Big Goodbye, The (8 page)

Chapter 14

When we stepped out onto Margie’s porch, Butch waved one of the uniformed officers over. “Take Mr. Riley back into town for me, would you?”

“I’ll do it.”

We all turned to see Frank Howell, the current mayor and Harry’s opposition, walking toward us. A large man in every way, Howell was tall and thick bodied, his fleshy face tanned, the center of his cheeks pocked with acne scars.

The yard was filled with Panama City Police and Bay County Sheriff’s Deputy’s cars, an ambulance, and a couple of reporters. Howell had stepped out of the crowd.

Howell had an odd walk for such a large man. It was light-footed and feminine, and looked to be the walk of a former dancer.

“Mr. Mayor,” Pete said. “We’ll take him. We didn’t mean—”

He shook his large head. “I need to speak with Mr. Riley,” he said. “This’ll give us the chance.” He turned and looked at me. “That okay with you?”

I nodded.

“I would ask you boys what you’ve got in there and how it’s going,” Howell said, “but it’s out of my jurisdiction and I don’t want to appear to be overstepping my bounds.”

As we talked, a cameraman with one of the reporters snapped our picture. I attempted to position myself so I could use Howell for cover, but the photographer just continued altering his angle.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Pete said. “That will let us keep working our investigation.” He turned to me. “And Jimmy, don’t you worry about anything. We’ll get this all straightened out real soon.”

As Howell and I walked away, the reporters shouted a couple of questions at us. I ignored them, and to my surprise, Howell did too.

We got into the back of his large red Packard Clipper and the driver eased out of the yard back onto the dirt road.

Though it had been Howell who honored me with a ceremony after I was shot, pinning the commendation on my coat himself, we had never spoken, and I had always thought the presentation was far more about a photo op for him than anything having to do with me.

“I hope our officers didn’t go too hard on you,” he said.

I shook my head.

“Hero last year, homicide suspect this year,” he said. “It’s amazing how quickly things change.”

I nodded.

“And how quickly people forget,” he added. “You’re one of the few bonafide non-war heroes we have around here. How can they possibly think you’re capable of what was done to that poor girl?”

The enormous backseat of the Packard was made more so by the double recessed front seats. I had seen houses with less head and leg room. Of course, a guy the size of Howell could use it. It probably didn’t seem roomy to him at all.

“You know why politics are so dirty?” he asked.

“The people they attract?” I said.

He smiled, his enormous face spreading even more.

“I think you’re being set up,” he said. His voice matched his build. It was deep sounding and forceful even when he was speaking softly. “Are you working for Mr. and Mrs. Lewis?”

I didn’t answer.

“I don’t expect you to divulge the names of your clients,” he said, “but if you are, be careful. Harry Lewis will stop at nothing to be mayor of our city, and with all the growth and changes—the military bases, the shipyard, the government contracts, the real estate boom—well, in the wrong hands a lot of bad things can happen.”

He paused, but I didn’t say anything.

“Harry’s up to something,” he said. “He may be using his wife and some quack named Rainer—calls himself a doctor. I just hope he’s not using you.”

“No one’s using me,” I said, as if I actually believed it.

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “I just hope you’ll keep it that way.”

“I will.”

“The reason politics are so dirty,” he said, “is because there’s so much at stake. Now, I’m no saint, and I’m not saying I am, but I’m not tempted by money and power. I have all I need of both of them. I don’t see the mayor’s office as a stepping stone to county, state, or national positions. I love Panama City. It’s my home. My family helped to build it. And right now it’s going through the biggest and most important changes it ever will. It’s no exaggeration to say our small town can actually win or lose the war. That’s what people like Harry Lewis don’t get. They’re too busy planning their next move, they don’t see the damage their self-interests are doing.”

The driver turned off Highway 231 onto Harrison.

Howell withdrew a card from his vest pocket and handed it to me.

“You may not know it yet,” he said, “but we have the same enemies. My home number is on this. If you need me for anything, you be sure to let me know.”

I nodded. “Thanks,” I said.

The driver pulled the big Packard up in front of our office door, Howell and I shook hands, mine momentarily disappearing in his, and I got out. As soon as the door was closed, he rolled down the window.

