Paper son, p.20
Paper Son, page 20
Johnny started the car and screeched up to the door. I was out of our car already, shouting and running, but I was too late. Keith and Howie jumped out, grabbed Tolson Reeves, shoved him in the car, and the Camaro peeled away.
36
Bill slid the car up and I jumped in. The Fergusons hurtled out of the lot and out of Clarksdale, not the way they’d come but into the fields and woods outside town.
“Tolson didn’t hear me,” I said. “Damn!”
“It looks like they didn’t, either. I don’t think they know we’re here.”
That was good, anyway. I called 911, reported a kidnapping, and said we were following a dark blue Camaro along Old Highway 61. A minute later, we weren’t. Johnny Ferguson took a turn and raced down a tree-shaded road beside the levee. Now there was no point in hanging back. I called 911 again while Bill sped up. The trees grew thicker and dense with undergrowth.
When Bill slammed on the brakes, I jackknifed forward, grateful for my seat belt. The Camaro had sprayed mud in a one-eighty skid and rocked to a stop in a clearing.
Our cars were grill-to-grill. From the back seat of the Camaro, the cousins threw an already-bruised Tolson into the mud. They jumped out after him. Johnny and Fisheye each boiled out a front door. Bill and I did the same.
Johnny’s side was mine. Before he could get a bead on what was happening, I launched into a tackle. He punched empty air and thudded on his back. Astride him and adrenaline-flooded, I slammed my fist down on the bridge of his nose. Then I jumped up and stomped his knee, same place three fast times. I raced back around our car, leaving Johnny howling. He’d get up, but I’d slowed him down, and the point wasn’t to win this fight. It was to grab Tolson and get the hell out of here.
Tolson, eye swollen, shirt torn, was on one knee, breathing heavily and pushing to stand while Keith and Howie piled onto Bill. That was because Bill had Fisheye pinned against the Camaro. As I watched, Howie’s fist connected with the side of Bill’s head. Keith was closest to me, so I front-kicked his butt. I felt the jolt all the way to my hip, and he clearly felt it worse. He spun to attack me but threw himself so off-balance that when I slammed my shoulder into him, I knocked him smack into the mud. Howie abandoned Bill and leaped at me. I danced out of reach. Bill wrenched Fisheye off the car and flung him into Howie. They crashed down together in a tangle of flailing limbs.
“Come on!” I shouted, and pulled Tolson to his feet.
We made it two steps. Then the angry wrecking ball that was Keith thumped into my back. I staggered and flew forward, landing hard. My breath was gone, and I couldn’t get it back. Hands pushed on the back of my head, grinding my face into a mud puddle. I twisted, desperate for air. Then suddenly the weight lifted. I rolled over, gasping, in time to see Tolson and Keith grapple until Tolson broke free and decked Keith with a huge fist to the chin.
Tolson dove into the battle between Bill and Howie. Fisheye was in there, too, trying to hold Bill so Howie could land blows, but Bill’s not an easy guy to hold and Fisheye dropped to his knees after a single kidney punch from Tolson’s giant fist. Tolson sliced an uppercut into Howie’s jaw at the same time Bill punched the guy in the stomach.
There was, briefly, not a Ferguson standing.
“Let’s go!” I scrambled to my feet and grabbed Tolson again.
“I’ll kill them!” he roared.
“Not a good idea.” I clamped on to his arm through his ruined suit jacket. Bill clinched Tolson’s other arm and we hustled him into our car. Bill started the engine and slammed into reverse, K-turning to charge back down the levee road.
We didn’t get ten yards before sirens and red and blue lights announced the arrival, on the road ahead of us, of the Coahoma County Sheriff’s Department.
“Well, well. What do we got here?” Bert Lucknell, hands on hips, looked around the clearing like a kid on the playground wondering where to have fun first. “Whole pile of my unfavoritest people all in the same place.” He looked at Tolson Reeves. “Except you. We ain’t acquainted. So how about you be the one to tell me what the hell is going on?”
Not an unreasonable question, even coming from Bert Lucknell. Tolson in suit, tie, and swollen eye; Bill, with blood down the side of his face from a gash on his temple; me, mud from scalp to shoes; and four Fergusons in various states of disrepair. Not that I believed Lucknell about his unfavoritest people, except for me and Bill. Still, I understood why he had to say it.
