It Takes Two (17 page)

Slim collected dishes. She then set down forks and three slices of pie. Refilling my Coke and the iced teas, she said there was plenty more pie. Half turning, she greeted a pair of businessmen who were just entering the room. “Take a table anywhere, gents.”

We ate a while in silence. Then Bud leaned back, a smile glinting. “You don’t think,” he whispered, “the colored boy had a hand in this?”

I couldn’t help laughing.

Doc put his spoon down. “Bad, bad joke. But no, I don’t think so. There was no suggestion of any such thing on his body or linen, which were immaculate, I’ll have to say. Speaking of hands, you probably won’t be surprised that I found not a trace of powder on Hillard Norris’s hands. Conversely, there were powder burns on the Negro’s right hand.”

Bud glanced at the table of newcomers. “May want to keep the volume down, Doc.”

“Even though Officer Hurston found Norris with the gun in his hand?” I said. “And you photographed it?”

“Even though he had been shot through his right wrist,” Doc agreed. “I would stipulate that it was resting in his hand. I can’t say for sure that he ever gripped it. What with the Mrs. disturbing the weapon as she did. But I don’t believe Norris fired a weapon Sunday morning. A very unusual situation, in my opinion, whatever tree you bandy it up.”

Slim had returned with checks. Stopping behind Bud and leaning down, she said, just low enough for us to hear, “Your switchboard called, sugar pie. They want you back at the office, pronto. Whyn’t you give me a call later?”

Bud nodded once, picked up all three checks, dropped three one dollar bills on the table and rose to his feet. “This is mine. I got to get on back and I thank you kindly for the company.”

As he swung around, he almost collided with a late-arriving businessman. When Bud stepped back, waving the man forward, the gent ignored him and stuck his hand out toward Doc. “Lem, Lem,” he called. “So good to see you.”

The man’s cadaverous breath fouled the air between Doc and me. He had a red, overheated face, low forehead and thick, mouse-brown hair swept back over his ears like a coonskin cap.

Doc stood up, stepped back and introduced us, pronouncing all three names slowly and carefully. The man, Coleman Bucklew, grinned and gave Bud a man-to-man handshake. His yellow-brown teeth looked false; his tongue and lower lip were stained from smoke and nicotine.

“Work for the sheriff, do you, son? I been a supporter of your boss for many, many years. I count Gene Hollipaugh among my real close personal friends. So lemme know if I can ever do anything for you.”

It was another story when Bucklew realized who I was. Instead of shaking my outstretched hand, he took a step back and pursed his mouth. “Sorry to say I can’t, in all good conscience, welcome you to our little town of Myers. Perhaps if we met under different circumstances? But I have to object to the cesspool of mongreloid carnality and sin you’ve come here to run. May you drown in it.”

Here was a man I really wanted to deck. In the Navy, no matter how many new assholes an angry superior may bite in a subordinate’s butt, decorum dictates that the chewing-out be delivered with at least a minimum of respect. Officers are trained to consider the human being as well as the fuck-up. So I didn’t say anything at first, which was OK because Bucklew wasn’t finished.

“The honest, churchgoing Christians of Lee County,” he continued, “of which I hope I may be included as a believer, do not appreciate the kind of visitors your kind of place attracts. They are not good for business. And we hear that unsavory entertainment is presented.”

By that time, having caught my breath, I asked Mr. Bucklew if he’d had an opportunity to visit the Caloosa lately.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he answered.

In that case
, I thought,
perhaps you might like to satisfy yourself that the hotel is no Sodom and Gomorrah
. “Hearsay and gossip are no substitute for first-hand information,” I answered, my tone perhaps a little too sharp. “You would honor me,” I concluded, smiling as best I could, “if you’d come for lunch or dinner, as my guest, and bring your wife and family. Any time. Tell them to bring swimsuits if they like.”

Bucklew looked as if he wanted to spit on my shoes. “Such an arrangement isn’t possible,” he said. “I wouldn’t see them dead there. And good day to you.”

