The Day the Music Died (22 page)

There was likely going to be a killing tonight. That was excitement enough. That the dead man might be an uppity Negro like Darin Greene made the prospect of death even more agreeable.

I stalked away from Jr. and went over to Cliffie. He looked to be in his glory. The bullhorn was a nice touch. The western-style holster rig seemed to ride ever lower on his hips, just the way Wild Bill would have worn it seventy years ago, when he was turning himself into legend.

There was press and they were notably excited, too. Not often small-town reporters get a story like this. This was drama, unlike most of the violence they covered—some farmer killing his wife and then himself in the middle of the night for reasons nobody would ever quite understand, faint, vanished cries lost to the lonely winds around the prairie farmhouse. Three cameras were working constantly, the flashbulb light brief and ghostly.

Up here, at the edge of the driveway that faced the windows of the living room and then dipped below the main floor into the garage, people were passing thermoses around. Apparently, they were expecting a long siege. The sharpshooter deputies didn’t take any coffee. They looked reluctant to put their weapons down at all.

Mist and fog and swirling red emergency lights the color of fresh blood only enhanced the drama. Cliffie had finally gotten himself into a movie.

I said, “I want to go in there.”

He’d been sipping coffee from a thermos cup and staring at the house. He turned slightly and took the cup from his mouth. “You think my luck could be that good? Gettin’ rid of three of the most obnoxious people in the valley? Greene, Frazier and you?”

“Now that’s a responsible comment, Chief. Why don’t you share it with the press?”

“Hell, I’m not afraid of those dip-shits. I give ’em a piece of my mind whenever I feel like it. Them reporters don’t like any of my family, and I could give a good moose turd.”

“I’m serious. I want to go in there.”

“For what?”

“To bring them both out alive if possible.”

He took another sip of coffee. “I’m not sure you’d be doin’ the coon any favors.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “Nope. That’s not the kind of boy who takes to bein’ locked up. And that’s where he’s gonna be for a long, long time after tonight. Unless he kills Frazier. Then we’re gonna hang him, come fall.”

“I want to go in there.”

“What if Greene decides to kill you?”

“Then he kills me, I guess.”

“But you’re bettin’ he don’t because you’re such a good friend of the colored.” He’d perfected his smirk by the time he was five: it was a masterpiece of malice.

I looked around at the crowd. The decent people of the town, who were in the majority, wouldn’t turn out to revel in somebody’s grief the way these people had. “I don’t see anybody else volunteering to go in there.”

“Maybe they’ve got more sense.”

“Or maybe they’re just spectators. As long as it’s somebody else’s blood being spilled, they can just relax and enjoy themselves.”

The smirk again. “Careful now, McCain, you wouldn’t want me to tell the press boys your opinion of the common folk, now would you?”

I nodded at the gawkers. “These aren’t common folk. These are vampires. They feed on other people’s trouble.” I was starting to hear some of Judge Whitney’s imperiousness in my voice. She didn’t particularly like anybody but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants but, by God, she’d defend anyone’s right to live and prosper in this country.

“I’d like to let you go in there, McCain. I really would. Because I think Greene’d blow your ass off, but I can’t. I’m the chief of police and I’ve got to use good judgment and good judgment says I can’t let you try and pull off some grandstand stunt like that.”

I looked at him a long moment, shrugged, then turned and started walking down the gravel driveway to the house.

“McCain! You get back here!” Cliffie started shouting over the bullhorn.

I think he even ran after me a few feet. Then he stopped, as I figured he would. Because even Cliffie could figure out that he really could get rid of Greene and not be charged with anything. If those three or four shots happened to take down the esteemed Robert Frazier, so be it—he was an old fart who’d frequently warred with the Sykes clan, and a rich bastard like him would just make for a juicier news story, anyway.

“You want me to grab ’em, Chief?” one of the deputies shouted.

“Shoot him!” a man in the crowd cried.

“Shoot him good!” cried an older woman.

The fog and mist were heavier as I neared the house. The mist was damp on my skin. The crowd, like a great hungry beast, had roused itself once again, salivating, trembling, shuddering with anticipation. A good evening had now turned into a great one.

