Mississippi Sissy (41 page)

When I got to Carl's, I tried to insert the key he had given me into the lock on his front door but my hands were shaking so badly I was having a difficult time getting the lock to work. The tremor from my ankle seemed to have risen now through my whole body. It had taken all my powers of concentration to get to his apartment, and now that I was there I had begun to hyperventilate to such an extent that I felt as if I were about to faint. The doorknob turned in my hand. I flipped on a light. I ran to Carl's bedroom where he was already asleep. “Ca-ca-ca-ca-ca . . . ,” I tried to get his name out but sounded instead like those flummoxed crows that flew toward Mom and Pop and me, the whole complaining flock of them, on that awful November afternoon of my childhood. Carl awoke at the sound of my stuttering attempt to say his name. He sat straight up in bed. When it dawned on him I really was there in his bedroom and was in distress, he jumped to his feet. He was well over six feet tall. His hair was so blond and his skin so fair he almost glowed before me the dark. His uncircumcised penis was half erect from the dream I had awakened him from. There was a lupine sharpness to his features, even when bleary like this from sleep. His eyes were icy blue. He put his hands on my shoulders and tried to calm my trembling. “It's Fr-frank,” I was able to say. “Something has happened to Fr-frank. He's d-d-dead, I think. I'm n-not sure. Awful. It's awful.”

Carl dressed quickly and got enough information out of me to know that there was blood involved and that what I had witnessed sounded sadomasochistic, certainly traumatic, most likely tragic. He told me to follow him in his car over to Bleak House in my Comet. When we got there, he next told me to wait in the hallway while he
checked the bedroom. He came right back out and seemed, even paler, about to be sick. We stared into each other's eyes for several long seconds and knew that no one else would ever know what we were feeling right then, right there. We did not have to speak. He took deep breaths, as if he were about to dive under water, and went back into the bedroom. He came back out and put his arms around me. “I think we're too late, buddy,” he whispered in my ear. “I think we're too late. I'm going to call the police.”

I stared at Margaret Alexander's smiling face and listened to Carl tell the dispatcher the address of Bleak House. Within a few minutes we heard two police cars arrive. Carl went running outside and hurried the policemen, a Sergeant Bartlett and an Officer Russell, into the house. Sergeant Bartlett, after checking on Frank, then told Officer Russell to get back on his car radio and tell the ambulance it wasn't needed. He next telephoned for someone from the coroner's office to be sent over, as well as investigators from the Jackson Police Department's Crimes Against Persons unit and the Mobile Crime Lab. Soon the house was teeming with people. Frank's body was wheeled out on a gurney. He was still lying facedown, still bound, but a sheet had been thrown haphazardly over him. I was sitting on the living room's low-slung sofa and the last I saw of him was his elbow, bent back behind him where his hands were bound, sticking out from under the sheet. Carl was by my side with his arm around me. An investigator named Fondren arrived on the scene and introduced himself to us. He wanted to ask me some questions. He started to sit in Frank's reading chair. “Don't!” I suddenly blurted at him. “No. Don't sit there. Just don't. Don't.”

“It's okay, son,” he said. “It's okay. I don't have to sit,” he softly said, and came and stood in front of the coffee table. “You're the one who found the body?”

“Yes, he is,” said Carl.

“And who are you?” Fondren asked him.

“I'm a good friend of Kevin's,” Carl said. “His name is Kevin Sessums.
I'm Carl Davis. We are both friends of Frank's. Kevin is living here.”

“Oh, you are,” said Fondren, interested enough in that detail to make a note on a pad he pulled from his hip pocket. “And where were you all day, Kevin?”

“Forest. I was in Forest with some friends. We went to church,” I said.

“Good for you, son. That's where you should be on Sunday,” Fondren said.

“Sir, this front bedroom looks ransacked,” a young policeman told him.

“No, that's my room,” I said. “I'm a pig.”

Fondren smiled and made another note. “Do you see anything out of the ordinary in the house, Kevin?” he asked. “Anything at all.”

“These,” I said, pointing at the comic books on the coffee table between us. “Frank doesn't read comic books and these weren't here when I left today.” I started to hand him the top one,
Doomsday
+
1
.

“Don't touch that,” Investigator Fondren said. He said it again: “Don't touch that.”

“Excuse me,” I said. I went into the bathroom. I locked the door.

“Don't flush!” he called after me. “There might be a salvageable fingerprint on the handle. Don't touch that, either. Don't touch it.”

I lay on the floor, fetal-like, and cooled my face against the tile. “Don't touch that,” I had heard that
Wait Until Dark
man say to me as the actors who only pretended to be police were scaring Audrey Whatshername up on the screen inside the Town Theatre when I was eleven. “Oh wouldn't it be lo-ver-ly . . . ,” I quietly sang to myself. “Lo-ver-ly. Lo-ver-ly. Lo-ver-ly. Wouldn't it be lov-er-ly . . .” Unlike that day at
Wait Until Dark,
I did not have to pee. I did not have to cry. I did not have to vomit or shit. I just wanted to be alone, to do something secret like lying in the fetal position with my face on Frank's bathroom floor. I needed a secret to calm me down. Secrecy
was how I coped. I turned over and put the other side of my face on the cool tiles.

