Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (106 page)

B
ARBARA PICKED UP ALLEN
at the airport the next day in the Rolls and offered to take him to lunch at Martoni’s, but he declined, and they went to the office instead, then to the house, where Barbara anxiously pumped him for information. Sam had kept her in the dark about almost everything to do with his personal finances, and now she was desperate to find out. Allen could certainly understand her feelings, and he went over some of the details with her, but he didn’t really feel comfortable with the situation, and he didn’t really feel comfortable with the widow, either, whom he scarcely knew. Death always unsettled him, but he was unnerved by Barbara’s sheer intensity, her near-ferocity, and the gulf in personality and manner between Sam and her.

There were going to be two funerals, she told him. Crain had convinced her of the necessity of that. There were just too many of Sam’s fans, friends, and family—including Sam’s own mother—who wouldn’t be able to travel to L.A. So Barbara agreed and gave Crain money to take care of the arrangements. But they couldn’t have either of the funerals until after the inquest was over. And in the meantime, she was going to have Sam’s body available for public viewing at People’s Funeral Home, here in Los Angeles, as soon as it was released by the coroner’s office.

Crain hovered around her, diplomatically seconding whatever she said. The subject was Sam, but the real Sam had disappeared from the conversation. “It was a boy that got killed,” Crain said at one point, and Barbara could barely restrain her disbelief. He wasn’t a boy, she wanted to scream at him. He was a full-grown, motherfucking man, who should have had more fucking sense, who should have looked out better for them all. But Crain was, in almost every other respect, a comfort to her; unlike Alex, he had never had any real ambition except to serve. Allen she was not so sure of. Every time she looked at him, those beady little eyes shifted away, and she didn’t know what he was thinking. He was going to get to the bottom of this, he kept assuring her, more and more emphatically. He was going to hire a private investigator, and he was going to find out the truth. Well, maybe so—but what good was the motherfucking truth going to do them now?

T
HE BODY LAY IN STATE
at People’s, across from the Dunbar Hotel on Central, for three days. It was released by the coroner’s office on Saturday night, with viewing scheduled to begin Sunday afternoon, but by one o’clock, traffic was tied up for blocks, with thousands of people lining the sidewalk and spilling out onto the street. Sam’s body was laid out in a glass-lidded bronze coffin, with guards stationed at either end. The bruises on his face were clearly evident, and friends and fans were openly weeping. “It hurt us so to see his little curly lashes closed and all bruised up in the face,” said the songwriting Prudhomme twins, who had given him “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day.” “We went to view him and pray for him—our hearts were broken.” A contingent of Black Muslims in dark glasses silently observed the proceedings, and nearly everyone who passed the coffin, as visiting hours extended well into the evening to accommodate the crowd, expressed skepticism about the official story of his death.

Allen and J.W. and Allen’s lawyer all met with a private detective from the Beverly Hills Investigating Service on Monday morning at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They went over their doubts and suspicions, the inconsistencies that not only surrounded the circumstances of Sam’s death but challenged the faith they had all come to place in him. The papers were full of talk of conspiracy, the girl, Elisa Boyer, had been named a prostitute by police sources, and her version and the motel owner’s version of just what had transpired were treated with almost universal disbelief. To the community at large it was almost as if this couldn’t have happened because it shouldn’t have happened, and Allen and Alex were caught up in similar feelings. And yet they knew Sam, and they knew something of Sam’s circumstances, and almost in spite of themselves they harbored darker suspicions of their own. This was about a
business
transaction, after all, and the single question that had to be answered was: was anyone else involved? The agency operative, M. K. Pelletreau, outlined the way in which he would begin his investigation: he had an appointment with a Dr. Curfey, the coroner of Los Angeles County, set up for that afternoon. Through his previous work, he would develop contacts within the police department. And he would seek to develop additional undercover sources to learn something more about the girl, how she worked, who she worked with, and how it was she had come to meet the subject in the first place. He would report back to them in a few days.

