Wicked City (36 page)

“Twenty-seven.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Black said. “You ready?”

“I said I can’t move.”

“Sure thing, hoss.”

Black called in four negro trusties from the jail who’d been brought over with the Guard. They took their posts on each corner of Fuller’s bed and, with the word from Black, lifted him up like a fat sultan and whisked him out the door.

“Load him in the truck,” Black said, following.

THE PARADE OF CARS CONTINUED OUT OF PHENIX CITY AND
down along the curving country road to Seale and Arch Ferrell’s big ranch house. His wife, Madeline, met us in the front drive, holding her newborn daughter, and she shielded her eyes in the bright sunshine, looking out at the hordes crawling out of their automobiles. I asked her to please get Arch.

She said he wasn’t there. She said she thought he was at the courthouse.

So we all waited about an hour, leaning against the cars, the deputies and prosecutors and photographers and newspapermen, until we saw Arch’s familiar Pontiac drive slow, a funeral pace, down the long road to his brand-new house, and kill the engine.

He climbed out of the car with a smile on his face and removed his hat. “Madeline, you mind waiting inside for me?”

The baby had started to cry, and Madeline mounted the steps and path to the house, closing the door behind her.

“Did you hear?” Arch asked.

I waited.

“Governor Persons has just suffered a massive heart attack. They’ve rushed him to the hospital.”

I shook my head.

“This town is killing everyone,” Arch said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Now, just what is this about?” he asked.

I looked at him, giving a slight shake of my head, and told him he was under arrest for the killing of Mr. Patterson.

He nodded and asked if we had a warrant, and I slipped a piece of paper from my new gray suit jacket and handed it to him. He stood there, a bit shorter than me, and read through the simple document as if judging its legal validity, showing he was still very much a man of the court.

And then he nodded again and looked up.

Black was at my elbow, his hand on the butt of a .45, waiting for Arch to take off or explode. Quinnie waited at the black Chevy with a 12-gauge in his little arms.

“Can I talk to my wife?” he asked. “I’d like to be the one to tell her.”

I looked to Jack and then over at Quinnie. There were twenty-odd cars parked out at crazy angles, maybe forty newspapermen and photographers circling us.

“Sure thing, Arch.”

As he walked up the steps and to the front door, everyone fell silent. He met Madeline there and he leaned in to kiss her but missed her cheek, whispering something. She put her hand to her mouth and began to cry as he leaned in to kiss his newborn on the forehead. His older daughter, Anne’s friend, held back in the black void of the open door with a dull expression on her face, numb to it all.

THE NEXT DAY, JOHN PATTERSON AND I FLEW OUT OF
Montgomery to Houston, where the local sheriff drove us over to Galveston and Si Garrett’s sanitarium. We were met in the lobby of this big white antebellum building by a doctor and a lawyer, one with a clipboard and one with a briefcase, fully ready to fight us. I presented the lawyer with the warrant and extradition papers while the doctor rattled on about all the delicate and frail sensibilities of a very ill man.

“Can we see him?” John asked.

The doctor looked to the lawyer. The lawyer shrugged.

They led us out the east wing of the building, following a well-worn brick walkway through colonnades and past large twisted oaks that grew only in this part of the country. The doctor used a key from his pocket to open a side door and walked ahead down a long gray linoleum hall dimly lit with artificial light. He spoke to a nurse sitting at a desk at the end of the hall, and we all followed to a small metal door, where he used another key from his other pocket.

He unlocked and opened the door, light following the sharp edge, opening like a weak dawn into a small square room where a skinny man lay huddled in the corner squinting up at us.

“Mr. Garrett?” I asked.

The room smelled of antiseptic and urine.

“I am Silas Garrett.”

“I’m Sheriff Lamar Murphy of Russell County, Alabama,” I said. “I’ve been sent to take you back to face charges of killing Albert Patterson.”

From the corner, Garrett palmed his way up on the two walls and stood. He wore a white smock. He looked much smaller than I remembered him, without the crisp white suit and big clean Stetson. His brown eyes looked confused, his hair thin, skin pale with the scruff of a black-and-gray beard that made him seem dirty.

“Are you well, sir?” I asked.

