I was not ready to leave, however. Forrest and Lee were my only leads on Chester, and I was convinced Forrest knew something. I decided to tell him some things and see how he’d respond. “Chester’s wife didn’t run off twenty years ago. She vanished. She left her car, her luggage, and all her clothes and jewelry. Her family never heard from her again. Did you know that?”
His jaw dropped open, and he set the lit cigar directly on his desk blotter. “All we knew about that was what my uncle told the family. That she had left, and that he had been in an accident, and that he was going someplace to dry out.”
“He didn’t get in a drunk-driving accident,” I said. “He wrecked his car trying to flee arrest for murder. I was the one chasing him. Your uncle bribed a prosecutor to get the charges dropped. Then your uncle sent Chester to California to prevent these scandals from embarrassing your family. I am here now because we found a woman’s corpse dissolving in a tub of acid. Chester was renting a room in her house and is currently a suspect in her murder. And we don’t know where he is. But I will find him, and I intend to send him to the electric chair. And, if you are covering for him, you’re an accessory after the fact. It will be my sincere pleasure to see you go to prison, Mr. March.”
The blotter paper was starting to smolder. I really wanted to see how Forrest would react when his desk caught on fire, but it seemed like he might be about to tell me something, and I didn’t want to give him a break that would allow him to think better of it, so I grabbed the cigar and deposited it in the ashtray, and then I pounded my fist a couple of times on the spot where it had been resting, to smother any embers.
Chester looked at the burned spot on the blotter, and then he looked up at me. “I had no idea about any of this,” he said. “I am not protecting Chester. He has been here several times in the last six weeks, asking for money. My secretary may be able to give you the exact dates of his visits. I offered to get him help and encouraged him to go to my church, but I wouldn’t give him any cash. As far as I know, Lee hasn’t given him anything either. If he comes here again, we will call you at once.”
“I think he is on the run now,” I said. “I think he murdered the landlady because she was trying to evict him and he wanted to stay in her house. But he had nowhere to dispose of her body, and the smell of it drove him out. He has to know she’s been found by now. He has to know that we’re after him. I need to know where he’d hide out. Who might help him if he were in legal trouble? Does your family own a cabin or a lake house someplace where he might go?”
“Oh my God,” Forrest said. He leapt up out of his chair, and I reflexively put a hand on my gun. I thought maybe he was about to make a break for it or something, but instead, he just started screaming, “Christine! Christine!”
The secretary who had greeted me at the door rushed into the office, eyes wide with real terror. “What do you need, Mr. March?”
“Send Amelia in here right away, and try to get Lee on the line,” Forrest demanded.
“Of course,” Christine said, and she raced back out of the office.
Forrest leaned forward and put his hands flat on his charred blotter. He was breathing fast and ragged. I decided not to say anything.
A second girl, younger, prettier, and whiter than the first one, scurried into Forrest’s office.
“When was the last time you saw Lee?” Forrest demanded.
“Yesterday,” Amelia said. I gathered she was Lee’s secretary.
“Did he have any plans last night? Is he entertaining any clients?” Forrest asked.
“I don’t know. He didn’t mention anything.”
“Did he tell you he wasn’t going to be in today?”
“He didn’t say anything.”
Christine appeared in the doorway. “There’s no answer at Lee’s house.”
“Detective Schatz,” Forrest said, “Lee split up with his wife last year, and he lives alone. If Chester was desperate and in need of money and he was willing to use force to get it, he would go after Lee.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go find your brother.”
22
Forrest was able to reach his wife by phone, as well as Lee’s ex-wife. Neither of them had seen anything unusual, but we didn’t know what Chester might do next, so I called for units to watch both of their houses and to pull Forrest’s daughter out of school and take her home. No sense taking chances with a psycho on the loose. Forrest and I would go check on Lee.
Forrest’s hands were visibly shaking as we rode the elevator down to the parking garage, so I offered him a lift to his brother’s house.
“Is this a police car?” he asked when he climbed into my vehicle.
“It is when I’m driving it,” I said.
The car I drove during the final years of my career as a Memphis detective was a 1970 Dodge Challenger. I had been in the habit of replacing my car every three years or so since I’d come back from the war; I figured life was too short to spend driving a shitty car. But I’d hung on to the Challenger because, in the 1970s, cars stopped getting better. Everything stopped getting better.
Beginning with the 1964 Ford Mustang, American automakers had been competing to make the most powerful two-door sports cars. The Challenger line was designed to match up against the Mustang, the Chevy Camaro, the Pontiac Firebird, and the Mercury Cougar, and in 1970, it kicked the shit out of all of them. Mine was the Road/Track model with the 440 Six Pack engine and a four-speed manual transmission with a pistol-grip shifter. It displaced 7.2 liters and was rated at 390 horsepower. The speedometer went to 150, but if you had a clear stretch of road and a reasonable tolerance for danger, the beast under the hood could bury the needle without much effort.
