“Who the fuck is Cecilia Tompkins?”
“She’s the victim of an unsolved murder—”
“A whore. A negro whore. You think a jury is going to ruin that nice young man’s life over a dead negro whore? You think they’ll believe a word from the mouth of the other negro whore you want to put on the witness stand?”
McCloskey had a real big head. Long forehead like the monster from the Frankenstein movies and a big caveman jaw. And his neck spread out beneath it rather than narrowing. I bet he needed to buy the king-size pillowcases to make his Klan hoods. He had little-bitty ears, though. And beady, close-set rat eyes. If you went to a cross burning, you could probably pick out which one was him really easily, because he’d be the goon in the giant hood with tiny eyeholes, and also, you’d be able to smell his shit-breath.
“Chester attempted to flee when I executed a search warrant on his house, and he tried to attack me with a knife after I ran him down,” I said.
“And who is going to testify to that? You?”
“I’d imagine so.”
“So you want the district attorney to risk the ire of a U.S. senator to take a murder case to trial against the finest legal defense team a very rich man’s money can buy, and all you’ve got for evidence is the contents of a jug of battery acid and the dubious testimony of a negro whore and a Jew detective?”
“Officers Cadwalader and Branch went with me to execute the search warrant and can confirm that March attempted to flee.”
McCloskey leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Had you placed him under arrest?”
“I’ve never seen a man take off like that while officers were searching his property.”
“But did you place him under arrest?”
I didn’t see a way out of that one. “No. Not until after.”
“Then he was free to leave, wasn’t he?”
“He killed those women, Henry.”
His lip turned up. There was a thick coat of caked-on yellow gunk between his teeth, so maybe he didn’t floss with shit after all. “You’re a damn fool, Schatz.”
“At least I ain’t ugly,” I said.
“Well, you ain’t pretty enough for me to put up with your bullshit,” McCloskey said. He turned to Byrne. “Get Chester March out of here. And keep your Jew on a shorter leash from now on. I don’t enjoy having to come down here at night to deal with this nonsense.” He elbowed past me and slammed the door.
Byrne produced a pipe from his jacket pocket, so I lit another cigarette.
“I didn’t want you as a detective,” he said.
“I know that,” I said. “I figured it out while I was waiting three years to get called up after I aced my exam.”
He nodded and lit his pipe, and he puffed on it while he ruminated over the next thing he was going to say. I let him. He had a normal-size head, and probably could have used a normal-size pillowcase to make his hood, but he would have needed at least a queen-size sheet for his robe because he was such a tub of guts. It would have been tougher to pick out which one was him at the cross burning. There were a lot of fatties in the Klan.
“You should have spoken to me before you went to the judge to get that warrant.”
I made a guttural noise that conveyed to him that I acknowledged the point without necessarily agreeing with it.
“I know why you didn’t, though.”
It was because I thought he was a halfwit, and because I had no respect for him whatsoever.
“It’s the nature of a Jew to be shifty. It’s what everyone expects from you,” he said.
I should have been wondering if he was gearing up to fire me, but I was busy trying to figure out if I could shoot Byrne, run down the hall to catch McCloskey, shoot him as well, and then plausibly claim I had killed them both in self-defense. Probably not.
“That being said, you did some good police work on this. It was real crafty of you to see if you could tie your suspect to those unsolved cases when you couldn’t find the wife’s body. Most detectives wouldn’t think to do that. Your people’s traits may be a little better suited to this line of work than I realized.”
This surprised me. I realized my hand had slid inside my jacket and my fingers were on the grip of my sidearm. I withdrew them. I still wasn’t going to thank this fat Irish prick, though.
Byrne continued: “I don’t like you much, and I expect you don’t like me much. But that doesn’t mean I like what Chester March is. I know why you took up this line of work. I know about what happened to your daddy. Lot of men on this force could tell you similar stories. I could tell you a similar story. No, I don’t much like what Chester March is, the kind of man who could do that to a woman. Makes me sick.” He took a deep pull from the pipe, slowly exhaled the smoke out through his nose, and then spat a wad of brown phlegm into the ashtray.
“What can we do if the district attorney won’t prosecute?” I asked.
He adjusted himself on his chair so he could get to a pouch of pipe tobacco in his jacket pocket. “If a U.S. senator had called the district attorney’s office to get March released, I’d expect to see the district attorney down here himself, unless he had some reason to stay away. Maybe there’s no senator, and McCloskey is acting on his own. Maybe March really has those kinds of connections, but the matter is so dirty that the district attorney didn’t want to handle it personally.”
“Doesn’t matter either way if McCloskey ain’t willing to prosecute that boy.”
Byrne nodded. “Yep. I’ve seen things like this before. Shit don’t stick to people like Chester March the way it does to regular folks. We’re gonna have to turn him loose in the next couple of hours, and whatever happens to him between now and then is all the justice those women he killed will get.”
This was surprising. “What, exactly, are you saying?”
Byrne leaned back, and the swivel chair groaned with effort. “He was in a car wreck tonight, wasn’t he? Maybe he got a little more hurt in that accident than we had previously realized.”
