by James Sallis
It took the jury less than thirty minutes to come back with a verdict and the judge all of two to sentence Lou Winter to death. Herb Danziger carried on appeal after appeal in Winter’s name, right up to the day of his assault. He’d even tried to represent him once afterwards. But when his time came, Herb sat there watching the blades on the ceiling fan go round and round, intrigued by the shadows they made. The judge put off proceedings till the following week and appointed a new attorney.
I hung up the phone after talking to Herb. Clouds moved along the sky as though, having misspoken, they were in a hurry to get offstage. Across the street Terry Billings’s legs stuck out from beneath his pickup as he worked on his transmission for the third time this month, trying to wring out yet another few hundred miles.
I was thinking about Herb, about Lou Winter, and remembering what Dr. Vandiver had so untypically said.
Sadness.
Not for himself, but for the others, the children. Or for all of us. In some strange manner, Lou Winter was connected to humanity as few of us are, but the connection had gone bad. Small wires were broken, sparks dribbled out at joins.
Once I had wanted nothing more than to see Lou Winter convicted, then executed. I understood why Herb held on: in a world all too rapidly emptying itself of Herb’s presence, Lou was one of the few tangible links to his past, to what his life had stood for, what he had made of it.
Was it really any different for me?
Lou Winter had been a part of my life and world for as long. It was altogether possible that in losing him I would be losing some unexplored subcontinent of my self.
That same day, I remember, I stopped Gladys Tate for driving drunk. She was in husband Ed’s ’57 Chevy and almost fell twice getting out. She’d already run into something and smashed the headlight and half the grille. When I mentioned that Ed was going to be damned mad, she grinned with one side of her face, winked with the other, and said, “Ed won’t care. He’s got a new toy.” His new toy was a woman he met at the bowling alley up by Poplar Grove, the one he’d left town with. Gladys looked off at the old church, now mostly jagged, gaping boards and yellowed white paint, though a skeletal steeple still stood. Then her eyes swam back to mine. “My clothes are in the dryer,” she said, “can I go home soon?”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BUSINESS CARD was for a financial consultant in offices just off Monroe in Memphis. That consultant thing had always eluded me, I could never understand it. As society progresses, we move further and further away from those who actually do the work. Consulting, I figured, was about as far as one could get before launching oneself into the void.
I came here with clear purpose. I’d be on my own, no attachments, no responsibility. Now I look around and find myself at the center of this community, so much so that freeing myself for a few days in Memphis took some doing.
First call was to Lonnie. Sure, he’d fill in, no problem. Be good to be back in harness, long as he knew it was short-term.
“I’ll try to keep it down to a minimum,” I said.
“You’re going after them, aren’t you?”
“You wouldn’t?”
“They hurt my daughter, Turner. For no good reason save she was there.”
“Figure they can do whatever they want out here on the edge, I’m thinking.”
“That’s what they’re thinking too. Just don’t forget to give the local force a courtesy call.”
“I’m not sure MPD wants to hear from me.”
“Call them anyway. You still have any contacts there?”
“Tell the truth, I don’t know.”
“Find out. And if you do, cash them in for whatever they’re worth. Nickel, dime—whatever.”
Next call was to barracks commander Bailey, who pledged to send down a couple of retired state troopers to rotate shifts as deputies. “Believe me, they’ll appreciate the chance to get out of the house.”
Then Val.
“Let me guess. You’re going to be away for a while.” She laughed. “Commander Bailey told me.” She was counsel for the barracks, after all. “Have to admit it came as no surprise. Any idea when you’ll be back?”
“I’ll call, let you know.”
“You better.”
“I’ll miss you.”
Another rapid burst of the laughter I had come so to treasure. “It’s pitiful,” she said, “how much I hoped you might say something like that.”