Bud and I met in a booth at the Legion Hall bar late that afternoon. He’d sounded frustrated and angry when he called from a gas-station pay phone thirty minutes earlier. So I bought him a beer and let him talk.

The boss had hauled him on the carpet as soon as he returned from lunch. He’d been asked, point-blank, what connections he’d turned up between the Ku Klux Klan and the killings at the Royal Plaza Motor Lodge.

“Hell,” Bud said. “There’s connections from here to Punta Gorda. But nothing to take to a grand jury. Not yet, anyhow.”

I dug into a bowl of peanuts. “And you don’t want to share your snitch with him?”

“Last thing I’d do. You know me better’n that. Hell, I keep my word.”

“So you ate your boss’s shit rather than tell him what we both know—that Willene Norris sent the Klan over to my hotel last night? That she’s your only suspect in her husband’s death? That she fucked up prime evidence in a homicide case? And that she aimed a piece of that evidence at me and fired. Hell, man, she could’ve killed me and you both, not to mention Doc’s trusties.”

“Mose and Drackett? Hell, those boys been dodgin’ bullets since they was in diapers.”

“You came onto the firing line late, Sarge. You weren’t out there minding your own business like a sitting duck. You weren’t looking down the barrel of a fucking loaded pistol when a crazed, bloodthirsty bitch started firing in all directions.”

Bud scooped up a handful of nuts and began feeding them into his mouth. “Wasn’t any more blood spilled. You didn’t get much more’n a scratch.”

“Maybe your boss needs to eat a plate of shit himself. You gonna go easy on the bitch just because she’s rich and owns half the town? Hell, man, I had to qualify with a sidearm. I could’a put the bitch down if I’d had a weapon. Hell, I might take on the Klan next time. I mean, I admit you did keep me from getting hit, and…” Halfway through my prissy blowout, Bud started shaking his head and grinning. “You’re going in three directions. It’s hearsay is all it is. You want to know what else the boss said? Or do you want to do all the talking? Lieutenant?”

“Sound off, Sarge. Don’t let me interrupt.”

“What the boss told me, point-blank, is that there is positively no connection between the Klan and the dead men. And not to waste time looking for one. And that if I’m having trouble handling two important assignments without confusing the one with the other, he’ll give me all the help he can.”

When I let the air stay empty, Bud added, “Like a kick in the butt, is what he meant. And a one-way ticket back home to La Belle if I don’t hear him loud and clear.”

“Simmer down,” I said, suddenly worried. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Not right now, I guess. But I am gonna chat some more with Leon Featherstone.”

“Thought maybe you should’ve collared Mr. Snitch again this afternoon—while he’s still willing to talk.”

“Too busy. Spent my time readin’ files on the Klan and the Norris family. Not much there.”

“When you gonna chat with Willene?”

“I’d rather line up my other ducks first. She ain’t gonna want to talk to me anyhow, wouldn’t think.”

“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t think so either. Guess you could drag her in front of a grand jury.” Then, remembering Asdeck’s instructions, I added that, besides Willene Norris, there might be some other connection between the shooting and the cross-burning, something we’d catch if we sifted through the whole thing again. “My boss wants us to keep our ears open for him,” I said.

Now it was Bud’s turn to turn silent. After about ten seconds he said gently, “You and the admiral been talking about this? And he wants me reporting to you? And you gonna feed it all to him? About my official duties? Huh.”

I was about to mouth off again, say something like “Fuck you, Sarge.” But then I got it. Bud was ready to cross over. He’d called from a pay phone and not his office. He was telling me everything he knew. And I was about to throw it back in his face. Asdeck had suggested that I entangle my buddy in a compromising way. Well, here he was, as nippy and submissive as a puppy. We might as well have been lying chest to chest on a beach somewhere, wrestling like heavy-eyed teenagers.

So I kept my answer slow and off-hand. “The admiral says it sounds to him like the sheriff may be covering for the Klan. Could be some good reason for it.”