“Seems like there’d be consequences for doing what you are suggesting, especially for a Jew nobody wanted in this bureau in the first place,” I said.
Byrne laughed. “I guess you’ve got no reason to trust me. But, out of the two of us, I ain’t the one descended from a duplicitous race. And I’ve got no inclination to get in the way of a Jew or anybody else giving a woman-killing piece of shit a well-deserved beating. Just don’t kill him.”
“I’ll take your suggestion under advisement,” I said. I rose from the chair, left the office, and closed the door behind me.
I was alone in a department full of men who hated me for what I was. They believed my racial defects rendered me incapable of doing my job and would have loved to have proof of it. I had worked for years to ascend to my current fragile position, and I had a wife and a young son who were dependent on my income.
I didn’t know Margery March, but I had done everything a conscientious detective could reasonably do to get justice for her. I could look my mother in the eye and tell her I’d stood by my principles. But principles don’t protect you; you have got to protect yourself. And now it was time to be sensible. I’d done as much as I could do. As much as I should do. As much as the law allowed me to do.
I opened the door to Chester’s interrogation room. His suit was dirty and wrinkled from when I’d thrown him on the ground and rolled him in his vomit. His head was wrapped in gauze, covering the cut on his forehead. He was holding a bag of ice over his bruised nethers. But he still thought he owned the place, the son of a bitch.
“I don’t know why you’ve kept me waiting here this long when I know my lawyer is already here,” he said. “You can’t treat me this way. You know who my father is? You had better take these manacles off of me. And you had better apologize.”
I thought about those women he killed. I thought of my father, dead in a ditch. I thought about my mother, constantly looking over her shoulder and hiding razor blades in the hem
s of her skirts. I thought of Bernadette Ward and all the people like her who lived their lives in fear of men like this. Why were they afraid, while he felt he had nothing to fear, even when he was caught dead to rights? He should be afraid. Him and everyone like him. Someone needed to give them something to be afraid of.
“I don’t hear you saying you’re sorry,” said Chester March.
He didn’t, and he wouldn’t. Instead, I let him hear the sound of his teeth breaking.
TRANSCRIPT: AMERICAN JUSTICE
CHESTER MARCH: After I met Buck Schatz in 1955, I never saw myself again when I looked in the mirror. I needed five reconstructive surgeries, and that’s not counting the dental procedures. They had to rebuild my nose using grafts of skin and cartilage from other parts of my body. I needed artificial cheek implants to hide the deformities caused by the fractures to my jaw, my cheekbones, and my left eye socket. I look, more or less, like a normal man now, but I don’t look like me anymore.
CARLOS WATKINS: And the dental work?
MARCH: That was extensive. He hit me five or six times with a metal club. Knocked a bunch of my teeth clean out of my head and shattered most of the rest. The ones in front had to be pulled out, because there wasn’t enough left of them to put crowns on. I wore dentures through the ‘60s; that was really the only option at that time. I got implants around ’72, which turned out to be sort of a blessing. It’s hard to take care of your teeth in prison, and ceramics don’t rot.
WATKINS: And he faced no repercussions for doing this to you? There was no criminal or disciplinary investigation into his conduct?
MARCH: As far as the police were concerned, I had been injured in a car wreck, and my father wasn’t interested in anyone hearing anything different. If I had pursued justice against Schatz, then everyone in my family’s orbit, all of society in Memphis, Oxford, and Nashville, would have known my wife’s disappearance was suspicious and that the police had been after me about it. It would have been embarrassing and harmful to my father’s business. And even though the prosecutor had dropped the charges Schatz wanted to bring, my lawyers advised me that those charges might come back if I made trouble for the police department. The lie that was convenient for the police was also convenient for me. I am ashamed to say it, but I let Buck Schatz get away with his crimes. He was free to go on brutalizing others for decades because I didn’t stand up to him.
WATKINS: I don’t think you should blame yourself for that.
MARCH: Even though I was not convicted or even tried, there were still repercussions for me—even beyond the injuries. Schatz kept coming around, returning to the scene, so to speak. Before he tried to arrest me, he’d always driven this ridiculous unmarked muscle car. But after his charges didn’t stick, he started driving by my house all the time in a black-and-white police cruiser. He’d flash his lights and wail his sirens, and all the neighbors would come to their windows. He’d already been questioning them, and they were wondering where my wife had gone, and then this police car was always staking out the house. Eventually, one of my father’s business associates heard about it, and at that time, my presence became detrimental to the company. So my father encouraged me to leave town.
WATKINS: That must have been difficult for you.
MARCH: Baruch Schatz ruined my life. The company was called March and Sons, Inc. We had been prominent landowners in Mississippi before the Civil War, and lost everything to the Yankees. The plantation holdings were broken up. But my great-grandfather was a resourceful man, and he knew the business. So, he started his company to bale and package and ship the cotton the new owners were growing on the land he’d lost. And within ten years, he’d got it all back and then some. And that land and that business stayed in the family for almost a hundred years, and it was set to go to me, and then Schatz ran me off from my birthright. I moved to San Francisco for a while, and while I was out there, my father died. He hadn’t handed me the reins. He hadn’t introduced me to the folks I needed to know to move our product. I wasn’t situated to run that business, so I had to sell it off. There is no March and Sons, Inc., anymore. And no more March sons either, probably on account of Schatz smashing my gonads.