Forty minutes later I was heading up Highway 51 in the Chariot, Lonnie’s Jeep, with an overnight bag of underwear and socks, two shirts, spare khaki pants just in case, basic toiletries. The gun I never carried, a .38 Police Special Don Lee insisted on providing me when I started working with him, lay swaddled in a hand towel, in a quart Glad bag, under the passenger seat. I imagined that I could feel it pulling at me from there, a gravity I was loath to give in to or admit.
I hadn’t been back to Memphis in, what, close to two years? At some essential level it never seems to change much. More fast-food franchises and big-box stores pop up, the streets continue to crumble from center to sides, there are ever-longer stretches of abandoned shops, businesses, entire office buildings. When the economy goes bad, the first leaks spring at the weakest segments. The Delta’s been hard hit for decades. You cruise the main street in small towns like Helena, just down the river a piece, or over by Rosedale, half the stores are empty as old shoes. The river’s still impressive, but it ceased offering much by way of economic advantage long ago.
Just inside the city limits, I stopped at Momma’s Café for coffee and a burger. Place was all but hidden behind a thicket of service trucks and hard-ridden pickups. Even here in the South, central cities become ever more homogeneous, one long stuttering chain of McDonald’s and KFC and Denny’s, while local cafés and restaurants cling to the outskirts as though thrown there by centrifugal force. Nowadays I find I have to lower myself into the city environment, any city environment, by degrees, like a diver with bends coming up—but I’m going down. And Momma’s was just right for it. From there I drove on in and dragged for a couple of hours the streets I used to run as a cop, feeling the city slowly fall into place around me. Drove north on Poplar where East High School once stood, now a nest of cozy aluminum-sided single-family dwellings with tiny manicured lawns front and back. Drove by Overton Square. Cruised down Walnut, took the left at Vance and crossed Orleans. Hit Able and proceeded north past Beale and Union. Swung by 102-A Birch Street where I’d shot my partner Randy.
When I worked out of it, Central Precinct was on South Flicker, second floor of the old Armor Station. Now it was housed at 426 Tillman in the Binghamton section, for many years a hard and hard-bitten part of the city that looked to be, especially with the recent completion of Sam Cooper Boulevard just north, on its way back.
I pulled into a visitor space, went in and gave my name and credentials to a sergeant at the front desk, who said someone would be with me directly. Directly, I surmised, here meant something on the order of any day now back home. Eventually Sergeant Collins came out from behind his desk and escorted me through a reef of battered metal desks to an office at the rear.
Sam Hamill had been a rookie along with me. Now, heaven help him, he was Major Hamill, the watch commander. Forty pounds heavier than back in the day, a lot less hair, deltas of fat deposits around the eyes. Wearing a navy gabardine suit and a charcoal knit tie that would have been the bee’s knees circa 1970.
“Turner. Good Lord.”
“Never know who or what’s likely to walk into a police station, do you?”
He came up from behind the desk to shake my hand. Took some effort. Definitely the coming up from behind the desk. Probably, too, in another way, shaking my hand.
“So how the hell’ve you been?”
“Away.”
He eased himself back into his chair in a manner that brought hemorrhoids or getting shot in the butt to mind. “So I heard. Guys that told me, it was like, ‘Hey, he’s gone. Let’s celebrate
.’”
“Don’t doubt it for a minute.”
We sat regarding one another across the archipelago of his desk.
“You fucked up bad on the job, Turner.”
“Not just on the job.”
“What I heard.” He stared, smiled and wheezed a bit before saying, “So where’ve you been?”
“Home, more or less.”
“And now you’re back.”
“Briefly. Touching down. Here and gone before you know it.”
“I was just on the phone with Lonnie Bates.”
“Guess that explains why Sergeant Collins at the desk had me cooling my heels.”
“Sheriff Bates speaks well of you. Seems a good man.”
“He is. Would have made a great con artist. People tend to see him as just this hicktown officer, and he plays up to it, when the truth is, he’s as smart and as capable as anyone I’ve ever worked with. Same goes for his deputy.”
“Other deputy, you mean.”
