Reach the Shining River (4 page)

7.

The audience is white. To a man. The air is thick with cigar smoke but somehow bright, so bright it hurts her eyes. She holds the microphone in one hand and with the other clutches at her dress, which keeps slipping from her shoulders and exposing her breasts. In the front row a man in a wrinkled suit and straw hat leers at her, pop-eyed and sweating, his lips working moistly.

Where is she? How did she get here?

She is singing. The wrong song, absolutely the wrong song:

The
hooded
horseman
and
the
burning
cross
,

Black
man
taken
,
black
woman
lost
.

She woke. Her head ached. She rose from her bed and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Through the open window came the drone of the locusts. Smells of baked earth and burnt grass. A whiff of garbage.

The song continued in her waking mind:

Rope
and
chain
and
poplar
tree
,

Weep
in
the
moonlight
,
weep
for
me
.

Oh, Eddie.

Since the funeral, grief had come in waves, foaming over her swiftly and suddenly, leaving her gasping for air. After, it left a flat, slick surface of fear. What might be done to her. To Wardell. Then the guilt. That she and Eddie had argued during their final moments. That it was Wardell,
Wardell
, who found his body.

How
would
it
end
,
ain’t
got
a
friend

My
only
sin
is
in
my
skin
.

What
did
I
do

To
be
so
black
and
blue
?

Eddie liked to sing old blues tunes when he was high. He could growl like Satchmo and imitate a Hot Five trumpet solo note for note with puckered lips. Laughed and licked his fingers. And hers. He would arrive late, when Wardell was sleeping at Jesse’s house, with barbecue from Henry Perry’s stand and bottles of Wisconsin Club beer.

She slumped at the kitchen table and wept. Blue moonlight fell across the floorboards. The deal dresser, glass knobs of the top drawer glinting, stared at her. She dug her nails into her palms. Framed in her bedroom doorway were twisted sheets and her good shoes, her singing shoes, at attention beneath the narrow bed.

The last time they lay in that bed he’d touched her wedding ring.

“What’s the idea here?”

“Keeps me honest.”

“Girl, you the most honest I know.”

And he the most gentle. Green eyes sleepy but searching. Sparse mustache downy above full lips. Skin light-toned and freckled, an auburn tinge to his straightened hair. My Scotch blood, he would say, if only to her. His take on the world was side-door: his language personal, his gait syncopated. A hipster, from his pork-pie hat to his crepe-soled shoes. When he played piano he closed his eyes and turned his head away from the audience, as if floating in his own universe. But the way he played – sweet, swinging, right there with her – was like his loving.

After Arlene’s meltdown on Saturday night, she had let Piney Brown convince her that Eddie was all right. She had come home from the Sunset praying for a knock on her bedroom window. But he didn’t show. On Sunday, after checking the club again, she went to the hotel on Wabash where he lived with Virgil Barnes. The dead-eyed morning clerk shrugged. Eddie’s and Virgil’s rooms were empty. Back at the Sunset she convinced Piney to go with her to the police, who took her name but refused to open a missing person’s file.

On Monday night she was summoned to the morgue. The body had been stripped of wallet and jewelry, so identification depended on her witness. The morgue was a horror. Examination slabs, refrigerators, dissecting tables, bone saws, plastic sheets. Pale and ghastly under fluorescent lights and stinking of formaldehyde. A fat man in a blood-spotted smock had led her through the maze of bodies, cigarette between his thin lips. She kept her gaze on the stained floor tiles, lifting it only to see the man pull back the sheet from Eddie’s face.

She had been praying that it would be Virgil Barnes.

“That him?” he said.

Dizzy, she had no choice but to grab the morgue attendant’s arm. He took his cigarette from his mouth. Ash fell to the tiles.

“Edward Sloan?” he said.

She nodded.

“Lady, I’m afraid you’re going to have to make a verbal ID.”

Eddie’s face was puffy and drained. His left eye was swollen, and a dry gash striped his cheek. His mouth gaped open; he looked confused and helpless. From her heart, waves of panic shot out to her limbs. Her stomach tumbled.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s Eddie.” She turned away. “I have to sit down.”

The attendant led her to a receiving area filled with cops and coroner’s assistants who smoked manically and laughed the dark laughter of men used to death. She refused the cup of coffee he offered and sat in a metal chair while he wrote his report. Her thoughts were mangled. Her breathing was broken. She would not look up. And yet she knew that what she would remember most from this awful morning would be what she hadn’t seen – his body, its shape stiff and anonymous beneath the plastic, disfigured in ways she couldn’t help imagining.

