Monday, April 30
I woke up in a surprisingly good mood for a Monday. I hadn’t caught up on any of my yard work over the weekend. And I wasn’t one inch closer to finding Gordon’s murderer. But I had managed to exorcise a demon or two, my what-if-Lawrence-hadn’t-strayed demon in particular, and good gravy, I was just feeling better about things. I took James on a longer walk than usual and doubled up on his treats. I put on a spring blouse and a pair of lightweight khakis. I dug around in the jewelry basket on my dresser for my bluebird brooch.
I got to the morgue right at nine. I made my tea and got to work marking up the weekend papers. At noon I headed down the hill to Ike’s.
“Morgue Mama!” he sang out. “I didn’t know you were rewarding us with your presence today.”
“I didn’t know myself until five minutes ago.”
“Well, it’s good to see your face,” he said. “I just hope you’re in the mood for chicken salad.”
“Sounds delightful.” I sat at a table by the window. It gave me a beautiful, unimpeded view of the empty storefronts across the street.
Ike brought me my tea then got busy making my sandwich. “What kind of bagel you want that on?” he bellowed over the top of his espresso machine.
“Surprise me,” I bellowed back.
He chose pumpernickel. He piled the chicken salad high. He went crazy with the cream cheese.
Ike’s lunchtime rush only lasts about twenty minutes. As soon as things quieted down he joined me, bringing me a free bag of potato chips. “You getting anywhere with that murder?” he asked.
It tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “You’re pretty well plugged into the black community-right?”
He laughed and helped himself to a potato chip. “I’m black, if that’s what you mean by plugged in.”
I knew I was blushing. “Let me try that again-What’s the general opinion of Shaka Bop?”
He laughed harder. “Good Lord, Maddy, that was even worse than before. There are eighty thousand black people in this city. We don’t exactly get together every Saturday night in some big hall and vote on general opinions.”
If he could tease, I could tease. “No? We white people do.”
“Oh, I know you do!” he answered. “Oh, I know you do!”
We laughed and ate potato chips and then we got down to a serious appraisal of Shaka Bop.
Shaka, of course, was still going by his real name when David Delarosa was murdered. One night at Jericho’s, during his last set of the night, he announced his plans to leave town. It came just two weeks after the police tried to pin David’s murder on him. He hooked the neck of his saxophone over his shoulder and pulled the microphone to his lips. “If Hannawa don’t love Sidney Spikes no more,” he said in an affected sharecropper’s voice, “then ol’ Sidney’s through with Hannawa.” It was an angry good-bye. We begged him to stay but we understood when he didn’t.
I remember Effie and Chick being especially upset that the city’s racist police had driven Sidney away from the people he loved. But to tell you the truth, I had the feeling that he was ready to move on anyway. He was a very talented musician. His reputation was spreading. It was time for him to move on to a bigger city and a bigger life.
The bigger city Sidney chose was San Francisco. As the years went by, word got to us that he was playing up and down the west coast, from Vancouver to L.A., that he was making occasional forays into New York to record. Sidney seemed to be on the cusp of fame. But the 1960s were not good to jazz musicians. Clubs closed by the bucketful. Record labels switched to rock and roll and soul. I remember Gordon reading us a letter from Sidney at one of our parties. It was a sad letter. Sidney said he’d been forced to “hang up my horn for a while” and take a job as a mechanic at a garage in Oakland.
In 1968 we learned that Sidney had joined the Black Panther Party. We also learned that he’d changed his name-legally changed it-to Shaka Bop. I was divorced from Lawrence by then. And I’d pretty much stopped running with the old Hemphill College crowd. But I do remember Gordon and Effie dragging me to Hannawa’s first McDonald’s about that time, to see what all the fuss was about. I remember Gordon explaining to us over those miserable little hamburgers that Shaka was the name of a great Zulu king during the early nineteenth century, famous both for his brilliance and his brutality.
Anyway, Shaka moved back to Hannawa in 1973. He formed a band and played at weddings and block parties. He helped organize a food bank for the poor. He ran for City Council and lost. He opened a small auto repair shop in Thistle Hill, a gritty inner city neighborhood just south of downtown.
A few days after Gordon’s funeral, I’d gone to my files in the basement and dug up a feature we’d run on Shaka back in 1978. It was one of the last stories Cynthia Buckland wrote for The Herald-Union before moving up to The Columbus Dispatch:
HANNAWA -Shaka Bop says he isn’t just fixing cars, he’s fixing lives.
Since moving back to Hannawa five years ago, the popular jazz musician and one-time member of the radical Black Panther Party has been making sure that the city’s working poor can get to their jobs.
