The Black Hearts Murder (20 page)

Fenner made for the fire chief's car.

It was past one o'clock when the team from the sheriff's office arrived. The fire chief and the truck with the grappling equipment had left. It was lonely waiting in the old quarry with the body of the black leader. But, as McCall remarked, it was lonelier for James.

The county morgue bus pulled in while Lieutenant Cox and Sergeant Fenner briefed the sheriff's men. By the time the two city officers were free to leave, it was one-thirty
P.M.
; it was two before McCall and the detectives reached headquarters.

“Ever notice how hungry you get after you've gone through the bit with a stiff?” the lieutenant asked. “I'm starved.”

“Me, too,” the sergeant said. “It's the same at a wake. Everybody stuffs himself.”

“Let's eat,” McCall said briefly; and they swooped down on the police cafeteria. As they loaded their trays, McCall remarked that he had assumed they would put out a pickup order on LeRoy Rawlings the moment they got back. “Why didn't you, Lieutenant?”

“That mysterious angle you're going to check out discouraged me,” Cox said. “Well go talk to LeRoy, but you've got me half sold he's not our boy.”

“Don't let me influence your investigation,” McCall said.

“Haha,” Sergeant Fenner barked. “You're a big help, Mr. McCall, you are. If you ain't interested in that ham, sir, would you mind getting the hell out of my way?”

It was shortly after three when McCall parked before the radio station. He found the upstairs office of the station manager unoccupied. The monitor speakers were switched on, however, so Ben Cordes was probably somewhere in the building. A disk jockey was spreading his personality all over BOKO's air.

McCall went down the hall to the three studios. They were on the right side, so grouped that the window of the control room looked into all three.

A sound engineer wearing earphones sat before the control panel. Through the window McCall saw into Studio B, where the disk jockey was working. He was seated behind a turntable, chain-smoking; his feet were on the table where the record was spinning.

The door to Studio A was to the right of Studio B, the door to Studio C was to the left of the control room. The signs over both were unlighted.

McCall tried Studio A first; it was empty. He went up the hall to Studio C and quietly opened the door.

Cordes and Whalen, the redheaded maintenance engineer, were seated at opposite sides of a long table. Between them lay two tape recorders. The resonant voice of Harlan James was issuing from one, fulminating against Whitey for oppressing the black man. Since the reels of the other tape machine were also spinning, it was obviously re-recording the talk.

Both glanced up at once when McCall came in. Cordes immediately switched off the broadcasting machine; Andy Whalen switched off the other.

“Mr. McCall,” the station manager-political candidate said. “We got another tape from Harlan James in the mail today. We're just re-recording it to cut out the profanity.”

“You won't be getting any more tapes from Mr. James,” McCall said. “He's dead.”

“Dead?” Cordes seemed surprised. “Harlan James?”

“Harlan James.”

Andy Whalen licked his thick lips. “Killed by the cops, huh?”

“No such luck,” McCall said. “He was shot by the same skunk who shot Gerald Horton, weighted down, and sunk in forty-five feet of quarry water …
the same night he disappeared.
”

TWENTY-THREE

There was a lengthy silence. Then Cordes said, “That's not possible, Mr. McCall. James has been sending us these letters and tapes daily since he went into hiding.”

McCall pulled out a chair at the end of the table and straddled it.

“The signatures on the letters were forged and the tapes patched up from old speeches he made at various Black Hearts rallies.”

Whalen said excitedly, “LeRoy Rawlings! It has to be, because Rawlings delivered that first package!”

“I think Andy's right,” the station manager said in a thoughtful voice. “Rawlings was also in a position to tape James's speeches, Mr. McCall.”

“So were other people,” McCall said, “any number of them. For instance, somebody doing research on the Black Hearts in a study of the black militant movement in this country. Or somebody else wanting a record of, Harlan James's inflammatory statements for the possible future use of same by police, prosecutors, or politicians interested in putting the whammy on the Black Hearts. By the way, Mr. Cordes, how does it happen that you didn't recognize Rawlings when he delivered the package of tapes to your office here?”

