Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  “You can’t do that,” the man said. His arms had dropped to his sides.

  “You don’t think so?” Brown said. He walked back to the man and shouted in his face. “You don’t think so?”

  “Hey, Tanny!” cried one of the uniformed officers. “I got fifty I can lend her.”

  There was a burst of laughter from some of the other policemen.

  “Sure,” came another voice. “Hell, we can take up a collection. Cover her until she blows away all the assholes.”

  “Put me in for ten,” said one policeman, rubbing his shin.

  “Hey,” said the man.

  “Hey, what?” Tanny Brown demanded.

  “You can’t.”

  “Watch what I can do,” the lieutenant said quietly. “Arrest this man.”

  “Hey!” the man said again as one of the officers slapped handcuffs around his wrists.

  “Criminal trespass. Obstruction. Battery on a police officer. Harassment. And let’s see, how about conspiracy to commit murder? That’s for giving his damn dumb drunk brother a gun.”

  “You can’t,” the man said again. His voice had lost its rage.

  “Those are all felonies, asshole. I’ll bet you don’t have a damn permit for that gun, either. And let’s add driving under the influence.”

  “Hey, I ain’t drunk.”

  Tanny Brown stared at the man. “Take a good look,” he said quietly. “You ever see this face again, and it’s gonna be real trouble. Got that?”

  “You can’t do this.”

  “Take him in,” Brown said to the uniformed officers. “Show him a bit of county hospitality.”

  “A pleasure,” murmured the man who had been kicked. He jerked the handcuffed man around savagely.

  “Take it easy,” Brown said. The uniformed officer stared at the lieutenant. “Okay,” Brown added, smiling. “Not too damn easy.” He whispered one more command. “And make sure the bastard gets put in a cell with the biggest, meanest, rasty-ass black folks we’ve got in stir. Maybe they can teach him not to call people names.”

  Two of the officers burst into brief laughter.

  Tanny Brown turned his back on the protesting man being dragged toward a squad car, walked back to the trailer, and spoke quietly to the woman cowering inside.

  “Missus Collins, we got to go to the police station. We’re gonna read you your rights down there. Then I want you to call up that attorney, have him come help you out. You got that?”

  She nodded. “I need to call my kids.”

  “There’ll be time for that.”

  He turned to the uniformed officer. “You get one of the female officers out here quick to transport her. See that she gets something to eat on the way.”

  “What charge?” the policeman asked.

  Tanny Brown turned, staring out at the sprawled lump that remained in the yard. “How about discharging a firearm within town limits? That’ll hold things until I talk to the state attorney.”

  He went back outside and stood next to the body.

  Stupid, he thought. So stupid.

  He glanced down at his watch. A lot of dying tonight, he thought.

  He looked at the dead man’s eyes. The face faded, pushed out of the way by his memory of his first look at Joanie Shriver’s body stretched out in the center of an embarrassed, angry group of searchers. They were standing at the edge of the swamp, beads of dirty-brown water and strands of green muck clinging to their boots and waders. He remembered wanting to touch her, to cover her, and forcing himself not to, steeling himself to the sturdy, official processing of violence.

  He swallowed back the vision. It was all my fault, he thought. I will set it right. I will not lose that one.

  Tanny Brown, struggling with visions of death, moved off slowly toward his squad car, believing nothing had ended that night. Not even the life demanded by the state.

  It was hurrying toward dawn when Bruce Wilcox called. The first insinuations of light were cheating the darkness out of the trees and sky, giving the world edges and shapes.

  Brown had spent the remainder of the night in taking a confession from Mrs. Collins; two hours of quiet, bitter history of sexual abuse and beatings, which had been, more or less, what he’d anticipated. The stories are always the same, he’d thought, only the victims change. He had then argued with a gruff assistant state attorney, irritated at being awakened, and negotiated with a divorce lawyer suddenly in over his head. Self-defense, he had insisted to the prosecutor, who had wanted her charged with second-degree murder. They had finally compromised on manslaughter, with the understanding that if there had been a crime committed that night, it paled in comparison to the crimes inflicted upon the woman.