Bud said, “Yeah?”

“And it sounds to me like that’s what you’re saying too.”

“Right. Yes.”

“The admiral first said he wondered if you’d give us a background report on Sheriff Hollipaugh’s deep-down racial attitudes, what he says and thinks in private—you know, about Negroes, integrated hotel staffs, the white-sheet brigade, things like that.”

“Hell,” Bud answered, “I bet even the man’s wife don’t know. He’s a politician. He’ll say whatever he needs to to get reelected.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I nixed that. The admiral said he had another way of checking.”

“You think maybe your boss is Klan?”

“The opposite. But I figure he wouldn’t set up a business without buying whatever kind of insurance was required.”

“And he’d need a local agent to write the policy?”

My balls went cold for the first time in the conversation. I sucked down two long swallows of beer before I spoke. “You’re thinking maybe our bosses already know all they need to about each other?”

“They could be checking up on us. Or on each other. To them, we’re just ground level grunts. Between ’em, they could be running a two-reel lawn mower. With our asses as grass.”

“No,” I said. “I trust the boss. He knows me inside out.”

“Not your, ah… You don’t mean your private stuff?”

That stopped me. But Asdeck didn’t have many secrets from me either. Not sexual secrets, anyway.

So I said, “Yeah, sure. He knows what I like. I told you, he’s liberal.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” Bud said, followed by, “He knows you’re a…that? And he don’t mind?”

No, I said. Not as far as I could tell.

Maybe I should have told Bud about my plan to hire him right then. Maybe it would have saved us a lot of trouble.

But instead I just said that I wanted to spend another night with him and we could talk about it then. And he said yeah, we’d get together. And we left it at that.

Back at the office, I phoned Wanda Limber to discuss a “special” surprise party for the boss. No doubt I was overcompensating a bit.

“Good to see you last night,” I said.

“Same here. Didn’t know you were such a high stepper.”

“You busy this evening?” I said, getting right to the point. “You and your friend Betty?”

“Never too busy for you, Dan.”

“This is for the boss, Wanda. Special favor, OK? Meet us in the club around 7:30. Let me know the charges later.”

“You mean Bruce Asdeck?” she said. “You know I know him? He and my husband Butch were at Ford Island together. And we’ve seen each other a time or two since then. What do you have in mind?”

They’d seen each other a time or two
. Wanda had a nice way of letting me know things. She was a lady, no doubt about it, right down to her matched pearls and closed-mouth discretion. She also had a wicked sense of humor. She told me once that men consort with women partly because their own hairy hands and thick fingers never whisper, “More, more, more, big boy.”

She and I understood each other. “What about Betty?” I asked. “Bruce ever seen her?”

Wanda said Betty was new in town and she didn’t think so. “OK, Betty just might let it slip to the admiral,” I said, “that she’s been reading the Kinsey report. She could wonder out loud how anybody, even a scientist, could watch a man and woman actually doing it. She’d have to sound pretty embarrassed about the subject. Probably she could say that no good woman would even want to witness such an act. Bruce can take it from there. There’s a room-service pantry with peepholes next to his suite. He’ll expect us to take a look after they get started.”

Wanda laughed silkily. “I like it. Let me talk to Betty. I don’t see any problem. She can dress like the president of the Boston Junior League, and flutter those big, dark eyelashes.”

Wanda knew her trade. All of this was fairly standard. I was about to say goodbye when she added, using the little-boy diminutive I didn’t like, “Danny, what about you and Betty mixing it up sometime soon? Or I could bring another girl with us tonight. You’re too shy. You ought to loosen up and have fun once in a while yourself. What do you do? Bottle it?”

“Bottle it, that’s right. And ship it home. Seriously, Wanda, I’ve been busy. OK, and tell Betty that Bruce is the athletic type. He doesn’t require anything special. Just keep a light on. She should stick around as long as he likes. Use her judgment. Good time to be had by all.”