Dead Ball (22 page)

Before he left Charlie Fathon’s, he had made four phone calls. He’d made sure Moss was all right in New York and that Cherry Ann Smoler was safe in Providence and would be at her friend’s the next day to receive the overnighted copy of the photograph. Then he reached Mickey in her Pittsburgh hotel, where she was working “a big Pirates-Diamondbacks clash” that evening.

“Whatcha doing?” he asked.

“Reading a book review from the
London Review of Books
on the Internet. Want to hear something interesting?”

“Sure.”

“The slug has a penis that’s seven times the length of its body.”

One could do worse, Harvey thought, than share life with a sports reporter who read the
London Review of Books
online, although perhaps one could do better than share life with a person who found the most interesting thing in it a passage about slug penises.

“They often get knotted up with other slug penises,” she said.

“I hate when that happens.”

“The only way for them to get free is for one slug to bite off his own penis at the base.”

“Couldn’t he nibble off just enough to get untangled?”

“Here’s the best part,” she said. “The self-castrated slug immediately becomes a female.”

“Would that it were so easy.”

“What are
you
doing?”

“Getting ready to drive off to Athens, Georgia, to talk to someone who’s pretending to be a journalist.”

“Oh,” she said “Just like me.”

The fourth call was to make sure that Clay Chirmside was in town.

“Mr. Chirmside?” he said from Fathon’s disheveled apartment.

“Speaking.”
Spuheekun,
it came out. A deep drawl.

“Are you the one writing the article about GURCC?”

“Who told you that?”

“Mr. Chirmside, my name is Harvey. I used to work at GURCC, and I’ve got some information about the organization that might interest you. I’ll swing by this afternoon.” And Harvey hung up, hoping that would be enough to hold him.

Chirmside’s house was a red brick bungalow on a working-class suburban street with a new Ford pickup in the driveway. Its lone bumper sticker said, “If at First You Don’t Secede, Try Try Again.” The cement urns on either side of the front steps gushed ferns. When Harvey got out of his air-conditioned car, the humidity whacked him in the face like a hot pillow. Before he had taken three steps, the bungalow’s screen door opened.

Chirmside came down the steps in a brown T-shirt and gray slacks. Harvey squinted at him in the bright sun. He was a tall middle-aged man with thin sandy hair through which his sun-reddened scalp showed on top. Gravity was doing a job on him: the flesh on his face had fallen around his mouth like the jowls of a hound dog, giving him an expression of angry fatigue, and his stomach ballooned over his belt. Despite his muscular freckled forearms, the seeds of his premature old age were already sprouting. Lush tufts of hair were growing in the depression at the bottom of his ears.

“Something I can do for you?” he said, frisking Harvey with his eyes, evaluating the fall of Harvey’s shirt, checking for pocket bulges.

“Clay Chirmside?”

“You got him.”

“I called you before about GURCC. I’m Harvey Johnson.”

“Who told you I was writing an article?”

“Well, you spent some time at the office a couple of weeks ago. You told folks you were writing an article for
Talk
magazine.”

“What if I was?”

“That’s a pretty prestigious periodical.”

Chirmside screwed up his eyes. “Something wrong with that?”

“It seems they never heard of you.”

“How would you know?”

“I spoke to the managing editor yesterday.”

“I don’t know about any managing editor. He wouldn’t know me from Adam.”

“Were you dealing with someone else then?”

“Another editor.”

“Whose name is?” Harvey said, feeling Chirmside’s anger come off him in waves. Curiosity and confusion were the only things holding the jowly man back.

“Jim.”

“Jim who?”

“Jim Parker.”

“Let’s see now,” Harvey said, plucking his current copy of
Talk
out of his back pocket. It was already folded back to the masthead page. “No, I don’t see any Jim Parker on the masthead. You sure you got the name right?”

“Listen here, Mr. Johnson,” Chirmside said, bits of cheesy spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. “I don’t much like you waltzing into my driveway and calling me a liar. Suppose you tell me exactly what your business is before I kick your Yankee ass out of here. And I guaran-damn-tee you I’ll do it.”

“Clay, I don’t believe I’ve ever been bodily threatened by a freelance writer before.”