Carl knocked on the door. “Are you all right in there?” he asked. “You want me to come in?”

“No, I'll be out in a minute,” I told him, my voice echoing slightly against the tiles and mixing with the static from the walkie-talkies on the cops' belts that crackled out there around Carl. I stood and washed my face with cold water. When I opened the bathroom door, I saw the young policeman who had been in my room now sitting in Frank's reading chair. I grabbed him by his shoulders and pulled him up. “Get the fuck off,” I said. “Don't sit there.”

The rookie looked over at Fondren. “Maybe you should take the boy to your place for the night,” Fondren told Carl. “Does he have anywhere else to go?” Carl nodded no. I hated being talked about as if I were not there. “I have all your information here,” Fondren said. “I'll contact you tomorrow, Mr. Davis. I'm sorry about your friend.”

When Carl and I got back to his apartment we climbed into bed nude, as we always did when we slept together, and, still in shock, I fell fast asleep in his arms. The next morning, Carl, having been awake all night watching me sleep, told me I should telephone my grandparents and let them know about Frank before they read it in the newspaper or heard about it on the television. I didn't bother to get dressed. I walked into his kitchen where the phone was and called home. Mom picked up. “Hello, it's Kevin,” I told her. I did not try to make small talk. “Mom, I have something I have to tell you. Frank has been m-m-m-m. . . .” I tried to say “murdered” but could not get the word out of my mouth. Finally I began to cry, then sob, then fall to my knees, my naked body sliding down the wall till I sat crumpled on the floor. I handed Carl the receiver I held over my head. Still naked himself, he took it from me and explained to my grandmother what had happened and that he was taking care of me, for her not to worry, that I was going to be okay. I could not stop crying. Carl
picked me up and carried me back to his bed. We began to make love and for a few blissful moments my tears subsided, but then I started crying again and could not stop. After a half an hour or so of my increasingly convulsive sobs, Carl called his doctor who agreed to come over and give me a shot to help me sleep.

My eyes flew open several hours later. I had one thought only: Frank's trunk of pornography. I had promised him I would get rid of it if anything ever happened to him.
I had promised him.
I sprang from Carl's bed and walked into the living room. He was napping on his sofa. The afternoon's edition of the
Jackson Daily News
was on his coffee table. A banner headline was above the name of the paper across the very top of the front page: D
R.
J
ONES
, ‘L
ITTLE
P
ROFESSOR OF
P
lNEY
W
OODS
,' D
IES AT
92. Jones was an African-American educator who had started Piney Woods Country Life School as an open-air classroom with fallen trees and logs as classroom benches and built it into an exemplary institution of learning for his people during the darkest days of segregation. Right below Dr. Jones's headlined obituary was a huge picture of Frank in a black turtleneck and herringbone sports jacket. Underneath the picture was his name and under that: SLAIN AT His HOME. The headline next to it read, NEWS ARTS EDITOR FOUND MURDERED. The story took up most of the front page. I picked up the paper and read the first few paragraphs:

Frank Hains, 49,
Jackson Daily News
arts editor and a well-known figure in Mississippi drama circles, was found murdered early today in his 616 Webster St. home.

A police spokesman said death apparently resulted from a blow with a blunt instrument on the back of his head.

Police information officer Sgt. Johnny Dickson said at noon there were no suspects and no leads in the case.

Dickson said the body was discovered about 1:12 A.M. by
Kevin Sessums, 19, a theater associate who was residing temporarily with Hains.

I stopped reading the story when I saw my name and dropped the paper onto the coffee table. Carl woke. I explained to him that I had made Frank a promise about the trunk of pornography and I had to go to Bleak House right then, that minute, before the police found it. Carl tried to talk me out of it—he didn't think I was quite myself yet—but he was so exhausted by then that he let me go. He also knew me well enough to realize there was no stopping me. It would have taken another call to his doctor and another shot to keep me from walking out his door and getting in my Comet.

When I got to Bleak House it was still overrun with police. Yellow crime-scene tape was up around the front steps. A photographer started following me and snapping my picture. “Are you the house-boy?” he started shouting. “Did you do it? Did you kill him? Are you the murderer? You queer, too?” I pushed him out of the way. “Faggot!” he muttered under his breath as I stepped over the tape. I walked up onto the porch. A policeman tried to stop me but I pushed past him, also. He chased me inside but Fondren was there with a colleague named Covington. They were coming out of the record library and Fondren told the policeman it was okay of me to be there. Every room in Bleak House was covered in white fingerprinting dust as the police continued to try to find any clues to the murder. I took Fondren aside and explained to him about the trunk. He said that they had already found it.

“I promised Frank I'd get that out of here if anything ever happened to him,” I begged. “It was really important to him that his family not find that. Please. Let me take it with me.”

