The Black Hearts Murder (15 page)

“Remember me, Mrs. Franks? I was in the detective bureau squadroom when the D.A. was questioning you about your brother.”

“I remember you.”

“Could I come in? I'd like to talk to you.”

Isobel Franks said, “Look, Mr. McCall, I got nothing against you, you sounded like you were at least half on our side when that pig Volper was trying to push us around. But my husband, rest his soul, and my brother Harlan both always preached never to go along with a white man
no
way.”

“Even if I want to help your brother?” McCall asked quietly.

“The rule is no white man no way,” the woman said. “Sorry.”

She slammed the door in his face.

SEVENTEEN

McCall stopped at a drugstore to consult a directory. LeRoy Rawlings's address was 1632 Compton. He looked at his street map; it was only two blocks east and a block south of the Franks house.

It turned out to be a four-family fake brick with individual outside entrances. The name Rawlings was on the letterbox of the downstairs right-hand flat.

A leathery old woman answered McCall's knock. She cocked her snow-covered head to one side like a wary bird.

“Yes, sir?”

“Mr. Rawlings home?” McCall asked politely.

“LeRoy? No, sir, he ain't.”

“Any idea where I could find him, ma'am?”

The old woman seemed to relax. “I never know where that boy is. He never bother tell where he going.”

“You're LeRoy's mother?”

“Yes, sir, Anita Rawlings.”

“I'm Mike McCall, Mrs. Rawlings.” He held his special shield case out for her to see.

She studied it for some time. “You a policeman?”

McCall realized that she could not read. “No, ma'am. I'm special assistant to Governor Holland.”

Her eyes widened. “The governor of the whole state? Oh, my. Just you come on in, Mr. McCall.”

McCall stepped into a sparsely furnished immaculate front room. From the old woman's nervousness, she had never entertained a white skin in her parlor before. She asked him if he would “set,” and he chose an ancient leather chair with walnut arm rests that looked as if it had gone through the Civil War. She perched on the edge of her settee like a bird poised for escape.

McCall cleared his throat. He was casting about for something to put her at her ease, when a kettle began to sing somewhere. She jumped up.

“Excuse me, I was about to have myself a cup of coffee when you come,” Mrs. Rawlings said. “I better turn that kettle off.” She pronounced it “kittle.”

“Don't let me stop you from having your coffee, ma'am,” McCall said, smiling. “Fact, I think I could use a cup myself.”

“You could?” the old woman asked, astonished.

“If you don't mind me inviting myself.”

“Mind! Land sake. You just set there, Mr. McCall.” She bustled out. “I'll be right back,” she called.

McCall looked about. On the end table beside the settee stood a nine-by-twelve easel photograph in a gilt-decorated white Naugahyde frame; he rose for a closer look. It was a wedding portrait of a young couple, showing them from the shoulders up. The groom was stiff in a tuxedo. The bride was in a trailing veil. Both looked slightly frightened. The girl was dark, purely African; the man was LeRoy Rawlings.

“I see you been admiring my LeRoy's wedding picture,” Mrs. Rawlings said. She was back with a pretty tole tray, obviously her best, bearing two cups of coffee and a creamer and sugarbowl. She set it down on her occasional table. “Here you are, Mr. McCall. Cream and sugar?”

“No, thanks, I like it black.”

“
Everything
?” she said shrewdly, eyeing him.

“No, not everything,” McCall said, grinning. “There are some I can do without—black
and
white.”

“Now ain't that a fact,” she said with animation. “You set, Mr. McCall!” She sipped her coffee.

“LeRoy's wife is a stunning girl.”

“Not bad. I thought that boy would never marry. Going on two year now. My land, he all of twenty-eight 'fore he taken the step.” She cackled and raised her cup again.

The lips and the shape of the jaw in the man's photograph could be those of Horton's killer, McCall decided. Could be. “Could be” was a long way from “were.”

“Why the governor interested in my son, Mr. McCall?”

Her sudden question startled him.

“It isn't LeRoy he's interested in, Mrs. Rawlings, I mean as an individual. Governor Holland sent me to Banbury to head off race trouble. And as vice president of the Black Hearts—acting president, now that Harlan James is hiding out—your son is in a good position to cool off the black brothers.”