PART 3
2011: KIND OF RACIST
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“So you fucked up the investigation, the DA dropped the charges, and then you bashed the guy’s face in with a stick?” Tequila asked. He leaned forward, and the sofa squeaked. All the furniture in Valhalla’s common areas was upholstered with a slippery plastic that the staff could hose down easily if someone shit themselves on it. “That is not a story you should tell on the radio.”
“The man said his program is about race and class and the criminal justice system,” I said. “If my witness hadn’t been a colored prostitute and I hadn’t been a Jew, Chester would have been convicted of murder in 1955, and he’d have gone to the electric chair decades ago. I did everything right, and it didn’t matter.”
William sniffed. “I wouldn’t really say you did everything right.”
“What did I do wrong?”
“Did you talk to the maid?”
“The maid?”
“The woman who cleaned Chester’s house. She had been in there between the time Margery disappeared and when you started investigating. Did you speak to her?”
“I never ran into her. I spoke to the neighbors. I got a witness identification of the man and the car from Bernadette Ward. What could the maid have told me?”
“I don’t know, because you never asked her. She was inside the house, cleaning up his messes. God knows what she might have seen. You should have tracked her down. But that’s not even the point. This reporter is going to be on Chester’s side. You’re the racist, classist system with your boot on everyone’s neck in this story. I mean, you literally put your boot on Chester’s neck.”
“That makes no sense. Chester was a rich white man. And it was my knee on his neck, not my boot.”
“You don’t get it.”
I lit a cigarette. “Then explain it to me.”
“Okay. He starts from the premise that the system is racist, classist, sexist, and broken. Then he looks for abuses. He finds you. You spent thirty years on the Memphis police force basically just being a bull in a fucking china shop and an inveterate corner cutter. He uses your misconduct as evidence supporting the thesis that the criminal justice system is corrupt, and then he tags the rest of that stuff onto it.”
“That makes no sense. I’m not a racist.”
“You kind of are.”
“You’ve obviously never met a real racist.”
“Grandpa, that’s exactly what a racist would say.”
I stubbed out my cigarette on the glass top of the coffee table, and I tossed the spent butt on the carpet. Then, I gripped the rails of the walker and slowly started to lift myself to my feet. “How would you know?”
He reached out a hand to help me up. I waved it off. “This reporter wants to give you a rope to see if you will hang yourself. He is not a person you should be talking to.”
“I can deal with him.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Tequila said. “Not with your mental situation.”
“My mental situation is fine,” I said.
He walked ahead of me, put his hands on the rails of the walker, and got up in my face, like Henry McCloskey had. “If your mental situation is fine, why are we even talking about this, and not about Grandma’s illness? I’m having a hard time making some radio show nobody listens to a priority when I just found out my grandmother has cancer.”
“I just found out, too.”
“No, you didn’t. You’ve known the whole time.”
“What this journalist is saying may not matter to you, but this was my work, and I am proud of it,” I told him. I lit another cigarette. “Chester March is a serial killer. He committed those murders, I caught him, and he got the death sentence he deserves, and anyone who says otherwise is a goddamn liar.”
Tequila paused
long enough to do some simple math, and then said, “Wait, so the district attorney’s office released Chester without charges in 1955, and you didn’t convict him for another twenty years?”
“Yeah.”
“So there’s another story—a story about what you did in 1976? And that’s the story this Watkins guy thinks should get the conviction thrown out?”
“There’s two sides to that as well,” I said.
“Grandpa, you cannot talk to this journalist.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
Tequila let go of the walker. “You’re threatened by somebody telling you that the history you’ve idealized wasn’t as great or as honorable as you remember it being. I can’t fix this for you, because what you’re trying to protect isn’t real, and Grandma is sick. She might die. You can’t be living in the past right now. You’ve got to be here—in this awful moment—with the rest of us.”
I threw the cigarette on the carpet without bothering to stub it out. Tequila stepped on it, leaving a black smudge. “Your grandmother and I have been together fifty years longer than you’ve been alive. She knows who I am, and she knows how I feel, and she knows why this is important.”
“When that journalist calls, just don’t pick up your phone,” he said.
“How will I know it’s him if I don’t pick up?” I asked.
“The number of an incoming call comes up on the screen.”
I fished the flip phone out of my pocket and squinted at it. “Who can even see the tiny numbers on this thing?”
“Just don’t answer the cell phone at all. I’ll talk to him. I’ll deal with this. You focus on Grandma.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“Yes, I do,” he told me. “I understand basically everything, because I am very smart. I’m much smarter than you ever were, even before your brain started calcifying or liquefying or whatever it’s doing in that thick skull of yours. Go get some rest. Tomorrow is another day, and it’s going to be a shitty one.”
Running Out of Road Page 8