“Being poor isn’t easy,” said Bop, who was born on the city’s south side as Sidney Thomas Spikes in 1933. “You get a job that doesn’t pay anything and it’s nowhere near where they let you live. Maybe you can get there by bus but maybe you need a car.”
And those cars, he pointed out, are hardly brand new.
“You scrape together a few hundred bucks and buy an old beater,” he said. “You pray every morning it’s going to get you to work and you pray all day long it’ll get you home at night.”
That’s where Shaka Bop’s Auto Run Right shop in Thistle Hill comes in. Bop and his team of talented young mechanics work with missionary zeal to keep the city’s old cars on the road, whether customers can afford to pay for the repair work or not.
“Half the time we charge only half of what other garages would charge,” Bop said. “And half the time we charge nothing but a smile.”
“You’re not saying Shaka Bop had something to do with that professor’s murder, are you?” Ike asked. His voice was uncharacteristically defensive.
I pawed the air. “No more than I’m saying he had anything to do with David Delarosa’s murder. But he was a part of the crowd Gordon ran with. On the periphery of it anyway. Back then and now. Maybe he has some helpful impressions.”
Ike squinted at me. “And that’s why you came to see me today, is it, Maddy? To see if Ike the Black Man had some helpful impressions of him? Before you ask him for helpful impressions of others?”
“Something like that,” I admitted.
Ike softened. Pretended to pout. “And I thought it was my chicken salad.”
“I’ve offended you.”
He didn’t move in his chair. But I could feel his soul reach across the little table and give me an enormous hug. “Oh, Maddy,” he whispered, “why does this world have to be the way it is? Everybody categorized by this and that? What was God thinking?” He took the last potato chip from the bag and broke it in half. He didn’t hand my half to me. He slipped it straight into my mouth. “We black people have a very high opinion of Shaka Bop. Including this black man. It pissed us off when they hauled him in fifty years ago and it would piss us off again if he got unnecessarily dragged into this.”
I sucked on the chip like it was a communion wafer. My knees were quivering from the intimacy Ike had allowed to flower between us, as innocent as it was. “I hope I haven’t unnecessarily pissed you off, Ike.”
“You know, Maddy,” he said. “I have always wanted to meet the great Mr. Bop in person. When you gonna go see him, anyway?”
I walked back up the hill to the paper. My bluebird brooch felt like it weighed five hundred pounds. Which was a good thing. After that half hour with Ike both my brain and my heart felt like they were pumped full of helium.
Anyway, the second the elevator door opened I knew a big story was breaking. People in the newsroom were talking louder. Walking faster. Huddling for impromptu meetings. Using other people’s phones. Mindlessly gulping from other people’s coffee mugs. “What gives?” I asked Margaret Newman, who was wiggling into her raincoat as she ran by.
“They got the other brother,” she said.
I raced to Dale Marabout’s desk. His phone was cradled under his chin. His feet were propped on the corner of his desk. From the way he was rhythmically tapping his toes together I gathered he was on hold, listening to some peppy tune. “Randy Depew?” I asked him.
He Grouchoed his eyebrows. “They got him in Las Vegas. Some hot sheets motel. Pizza delivery guy recognized him from America’s Most Wanted.”
Before I could ask another question, Dale twisted toward his computer screen and started spitting questions into his phone. I headed for my desk.
I just love it when a big story breaks like that. Oh yes, big stories are usually tragic stories. But just the way the newsroom comes alive to cover them, it’s better than-well it’s better than almost anything.
And so I settled in at my desk and watched everybody else work. Dale had the lead story to write, about how Randy Depew was apprehended and what was likely to happen to him when police got him back to Hannawa. Bob Beyer and Nan Ritchey put a sidebar together chronicling events from Paul Zuduski’s murder to the shootout in Hannawa Falls. Margaret was pulled off her feature on the county’s disappearing frog population and sent to police headquarters to catch any crumbs that came out of there. Burl Chancellor was given the politics sidebar, how a future trial would affect Congresswoman Zuduski-Lowell’s re-election. Our TV writer, Roxanne Kindig, was assigned the America’s Most Wanted angle, how that show was making it impossible for criminals to evade justice. Other reporters were pulled in to the coverage as needed. All afternoon Managing Editor Alec Tinker trotted from desk to desk, like one of those damn plate spinners you used to see on The Ed Sullivan Show, to make sure it all came together by deadline.
There was one angle of the story that we weren’t covering. The angle that affected me. With Richard Depew safely locked away, Scotty Grant just might find a little more time for Sweet Gordon’s murder. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure if I liked that prospect or not.