He shook his head. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at John Patterson. He began to tremble.

Patterson looked across at Garrett, the man fumbling with his hands and looking away. John’s jaw clenched. I waited to hold him back.

“I’d really like you to explain to my mother why you killed her husband over a political pissing match.”

He shook his head. He looked down. A scolded child.

He looked eighty years old.

“It doesn’t take much to keep you quiet. It took three bullets for my father.”

“As you can see—” the doctor started.

“He looks fine to me,” I said.

“Under no circumstances,” the doctor said, already walking out of the room. “Rest, Mr. Garrett. Please, just rest.”

He turned off the lights, arguing with us out in the long, endless linoleum hall. As he spoke, I watched the door close, the narrowing of artificial light, that swath cut down to just a sliver, and I saw Si Garrett fall back into that far corner, bracing his back and sliding down to his haunches. Doing nothing but staring into the dark as the door closed with a click.

IT WAS THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AND I WAS DOWN
at Slocumb’s checking up on how my father-in-law was making out with his other son-in-law who’d taken my place. Anne and Thomas rode over with me and were raiding the ice-cream freezer, to the great aggravation of their grandfather, who had always been known to be stingy with the cones. I talked to my brother-in-law a little about the dozens of fugitives we were looking for, including Fannie Belle and Johnnie Benefield, and gave him a wanted poster to tack on the wall by the cigarettes.

He commented that Benefield’s picture was enough to scare off customers.

We were going to swing by and pick up Joyce and then head down to Columbus and Broadway to spend the rest of the day Christmas shopping. Thomas and I talked about maybe catching a movie after paying a visit to Santa Claus.

I excused myself, as Thomas was trying to climb into the cooler with his grandfather pulling him back by his sneakers, and walked around out back to smoke a cigarette. From around the garage, Arthur joined me and I gave him a cigarette, and we stood there looking across at the muddy creek and the path that had led to my house, now tangling up in weeds.

Arthur wore grease-stained denim overalls and a wide smile on his worn negro face.

“You miss me?” I asked.

“Not at all.”

“You ready for Christmas?”

“You know it, Sheriff.”

“You know you can just call me Lamar. I’m no different.”

“No different, except you can put my ass in jail.”

“You do have a point.”

He smoked the cigarette fast and crushed it under his work boot. He looked around, just to make sure no one was in earshot, and said, “I was listenin’ to the radio in the shop the other day. You know, like I always do. And, anyway, Mr. Patterson come on and started talking about Phenix. He was talking about the way the sheriff and the police didn’t let no one have any rights. He said livin’ in Phenix City was like livin’ over there in Russia.”

I nodded.

“He said a man’s vote didn’t mean a thing here. He said there hadn’t been an honest election in a hundred years.”

“That’s probably true,” I said. “So what’s the point?”

Arthur shook his head. “No point, just something I found mighty interesting.”

“You’re talking about the negro situation.”

He caught my eye. I smiled at him, my cigarette burning down to a nub, singeing my fingers.

“Fella came by to see you the other day. I told him to find you at the jail, but he left a number. Wanted to talk about that reward you put up.”

I shook my head. “People been calling for two weeks about that reward money.”

“I figured,” Arthur said. “That’s why I didn’t think much of it. Hell of a car, though.”

“What’s that?”

“That fella that stopped by. Had the longest goddamn car I ever seen. A ’39 Lincoln, black, and about a mile long. That’s what I call an automobile.”

“Where is that number?”

“By the register.”

He followed me back into Slocumb’s, where I shuffled through some receipts and deposit slips and found a phone number for a man named Padgett. I showed it to Arthur and he nodded.

I had the phone in my hand and started to dial.

“I’ve been prayin’ y’all catch the fella that did that to Mr. Patterson,” Arthur said, wiping the sweat off the back of his neck with an oil-stained rag. “I prayed for it since it happened. Figured it’s my town, too. Ain’t that right?”

“I’M NOT GOING TO LIE TO YOU, MR. PADGETT,” I SAID. “IT’S
not a position I’d want to be in.”

