Echoes of a Distant Summer (74 page)

He strapped on his grandfather’s two-gun shoulder holster. He checked the slides on both pistols and ensured they had full magazines before he chambered a bullet in them both. The holster had loops for four additional magazines, which he filled. He saw his grandfather’s Bowie knife, but decided against it as being too large and chose a knife with an eight-inch blade similar in size to the one he used in his practice sessions with Carlos. When he walked out of his bedroom, he was ready to leave a pile of his enemies’ bodies after each encounter. The animus of King Tremain would rise and walk the earth again.

E
lroy Fontenot was from the old school. He believed in the Old Testament, that the culpable should be called to answer. That belief was part of the reason he had been a good policeman and it was the reason he had come to New Orleans. He adjusted his earphones and stared through the side curtains of his rented van at the mansion across the street, which stood behind a high wrought-iron fence. He turned to his bank of electronic-monitoring equipment and saw one of the meters oscillating. He fiddled with a few dials. A speaker squawked and static followed, then with more fine tuning, Elroy was able to distinguish voices. He listened for a moment and determined that the telephone conversation was between two women and concerned an impending shopping spree. He turned another dial and switched to a different monitoring system, where he heard a radio blaring its call letters over disco music. He cycled through his various monitoring pickups and was unable to find another human voice. He turned down the sound and slipped behind his spotting scope, through which he studied the building and its surrounding grounds. He saw the two guards making their appointed rounds. They functioned like clockwork, down to the time they took their breaks. After five days of watching, Elroy knew their schedules to the minute.

His last ten years in the San Francisco Police Department Detective Division performing surveillance work had stood him in good stead. Over the years he had collected a considerable amount of electronic equipment and he was intimately familiar with its repair, deployment, and limitations. Once he had made his decision, it didn’t take but a couple of hours to get the information he needed. It had not been difficult for him to obtain the necessary addresses through his network of law enforcement associates with whom he still maintained a relationship. He had gotten on the plane that very night with all his equipment. After checking into a nice motel, he rented two different-colored vans and had three different sets of detachable signs painted for their sides. He bought a good sleeping bag, an air mattress, urinals, and a small portable toilet. He spent two days tracking down errant addresses and then—success. He had found the home of his quarry, seen him preening in his front yard as if he didn’t have a care in the world, a wrinkled, limping old man who thought he had outlived his enemies.

Fortune was with Elroy. When he first arrived on the scene the street corner closest to the mansion was under construction. There were a number of different utility vehicles from several different companies parked up and down the street. Men in work clothes were all around. His vans fit right in. The first day of surveillance he scaled a telephone pole and tapped into the mansion’s phone line. The second day, he posed as a utility field technician and entered the property and had one of the guards take him around to the main power meters and then escort him through the mansion while he checked for gas leaks and possible electrical shorts. The guard was an uninterested fool. He paid no attention to Elroy’s actual activities. Everywhere he thought was a good site, Elroy had left a small electronic bug.

The ease and facility with which everything had been accomplished was disturbing. It appeared that once he had made the decision to kill Pug DuMont and any other male DuMonts who chose to fight, Lady Luck was at his shoulder. It seemed too easy. Elroy was not used to having luck in his pursuits. He continually ran afoul of the world, which he thought should run with the organization and efficiency of an orphanage. He had understood distance, order, and routines. He had not understood emotions and the messy way people spilled out of their personalities, losing all shape and form. He hadn’t solved the mystery of nurturing until it was too late. Success in a family required the very things he had not experienced, and as a result the very things he was unable to pass on to his children.

Elroy had come to Louisiana to avenge himself. As a police officer he had done a number of things that, strictly speaking, were illegal, but he had held and still held that they were acts done in the best interests of the community. So what if a damned killer, child molester, or a dirty, drug-dealing weasel occasionally didn’t get a fair trial? Or for that matter, didn’t even make it to jail sometimes. So what? Those men had been vectors of evil. He had seen the effect of their crimes. So had he, firsthand, seen the results of Pug DuMont’s crimes. He read the file that Jackson had given him straight through the first night he had received it. Even though it brought tears to his eyes, he could not put it down. The narrative held him with a destructive fascination. He was trembling with anger and hate when he finished reading it. The mother that he had dreamed about on countless, lonely nights in the darkness of the orphanage had been passed around from man to man for the sick pleasure of causing her pain. Then the DuMonts had left her in the swamp to
die. The file revealed that in 1935 King had tracked her down in Mississippi. He had personally gone to visit her and discovered that she had never regained her senses. He had paid for her institutionalization in a good facility from 1935 until she died in 1960. At this point, Elroy had to put the file down for a while. His mother had been destroyed by the DuMonts’ desire to get back at King Tremain. Not only had they violated his mother, but his own life with his family had been forfeited because of their treachery. It affected not only who he was, but who he wasn’t.

Elroy stared at his equipment, which he had either built from kits or purchased at his own expense, and shook his head sadly. The equipment reminded him of his years within the San Francisco Police Department. He had retired as a detective sergeant after twenty-five years of service. He had been passed over for promotion countless times even though he scored in the top percentile on the written test. He had been a vocal foe of the racism he experienced in the department, and that had not won him any friends in management. The only reason he had received the promotion to sergeant in 1967 was because he had hired an attorney to sue the city for failing to comply with their own rules. The city chose to negotiate rather than go to court. He was promoted with much defamatory innuendo from the rank and file and a clear lack of support from the captain of his division. It was the captain’s unwillingness to distribute funds and resources equitably to Elroy’s squad that caused him to start building and collecting his own equipment.