B
OBBY WOMACK WAS INCONSOLABLE
. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He and his brothers had arrived in Houston with the Upsetters for the start of the tour. They were just checking into their motel when they heard the news, and after calling J.W. to confirm that it was true, they headed straight home. Bobby was unable to contain himself—he just cried and cried, and by the time they got back to Los Angeles, the others were sick of having him around. Bobby, in turn, was shocked by what he viewed as the callousness of some of his fellow musicians. A bunch of them were riding back from the funeral parlor, “and I was crying so hard, I remember, somebody slapped me upside the head and said, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Everybody was talking about what they were supposed to get, what Sam was going to give them, and then the motherfucker up and died. And I was just sitting there crying.”

He went to Barbara and told her that Sam had bought them all new instruments just before they went out, and none of them, including Bobby, had even begun to pay him back. She looked at him, like, “What the fuck do you want me to do about it?” And he said, “I just wanted you to know.” But Barbara was more out of it than she let on—she was unable even to focus most of the time. The Cooks had barely spoken to her when they arrived, the old man indicating what he thought of her by his icy disdain, that damned Charles practically accusing her of murder. The house was full of people, but she felt all alone, removed by a gauzy web of medication and mood from the day-to-day events that were taking place around her. Her sisters looked out for her and made sure the children were being taken care of. René and Sugar did the best they could to protect her from everyone else’s needs and solicitude. Alexander’s wife, Carol, was sweet, but the others all seemed to want something from her—Clif acted like it was him that had gotten killed, those damned Womack brothers were always underfoot, and people were coming around with food and shit that she didn’t even want to look at, let alone touch. They all blamed her, she could tell, but the truth was, none of them could blame her more than she blamed herself. She kept thinking maybe it was because she hadn’t been able to raise herself to Sam’s expectations, maybe she had expected too much from him. One time she felt so cold she thought she was going to die. Her feet felt like they weren’t even attached to her body, her breath grew short, and the only thing that saved her was the thought of her children. They would have no one to take care of them. “I can’t die,” she said, and her sisters started crying, even as they sought to comfort her. She was only twenty-nine.

T
HE CORONER’S JURY
hearing on Wednesday was a cut-and-dried affair. It convened at 1:00
P.M.
in room 150 at the austere Hall of Justice, with the coroner making his presentation to a seven-member jury consisting of four men and three women, and a Mr. Joe Barilla representing the district attorney’s office. There was a crowd of fans outside hoping to gain admission when Barbara arrived with Crain and her sister Ella. Barbara was wearing a light-colored tweed suit with a white blouse, a fashionable broad-brimmed hat, and a hurt, almost wounded expression on her handsome, high-cheekboned face. Her sister and Crain sat on either side of her with Alex and Reverend Cook to Crain’s right and the motel owner and manager seated in the row directly in front of her. She was barely audible in her brief testimony, merely reaffirming her identification of her husband’s remains and correcting the coroner’s statement of his age. Allen’s lawyer, Marty Machat, was identified as her attorney, but he had nothing to add.

After the medical examiner’s testimony and the report of the first investigating officer on the scene, the girl, Elisa Boyer, took the stand. She was bare-legged and wearing the kind of oversized dark-glasses-and-kerchief combination that made her look a little bit like Jackie Kennedy, or as if she had just been out for a ride. Her shiny black bangs peeked out from underneath the scarf, and she wore a belted sweater coat over a sleeveless drop-waist dress. There were gasps from the crowd and a growing wave of restiveness bordering on outright hostility as she recited her by now familiar story in a shrill, almost defiant, and unhesitating voice. When she reached the point where she spoke of being kidnapped against her will (“I turned to Mr. Cooke, and I told him, ‘Please, take me home,’ [but] he took me by the arm and he dragged me into that room”), the courthouse erupted with cries of protest, and the coroner, who served as both chief investigator and presiding officer, was led to announce, “There will be no demonstration or no outbursts. If there are, these people will be eliminated from hearing the inquest.” Sam pulled her sweater off, she said, he ripped her dress—she was able to make her escape only after he had gone into the bathroom. She knocked on the manager’s door, but evidently the manager didn’t hear her, so she went around the corner, got dressed in the shadow of an apartment building, dumped Sam’s clothes in the building’s garage area, spotted a telephone booth, and called the police. “I had no idea that someone had shot Mr. Cooke,” she testified. After the coroner had finished with her, the district attorney asked a few questions, and when he was through, Marty Machat attempted to address the witness. He only got as far as “May I —” when the coroner said to the witness, “You may be excused.”

