The Secret of Magic (17 page)

Only one thing wrong with it, but this one thing was glaring. There was a button missing, the third one down from the top. It had been lost someplace, somehow, and not replaced and the loss was made glaring by the two rust-colored splotches that had taken its place. Hardly bigger than quarters, they were free-form and jagged, and reminded Regina of a child’s finger painting. But not
quite
. She had no idea what they were. Regina leaned closer, smelled Fab detergent and bleach. Clean smells. Still, the shirt wasn’t exactly what she would call clean, not with the free-form of those smudges on it. Frowning, she lifted the shirt closer. That’s when the note fell out.

It had been hiding within that brown paper parcel, maybe wrapped up in the shirt itself, surely concealed by it. The paper it was written on was old, yellowed by age and dried out by it, with embossed pink and blue roses along three of its sides. Everything in the pale colors that brought to mind fading. Especially since they framed words that were stark black with new ink, but as clear and forceful as Mary Pickett could have written out in her perfect Palmer penmanship hand.

Hide Me.

N
ext morning, Regina showed up so early at the Duval law offices that even Miss Tutwiler had yet to arrive. Eight o’clock sharp. She heard the courthouse bell pealing. The door was unlocked, as she had suspected it would be, so Regina went directly in and perched lightly on the edge of the waiting room chair nearest the desk.

She was still there when Miss Tutwiler came in through the back. The receptionist whistled—“I’ll Be Seeing You,” something they’d played all the time when the war was on—as she opened the shades, picked the mail from under the slot. Only when Miss Tutwiler straightened up—“Oh, Sweet Jesus. My poor back!”—did she catch sight of Regina . . .

“You again!” she exclaimed, mouth widening, eyes narrowing; this morning all her pin curls carefully undone. “You better haul your butt on off that chair and out that door, and I do mean right this minute. I already told you once. I’m not studying to tell you again!”

Naturally, Regina Mary Robichard, Esquire, no longer quite so fresh from New York, had expected this reception. She said, “When the district attorney gets in, please tell him I’d like to see him. I’ll be waiting for him out front.”

With that, she nodded politely and stepped back into the sunshine, where she noted with satisfaction that the square was filling up.
The more, the merrier,
she thought grimly, anticipating what was to come.

Last night, watching out for palmetto bugs, she’d searched until she found what she thought might be a safe hiding place for the shirt, which was hard in a cottage that had no built-in closets and no bureaus or wardrobes with drawers. Finally, she discovered what she thought might be at least a good enough place behind an old barkcloth curtain—green palm leaves fronting a tan background—that covered the lower pipes under the kitchen sink and hid Dutch Maid cleanser, and a box of Ivory Flakes detergent, bottles of lye and Three Seal ammonia and, way in the back, a sack full of rags. She stuffed the shirt in the middle of these. Not the best hiding place maybe, but at least
something
.

It never entered Regina’s mind that she might not actually hide the shirt, that she might show it to someone. There was something about the urgency of that
Hide Me
note that made her do exactly as it said. What else could she have done, anyway? Ask Dinetta or Willie Willie? Mary Pickett?
Any of you leave a stray shirt on my bed? Who’s is it? What’s it mean?
No,
Hide Me
said enough. For now. Whoever had put it there would come forth, would give her more instructions or more facts, of this Regina was certain. Just like she was sure this shirt had something to do with Joe Howard, with her investigation into his death. How important it was, she had no way of knowing—not yet, anyway. And maybe it was nothing, not crucial at all. Maybe it was what it pretended to be, a child’s finger painting on a clean white shirt. But she’d hide it anyway and not mention it until it was mentioned—as it would be, and probably sooner rather than later, by the person who had come in her door, come up the stairs, put it on her bed.

But first there was something else that needed doing, and she found what she needed for it under Willie Willie’s stained porcelain sink as well—a wicker basket, a blue vinyl–covered thermos. She’d washed them both, filled the thermos with water, put it into the basket beside the pillow Thurgood had warned her she’d need. Then she’d put in the book.