“Other deputy, right.”
Sam nodded. When he did, cords of loose skin on his neck writhed. “Bates told me what happened.”
He fiddled with a Webster cup. Clutch of ballpoint pens, letter opener, scissors, six-inch plastic ruler, couple of paper-sheathed soda straws, a cheap cigar in its wrapper.
“Deputy sheriff from another county won’t hold much water here in Memphis.”
“I know that. On the other hand, I do have a fugitive warrant.”
“So Sheriff Bates informed me. So after I hung up from talking to him, I called over to our own sheriff’s office and spoke with the fugitive squad there, people you’d ordinarily be expected to coordinate with. We help them out sometimes. Game of ‘Mother May I?’ is mostly what it is. You know how it works.”
I nodded. “They give you permission to take one giant step?”
“So happens they did.”
“Your town, Sam, and your call. Just I’d appreciate being there.”
“Course, first we have to figure out where there is.”
“Judd Kurtz doesn’t ring any bells?”
“Not with me. Nino’s we know. Also Semper Fi Investments. We keep an eye out. Hang on a minute.”
He punched in an interoffice number, waited a couple of rings.
“Hamill. Any word on the street about a missing quarter-mill or so? . . . I see. . . . Say I was to whisper the name Judd Kurtz in your ear, would it get me a kiss? . . . Thanks, Stan.”
He hung up.
“Stan heads up our task force on organized crime. Says a week or two back, a minor leaguer made his rounds—passed the collection plate, as Stan put it—then went missing. Rumor has it he’s a nephew to one of the bosses. Stan also says someone’s tried his best to put a lid on it.”
“But even the best lids leak.”
Sam nodded.
“Stan have any idea where we can find this supposed nephew?”
“You really been away that long, Turner? You think we’re gonna find this guy? What, he ripped off one of the bosses, then got himself arrested in the boondocks, made them send in the thick-necks? Those sound like career moves to you? Nephew or not, he’s under Mud Island by now.”
“In which case I need to find the thick-necks.”
“How did I know?” Eyes went to the window looking out into the squad room. All the good stuff happened out there. He used to be out there himself. “You know your warrant doesn’t cover them.”
“I’m not asking you to help me, Sam. Just hoping you and your people won’t get in my way.”
“Oh, I think we can do a little better than that.”
Again he punched in a number. “Tracy, you got a minute?”
Ten, twelve beats and the door opened.
Thirtyish, button jeans, dark T-shirt with a blazer over, upturned nose, silver cuffs climbing the rim of one ear.
“Tracy Caulding, Deputy Sheriff Turner. Believe it or not, this man used to be one of ours. The two of us came on the job together, in fact.”
“Wow. Now there’s a recommendation.”
“Back home, his sheriff got taken down by some of our local hardcases. Turner would like to meet them.”
“Taken down?”
“He’s alive. Badge is gonna spend some time in the drawer, though.”
“That really blows.”
“No argument from me. City rats gone country, Tracy. It’s not their territory, what the fuck? They’re in, they’re out, they’re gone.”
“Where am I in this, Sam?”
“You ever said ‘sir’ or ‘boss’ your whole life?”
“Not as I recall. My mother—”
“Was a hardcore feminist, six books, whistle-blower on the evils of society. I do read personnel files, Tracy.”
She smiled, quite possibly in that moment adding to global warming.
“Thing is, Turner here’s been away a while. We don’t want him getting lost. Show him around, help facilitate his reentry.”
“Ride shotgun is what you mean,” Tracy Caulding said.
“I don’t need protection, Sam.”
“I know you don’t, old friend. What I’m thinking is, with you back, maybe we do.”
CHAPTER SIX
HAD A WONDERFUL BARBEQUE dinner that night, Tracy Caulding and I, at Sonny Boy’s #2 out on Lamar: indoor picnic benches, sweaty plastic pitchers of iced tea, roll of paper towels at each table. There was no Sonny Boy’s #1, Tracy told me—not that, after a bite or two, anyone was likely to care. Amazing, blazing pork, creamy cool cole slaw, butterbeans and pinto beans baked together, biscuits. “Biscuits fresh ever hour,” according to a hand-lettered sign.