Loud voices split the air. “Well, shit,” a big cop said, grasping his hat to prevent it sliding from his head, “if he ain’t dead, then I’m screwing Eleanor Roosevelt.”

8.

The paperwork lay in the buttery glare of the desk lamp. Police file. Morgue sheet. Press clippings from four papers. Stolen vehicle list from highway patrol for the week of August 12. Covering a corner of the desktop was a dusty copy of
The
Missouri
Revised
Statutes
, thick as a bible, its pages open to the titles defining offenses against the person (unlawful killing). Across the baize were scattered Emmett’s notes of the last hour, scrawled in thick pencil and stained with coffee.

He massaged his eyelids with his fingertips and squeezed the bridge of his nose. It was after eleven p.m. Apart from security and the cleaners, he was probably the only person in the building. He’d promised Mickey to return the police jacket by midnight. Not that he’s learned much from it.
Edward
J
.
Sloan
,
NM
,
6’2
”,
DOB
unknown
,
DOD
8
/
14
/
35
,
homicide
. This shorthand biography, stenciled on the top right-hand corner of the soiled manila folder, offered as much detail as the slim pickings inside: a vague crime-scene report and a handwritten investigation log with a single meager entry.

The investigating detective, R. J. Timmons, had not pushed himself. The report template had gaps all over it, including blanks for time of discovery and description of the victim. Place of discovery simply said “Missouri River, South Bank”. There was no indication of who had found the body. The log entry, listing the contents of the deceased’s room at the Park Hotel, had no distinguishing detail. No photographs or prints. No lists of possible witnesses or suspicious loiterers. No evidence of any legwork. Over a week since the murder and yet the file was so thin Emmett wondered about Timmons’s motives. If the guy was covering for the Carrollo boys, you would at least expect him to
pretend
to be diligent.

The morgue report, in contrast, was thick with unsavory detail. Here Emmett had been helped by chance. The city and county morgues were housed in the same low building on Eighth Street, with a wooden screen separating the operations. Sloan’s body had been delivered by mistake to the county side, ensuring a clean sheet and lowering the risk of tampering by city cops. The assistant county coroner, Joe Healy, was a pal from the old neighborhood, so Emmett got the sheet the day after the autopsy.

It wasn’t pretty. Whoever killed Sloan knew what they were doing. Three gunshot wounds, one in the back of the head, two in the lower back. The .38HV slugs (since gone missing) most likely had come from a Smith & Wesson Heavy Duty. There were ligature marks on neck and wrists and cotton fibers in the mouth and throat. Brass knuckles had inflicted a lateral gash on the right cheek and crushed the zygomatic bone. The left side of the body was heavily bruised, with two broken ribs. The dead man’s forehead and the knees of his black suit pants were soiled with riverside clay. His suit jacket had been pulled over his head, and his back was speckled with powder burns. Estimated time of death was two o’clock on the morning of August 14. Until picked up by the ambulance, the body had not been moved since the shooting.

Age thirty to thirty-five. Blood type O+, with .07 alcohol content and traces of THC. A marijuana user, but otherwise normal. A healthy man in every discoverable respect. But a dead man.

Emmett translated the cold detail into narrative. Some time after midnight, at least two men had driven a stolen car into the vice district and picked up Sloan, who was walking from one bar to another, perhaps, or smoking reefer in a back alley. He resisted and had his face smashed for his trouble. They bound and gagged him and levered his tall frame into the passenger seat. From the rear, one of the gang held his head in place with a rope while the driver followed a roundabout route to a lonely spot somewhere on the south shore of the Missouri River, not far from where Emmett grew up. While Sloan stared straight ahead, bleeding and terrified, his murderers sat calmly in the car, smoking and waiting for the last goods train to pass. When the train was gone, they dragged him to the shore. Sloan’s last earthly sight would have been the bright lights of Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City, twinkling in the night sky.

Accurate? Close enough, he could be sure. Emmett had tried a few murder cases. And once a story started in his head, intuition kept it unfolding.

It got worse.

