Blackman's Coffin

by Mark de Castrique

Nakayla set her handbag on the counter. “We’ll take two tickets.”

  I reached for my wallet. “Let me get them.”

  Susan looked from me to Nakayla.

  “Okay, big-spender,” Nakayla said.

  I pinched one of the crisp twenties fresh from the ATM.

  “That’ll be two dollars, sir.”

  “Two dollars?”

  Susan winked at Nakayla. “They’re a dollar each.”

  “I can’t buy a cup of coffee for a dollar.”

  “That’s why we don’t sell coffee.”

  I felt guilty with my eighteen dollars in change and dropped a five in a donation box. During the wait, Nakayla and I looked through several books of old photographs. Was I peering into the world of Henderson Youngblood or the world created by Thomas Wolfe?

  The announcement came that the tour was beginning.

  “What are we touring?” I asked.

  Nakayla pointed through the lobby’s rear windows to a two-story yellow house next door. “Wolfe’s mother ran a boarding house. You’ll see what it was like when Wolfe lived there.”

  Ted Mitchell proved to be a middle-aged man with dark-rimmed glasses and salt and pepper hair. He introduced himself and encouraged us to ask questions. The older woman warned she was a retired English teacher and would be giving us a test at the end of the tour. Her husband laughed and assured us she wasn’t kidding.

  With the group at ease, Ted passed out cards to each of us. “I want you to imagine you’ve just arrived at the train station and a young boy handed you this card. The year is in the early 1900s and the boy is Thomas Wolfe, whose mother often sent him to find boarders.”

  The card read “Old Kentucky Home Just Off The Car Line No Sick People Rates Reasonable Mrs. Julia E. Wolfe, Proprietress.” The phone number had only three digits.

  “Now ladies and gentlemen,” Ted Mitchell said, “follow me as we walk back through the years and enter Thomas Wolfe’s childhood.”

  I held back, letting the faster walkers go first. Nakayla strolled beside me, her handbag containing the journal tucked under her arm.

  Our group sat for a few minutes in rockers on the wide porch, breathing the mountain air and listening to Mitchell explain the history of the house. The name Old Kentucky Home came from an owner who pre-dated the Wolfes and had moved from Kentucky. Even though we were in Asheville, somehow the name fit.

  The interior was a maze of halls and rooms. White-washed walls, dark trim and wide plank floors conveyed the feel of a bygone era. I had trouble navigating some of the stairs and Ted Mitchell would patiently wait for me to catch up before sharing his stories, often pointing to a portrait, piano, or fireplace to illustrate his point.

  In one of the bedrooms, Mitchell mentioned Wolfe had stayed there when he returned for a few months in 1937, eight years after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, which had so scandalized Asheville. By then Wolfe’s novels had made him a celebrity and the town was anxious to wrap itself in his fame. Mitchell pointed to a table where he said Wolfe had written the story “Return”during his visit. A little over a year later, Wolfe would be dead.

  The tour moved on but I lingered by the table, studying the piece of paper with Wolfe’s handwriting left there as an example of the author’s presence.

  Nakayla stepped beside me. “What do you think?”

  I was tempted to pick the small sheet up, but I didn’t want to violate Mitchell’s request that we not touch anything. “I don’t see the telltale ‘of’ in these few sentences, but the large, bold style of the letters is the same.”

  “You’re still comfortable showing him the journal?”

  I took her arm and led her after the others. “Yes. Otherwise everything comes to a dead end.”

  The tour ended back in the adjacent building. Mitchell encouraged us to see a short film on Thomas Wolfe that would be starting soon in the auditorium. After the others had thanked him and moved through the double doors to find seats, Nakayla spoke up.

  “Mr. Mitchell, do you have a few minutes?”

  He looked past us to the auditorium. “You’ll miss part of the movie.”

  “My name is Nakayla Robertson. I left you a voicemail on your home machine asking to speak with you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been out of town and returned last night to find lightning had fried the answering machine and my TV.” He glanced at me, not sure why the two of us would be tracking him down at home.