  Exhaustion curled around him, like his fingers gripping the pen as he signed the last of his reports, when the phone on his desk buzzed.

  “Yes?”

  “Tanny? It’s Bruce. Scratch one mass murderer. He went through with it.”

  “I’ll be damned. What happened?”

  “He basically told everyone to go fuck themselves and sat in the chair.”

  “Jesus.” Brown realized his fatigue had dissipated.

  “Yeah. Old Sully was one evil motherfucker right to the end. But that wasn’t what was so damn interesting.”

  Tanny Brown could hear the excitement in his partner’s voice, a childish enthusiasm that flew in the face of the hour and the awfulness of everything that had happened.

  “Okay,” he asked. “What’s so interesting?”

  “Our boy Cowart. Man, he spent all day squirreled away with that creep, all alone, listening to the bastard confess to maybe forty murders. All over Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama. A regular one-man crime wave. Anyway, our boy Cowart comes out of this little tea-and-sympathy session all shaky pale. He just about lost it when his fellow vultures turned the heat on him. They were whaling on him with questions something fierce. It reminded me of wrestling matches, you know, where you know you’re outclassed, and you keep trying one move after another, and the opponent has got all the answers, counters everything, until you know you got no chance and you’re just in it until the whistle blows. Hurting more and more.”

  “That is interesting.”

  “Yeah. And after he got tired of letting his buddies in the press chew him over and spit him out, he took off like the devil was nipping at his heels.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Back to Miami. At least, that’s what he said he was gonna do. Hell, I don’t know for sure. He’s supposed to meet those detectives from Monroe County later today. They weren’t none too pleased with our boy Cowart, either. He knows something about those deaths down there that he ain’t saying.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, hell, Tanny. I’m just guessing. But the man looked like he was pretty seasick with all he’d heard. And I don’t think he told the half of it.”

  Brown sat back, listening to the excited tones in his partner’s voice. It was easy for him to picture the reporter squirming under the pressure of information. Sometimes, he thought, there are things we don’t want to learn. His mind calculated rapidly, like doing sums.

  “Bruce, you know what I think?”

  “Bet it’s the same thing I’m thinking.”

  “I bet Cowart got told something he didn’t want to hear. Something that screwed around with the way he had it all figured out.”

  “Life ain’t quite so neat and tidy, sometimes, is it, boss?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have fazed that cold-hearted bastard to listen to someone tell him about any bunch of murders, no matter how many. I mean, just about everybody had Sully figured for more than he’d owned up to, so that weren’t no great surprise . . .” Wilcox began, only to be i
nterrupted, the thought finished by Brown.

  “There’s only one murder that means anything to him.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  And only one murder that means anything to me, Tanny Brown thought.

  He drove through the weak dawn light slowly, his mind churning with questions. He spotted the paper boy on his bicycle zigzagging up the street, and he pulled in behind him. The boy turned at the sound of the car, recognized the detective and waved before rising up on his pedals and racing ahead. Brown watched him maneuver amidst the wan morning shadows that blurred the edges of the neighborhood, making it appear like a photograph slightly out of focus. He pulled into his driveway and looked about for an instant. The detective saw modern security: measured rows of clean stucco and cinder-block houses painted in shiny white or quiet pastels, all marked with well-trimmed shrubs and bushes, green lawns, and late-model cars parked in the driveways. A simple, middle-class existence. Every house within a ten-block neighborhood planned by a single contracting company, designed to create a community both unique and uniform at the same time. No Old South here. Some doctors, some lawyers, and what was once the working class, policemen, like himself. Black and white. Just modern America moving forward. He looked down at his hands. Soft, he thought. A desk man’s hands. Not like my father’s. He glanced at his thickening middle. Christ, he thought, I belong here.

  Inside the house, he hung his shoulder holster on a hook next to two book bags stuffed with notebooks and loose-leaf papers. He removed the pistol and, as was his habit, first checked the chambers. It was a .357 Magnum with a short barrel, loaded with wadcutters. He hefted the pistol in his hand and reminded himself to book some time at the department’s shooting range. He realized it had been months since his last practice session. He opened a drawer and found a trigger lock, which he slid around the firing mechanism. He put the gun in the drawer and reached down to remove his backup pistol from his ankle holster.