“Oh, and Jimmy,” he said, “as long as I’m mayor you will not be harassed by the police or set up for murders you didn’t commit.”

He didn’t say it, but the implication was clear. It was in my best interest to do what I could to help keep him mayor.

Chapter 15

The next morning, July walked into my office and dropped the
Herald Tribune
on my desk. I looked down at it. There I was on the front page right next to the latest war news, above the fold, surrounded by police in front of Margie’s house. The headline read: Former Detective Suspect in Murder of Local Socialite.

“When you get mixed up in something, you don’t do it by halves, do you, soldier?” she said.

I smiled at her, but only a moment, as I quickly scanned the article.

“Does Ray know what you’re involved in?”

Nodding to the paper on my desk, I said, “It looks like all of Panama City does now.”

“Anything in it?”

“You asking if I killed Margie Lehane?”

“No,” she said. “You didn’t, did you?”

“Has Ray made it in yet?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He may be going straight to the courthouse. I’m not sure. You know how he is. What’s that word you used?”

“Taciturn.”

“You gotta get a girl, fella,” she said. “That ain’t even the word you used last time.”

I smiled.

“He never tells anybody much,” she said. “Tells me even less.”

“Why you think?” I asked, though I knew. I just wondered if she did.

“Because I’m not a . . . a . . . peer—not that Ray really has any of those. I’m more a project. Speaking of . . . he had an old file open on his desk yesterday.”

“Dorothy Powell?”

She nodded. “She haunts him, but good, don’t she?”

“If you’re a savior, the ones you don’t save always do.”

“You two aren’t alike in a lot of ways, but in that you are.”

I wondered what she meant, but I didn’t ask her. I didn’t have to. She went on to tell me.

“Someone needs savin’—especially a woman, you two are the first guys to step forward, and you feel completely responsible for her the rest of your lives. It’s the way Ray is with me, and you are with Lauren Lewis.”

It wasn’t quite the same with Lauren, but before I could say so, two men walked through my door without knocking.

The first man was small and thin, probably nearing middle age, well dressed and smooth. The man who followed him was his muscle—big, bulky, powerful. I had seen and dealt with enough men like them to know the sort of men they were. They were here to deliver a threat, issue an ultimatum, give a warning. They were the kind of men who if you saw a second time meant someone was getting hurt or dead.

The big man would have no problem tossing me around the room with one hand, snapping me in two with so little effort it wouldn’t raise his heart rate, but the little one was by far the more dangerous of the two. I knew it before he opened his mouth, before he delivered a single threat or made good on it. I could see it in his eyes. It wasn’t what was there, but what wasn’t. Behind his gray eyes there was no conscience, no empathy, no pity, no mercy, no remorse.

The smaller man sat down in one of the chairs in front of my desk.

“Excuse us a minute, doll,” he said to July.

She started to protest, but I shook my head, and she walked out quietly and closed my door.

“That was smart, soldier, you got brains,” the small man said. His voice was low and flat, with only occasional inflection. “No need to get the pretty girl mixed up in any of this.”

The small man had a grayish tint to him. Perhaps it was that his gray pinstripe suit and gray felt fedora matched his eyes. Maybe it was the faint gray stubble on his face, but it seemed to be more than that, as if his little body put off the color of his core somehow.

“Any of what?” I asked.

The big man, who wore a slightly too-small black suit, remained standing and had yet to make a sound or an expression.

“Complicated things like politics, medical treatment, and romance,” he said. “Things guys like us should stay out of.”

“Brother, I’m about as far out of those things as a body can be,” I said. “Got no political interests—let alone aspirations, got no use for women, and not undergoing any medical treatment.”

“Not yet,” the big man said.

He sounded like a slow, mean kid, and I wondered how the little man put up with him.

“Must be tough havin’ only one arm,” the little man said.

“There’re worse things,” I said.

“Sure, soldier, but you’re in the tough-guy business,” he said. “Hard to be tough with only one arm.”

“I do all right,” I said.