Lucknell had brought with him Tom Thomson, of course, and another pair of uniformed deputies in a second car. Thomson and one of the new folks, a skinny white woman, had the Fergusons corralled over by the Camaro. The other, a stocky black man, stood guard over me, Bill, and Tolson. No one was handcuffed yet and no one was under arrest, but I would be surprised if the morning ended with both those things still true.
Tolson stood straighter, and I could see he was aching. “Tolson Reeves. I’m with the Coahoma County Public Defender’s Office. Those men”—he pointed at the Fergusons—“abducted me outside the courthouse. They assaulted me, punching me and using racial slurs. These folks”—now his arm moved to me and Bill—“must have seen what happened and came to help.”
“That’s exactly—” I began.
Lucknell wheeled on me. “I’d be obliged if the rest of y’all would exercise y’all’s constitutional right to remain silent.” He turned back to Tolson. “Abducted, is that a fact? And why would these gents be wanting to do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“That’s bullshit!” Fisheye lunged forward. Tom Thomson seized him from behind in a body lock. Fisheye thrashed, yelling, “Bullshit!”
Johnny, who’d made it to his feet and around the car while we were driving our ten yards, now started limping toward Thomson with clenched fists. He stopped short when the female deputy pulled her gun and said, “I’d stay right there.”
“Damn good idea, Johnny,” Lucknell said, winking. “Beth Ann’s a helluva shot. Now, Fisheye, you telling me this gent ain’t being truthful when he says all y’all abducted him, or when he says he don’t know why?”
“Of course he know why!” Fisheye glared at Tolson with the forward-facing eye, and at Lucknell with the other. “That colored son of a bitch been chasing after my daughter!”
37
I stared at Tolson Reeves. My eyes were wide with disbelief, but not at him. How dumb was I? If Anna Rae Ferguson did indeed have a boyfriend she wasn’t willing to go public about, it seemed it wasn’t Jefferson.
Lucknell needed a minute to take this in, too. “Well,” he said, adjusting his hat. “Well. I’ll be.” He turned to Tolson. “That true?”
Fisheye Ferguson squirmed, but Tom Thomson managed to clink his wrists behind him into handcuffs and then vise-grip onto his arm. Tolson, gaze locked on Fisheye’s straight-staring, popping eye, said, “First, that’s no one’s business but mine. Second, if it were true, would that give them the right to abduct and assault me?”
Lucknell appeared to be considering this. “No, sir,” he said. “No, it would not. Excepting, if your advances happened to be unwelcome and—”
“Unwelcome?” howled Fisheye. “What the hell, Bert? Of course they’re unwelcome! Bet your fat ass they’re unwelcome!”
“Fisheye, calm yourself down, there.” Lucknell regarded the handcuffed man. “You got a way to get in touch with Anna Rae?”
“’Course I do! Number’s on my speed dial.” His chin gestured toward his shirt pocket. “Tell this chimpanzee to leave me go, I’ll call her.”
Lucknell said nothing until he’d walked over, slid Fisheye’s phone from his pocket, and poked it on. Then he asked for the password.
“The fuck? No way. Use your own damn phone!”
“What’s to say she’ll answer? She don’t know my number.”
Wait, I thought. She don’t—doesn’t? Then how had she called to tell you we were heading back from Oxford?
“Give it here, Fisheye,” Lucknell said, “or I’m taking y’all in.”
“On what charge?”
“Kidnapping. Assault. Looking ugly. Any shit I can think of.”
Sullenly, Fisheye murmured a string of numbers. Lucknell, grinning, tapped them into the phone and put it to his ear. He waited, then, “Hi there, Anna Rae. No, it ain’t your daddy, this here’s Detective Bert Lucknell down here in Coahoma County. How you doing? No, he’s fine, but there’s been a little disturbance and I got something to ask you.”
Lucknell walked until he was out of earshot. We all watched, no one saying a word, while Lucknell, his back to us, conversed with Anna Rae. Finally, lowering the phone, he turned. He treated us all to his noxious smile. Walking back, he slipped the phone into Fisheye’s pocket and patted it. In the tense silence, Lucknell sauntered over to Tolson and looked him up and down. Then he spoke.
