It Takes Two (31 page)

She wasn’t to blame.

I put my black candle to her tight wick

Our love won’t never be the same.

A barrel-shaped man at a table near us doubled over in appreciative laughter, gasping and pounding the wooden floor with his boots. Drackett whistled and waved his arms. Two women stood up and started swinging their hips and bosoms. “Glory,” one of them called out, addressing the ceiling or maybe Jesus. “High test,” her companion answered, “in them twin tanks.”

Emma Mae didn’t have time for such foolishness. She was on Tommy as soon as the song finished, grasping his shoulders, swinging him around and filling his ear with fast, hot words.

The bouncer with the emerald inlay spotted Emma Mae on the bandstand and started across the room. The drummer stood up. “Take five,” he squealed, his voice reedy with teenage surprise. “Bar’s open. We be rocking and rolling with Tommy Trouble after a short break.”

But Tommy Trouble was through for the night. We got him out of the club and into the car fast. When the bouncer, who was also the club manager, heard what had happened to Carmen, he volunteered to send someone with us. Saying we’d call him with news instead, we headed back up the river road to town.

Emma Mae and Tommy huddled in the back of the car while I drove. Before I could ask Tommy about the gig at the juke joint, he volunteered an explanation. “Now you been to Portia’s,” he said. “You know my Harlem face. Portia don’t pay good as you do. But everybody got to work two jobs,” he said, adjusting his zebra-striped tie. “Till they get somewhere. Me, I got two whole careers—because, you know what? I be ambitious.” Sounding at once forceful and prissy, he added, “Most ambitious nigger you ever did see.”

Jesus
, I thought.
I didn’t see any of this coming
. “Look,” I said. “You’re excited. We’re all worried about your buddy. I’m just surprised.”

“My buddy!” Tommy spat back. “Dan, darling, how would you know? We don’t work for you but five to midnight. You don’t know what we do before or after, what’s in our heads or who’s in our beds.”

“Shush up, now,” Emma Mae said, drawing him close. “Both of you. Dan doesn’t have any problem with you and Carmen being together. Do you, boss?”

I said I sure didn’t. But when I started to repeat how surprised I was, Emma Mae shushed me again.

“Stow it, boss. Pretend this is fucking Noah’s Ark. They’s matched pairs all over the earth and the water is rising.”

By the time we got back to the hospital, the doc had finished stitching up Carmen’s split eyebrows, gouged scalp, lip and left ear. He was sleeping when we tiptoed in. The nurse, the younger one, gave Tommy a funny look but said only that somebody in the family needed to check with the credit office before Mr. Morales could be assigned to a ward. I said I’d take care of it.

After ten minutes or so, Carmen started coming around. He’d been surprised by two young white guys and an older man wielding a tire iron, he said. When I asked if he recognized any of them, he said he was pretty sure the guy with the tire iron was the drunken, foul-mouthed fanny-pincher we’d thrown out of the Caloosa Club on Wednesday night. The young guys smelled bad, he said, and weren’t wearing shirts.

“They didn’t have no mercy,” he said, drawing his hands from beneath the blanket and holding them out for inspection. “But I didn’t have no mercy neither. Just look at my nails. See the dried blood under there? Maria! Before they got me down on the ground, I think I scratch one cracker’s eyes out.”

Tommy started to cry. His pomaded hair had begun curling up, out of control, and he suddenly looked his age, which was three or four years less than mine. “Can I just take you home tonight, honey?” he whispered, leaning over Carmen. “How you feel now? You know you’d sleep better at home. I be taking care of you always, my pretty
señorita
.”

Seeing, but probably not hearing, this, the older nurse, who had been waiting beside the curtains, stepped forward, brandishing a cotton swab and a large syringe. “Take off,” she said. “All of you boys. Outta here, now. Unless somebody can tell me if this cowboy has had all his shots, I’m gonna stick him with everything from penicillin to horse liniment.”

Back at the hotel, I phoned Bud. I wanted him to check on Bobby Jim Carter, the foul-mouthed Bradenton butt-pincher. And to run down the tramp who’d found Carmen.

