Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (105 page)

It is impossible to know exactly what happened next. All Sam had left in the way of clothing was his sports jacket and shoes. He pulled on the jacket, covering himself as best he could, then put the shoes on his feet and flung open the door. His head was thick with alcohol and rage, but evidently he thought he had seen her going toward the manager’s office unit. Maybe he did. Or maybe in his befuddled state Sam just assumed there was nowhere else for her to go. He jumped in the car and pulled up in front of the manager’s apartment, leaving the engine running as he banged loudly on the door. It was a long time before the woman answered—he could hear the sound of the TV inside, so he knew she was in there—but finally she came to the window and glanced balefully out at him. From her vantage point, she could see his bare chest underneath the fancy sports jacket—she wasn’t interested in seeing any further. She stood there with her arms akimbo, glaring at him. Where was the girl? he kept on shouting, yelling his damn-fool head off. What did you do with her? She shook her head. She didn’t know about no girl. Where’s the fucking girl? he demanded. When she continued to indicate that she had no idea, and what’s more, she didn’t care, he said he didn’t believe her and demanded that she let him in so he could see for himself. Call the police, she shrugged, if he was so damn certain. Let them sort it out. But she could see he wasn’t going to go away. She had dealt with men in this state before. That was one of the reasons she had the gun. She checked its location on top of the two TVs stacked one on top of the other. Then she heard his shoulder working at the door, and before long the cheap stripping gave way and the door came off its hinges, and the man was standing there demanding that she give over the girl.

If the girl was, in fact, there, did she hide? Or was she really gone, as the motel manager, Bertha Lee Franklin, continued to insist and would insist to her dying day? Whatever the case, Sam was enraged. The girl had his clothes, and the girl had his money. Did she think he was just going to let her play him like that? He went back to the kitchen and the bedroom of the small apartment, and when he didn’t find her there, he grabbed the manager, who, though she was only five foot six, at nearly one hundred ninety pounds outweighed Sam by a good twenty-five or thirty. He was so angry he could scarcely remember who he was. He shook the woman by the shoulders, as if he could wring the information out of her. She fought back, and they got into an awkward wrestling match and fell to the floor. She was biting and scratching, and when she finally got out from under him, she went for the gun. He must have realized immediately how desperate the situation was, but how many times had he been in situations no less desperate and emerged unscathed by dint of luck, pluck, or simply because
he was Sam Cooke?
There was a flash and a report as they struggled for the gun, and a bullet went into the ceiling. There was a second discharge, and he was still standing. The third bullet tore through both lungs, the heart, and lodged near his right shoulder blade, as blood splattered all over the woman’s dress. “Lady, you shot me,” he said with a combination of astonishment, bewilderment, and disbelief. In Bertha Lee Franklin’s recollection, he ran at her once again, and she picked up a stick and hit him over the head with it so hard that it broke in two.

T
HERE WERE TWO CALLS
to the police in almost immediate succession. The girl called at 3:08 from a phone booth barely a block away. She said she didn’t know where she was, that she had been kidnapped and it was too dark for her to ascertain her exact location. She was told to stay right where she was, an officer would come to her rescue. Less than ten minutes later, another call was logged at the Seventy-seventh Precinct house, this one from a Mrs. Evelyn Card, who said she owned a motel called the Hacienda and had been on the phone with her manager when she heard a guy break in the door of the manager’s apartment. There had been a loud altercation, and then all hell broke loose, “and I think she shot him, I don’t know.” What was the location of the motel? the police dispatcher asked, and she told him it was Ninety-first and Figueroa, then returned to her description of the scene she had so conveniently witnessed on the telephone. There had been a lot of break-ins in the area lately; as a matter of fact, she had had some bastards try to hold her up tonight at Mary’s Come In Motel, the establishment that she and her husband ran just a few miles up Figueroa from the Hacienda—the dispatcher cut her off and told her they would send out a car right away to take her statement.