They pushed Sloan to the ground and shoved his face into the wet clay. They kicked him hard and frequently, removing the gag to hear him moan. Blood lust made them tremble. Did they call him a filthy nigger? Did they laugh at his suffering? It would not be long before they gave in to climax and shot him in the head. Breathing heavily, they stared at the twitching body. One of them yanked Sloan’s jacket above his head. For good measure, the gunman fired two high-velocity rounds into the body at close range, the muzzle blast lighting the air like a flashbulb. He tucked his revolver into his holster, squared his shoulders, and allowed his accomplice to pull him towards the car. And so they roared away, leaving Edward Sloan dead in the river mud.

Emmett sipped his cold coffee and turned his attention to the newspaper accounts. The stories followed racial lines. The
Times
and the
Journal
Post
blamed the murder on the atmosphere of vice in the colored part of town, neglecting to mention that most of the clubs and gambling dens on Twelfth and Eighteenth were owned by whites. The
Star
was more objective, and pointed out that Sloan had no criminal record and no apparent reason for being the target of such a vicious attack. But an editorial did say he was colored and hinted between the lines that he must have been mixed up in something dirty.

The
Call
was the Southwest’s leading Negro newspaper. As expected, its report was full of controlled outrage. On successive days it ran a page-one news story, an editorial, and an obituary. Emmett read them chronologically. The obit gave him a glimpse into the dead man’s character:

Sloan was known in the Negro community for his humor, his gentleness, and his talent. The son of a Tulsa minister, he moved to Kansas City as a young man and graduated with honors from Lincoln Normal School. A member of Local 627 of the AFM, he was a pianist of rare distinction, comfortable in many styles, and played regularly at Emmanuel Baptist Church. His untimely death is deeply regretted by his colleagues, friends, and family.
There
Is
Balm
in
Gilead
.

Emmett rose from his chair, kneading his lower back, and looked out the window at Police Headquarters and the US Courthouse, lit up in the darkness. Edward Sloan. A church-going man. A musician. Tall and sensitive and friendly. Why would Carrollo or Pendergast or anyone else in Kansas City want him dead? Emmett had the narrative. But what about motive? Was it as simple as Mickey said: the poor guy stumbling across something he wasn’t supposed to see? Then why so little effort to make it look routine? Something wasn’t right. It was like those news-magazine pictures of lynchings in Georgia and Florida. A black body hanging from a tree, the grinning faces of men and boys in straw hats and overalls, clubs and guns held loosely at their sides. Drawing attention to the brutality. Boasting about it.

He gathered up the police files and put them back in the folder. Before heading out to meet Mickey, he called Fay. Their maid, Hattie Renfroe, answered.

“Hattie, what are you doing there?”

“That you, Mr. Whelan?”

“Yes, it’s me. Put Mrs. Whelan on.”

“She ain’t here.”

The clock on top of the police tower said eleven-thirty.

“Where is she?”

“You axin’ the wrong person, Mr. Whelan. I done finished the bakin’ for tomorrow and now I’m leavin’.”

“Did she say when she’d be home?”

“Didn’t say nothin’ to me, Mr. Whelan.”

He rang off, grabbed the jacket, and left the office. In the elevator was a trace of perfume, left by some late-working secretary.

Maybe he should have stayed at home. Or taken Fay out to the Terrace Club. Tomorrow he would pay for his late night, and it wouldn’t matter that he’d been working. But with Fay these days he couldn’t win. He had to work flat out to break the bank
and
be on hand every minute for social calls.

As they had been getting ready for bed on Sunday, after he’d met Lloyd at Mission Hills, she had asked him, “So what did Daddy want?”

“Oh, you know. Him and his pals sounding me out. Businessmen in this town like to know what’s going on. Like to hear the perspective of someone in public service.”

She shed her underthings and stood naked before him. The bedroom window was open and a warm breeze blew the net curtains behind her. “Emmett, who do you think I am? One of your naïve north-side clients? I’ve been around Daddy long enough to know what happens at Mission Hills.”

Strands of auburn hair fell across her eyes. Her parted lips were moist.

“They want me to look into a case.”

“Ah, a case. An important case.”

“To them, yes.”

“If it’s important to them, it’s important to everyone. It’s important to us.”

“I suppose it is,” he said.

His mouth was dry. His knees weak.

She slipped her nightgown over her head and sat on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair. “What did they promise you?”

“Promise me?” he said hoarsely.

She looked over her shoulder. “Are you going to make us a fortune, Emmett?”

“Could be,” he said. “Come to bed.”

She sighed, finished her hair, and lay beside him. He touched her shoulder.

“Not tonight,” she said, and turned her back to him.

Solve the case. Make a bundle. Was that what it was going to take?