Three Days Before the Shooting ... (189 page)

But now time leaped forward and wavered, and down the middle of a Manhattan street a group of smiling black women and men accompanied by a blaring brass band were dancing a high-stepping cakewalk. And while the women were prancing and smiling in a shimmering flurry of pink feather boas, the dashing black beaus, dressed in white ties and tails, were flourishing silk opera hats above their partners’ plumed heads. To which, smiling coquettishly, the women were responding by aiming high kicks toward the beaus’ gleaming hat brims. And as they swayed and swayed and kicked higher and higher they revealed teasing pink flashes of their ruffled silk lingerie, and their feminine garters were adorned with tiny blue bows. And as I watched them prance to the beat of the blaring brass tune I recalled a snatch of its once popular lyrics, which were echoed years later in a mosaic-like poem by Thomas Stearns Eliot:

If you like-a me
Like I
Like-a you …
Under the bamboo tree …

Then with a swoop and a flourish the dancers were gone—and I was watching a race between the riverboats
Natchez
and the
Robert E. Lee
. And as they went plowing along with their sidewheels awhirl and their smokestacks billowing a
crowd of blacks who were lined on the levee were urging them on with cheers and with laughter.

Which left me wondering at the complex role played in our fractured democracy by the sports and the arts, and struck by the irony of irreverent laughter serving as a balm for the wounds that both bind and divide us …

But now, my musing interrupted by the Sergeant’s command to one of his men, I turned to see on a table nearby an Edison phonograph, a telegraph key, a Leyden jar, a tintype camera, a collection of antique movie projectors, and a scattered collection of stereoscopic views of early America: Niagara Falls, a spouting Old Faithful, Jamestown, Boston, and Virginia’s old Williamsburg. And then I took note of a towering stack of phonographic discs, on the top of which I looked down to see a cracked recording of “The Bear Mash Blues.” …

Then from behind me the lock expert complained, “Look, Sarge, I could save time by giving this thing a bang with my shoulder.”

“And you’d wake up the dead,” the Sergeant said, “so stick to that lock ‘til you’ve solved it. That’s what you’re paid for.”

“Okay, but by then whosever’s in there could climb out the window.”

“Don’t worry, the joint’s surrounded,” the Sergeant said, “so snap to it!”

And with that I continued making notes on the room and its clutter, which was becoming a mind-teasing mixture of weird treasure-house and pack rat’s burrow. And in inching my way I grew dizzier and dizzier.

Here was an old Franklin stove supporting a fading framed portrait of Teddy Roosevelt wearing his Rough Rider’s uniform. A full-length portrait of Senator Stephen A. Douglas looked down from a wall surrounded by framed collages made of fading handbills that offered rewards in cash for the safe return of runaway slaves. A playbill dated April 14, 1865, announced the final performance of
Our American Cousin
, a drama in which Laura Keene had starred on the stage of Ford’s Theater, that site of a deed so fatal that it still finds uneasy echoes in our hesitant memory. And next to that haunting reminder that our country’s history possesses elements of tragedy (and no doubt to the delight of my invisible tor-menter), I saw a playbill of the same fatal date that proudly announced the presentation of Boucicault’s “Great Sensation Drama”
The Octoroon
, and beside it a portrait of young Thomas Jefferson.

And now I moved past a tall weathered totem pole carved with animals, birds, and tribal ancestors—and was brought to a halt by the cast-iron figure of a young blackamoor.

A relic from the days when few cars were available, the figure had once served as a convenient device for tethering horses. But now it stood high on a table with a small palm stretched toward me and a mischievous smile on its shiny black face. And as it stared back with eyes that seemed to look through me, I realized that the object on its head at a debonair angle was the inverted bowl of an old chamber pot, and as I frowned in revulsion it appeared to respond with a
gaze of derision—from which unnerving spell I sought to escape by grabbing the offensive utensil and snatching it away.

Whereupon I saw printed on its side in Italian:

Mange Bene,
Cacca Forte,
Vida Longo!

