“What happens if you don’t? What happens if you walk away?” Rose asked.
I shrugged and bit into a chunk of tuna. “Then she’s the cat in the box. Nobody knows if she’s alive or dead, so there’s no name on the list downtown. We look for people who go missing, but there’s no accounting for the ones we don’t find. There’s nobody counting how many we solved, like there are with murders. There are lots of reasons people go missing. Sometimes they get on a bus and just skip town. Maybe Margery March met a man and ran off with him.”
“But you know Margery March didn’t get on a bus,” my mother said.
I lit a Lucky Strike. “Suppose I start down this road but I can’t find the body. It takes a bulletproof circumstantial case to convict somebody of murder if you don’t have a corpse. Every one of those reasons I could have used to walk away from the case without calling it a murder becomes a defense lawyer’s argument at trial. If we haven’t found a body, how do we even know she’s dead? And if we don’t know she’s dead, how can we convict her husband of murdering her?”
Mother reached across the table, plucked the cigarette from my lips, and ground it into the ashtray. “I didn’t raise you to be a coward. Your father, alev ha-shalom, would be ashamed,” she said. “He died fighting for what he believed in.”
I tapped my pack of Luckys against my palm so that one popped out. “And you always said he was a fool. That he died because he thought his principles would protect him. You said he believed in a world governed by justice and fairness. A world that doesn’t exist.” I struck a match.
Mother lunged across the table and smacked the unlit cigarette out of my mouth. “Principles don’t protect you. That doesn’t mean you live without principles,” she said. “It just means you have to protect yourself.” For emphasis, she produced a six-inch serrated hunting knife from someplace under her skirt and dropped it on the dinner table.
“How does he protect himself if he keeps tilting at windmills?” Rose asked. “You know how hard he had to work to make detective. You know all the bigots in that department don’t believe a Jew can do that job. They’re looking for an excuse to call him a failure. He’s got a family to feed. He has a son. And I know he pays some of your bills as well, Bird. Why does this woman’s disappearance have to be his problem? He has enough problems already.”
“Either he’s a man or he’s not,” Mother said. She dropped her fork onto her plate and pushed the plate toward the center of the table. “By the way, Rose, you can’t cook for shit.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and tossed it onto the plate.
“Watch your language in front of the kid, Mother,” I said.
“You can’t cook for shit, Mommy!” Brian said. “Cook shit!”
“You don’t have to eat here,” Rose said, and she scooped up the baby, grabbed Mother’s plate, and stormed off to the kitchen, pausing just long enough to give me a dirty look. Maybe I should have stuck up for her; God knows, if any man alive had said something like that about my wife, I’d have put him face-first through the nearest wall without hesitation. But this was my mother. What did Rose expect?
I took another bite of my croquette, and Mother sat there, glowering. The dining room was silent except for the sound of my knife cutting through the fish and breading. Mother was right, of course, about Chester March. She was right about the food, too. The croquettes were too oily, and a little bit burned.
I grabbed the ketchup bottle and shook it until a big, gelatinous gob fell onto my plate.
Mother took care of me on her own after Dad was killed. It wasn’t easy for a woman to make a living and raise a child by herself in those days, but I never wanted for much. She was tough and smart, and she was right about most things. You could fight Hitler. You could fight the Klan. You could fight crime. But if you tried to fight with Bird Schatz, you were probably going to get your ass kicked.
“Of course I’m going after March, Mother,” I said. “I don’t let people get away with the kinds of things he has done.”
“Good,” she said.
I tapped my pack of Lucky Strikes against the table again, but she shook her head at me, and I put it back into my pocket.
8
Once I decided to treat Hortense Ogilvy’s report about her missing friend as a criminal investigation, it meant I was going to have to do some actual work. You wouldn’t know from watching police shows on television that detectives have to do real work sometimes. But we do, and it’s a pain in the ass.
The first thing I needed to do was verify that Margery March was, in fact, missing, and to make sure my witness wasn’t just a crank. I checked to see if Hortense had a criminal record and didn’t find anything. I pulled her traffic record from the local DMV. She’d gotten a parking ticket once, but a judge had fixed it for her.
Using the date of birth from her driver’s license, I figured that she’d graduated high school in 1948. The Memphis Public Library kept archives of The Commercial Appeal on microfilm, so I took a drive down there and looked through April, May, and June of that year, to see if they’d written anything about her. I found a photo of her attending a cotillion in the grand lobby of the Peabody Hotel. Her dress was lovely, but she was not. She appeared to be grimacing, but based on the context, I decided that was just how her face looked when she smiled. The boy escorting her looked like he would rather be anywhere else. The accompanying article said Hortense was going to attend Southwestern Presbyterian College.
The library also kept yearbooks from the local colleges, and I was able to use those to verify that Hortense Ogilvy had been at Southwestern from 1949 to 1953 and had graduated. Margery Whitney attended from ’49 to ’51, so that was probably how they knew each other.