But the 1970 Dodge Challenger was also the last of a dying breed. Detroit started sacrificing performance for fuel efficiency as early as 1971, and when the price of oil quadrupled during the 1973 gas crisis, automakers quit building powerful gas-guzzlers like the Challenger, which only got about ten miles to the gallon on the street, and replaced them with fuel-sipping compact cars. New emissions standards and environmental regulations guaranteed that, even when gas prices returned to sane levels, the days of the great American muscle car were over.
It did not seem like a good time to explain this to Forrest March, however, who was in a state of near panic over his brother.
“It’s nice,” he said. “Real nice.”
I put a flashing bubble light on the dash and got us to Lee’s residence in the Central Gardens neighborhood as quickly as I could, though the Challenger’s giant engine was of no particular benefit in midday traffic on city streets.
Forrest jumped out of the car and ran up the porch steps as soon as I pulled into the driveway, but when he reached the door, he hesitated.
“If he’s in there—if something has happened—I don’t want to be the one to find him,” he said, when I walked up behind him.
“I understand,” I said. “I’ll try to make sure you don’t have to see anything you don’t want to see.” I was feeling a lot more sympathetic toward this guy now that he was potentially a victim, and now that he was being helpful.
I rang the doorbell several times, and then I knocked loudly, even though I could hear the bell inside the house. There was no response.
“I have a key,” Forrest said, and he unlocked the front door.
I drew my .357 from the holster in my armpit. “I’m police,” I shouted into the darkened interior of the house. “Mr. March, your brother is here, and he has opened the door for me. I am coming in.”
“What should I do?” Forrest asked.
“Step back, off the porch,” I told him. “I’ll let you know when I’m sure it’s clear.”
I flipped on the light next to the door and spent the next five minutes checking every room in the house and opening every closet in case there was a body or an assailant hidden in one of them. The house was empty.
The last place I looked was the attached garage. There was a la
te-model Cadillac Eldorado—a go-kart engine wrapped in luxury trim—parked inside. I stepped out onto the porch, where Forrest was pacing back and forth.
“There’s no body,” I said. “And no signs of a struggle.”
“That’s good news, right?” Forrest asked.
“Good news would be if he was here and he was fine. He is not here, and we still don’t know where he is. Is the Cadillac in the garage your brother’s car?”
“Yes,” Forrest said.
“Does he have another one?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s here, and he’s not. That gives me cause for concern.”
“Oh God.”
“But, like I said, there’s no blood, there’s no signs of forced entry. It looks like Chester took Lee someplace, but he took him alive. Chester is after money, as best we figure, so he won’t kill Lee until he gets it. He hasn’t got it already has he? There isn’t a safe full of cash or valuables in this house, is there?”
“Not a safe. My brother has a Rolex and some other jewelry, and he kept a few hundred dollars in cash. Maybe a thousand. Nothing significant.”
A thousand dollars and a handful of gold didn’t sound insignificant to me, but it also didn’t sound like enough to maintain the lifestyle to which Chester March was accustomed. He was looking for a bigger score. “Then we know where he’s going.”
“Where’s he going?”
How could a man so rich be so dumb? “Wherever the money is,” I told him. He nodded, but didn’t say anything. I intuited that he was just pretending to know what was going on. “Where is your brother’s money, Mr. March?”
“Oh. We do our banking at First Tennessee,” he said. “The downtown branch.”
Okay. This was information I could work with. I didn’t know where Chester was, but I had an idea where he was going to be. I sent Forrest into the house to phone his banker and to find out if any withdrawals had already been made on Lee’s accounts. I returned to my car and used my portable radio to call for units to stake out every First Tennessee bank in the city and to keep an eye out for Chester, Lee, or the metallic blue Impala.
I returned to the house to find Forrest on the phone. I took the receiver from him.
“This is Detective Lieutenant Buck Schatz. To whom am I speaking?”
“My name is Victor Burton. I am head teller on duty at First Tennessee,” said the voice on the line.
“One of your clients, Lee March, is missing, and I have reason to believe he may have been abducted by someone who is trying to extort money from him. Can you tell if someone has made a withdrawal or cashed a check on one of Mr. March’s accounts since yesterday afternoon?”
I waited while Burton consulted his ledgers, or whatever he used to keep track of account balances.
“Nobody has,” Burton told me. “At least not for any significant amount.”
“How sure are you of that?” I asked.
“We keep records of any transactions conducted from this location. If someone attempted to make a sizable withdrawal or cash a large check at one of our other branches, the teller there would call here first to verify that the account has the funds on deposit, and to notify us of the transaction. A teller might cash a small check and put the paperwork through a day or so later, but we would know about any transaction larger than around two hundred fifty dollars.”
“Somebody may try to withdraw money from Lee March’s personal accounts, or from the March Mercantile business account, or else cash a large check drawing down one of those accounts. This person might come into the branch with Lee March, or he might come in alone, pretending to be Lee March, in order to make this transaction. I need you to make sure that nobody can clean out those accounts, and I need to find that man. If he gets the money, he will kill Lee March and leave town. If he comes in, have your people try to delay him as long as possible and call the police. There will be officers nearby, prepared to assist. And warn the folks at your other branches. I will be there shortly.”
I hung up the phone and headed back out the front door and down the walkway, toward my car. Forrest paused to lock up the house, and then he followed me.