Cecil Padgett was in his late twenties. A slender, handsome man with intense blue eyes and that kind of tanned skin that comes from hard outdoor labor. He smoked and listened to me, sitting on a sofa in the center of an Airstream trailer he shared with his wife. He nodded with everything I said, grounding out his cigarette in a tin can on the coffee table.

His wife hovered around in their tiny kitchen, pretending to be rearranging dishes but exchanging glances with him until he stopped looking to her.

“So they might try and kill me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I read about that other fella. Not a good way to go.”

“He was connected with the rackets. The man who we think killed him probably did it because he switched sides.”

“Those gangsters probably wouldn’t be pleased with me either.”

“We would ask that you and your wife stay in a hotel with protection until the trials.”

He nodded.

His wife dropped a tea cup and it shattered on the floor. She put her hand to her mouth. I looked to Padgett and he stood, asking if we could get some fresh air. It was night, and we stood out by our cars, the fat ceramic Christmas lights hung over the little canopies set up from all the Airstreams at Tropical Paradise Court in Columbus.

“Why were you downtown?”

“We wanted to see a movie,” he said. “I was checking the times.”

“Did you stay?”

“No, sir,” he said. “It was a western, and those things always leave me feeling kind of low.”

“How’s that?”

“Too many people have to die.”

I nodded, and reached out to shake his hand and said, “Merry Christmas.”

He looked past me. From one of the trailers, a fat woman in a big red sweater walked outside, waiting for her little dog to squat and go to the bathroom. Another trailer door opened, and a man threw out a bucket of dirty water, heat steamed up off the gravel. Nearby, Padgett’s ’39 Lincoln sat with the hood open, its engine in pieces.

“So when do I have to let you know?”

“When you can.”

“How ’bout now?”

“Now is good.”

“This ain’t about the reward.”

I nodded.

“When I read about that fella dying and me not standing up…. It’s hard to put into words.”

“I understand, Mr. Padgett. You’re standin’ up now.”

“Guess I am.”

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

22

ON CHRISTMAS DAY,
Thomas got duded up in his brand-new Roy Rogers gear, complete with vest, hand-tooled belt with
R.R.
written in studs, and a deluxe holster filled with a pair of toy six-shooters loaded with caps. He’d already shot at Anne’s cat four times, and that caused a minor break in the peace. But she’d forgiven him and gone on outside after breakfast to try out a pair of white J. C. Higgins roller skates and say hello to a schoolmate who lived two doors down. Santa had also brought Thomas a junior boxing set, and Joyce, as a joke, had bought him a Happi Time service station set that came complete with plastic figures of the attendants who worked the grease rack, platform, and pumps. All this coming as a joke, because he liked to see me work at the station more than sit behind a desk at the sheriff’s office.

Joyce picked up one of the figures, eyed it, and looked back to me and said, “The fella wears a hat. How come you didn’t wear a matching hat?”

I’d given her a fourteen-karat watch I’d seen her eyeing at Kirven’s, and she’d bought me a Craftsman electric razor kit. While Anne zipped around in our driveway on new skates and Tommy raised hell in the backyard, I picked apart the kit and placed the contents on the coffee table.

“You see the mirror plugs in, too,” Joyce said. “It has a small light.”

I reached behind the chair where I sat, still in my robe, and plugged it in. “Well, I’ll be.” I studied my face in the reflection, seeing Joyce’s chin resting on my shoulder, and she gave me a solid smile.

“How’d you ever land such a handsome man?” I asked.

“Lord knows, it was tough,” she said. “So do you like what you see?”

LORELEI SHOWED UP JUST AFTER WE’D FINISHED UP A BIG
Christmas dinner — Jack Black joining us while taking a break from the night patrol — and, as I opened the door, I realized I hadn’t seen her since she’d been found half dead on the rocks. I’d heard she’d left town with Billy but never expected to see the girl in PC again. The surprise must’ve shown on my face, because she stepped back off the landing to the walkway and looked down at the ground, unable to speak.

The first thing I thought about after I invited her in, her declining and standing there shivering, her breath like smoke, was that her nose and under her eyes reminded me of a fighter with all that scar tissue. There was also a long scar that ran down half of her face that looked as if it had come from a knife but maybe from the sharp rocks.