Chiefs (31 page)

Carried laughed wryly. “Well, you’ve got me there. I guess anything you might do to make Emmett your friend might get you in trouble with the Lord. Can I serve you some more corn, Mr. Fowler?”

Patricia looked puzzled. “I don’t undrstand why the Spences hate blacks so much.”

“Well,” said Billy, “from what I hear, Hoss Spence didn’t have much, came from a family of dirt farmers, folks that might have had to compete with Negroes for sharecropping. Folks like that sometimes hate Negroes because they feel they’re a threat to their prosperity. I guess maybe Emmett just inherited that view of things from Hoss. I expect his children will inherit it from him. It’s a shame that sort of feeling has to go on and on. There’s no reason for it.”

Mr. Fowler spoke up again. “Billy, what do you reckon that was all about, out at Marshall’s?”

“Well, it’s pretty clear to me that somebody wanted to see Marshall in a lot of trouble.”

“Who do you think?”

“Unless Marshall has a problem with somebody I don’t know about, and I think he’d tell me if he did, then it seems to me that Mickey Shelton would make a good candidate. Marshall’s giving him some unwanted competition, I guess. I think Sonny Butts could be mixed up in it, too. He and Marshall had some sort of argument, so Sonny’s mad at him, and Sonny’s in a position to handle the police side of a situation like this.”

Mr. Fowler nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Sonny’s always been a little too slick for my liking. He knows how to butter folks up, but I wouldn’t trust him much. He ran up a big bill at the store, and I had to stay on him to collect it. I think he thought I was just going to mark it ‘paid’ because he’s a policeman. I got that impression. I tell you, I’d rather have Marshall Parker for a customer than Sonny Butts.”

Billy grunted. “I’d rather have Marshall Parker for a policeman than Sonny Butts, to tell you the truth. In fact, I suggested to Hugh Holmes that the city hire a colored policeman, one of the veterans. A majority of the actual peacekeeping the police do is in Braytown, anyway, and I think a Negro could do a better job over there.”

“What did Hugh say?” asked Mr. Fowler.

“He seemed to think it was a good idea, and there was even some sympathy for it at the council meeting, I gather, but there was only enough in the budget to hire one new man, and they picked Sonny Butts. Melvin Thomas thought it might be a good idea, too, and he told me that when there was a need for a fourth officer he’d consider recommending hiring a Negro. I don’t think Sonny would like that, though.”

“Does it matter what Sonny likes?” Eloise asked.

“It matters to Melvin. He thinks Sonny has been doing a great job, and I guess he has with the traffic and such.”

“Does Melvin know about the beatings at the jail, do you think?” Mr. Fowler asked.

“Brooks Peters talked to him when he first heard about it, and Melvin listened, although he didn’t seem to think there was much to it. Sonny holds that he just uses necessary force, and that drunks get rowdy and have to be handled. There was another incident last night, apparently, although the man wasn’t seriously hurt. Old Jim Parker came to Brooks about it before church this morning, and Brooks is going to talk to Melvin again tomorrow.”

“Will that help?” asked Eloise.

“It’s not going to get Sonny fired, but if Brooks can stir up Melvin enough, at least it might put a stop to what’s been going on. It’s not as though there was enough evidence, witnesses and all, to prosecute Sonny.”

“Melvin’s a good man,” said Mr. Fowler. “He’ll do what’s right.”

“Oh, he’s a decent enough fellow,” said Billy. “I just wish he was smarter. He lets himself get manipulated by Sonny Butts.”

“That Butts family has never been much good,” said Carrie. “His mother’s nice enough, poor thing, but Sonny’s daddy was always a problem. He was a drinker, and Will Henry had to put him in jail once or twice.”

Across town, on the other side of the M&B railroad tracks, in Milltown, at the corner of Maple and Poplar, another family was having a Sunday fried-chicken dinner, a smaller family.

“Oh, Sonny, I’m so glad to see you. I wish you would come to see me more regular.”