“You willing to press charges? Abduction, assault, whatever the hell went on?”
“You bet I am.”
“And y’all,” he said to me and Bill, “you willing to testify, being witnesses and such? Maybe even”—he eyed the blood on Bill’s face—“press a charge or two yourselves?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and Bill nodded.
“What?” roared Fisheye. “Listen here, Bert—”
“I’d advise you to shut it, Fisheye. Tom, read these boys their rights. See, Fisheye, what I was thinking, it would’ve been one thing if this fellow was bothering Anna Rae, wouldn’t leave her alone, and she called her daddy for help. But Anna Rae, she says it ain’t like that. She tells me she and Mr. Reeves here, they been seeing each other since school started. It’s true love, so she tells me, or at least it ain’t nothing she’s about to call her family concerning. Because she knew for a fact that if any of y’all found out, you’d beat the crap out of him.”
Fisheye paled. “My Anna Rae, with this monkey? Bert, shut your lying mouth!”
Howie flushed rage-red, and Keith snarled wordlessly. Johnny just kept a grim stare fastened on Lucknell.
Lucknell gazed over the Fergusons, and a sly grin spread across his face. “Now, I ain’t saying what Anna Rae and him are doing is anything I like. Y’all know my feelings on that kind of subject. But they ain’t neither of them children, and Fisheye, you’re the one let her go away to Oxford. And what this here gives me, it gives me some of that—what’s the fancy word?—serendipity. ’Cause right here, I got something I been wanting a long time. I’m gonna arrest me a bunch of Fergusons for a damn big crime, and I’m gonna make it stick.”
38
The next hour passed predictably enough, though I was variously confused, skeptical, and furiously thinking.
Everyone was either arrested (the Fergusons) or more or less politely requested to accompany the deputies back to the Sheriff’s Office (Tolson, Bill, and me). Paramedics were waiting at the station to examine those who needed examining. The skinny female deputy, whose full name turned out to be Beth Ann McGee, took me off to take my statement. Bill went with the stocky man, whose name tag gave his last name as Waters. Tolson, as the kidnap-and-assault victim, was escorted by Tom Thomson, the senior deputy. Bert Lucknell took the honor of dealing with the Fergusons for himself.
Lucknell made it to my interview room just as I finished giving my statement to Beth Ann McGee. I was feeling right at home, having become so familiar with the place yesterday. Lucknell told McGee to go ahead and scoot, and when she left, he pulled out a chair and sat.
Grinning, Lucknell shook his head. “You people sure are something. Two Yankee private eyes—one a Oriental girl—and a colored lawyer, whaling on four Fergusons. Johnny tells me it was you jumped him yourself, while the menfolk were busy with his kin.”
“I wouldn’t say I ‘jumped him.’ But yes, that was a one-on-one match.”
“I’ll be a son of a spotted pup. Now, ma’am,” he said, and his grin faded, “I’d very much appreciate knowing what all this morning’s ruckus has to do with Jefferson Tam.”
“I would, too,” I said. “Though probably, it doesn’t.”
Oh, Lydia, I thought, a technical truth like that is exactly what your mother hates about your job. While Tolson’s romance with Anna Rae might, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with Jefferson, Bill’s and my presence on the scene had everything to do with him.
Lucknell sighed. “Still, ma’am, I’d be obliged to hear what story you got to tell me.”
So I told him. Everything I said was true, but I didn’t say everything. I left out the part about us following the Fergusons, because if we’d really been in Burcell just to apologize, that wouldn’t have made sense. I could only hope Bill had thought of that, too.
Lucknell sat, arms folded on the mound of his belly, and when I was done he asked, “So what you’re are saying is, y’all just happened to decide to go to the courthouse to find Mr. Reeves to talk to him at the same time as Fisheye and his boys decided to go find him, too, for their own reasons? There ain’t no chance y’all overheard him say that on the phone?”
