False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (10 page)

Jordan was starting home with an order of beef on the passenger’s seat when a boy with a stack of newspapers came up to his open window. Jordan figured he’d been drawn by the smell, as were a couple of scroungy dogs. He gave the boy a nickel, and slipped a paper under the leaky bag from Mae’s in the hope of saving his upholstery. He was stalled at a red light when he raised the bag for a look at the front page.

The Freeman
, Atlantic City’s Negro weekly, was a broadsheet that had turned Jordan’s fingers black the one or two times he’d had a look at it. A headline across eight columns announced:

HOOFER SONGSTRESS VANISHES

A.C. COPS WITHOUT LEADS

He kept one eye on the page until a near collision with a motorcycle. On a quiet, sunlit street he shut the engine, slipped the second section over his lap, and tore open the paper bag.
The first section was hung from the steering wheel for easy reading.

A performer with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, 21-year-old Etta Lee Wyatt, had disappeared after Saturday’s midnight show at the Ruckus Room. The missing woman was described variously as a chanteuse, chorine, song stylist, thrush, brilliant newcomer, showstopper, and the next Lena Horne. Jordan doubted she was many of those things. As the big band era came to a close, Armstrong had folded the 19-piece orchestra he’d fronted since the mid-1930s, and returned to the traditional New Orleans-style combo with which he’d made his name. Atlantic City audiences were not jazzhounds. When the All-Stars came to town Satchmo hired pretty light-skinned girls to dress up the stage.

Etta Lee Wyatt had appeared with Billy Eckstine, Cab Calloway, and the Nicholas Brothers in Atlantic City. Headshots of a moderately attractive girl with an overbite left Jordan underwhelmed. He licked his fingers, and turned the page. A photo spread explained why the big acts sought her for local runs.

In a trifle called
The Zanzibar Review
Etta Lee’s specialty number was a seductive hoochy-coochy front and center before a chorus line of darker-skinned, thick-featured girls. The new Lena Horne looked to Jordan like the old Josephine Baker in an apron of bananas and a cantaloupe halter. He cringed, thinking of how he used canteloupes to describe what was under the canteloupes in the picture. Nice canteloupes.

With the All-Stars she shimmied during Satchmo’s medley of “St. James Infirmary Blues,” “Black and Blue,” and “Shine.” Band members remembered nothing out of the ordinary at Saturday’s late show. When Etta Lee missed the Sunday performances, and failed to call in, the All-Stars’ drummer and reed player visited her rooming house off Missouri Avenue. Fannie Potts, the 83-year-old landlady, told them she had last seen her young tenant around 8:30 on the day she vanished.

“She was wearing sandals and a summer shift, and I could see the straps of her bathing suit under her coat collar,” the old woman was quoted as saying. “Dearie, I told her, are you looking to come down with the grippe? She told me she had business on the beach. Weren’t none of my business what kind. I let her go, for which I’m sorry. She’s a lovely child, but God didn’t give her the sense to keep warm or safe.”

Armstrong’s management reported Etta Lee missing to Atlantic City police, who were told by Fannie Potts that the girl had walked off along Missouri Avenue in the direction of Chicken Bone Beach. Detectives concluded that the young dancer left town with a new boyfriend. The article, and the investigation, ended there. An editorial denounced the police for abandoning the case without an inspection of the beach. A Negro gone missing, the paper charged, was not a major priority.

There was more to the editorial, but Jordan dripped brown sauce on the final paragraphs. Eating barbecue in the car wasn’t a great idea. Each time he did it he promised would be the last. He pinched a handkerchief from his pants, and blotted his face, his shirt, the seat, the mats and the dashboard. Then he drove the few blocks to the beach. A good reporter followed up on everything the cops did. Without newsmen looking over their shoulder, Jordan believed most police departments were worthless bureaucracies.

Chicken Bone Beach, Atlantic City’s colored beach, had acquired its name because Negro bathers packed their lunch hampers with fried chicken on hot summer days. Off-season the name did not ring true. Nothing distinguished the deserted black beach from the white beaches surrounding it on both sides. Other than newspapers propelled by the wind the sand was immaculate. Not a chicken bone in sight to spoil the view.