B
ARBARA WAS SITTING
in the library waiting for Sam to come home. In spite of her promise to be in early herself, she had only gotten in around 2:30 or 3:00—she had had certain things to work out with her bartender friend, and she knew damn well Sam wasn’t going to be rolling in until the early hours. She didn’t want to go to bed alone, though, so after checking on the children, she turned on the TV, made herself a drink, smoked a little pot, and curled up on the couch in the reading room while she waited for the fucker to come home. She was asleep when the phone rang a little before six. It was her sister Beverly, and she was momentarily confused as Bev started talking about how she had just gotten up and was getting dressed to go to work when she heard the news on the radio. She said, “Have you heard the news?” It was six o’clock in the damn morning, Barbara said. How in the hell was she going to hear any news? “Well, girl,” her sister said, “is your husband at home?” Barbara just snorted. “Well, honey,” her sister said, “he’s dead.”

Just then, the doorbell rang. Shaken, still unable to absorb what Beverly had said, she told her sister to hang on. It was the police, two police detectives—they flashed their badges and said, “Are you Mrs. Sam Cooke?” She nodded mutely. They said, “May we come in?” She nodded again. She said, “I’m on the phone, talking to my sister. Is my husband dead?”

The rest was a blur. She asked Beverly to come over as soon as she could and made herself a drink. She offered the police a drink, but they declined. They told her the details of the shooting, but it made no sense to her. He had been with some woman, but when he got shot, the woman wasn’t nowhere to be found. She poured herself another drink. By this time the house was filling up with people, and the phone was ringing off the hook—it must have been all over the news. René and Sugar Hall were among the first to arrive, Alex and Carol and the baby, Clif, Lou Rawls, Sam’s old manager, Jess Rand, and his wife, Bonnie, who had helped her decorate their first apartment—except for the pained expressions on their faces, it could have been a damned party. But she was unable to face any of them, she didn’t want to talk to anyone on the phone—and while the two policemen looked on in some surprise, she took her drink and went out and sat by the pool, leaving them all to René and Sugar and her sister to deal with. At some point Linda came out and joined her. Her eyes were deep wells of sadness, and even though she was only eleven years old, Barbara knew she understood exactly what was going on. Just like Barbara had understood when she wasn’t much older than eleven that she loved Sam Cook and she would love him till the day he died. And now he had. You never knew the twists that love could take—if she had been a better mother, maybe things would have been different, if she had been a better mother, maybe Vincent would still be alive, if Vincent were still alive, maybe Sam . . .

There was a big tree in the music room with a bunch of Christmas presents under it—Sam had just gone out and made a damn fool of her . . . again. He had been doing it all his life, from the time he went off and married that California bitch, left her and her baby on their own, and now, by the manner of his death, he had really outdone her once and for all in the world’s eyes. They had all thought she wasn’t good enough for him, Sam’s friends and business associates, the Cooks with their damned prejudice-ass attitude, they had never thought she was good enough for their Sammy, and now he had gone and proved them all right. If there had been anything to the marriage, everyone would be saying, why couldn’t she keep him at home? There was no way for her to answer back. She knew things about their all-American boy—but it was just like it had always been. Every time she tried to say anything, he always had the last word. He was just doing what he wanted to do. Everyone knew that. And her? She had never known what she wanted. Except Sam.

T
HE TWO POLICEMEN
stuck around for most of the day, talking to everyone, getting all their gossip, opinions, and theories—it was almost, Barbara reflected, like a damn TV show. Crain was on his way from Chicago, along with her older sister, Ella—she trusted Crain more than the whole damn lot of them. Once they had gotten their business straight, he had always treated her with respect. He was like a longtime court servant loyal to them both, and she knew he’d help her get through some of the worst of it. He’d help out with the Cooks, too, serve as a kind of intermediary for her. She had spoken with the old man, and he had given her more of that cold-ass shit. He would be driving out with Charles, he told her. No, he wouldn’t be staying with her. What would be the point? he said with his usual weird insistence on the literal. His son would not be there.