Under which the following comment was written in English:

“But now, alas and alack, Her lovely soft
Thighs shall be bathed
By bright Pearly Tears.”

And fearing that the grinning black figure would take off and start dancing a buck dance, I returned the bawdy utensil to its nappy iron head.

But where, I thought as I moved quickly away, are the fumes coming from? Could it be from the fireplace? And could the building actually be, as Murphy suggested, a site for illegal activities? And all the clutter a shield for crimes that had long gone unnoticed? Could the mass of images and objects from the past have been amassed as a façade behind which some violation of law had only now run its course and ended in murder? How did one even
begin
to think about a place in which the weird collection of incongruous objects were evoking a whirl of long surpressed memories? And why were the detectives taking so much time in picking that lock!

Then, inspired by the fumes in the air, I thought, Perhaps there really
is
a still in this building, with its copper coil winding between the walls and the floors and down to the basement, where even now its illegal distillant is being collected.

And making my way to the room’s marble fireplace, I examined its opening but found no sign of a still’s hidden coil. Instead, in the space usually occupied by andirons, firewood, and ashes, I found an ancient iron safe, on the black door of which I read quotations that were a mix of the Bible and Benjamin Franklin. Painted in red, gold-bordered letters, they offered the following advice to the reader:

REMEMBER THY FATHER IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH FOR A PENNY SAVED IS A PENNY EARNED (!)

Then, hearing the detectives thudding the door to little effect, I moved from the safe to a wall on which I saw a series of photographed portraits of once-famous Indians. Among them Black Hawk and Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and
Chief Joseph, Osceola, Crazy Horse, and Stumickosucks—a name as imposing as its owner’s grim image. Here was a ceremonial scene in which white men and Indians were making a treaty, a group of Plains Indians in full regalia posing with impassive dignity for an early daguerreotypist—perhaps no less than the great Mathew Brady.

Then came photographs of President Warren G. Harding. In the first of which, surrounded by cronies, Harding might well have been indulging in the hyper-alliterative oratorical style for which he was famous. Such as his letter “P” accented “… palaver on progress without pretense or prejudice or accent upon personal pronouns, and without regard to the perennial pronouncements and unperturbed by people passion-wrought over the loss of promises proposed.”

Which phrase I recalled as among the guests who were listening I identified Albert Fall and Harry Daugherty and surmised that the scene might have been snapped about the time Teapot Dome, that nation-shaking scandal of the twenties, was on the point of exploding. And then came photographs of scenes that fairly exulted, “HARDING, HARDING, WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING!”

Harding attired in a suit of white flannel, silk shirt, bow tie, and panama hat while playing croquet on the handsome South Lawn of the White House.

Harding standing on a balcony with a party of ladies with high generous bosoms who displayed fancy wide hats while waving to a mob of small kids who were rolling Easter eggs on the lawn below them.

Harding with hand upraised while taking the oath of his office, his swarthy face somber beneath his white, neatly parted hair.

And Harding in top hat and fur-collared coat smiling suavely as he waved from a limousine to a Fifth Avenue crowd.

And then, just when I was taken with sadness by such poignant reminders of those desperately optimistic days, when this war-weary nation’s most popular slogan was “A return to normalcy,” I was face-to-face with Jack Johnson, the most notorious of all heavyweight champions, and a man whom certain sports reporters and Sam, my favorite black waiter, regard as an underground hero. Which I confess was an opinion in whose regard I remained strictly neutral. Nevertheless I recognized that Johnson was a figure of national prominence who had indeed been most imposing, skillful, and troublesome. But now, erupting like a ghost from the past, he came jogging toward me like a black Hercules. Broad-shouldered and tall, he’s wearing a black-and-white suit of giant hounds -tooth check, a white turtleneck sweater, and a circular fur cap of Russian design. And gripping a club of a walking cane midway its length he comes jogging toward me with a haughty expression. Then, in Havana, stretched on the canvas, he’s shading his eyes from the sun with a nonchalant gesture while Jess Willard, the triumphant “White Hope,” waits in a corner while the referee with hand in the air renders his verdict. But was Johnson really defeated—or, as Sam the waiter insisted, simply bowing to the force of white racial prejudice? And thinking,
Damn this room and the questions it raises
, I returned to the present when one of the detectives bumped into a table and a huge music box came alive with a reedy, twangy rendition of “Oh Didn’t He Ramble.”

