The Red Storm (20 page)

“Why did you kill your parents?” I asked.

“Didn't have much of a choice. I would imagine they always knew something was wrong with me. But when my dad caught me with another boy one day, things changed. I'd get beaten routinely, and it went up from there. Whatever love I had for them was gone. They were going to disown me and send me to a nuthouse. So one night while they were arguing over me in their room, I came in and shot them both. I covered it up best I could, and bribed the detective on the case. I offered him a big cut of the inheritance. After that, I took over the family business and started in on the numbers racket.

“But I couldn't forget Storm. I sent some of the best people to try to locate him. When they found him hiding in Boston, I left without thinking. You should've seen his face when I knocked on the door of the joint he was hiding out at. He didn't recognize me at first, until I told him who I was. He invited me in and acted like we were old friends. Said he never was going to harm me. I guess I got caught up in the moment, and I told him how I felt about him.”

Mallon went into a fit of coughing, and by the amount of blood coming out, I knew he had minutes left in him.

“I don't know what happened after that,” he continued. “My memory gets a bit fuzzy from all the blows Storm gave me. I remember laughing every time he hit me, because in some way I liked it. That seemed to really tick Storm off more, and he hit me so hard I blacked out. I woke up tethered to a chair, and saw Storm lighting a kerosene blowtorch. I recall him muttering that he was going to burn that queer pretty-boy face of mine right off. I don't remember much after that, except waking up in the hospital.”

Mallon laughed. “Maybe my parents were right, I do belong in a nuthouse. Because no matter what he did to me, I still had feelings for him.”

“Why were you so hell-bent on killing his daughter?” I asked. “Storm was dead, why couldn't you just leave it at that?”

“Someone else robbed me of the chance to make him pay! Somebody had to suffer for what was done to me, so it might as well be her. Like father, like daughter.”

“She ain't nothing like her old man.”

“Sure, she ain't! The apple never falls that far from the tree. She'll end up just—” He broke off, and looked out past me into nothing particular. Death came to him soon after, and his lifeless, mutilated head slumped to the side.

*   *   *

The inside of the plantation house was littered with corpses. I found Tommy O'Cahan lying just inside the back door with a chunk of his head missing, a frozen grimace on his face. There were more bodies in the main room near the stairs. The putrid smell of burnt flesh and bodies was nauseating.

The last quarter of the staircase had been blown to pieces. Midway up the stairs was McKenzie, covered in a fresh coat of bullets. Farther up was a singed torso of what I guessed was a man. The body would have been unrecognizable, but I recognized the immaculate shoes I witnessed Buzz Martin wearing a few nights earlier.

The first door in the hallway at the top of the stairs was propelled off its hinges. I went inside, and saw Brawley inside a cast-iron tub, holding his gun while clutching his right shoulder.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Big explosion, had to take cover,” he said.

I helped him out of the tub, and on unsteady feet he stumbled out of the room and into the hall.

“What went on?” I asked.

“Hell went on. They were waiting for us when we came in. Made too much damn noise picking the lock. Opened the door and an entire goon squad was standing just on the other side. I knew they weren't going to let us leave alive, and I wasn't going to go out like a chump. I shot the closest one to me straight in the head and we bolted upstairs. McKenzie didn't make it. Bastards cut him in half before he could even get up the stairs. I took a hit myself in the arm, but Ducan and me were able to secure ourselves in the bathroom. The elevated position helped our odds, and I got to picking most of them off. I sent Ducan to check the back rooms to see if Mallon was hiding out there. That's when one of them got the cute idea of running up the stairs with a live pineapple to throw at me. He almost made it before I saw him. He had the pin in his mouth and was about to toss it by the time I shot half his arm off. I didn't wait to see what happened, and dove straight for the tub. I guess I hit the bottom too hard, because I blacked out for a few. Came to just a few moments before you got here.”

“Glad you didn't shoot me when I came in,” I said.

“Damn near did, but the rod is on empty. Best I could do was throw it at you.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I figured it was you. If there was still any more of them alive, they wouldn't have come through the door like that. They would toss another one of them bombs in the room and called it good. By the way, you're the worst backup I've ever had. What the hell took you so damn long?”

“I was busy going after Mallon,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“In a ditch behind the house,” I said.

“I guess this evening didn't turn out so bad after all,” Brawley said.

I helped Brawley get back down to the ground floor, where he called it in. A few minutes later Ducan came in through the front door.

“Where you been?” Brawley yelled.

“I was chasing after someone. I went and checked the rooms like you told me to. Didn't find Mallon, but in the last room I saw someone climbing down off the balcony. I don't know who he was. When he got to the ground, and saw me on the gallery, he fired a few shots. I returned fire, and hit him, but he still ran off. When I got down so I could go after him, I followed the blood trail the best I could in this light, but it `got too dark to track. I didn't have a flash on me, but I can tell you, he ain't going to go far. I think I got him in a bad area. The blood was real dark.”

“You did good,” Brawley said. “You got a cigarette, Fletcher?”

I shook loose a cigarette for him, and we waited till the sound of far-off sirens came.

 

CHAPTER 17

It took days for the officials to clear the plantation. Upon canvassing the area, deputies found on the main road the remains of a local, Leland Wendell. He'd been run over repeatedly by his own Chevrolet Series DB Master Commercial truck. The authorities believed it was a sure shot that the carnage was the aftermath of a reckless escape by the man Ducan had shot. Wendell's wife, Bernadine, had been found five miles down the road. It was reckoned that she'd been tossed out of the truck going over fifty.