I stayed in the morgue until six-thirty and drove down to pick up Ike. The lights in his shop were already turned off. He flipped the CLOSED sign. Locked the door behind him. Trotted to my car. “If I’m going to close early for you, the least you can do is get here when you say,” he complained.
Downtown Hannawa doesn’t have much rush hour traffic anymore, and what little it does have was over long ago. I made a wide U-turn and headed south. “I’m a woman with responsibilities,” I said.
He laughed until I laughed.
And I needed to laugh. I was so nervous about seeing Shaka Bop I could barely breathe.
“He knows you’re coming?” Ike asked.
“What fun would that be?” I asked back.
We were in Thistle Hill in two minutes. The streets there were narrow, mostly brick, mostly one-way. The houses were a hundred years old and looked it. Many yards were surrounded with chain-link fences. Many of those fences featured BEWARE OF THE DOG signs.
We passed Garfield High School and a half-dozen abandoned factories. We crossed Sixth Street and pulled into the bumpy, gravel-covered parking lot that surrounded Shaka Bop’s garage. We wound through the uneven rows of old cars until we found a place to park.
The garage was modest but it was big. It was constructed of cement blocks. It had five bays. A hand-painted sign ran the full length of the building. SHAKA BOP’S AUTO RUN RIGHT it said.
A tall, wide-shouldered man appeared out of nowhere at my car door. He bent low and smiled at me through the window. It was Shaka Bop himself. He wasn’t wearing his signature dashiki or porkpie hat that day. He was wearing a crisp white shirt and a blood-red necktie, a navy blue spring jacket zipped tight around his ample belly.
I rolled down the window. “You remember me?” I asked.
He squinted at me and then smiled. “Pop your hood for me, Dolly.”
“I didn’t come for my car, though God knows the old thing needs plenty of work,” I said. “I came to see you about Gordon.”
Shaka’s smile faded. Then recovered. “Pop it!” he said.
So I popped my hood and he strolled slowly to the front of my car. He lifted the hood and hooked it open. Ike and I joined him.
Shaka rested his hands on the grill and leaned over the engine. He studied all the dirty old parts, scatting some wonderful jazz under his breath. I introduced him to Ike. “This is my friend, Ike,” I said. “Ike’s Coffee Shop downtown.”
Shaka didn’t take his eyes off my engine. “Oh yes. Ike’s Coffee Shop. Good to see you making a stand down there, Ike.”
Ike put out his hand, but when no hand came back at him, withdrew it into his coat pocket. He remained cordial nonetheless. “Maddy’s told me all about those years in Meriwether Square.”
Shaka looked up now. “Too bad you couldn’t have been there,” he said.
I’m sure Ike knew what he meant. I know I did. Meriwether Square was as segregated as every other neighborhood in Hannawa in those years. Unless a black man had a saxophone or a trumpet or a pair of drumsticks, he was not welcome in any of those clubs.
Shaka checked my oil and antifreeze. He carefully lowered the hood, as if it might disintegrate if he let it drop. “You’ve got some catastrophically cracked belts and hoses, Dolly. God knows you need a tune-up. But other than that, everything appears surprisingly copacetic for an old honey wagon like this.”
Shaka wrapped his arm around me and walked me to the garage. Ike followed. By the time we reached his office, Shaka had my car keys and my agreement to let a couple of his miracle men give my Dodge Shadow a good going over while we talked.
Shaka had a huge wooden desk, piled high with car parts, diet Coke cans, old newspapers and magazines. He sat behind the clutter. He folded his hands across his belly. Ike and I sat across from him, on an old car seat propped against the wall.
“The love sure flowed back then, didn’t it, Dolly?” Shaka said. He was swiveling back and forth in his chair, like the confident king he was. “Though I don’t recall any of your love ever flowing my way.” His eyes studied my reaction, then shifted to Ike, to study his.
I wanted to see Ike’s reaction, too. But I didn’t dare look at Ike. Instead I watched as my car disappeared into one of the bays at the other end of the garage. “I guess by now you know I’m looking into Gordon’s murder,” I said.
Shaka sifted through the newspapers on his desk, pulling out a copy of The Harbinger. He snapped the story about me with his thumb and forefinger and grinned. “Soon as I saw this little nugget of journalistic joy, I knew it would just be a matter of time before I saw you, too.”
I stretched my neck toward his desk like an ostrich, as if I’d never seen the story before. “You did?”
