Wicked City (6 page)

Thirty minutes later, Garrett decided to call in all the favorite newsboys into the grand jury meeting room, where he sat thoughtfully at the head of the table, the windows open, letting in hot breezes and the sounds of bullhorns and sirens. He waited for another siren to pass, face drawn and solemn, thoughtful as hell, watching his hands till he spoke. He’d left his white Stetson on the rack outside and wore a pair of large, round gold glasses that made Arch think of a cartoon owl.

Someone leaned back into their seat and the wood clicked and groaned as Garrett nodded to Bert Fuller, who closed the door to give them all some privacy. Arch wanted a drink very badly and wished he’d filled a coffee cup with bourbon.

Fuller, still in his Texas hat and western shirt, leaned against a wall, just a cowpoke against a fence. His arms were crossed.

“I want to make it plain I have complete confidence in these elected officials,” Garrett said. “Sheriff Matthews. And Mr. Ferrell. Who I believe is the best damn solicitor in the state. These men are already working on three different theories on the murder.”

One of the reporters, a worthless sonofabitch from Birmingham named Ed Strickland, didn’t miss a beat: “Does one of these theories factor in the vote fraud case concerning Mr. Patterson’s election as attorney general?”

Jesus H. Christ.

“Since I will be testifying in that particular case, I don’t think there is any reason to ask me for comment.”

“What about the accusation that you and Mr. Ferrell personally added six hundred votes in the Russell County tally to his opponent? It’s been said that Mr. Patterson knew of other cases like this across the state.”

Arch mopped his face with a handkerchief. He could excuse himself for a moment, fill the coffee mug, and step back into the meeting.

“Considering the situation, I don’t think we need to visit a mess of political slander.”

“Are you working on any leads?” asked another newspaperman.

Si Garrett nodded and nodded, his face drawn like an old hound. He brushed some dirt off his crisp white suit and stood, peeking through the slatted blinds and then back to the small group of men in the room.

Arch took a long breath. Si’s goddamn pauses working on his last nerve. If he would just be quiet, he could sneak off for that drink.

“We’ve had such little time. In fact, I only just learned that this horrendous act occurred at the exact moment Mr. Ferrell and I were on the telephone discussing the recent
Brown versus Board of Education
decision. I never dreamed something so horrible was happening at that very moment.”

Arch nodded along with Garrett, feeling good about him again, but as he did he noticed a few of the newspapermen looking at each other. They looked to have grown uncomfortable in their hard chairs in the closed-off room.

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, GARRETT DROVE ARCH OVER THE RIVER
to his deluxe suite at the Ralston while troops continued hammering signs on telephone poles announcing that Fourteenth and Dillingham streets were off limits to Army personnel. Arch watched them all, slunk down in the backseat of the big black Cadillac, as Garrett talked to his driver about this wonderful place where they were all going for steaks and cocktails tonight called the CoCo Supper Club. As long as they could sneak him some liquor, all was right in the world.

“Take me home,” Arch said. “Please.”

“Nonsense,” Garrett said. “I invited half the newsmen in town to come have Sunday dinner with us. We got to get the good feelings back again. We got to let them know that you are doing everything in your power as solicitor to make sense of this horrible situation.”

“I didn’t create this place. It was here long before me.”

“Since the Civil War.”

Arch tipped a bottle of Canadian whiskey to his lips, switching from the good bourbon he’d brought from his home out in the country. “You’re goddamn right. If I tried to stop the gambling, they’d run me out of town on a greased pole.”

Garrett turned full around in the front passenger’s seat and smiled as if he’d just had a spot of great news. “Did I tell you last year I had to be institutionalized?”

“What?”

Arch just looked at him, the view of Phenix City fading from the windows around him, one of the Guard troops saluting the car. He narrowed his eyes and waited for a punch line that didn’t come.

