Roots of Murder (19 page)

On her way out, Nell told Dolan that when Carrie arrived, she could assist him in any odious task he could come up with. She didn't quite use those words, settling for something more innocuous like “the
long-neglected
filing,” but her meaning was clear. With a mental squaring of her shoulders, she said he should tell Carrie she needed to talk to her today. Her duty done, she was out the door.

She hadn't bothered to call ahead about visiting hours, knowing she was likely to get in if she was there but could easily be put off over the phone. She gauged almost ten in the morning to be early enough to not run into lunch but late enough to be beyond the morning routines best kept from visitors, like bed pan emptying and denture brushing.

Many of the original details of the old building had been preserved, including a
carved-wood
reception area that wouldn't have looked out of place in a private club catering to an older generation of men. Nell was relieved to note the public areas were neat and smelled vaguely of pine cleaner, or perhaps the whispering pines that had been left to grow tall on the grounds.

The woman behind the reception desk looked as if she could have been carved out of pale, sunless wood. She had thin lips that might disappear altogether if she dared smile. She didn't risk it as Nell approached.

“Hello, I'm here to see Penny March,” Nell announced.

“Miss March? Is she expecting you?” The woman accented the Miss a little too hard, as if Penny March had failed not only by getting old, but also by ageing without marrying.

“I would think so,” Nell answered. She would think whatever she wanted in situations like this. Right now she was thinking it was possible Marcus had alerted Penny March to her visit.

“Visiting hours don't really start for another fifteen minutes.”

“That's fine. I'll wait,” Nell replied without moving, making it clear she would wait right here where the lipless woman would have to constantly be annoyed by her presence.

That seemed a greater burden than reception pay demanded. “Miss March is out on the deck.”

“The deck is this way?” Nell inquired, as offering directions didn't seem part of the woman's duties.

A nod was all the response she got.

At the far end of the hall, a glass door showcasing the sun in the pines seemed close enough to the direction of the nod for Nell to feel officially sanctioned.

Her guess was correct; the door led out to a wooden deck covering the entire back of the building. On one side, engrossed in a card game, were three women and one man. Nell started toward them, but then noticed a single woman at the far corner. Although given the numbers it was likely that Penny March was among the card players, Nell crossed to the lone woman.

“It's a beautiful day, isn't it,” the woman said as Nell approached. Then she added, “Is it visiting time already or did you manage to slip by the Medusa?”

“Told her I'd wait standing right in front of her. So I've managed to get in all of fifteen minutes early.”

“A rule breaker. I like that in a woman.”

“I'm looking for Penny March.”

“How about Nickel Waltz? Quarter Tango? It does sound like something the local band should be playing, doesn't it?”

“You're Penny March?” Nell asked, guessing only the owner would be so free with her name.

“I am. In the living flesh. Or what's left of it after
eighty-seven
years. And you are?”

“Nell McGraw. I'm with the
Pelican Bay Crier
.”

“I've been hoping you—someone like you—would come. Those poor children.” The day remained bright, but her face changed abruptly as if a cloud had raced across the sun.

“Which children?” Nell asked softly. She pulled over a chair to sit down next to her.

“The ones in today's paper. The ones found in the woods.”

“Do you know who they were?”

“No, I don't know who they were, but I think I know what put them there.”

“Murder?” Nell queried, leaning in closer.

But Penny March, too, had to learn to trust her. “How did you find me?” she countered.

“Marcus Fletcher suggested I talk to you.”

“Did he say why?”

“No, just that I needed to talk with you.”

“And how is Marcus doing?

“He's doing well enough to run for mayor.”

“Good. Then I'd best live long enough to vote. It's been a while since I've seen him. You know it just isn't done, a man of his age and skin color visiting a woman of my age and skin color. Medusa follows him around like he might steal a bed pan.”

“Still?” Nell asked.

“Do you really think people outlive their bigotry?”

“I would hope that at least some people could change,” Nell re
plied.

“Some do; some harden and pass it on. She does call him Mr. Fletcher, but I think that's only because she can't pronounce Marcus.”

“And you have to live here in her power.”

The old woman shook her head. “She has no power over me. Oh, she can do things like make my visitors hew to the rules, the petty
chest-thumping
the truly powerless have. If I care at all, it's about how sad that she does these small things. They have no effect, yet she keeps on doing them as if she has nothing else in her life.”

Nell nodded, then got back to her story. “Why were those bodies left in the woods?”

“It won't seem like we're going there, but we are.” Penny March turned to face Nell directly, her eyes a clear, penetrating blue. “I was born two decades before this building was built, all shiny and modern at the time. Just as well; I'm glad not to die in the place I was born. That seems fit for homes but not impersonal hospitals. Born here in Pelican Bay, grew up here, lived here, and will die here. The most adventurous thing I did was serve in the Army during the war. Korea. My father was furious I signed up before my brothers. I bring that up because that experience taught me I didn't want to be a
stay-at
-home baby maker.

“There weren't many careers open to women back at the time, so I took what I got and started working in the records department in the courthouse. Back then it was small enough I did a little of everything: property taxes, even traffic tickets. Anything that was a record and had to go somewhere official. In 1959, a Mr. Albert Dunning came in to head the department. Of course no one considered promoting a woman to run the place. By no one, I mean not even me.

“But Mr. Dunning was … not a nice man, and he wanted more than his station would bring. At first it was easy. He just tightened the rules without warning, which wasn't nice, but they were the rules. Any late property taxes got hit with a fee, even if they were just a day late. He waved them, of course, for the important people. I remember him saying, ‘They're too busy to get it in on time. But those others have no excuse.' He let the Pickings go for two whole years once. Some people could barely scrape together the tax, let alone a penalty fee. They got more and more behind, until their property was put up for tax sale. Mr. Dunning would always notify some of the ‘important' people he thought might be interested in the property. I can't prove money exchanged hands, but I know some of them never appeared in the paper. Some people claimed they never got proper notice, so that makes me even wonder if all the letters made it to the post office.