Chirmside turned his head and spat on his own lawn. “I’m waiting.”

“My friends at GURCC asked me to check you out. I’m a private investigator. Clay, what were you doing at GURCC?”

“Why don’t you tell me why you wanna know so bad?” He spat on his lawn again.

Harvey sized him up and went for it. “Clay, if I thought you were the kind of man who could be bought, I’d try to pay you for the information.”

He looked at Harvey for a full five seconds. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

Hot damn, Harvey thought—we’ve got a winner. “What kind of money is worth talking about in your opinion?”

“I’m not interested if it don’t have three zeroes.”

“Maybe we could continue this negotiation on your front porch. It’s hot out here.”

Harvey preceded Chirmside into the shade of the porch. Harvey sat on an aluminum chair. Chirmside leaned against the outer brick wall, lighting a Marlboro Light with an irritable flip of his chrome Zippo.

“Here’s what I want for my thousand bucks,” Harvey said.

“I want to know what you were doing at GURCC and who hired you.”

“I want a sneak preview of the dough.”

Harvey reached into his front pants pocket and produced a folded wad of crisp
ATM
bills. He fanned them out—five one-hundred-dollar bills and twenty-five twenties.

Chirmside held out his hand and said, “Give it to me.”

“Easy, Clay. Where are your manners?”

“Please.”

“Now you’re talking.” Harvey counted out the five hundreds and handed them over. “Start at the beginning.”

Chirmside folded the bills and slid them into the pocket of his gray slacks. Then he inhaled half an inch of his Marlboro and said through the smoke, “A guy called me a few weeks ago to buy two photographs for him.”

“What guy?”

“He didn’t say, and I still don’t know.”

“I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.”

“Now, listen, you’re gonna get your money’s worth before I’m through, but you’re not gonna learn the guy’s name, ’cause I don’t know it myself.” The money had already changed him, softened his manner. “If you wanted the photos this fella wanted, you wouldn’t give your name, either.”

“Because they were photos of a lynching?”

Chirmside’s sandy eyebrows jumped. “Well, now.”

“So you posed as a collector and made Connie Felker an offer for them.”

“Now you’re not letting me earn my money.” He leaned down and put his cigarette out in one of the cement urns.

“She said she’d think about it, didn’t she? Then she went with a better offer. She gave them to GURCC.”

“She just gave ’em away.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I told the guy the next time he called that GURCC got the photos, and he told me to pretend I was a reporter and go there and see what I could do.”

“See if you could ‘acquire’ the photos?”

“Sumpin’ like that. Find out what they intended to do about them.”

“If they were going to investigate. Is that it?”

“Sumpin’ like that.”

“He wanted you to steal the pictures, didn’t he?”

Chirmside nodded once.

“And did you?”

“Couldn’t do it. I tried. One day when I was there, they had that ballplayer there, the one with the big hitting streak.”

“Moss Cooley.”

“Right. And his girlfriend was there with him. And that crippled nigger fellow works there that’s his friend—”

“Charlie Fathon.”

“Right, he was showing them some case files, and I said, ‘Boy, why not show ’em them photos you just got from that old Ed Felker business?’ So Charlie Fathon showed them the two photos, and I was hoping I’d have me a chance to steal them and make some extra money, but Moss Cooley and his girlfriend never let ’em out of their sight.”

It hadn’t occurred to him that the originals were locked away and that he’d only be stealing copies. “Why’d the man want the photos, anyway?”

“Damned if I know. For the amount of money he was paying me, I didn’t want to ask any questions.”

“Anything else happen while you were at GURCC?”

“Well, that’s when I overheard Moss Cooley and his girlfriend talking about how the man in the photo looked familiar.”

So Chirmside assumed that they
both
recognized the man, whereas Cherry Ann had told Harvey that it was only she who did—and that Moss in fact had chided her for thinking she would know a man from a thirty-year-old photo. “You’re not talking about the picture of Felker, are you?” Harvey said.

Chirmside shook his head. “Other one.”

“Which is a photo of what?”

“Another guy standing in front of the hanging man.”

“What’s his name?”

“Damned if I know.”

“So tell me why you think you were hired to get those photos for the man?”