Cordes blinked. “I told you. I'd never seen Rawlings on television.”

“Maybe so. But you could hardly have avoided seeing him in person. Your late boss, Horton, told me you attended a number of Black Hearts meetings in the preparation of a special BOKO program on Banbury's black militant movement that you broadcast last month. It's inconceivable that Rawlings, the vice-president of the Black Hearts, wasn't present on at least one of those occasions. What's more, Rawlings as James's chief lieutenant would have to have been seated on the platform near his leader, just as you were seated on the platform near your boss Gerald Horton the night Horton was killed. In his executive capacity, in fact, LeRoy Rawlings probably even addressed these rallies, at least to the extent of introducing James. You had to have seen him, Cordes; you had to have known him by sight.”

“Come on, McCall. What are you getting at?” There was a noticeable roughening of Cordes' voice, along with the dropping of “Mister.” McCall felt relief. He shifted ever so slightly in the chair, balancing on the balls of his feet.

“Nobody delivered that first tape and letter to you, Cordes. You ‘delivered' them to yourself. And mailed the tapes and letters received by the other stations, as well as the letter to Rawlings purportedly written by James. Where did you get the James signature you traced, by the way?”

The little man's eyes began to go this way and that.

“I imagine he had something with his signature on it in his wallet when you grabbed him. He must have had a driver's license, a credit card …”

He stopped. Cordes had suddenly got to his feet and walked over to the glass partition separating the studio from the control room. He pulled down the black shade, barring the view of the sound engineer. McCall was busy watching Whalen; the ex-boxer was a physical threat.

Cordes did not reseat himself; he stood glaring down at McCall, who nodded toward the twin tape recorders on the table.

“You were putting together another speech to ‘arrive in the mail' tomorrow when I walked in. You don't have to re-record a speech onto another tape to blip out an undesirable word here and there. You can simply erase on the original tape. I took you by surprise and you had no time to think up a better explanation for what I caught you doing. It was careless of you not to lock the studio door.”

The station manager glared at his maintenance engineer; his maintenance engineer glared back. “I was here first,” Whalen said sullenly. “I naturally thought you—”

“
Shut up
” Cordes said. His little hands were fists now, and he planted them on the tabletop, transferring his glare from Whalen to McCall. “Do I understand, McCall, that you're trying to implicate me in whatever happened to Harlan James?”

“I'm not trying,” McCall smiled. “I've done it.”

“You're out of your mind! Next thing I know you'll be accusing me of having murdered him!”

“No, Cordes, only of masterminding his murder. And, of course, of being behind Gerald Horton's murder, too.”

“You are plain, raging mad!”

“Actually, I've been kind of slow on the uptake. If it weren't for that Milquetoast front of yours, I'd have given you at least a passing thought when I was thinking over possible motives for Horton's murder. But you were so beautifully reluctant to take his place as mayoralty candidate. I have to admire—if that's the word—your timing, Cordes. Coming only a week before the deadline for filing candidacies, Horton's assassination left no time for the party to groom anybody but the departed bigwig's shy and faithful right arm, his campaign manager, strategist, and speechwriter. You'd actually helped draft the party platform. Who else was there who could step in at the last moment and hope to make a creditable race of it against the black candidate? You knew that no matter how hard you shied away from a draft, the party's executive committee would force you to accept the candidacy; you were their only possible choice.”

“Words,” Cordes said; his nose was pinched white at the nostrils. “Hot air. Meaningless!”

“Horton's killing was timed beautifully for another reason, Cordes. The way you inherited his top spot on the slate more than made up for the handicap of not being very well known to the voters. You knew that the majority of the white electorate, scared by the assassination, wouldn't stand for black militants getting their candidate in—or, anyway, a black man—by killing off his opponent. They were bound to vote against Jerome Duncan if only to show the black community that such tactics wouldn't get them into power. Your plot to have the white candidate assassinated by a black was diabolical, Cordes. It could have produced one of the bloodiest race riots of this century.”