Then the Sergeant was cursing and as the tune expired I turned back to see Johnson dressed in a bullfighter’s costume while posing with his arms around the shoulders of the Joselito and Belmonte, who like himself were both outstanding athletes. Yes, but unlike our boxing theirs was a sport which was life-risking and tragic.

And now here was Johnson looking sinisterly graceful in his black fighting togs, with his domed, shaven head bobbing and weaving as he taunts and has fun with Jim Jeffries.

Which called to mind an incident from my boyhood in which a little black kid hurled a taunt from the top of a fence in an alley. Sticking out his tongue and thumbing his nose he had yelled,

“Hey, whitey! If it hadn’t been for
that white referee
Jack Johnson woulda
killed
Jim Jefferie!”

And as I grinned at that forgotten hilarity there came a bang behind me, and I whirled to see the door flying open. And as the Sergeant and his men stepped into the doorway and froze in confusion I rushed to join them, and came face-to-face with a scene for which even the chaotic room had not prepared me.

[RITUAL 1]

H
AVING ASSUMED THAT THE
victim was white, prostrate, and barely alive, I gasped. For instead, staring toward the door from a throne-like position, an elderly black man sat high in a coffin with his face distorted as though shouting a protest. And as I stared in astonishment I heard Murphy exclaim, “Well, I’ll be damned, that guy is a
boogie
!”

And to my dismay certain idealistic notions of democracy to which I still cling were knocked out of kilter by the paradox posed by the mansion, the servants, and the old man’s complexion. Yes, and his unusual attire.

For while the lawmen gaped as though their world were collapsing I noted his gray morning coat, blue ascot tie, and pink boutonniere. Then came a glint from his dangling pince-nez and I whispered with mounting amazement, “It’s a gag! An outrageous
gag
!”

But now, catching sight of his work-hardened hands, I was struck by what certain French existentialists would have seized as an eloquent symbol of American absurdity:

Sitting with his forearms resting on the closed lower portion of the coffin’s curved lid, the old man was gripping a Bible and a half-consumed bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. And while I strained to make sense of his odd juxtaposition of coffin, whiskey, and leather-bound Bible, the moaning resumed from somewhere below him and I joined the detectives in search for its source.

Directly below the man in the coffin, a black man dressed in faded blue jeans lay sprawled in a Chippendale chair with his chin on his chest and grasping a glass and a half-empty bottle of the same brand of whiskey. But before there was time for a look at his face the Sergeant exploded.

“What the hell,” he yelled, “is
she
doing here!”

And alarmed by the overtones of outrage and panic with which a veteran detective had voiced the word “she,” I whirled so abruptly that I took a blow in the crotch from my swinging recorder. And there, back in the shadows to the left of the door, I saw the form of a woman.

Kneeling on the floor, she was grasping the arms of an upholstered chair, and as she struggled to rise I thought, She must be his wife or a grief-stricken relative…. But with a step closer that naive assumption was dispelled by her bawdy costume and her scandalous antics.

White, drunk, redheaded, and bloated, she was totally bare but for her high-heeled black shoes and a sly skimp of a skirt that flared from her hips like the pale yellow rays of a surrealist sunburst—from which, now, sensing a stir in the doorway, I looked up to see three men from the vestibule who were staring at the scene with wide-eyed amazement, and heard the Sergeant yell, “Dammit, Morrison, get those Peeping Tom bastards back to the foyer and see that they stay there!”

And with Morrison charging the men like a Hall of Fame tackle, he grabbed hold of the woman and wrestled her up from the floor and into the chair. Then, whirling with a scowl of distaste, he stabbed a finger at a gawking policeman in uniform.

“You,” he shouted, “stop staring at the strumpet and get her butt covered!”