“Son, you can't remove anything from a crime scene,” Fondren explained to me. Then he wanted me to tell his partner Covington what I'd told him about the comic books still there on the coffee
table. I did as I was told, then begged again for them to give me the trunk of pornography. “Don't worry,” said Fondren. “I'll make sure his family won't find it or see anything that's in there. I promise. Let me walk you out to your car. There's something I want to talk to you about. Is that a Comet you're driving?”

He and I climbed into the front seat of my car. Neither of us spoke at first, but sat silently and watched all the activity at Bleak House. He then turned and looked out his window on the passenger side at all the gravestones. “That's a Jewish cemetery,” I told him. “Frank loved living across from that. He thought it was beautiful.”

“I'm beginning to see Mr. Hains was one of a kind,” he said. “I want to ask a favor of you, son. We've ruled you out for the murder. Your alibi's airtight. But when I start getting questions about you from the press—especially the TV guys, they're already curious about you—I want to say we've ruled nobody out. I won't say you're a suspect but I won't say you're not one, either. We've got an APB out on someone we're interested in. A real piece'a work. We want him to think we're not onto him so he'll slip up and we can throw the net over him. We think he might have gone down toward New Orleans. He was spotted around McComb. Is that okay with you? It might get a little nasty. Mr. Davis tells me you're about to move to New York City anyway. Can you handle it? Would you do that for us so we can catch your friend's murderer?”

I didn't even think about it. “Sure,” I said, and shrugged. He was right. I was moving to New York in a matter of weeks. What did I care what a bunch of Mississippians thought of me?

“Thank you, son,” said Fondren. “I guarantee you we're gonna get some justice here. You take care of yourself.” I had a hard time doing that, for my next few days in Jackson were a blur of scandal and grief and fear. Fondren was right: The TV guys kept calling me the “house-boy,” a moniker that had seemed to stick, and would not stop asking questions about me as they fanned the sadomasochistic and homosexual
aspects of the case. If one only watched television, one would think I was the murderer.

________________

A week after my conversation with Fondren, an African-American acquaintance of Frank's named Larry Bullock was arrested in New Orleans, where he had fled, while sitting in the shade of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Bullock was a drifter who had ended up in Mississippi working at the blood bank located next door to the offices of the
Jackson Daily News
and
Clarion-Ledger.
He was from Indiana, where he had already been arrested for rape and sodomy, as well as two murders for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. I had to return to Jackson in February to testify at the trial, taking a break from rehearsals at Juilliard, where I had been cast as Edmund in
King Lear.
Bullock's defense was to put Frank on trial and prove that Frank was a promiscuous homosexual and that anybody could have killed him because he had so many sexual partners. The judge even allowed the trunk of pornography to be admitted as evidence. With my grandfather sitting in the courtroom, I had to go through the trunk and identify each piece of pornography I myself had looked at before; a sampling was then passed among the jury, most of whom averted their eyes in disgust when the magazines were placed in their hands. The comic books were also admitted as evidence—they bore Bullock's fingerprints—as was his admission of guilt to his half-blind cellmate, George “Tangle-Eye” Lamb, another acquaintance of Frank's, a character that Miss Welty could not have imagined but whom Flannery O'Connor most likely could have. Bullock had warned Tangle-Eye that he would kill him and his family, “even, he say, if he had to go to Timbuktu to find somebody to do it,” if “Tangle-Eye” testified against him. But Tangle-Eye took the stand anyway, because “Larry threaten my mama and nobody threaten my mama, that ain't right. Naw, sir. Larry kilt Mr. Frank. He tolt me so. Mr.
Frank be a right-nice man. A
right-nice man.”
Jane Petty and Miss Capers and Karen Gilfoy and Miss Welty, in their capacity as Jackson's reigning doyennes, had skirted the rules and pooled their resources to hire a lawyer friend of theirs to aid in the prosecution of Bullock, not trusting the elected district attorney to fully press the case because of its homosexual aspects. Their lawyer friend—a man whose last name, appropriately, was Royals—told the jury during his summation that he understood their unease at the subject of Frank Hains's homosexuality. “But try the correct issue. Don't try Frank Hains. He's already been executed,” he said, as if maybe that were a good idea if the jurors themselves were thinking such a thought. Bullock was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. After the trial Royals told me not to worry about the sentence. “He's such a crazy mean son of a bitch, Bullock'll be dead soon,” he said with a cold certainty. “Somebody in the state pen at Parchman'll kill ‘im.” Royals proved clairvoyant. A few months later, while exercising in the prison yard, Bullock was surrounded by a circle of inmates while the one he had singled out to be his “bitch,” the tiniest but toughest one in lockup, stuck a shiv deep into his gut and walked it around the circumference of his waist until he was disemboweled. Mom mailed me a clipping from the
Clarion-Ledger
that told me of Bullock's murder. “Remember Galatians,
Chapter 6
, Verse 7,” she wrote on the note she attached to the clipping. A message to Bullock? To Frank? To me? “‘Be not deceived,' ” she wrote. “‘God is not mocked: for whatever a man soweth that shall he also reap.' Have you found a church to go to yet in New York City? You are in my prayers several times a day. Find a church. It would put my mind at ease. Find a church, and go.”