Elroy could not say that he ever grew used to the blatant discrimination that was manifest in his department, but he did develop patterns for dealing with it. Early in his career his method was to meet aggression with aggression, insult with insult, violence with violence. In the paramilitary lexicon of the police, he became labeled as a Negro with a chip on his shoulder, a troublemaker who was hypersensitive about race-related issues. It was often said that he couldn’t take a joke. Yet when he looked back, from the height of his years, he realized that some of the whites’ allegations were true. He had been bitter. He did have a chip on his shoulder.

His anger had actually begun to take shape in his first year on the force, beginning with the one time that he had met King Tremain. It happened long before he knew that King was his father, but the memory of their meeting was still as clear in his mind as if it had happened
yesterday. He had risen early that morning. It was in the summer of 1954. He’d kissed the picture of his fiancée that he kept on his bureau dresser and thought they could now start planning their wedding since he had a steady job with benefits, vacation, and a pension. He had a breakfast of grits with sugar and milk as the rays of a pale sun, partially obscured by clouds, came through the window of his kitchen. He had a nice view of the shipyards and the East Bay from his Quonset hut on Hunter’s Point. He liked gauging the weather from his window while at breakfast. It was his way of determining what type of day it would turn out to be. That particular day all the fog and low-lying clouds had been swept away and the views of the East Bay hills were startlingly clear. He had judged it to be a good day. June rains had been showering the city for days on end and any abatement had to be a positive sign.

His police uniform was nice and clean. Elroy had been selected to participate in an experimental effort by the mayor to allow five Negro officers to hold permanent positions on the force and exercise the full range of the law. Prior to this program San Francisco’s only colored police were in temporary status and most of those had been hired during World War II, when many of the whites had joined the army to fight overseas. Elroy had been very excited when he was first selected. He realized that he and his four colleagues were pioneers of a sort, blazing the way for others to follow. He had looked forward to bearing up to the charge, but as the months wore on, the constant barrage of invective, derisive remarks and cruel practical jokes by white officers began to take their toll. When the whites returned from the war in the mid-forties, the original colored officers who had been hired during the war had either been terminated from their temporary public safety positions or allowed to transition to turnkey positions in the jail. The turnkeys were limited to billy clubs and the colored section of the jail. These men who were no longer allowed to carry guns were taken as the standard for Negro achievement. Elroy knew his white counterparts hated the way he pushed against the department’s racist restrictions, but he felt he had earned his rights in the war.

After six months on his new assignment, Elroy returned the hostile acts of the white officers in their own coin. He once fought one of the strongest whites in the department at two o’clock in the morning at the Polo Grounds. The fight was attended by officers and turnkeys. Elroy had always been good with his fists, and his years as a foot soldier in
World War II had only served to polish his skills. The man’s brute strength was no match for one who had fought many times hand to hand for his survival. Needless to say, Elroy slowly beat the man to the ground.

As the first year passed, through demonstrations of bravery and physical effort, the five slowly earned the grudging respect of some of the rank-and-file patrolmen. However, the majority of the whites never fully accepted working with Negro officers. Despite all the hostility to which he had been subjected, Elroy was unprepared for the way events had unfolded on the day he met his father.

He arrived at his station near city hall punctually and had been informed by the white sergeant over his unit that he was assigned to work with a strike force that was responsible for stopping racketeering activities in the nonwhite areas of the city, like Chinatown, Hunter’s Point, Mission Street, and the Fillmore. Everyone knew the real purpose behind the strike force was to shut down any Negro, Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, or Japanese gangster who was growing too powerful in his community. The detective division had received information from a reliable informant that one of the major figures in the extortion and protection rackets in the Fillmore had his bank in the basement of an apartment building on O’Farrell between Scott and Pierce streets.

Elroy and his four colleagues reported to the assignment room and learned that they were going after King Tremain. He remembered shaking his head and laughing cynically. Everyone in the room knew that King Tremain was involved in gambling and had nothing to do with extortion. His real crime was standing up to the Italians who were trying to push heroin in the Fillmore. There had been several murders in the Fillmore, then another spate in North Beach and more murders in Napa. The North Beach and Napa murders caused considerable outcry in the papers and radio news. One whole branch of the DiMarcos had been wiped out. There was no evidence to link King to those deaths, but many people knew he was responsible. The Mob had decided to pay the police to take King out and the department was happy to do it. Tremain was considered to be a nigger who had outgrown his britches and there were many officers eager to cut him down to size. Elroy looked out the department’s second-story window and saw storm clouds once again amassing above Twin Peaks. More rain was on its way.

When the police deployed around the apartment building, Elroy and
his colored unit, wearing plainclothes, were sent in first. The unit entered through the main lobby and cautiously descended the stairs into the darkness of the basement. Each man was alert as he moved into the shadows. They knew that King was a dangerous man and would not willingly submit to arrest. They had their guns at the ready and were prepared to fire at the first sign of movement. The basement was divided into a parking area and a walled-off corridor which led to a row of rooms near the back of the building. Elroy and Tyree Washington chose the corridor while their three companions entered the dimly lit parking area. There was one bare lightbulb lighting the corridor as the two crept toward the closed doors in the rear. They passed several darkened rooms with open doors; a quick search revealed there was no one in them, but near the end of the hall they heard noises coming from a room whose door was partially ajar. Tyree and Elroy gathered themselves and burst into the room. Elroy rolled in on the floor and came to his feet ready to fire his gun. Tyree followed him closely. They saw Sergeant Dale Thurmondson standing over a body.

Thurmondson turned his pink face toward them and brushed blond hair out of his eyes. He smiled. “Glad to see you boys finally made it, but we didn’t get here in time to save old Riley Turner. Looks like that nigger Tremain killed him.”