I went back to the microfiche and flipped through the wedding announcements from the spring of 1951, until I found an article about Margery Whitney’s marriage to Chester March. Chester had graduated from University of Mississippi, and he was employed with his father’s cotton concern outside of Tupelo. The article mentioned that Chester’s best man, a guy named Murray Bottom, had delighted the attendees with a story about how Chester used to shoot stray dogs. I decided I wanted to talk to that guy.
The operator found me a listing for a Murray Bottom in Oxford and patched me through to him.
“Howdy,” I said. I had the story about Hortense’s cotillion in front of me. I checked the byline. It was written by a guy named Al Waters. “I’m Al Waters from The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, and I am writing a story about Chester March. I was hoping you could tell me some things about him, sort of as background.”
“What kind of story are you writing about Chester?” he asked.
“I write for the society page,” I told him. I tried to guess what a rich guy might do that would get written up in the newspaper. “I’m doing a piece on Chester’s charity work.”
“Oh,” said Bottom, sounding relieved. “I thought he might be in trouble.”
I laughed. “Now, why would you say a thing like that?”
“No reason, no reason. I’m sure he’s doing a lot of good, with his charity. I just always thought there was something a little strange about that guy.”
“You were the best man at his wedding,” I said.
“Yeah. That was one of the things that was strange. Why would he ask me? I knew him when we were kids. My father services and repairs farm machinery, and old Mr. March was an important account for him. Pop always wanted me to let Chester hang around with my crew, so I was friendly to him, but I never thought we were close. And I hadn’t even heard from him in several years before he called to ask me to be in his wedding. I didn’t want to do it, but, you know, his family is a big chunk of our business. You’re not gonna print any of this, are you?”
“Naw,” I said. “Just background.”
“Maybe a lot of guys were off in Korea when they had the wedding. Maybe he didn’t have anybody else who could attend.”
“Why wasn’t Chester in Korea?” I asked.
“I think h
e got a deferment because his job on his daddy’s farm was vital agricultural work.”
“What does he do for his father?”
He was silent on the line, maybe starting to see through me. “Can’t you ask Chester these questions if you’re writing a story about him?”
“An important guy like Chester March just expects you to know these things when you go in to talk to him. I always find it’s best to find out as much as I can before I sit down with my subject, so I waste as little of his valuable time as possible.”
He took his time chewing on that, and then he said, “I guess that makes sense, but I don’t really know what Chester does for his father. I’ve been down to their land to service some of the equipment, and I’ve never seen Chester around. He lives in Memphis, and Mr. March doesn’t have much business up there. To tell the truth, I got the impression Chester just had a make-work kind of job to get the deferment and stay out of the war.”
“How’d you stay out of it?” I asked, even though I had no real reason to want to know.
“I didn’t,” Bottom said. “I got a chunk of my leg shot off in ’50, and then I came home. I walk okay now, but I had a rough time of it for a while.”
That made me like him a little better. “I caught one myself, in France. Made a real mess of my shoulder.”
“And now you write for the society page.” He sounded skeptical. I wasn’t sure how much more bullshit I could feed this guy.
“I’ve got our article about Chester’s wedding here, and it says you gave a real ripper of a toast at the reception,” I said. “You had everyone in stitches, apparently. Can you tell me that story?”
“That was a few years back. Refresh my memory?”
“Something about shooting dogs.”
“Oh, I don’t really remember how I told it to make it sound funny. It’s not a funny story. Chester had a .22 rifle, and he used to like to shoot dogs with it. He said they were mangy, flea-bitten strays, but people just let their dogs run in the country back then, so I don’t know how he’d know if they were strays or not. A .22 is a small-caliber rifle. You use it to hunt squirrels. If you shoot a dog with a .22, it won’t die right away, unless you get it through the head or the heart. Chester used to like to shoot them through the guts and watch them bleed. I didn’t like that. I like dogs. I didn’t want to hang around with him, but it was real important to stay on his family’s good side. Old Mr. March was an important account for my dad. Anyway, I’m sure Chester grew up all right. He’s a married man now, and he does charity work.”
“Yeah, I think he’s a good sort,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”
I liked dogs, too. And I was really starting to wish ill on Chester.
Having established that Miss Ogilvy was not self-evidently a nutcase and that something was off about Chester, I felt comfortable contacting Margery’s family in Nashville. I had the operator patch me through, and I got her mother on the line. I told her I was Al Waters from The Commercial Appeal, and was trying to get in touch with Margery for a story.
She told me Margery hadn’t called in a few weeks. I asked if that was unusual, which probably stretched the credible limits of what Al Waters might ask, but Mrs. Whitney didn’t catch on. She told me her daughter usually called more often, but long-distance wasn’t cheap. She didn’t seem worried. I didn’t want to worry her until I knew for sure what had happened.
I went back to the DMV files and found Margery’s records. She drove a light blue 1953 Packard. I checked to see if a car matching that description had been found abandoned anywhere and came up empty.
I took a drive out to Overton Park Avenue, found a space on the street down the block from Chester’s house, and waited for him to leave. Once I saw him drive off in the Skylark, which he was still parking in the driveway, I went over to the house, lifted the garage door about six inches, and took a look inside. The Packard was there. If Margery had run off someplace, she’d done it without her car. I was tempted to see what else he might be hiding, but I didn’t want to risk searching the garage without a warrant. Nothing could be worse than finding a murder weapon or some human remains during an illegal search and getting all my evidence thrown out of court.