Ducking into the blowing sand, Jordan went to the water’s edge. A mile off shore freighters ploughed toward the port of
New York. He wished he could put out his thumb, and hitch a ride. There was nothing to see here. Etta Lee Wyatt was not playing hide and seek, waiting to be found. He looked back at the boardwalk done up for summer, like a vacant stage set. “Business,” Etta Lee’s landlady said had brought her boarder to the beach. What business did anyone have here now?

The odds were that Etta Lee was okay. The police might have it right, and she was with a new beau. She was only 21, but parading onstage in humiliating costumes for the amusement of leering strangers grew stale fast. Easy to understand why she would take off without letting anyone try to talk her into a change of heart. Why had she stopped first at the beach? The smaller mystery cast the larger one in an intriguing gloss, a gold mine for a writer if things turned out bad for Etta Lee.

Wet sand pulled at Jordan’s heels as he dodged a breaker crawling up the tide line. Chicken Bone Beach, between the Convention Hall and the Ocean One Pier, was the finest beach on the municipal oceanfront. Segregation wasn’t official in Atlantic City. This was New Jersey, after all, not the South, and a Negro could go to any beach he pleased. If he used his head, though, he came here. An isolated Negro or two would be tolerated on the white beaches, but Negroes showing up in large numbers on a sweltering August afternoon might be a different story. Maybe that was why the city fathers had given the Negroes the nicest beach—as a bribe to keep them in their place.

Jordan enjoyed these conversations with himself, the arguments that he never lost. But they didn’t put him closer to Etta Lee. He stared out to sea, half expecting to spot the girl in her tropical get-up riding the waves. There was only the gray water under grayer skies dissolving into foam at his toes. Soon he began to shiver. He went to his car, and drove back along Missouri Avenue.

Fannie Potts’ rooming house was two gloomy stories in a
popular Japanese style that fell out of fashion on the Jersey Shore after the First World War. The once-grand homes in the Negro district had seen better days. Miss Potts’ was a foreboding place. Most of a chimney had toppled off the roof. Several windows were glazed with cardboard. Beach grasses sprouting from cracks in the mortar caricatured a haunted house. In Jordan’s head as he pulled up to the curb was a list of questions for Fannie Potts, and her possible answers. They were quotable answers, touching recollections good for a second-day lead, which wouldn’t advance a story for a detective magazine. If he were writing for a paper, he would storm Fannie Potts’ door. But he didn’t need anything she was likely to give him. The evidence pointed in another direction.

Jordan checked the
Press
to see how McAvoy was playing Etta Lee’s vanishing act. There was nothing—not even a mention that she was gone. Like most mid-size east coast dailies the
Press
gave little ink to Negroes. Sure, Negro criminals preying on whites made for good copy. But if you played up the disappearance of a Negro girl, you would be expected to cover her friends’ weddings, and the births of their children, and to make space on the obituary page, too. The readers did not want integration with their morning coffee. A good many might cancel their subscriptions, and take a suburban daily for which Negroes did not exist. If Etta Lee turned up dead, she would not be ignored by the
Press
. McAvoy wasn’t heartless. The death of a pretty colored girl with connections to Satchmo Armstrong, everyone’s favorite Negro, had the makings of a good story. The
Press
was a progressive paper with a commendable outlook on civil rights, but wasn’t prepared to cover the meanderings of a 21-year-old Negro dancer. McAvoy would say that he was saving Etta Lee embarrassment by not playing up her case.
What if he was?
thought Jordan.
Since when was that his job?

Jordan didn’t care who he embarrassed, even if it was himself.
His talk with Fannie Potts would come at another time. A word with the police couldn’t be put off. Noticing a speck of beef on the upholstery between his legs, he picked it up with his fingertip. It didn’t taste bad. He found more.

Atlantic City police headquarters was located near City Hall and the central fire station in the part of town caption writers called the nerve center. Jordan had an easy relationship with the local cops, who deferred to the troopers in major investigations that invited criticism from the
Press
. For taking a kitten down from a tree, or walking an old lady across a busy intersection, Jordan endorsed the Atlantic City police. The cops didn’t care what he said privately about them, as long as he kept it out of the paper.