  He could smell bacon frying in the kitchen and he walked that way, past Danish furniture and framed prints. He stood for a moment in the doorway to the kitchen watching his father, who was bent over the stove, cracking eggs into a skillet.

  “Hello, old man,” he said quietly.

  His father didn’t move but cursed once as some bacon grease splattered onto his hand.

  “I said, good morning, old man.”

  His father turned slowly. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, smiling.

  Tanny Brown grinned a greeting. His father didn’t hear much anymore. He went over and put an arm around the man’s wide shoulders. He could feel the old man’s bones beneath the thin cotton of his faded work shirt. He gave his father a small squeeze, thinking how skinny he’d become, how fragile he felt, as if he would break under the pressure of his son’s hug. He felt a shadow of sadness inside, remembering a time when he’d thought there was nothing those arms couldn’t lift and hold, now realizing there was little they could. All that strength robbed by disease. He thought, You grow up angry and pushing for that day when you’re stronger and tougher than your father, but when it comes it makes you embarrassed and uncomfortable.

  “You’re up early,” the son said as he released his grip.

  His father shrugged. He hardly slept anymore, Brown knew. A combination of pain and stubbornness.

  “And what you calling me ‘old man’ for? I ain’t so damn old. Still whup you if I had to.”

  “You probably could,” Brown replied, smiling. This was a lie both enjoyed.

  “Sure could,” insisted his father.

  “The girls up yet?”

  “Nah. I heard some shifting about. Maybe the bacon smell will wake ’em. But they’re soft and young and don’t like getting up none. If your momma was still with us, she’d see they got up right and smart first cock crow, yessir. It’d be them in here fryin’ this bacon. Making biscuits, maybe.”

  Brown shook his head. “If their momma was still here, she’d tell them to sleep in and get their beauty rest. She’d let them miss the school bus and take them herself.”

  Both men laughed and nodded their heads in agreement. Brown recognized that his father’s complaints were mainly fiction; the old man doted on his granddaughters shamelessly.

  His father turned back to the stove. “I’ll fix you some eggs. Musta been a tough night?”

  “Wife shot her ex-husband when he came looking for her with a handgun, Dad. It wasn’t anything unique or special. Just mighty sad and bloody.”

  “Sit down. You’re probably beat. Why can’t you work regular hours?”

  “Death doesn’t work regular hours, so neither do I.”

  “I suppose that’s your excuse for missing services this past Sunday. And the Sunday before that, too.”

  “Well . . . ,” he started.

  “Your momma would whip you good if she were alive today. Hell, son, then she’d whip me good for letting you miss services. It ain’t right, you know.”

  “No. I’ll be there Sunday. I’ll try.”

  His father scrambled the eggs in a bowl. “I hate all this new stuff you got in here. Like this damn electric stove thing. Nuclear food cooker, whatever the hell it is.”

  “Microwave.”

  “Well, it don’t work.”

  “No, you don’t know how to work it. There’s a difference.”

  His father was grinning. Brown knew the old man felt a contradictory superiority, having grown up in a world of icehouses and outhouses, well water and woodstoves, having made his life out of an old, familiar world, and finally been taken in his old age into a home that seemed to him closer to a rocket ship than a house. All the gadgets of middle class amused his father, who saw most of them as useless.

  “Well, I don’t see what the hell good it’s for anyway, ’cept maybe for thawing stuff out.”

  He thought his father correct on that score.

  He watched as the old man’s gnarled hands swiftly dished the omelet into the skillet and tossed the eggs, folding them expertly. It was remarkable, the son thought. Arthritis had stolen so much of his mobility; old age, much of his sight and hearing; a bout with heart disease had sapped most of his strength, leaving him gaunt with skin that used to burst with muscles now sagging from his arms. But the old tanner’s dexterity had never left him. He could still take a knife and slice an apple into equal pieces, take a pencil and draw a perfectly straight line. Only now it hurt him to do so.