Sonny Butts wiped his mouth and sat back. “Mama, you know I’m on duty all the time. I wish I could get by here more often, but a lot of times when I’m off, you’re at the mill, you know. Boy, that sure was good chicken.”

“You look so nice in your uniform, Sonny. I’m real proud of you. Mrs. Smith next door said she saw you on your motorcycle the other day and you looked so dashing. That was what she said, dashing. Your daddy would be proud of you, too, if he was alive.”

“Yeah, like he was proud of me when I was playing ball. I bet he got thrown out of half the games I played, the old rummy.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way about your daddy, Sonny.”

“I don’t know why you stand up for him, Mama. He never gave you nothing but a hard time, and he beat up on you ‘bout every time he got drunk, which was regular.” Sonny ground his teeth. “Beat up on me, too, until I got big enough to do something about it.” Sonny remembered with some satisfaction the first time he had hit his father. The man had wilted like a flower, and he had never laid another hand on either of them again while Sonny was around. He drank nearly all the time, though.

“Well,” his mother replied weakly, “In the beginning he was … I mean, he never did any of that before you was born.”

“You think he got that way because of
me?”

“It was like he was jealous of you, kind of. I don’t know. I never understood it.”

“Well, you’re better off without him, I can tell you that.”

His mother began to clear away the dishes. She still misses him, Sonny thought. He shook his head. The telephone rang, and she went to answer it.

Carrie found the buzzer under the carpet, and Flossie came to take the dishes away. “Now, who’d like some peach cobbler?”

Patricia glanced at Billy and smiled. “That sounds just wonderful, but … I’m afraid I’m going to have to start watching my weight.”

Carrie laughed. “Sugar, you’re too thin as it is.” Her eyebrows shot up. “Unless—?”

Billy laughed aloud. “Well, Mama, I guess you better start getting used to the idea of being a grandmother.”

“That’s right,” Patricia said. “Next April. It’s going to be a boy, I can tell.”

In the excitement that followed no one heard the telephone ring. Flossie came back in. “It’s for you, Mr. Billy.” Billy left the room.

“When did you find out, Trisha?” Eloise asked.

“Just yesterday, when Tom Mudter confirmed it.”

“Is everything all right?” asked Henry Fowler worriedly. “I mean, are you all right?” He was already thinking of what he could do for a grandchild.

“Of course, Mr. Fowler. Happens every day, you know. Nothing to be concerned about.”

“Well, I’m just so happy, Patricia,” Carrie said, beaming. “We’re going to enjoy having a baby in the family. I’m just so pleased for you and all of us.”

Billy returned to the room. Patricia noticed immediately that something was wrong. “What is it, Billy?” They all turned and looked at him.

“That was Hugh Holmes. Melvin Thomas collapsed and died on the steps of the Methodist Church about an hour ago, right after church.”

“How awful,” Carrie said. “He was such a nice man.”

Billy stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out a window. Patricia wrinkled her brow. “Is there something else, Billy?”

He nodded. “Some of the council members got on the phone right away. Sonny Butts has been made acting chief of police. Mr. Holmes thinks they’ll make it permanent tomorrow.”

Chapter 13.

WHEN SONNY walked into the Delano police station after Melvin Thomas’s funeral on Tuesday morning, he felt like a king newly crowned. The council had voted to make him chief of police the preceding day, although the announcement was being withheld until Thursday, partly out of respect for the dead and partly because the
Delano Messenger
was published on Thursdays, and that was a convenient way to announce his permanent appointment.

He had a girl, Millie, on loan from the city manager’s office to answer the phone and handle the radio until he could hire another officer, and she was at work as he entered. He looked around the station room for a moment. The place was already the way he wanted it. Thomas had been content to let him arrange the station room, and Sonny was satisfied that he had done it efficiently. Now what he wanted was to get at the old man’s office—now his office.

“Millie, I’ve got some work to do for a while. Don’t call me unless its real urgent, okay?”