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “But goin’ up against the locals what pass for muscle around here’s one thing. Takin’ on guys like us is another.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Doesn’t change anything, but it may be true.”

“Okay, soldier, I understand,” he said. “I’m just wasting my breath here. Doesn’t matter what I say, we’re gonna mix it up ’cause that’s what guys like us do, but I still gotta give you the message I’s hired to just like there was a chance you might actually listen to it.”

I nodded.

“Man who hired me thinks it’s best you stay out of politics, away from other men’s wives, and away from hospitals.”

The big man came to life again, his face showing his pride in himself and the pleasure what he was about to say would bring him. “If you don’t,” he said, “you’ll need a doctor
and
a hospital of your own.”

“But not a politician or another man’s wife?” I asked.

The big man looked confused. The small man smiled.

“You ought not do that, mister,” the small man said. “That’s just low.”

“According to you, I’m gonna have a short life,” I said. “Better get my fun while I can.”

Chapter 16

It cost me extra, but I had Clipper in a uniform. He was banging on the delivery entrance of Rainer’s place on Eleventh Street, a brown parcel in his left hand. A single-bulb light fixture above the door provided the only illumination, and from my position in the back of the delivery truck all I could see of him was his white uniform, the white of his real eye, and his bright white teeth.

Clipper Jones was a young Negro who had been part of the 99
^th
Fighter Squadron, 1
^st
Tactical Unit before suffering the loss of his left eye. He picked up the nickname Clipper while training at Dale Mabry Field because of the way he would so fearlessly dive down toward the Gulf, fly in low and “clip” the tops of the north Florida pine trees.

The back door of the private sanatorium opened, and Clipper began his routine.

I was crouched in an old milk truck. One of Clip’s many brothers had converted it into a delivery vehicle. I was attempting to see and hear what was going on near the door.

“He’s not here,” the dark-haired nurse said.

It had rained earlier in the night and was threatening to again. The air was thick with moisture. As if steam rising out of the earth from small hidden holes, a low fog hovered over the ground, some of it breaking free to cling to tree branches and gather itself around the lights on buildings and street corners.

“This here’s gots to be signed fo,” Clipper said. “And it’s gots to be Dr. Rain to do it.”

“Rainer,” the woman corrected.

“Rai-n-er,” he repeated slowly.

I thought he was overdoing it a bit, but he often told me you could never overestimate the superiority white people felt over coloreds.

He must have been right because of what she did next.

“Come in,” she said. “I’ll call Dr. Rainer.”

She turned and began walking inside. Before he followed her, Clipper looked back in my direction and gave me a big, fuck-crackers smile, which was about all I could see.

When Dale Mabry Field near Tallahassee was expanded from a small airport used by private planes, Eastern Airlines’ DC3s, and National Airlines’ mail carriers to an Army airfield in late 1940, a small black community had been relocated. Clipper’s grandparents had been part of this community. It had never set well with Clipper, and he didn’t mind letting his superiors know it. In fact, his antics in the airplane that earned him his nickname were part of his protest. He had always suspected his eye injury wasn’t an accident—hired me to prove it, but I couldn’t get past the army’s tall green wall of silence and endless miles of red tape.

Within a few minutes, Clip was opening the back door and waving me in with the gun in his right hand. I climbed out of the truck and joined him.

“Not much security,” he said. “One fat fucker I slapped the shit out of.”

“Where’s the nurse?”

He jerked his head toward the open door. “Come see for yourself.”

I followed him into a tile-floor lobby to find the discarded box his gun had been in, the fat security guard on the floor, and the night nurse cuffed to a big wooden chair, a piece of tape across her face holding a gag in her mouth.

“Why the gag?”

“Take it off and see,” he said. “Shit, Jim, how long it gonna be ’fore you quit questioning every got damn thing I do?”

I started to remove the gag, but stopped myself. “Sorry,” I said.

The small lobby had brownish linoleum with green-and-rust-colored frames around Oriental rugs. A reception area behind a small glass sliding door stood on one wall, the light inside it providing the only illumination for the dim lobby. In the middle of the open space, two seating areas, one a modern Kroehler couch and chairs, the other East Indies Rattan.