  “This is my friend Sam Blackman. Mr. Mitchell, my sister was Tikima Robertson.”

  Mitchell stepped back. Our names had meant nothing but Tikima’s clearly jolted him. “She was your sister?”

  Nakayla nodded.

  “I read about her in the paper.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Yes. On the phone. We were supposed to meet, but she never showed up.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “A couple weeks ago. I think a Monday when the Memorial was closed.”

  I retraced the dates from Tikima’s Saturday visit. “June 4th?”

  “That sounds about right. I can check my calendar to be sure.”

  “What did she want to talk about?” I asked.

  “She said she might have a Wolfe manuscript. Of course, I was interested.” He looked at Nakayla and shook his head. “But then she never came.”

  “I have what she wanted to show you,” Nakayla said.

  Mitchell’s eyes brightened. “You do?” He looked around the lobby. Several people browsed the books, waiting for the next tour. “Let’s go to the staff break room. I have about twenty minutes.”

  We followed him through a door marked Staff Only. The room was more like a hall with a refrigerator at the end and a stainless-steel double sink on the left. Mitchell motioned us to take seats around a small table.

  I was hoping Nakayla would just hand him the journal and not prompt him with any clues as to why we thought Thomas Wolfe wrote it. She must have read my mind. She opened her bag and pulled out the journal. She had wrapped it in tan chamois. Without saying a word, she slid the bundle across the table.

  Mitchell eyed it for a few seconds and then unwrapped it so the volume rested in the center of the soft leather. “May I?” he asked.

  Nakayla nodded.

  He opened the cover. As he read down the first page, his eyes widened. “The penmanship bears a strong resemblance and it’s written with a pencil like Wolfe used, but there’s an artificiality to the language that’s not Wolfe.”

  “What if he were trying to write like a twelve-year-old boy trying to write like Robinson Crusoe?” I asked.

  “The voice,” Mitchell said. “Yes, that would affect the vocabulary and sentence structure. You’re sure this isn’t authentic, that a Henderson Youngblood didn’t write it?”

  “We’re not sure,” Nakayla said. “We found the journal alongside your biography of Wolfe in Tikima’s apartment. Then the entries break off with a few strange sentences.”

  Mitchell flipped through the pages carefully till he came to the end of the writing. He read aloud, “Vocabulary and style getting away from him. Ask Harry about the mule.”

  “We don’t know who Harry is,” I said.

  Mitchell turned back a few pages and read for a couple minutes. He mouthed a word or two as they made an impression.

  “We don’t know why Tikima thought Wolfe might have written it,” I said. “But we saw the handwriting similarity between the journal and examples of Wolfe’s manuscripts in your book.” I mentioned the unique style of the word “of” and our feeling that the language grew more adult as the story progressed.

  Mitchell pursed his lips. “If it is Wolfe, I could see him getting immersed in the narrative and losing the boy’s perspective, especially in a first draft. Can I keep this awhile?”

  Nakayla looked at me.

  I shook my head. “Sorry. We’re going to turn it over to the police. There might be a connection with Tikima’s death.”

 
The blood drained from his face. “Really?”

  “Maybe. The police will have to make that determination.”

  Mitchell turned a few more pages, almost caressing them. Then his eyes froze. He whispered a strange word that I couldn’t make out.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He turned the journal around and pointed. I read phthisic.

  “Yes,” I said. “That stopped me too. I don’t even know how to pronounce it let alone know what it means.”

  “Tiz’ik,” he said. “Phthisic is most commonly used as a medical term. It means shrunken, atrophied.” He turned the journal so he could read it. “‘My leg began to hurt. I slipped the support strap off my shoulder and pulled my phthisic stump clear of the socket. The pain eased.’”

  “Pretty sophisticated for a twelve-year-old,” I said.

  Mitchell nodded. “Pretty sophisticated for anybody. Anybody except Thomas Wolfe. He liked medical terms. Phthisic appears on the second page of the first chapter of Look Homeward, Angel. He uses it to describe the feet of a carved stone angel. If Wolfe didn’t write this, then someone went to the trouble to copy his handwriting and vocabulary.”