Charles, who lived with his wife and family in Detroit, had actually set out for California on his own as soon as he confirmed that it was not just another false rumor. At first he had thought it was going to turn out like the leukemia scare, but when he called Sam’s house and the police answered, he knew it was true. So he gassed up the brand-new limo Sam had given him and stuck his pistol in his pocket and said, “I’m gonna kill that woman, Bertha Franklin.” He had only gotten as far as St. Louis when the fuel line sprang a leak, and while he was getting it fixed, his mother called him on the car phone. She begged him to come back to Chicago for Reverend Cook (“I couldn’t refuse my mother nothing”), and when she found out what he planned to do, she made him leave the gun behind. Then he embarked for California once again, his mind still roiling with thoughts of revenge. It couldn’t have happened the way they said it did. Sam didn’t have to pay for no pussy—and to get killed for it to boot? Sam wasn’t no gangster, but he knew how to take care of himself. The more Charles thought about it, the more he was convinced that Barbara might have had something to do with it. And if he found out that she did, then he was going to kill her, too. Meanwhile, the old man sat beside him wearing his preacher’s hat and light, plastic-rimmed glasses, his face almost expressionless, his spine stiffened with rectitude, not sharing his thoughts with anyone but his Maker. When they first got the call, his wife had turned to him and said piteously, “Oh, Brother Cook, what are we going to do now?” He just stared at her. Do? he said a little incredulously. They were going to do what they had always done. “I didn’t depend on Sam taking care of me,” he told Annie Mae, as if surprised that she would need reminding. They had always depended on God.

Allen Klein first heard the news on the radio. It was snowing hard in New York, and he felt as if the world had come crashing down around him, but he knew he had to keep going somehow, and when he couldn’t get a flight out until the next day, he put together a statement that desperately sought to salvage whatever he could from the situation. “The story of Sam’s death as reported is impossible,” he declared, citing as one of his proofs the fact that “Sam was known to carry huge sums of money with him at all times and it is evident that someone is trying to cover up the [real] reasons for this tragedy.” He didn’t know if this was true, and he didn’t care, he was just trying to deflect some of the attention from Sam’s actions by suggesting that this was a man who had been killed not in an act of adultery but as the victim of a violent crime. “Sam was a happily married family man with deep religious convictions,” the press release went on, “[he] was not a violent person, and the statements given out as to why he was killed are entirely inconsistent with the type of person he was. Out of respect to Sam and his wife and children, I would appreciate it if the press would withhold publishing hearsay information.”

Barbara went down to the city morgue with her sister and Sugar Hall to identify the body. They had him up on a slab in a glass room all by himself—it was like out of one of those monster movies, Barbara thought, this couldn’t really be happening to her. She wanted to touch him, it didn’t even look like Sam, all cold and lifeless—he was so pretty, and now he was just this battered corpse—but the man said, “Can you see, Mrs. Cooke? Can you see him?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s him.” Except it wasn’t—not really. They said they had to perform an autopsy to determine the cause of death, and when she questioned the need, they said by law they had to do it, whether or not she gave consent. She asked them who would perform the autopsy, and they said, “Well, you can have your doctor, if you want.” So she called her doctor, and it turned out he had worked for the coroner’s office while he was in medical school, and he agreed to do it. That way at least, she figured, she would find out what had really happened. She picked up Sam’s keys, the $108 he still had on him, and the rest of his belongings, including the bottle of whiskey—good booze, she noted, just like Sam always drank. Then she and Sugar and Beverly went to the police lot to pick up the car, his latest pride and joy, and she slowly drove it home. He must have been drunk, she thought, drunk and confused—that was how he died, this man to whom propriety and control were always so important.

Meanwhile, at the Hacienda, a crowd had formed both out of curiosity and to voice its anger and disbelief. They started off singing some of Sam’s songs, but the mood swiftly changed, and they began to call out Mrs. Franklin’s name, demanding that she show herself while they shouted angry threats. Eventually, the
Los Angeles Sentinel
reported, “the police had to be called to maintain order, and the motel was later closed until further notice.” It was as if the whole world had gone off its axis.