A rock caught me on the side of the head. Not a big rock, but one sharp enough and heavy enough to stun me. Several people laughed. I didn’t give the bastards the satisfaction of touching the wound to see if I was bleeding. Oh, yes, the beast was definitely roused up again.

The front window was empty. The curtains were open and I could see edges of the couch and an armchair. The rest was darkness. Nobody had reported hearing any gunshots yet so I assumed Greene and Frazier were still alive.

I walked up the six steps that led to the small porch and the front door. I tried the knob. It was locked. I could stand here and argue with Greene to let me in, but that could go on for hours.

I reached in my back pocket and took out my clean, white handkerchief. I wrapped the hanky around my fist and broke out one of the panes in the door window. A buzz went through the crowd. They couldn’t see what I was doing. But whatever it was, the sound of breaking glass and all, it had to be exciting. The beast was not only roused, it was excited.

I reached past the jagged remnants of the pane and groped inside for the knob. It turned easily. I pushed the door open and went inside.

Living room. Hallway. Dining room. Dark. It seemed even colder in here than outside. The heat had been off for a while now. I could smell a cold fireplace and stale cigarette smoke. I heard nothing.

I decided there were two likely places Darin Greene would be holed up: bedroom or basement—they would be the most difficult for the police to reach without a shoot-out.

I was going to call out Greene’s name but decided against it. He wasn’t going to be happy to see me no matter how friendly my voice sounded.

I walked over to the head of the hallway, my footsteps heavy and loud. I was sweating. Maybe Cliffie was right for once. Maybe I was a fool for coming in here. Maybe all Greene would want me for was target practice.

I started down the hallway. More smells came to me. The chemicals the police had used on the crime scene. The seductive hint of perfume, probably from one of the bedrooms down the hallway. And cold—cold has a smell. Jack London always talked about it in his Alaska stories. For the people in his stories, the smell of cold was too often the smell of death.

My footsteps sounded elephantine on the wood floors. I was six, seven steps down the hallway. The light from the front of the house suddenly died. The hallway was very dark.

I didn’t really see him until it was over. A silhouette leaned out of a bedroom doorway on the right, near the end of the hallway and two bullets exploded red-yellow from the barrel of a pistol.

I was too busy diving to the bedroom’s carpeted floor to recognize who it was. But of course it was Darin Greene. I got a nice rug burn on my chin. Reminded me of the dates I’d had in high school with Pamela. We’d roll around on her folks’ new carpeting and I’d get a lot of rug burns but very little else.

“I coulda killed you, man,” Green said from the darkness of the bedroom. “And next time I will. Now you get your white ass outta here.”

“Cliffie wants to kill you, Darin,” I said, putting a hand against the wall to help me to my feet. “You’re making it easy for him.”

“All I want is for this son of a bitch to tell me the truth, man,” Greene said. “That he killed Susan.”

“I didn’t!” Robert Frazier half-screamed. “I would never kill my own daughter.”

“You found out I was sleepin’ with her and you killed her, you son of a bitch!”

So there it was. The reason for the falling out with his old friend Kenny Whitney. There aren’t many ways to alienate a man faster than to sleep with his wife.

“Kenny killed her! Kenny killed her!” Frazier said again.

I was scared, but it wasn’t a crippling fear. In ninth grade a kid from a county high school picked a fight with me with no warning. It was at a football game and he’d had a few illegal beers. He lunged at me. And I was crippled, paralyzed. I couldn’t reach my anger. That’s the scariest feeling in the world, when you can’t find the wherewithal to fight back. Three or four friends of mine pulled him off me.

Greene fired off another shot, but all it hit were some perfume bottles lined up along a Hollywood-style makeup table. The bottles sounded delicate as they flew apart. The air was flooded with the high sweet narcotic of expensive perfume.

I rolled past the bed to a place behind a chaise lounge. The bedroom was enormous—the huge canopy bed, the master bathroom off the west wall, two walk-in closets and enough floor space to hold a modest-size meeting.

From behind the chaise lounge, I said, “You don’t want to die, Darin. We’ve got to get you out of this house alive.”

“Sykes’ll kill me anyway.”

“Not if I lead the way out and you’ve got your hands up. Not even Sykes’d be that stupid.”

“He thinks I killed my own daughter,” Frazier bellowed. “He called me up tonight and said if I’d come out here he’d tell me who really killed Susan. So, like a fool, I came out here and then he accuses me!”