“What are we going to do now?” he asked.
“We are going to wait here until units arrive to watch this house, and then I am going to take you back to your office. We’ll have somebody there as well, in case Chester turns up again. At close of business, an officer will escort you home, and if Chester is still at large, we’ll leave units outside your house overnight.”
I slid into the driver’s seat, and Forrest walked around to the passenger side. And then the radio crackled to life: “Officers in pursuit of a metallic blue Chevrolet Impala. California plates. Heading toward I-55 southbound.”
“Get out of the car,” I told Forrest.
“But—my brother,” he said.
“I’ll do what I can to get him back. But you aren’t coming with me,” I said. “It’s not safe, and the extra weight slows the car down. Go back to your office, and I’ll radio the officers there as soon as I have news.”
He hesitated briefly, and then he stood up and closed the car door. I backed out of the driveway and headed for the on-ramp to I-240. I was ten minutes away from the pursuing officers, which meant the Challenger could catch up to them in six. Traffic was light, which was lucky. I upshifted, and the 440 engine bellowed. I was going to get this son of a bitch.
TRANSCRIPT: AMERICAN JUSTICE
CHESTER MARCH: The history of my family is a little bit complicated. If you talk to the prosecutors, they’ll tell you that I kidnapped and tried to extort my cousin, but they won’t tell you about what my uncle and my cousins did to my father and to me.
CARLOS WATKINS: Okay, I’m here to listen.
MARCH: My grandfather built a business on growing cotton and selling it to textile manufacturers. But, after the war, growing cotton in Mississippi wasn’t as lucrative anymore, and selling imported cotton had become a booming trade. After my grandfather died, my uncle tricked my father into an unconscionable division of the family firm, which stuck my dad with the debt-saddled, underperforming agricultural properties, while my uncle’s side of the business became a thriving shipping concern.
WATKINS: My understanding is that, when your father died, you liquidated his cotton-farming business for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
MARCH: A fraction of what my inheritance should have been. What you have to understand is that, in 1976, my cousins were very rich and I was destitute because my uncle conned my father out of my birthright. All I was trying to do was rebalance those scales. It was about justice. Do you understand that?
WATKINS: I think so.
MARCH: My cousin Forrest certainly did not. When I went in and explained to him that some of his money was actually my money, he asked me if I had a gambling problem, and if I needed to go to church with him. You wouldn’t think someone could be so avaricious and so sanctimonious at the same time, but my cousins were sincerely bad people. When I went to my other cousin, Lee, I had to be a bit more persuasive.
WATKINS: You abducted him at gunpoint.
MARCH: Look, the key thing to understand is that they robbed me first. I didn’t choose to be in a situation where I had to approach them, hat in hand, and beg for my supper. And I didn’t choose to be in a situation where I had to force the issue. I’m the victim here. I had no choice but to stick a gun in Lee’s face, because of what he and his brother and their father did to me. Maybe if my uncle hadn’t betrayed him, my father would have lived longer. Maybe a lot of things would have been different. You think about that a lot, when you spend a few decades in a place like this. All the people who failed you or screwed you to cause you to end up here.
WATKINS: Let’s talk about what happened when Buck Schatz entered the situation.
MARCH: I had Lee’s identification and his bank ledgers. He had a checking account with a quarter million dollars in it. A checking account. In 1976. That doesn’t even include his houses
or his retirement account or his brokerage account or his stake in March Mercantile. He could have just given me that money, and he still would have been rich, and everything would have been fine.
But he wasn’t willing to be reasonable, so, if I was going to get what I was owed, I was going to have to take it. I figured that he and I looked enough alike that I could pass his identification at an out-of-the-way bank branch and clean out the account from there. So, I wrote a check for the whole amount on deposit, I made him sign it, and I tried to cash it.
The tellers were suspicious of me immediately. One of them sidled away from his window and went into the back office, and I could tell he was going for a phone. The manager was giving me some rigmarole about how they didn’t have that much cash on hand, and that I was going to have to wait for them to bring some more over from another location. I could tell that they were stalling me, and I suspected that Lee had already been missed. So I ran out the door. And, sure enough, I saw flashing lights in the rearview before I even got to the on-ramp for the interstate. If I’d stayed ninety seconds longer, they’d have cornered me in the bank. But I’d caught on to their ploy, I had a lead on them, and I was heading south on I-55 in a fast car. I was fifteen minutes from crossing the bridge into Mississippi, and the police cars were falling farther behind me. I knew the local cops wouldn’t chase me across the state line, so I thought I was going to make it.
And then I heard this noise, a rumble at first, and then as it got closer, it became a roar, overwhelming the sound of the sirens. It was so loud I thought they must be chasing me with a helicopter, but then I checked the rearview, and I saw an unmarked Dodge with a flashing blue light on its dash. I was probably doing ninety, and he was closing distance on me like I was standing still. I don’t know if someone your age has ever even seen a car like this. It was a sports car, but huge—something like fifteen feet long—to accommodate an enormous engine. It was hideous and impractical and dirty and noisy, and a car like that appeals to a particular kind of man.
Running Out of Road Page 17