The truck was unearthed off of River Road just inside New Orleans city limits. It had been rammed into an oak tree. Nobody was found in the wreckage, but a large amount of blood was found in the truck's interior. There was an additional blood trail that left the truck and went to a roadside police call box a quarter mile up the street. A phone history of all the numbers called from the call box was made, but turned up little. The only number they got for that day was unlisted, and upon calling it, they found it to be disconnected.

Word got to us as soon as the sheriff and deputies arrived that the rest of Mallon's men had driven themselves right into a police chopper squad. Their machines were torn into till there was nothing left but the chassis and wheels. Mallon should have prepared his gorillas for such an ambush, but he wasn't thinking straight. His carelessness was why he ended up dead.

The deputies on-site did their best to barricade the ensuing news, but to no avail. The story hit the front page of the paper and was burned on there for days. The media found a new hero in Brawley, and played him up as the new crusader of crime.

I made an appearance at the Department of Justice, where I surrendered written documentation that I had discharged my weapon and the result was the death of Mallon. Mallon being deemed a dangerous criminal and the circumstances leading to him being fired upon made it obvious self-defense. Yet I was told they were going to review the matter very seriously to see if it was in fact reasonable use of deadly force. I knew little would come of it. My involvement in the raid was being underwritten and concealed from the media, for political reasons, no less. The way the department saw it, a colored man taking out Mallon as opposed to one of their own was upsetting to them. But being kept out of the papers was fine by me. The few times I ever did make it in them, the kindest way they referred to me was as “the Negro.”

A day after I made my report to the Department of Justice, District Attorney Emerson came a-calling.

It was a repeat of the last time I got called into Emerson's office. I sat back in silence while Jim Prescott did all the talking. The difference was that this time it wasn't just Emerson in the room. Chief of Police Golik and Mayor Maestri were there as well.

Mayor Maestri prided himself on being a moral politician, yet his frequent visits to the city's brothels were a secret to few. When he publicly got caught coming out of such a questionable establishment, he stated he went there for “investigation” purposes into the city's sex trade.

Emerson, Golik, and Maestri took turns throwing out accusations and threats, which Prescott refuted. Golik accused me of overstepping my bounds by being involved in the takedown of Mallon. Prescott's rebuttal was that I was working directly under the supervision of Brawley, and that any complaints he had, he'd have to take up with his own officer.

This led to the tactic they always went for, the threat of suspending my license. Prescott refuted the threat, stating it was not their decision but the State Licensing Board's. He reminded them that they were currently on not so good terms with the board. The board had grown weary of the police frequently overreaching their authority by suspending licenses without their approval, and their perpetual bullying tactics to do so. He went on to say that the board would dismiss any case they brought against me, since they had no direct evidence that I had violated the terms of any agreement.

When the meeting reached its closing, all allegations from them had been roadblocked. Emerson said little. He sat mostly in silence and I watched as the color drained out of his face. He did not have a favorable reputation as a competent DA as it was, and allowing me to come out of this unscathed, he almost certainly knew that by the next election he would be railroaded out of his position like so many DAs before him.

He spoke up only after receiving ghastly looks from Maestri. “Let's be reasonable here, Prescott,” he said. “I'm sure Mr. Fletcher means well, but it would just be best if he ceased what he is currently doing.”

“It would be the best for whom?” Prescott asked. “If you cannot see the benefits my client provides, that is your business. Now I'm not going to bore you gentlemen with the litany of squandered opportunities over something as trivial as skin color, but suffice to say, in my briefcase I have a signed letter from Detective Brawley stating what a valuable resource my client is. I'm sure if this made its way to the papers, people would be interested to know that, especially when it was written by a party who has received a proportionate amount of recent public acclaim.”

Emerson said nothing. His poignant face tilted down at his desk, while Golik and Maestri looked on in disgust.

That evening Emerson did a nine-point Olympic dive out of his third-story apartment window onto Rampart Street.

Prescott notified me of the event early the next morning. He said that the city should think about renaming Rampart after him. He thought it would only be fitting, since the street was the only sort of impact Emerson had ever made in his life.

*   *   *

I called JaRoux before he left his bait shop and told him to pass on to the women that I would be picking them up at the pier the following evening. When I arrived on Pratt Drive, the officers that had been planted there after Mallon's men gave the place the works were gone.

Zella's house had been professionally searched by Mallon's men in an endeavor to find anything that could tell them where she was.

I used the phone to call Lily Everhard and asked her if she could do her best fixing the place up by the next day. Everhard was a middle-aged mulatto woman who on occasions scoured my own apartment.

I made another call to a locksmith and asked him to come out and replace the entrance door lock that had been damaged in the break-in.

At seven the next evening I waited in my car and watched as the boat carrying Zella and Aunt Betty glided up to the pier. I got out and helped them stow their things in the car. They said little on the drive, outside of Zella stating how strange it felt being back in the city again.

I helped with their bags up to the place, and I could see they were both a bit worried at what they were going to find inside. I had informed them earlier that the house had been ransacked, and upon opening the door, they were greeted with the revelation that the house ended up being cleaner than when they had left. Everhard was very capable at what she did.

Aunt Betty retired soon after, while Zella offered to brew me coffee. I took her up on her offer, and set out to the bathroom to wash up. The sticky humidity of the swamps always left me in an unclean state.

I opened the wrong door. Instead of the lavatory, I got welcomed with the image of Aunt Betty standing with her back to the door in nothing but her underwear and a brassiere as she changed into her night attire. The horrific scene would be enough to make even the most fertile of men impotent.

In the course of sealing the door on the unpleasantness, I spotted something that did interest me.

I found Zella in the kitchen. She too had changed into her nightwear, a negligee. Pouring the coffee into two cups, she looked up and saw me.

“You all right?” she asked. “You look like you just crawled out of a grave.”

“I'm fine,” I said, taking a seat near the table.