Greene said, “I know I’m a bastard, Frazier. But I wasn’t a bastard to Susan. Believe it or not, I loved her. And she loved me. I was gentle with her. Real gentle. The way I shoulda been with my wife and kids.”

Until that moment, I’d had a hard time imagining Darin and Susan together. But the soft way he spoke, I could hear why she’d gone with him, especially considering the way her husband had treated her and all.

Then Darin went and ruined everything.

“You made her get an abortion, didn’t you?” Greene said to Frazier. Then he turned to me, “Me ’n’ her was gonna have a baby. Kenny couldn’t have no kids on account of his sperm count or somethin’. Anyway, she made the mistake of tellin’ Frazier here what happened and then he made her get an abortion.”

“Yes,” Frazier said, “and that’s when you started blackmailing her.”

Green hit him. It was one of those blows that you can almost feel; it was so blunt and deadly. I peeked up over the edge of the chaise lounge. Frazier was sinking to the bed. “Don’t you ever say that again, man. I loved her and she loved me and I wouldn’t blackmail her. No way!”

Frazier, holding his head from Greene’s punch, said, “Then who was blackmailing her?”

“I don’t know, man. But it wasn’t me!”

Frazier raised his head. He looked old now in the spilling light from outdoors, old and baffled and done. Even the anger seemed blanched out of him. “Then you know how I feel when you accuse me of killing my own daughter! I sure as hell didn’t like what she was doing. But I didn’t force her to have an abortion. She did that on her own. And I didn’t kill her, either.”

“Where’d she’d get an abortion?” I said.

“She took care of it herself,” Frazier said. “At least that’s what she told me. Maybe Greene knows.”

“No, I don’t. She just went and done it’s all I know.”

By this time, I had crawled to the far end of the chaise lounge. I needed something to throw.

There was a small table at the far end of the chaise lounge. On the table was an ashtray, a star-shaped glass ashtray. It could probably fit comfortably in the palm of my hand. No real weight at all. The only thing that made it a potential weapon were the edges. They couldn’t cut deeply, but they could certainly do enough damage to momentarily stun somebody—if the thrower’s aim was accurate.

I snatched the ashtray up and gripped it tight. I’d have to stand up to throw with any accuracy. And then I’d have to follow through. Hopefully, between Frazier and I, we could restrain Greene long enough to get his gun. The longer we waited, the hungrier that crowd was going to get.

But the first thing I needed to do was distract him. There was a small cigarette lighter next to the ashtray. That would work.

He went for it. I hurled the lighter against the wall behind him. He whirled. His gun didn’t go off, but he yelped, startled, and shouted my name. I took aim and flung the ashtray at him.

“Grab his gun, Frazier!” I shouted as the ashtray left my hand.

So much for my big league baseball fantasies. The ashtray got him in the neck, not the head. It didn’t have the impact I’d hoped for. He didn’t drop the gun, but he did turn toward me and, as he turned, he was off balance. Frazier moved much faster than I would have thought possible. He grabbed Greene’s gun and then gave Greene’s wrist a savage twist. I came running. None of this was pretty. Frazier was screaming hysterically, Greene was clumsily trying to rain blows on Frazier’s head with his free hand and I stumbled over my own feet as I lunged for Greene. The gun discharged again. My clumsiness saved me.

My momentum continued to carry me forward. I slammed into Greene and swung a wild punch at his head. It got him in the ear. I doubt it hurt him much, but it sure pissed him off. And when he got pissed, he got sloppy. He lunged at me, the gun dangling from a single finger. Frazier tore it from his hand and then slammed a punch into Greene’s face. He had quite a poke for an older man. And that was it.

“Now you stay right there, you son of a bitch,” Frazier said. He pointed the gun straight at Greene’s face. “I’m going to march you outside, Greene. And I’m going to make sure nobody hurts you. I don’t want this town of mine to get a reputation for having a bunch of trigger-happy bigots in it. I’m going to make sure you get to the jail safe and sound and I’m going to make sure Sykes treats you right or I’m going to kick his ass from one side of this state to the other. And I’m also going to see that you get as fair a trial as possible. And then I’m going to have the satisfaction of you spending one hell of a long time in a cage where you belong. You understand me, son?”