The old woman gave a bright nod. “If LeRoy and Harlan preach peace 'stead of preaching fight all the time, I like it finer. Don't get me wrong—I'm all for the rights we black folk win the last fifteen year. When I a young 'un, white people call me ‘gal,' or ‘Mandy,' treat me like I'm some kind of dirt. Now the white clerks in the stores say ‘ma'am,' just like I'm good as the white ladies. LeRoy and Harlan say this never happen if not for the Black Hearts and such-like outfits, and I reckon they a lot to that. But all the time now they in trouble with the police. I like to die with fretting.”

McCall said, “It's worrisome, all right, Mrs. Rawlings. Martin Luther King managed to win some important rights for blacks without violence, but I can see how lots of people would consider his methods too slow. Matter of fact, I've often thought that if I'd been born black I'd probably be a militant.”

“You would?” she said. She appraised him with her direct black eyes. “Now ain't that interesting.”

“I'm not saying I approve violence,” McCall said quickly; no one was going to con this old woman. “I'm merely saying I think I can understand what drives black people to it. I know if I had to take the kind of pushing around the average black man does, I'd want to push back twice as hard, too. That wouldn't necessarily make it right. It's just that I'm mule-headed enough to understand your son's mule-headedness.”

“Now, see?” Mrs. Rawlings said, smiling. “LeRoy and Harlan both wrong. They always say no white can understand how us blacks feel. More coffee, Mr. McCall?”

“Just about coffeed out,” McCall said, “thank you. Heard from Harlan since he went underground?”

“LeRoy get one letter saying not to worry, but Harlan don't say where he at. 'Course, we hear him talk on the radio every day. LeRoy tune him on, or if he ain't here, Emily do. I wouldn't myself.”

“You sound as if you don't care for Mr. James, Mrs. Rawlings,” McCall said with a smile.

“Oh, I like him all right. But I hear that stuff so many times before. LeRoy and Emily always dragging me out to those Black Hearts meetings. Harlan a real fiery speaker, like an old-time preacher, but he keep saying the same thing over and over till you want to fall asleep. About the honkies, and the slavemasters, and all. I suppose it's true, but a body gets tired of the same old thing—”

The front door was keyed open suddenly and an attractive black woman in her late twenties came in. She was the girl in the photograph. She froze at sight of McCall.

The old woman said quietly, “Emily, this is Mr. McCall from the governor's office. My LeRoy's Emily, Mr. McCall.”

McCall, on his feet, said hello.

Emily Rawlings's black eyes snapped. “You're the man who tried to get my husband to tell where Harlan James is hid out, aren't you?”

“That's right, Mrs. Rawlings.”

She has styled her hair in an exaggerated Afro hairdo; the copper loops hanging from her ears were three inches in diameter. Her dress was violent and stunning.

“Get out.”

The tiny white-haired woman said, “I declare I don't know where you brought up! Don't pay her no mind, Mr. McCall. The young folk today got no respect for nothing and nobody.”

“It's all right, Mrs. Rawlings,” McCall said. He turned back to Le Roy Rawlings's wife. “I just stopped in to talk to your husband—”

“The Black Hearts took a vote on you,” the young woman said. “They decided the rule of no truck with pigs applies to you, too. So we don't want you smelling around our house. Like I said—get out.”

The old woman was furious. “I going tell LeRoy about this! I sick of you and your uppity airs! Talking like that to a man from the governor hisself! LeRoy going to hear—”

“You do that,” the young woman said, and flung the door open, holding it that way. “You heard me, Mr. McCall. Out. That polite enough for you, Mama?”

“It's all right, Mrs. Rawlings,” McCall said again to her mother-in-law. “I understand this, too. It's been a pleasure and a privilege to talk to you.”

She threw her apron over her face.

As he started his car, a motorcade began to creep across Jackson Road half a block away. He drove to the intersection and stopped to let it go by, assuming from its snail's pace that it was a funeral procession. But he was startled to see that most of the four to six men in each car were armed with rifles or shotguns. All were white.