  “How much could this be worth?” I asked.

  “To scholarship or to collectors?”

  “To whoever would pay the most.”

  Mitchell closed the book and rubbed his fingers over the leather. “Hard to say. It’s not part of a known Wolfe work and it’s too incomplete to have any publishing value. As talented as Wolfe was, he’s not enjoying the stature of Hemingway or Faulkner.”

  “Let me put it this way,” I said. “Is the journal worth killing someone?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  This was the answer I expected. If the journal was worth a fortune, Tikima could have brought it to someone like Mitchell without involving me. Let the literary world know of its existence and sell it on the open market. But Tikima wasn’t seeking to find the journal’s highest bidder; she was launching an investigation based upon it.

  I was ready to move to the question I believed to be crucial. “If Wolfe wrote this, then it’s fiction. But in the journal one of the characters, Elijah Robertson, is murdered. Elijah Robertson was the name of the great-great grandfather of Tikima and Nakayla, and he was actually murdered on the dates given in Wolfe’s story.”

  Ted Mitchell got up from the table, went to a storage cabinet, and returned with a copy of his biography of Wolfe. “Thomas Wolfe’s fiction was experienced fact set in the context of fiction. That was the big row created by Look Homeward, Angel. There were people in Asheville who annotated their copies with the real names, and many of the thinly disguised characters were not depicted in a complimentary way.”

  Mitchell opened his biography to a page near the middle and pointed to a photocopy of typescript. We could see the word “Julia” scratched out and “Eliza” handwritten over it.

  “Julia was Wolfe’s mother,” Mitchell explained. “The mother in Look Homeward, Angel was Eliza. You can see he didn’t bother to change the name until after someone had typed his longhand pages. Asheville became Altamont, other place names were barely changed if at all.” He took back the biography and rewrapped the journal in the chamois. “I’d say if Wolfe did write this, odds are every event is rooted in something he experienced or something someone told him happened.”

  “And people were upset by what he wrote in Look Homeward, Angel?” I asked.

  “Like I said during the tour, he didn’t return to Asheville for eight years.”

  Nakayla took the journal from Mitchell and then hesitated. “Maybe Mr. Mitchell should read it. Tell us what he knows to have happened in Wolfe’s life.”

  My gut instinct sent a sharp warning. “I’m more concerned about what may happen in Mr. Mitchell’s life. The less he knows about the journal the better.” I turned to Mitchell. “My advice is for you to say nothing about our conversation or the existence of this volume. If the police bring it to you, then say what you want at that point. But I’m not going to mention your name to them.”

  “Why not?” Mitchell asked.

  “Two people tied to the journal have already been murdered. I don’t want you to be the third.”

  ***

  “Where did Tikima get the journal?” Nakayla asked the question as we walked to her car in the Wolfe Memorial parking lot. “That’s what the police are going to ask.”

  I’d been mulling the question myself. With Mitchell’s analysis that Wolfe likely wrote it and that the events described probably happened, the source of the journal would be the best lead for understanding its meaning. But we had no idea where to begin other than the files Tikima had taken from the Armitage office. We. What was I thinking? This wasn’t my case. I’d followed my curiosity about an eighty-eight-year-old journal hidden in an Elmore Leonard dust jacket with my name posted on it. Now I knew the journal might not be that old, was probably a mixture of fact and fiction, and most importantly a problem for the Asheville police, not for former military criminal investigator Sam Blackman.

  “So, what do we do next?” Nakayla asked.

  “We take this to the police. All of it. You’ll say you found the journal last night, but without my name on it. That’s a tangent Peters would fixate on that will waste time. We’ll show him the Wolfe handwriting connection and your family link to Elijah. If he contacts Ted Mitchell, well, we’ll say we didn’t want to involve Mitchell in something that might be a wild goose chase.”

  Nakayla stopped at the driver’s door and spoke over the roof of the Hyundai. “Why not tell him we talked to Mitchell?”