“Some people did very well with the property they acquired. Did you know Lamont Vincent? He bought the property on the other side of city hall for several hundred dollars in back taxes. It was a beautiful old house, in disrepair. He left it to rot for a few years, until a timely fire burned down what was left, just as the city was looking for more property for the office complex. He made close to thirty thousand dollars off of it.

“Jeremiah Billings. He was old and frail. And colored. They had owned that land for generations. When it was due, he was too sick to come in to pay. Mr. Flanagan, my old boss, would never have minded. “He'll get it next month,” was what he'd have said. But Mr. Dunning slapped him with a penalty. It broke my heart to tell that frail old man that he owed not just the taxes but a fine on top. I remember him standing there saying, “But, Miss March, I always pay, you know I always pay.” I pulled ten dollars out of my purse and gave it to him. It was all I had and didn't cover the fine. He paid me first the next month, but he was still behind, so he got another penalty. He would have caught up in the summer, when he made the harvest, but that was too many months away.

“He lost his property in February, a cold hard month for a man to be put out, everything he worked for gone.” Penny March was silent, perhaps contrasting her old age to his.

Nell gave her the silence, then asked, “Do you remember who bought the property?”

“Of course I remember. Bryant Brown. I was gone by the time he sold it, but it's a stretch over where the Interstate goes through. Part of it is now Wendell Jenkins' car empire.”

“Brown? Any relation to Whiz Brown, the police chief?” Nell asked.

“His father, I believe. Whiz was the family ne'er do well, but Bryant and his son Buzz could get money out of road kill opossum.”

“Still, why is his name so familiar?” Nell wondered, more to herself than a real question.

But Penny March had the answer. “Because Bryant Brown managed to exit this world in an act of massive stupidity. Buzz survived, but lost a few fingers. Seemed that Bryant considered himself a tough man and was always on the lookout for ways to demonstrate it. I think that one of his disappointments in Whiz was that Whiz was either too smart—I know, that's hard to credit—or two cowardly to join in. One night Bryant and Buzz managed to catch a rather large cottonmouth and after enough bourbon, decided to have a snake toss. There aren't too many snakes that would enjoy this game and this one most surely didn't. Buzz got nipped on the hand, but Bryant was bitten in the face and there just wasn't much that medical science could do to overcome that kind of folly.”

“Yes, now I remember the story,” Nell said.

“It was at one of those points when Bryant was most disappointed in Whiz, so he was left out of the will, although he contested it. As far as I know, that ended the two brothers ever speaking to each other.”

“So Bryant Brown got the property for back taxes and, somewhere along the line, we can presume that someone bought it for a decent amount,” Nell summed up.

“Yes, that's about it. You have to understand the times, too. No white lawyer would help a black person. It would be poison to their practice.”

“Especially standing up for the poor black people against some of the more powerful members of the community,” Nell commented.

“We can look back now and see the wrong and the right and wonder why it wasn't so glaringly visible back then. There were consequences, harsh consequences. One young lawyer told me he'd been asked by his wife to help her maid's brother. He said that he didn't really think anything of it—it should have been simple, a phone call or two and a compromise, the brother would pay a little extra and get things settled. But this young lawyer was told by his two law partners that if he wanted to work in this county he'd never do anything like that again. He had a wife, two young kids.” She was silent for a moment, then added, “It's easy to look back and judge when you don't live with what they could do to you.”

“And yet you saw it was wrong,” Nell said.

“I saw it … yet, my mother was ill, I had to take care of her, had to have the job. One brother killed in the war, one came back only half a man, stumbling around in life like he left his soul back on one of those bloody hills. I did … what I could. Changed a date here and there, if Mr. Dunning wasn't around. Tried to warn people. That's when I first met Marcus. He'd come in with some who couldn't read and write so well. He printed something in that newspaper he ran, so people would know. I think they organized to make sure people paid on time, took up collections here and there to help those a little behind get through. It was mostly the colored folks who lost their property. A few of the people that might be called white trash.

“Mr. Dunning caught a lot of people in the sudden enforcement, but they wised up and the change of property dried up. I can remember him coming in some days
point-blank
asking me if anyone was late. I think he guessed where my sympathies were, so he'd stand there behind me watching, just watching. He once or twice even tried to act like it was a day later, tried to confuse me. I stopped him once, pointing out that if I was wrong, so was today's paper, and I held a copy of the Crier under his nose.

“But after about the first few years, very few properties got behind, so they couldn't grab them that way. That's when they decided they weren't going to play by the rules anymore.”

“By they, who do you mean?” Nell asked. She had been noting down the names as Penny March talked.

“‘They' can be vast, can't it? Certainly Mr. Dunning; also the sheriff, Bo Tremble. I think he actually enjoyed evicting people. Judge Kellogg; he had to have some idea of what was going on, or be so willfully blind that a rattlesnake would have been a smarter judge. Those were the ones I saw, that I knew about. It's a fair guess most of the rest of the town officials had to have some idea. From about
1957-58
to about 1964, over twenty percent of the property held by the black community came into white hands—and I'd guess that to be about ninety percent of the property anyone rich and powerful wanted. No interest in the small lots next to the railroad track. How could anyone who paid attention not have known?”

Nell almost said, “like the local paper,” but that was her own ghost to exhume. Instead she asked a reporter's question. “What happened in 1964?”