The procession extended as far as he could see. There had to be well over a hundred automobiles in the convoy. Or posse.

Jackson Road was too narrow to allow him to drive alongside the procession. McCall backed into a driveway, returned along Compton, and took the first street paralleling Jackson. He raced for three blocks, then shot back to his objective.

The head of the procession was a quarter of a block away when he reached Jackson Road. McCall swung right, wheeled left, stopping his car broadside to the oncoming cars and blocking both lanes. He cut his engine and sprang but.

The lead car rocked to a halt; the cars behind it closed in bumper to bumper. The driver and three other men spilled from the lead car; they carried rifles. McCall recognized two of the men. The driver was the lanky blond man with the foreign accent whom Benjamin Cordes had called Zablonski. The man who had been seated beside Zablonski was the one with the red-veined doughface Cordes had called Rozak.

“What's the big idea, wise guy?” Rozak rumbled, brandishing his rifle. “You're blocking traffic. Get that heap the hell out of here.”

McCall held his shield case up to Rozak's eye level. “What do you men think you're doing? Where are you going, Rozak?”

The man seemed taken aback. “How d'ye know my name?”

“I know this one's, too,” McCall said. He glanced at the tall blond man. “Zablonski, who wants to wipe out Blacktown. Is that where you're headed?”

And where the hell were Chief Condon's police?

Zablonski blinked. “How this guy know me, Joe?”

“I remember now, Joe,” one of the other men said. “I saw him at the union hall last night. He must have got your names then. Who is he, anyways?”

“Mike McCall,” Joe Rozak growled. “The governor's errand boy. The hell with him.” He whirled and waved the rifle over his head. “Nobody's going to stop us now, men! It's only the next block. Let's walk the rest of the way. Unload and walk!”

Men began to pile out of cars all along the line. In the confusion McCall innocently asked one man, “What's on the next block?”

“Black Hearts headquarters. Where you been? You want to get run over by about five hundred men, mister, you just keep standing here!”

Some of the men were making threatening gestures toward his car.

McCall glanced up and down the street. Except for the posse of whites, there was not a soul in sight. It was a street of small shops and neighborhood upstairs offices with plate glass fronts in a variety of lettering, much of it crudely done, with an occasional misspelling; here and there stood a three-story apartment building. There was no sign of life in the commercial establishments; it might have been Sunday. Apartment shades were drawn to the sills. McCall felt his flesh creep. The people here could not have had more than a few minutes' warning, yet it was as though the whole area had been evacuated by its inhabitants.

No vehicle moved, either, although the curbs were jammed with cars.

And the Banbury police were totally elsewhere.

A one-man army I ain't, McCall reminded himself.

He got back into his car, started the motor, backed around, and took off. None of the posse made an attempt to stop him. Joe Rozak was yelling orders, trying to get his army to form a column of fours, and his three lieutenants, headed by Zablonski, were hurrying back along the line to see that Rozak's orders were carried out.

EIGHTEEN

In the middle of the next block McCall spotted what he was looking for. Between a barbershop and a grocery store, an open flight of stairs led up to the second floor of a ramshackle two-story wooden building. Over the stairway hung a sign sporting a white circle with a black heart in its center, a white dagger thrust through the heart.

There was an alley beside the stairway, and McCall swung into it fast, jumped out of his car, and took the stairs three at a time. The door at the top was locked. He pounded on it. It opened three inches; it was on a chain. The face of LeRoy Rawlings stared out at him. There was a submachine gun in his hands.

“You crazy, man?” the vice president of the Black Hearts said. “You damn near got cut down just now. Get out of here.”

“Let me in,” McCall said. “Quick.”

“What do you want?”

“There's a mob of maybe five hundred vigilantes headed this way, and they're armed to the eyeballs.”

“We know it,” Rawlings said. “We're waiting for them.”

“Do you
want
a shootout, for God's sake?”

“That's up to the honkies, man. They want it, we'll oblige.”

“Don't keep me standing out here,” McCall urged. “Let me at least use your phone. Maybe I can still head this lunacy off.”