It Takes Two (2 page)

“Sounds like a bunch of real civic leaders,” I said. “Keeping the town safe from invasion by President Truman and Duke Ellington’s band.”

Bud started his sit-ups. “Preacher Pucklet was leading the women. He’s pastor out at the La Belle Church of Apostolic Holiness, where my two aunts go. I recognized him right through his disguise. And I think maybe the reverend preacher-man recognized me. He looked kind of shamefaced-like.”

Bud punctuated his commentary with a series of pauses and grunts. He spoke with the twangy backcountry accent of the Florida interior. Boss came out
beuss
, sheriff
shurf
, disguise
DIS-guys
.

“You going to draw patrol duty every time the Klan unfurls their sheets?”

Trim and dead fit, Bud wasn’t yet out of breath. But the exercise had started tightening his voice. “Use my best judgment,” he huffed. “Keep an eye peeled when need be. For instance, just a couple weeks ago they beat up a…a nice colored man. And somebody did burn a cross. In a schoolteacher’s front yard. Teacher was white, but she was teaching evolution. Was how I heard it.” Bud pulled a couple more sit-ups. “Preacher Pucklet calls evolution godless communism.”

“What about the nice colored man?”

“Drank water out of the wrong fountain at Flossie Hill’s department store.”

“Jesus. That’s a hell of a serious business. Damn serious.”

“Myers cops wouldn’t write up a report. Scared to.”

The beer bottle in my hand was empty. I stood up. “You want a brew?”

He waved me off. “I’d rather we go out for some real breakfast,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?” When I shrugged agreement, he returned to the main subject. “Damn serious if the police, county commissioners and everybody else look the other way when a bunch of no-account crackers start beating up on respectable people.”

I dropped down on one knee close beside him. “Cowboy Bud gonna ride to the rescue? Save the downtrodden? Be a
hee-ro?
”

“Sure, Dan. All by my lonesome.” The sit-ups continued, faster now. “Last night’s march was probably a one-time thing. And I had my orders. To keep hands off. No interference. Not unless…unless a law got absolutely broke—the boss’s law, you understand.”

He got to his feet and began to run in place next to the barbell set. After he’d covered about a quarter of a mile, the pay phone inside the rooming house started ringing. I told him he ought to ignore it. Instead, he trotted to the back door and disappeared.

He was mopping his face with a towel when he returned. “There’s a couple of bodies they want me to look at,” he said, swabbing his big ears. “Street cop is already on the scene. But he’s a rookie, the half-breed they hired in November. Sheriff left word that it’s more than the boy can handle by himself. Switchboard operator says the neighbors called in about a regular shooting match at a tourist court down on Tamiami Trail early this morning. They need me to write up a report.”

“Just a typical Sunday in Myers,” I joked, trying to keep it light. “Only you’ve already worked a weekend shift.” I didn’t want Bud going anywhere—except maybe inside again, and with me. Still watching him towel off, I gathered up the newspaper. The day was already hot for February. “Did you know your nose is sunburned?” I asked, swiping my hand past his sweaty face.

He ignored the caretaking gesture. “I told my switchboard gal,” he said, “how the coroner ought to go and look into it first. She said he’s already on his way.”

“Get hold of the sheriff on the phone,” I said. “Tell him it’s your day off. Tell him you’ve got a wrestling match to take care of.”

Bud threw a couple of shadow punches my way. “Shut up, will you?” he said genially. “Right. Yes. Phone the boss up at the Police Benevolent and Protective Convention in Ocala. Tell him I’m gonna be busy taking a long afternoon nap—with a buddy. He’d like that—like to throw me in the holding tank, by the way. While his secretary types up a felony morals charge and a set of separation papers.” He rubbed his eyes with his fists. “Shit, Dan,” he said. “You got one thing on the brain all the time. You’re like a kid.”

“Two things,” I answered. “You forgot the beer.”

He looked down at the grass, serious. “Stow that, will you?”

“What about Matt Ramos?” I countered. “The switchboard gal couldn’t track him?”

Ramos was the other half of the Lee County detective squad. He was the junior man, hired four months after Bud.

