I counted twelve police cars pulled up at various angles on the street by the time I was put inside one (hand lightly on my head as I was urged into the backseat) and taken downtown. Most of them had flashers going. It looked like one of those carnivals that unfolds out of two trucks and takes over a whole parking lot.
At the station the cuffs were removed, I was given coffee, and for several hours, riders changing from time to time but always the same tired old pony, we played What-was-the-exact-nature-of-your-relationship-to-the-deceased.
It was all pretty much stage whispers and much ado. They knew I wasn’t involved in the shooting. But black man/white woman was a formula they just couldn’t leave alone. That people were getting shot like paper targets out there in the streets was nothing compared to this danger. Eternal vigilance.
“Come on, Griffin. Own up to it. You were lovers. Had to be. We know that.”
He lit a cigarette, pushed the pack an inch or two across the table toward me.
“We look into it, we’re gonna find out maybe she paid rent, bought your clothes, kept you in booze. Save us all some time here, boy.”
“What was it, she started asking for something back? A little responsibility, maybe?” This from a wiry guy leaning against the wall behind the smoker.
“We got ten, twelve reporters lined up out there waiting to talk to someone, boy. Trying their damnedest to dig up a photo of you, any photo, they can run with their stories. Mayor’s already called the chief-his and Ms. Dupuy’s family go way back-and the chief’s called me. Chief’s waiting up for me to get back to him.”
“We got to lay this off on someone soon, and I might as well tell you, we don’t much care who it is.”
“Shit deep enough you gonna need a big boat, anyway you come at it.”
The wiry guy pushed himself away from the wall. His shoes were thirteens at least. On him, they looked like clown shoes.
“Someone said she’d have you make ape noises toward the end of things. Said that was the only way she could get off. That right?”
Dead silence. Smoke rolled about the room, thick as fog.
“You wanta just wait outside, Solly?”
“I-”
“Now?”
He waited till the other was gone.
“Lewis, we’re trying to do you a favor, man. Just tell us the truth. What you could be looking at, it’s prob’ly ten to twenty, even with good behavior. Your behavior likely to be good?”
I told him I doubted it.
“Somehow I do too.”
I didn’t have a record, that came later; but as I said, my name was on the streets some, even then.
I kept on trying to give them what they expected. Never met an eye, said yessir till my voice went hoarse, kept my head down. Along about daylight I decided what the hell, this dead horse had been beaten enough for one day.
“Sir,” I said. “Don’t you think I should have an attorney present?”
I figured they’d either shoot me or club me over the head and throw me out back with the rest of the trash. And at that point either one sounded preferable to more of the same.
“Why of course I do. I even believe you people, you’re brought up right, you’re good as anybody else. But the fact of the thing is, I can hold you for as long as I need to and ain’t nobody going to say anything.”
“On what charge?”
“Lewis, Lewis.” He shook his head. “Where you been, boy? I don’t need any charges.”
“Maybe that will change.”
“Maybe. But it ain’t yet. Meanwhile you’re a nigger. You been consortin’ with a white woman got herself killed last night. You got no steady employment, got a hist’ry of violence, discharged from the service after beating in a few heads. You’ll be lucky you even make it far as a cell.”
He made a great show of packing his Winston down, snapping it repeatedly against a heavy Zippo lighter with some kind of military emblem on it. He put the cigarette in his mouth, thumbed the lighter’s wheel and held it there.
“You boys come down here with a hard-on from-what? Arkansas? Mississippi? — and the city turns you inside out. You got some bad friends out there. Every day goes by, you sink a little further into the scum that coats this city a foot deep.”
He brought lighter to cigarette, a small ceremony.
There was a rap at the door. The wiry guy stuck his head in.
“See you a minute, Sarge.”
He went over and they stood there talking.
First I could make out only occasional words. Then, as their voices rose, more.
“… come down …”
“… bust … desk jockey … wipe his nose …”
“… collar comes off, like it or not …”
“Fuck that.”
“More like fuck you, Sarge.
“Yeah, like always.”
He came back.
“You’re free to go, Griffin.”
“Just like that?”
He nodded. I started to say something else, ask what the hell, but he stopped me. “Get on out of here.”
The city was just coming alive outside. Soft gray bellies of clouds hung overhead, as though draped, tent-like, on the top of the buildings. Sunlight snuffled and pawed behind them.
And Frankie DeNoux sat on the steps.
I almost didn’t recognize him, since he wasn’t wearing his office.
“Sweet freedom,” he said.
“Believe it. But what are you doing here? Boudleaux finally throw you out? Whoever Boudleaux is.” Far as I knew, no one had ever seen him. “You on the streets now?”
“Ain’t that the way it always is. Do a favor for a guy, he won’ even talk to you after.”
“What favor’s that, Mr. Frankie?”
“Sweet freedom,” he said again.
I just stared at him.
“Got me a man up there. He keeps me posted what’s going down, I slip him a fifty ever’ week or so. Las’ night he calls to let me know this woman’s been shot and the police’ve brought in this guy he knows does some work for me. But the guy ain’t been charged with nothin’, he says, ain’t even on the books.
“Well. This, I know, is definitely not good. Bad things happen in police stations to people who are not there. I know this from working with the criminal element, and with the police element, for forty years. After forty years, I also know a few people. Favors get owed along the way.”
Closing the rest of his fingers, he held thumb and pinky finger out: a stand-up comedian’s phone.
“I made some calls.”
“You made some calls.”
“Well, really it was just one. The other guy wouldn’t talk to me. But …” He waved a hand: here’s the free world anyway.
“I didn’t know you had friends, period, Mr. Frankie. Much less friends in high places.”
“High, low, scattered in between. Lots of those won’t talk to me anymore either. What the hell. ’S all information, Lewis. You got information, you get things. You got things, you get information.”
I was with him so far. But there was one point I wasn’t clear on:
“Why?”
“Why, you got work to do for me, don’t you. Now how you gonna do that locked up in there? Or with your mouth all busted up-you tell me that.”
“Seems obvious, now that I think about it.”
“Don’t it, though.”
“I owe you. Mr. Frankie.”
“You don’t owe me shit, Lewis. And don’t Mr. Frankie me. Back up there, that was mostly smoke. What they call a dog and pony show. But you feel like saying thank you, there’s a Jim’s right round the corner. You could come have some chicken, sit down with me. Forty years I been eating alone.”
I said I’d be pleased to, and we walked on.
“Man might be dropping by to see you sometime later on. He does, you talk to him for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me either.” I held the door open for him. There were a couple of people in line ahead of us. A city bus driver. A rheumy-eyed white man in bellbottom jeans, grimy sweater and longshoreman’s cap. “You know that story ’bout the tar baby?” Frankie said.
I nodded.
“Well, that’s ’bout how black my mother was, Lewis. Black as tar. I ain’t been white a day in my life and ever’body’s always thought I was. Ain’t that somethin’?”
We stepped up to the counter.
“You want white meat or dark?” he said, and laughed.