Now, hustled summarily out of the office, and sitting once again on the Duvals’ front steps, she pulled out
The Secret of Magic
,
a novel still very much banned in Mississippi, or so Anna Dale Buchanan had said. Regina had forgotten her handkerchief here the day before, and it had disappeared, so she pulled out another, settled herself, looked around, started to read:

They were at the very edge of the forest now, but they’d found the right path. Collie was sure of this, and she told them so. It was later than they thought it would be, though. The daytime peepers had stopped their chatter, and the hooty owls were whooing deep down in the woods. This licking close to the river, anything could happen. Good or bad, you never knew which.

“Come on, Booker. Hurry up! You scairt?”

Jack calling out. Collie laughing.

Regina was used to seeing the dusty pink cover of the book in New York—the two blond white children running toward a distant forest, but with Booker turned back, his face captured by the moment. Booker with his dark skin, his devilish expression, his wide-open eyes. A face that hinted at something, never quite gave it away. Yesterday at Anna Dale’s, Regina had thought for the first time how this cover might play in Mississippi, the
scandal
of it. Above all, there was the arch of the prominent title and the author’s name, M. P. Calhoun, printed big as you please. In front of the Duval office, people walking past slowed when they read this. Both the square and the street hushed.

“Get on in here!” Miss Tutwiler banged open the door. She stuck her head out, shook it with such force that those folks looking would know she was only doing her duty—and that she’d soon have a tale to share with anybody who might care to listen.
Uppity New York Nigra. There she sat, bold as you please!
“The district attorney said he’d see you. Five minutes. No more.” Miss Tutwiler no longer called him Bed, at least not to Regina Robichard.

Regina sprang to her feet, smoothed down the skirt of her suit. She reached to put the book away into her basket, but Miss Tutwiler was quick as greased lightning. “Better hand that over. Reading a banned something is
illegal
in the state of Mississippi. Mr. Duval could get himself in a heap of trouble letting you bring that in here.”

Regina gave her the book. Then, immensely satisfied, she followed Miss Tutwiler in through the Duval front door.

The front door—because there was obviously a back one, and it was the back one people must use when they came here. Regina realized this right away. Nobody had passed around her, but the reception area was full. Two white-shirted men on straight-back chairs, staring at Regina through the smoke of their cigarettes, a young woman in a polka-dot dress looking up from a tattered copy of
Look
magazine. Miss Tutwiler sailed through the midst of them, the book’s front cover held tight against her prim, buttoned-up bosom. But no one paid the least bit of attention to Miss Tutwiler, not with Regina striding through there.

Miss Tutwiler opened a stout oak door. “She’s here.”

Regina skirted around her and walked in.

She didn’t know what she’d expected but whatever it was, it had not included this many people—a young white man, an even younger white woman with a notebook in her hand, an older black man. All of them reverently grouped around the central motif of an aw-shucks country lawyer in his ah-shucks country office, a spittoon on conspicuous display right beside the mahogany desk in case anybody failed to get the
Hey, now I’m just one of y’all
message. Linen suit, dun-colored and a little too light for the season, flourished bow tie, round red face, a vandyke beard so scrupulous neat that Van Dyck himself might have trimmed it—and sharp little eyes that followed Regina’s every movement like twin razor blades.

Was this Bed Duval? From what Mary Pickett said, Regina had expected someone younger. She held out her hand to him anyway. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. District Attorney. My name is Regina Robichard. I am an attorney with . . .”

“Everybody knows who you are, Missy.” The words rumbled out from the man at the desk, cascading against Regina with the force of glass marbles.

He didn’t take her hand, didn’t look at it, even, and after a moment Regina pulled it back. She cleared her throat.

“I represent Mr. Willie Willie in the wrongful death of his son, Lieutenant Joe Howard Wilson. I am here at the behest of Miss Mary Pickett Calhoun.” She added this last for good measure.

“We also know why you’re here.” This from the woman. Like Mary Pickett, she had a high, trilling voice; like Miss Tutwiler, she was dressed in dark blue with lace trim.

Nobody had introduced themselves, but Regina flashed a bright smile. “Are you the stenographer? Would you mind taking notes?”

A current sizzled through the room. Instantly, Regina realized she’d said something wrong. Mighty wrong. That is, if the woman’s stony face was any indication, and there was certainly nothing aw-shucksy about the sitting man now.