“I told you I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s because he might be protecting the man in the photo?”

Chirmside shrugged. “Got me.”

“Because he
is
the man in the photo?”

“Got me again, Harvey Johnson.”

“Because there was only one arrest in that case: Ed Felker. That other man’s never been identified. And until the little newspaper story appeared a while back about Connie Felker and the two photos, no one knew who else might’ve been involved in the lynching of Isaac Pettibone. Isn’t that right?”

“Hell, you’re the one with all the answers. I’ve got half a mind to give you back, say, twenty dollars of your money.” He laughed mechanically, like someone who had learned how from a manual.

“So you told the man who hired you that Moss Cooley and his girlfriend thought she recognized the man in the photo? The one in the straw cowboy hat?”

“That’s right.”

“Did the man also ask you to find out if GURCC was going to try to reopen the Felker case and identify the second man?”

“I found out that, no, they weren’t fixing to do that.”

“Did he ask you for the name of Moss Cooley’s girlfriend?”

“Yes, sir. I tried to get her last name, pretending I was going to put her in my article, and Mr. Cooley, sir, he asked me in no uncertain terms not to mention either of them in my article and stopped me from getting her name. I did try to describe her best I could to the man who hired me.”

Harvey counted out ten twenties and handed them to Chirmside. “Did the man give you a phone number to call when you wanted to get in touch with him?”

“No, sir. He just told me to wait for his calls.”

“You don’t have caller ID?”

“No, sir.”

“What did he sound like?”

“Nothing special.”

“Did he have an accent?”

“None that I could tell. Maybe midwestern. I’m not real good on accents.”

“How did he pay you, Clay?”

“He sent me cash in them padded bags through the regular mail without a return address.”

“How many installments?”

“Two.”

“Can I see those bags?”

“They’re long gone.”

“Where were they postmarked?”

“Don’t rightly recall.” He lifted his chin and closed his eyes. “Not too far away, is my recollection.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember the postmarks, Clay. You had to be mighty curious at that point.”

“Maybe it was some place in Tennessee.”

Harvey reluctantly counted out ten more twenties. Chirmside’s hand shot out like a trained monkey’s and took the money. Harvey held the last five twenties up by his ear and made it shake.

“Now, for the last hundred dollars, Clay, I want to know how this man come to hire you to do this job.”

“It just so happens I do a little private investigation work myself.”

“Why you?”

“I guess it’s my reputation,” he said with a smile. “Word of mouth. Man of a thousand disguises.”

Right, Harvey thought to himself. More like a man of two disguises—dumb and dumber—even if he had managed to fool the folks at GURCC. “So you do a lot of this sort of work?”

“Like I say, I’m a private investigator.”

“Then how come the side of your pickup says ‘Chirmside Paving and Resurfacing’?”

“Got to make ends meet,” he replied without missing a beat. “You know how it is.”

“You got a license to be a private investigator, Clay?”

“No, sir. I’m not that kind.”

“You advertise?”

“Don’t need to.”

“I’ll bet you have to beat the customers away with a broom.” Harvey laid the last bills in Chirmside’s hand.

“Is that it?” Chirmside walked toward the porch steps. “I hope I’ve been a help.”

“You’ve been an enormous help,” Harvey said, descending the steps ahead of Chirmside. “I appreciate your candor.”

“I don’t know what that is, but I’m glad you appreciate it.”

Harvey drove off, thinking that you had to hand it to the civil rights movement. It had helped make possible both Charlie Fathon, who became what his father probably never even dreamed of, and Ed Felker, who became everything his father had dreamed of, and more.

O
N THE OUTSKIRTS OF
Athens, Harvey found a buffet lunch joint and waited in line for his meat-and-three. He took his tray—chicken-fried steak with sawmill gravy, collards, black-eyed peas, stewed yellow squash, corn bread, and sweetened ice tea—to a chipped table in the corner under the air conditioner and began telling himself what he thought he knew.

First, that the man he was looking for was the man in the photo—possibly his son. After thirty years, a home-processed photo had jumped out of a Georgia lockbox, threatening to deliver him from his anonymity. He thought both Cooley and his girlfriend were in a position to identify him.