“Matt wanted to take off today,” Bud answered. “Said he needed to carry Delores and the kids out to Buckingham, where she comes from, for some kind of picnic. In-laws and all. Church, maybe. I told him sure.”

“What the hell?” I said. “Didn’t I hear you tell me last Sunday this was gonna be your weekend off? That you were going off shift three days to spend time with me? Which is the reason why I’m not at the hotel counting bath mats.”

His voice, when he answered, came out slightly high. “Sure, Dan. Sure, it’s my weekend off. Today’s Sunday. But Matt’s a married man. A father. Have to give him the benefit. And the Klan deal came up sudden. And so did this shooting.”

I tossed the empty bottle under the hedge. “Keeps slipping my mind,” I said, pissed but resigned. “Every one of you Dick Tracy types can take off Saturdays and Sundays because there’s positively no crime allowed on the Sabbath in Lee. No rape, no aggravated assault, no grand theft. But if some little situation does happen to turn up, it’s always duty day for detective Spencer Wright.”

Bud snapped the damp towel in my direction, grinning. “This is two bodies and a tourist court full of bullets, Dan. Not a shoplifting case. I’ve been called in because I’m available and highly trained. And I like making a decent living. Hell, I like this job. You know what I mean?”

I said sure, that my job at the Caloosa was all fine and dandy too. But I also wanted to spend time with my buddy when we both had days off.

He glanced at me hard. “This is time,” he said. “And it oughtn’t to take all day to write up a Sunday morning shooting.” I folded the towel I’d spread out on the chaise. Bud hefted the unused barbell. “You want me to drop you back at the hotel?” he asked. “Maybe phone you later?”

“I’d rather drive over with you,” I answered. “Otherwise, I’ll just work.”

Scowling, he shook his head. Then, after a moment, he shrugged just as elaborately and said, “Guess it wouldn’t be no harm in that. You figure you could stay out of the way while I check the slaughterhouse?”

When I said I thought I could, he winked and grinned. “We better shower and clean up, then. Slip into some decent clothes.”

“You don’t have any decent clothes,” I answered. “Except that golf shirt of mine, the one you stole right off my back last Tuesday.”

“Hate to break it to you,” he replied, moving toward the house. “You remember that rain the other morning? Had to use your ratty rag to rub down the Jeep.”

I swatted his scarred neck with the rolled newspaper. “Do you realize the emperor of Japan’s former golf pro gave me that shirt? And you used it to wipe off your rust bucket?”

“We wiped Hirohito’s yellow ass,” he said, laughing. “Back when we was in uniform.”

“The good old days, that right, Sarge?” I answered.

“Bull
shit
, Lieutenant,” he replied.

“A shower, though,” I said, knowing this sort of byplay lessened our competitive male-male tension. “That sounds like a hell of a good idea.”

“Shut up, Dan. We don’t have time for that kind of foolishness.”

“Yeah, we do.”

Once we got inside Bud’s room, he stowed the weights under the bed and headed for the shower. When the hot water came on, he adjusted the flow, stripped off his trunks and stepped behind the canvas curtain.

When I dropped the borrowed trunks next to his sweaty ones, my cock flipped up. Bud’s naked ass drew me like a paper clip to a magnet. I stepped up behind him into the long, narrow tub.

“Soap your back?” I said, touching his neck and shoulders. He stood a little taller. “We gotta hurry,” he said. “My back’s OK.” He turned to face me, the shower spraying his neck and shoulders. His eyes were shut tight, his nipples erect, and his hard cock pointed up like a coat rack. He let me soap his chest and balls for a few moments, then turned slowly away.

“You got any shampoo?” I said, lathering up my underarms, gut and crotch.

“Bar soap’s all I use.” Bud reached back to touch my erection with both hands. “You’re soapy enough, Lieutenant. Ready to rinse off?”

Moving sideways, he edged past me to the rear of the tub. I stepped forward under the spray. My stiff cock nuzzled his hard ass as we switched places. While I rinsed down and turned to face him again, he scraped water off his arms and chest with cupped hands. His dick looked like a stubby pipe left out in the rain. Stepping over the rim of the tub, he began to towel himself off.