Not long after, they were seated at the CoCo Supper Club, a hell of a little restaurant just off the runway from the Columbus Airport where you could eat fried Gulf shrimp and lobster and the best T-bone in the city while you watched planes take off and land. Garrett sat at the head of the table and ordered cocktails for everyone but himself, instead asking the waitress — a pretty little girl who called all the men doll — for an entire bottle of sparkling water with a bucket of ice and a glass. The men ate and laughed, the newsmen telling jokes and Garrett roping them back into points about the murder investigation, telling them all that they were working on those three theories and letting that bit pass just as he saw the food coming out of the kitchen and then hushing as they all settled into the shrimp and T-bones and bourbon and Gibsons with tiny onions.

Arch just looked at his food, feeling outside himself, and sometimes Garrett would ask him something and Arch would just look up expectantly, looking for another place, another situation from the one he now found himself in, and he drank. He drank at least a half dozen bourbons until he began to rattle on, mainly to himself, about Arch Ferrell — using the third person — being a good man. “Arch Ferrell never did anything illegal in his life.”

And this caused some looks from some of the newsmen and some wry smiles and poked ribs, but they all kept eating under the constant, weighted stare of Si Garrett’s owl glasses.
To hell with ’em all.

Sometime during the meal, Arch looked up, sure he’d been asked a question but not sure of the question, and simply said: “Si Garrett is the best friend I got. He’s one of the greatest men in Alabama.”

And with that, Garrett motioned to the little waitress, and Arch heard him whisper into her ear: “Please bring Mr. Ferrell another. But make this one a triple.”

“Sure thing, doll.”

Later on, the steaks were polished off, just bloody bones on the plates, the fat and grease congealed into a purplish pink mixture where some of the newsmen had squashed the cigarettes they continued smoking. Arch smoked, too, but he stared beyond the newsmen and out beyond the grand dining room of the CoCo Supper Club and the empty bandstand. For a long while, he watched the planes and the flashing of red lights on the tarmac, but then he noticed the long ash on his cigarette and realized he hadn’t taken a puff.

He studied the cigarette, blinked, and then leaned in close to Garrett’s ear.

“I know all about that talk,” Arch said. “I’ve heard it since Pat was killed. I’m tough and mean, nobody knows that better than me. I’m not a religious fella, never have been, but this thing is making me wish that I were. But no matter what anybody says, I didn’t kill Patterson. I just couldn’t kill a human being.”

He nodded to the group, stubbed out his cigarette, and then took down all the bourbon in one gulp. Some of the men kept gnawing on the bones, freeing those last pieces of gristle. Arch nodded again, satisfied with an answer to a question no one asked, his eyes closing and then opening, his head bobbing down and then jerking back up awake.

And then he stood and wished everyone good-night before placing his hands on the table, taking a deep breath, and vomiting all over the white linen.

“I WAS GOING TO LEAVE THIS DIRTY, GODDAMN TOWN,”
John Patterson said to me, searching through another row of files in the endless wood file cabinets in his father’s law office. After a Sunday morning service, he worked row by row, pulling out anything that could be of help, or anything too personal, and setting manila folders into cardboard boxes. He stopped, resting his arm on top of a cabinet. “I don’t want to be a vigilante or savior now. Hell, I never understood my father. His political ambitions. Why he stayed here. He could’ve made better money in about any other town in Alabama.”

I didn’t say anything. I just waited for another box of files to take down to a truck I borrowed. The window air conditioner had been cut off by mistake, and I fanned my face with a ball cap.

“The only reason I wanted to be a lawyer was to make enough money to retire early. Go fishing. Enjoy life. Not this mess.”

“Nothin’ wrong with that.”

“You are damn right,” John said. “Listen, Murphy, I want you to store this at your house, all of this. I don’t want that bastard Si Garrett going anywhere near my father’s papers.”

I reached for another loaded box on Albert Patterson’s desk.

John had rolled up his dress sleeves to his elbows and his hairy forearms glistened with sweat, not a bit of comfort coming from an old Emerson table fan.

He kept flipping through files, his fingers moving each one, another drawn and then slipped back, more yet for the growing boxes we had started to stack.

“You and Britton turn up anything?”

“A little,” I said. “Heard something about our old friend Tommy Capps.”

“Dynamite?”

“Hell of a name,” I said.

“He’d never kill my father.”

“He blew up Hugh Bentley’s house,” I said, talking about the attempted murder two years ago of our little anti-vice group’s president. His two sons and wife miraculously survived.