“No, sir, we didn’t. The call he took seemed to have to do with Anna Rae, and he called Johnny right after, furious. We did figure it was possible he’d go running out and do something about whatever he’d just learned. But he threw us out before we heard anything else. And honestly, I thought they’d go to Oxford, if they went anywhere. Fisheye told Johnny he’d just heard from Freddie. That’s the name of Anna Rae’s manager.” I added helpfully, “Where she works.”
Lucknell eyed me. “That’s pretty much exactly the way Smith told it.” He shifted in his chair. “Seems Fisheye’s been employing one or two folks up there in Oxford to keep an eye on his little girl. This Freddie fellow saw Anna Rae and Reeves together after her shift last night. Him and Anna Rae weren’t holding hands, nothing like that, so Freddie wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but he’s had his suspicions before. Reeves drops into the café from time to time, get himself a cup of coffee. Always, so happens, on Anna Rae’s shifts. When Freddie heard Anna Rae on the phone this morning, cooing like a lovebird, talking about ‘when you come in tomorrow,’ he thought he’d let Fisheye know.” Lucknell folded his hands on the table. “Thing that interests me, ma’am, is Freddie’s never seen the two of them alone before. Usually they have another student or two with them. Like, for example, Jefferson Tam.”
To his pointed look, I said, “I knew they were friends.”
“If someone had shared that information with me, I might’ve discussed with Mr. Reeves the question of where Jefferson Tam had got to.”
“I guess I assumed you knew everything of importance that went on in Coahoma County. Anyway, we asked Mr. Reeves. He says he doesn’t know.”
“I’m sure he did say that.” When I didn’t reply, Lucknell shrugged and went on. “He just told me the same, in a room down the hall there. I dropped in to mention that Anna Rae’s on her way down here now, all worried about her sweetheart and madder’n a wet hen at her daddy.”
Talk about a guy’s girlfriend to soften him up and then sandbag him with the question you really want the answer to—not a bad interrogation technique. I looked at Lucknell with new respect as I said, “I guess the Fergusons have some family issues to work out.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am, they got some issues, for sure.” Lucknell nodded. “And in the matter of family, so you’re telling me y’all ain’t no closer to finding Jefferson Tam than any of us was yesterday, that right?”
I wasn’t sure, actually, if that was right, but I was sure I didn’t want to explain to Lucknell why it might not be. I settled for, “I think so.”
For a time, he sat gazing at me. Finally, he hefted himself up out of his chair. “Ma’am,” he said, “I got to admit that from the day we met, I saw y’all being here as adding to my headaches. Now in a way I’m indebted, because I got four Fergusons sitting in a jail cell I’m thinking they ain’t gonna easily get out of. If I can get Fisheye’s ass locked up—begging your pardon, ma’am—then that whole sweet operation they got down there in Burcell is gonna go straight to hell, ’cause there ain’t another one of them with brains enough to run it. That’s why I told you about Freddie just now. A way of paying off that debt.
“But,” he said. “But. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that rounding up a pile of Fergusons is about to take my mind off looking for Jefferson Tam. Looking for, and I’m here to say, finding. So, ma’am, whatever really did happen this morning, and however much my boss would be pleased to see Congressman Reynold Tam and all them Democrats happy down there in Jackson, please keep it mind that none of this gives any y’all any license to come between the Coahoma County Sheriff’s Department and Jefferson Tam. Have a nice day.”
Lucknell left the interview room door open, which I took as permission to leave. As I was walking the corridor to the stairway, my phone rang.
“Me,” Pete said when I answered. “Where are you two at?”
“We’re in Clarksdale,” I said. “Long story.”
“Any chance you could come over and tell it? I got something to show you.”
“Sure. To the store?”
“No, I got Henry to drop me home, like yesterday.”
“Be there as soon as we can.”
Not surprisingly—by now it was almost a tradition—Bill was waiting for me in the reception area by the door. He had a gauze pad taped to his temple—under the circumstances, also not surprising. The new factor was that Tolson, rumpled, bruised, one eye swollen half-shut, sat beside him.
“Wow,” I said. “You two look like ten miles of dirt road.”
Tolson grinned at my Southernism.
“Don’t do that,” Bill warned him. “It will only encourage her. Although I must say,” he surveyed me, “dried mud is a good look for you.”