We hadn’t said anything else. Neither of us was willing to risk a definite refusal. And I couldn’t think of any more jokes. By the time I was halfway dry, Bud had put on black socks and khaki boxer shorts and was buttoning the cuffs of a freshly ironed business shirt. A cotton pup tent rose between his open shirttails.

I stepped into my Navy-issue shorts. When they settled around my waist, my white tent matched his tan one. Pulling up my pants, I forced my tent pole toward the floor.

“That a Klan hood you’re wearing down there, Sarge?” I said, pointing with my thumb. “Over your cattle egret?”

Already blushing, he grinned when he answered. “Could be a new-model Hotpoint stove, feels like to me. Might have to try it out sometime.”

Flattening his tent as I had, he buttoned the front of his shirt, zipped up his pants and buckled his belt. “Good thing we got this situation on ice now. You ready?”

“Meaning we’ll keep it for later?”

Touching my shoulder gently, he turned me toward the door. “I didn’t say that.”

“I like your cow bird better without the hood.”

“I like you better in my Jeep,” Bud said. “Let’s go.”

Rookie cop Walter Hurston was taking abuse from an angry white woman when we arrived. Hurston was twenty years old, solidly built and just over five feet tall. The half Filipino grandson of a pioneer Lee County family, he had shiny black hair, weightlifter’s arms and an olive complexion.

Hurston kept his chocolate-almond eyes on the woman’s flapping jaw until Bud moved in behind him. Though well past the end of a long graveyard shift, the creases in the rookie’s white service shirt and fawn trousers remained sharply defined. His spit-shined oxfords caught the mid-morning sun like smoked mirrors.

The woman looked half a century older than the rookie. Despite the early hour, she’d gotten herself up in high heels, a chenille dressing gown—hot pink with lemon yellow lapels—and enough rouge and lipstick to cover a fire truck. Her unnaturally blond hair was rolled into a half moon. Big doll’s eyes—bright as mirrors and rimmed by sooty lashes—clicked open and shut behind oversize lenses. Too many years under the rugged sun had blotched and creased her face and neck. She was a native of Montreal.

Bud had parked the Jeep sideways under a water oak on the cross street. Through the windshield, I had a clear view down the long colonnade of the Royal Plaza Motor Lodge. The one-story structure was built to resemble a Spanish monastery, hence its red tile roof and yellow stucco walls. Every iron-hinged door, except the one guarded by Hurston, was shut. Three cars were parked on the tarmac out front: a dusty Dodge coupe, a prewar Chevy and a new Ford sedan with the factory sticker still in place. The shiny black Ford matched Hurston’s shoes.

When Bud flashed his badge, the woman’s attention shifted quickly. “I’m za manager,” she announced in a heavy French accent. “And I muz inspect za damage to za room wisout no delay. Before I call za insurance and my owners. You don’t believe me, you ask anybody. I have my duties here too. He can’t keep me out.” She gestured toward Hurston, raising both hands in frustration or polite fatigue. “A big officer on za beat, and always polite before zis. He say he doesn’t even has a search warrant. I am Madame Claudette Marie Jenkins. I rent to respectable visitors only. No locals wisout luggage. No police—none, not once, of any color—were ever summoned here.”

Like pretty much everything else in the Deep South in the late 1940s, Florida law enforcement was racially segregated. President Truman’s integration of the armed forces in 1948 had been tepidly matched by a few progressive cities in the region. But Fort Myers wasn’t one of them. Excepting three black maintenance men, two light-skinned officers of Cuban descent and the Amerasian Hurston, the Fort Myers and Lee County police forces were as lily-white as the most venomous Klansman could wish for.

Mrs. Jenkins’ motor lodge, like her freckled skin and some of her clientele, was unofficially beige. Catering mostly to discreet Northern and Midwestern tourists who arrived with confirmed reservations, the Royal Plaza occupied a choice corner along the four-block stretch of South Tamiami Trail that divided the white section of Fort Myers from what was then called Colored Town.

After worried neighbors and one terrified guest phoned the police to report predawn gunshots, the police dispatcher sent Hurston to investigate. (Under the direction of a white sergeant, Hurston and the two Cubans were routinely assigned to Colored Town.) Hurston was no dummy. One glance at the bodies told him he needed to call for a backup. A
white
backup.