“You know those men from Montgomery accused Bentley of blowing up his own house to get sympathy.”

We worked for an hour in the heated second floor of the Coulter Building, the old plaster-walled law office feeling like the loft of a barn or an attic. Every few minutes, I’d take a box down to the back of the truck. Armed guards and local hick police watched the still Sunday streets, but no one asked what we were doing.

Everyone seemed to be afraid to look John Patterson in the eye.

Just before John locked up, we heard heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs and up on the landing. Deputy Sheriff Bert Fuller walked inside the office, mopping his face with a red bandanna, with Joe Smelley from the state police right behind. Fuller wore a suit, and Smelley wore wrinkled pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt soaked through the armpits.

Smelley didn’t say anything, only walked to one of the boxes and immediately helped himself, searching through the files.

John’s jaw clenched and his eyes flashed from Fuller to me.

“Well, howdy, palooka,” Fuller said to me. “Ain’t you got some gas to pump?”

“I’d rather be here with you, Bert,” I said. “You make us all feel so safe.”

“You better watch your step,” Fuller said. “I don’t care what you used to be. I’ll beat you silly.”

John stepped in front of him.

“We came by for a talk,” Fuller said.

“You can set a time with my secretary.”

Fuller snorted. He looked over to Smelley, who’d picked a file from the box and glanced through it. Smelley looked to Fuller and snorted back.

“Funny you should mention your secretary.”

John’s breathing was loud and rapid. I unconsciously staggered my feet, fingers opening and closing into a fist.

“What’s her name? Vicki?”

John breathed, temple throbbing, and Bert Fuller popped some chewing gum, waiting for a response. The short, grubby fingers of Joe Smelley flipped through Albert Love Patterson’s personal papers.

“I came up here as a favor to you, John,” Fuller said. He took a seat on Albert Patterson’s antique desk and placed his Stetson on his knee. “I know you sure would hate for the newspapermen to start poking around this thing. And your wife, Mary Jo. Good God. That would set the tongues a-waggin’. So why don’t we just sit and talk about things as men. We all know men like pussy, and it don’t mean you’re not a Christian if you set out for a little poke once in a while. Hell, I seen your secretary and I wouldn’t mind having a taste myself.”

“Shut your filthy, foul mouth and get your fat ass off my father’s desk.”

Fuller snorted again and breathed and waited a few beats. And then stood and looked back on the desk, as if mocking the idea he could have soiled the wood. He grabbed his hat and placed it back on his head, knocking it off his brow with two fingers. Resting his hands on his gun belt, he nodded and popped his gum. “Joe?”

Smelley placed the file on the desk next to the box he’d sifted through. He stood and started to pace. I lifted my back foot and shifted, watching the three men in an orchestra of heated movement. Dogs circling around each other.

“I knew your daddy real well, John. He was a fine man. I know you know he was a fine man. I don’t think there is any delicate way to say this, but it’s my job to ask these questions.”

“I have not even put my father in the ground.”

“I know,” Smelley said, holding up a hand. “I know. But, still, this is my job, and I want you to understand and respect that. Okay? Listen, there has been some talk around town that maybe your daddy was staying up late with that secretary of yours, too. We know her husband was overseas, and we know how young ladies can get real lonely looking for a daddy to cozy up to. Well, we just thought there isn’t a lot that could set daddy against son, except one thing.”

“Don’t say another goddamn word,” John said.

Fuller popped his gum again. “Hell, I’ll say it. We think you and ole Pat was hitting that same pussy and you might’ve gotten riled, is all. We got to ask these questions.”

John leapt for Fuller’s throat, but I’d seen the moment, muscles coiled, and I reached around my friend’s waist and pulled him back. Patterson jabbed his elbows back and yelled and bared his teeth, but I held on tight.

Fuller rested his hand on his gun and shook his head with feigned sadness. He shrugged, spit his gum in the wastebasket, and motioned for Smelley to come on. He shook his head for the weakness he’d seen in the office. I wanted to let Patterson go so badly, to let him unleash all that rage, but I knew Fuller wanted to shoot, had maybe come there to shoot, and there had been enough blood for the week.