Bertha Franklin was then called to the stand. She moved slowly, still in pain, apparently, from the physical struggle she had undergone with the deceased. She wore a light-colored suit, a single strand of pearls, and harlequin dark glasses, but though she had had her hair done for the occasion, the impression that she gave was one of uncompromising gruffness, as she truculently regarded both the coroner and the courtroom. Was she willing to testify in the absence of counsel? she was asked. “I can if you want me to,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

In her testimony she contradicted Elisa Boyer’s and the investigating officer’s accounts slightly—she had personally witnessed no resistance on Miss Boyer’s part when the two of them arrived (“She didn’t say a word”)—but for the most part differed in no other significant respect from the previous witnesses. As for the happy coincidence of her having been on the phone at the exact moment that the man broke down the door, she indicated, after a momentary hesitation, that she was not engaged in conversation when he rented the room. “It was shortly after.” It had been, she said, quite a struggle. She was still sore all over and was taking therapy treatments every other day. How far was Mr. Cooke from her when she fired the gun? “He wasn’t too far. He was at close range.” And how did she know she had struck Mr. Cooke? “Because he said, ‘Lady, you shot me,’” she testified in a raspy, dismissively impassive voice. The dress that she had been wearing that night, all splattered with Sam’s blood, was identified and put into evidence. A juror asked if she had a gun permit, and she said that she did. At the conclusion of her testimony, Marty Machat once again attempted to ask a question and was once again refused, and she was dismissed at 2:10
P.M.

After a ten-minute recess, just three additional witnesses were called: a motel resident who had occupied the room next door and thought there might have been a little bit of resistance, or disagreement, when the couple entered their room; the motel owner who had been on the phone with Bertha Franklin; and a police officer who recounted some of the details of the investigation. The motel owner, Evelyn Card, offered testimony that so precisely corroborated her employee’s it might almost have seemed a pas de deux. She had heard everything, right up to the arrival of the police. She had employed Mrs. Franklin for three years, and they spoke on the phone every night. Through Officer Thomas’ testimony it was established that both Miss Boyer and Mrs. Franklin had passed voluntary lie-detector tests. Photographs of the scene were introduced into evidence. Tape recordings of both calls to the police were played. All of the deceased’s recovered possessions were enumerated: his clothing, an Omega wristwatch, the money clip with $108, and some change.

Once again the witness was dismissed by the coroner after the district attorney and members of the jury had concluded their questioning, but this time when Marty Machat raised his voice to object, the coroner momentarily conceded the point. “You may ask one, Mr. Macheck [
sic
],” he said.

“Did you, by any chance,” he asked Officer Thomas, “trace the occupation of the girl, Lisa Boyer?”

“We are not concerned with the occupation of the girl, Mr. Macheck,” the coroner interposed before the officer was able to answer.

After a couple more questions that yielded no more satisfactory response, Allen’s lawyer asked, “Was anything else missing from the clothing that was not found, such as credit cards?”

“I understand,” said Officer Thomas, “from members of his family and Mr. Alexander, that a card carrier, not the wallet, that he carries a bunch of credit cards in, also a driver’s license. To my knowledge this has not been found.” Was a search made of Miss Boyer by the police department? asked the coroner, his interest evidently piqued for the first time by this line of questioning. No, sir, was the officer’s reply, and he was once again about to be dismissed, when the DA jumped in and asked if a search had been made of Miss Boyer’s purse? Which, as it turned out, had been done, yielding only $20, Miss Boyer’s driver’s license, and some miscellaneous papers. None of the cash that Sam was said to have been carrying on him—the thousands of dollars that many people believed he always had on his person, or even the roll of bills that Al Schmitt’s wife, Joan, would recall having seen at Martoni’s—had turned up. But no further follow-up was undertaken, and after little more than two hours of testimony, the case was turned over to the jury, who deliberated for twenty minutes, then returned with a verdict of “justifiable homicide, committed by the said Bertha Franklin in protection of life and property.” When polled individually by the press, the jurors indicated that the strongest evidence in favor of acquittal were the lie-detector tests but that the motel owner Evelyn Card’s testimony helped quite a bit, too. Short of a filmed record of the event, what could be more persuasive than the overheard commission of a crime?