“You must be stoned,” Cordes said. “High on grass or something. It would have been a lot better for you, McCall, if you'd make these ridiculous accusations with no witness present. Andy, I want you to remember every word this lunatic's said, because I'm going to sue him—and that unscrupulous upstate politician he works for!—for defamation of character. By God, McCall, I'll sue for a million dollars!”

“Why don't you both sue?”

“What?” Cordes said.

“What, what?” Whalen said. “What d'ye mean?”

“You're going to have grounds, too.”

“What's that supposed to mean!”

“You should have taken a course in makeup from a qualified actor, Andy. Or done some research on the nearest member of the Black Hearts. When you held out your hand at the quarry to catch that roll of piano wire, your sweaty palm glittered like patent leather. Don't you know there's far less pigmentation in the skin of the black man's palm—and the soles of his feet—than in the rest of him?”

The silence became ghastly.

Whalen said weakly, “I don't know what you're talking about …”

“You're accusing my maintenance engineer of having made up as a Negro and killed Gerry Horton?” Benjamin Cordes yapped. “Who'd believe a wild yarn like that?”

But McCall went on evenly, “At your instigation, Cordes. And then you sent him after me, although you must have had some doubts about Andy's ability to do the job, because you had him make up in blackface again just in case he wasn't able to pull it off and I survived to give the police a description of my abductor and assailant.”

“You're guessing!”

“No. On the way to the quarry my ‘black' kidnaper asked me what the clue was that the police got from the pistol used by Horton's killer. I'd mentioned the existence of a clue to only three people: Mayor Potter, Jerome Duncan, and you. To the mayor and Duncan I said nothing about the gun, only the bare statement that the police had a clue. It's true that the mayor could have learned about the pistol application report on James from Chief Condon—assuming Condon had had a report on it from Lieutenant Cox and Sergeant Fenner—but even if he had, the mayor is a wise old fox who doesn't go around running off at the mouth to potential killers. And yes, Duncan could theoretically have been involved with the killer—but how could he have known that the clue I mentioned concerned the weapon, which has never even been found? That narrowed it down to you, Cordes, and to you I
had
made a slip and specified that the clue concerned the weapon. So I figured: who's close to Ben Cordes, a white man with thick lips and broad nostrils? Why, his handyman Andy Whalen.”

Whalen said thickly, “I'm going to sue him, too!”

“You'll have to try it from a jail cell, I'm afraid,” McCall said. “Once Cox and Fenner run all this down, they won't have any trouble putting the tag on you, Whalen. There can't be a lot of places in or around Banbury where you can buy or rent the kind of Afro wig you wore, and the fact that you're white will have stuck in the storekeeper's memory. And how many places are there in this town where you can buy theatrical makeup? On top of that, you've probably got the stuff stashed away in your home, including that black Italian shirt and the Woodsman pistol, in case your boss here wants you to go into character again. Incidentally,
was
that Harlan James's target pistol?”

Whalen's face was as red as his hair. “I don't have to listen to this—” He jumped up.

McCall stood in his” way. “If you think you're going to rush home and destroy the evidence, Andy, forget it. The only place you're going is police headquarters.”

“You going to stop me?” Whalen roared. “You think you're as good as Kid Cooley?”

“That's history, Andy, ancient history. Look at your pot. Anyway, I'm not getting into a boxing match with you; your fists probably still rate as lethal weapons in the law books. I'm merely reminding you that running away isn't going to solve your problems. The law will collar you no matter how fast and how far you run. So use your head and come peacefully.”

Whalen lunged and threw a whooshing left hook to McCall's jaw. But McCall was faithful to his gym regimen; he saw the paunchy ex-fighter's punch coming in slow motion, and he was inside it harmlessly and jabbing with the stiffened fingers of his right hand into the man's exposed armpit. Whalen yelped; his left arm came down like a tree trunk, temporarily paralyzed by the judo jab. He bellowed a curse and tried a right cross to McCall's head. The smaller man ducked inside again, grabbing the offered wrist with both hands like a drowning mar He whirled, yanked, and flipped Whalen over his shoulder. The ex-pug landed on his back with a mighty crash.