But the phone in the hall at Bud’s rooming house didn’t answer. I tried it four different times between three A.M. and dawn.

Bad news travels fast. The Editor’s Notebook column in the Sunday
News-Press
included two blind items. One was a short series of upbeat speculations on the years of service, selfless motives and noble ambitions and of an unnamed county official. The gentleman was said to be entertaining offers from backers urging him to make a run for the U.S. Congress.

The second item, buried at the end, reported that highly placed officials and leading citizens were increasingly concerned about rumors of gambling, drinking and other unsavory activities “at an unidentified but highly visible Fort Myers venue.”

There was no doubt as to the identity of the official (Sheriff Hollipaugh), the venue (the Caloosa) or the source of the rumors (Willene Norris).

I read the piece over coffee in my office. What with calling Bud and worrying about Carmen, I’d gotten less than two hours sleep the night before. I’d just started my second reading of the piece when the desk clerk leaned inside the door. “Long distance,” he announced, sounding mournful. “Person to person, he added, “on line three.”

Admiral Asdeck had gotten up early too. A Myers friend had woken him up to read the unmistakably linked pair of items over the phone. He wasn’t worried, he told me, but he did think it would be a good idea to shut down club operations for a week or two, just to be on the safe side, till the rumors went away.

“Tell members you need to repair a leaky ceiling,” he ordered. “Say you’re installing a new chandelier and you’re sorry as hell about the inconvenience.

“And meanwhile,” he added, “ask your cop pal to find out whose loose lips are stuck in that cow-town editor’s ear.”

“He already nailed that one down,” I answered, pleased to offer the boss at least a shred of information. “It’s our pistol-packing mama.”

After describing Saturday’s poolside meeting with Mrs. Norris and her cousin, I told Asdeck that Carmen was in the hospital following a beating. Turns out, I added, that he and Tommy Carpenter are a lot closer friends than I’d thought.

“What a surprise,” Asdeck said dryly. “But this unprovoked attack is definitely something for your buddy to look into.”

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically. “As soon as I can find him.”

Emma Mae showed up a few minutes later. She had our new housekeeper in tow, fitted out in starched cotton uniform, apron, matching cap and powdered oxfords.

“Went by and picked up Mary this morning,” Emma Mae explained. “Good thing too. People been telling her things over in Colored Town. Folks over there is upset.”

Homer Meadows entered the office and set a plate of grilled fish and grits in front of me. After topping off my coffee, he disappeared.

“Could you kindly find us a basket of them fuckin’ sweet rolls?” Emma Mae called after him. “It’s not like we’re invisible.”

“Be a lot of talk,” Mary confided, a nervous frown on her thin face. “Over in Colored Town. Be rumors, a lot of them. Saying last night that, that-there, ah, the Klan, well, some folks is sayin’ they plannin’ to burn more than a cross this time.”

Oh, shit
, I thought.
Too bad Wash didn’t kill Willene instead of her husband. Competition with other men, that I can take. But a powerful, vengeful woman bent on destroying the half of the town she doesn’t own?
I had no experience in such matters. Shivering, looking around, I could half imagine the burned shell of the torched Caloosa, with the lynched bodies of Bud, Homer, Emma Mae and Mary hanging from the scorched branches of the oak trees out front.

“Be rumors,” Mary continued. “They mean to torch a church, a colored church. Be rumors for some time that they’s been outsiders comin’ around, stirrin’ up folks. Your…ah…Klan people, they don’t like it.”

“Fuckers don’t like anything that’s any good for anybody else,” Emma Mae remarked. “Bunch a candy-ass spoil-sports with too much time on their hands, if you ask me.”

After they left, I phoned Bud at the rooming house. This time I caught him. Careful not to ask where he’d been all night, I detailed the attack on Carmen Veranda, said that he was still in the hospital and that the tramp who’d discovered him was missing. When I mentioned Bobby Jim Carter, Bud said he remembered the gent and would see what could be done to track him down. When I outlined the latest rumors from Colored Town and the
News-Press
, Bud laughed. I asked what was so funny and he answered, “Just another off-duty Sunday shot to hell. See what I mean?”