Captain Eamon Halloran was chief of detectives, a retired Army lifer with six years of service under General MacArthur in the Philippines before the war, and Guadalcanal vet. He was from the old school of policing, and regularly sent men into bad neighborhoods to beat up the hard cases with fists and saps. The
Press
didn’t always look the other way. But when Halloran was called to account, he denied that the beatings happened. Since crime in Atlantic City was at low levels, the public supported the roughhouse tactics. The
Press
never called for Halloran’s badge, and everyone remained on good terms.

But Halloran wasn’t happy to see Jordan coming to his door. Jordan supposed that no cop ever was. He took it as evidence that he did his job well.

“What can I do for you today, Adam?” Halloran’s County Mayo brogue was for news conferences, police funerals, and grade school assemblies, and made Jordan feel like a fourth-grader sent to see the principal.

“You can give me a few minutes to hear what I have to tell you.”

“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

“It should,” Jordan said. “But we’d both get nothing.”

Halloran’s lip retracted from his upper teeth. He had perfected his small grin in the Philippines under orders not to let the locals know what he thought of them. “Nothing about what.”

“Etta Lee Wyatt.”

Halloran had to think. “The shine dancer? I’ve got something for
you
. Take a load off, I’ll fill you in.”

Jordan remained on his feet.

“You’ve got the wrong face on, patronizing when it should be grateful,” Halloran said. “You come to see me as you do from time to time, like you have me in your pocket. But my sources are more reliable than yours, they give me information I can
use
. You won’t tell me who your sources are. You’ve promised them confidentiality, you say. I say your sources are voices in your head.”

Jordan pulled up a chair. “You first.”

“That’s polite of you, Adam. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think something terrible hadn’t happened to your dancer, something we can make hay with in our separate ways. Sorry to disappoint. I’ve got two witnesses, not a disembodied voice, but flesh and blood human beings—” He put up two fingers, and waggled them. “They tell me she’s fine.”

“Who—?”

“First is a trucker who noticed Etta Lee roll up in a pre-war Ford to a motor court outside Trenton. An older gent was at the wheel. For luggage they had several brown paper bags, and a bucket of ice. The Ford was still there when the trucker left in the morning.”

“How does he know it’s her?”

“He saw her picture in a Negro newspaper,” Halloran said.

“How do you know he’s right?”

“They may all appear alike to you, but not to this fellow, he’s several parts colored himself. The other witness is a cashier in a
Negro restaurant on U.S. 1 near Baltimore. Your wayward entertainer stopped for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, hold the mayo, around eleven last night.”

“With the older gent?”

“The witness didn’t say. We didn’t ask. She’s Negro herself, Negro through and through. It’s a good ID, which makes two independent sightings. Don’t tell me we don’t know what’s going on with the girl.”

“Two sightings in opposite directions a hundred miles apart,” Jordan said. “If Etta Lee Wyatt was headed north toward Trenton, why did she show up in Baltimore to the south?”

“I’m a policeman, not a guardian angel. She hasn’t been harmed, no law’s been broken. She’s free...uh, free, and twenty-one. She can go anywhere she pleases, even in circles.”

Jordan shook his head.

“Who are you to say she can’t?”

“She’s dead.”

“You’ve mentioned that you want to be a novelist, but haven’t gotten anywhere. You’re trying out your fictions on me, aren’t you, to see how they play?”

“I’ve given up writing novels. She was killed.”

“This is a moving performance, Adam. Have you considered your real talent may be for the stage?”

Jordan said, “I have an idea where to find her.”

“How do you explain this sudden helpfulness? I heard you lost your job. Now you’re doing mine. Do you want it for yourself? If you can’t get the facts straight when they’re spelled out for you, what will you do with them?” Halloran glanced out the window at Jordan’s Hudson. “You parked in the spot reserved for the
Press
. You’re taking a chance you’ll be towed away.”

“Do you know the Chase case?” Jordan said. “The woman found by state police on the beach at Little Egg Harbor?”

“You have your facts wrong again. It wasn’t troopers who found her, it was a reporter.”

“I beat them to the scene by a few minutes, yeah,” Jordan said.

“You’re not telling me you discovered the Wyatt girl’s body, too? Even a failed novelist should know that’s too great a coincidence.”