He handed me the paper. “Murder ain’t a big thing in Thistle Hill. I’ve been to more premature funerals over the years than I care to think about. But over on your side of town, Dolly? Around that happy little college? Those happy little neighborhoods filled with all those happy, happy people? There’ve been just two murders in fifty years and both involving Sweet Gordon. Next stop Coincidence City and don’t forget your luggage. First his libidinous chum. Then the professor himself. Oh, yes! Soon as I saw that little write-up, I knew the sagacious Dolly Madison Sprowls must’ve put two and two together. Knew sooner or later she’d squeeze the saxophone man into her math.”
Shaka always had a way with words. They were musical notes to him, to be arranged in surprising ways, to agitate and enlighten. So while I was prepared for all sorts of interesting things to come out of his mouth that evening, I hadn’t expected anything quite as poetic as libidinous chum. “Why’d you call David Delarosa that?”
“Because that young beagle was always sniffing for a snuggle bunny. You remember that night at Jericho’s, don’t you, Dolly? That sucker punch I took for you?”
A squeaky self-conscious giggle spilled out of me. “I don’t think many men ever took me for a snuggle bunny, no matter how drunk they were.”
Shaka laughed like a horse. “That had more to do with your attitude than your attributes, Dolly. And you stuck to that boyfriend of yours like wallpaper on a convent wall.”
“Lawrence and I were engaged by then,” I said.
“Indeed, you were,” said Shaka. “But that night, as I recall, you were quite alone.”
I told him that Lawrence was in Columbus, covering the state debate tournament.
“Doesn’t matter where he was,” he said. “You were alone. And David Beaglerosa was on the hunt.”
I didn’t much like it that Shaka was questioning me-after all I’d come to question him-but I did want his impression of David Delarosa. “He never hit on me,” I said.
Shaka horse-laughed again. “But he sure hit on me.”
“But that was a racial thing, wasn’t it?”
Shaka was studying Ike again. “The fact that I was of the Negro persuasion didn’t help matters, I’ll give you that. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know if he specifically had designs on you or not. Chances are you were just a handy feminine foil. A way to keep me from digging any and all the white birds perched around the table that night.”
“Chances are,” I agreed.
He playfully patted his stomach. “I’m a fat old man now. Can’t get a bird of any feather to look at me twice. But in my prime I rarely had the pillows to myself.”
“Including that night I understand.”
Memories of a different time drained the confidence from Shaka’s eyes. “Thank God I didn’t.”
“And thank God it was Effie sharing the pillows?”
He nodded. “Imagine if I’d gone home with some other white girl that night? It took some real cojones for her to tell the police she’d been with me, I’ll tell you that.”
Ike hadn’t said a word since we’d lowered ourselves onto that old car seat. He said something now: “They would have strapped you in the electric chair fast as they could.”
Shaka’s answer was little more than a whisper. “That they would have, my brother.”
“Let’s hope they don’t get any ideas now,” I said.
Shaka leaned back in his chair. He put his hands behind his head and rocked. “That your way of asking me if I have an alibi for the day Sweet Gordon was killed?”
“She’s not the most subtle woman,” Ike said.
Shaka winked at him. “No, she’s not. But as long as I’ve got her old Dodge hostage in there, I’m going to operate on the assumption she’s on my side.”
“I’m on Gordon’s side,” I said.
Shaka took off an imaginary hat and tipped it to me. “So am I. He was a fine man.”
“And you’re a fine man,” I said.
Shaka didn’t quite know what to do with that. First he smiled and then he frowned. “I was here until ten-thirty that Thursday. Seeing if I couldn’t coax another hundred-thousand miles out of the Apple Street Baptist Church’s old Sunday school bus.”
“Have the police talked to you?” I asked.
“I’ve told them that, yes. But I was here alone. From five on, anyway.” He hesitated. “I don’t know if that gets me off the hook or not.”
The coroner’s report, of course, had put Gordon’s death sometime between noon and midnight that Thursday, anywhere between 36 and 48 hours before Andrew J. Holloway called from the landfill. “Neither do I,” I said.
Shaka rubbed the twitch out of his nostrils. “Well, they haven’t hauled me downtown yet.”
I struggled off the car seat and peered through the glass office door. My car was high on a rack. Two young mechanics were standing underneath it, heads tipped back like a pair of bewildered turkeys trying to figure out where the rain was coming from. “Did the police ask you why you weren’t at this year’s Kerouac Thing?”
“No, they didn’t ask me that.”
“And what would you have told them?”
“The brutal truth, Dolly. That sometimes those stuffy old poops are more than I can take. Every damn year reading those same old cob-webby poems. Telling those same old hyperventilated stories. Living in the past like they’re already dead.”
“One of them is,” I said.
