposed to scare me, stuff where I’m supposed to think you know more than you know, so if I know more than I’m letting on, I’ll get scared and go all to pieces and spill the beans.”
Hanson said, “All right then. The bare bones. Your uncle said there were child murders. There was no evidence of that. Just evidence that over the years children had come up missing. It wasn’t a case I was familiar with. I gave the file notes on missing kids in the black section a once-over. It didn’t look good, but there wasn’t anything there to go on. What your uncle wanted was for us to give him a team, some men to work with, and he was going to solve the case.”
“He said that?” Leonard said.
“Said he and his associate would prove to us something was happening and who did it.”
“Who was his associate?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t name him. Said it was best he kept his man on the outside. Said he wasn’t willing to turn it completely over to the department because it would be swept under the rug. Said he needed our facilities. Maybe he didn’t even have an associate. Maybe he did.”
“You mean maybe it was me,” Leonard said.
“I didn’t say that,” Hanson said.
“Needless to say,” I said, “you didn’t give Chester his own team.”
“No,” Hanson said. “He was pretty erratic, so he was hard to take seriously. He didn’t really present any evidence, just talked. And sometimes kind of randomly. Like he’d forgotten what he’d come around for. Everytime he showed up, he was a little less with it. Not that we’d have given him his own team if he hadn’t been nuts. No insult intended there, Leonard.”
“None taken,” Leonard said. “But I still don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”
Hanson removed his cigar and put it inside his coat pocket. “OK then,” he said, “I’m through being clever. For now. You fellas want more coffee?”
“I’ll have a Coke,” Leonard said. “Long as you’re buying.”
13.
Three days later and the morning was very bright and the light that came through the windows was splotched with eyeshade-green patches from the sun shining through oak leaves and there were intervals of jet-black shadows made by the bars over the windows.
We had spent the time since the discovery of the body out at our places outside of town, but now we were back. The cops were through and no more kid skeletons had been found, though Leonard had profited fifty-five cents found on the ground beneath the flooring, turned in by Hanson, who may have done it to prove to us he was an honest cop. Hell, it might have even come out of his pocket.
The law had been nice enough to haul off the newspapers and the rotten lumber, just in case a clue was lurking in a knothole or behind the sports sections, and Leonard bought some one-by-e
ight pine boards and a sack of nails and we went to putting in new subflooring. That’s what we were doing the morning I’m talking about. The boards were fresh cut and the weather so hot you could smell the resin on them and feel a powdering of sawdust on your hands. It was a little odd, putting that flooring down and living in a house where just a few days ago Leonard had made a bony discovery, but with the newspapers hauled off, the smell of new lumber, and the hot sunshine sticking through the windows, the house seemed different somehow, as if it had never held the remains of a long-dead child.
When we had a good chunk of flooring replaced with Lap ’n’ Gap decking, Leonard said, “Let’s break it.”
We poured some lukewarm coffee into our cups and went out on the porch and sat in the swing. It was not so humid this day, so maybe that was better, though it’s always been my contention that at the bottom of it all, the distinction is bullshit. Bake or fry, hot is hot. Least when it’s humid, I know I’m hot, when it isn’t, I get the feeling I’m being cooked up secretively.
We sipped the coffee for a while and looked at the street and watched a few cars go by. Over at the crack house, it was quiet.
Leonard went back into the house and came out with a bag of his favorite cookies, vanilla creme. Well, actually his favorite is vanilla anything. He kept the bag on his side of the swing and didn’t volunteer me any cookies. He made me ask for one.
“You haven’t been the most talkative about all this,” I said.
“A board’s a board,” Leonard said. “You do what I say, you won’t fuck up.”
“Your uncle, Leonard. You haven’t talked about your uncle.”
“I’m still putting it together. Not just the stuff with the skeleton, but my life.”
“Is this going to be one of those insightful moments?”
Mucho Mojo cap-2 Page 6