So, I shut the garage, walked over to the door, and banged on it for about ten minutes, in case somebody other than Chester was in there. Nobody answered.
9
This was looking pretty straightforward to me. Margery was dead, and Chester had probably killed her. But my hunch wasn’t going to be enough to convict him, especially since I had no idea where the body might be.
Contrary to what you might have read in detective novels, it is possible to commit a perfect murder. You bury a body under concrete, dissolve it in acid, or dump it properly in deep water, and nobody will ever find it. But most people don’t manage that trick the first time they try. They bury bodies in shallow graves, so animals uncover them; or they use the wrong kind of acid, and it doesn’t dissolve the corpse; or they dump the body in a lake, but they don’t weigh it down enough, and it bobs to the surface when it begins to decompose and bloats with gas.
If Chester knew how to make Margery disappear, I figured that this might not be the first time he had done something like this. He might have had some practice. I pulled all the files for unsolved murders and unaccounted-for disappearances of women between fifteen and forty years of age from the previous five years and took them to my desk. There were a couple dozen of them, which was more than I expected. Less than a quarter of total murder victims were women, and in most cases, when a woman was murdered, detectives didn’t need to look beyond her husband or her lover to find a culprit.
But certain women—prostitutes, dopeheads, and the kinds of women that hung around truck stops—had a tendency to fall prey to random assaults and sadistic drifters. It was real tough to pin down a suspect who was a stranger to his victim and often had no connection at all to the community. In a solid 90 percent of murders, there’s somebody out there who knows who did it, and all a detective has to do is find that witness and get them to talk. But these women were falling prey to men nobody knew, and they weren’t the kind of women whose murders the department was prone to making a great effort to solve. Out of twenty-seven women whose murders had gone unsolved, twenty-three were colored. I set aside all the files where the victim had last been seen getting into a semitruck, and all the files where the victim had last been seen in the company of a colored suspect. That left me with only one.
A witness named Bernadette Ward had seen victim Cecilia Tompkins speaking to a well-dressed white man on the evening of May 11, 1953.
Ward described seeing Tompkins and the well-dressed white man getting into a new-looking red car with a description that matched Chester’s Buick Skylark. She didn’t get the plate number, but she described the fabric top of the convertible, the whitewall tires, and the way the headlights and the front grille looked like a scowling face. Late-model luxury cars were uncommon in Bernadette Ward’s South Memphis neighborhood, and so, for that matter, were well-dressed white men.
Nobody saw Tompkins again until her corpse washed up on the banks of the Mississippi fifty miles south of town on May 18.
She died from blunt-force trauma, and her body was covered in chemical burns that the coroner believed had occurred postmortem. The killer had attempted to dissolve the corpse using acid or some other abrasive, and he dumped the remains in the river when that didn’t work. Both Ward and Tompkins were colored prostitutes, so nobody looked very hard for the man Ward had seen.
The detective investigating Tompkins’s murder decided she’d been killed out of state and closed the file, with the blessing of Inspector Byrne, who oversaw the homicide division.
I found Bernadette Ward working on the same corner she’d been on two years earlier when Cecilia Tompkins disappeared. When I climbed out of my unmarked car and she saw I was white, she looked nervous. I showed her my shield, which didn’t make her any more comfortable. But she didn’t try to
run away, which I appreciated. I always resented the ones who made me chase them.
“I ain’t seen nothing, I ain’t done nothing, and I don’t know nothing,” she said. Her voice was rusty and jagged, the kind of voice a woman only gets from being strangled by somebody who means it, and probably more than once.
According to the DOB that was printed under her mug shot, she was five years younger than me, but she looked five years older.
I’d been starved, beaten, and shot. Recovering from my war wounds had taken a lot out of me. I’d spent time in a foxhole and in a prison camp, and I had not chosen a low-stress occupation. But I suspected Bernadette Ward could tell me a few things about rough living that I didn’t yet know.
“Whatever you’re getting up to out here, I don’t care about it,” I told her.
She leaned against a streetlamp and crossed her arms. “Well, you’re gonna have to excuse me if I don’t believe you.”
“I’m here to ask you some questions about Cecilia Tompkins and the white man who took her,” I said.
She laughed—bitter and off-key. “Now I know you’re lying. Nobody gives a damn about Cecilia Tompkins. The police made that real clear to me.”
I thought about telling her that I cared about Cecilia Tompkins. But she wouldn’t have believed it, and I didn’t even really believe it. If I had cared, I would have been here sooner. The disappearance of Cecilia Tompkins hadn’t been my case; I hadn’t even known about it. But the file had been sitting there, waiting for me or anyone else who wanted to make trouble for himself, and I had never been interested in that kind of trouble. The only reason I was in South Memphis talking to this woman was to get something on Chester.
If I had been responsible for investigating the Cecilia Tompkins killing, would I have struck it from the list of Memphis murders using the same justification the investigating detective had used? Would my mother have said the same things to me she’d said about Margery March if I’d told her about the killing of a colored hooker?
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