  “Here you go. Should taste good.”

  “Aren’t you gonna join me?”

  “Nah. I’ll just make enough for the girls. Me, just a bit of coffee and some bread.” The old man looked down at his chest. “It doesn’t take a lot to keep me going. Couple a sticks on the fire, that’s all.”

  The old man slid slowly, in obvious discomfort, into a chair. The son pretended not to notice.

  “Damn old bones.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Theodore,” his father said quietly, “how come you never think of finding a new wife?”

  The son shook his head. “Never find another like Lizzie,” he said.

  “How you know if you don’t look?”

  “When Momma died, you never hunted out a new wife.”

  “I was already old. You’re still young.”

  Brown shook his head. “I’ve got all I need. I’ve still got you and the girls and my job and this house. I’m okay.”

  The old man snorted but said nothing. When his son finished, he reached out for the plate and carried it stiffly over to the sink.

  “I’ll go wake the girls,” Brown said. His father only grunted. The son paused, watching the father. We’re quite a pair, he thought. Widowed young and widowed old, raising two girls as best we can. His fat
her started to hum to himself as he scrubbed away at the plates. Brown stifled a sudden, affectionate laugh. The old man still refused to use the dishwashing machine and wouldn’t allow any of the others to use it either. He’d insisted that there was only one way to tell if something were truly clean, and that was to clean it yourself. He thought that proper, in its own way. When the girls had complained, shortly after his father had moved in, he’d explained only that his father was set in his ways. The explanation had sat unquietly in the household for a few days, until the weekend, when Tanny Brown had loaded both girls into his unmarked squad car and driven north fifty miles, just over the Alabama border to Bay Minette. They drove through the dusty, small town with its stolid brick buildings that seemed to glow in the noontime heat, and out past a long, cool line of hanging willows, into the farm country, to an old homestead.

  He’d taken the girls across a wide field, down to a little valley where the heat seemed to hang in the air, sucking the breath from his lungs. He’d pointed to a group of small shacks, empty now, staggered by the passing of time, faded reds and browns, splintered with age, and told them that was where their grandfather had been born and raised. Then he’d taken them back toward Pachoula, pointing out the segregated school where his father had learned his letters, showing them the site of the farm where he’d worked hard to rise to be caretaker, and where he’d learned the tanning business. He showed them the house their grandfather had purchased in what had once been known as Blacktown, and where their grandmother had built up her seamstress business, gaining enough of a reputation that her talents cut across racial boundaries, the first in that community. He’d shown them the small white frame church where his father had been deacon and his mother had sung in the choir. Then he’d taken them home and there had been no more talk of the dishwasher.

  I forget, too, he thought. We all do.

  The hallway outside the girls’ room was hung with dozens of family pictures. He spotted one of himself, in his fullback’s outfit, cradling a football. He could see where the slick, shiny material of the jersey was frayed up near the shoulder pads. The red-and-gray uniforms at his school had been the used outfits from a neighboring white district. The girls don’t understand that, he thought. They don’t understand what it was like to know that every uniform, every book in the library, every desk in the classrooms, had once been used in the white high school, and then discarded. He recalled picking up his secondhand helmet for the first time and seeing a dark sweat line on the inside. He had touched the padding, trying to see if it felt different. Then he’d raised his fingers to his nose to check the smell. He shook his head at the memory. The war changed that for me, he thought. He smiled. Nineteen sixty-nine. The march on Washington had been six years before. The Civil Rights Bill would pass the year after. The Voting Rights Bill in 1965. The whole South was convulsed with change. He’d returned from the service and gone to college on the GI Bill and then, coming home to Pachoula, had learned that the all-black school where he’d carried the ball was no longer. A large, ugly, stolid cinder-block regional high school was under construction. There were weeds growing on the playing fields he’d known. The red-and-brown dirt that had streaked his uniform was covered by a tangled growth of crabgrass and stinkweed. He remembered cheers, and thought there had been too few victories in his life.