Still, he said he thought he could find time to check it all out, including the whereabouts of Bobby Jim Carter last night and the possible threat to a church. The whereabouts last weekend of the ambitious but unnamed high official were being checked out again, this time by lower-ranking but skilled associates. Their identities, he said, would also go unnamed.

“One connection did get put together for me by a source I can’t mention, but you know who I mean,” he said. “The snitch clerk, you mean?”

“Right. Yes. He does get his nose in a lots of people’s business. One thing he told me I figure should interest you and the admiral. You know who the contact is?”

“For what?”

“Contact between the colored youth groups and the Yankee organizers. It’s somebody that works in your hotel. A church member.”

That I had radical religious elements on my staff was news I didn’t want to hear. “Who? Emma Mae?”

“The piano player, Tommy. Didn’t surprise me none. My source knows it from the Klan. So I’d say your music man had better watch his step. You tell him not to walk anyplace alone, at night. Give him my phone numbers. Tell him to call me or Officer Hurston if anybody comes after him.”

All I could do was swear at the growing complications, and worry a bit more.

Before hanging up, though without much hope, I suggested that Bud and I get together for a swim that afternoon. “No sweet talk,” I said. “No fishing trip. We both need the exercise.”

Saying he had other plans, Bud hung up without even asking for a rain check.

So I skipped lunch, changed into my suit and swam laps alone. The conversation had made me horny as hell. Kicking through half a mile of chilly water usually took my mind off my other physical needs. It had been more than a week since Bud and I really mixed it up. The bothersome tightness in the front of my trunks didn’t begin to dissipate until I’d completed half a dozen laps.

I’d finished my workout when Frank strolled onto the pool deck, a smile on his face, his bathing suit rolled in a towel.

“Hope that invitation was serious,” he said, kneeling by the pool and extending his hand. “My shoulders are tight as tweezers today. But I’m back, ready for another workout, if you can stand the company.”

I looked up at him, aware of the fine, dark hair on his arms and the small, thin creases on either side of his shining eyes, and wondered,
What would this man look like without his pants and shirt, stark naked, showering beside me, joking and making himself available for a little man-to-man combat?
Taking a breath, I sank back beneath the surface, popped up, cleared my eyes and hauled onto the lip of the pool.

“Absolutely serious,” I assured him. “You’re welcome to use the pool and locker room any time. Wish I could join you, but I just finished my forty laps. But another time, absolutely. Maybe if you call first?”

He looked as disappointed as a shut-in puppy. When he flexed the thick muscles of his neck, I hesitated. Rather than pursue the connection, I changed the subject.

“You know about Tommy’s friend Cabildo Morales? That he’s in the hospital?”

Frank looked at me carefully, then nodded. “Yes, I do,” he answered. “Terrible thing to have happen. Is there a flower shop in town? I thought I’d stop by and try to cheer him up.”

I gave him directions to Exotic Blossoms on First Street. Then we both stood up, bumping elbows like nervous teenagers.

“Need to check in at the hospital myself,” I said.

“Maybe we’ll meet up later.” Frank looked hopeful.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe so. Maybe later. That’d be swell.”

While I was at the hospital that Sunday afternoon, all hell (in the form of Gene Hollipaugh) broke loose for Bud Wright.

First off, Sheriff Hollipaugh ordered the county switchboard operator to track down the off-duty detective “wherever the blazes he’s hiding out” and to call him into the office “ten minutes from whenever you ketch him.”

With Bud on the carpet, and no invitation to sit or report forthcoming, Hollipaugh commanded his junior to mount a close watch on Ku Klux Klan activity at the expense of all other cases in his book. “Stay alert for possible connections to the attack on Cabildo Morales,” he’d added, “and keep your big ears peeled for rumors of white-sheet marches and church burnings.” When Bud remarked that everything mentioned so far appeared to be part of the same case, the sheriff threw him a sour look, shook his head as if speaking to a child and replied, “They ain’t. So shut your cowboy mouth, if you’d be so kind.”