  “Because I don’t know why Tikima didn’t go to the police in the first place. Instead, she planned to talk to me. Maybe she heard exaggerated compliments from Cookie at Walter Reed, maybe my notoriety from the congressional hearings attracted her interest, or maybe she just felt more comfortable talking to a fellow military officer.”

  “You say Tikima didn’t trust the police, and so you don’t trust the police, but you’re handing them the investigation?” She shook her head. “You’re giving up.”

  “It’s not about me!”

  The frustration in my voice hit her like a slap. Her cocoa skin darkened. “No. I guess it’s not.” She yanked open the door and got in.

  I hesitated, angry at myself for snapping at Nakayla and unsure how to make amends. I’d spoken without thinking, saying I couldn’t be sure of the police while telling Nakayla to depend on them to solve her sister’s murder.

  And it was about me. I’d been a good warrant officer, specializing in obtaining evidence and using investigative procedures to support the military prosecutors. As a new civilian here in Asheville, I wouldn’t have access to forensic labs or data bases. I’d be playing detective, a cartoon version hobbling around without the authority to conduct searches or interrogate anyone. A prescription for failure.

  The psychologist at Walter Reed had warned me of the stages amputees go through. Depression and feelings of inadequacy will commonly occur. But the flipside of that emotional journey is the compulsion to overachieve, to prove to the world and yourself that you are every bit the man you were before a part of you had been severed from your body and soul. Finding the way between those two extremes would be an ongoing challenge. I needed to find that way now.

  I opened the passenger door and leaned in. “Is there a Kinko’s nearby?”

  “Yes,” she said coolly.

  I maneuvered into the seat and turned to face her. “Before we see Detective Peters, let’s copy the journal and the files. As far as we know, the journal belonged to Tikima and should eventually be returned to you. The files will go back to Armitage. But with our own copies we can work parallel, staying clear of the police while learning what we can.” I thought about the time that might take. “Today’s June 22nd. You’ve got the apartment for a little over a week?”

  “Tikima’s now on month to month. As executor of her estate, I’ll keep paying the rent.”
r />   “No. I can’t accept that.”

  “Why not? I’m going to hire you. This is part of your expenses.”

  “I’m not a licensed investigator. If you insist on paying me, then I’m leaving for Winston-Salem. But if I’m your friend, helping as I can with little expectation of success, then I’ll work day and night.”

  Nakayla looked away. I heard her swallow. When she faced me, tears sparkled in the corners of her eyes.

  She held out her hand. “You’ve got a deal, Mr. Blackman.”

  “No. You mean you’ve got a deal, Sam.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Asheville Police Department was located on Pack Square in the center of the city. As Nakayla maneuvered her Hyundai through a construction detour, I noticed the square was getting a major facelift. Orange barricades and plastic mesh fencing cordoned off streets and sidewalks.

  “What are they doing here?” I asked.

  “Creating a new square. There’ll be an amphitheatre at one end and an overall layout to encourage pedestrian traffic.”

  To me it didn’t look like the pedestrians needed any encouragement. The sidewalks and outdoor cafés were filled with people.

  “The town seems to be jumping,” I said.

  “Coming into its own again. Back in the 1960s when many cities spent money on urban renewal, Asheville was too poor to raze its old buildings. All it could manage was to minimize the disrepair. Now that same architecture is a treasure to be renovated, not replaced. People are appreciating what had been the glamour of the early 1900s, a style no one can afford to build today.”

  The police station didn’t exude the art-deco or gothic design of yesteryear. The functionality of 21st century law enforcement trumped aesthetics, and though nice enough, the municipal building housing the police and fire departments could have been found in countless cities across the nation. In the police station lobby, we asked for Detective Peters at an information window more appropriate for a bank teller.

  In less than five minutes, Peters stepped through double doors and signaled us to follow him. He actually smiled when he saw the files under my arm. He led us into a small conference room and we sat at a round table that dispelled the interrogative atmosphere where the officer sits on one side and the suspect on the other.