“Sure, Sonny.” She giggled. “I mean, Chief.”

He had been screwing her once a week for three months. Too bad there wasn’t a sofa in the chief’s office. Maybe he could wangle one. He went into the office, closed the door, and leaned against it for a moment. He was breathing hard with excitement.

Things had worked out so much better than he could ever have dreamed they would. After a whole war of being pushed around, first by NCOs, then by officers, now
he
was in charge. He had wanted a battlefield commission, but it had never come. Now he had better than a commission, he had a command. He was fucking
Eisenhower
, was what he was.

The office wasn’t much—a small room that had been added onto the original building, furnished with a desk, a filing cabinet, a hat rack, and three wooden chairs. But it was the first office he had ever had, the sort of office a company commander might have had in the army. He walked around it slowly, looking into a filing cabinet, shuffling through the stack of papers on the desk. Christ, what a mess! Thomas had never let him get these files, this room, organized. He opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet and started.

Two hours later he had filled two large cardboard boxes with old files, circulars, papers, and just plain trash. The desk top was clean as a whistle except for a telephone and a calendar. He sank into the desk chair and opened a drawer. The drawers were all that was left. He began filling a smaller box with the old man’s stuff—an electric razor, a Parker pen, a pistol, some personal bills, a few photographs of his family—there wasn’t a hell of a lot. Then he emptied each drawer in turn on the desk top and filtered through everything to find out whether it was personal or police stuff and whether it was important enough to keep.

There were a few file folders. He put those aside for last. At noon he sent Millie out to get him a sandwich, then he propped his feet up on the desk, ate his sandwich, and read through the files. They went back a long way. Thomas had been a sergeant on the Columbus police force when he had been hired to replace Will Henry Lee nearly twenty years before. At first, it seemed to Sonny, Thomas had been enthusiastic about his job and had stuck to the routines of a trained officer from a bigger town. The files were mostly collections of information on the same type of crime—there was a folder on stolen cars, for instance—and notes that, in cooperation with the state police, car thieves who had been working the area had been arrested and convicted. There was another file on a string of burglaries that had taken place over a period of months in the thirties, and a similar concluding set of notes. The files seemed to have been kept as much for sentiment as for records.

In the late thirties and during the war years, though, the files seemed to have been kept more erratically, and there were fewer notes. Thomas must have been getting tired of the work by then, Sonny thought. The last of the folders was one marked “missing persons.” Sonny took a long swig of his Coca-Cola and opened it.

There were a dozen circulars put out by the state police, beginning in the late twenties and continuing into the war years. They were arranged more or less chronologically, as if they had been simply added to the file as they had come in, the more recent ones on top. Each sheet had a photograph, usually a family snapshot or a portrait by a two-dollar photographer, or, where there was no photograph, simply a detailed description. The missing persons, he noted, were all male and white. Nearly all of them were very young. As Sonny flipped through them, he noticed that the further down the stack he got the more attention seemed to have been paid to the circular. While the more recent ones on top were without notations, the older ones had comments and underlinings, mostly related to where the subject had last been seen. Greenville, Woodbury, and Waverly Hall had all been underlined on various sheets, and there were notations: “check jungles” or “seen hitchiking.” Sonny viewed the lack of comments on the later circulars as typical of Thomas’s waning interest in his job as the years wore on. There were no reports included of any of the subjects’ having been located.

Clearly, though, Thomas had been interested in these missing young men, at least at first. He had obviously checked the hobo jungles and asked some questions, maybe showed the photographs around. Sonny picked up a pencil and started through the more recent circulars, underlining as Thomas had. When he had finished he found a road map and a grease pencil and started marking the towns where the subjects had last been reported. Five of the twelve had last been seen some distance away—Macon, Carrollton, places fifty or more miles from Delano. He removed them from the stack and did not mark them on the map. The remaining seven were represented by marks that formed an uneven circle. At the center of the circle, roughly, was Delano.