“Girl,”
he barked, his voice pitched so low Regina heard the tick of a clock through it. It sounded like a death knell. “This here
lady
is my daughter. And you better treat her with respect if you know what’s good for you.
Mrs.
Marjorie Duval Tisdale is a lawyer, come up from Jackson to help her brother get elected judge.
Mrs.
Tisdale is a graduate of the University of Mississippi School of the Law, as is her brother and her daddy and her daddy’s daddy before that. And she, Missy, is a proud member of the Mississippi bar.”

“I am so sorry,” Regina said, and she meant it. She wanted to tell this woman how the same thing happened to her in New York all the time, that people were continually taking her for something she wasn’t, asking her to take notes, wondering aloud where her steno pad was, so she understood how this woman felt, the frustration. But nobody in this room seemed like they’d want to hear that. So she repeated, “I’m sorry.”

The black man smirked,
Not as sorry as you gonna be,
and, for the first time, Regina looked closely over at him. He had on a dark suit and dark tie. Something deliberately chosen not to be noticed, like an undertaker’s clothes, she thought. She wondered who he was, but she’d learned a lesson. She’d wait to find out. What was it Thurgood said? “
Assume
makes an
ass
out of
u
and
me
.” Well, she had assumed about Marjorie Tisdale and made an ass of herself. She turned back to the man at the desk.

“I’m here to see about looking through the grand jury report on Joe Howard Wilson’s death.” She added, “If I may.”

“DA can’t do that,” said the black man, quick as you please.

“That’s enough, Tom.” The older man scowled, waved a hand at him, and then turned back to Regina. “What did you say your name was again?”

I thought you said you knew.
But aloud she said, “Regina Robichard. I am . . .”

“Let me introduce you here, Regina. Now my name is Forrest Duval. This is my son, Bed. He’s a Nathan Bedford Forrest Duval, too. The
fifth
, to be exact. Bed’s his nickname, and he’s district attorney. My daughter—I imagine you know who she is now. Not likely ever to forget it again. And that there colored man’s Tom Raspberry.” No explanation as to who Tom Raspberry was or what he was doing here. “And like Mrs. Tisdale said, we know just who you are.
What
you are, too—and what you aren’t, Regina. Like, for instance, the fact you haven’t passed over any bar yet. Bar, as in the New York State bar.”

What did that have to do with anything?

“I graduated from Co—from law school this spring.” She thought it best not to mention Columbia, try to stir it into a pot that seemed already filled to the brim with University of Mississippi pride. “But I have taken the bar exam.”

Forrest Duval swiveled his large head like a lighthouse from his daughter to his son. “That place, that
Nigra
place, she comes from in New York . . . Why, I imagine it’s lousy with lawyers. But all they found to send down here is a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy little lawyerette. That don’t sound to me like they’re serious about our Willie Willie. More like they want to use him for a publicity stunt. The more they can show how bad things are in Mississippi, the more money it brings in for them.”

Tut. Tut. Tut.

“Mr. Duval . . .” began an indignant Regina. But the arrow had hit home. The Fund did need money. It always had, and she imagined it always would. “I’ve got new information. A woman. A white woman. She saw what happened on that Bonnie Blue bus.”

“What you think? We don’t know about her, too?” said Forrest.

His son cut in. “Why don’t you tell us what exactly it is you want?”

Regina turned to him. He was in a white shirt, no jacket, with his tie loose at the neck and his shirt sleeves rolled up. He looked like those men she’d seen walk right past that woman struggling with her child and her baby buggy yesterday. He
could
have been one of them, Regina thought. White men looked pretty much the same to her. Not bad-looking, maybe about Joe Howard’s age, or the age Joe Howard would have been. She wondered if he’d been in the service. A nice enough face, pleasant, even, but with the same sharp gray eyes as his daddy—eyes that were beaded in on her now.

“I’d like to see the grand jury records. I need to see what they say.”

This time the quick look passed from the judge to his daughter. Their lips pursed together at the same time.

“Something you should know, if you haven’t already been told,” said Forrest, “and that is, judgeships are elected here, and taking on a rascal like Ezekial Timms would be a tough business, even at the best of times. But my boy’s moving up. Got to. And he’s already stuck his neck out enough on this Joe Howard thing, asking for a grand jury in the first place. I warned him not to get involved. Something like that—you just asking for trouble. Told him it wouldn’t do one bit of good, and it didn’t.”