“Another premature funeral,” Shaka said.
I asked him what he knew about Gordon’s argument with Chick over Jack Kerouac’s hamburger. “Another reason why I didn’t go,” he said. “Who wants to listen to two old white men argue about cheese?”
“They really got into it this year,” I said.
“That’s what I hear,” he said.
I asked him what he knew about Gordon’s relationship with Chick.
“Sometimes I got one vibe, sometimes I got another,” he said.
I asked him if he thought Chick could have murdered Gordon.
“No more than I could’ve,” he said.
Then I asked him if he thought Gordon could have murdered David Delarosa.
“I’d like to give you the same answer,” he said. “But the truth is, after those unrequited fisticuffs at Jericho’s, I was neither surprised nor dismayed to learn of that boy’s fatal fall. There was something infinitely unlikable about Mr. Delarosa.”
Finally I asked him if he knew what Gordon might have been looking for at the landfill. “The young cat he used to be,” he said. “That’s what I always figured.”
“So, you were aware of his digging out there-long before he was murdered?”
“Long, long before,” he said. “Like all the beans in the jar.”
I was following Shaka’s jive just fine, but Ike’s Republican mind was having trouble with it. “Beans in the jar?” he asked.
I explained: “Members of the Baked Bean Society,” I said. “And by virtue of that membership, the sizable number of suspects in Gordon’s murder.”
“Right-o-roonie,” said Shaka. “One big black bean and a whole bunch of little white ones.”
My Dodge Shadow had new belts and hoses, a tune-up, five quarts of fresh oil, the proper amount of air in the tires. It was scooting through Thistle Hill like a rocket ship on its way to the moon. The ancient streetlights were as dim as stars. “I’m glad you came along, Ike,” I said.
I was expecting him to say something supportive, something like I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Instead he said this: “Wish I hadn’t.”
“Wish you hadn’t? You begged to come along.”
“I know I did. He just seemed so life size.”
“Heavens to Betsy, he’s big as a bear.”
“It was just tough watching him squirm, I guess.”
I wasn’t smart enough to let up. “Squirm? Were you and I looking at the same man?”
“No, I don’t think we were.”
“Good gravy, Ike.”
“Don’t good gravy me, Maddy. He’s an important man in the black community.”
“I know that.”
“Not the way I know it, you don’t.”
It was my turn to be the bear. “This is not a black and white thing. A friend of mine has been murdered.”
“Oh yes, and you just wanted some impressions.”
“That’s right. I would never do anything to get Shaka in trouble. Not if he didn’t deserve it.”
“And you think there’s a chance he does?”
“I think we better talk about something else.”
“I think we better talk about this.”
I’d known Ike for twenty years. And he’d never spoken to me like that. Like a man that mattered. And, to tell you the truth, I rather liked it. “I don’t know what to think,” I whispered. “Not now.”
He softened, too. “You pick up on something, did you?”
“You remember when he shuffled through all those papers on his desk and pulled out that copy of The Harbinger?”
Ike bristled. “You were surprised somebody from Thistle Hill reads the college newspaper?”
“Don’t go there again, Ike. The only thing that surprised me was the address on the mailing label. Last Gasp Books. Effie’s store.”
Ike pondered the implications of that. “I think I understand-no, I don’t think I do.”
I explained: “Effie, as I’m sure you’ve already gathered, was a lot closer to Shaka than the rest of us. She provided police with his alibi for the night David Delarosa was murdered. Now when she sees in the college paper that I’m looking into Gordon’s death, she goes straight to Shaka.”
Now Ike did understand. “Gave him a heads up?”
We were back downtown, where the streetlights were bright enough to illuminate the inside of the car. “When that story in The Harbinger came out, I’d already been to see Effie at her book shop. I’d asked her oodles of questions about David Delarosa. So she knew where my mind was going on this. And then she gets her copy of The Harbinger and sees that Maddy Sprowls isn’t just concerned about Gordon’s murder-she’s investigating it. ”
“It could be innocent enough,” Ike said.
I turned onto South Main and floated past the empty storefronts toward the Longacre Building. “You remember that libidinous chum stuff about David Delarosa? That beagle sniffing for a snuggle bunny stuff? Effie didn’t put it quite so colorfully, but she pretty much told me the same thing.”
“So you think she’s trying to get you to look under the wrong rock?”
I pulled up in front of Ike’s coffee shop. “I think maybe the rocks are in my head.”
He reached across the seat and gently patted my shoulder. I reached across the seat and gently patted his. He got out. Closed the door with a gentle kloomp. He bent low and waved good-bye through the window. I gently waved back.