For all its cultural razing, Memphis remains one of the great barbeque towns.
Tracy lowered a stand of ribs she’d sucked dry onto her plate and, tearing off a panel of paper towel, wiped her mouth as lustily as she’d taken to the barbeque. She picked up another segment of ribs, held it poised for launch, told me: “Stan Dimitri and I had coffee together this afternoon. From organized crime? He filled me in on the Aleché network.”
“That what they’re calling them now? Networks? To us they were just gangs.”
“Then for a while it went to crews. Now it’s networks. This one’s responsible for much of the money that gets dry-cleaned through Semper Fi Investments. Run by, if you can believe it, a Native American who passes himself off as some sort of Mediterranean. Born Jimmy McCallum, been going by Jorge Aleché for years now.”
“He the one with the nephew?”
“Stan thinks so.”
“Stan thinks—that’s the best you have?”
Shrugging. “What can I say?”
“Well . . . What I think is, it’s time for a massive rattling of the cage.”
The second portion of ribs dropped onto her plate. A third or fourth paper towel wiped away sins of the immediate past. Older sins took a bit longer.
“And here Sam thinks you’re out of touch.” She held up her beer, tipping its neck towards me. “I know who you are, Turner.” “I’d be surprised if you didn’t. However big the city, the job’s always a small town.”
“I started hearing stories about you the day I first hit the streets.”
“And I remember the first time I looked in a car’s rearview mirror and saw the legend ‘Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear.’”
“What the fuck’s that mean?”
“That you can’t trust stories.”
“Yeah, but how many of us ever get to have stories told about us?” She drained her beer. “You notice how these bottles keep getting smaller?”
From the breast pocket of her blazer she took a narrow reporter’s notebook. Found a free page, scribbled addresses and phone numbers, tore the page off and passed it me.
“Consider it part of your orientation package.”
“You memorized all this?”
“Some people have trick joints, like their thumbs bend back to their forearms? I have a trick memory. I hear something, see s
omething, I’ve got it forever.”
“Buy you another beer before the bottles get too small? Alcohol kills brain cells, you know—could help wean you off that memory thing.”
“Worth a try.”
I got the waiter’s attention, ordered another beer for Tracy, bourbon straight up for myself. He brought them and began clearing plates.
“Speaking of stories, I remember one I read years ago,” Tracy said. “I was into science fiction then, and new to reading. Every book I opened was a marvel. One of the older writers—Kuttner, Kornbluth, those guys. People lived almost forever. But every hundred years or so they had to come back to this center where they’d plunge into this pool and swim across it. To rejuvenate them, I’m sure the story pointed out. Symbol of rebirth. But what I got from it was how the water of that miraculous pool would take away their memories, wipe them clean, let them go on.”
I took a fond, measured sip of my bourbon. There was a time in my life when measured sips hadn’t been called for. That whole measurement thing creeps up on us. Start off counting hairs in the bathtub drain, before we know it we’re telling people we’re only allowed a cup and a half of coffee a day, reading labels for saturated-fat content, trying to portion out our losses, like a double-entry accountant, to history and failing memory.
“I’m not sure I know how to respond,” I told Tracy.
“Yeah. Me either. Exactly what I mean. Four hundred killed when the roof of a substandard apartment building collapses in Pakistan. A fifteen-year-old goes into his high school with an assault weapon and kills three teachers, the principal, twelve fellow students. Half the citizens of some country you never heard of go after the other half, kill or butcher them and bulldoze them into mass graves. There’s a proper response to something like that? You get to wishing you could go for a swim, wipe it all away. But you can’t.”
We tossed off the remainder of our drinks in silence and called it a night. Enough of the world’s eternal problems and our own.