Done for a Dime (9 page)

Once, during a week home for R & R, Murchison happened upon his father sharing a beer with a shipyard pal. They were discussing the pictures on the mantel, Willy’s trimmed in black. “Yeah, hell, take a look. My sons. The Casualty and the Martyr.”

One tour proved enough. Murchison’s younger brother illusions were gone and the war was done. Once released, he walked on at San Diego State, earned Honorable Mention All-WAC at strong safety senior year. A free agent tryout with the Chargers thrilled his dad for a bit, but he was camp fodder: white, mid-twenties, too slow, too old. Jobs were scarce, the recession. Deciding to put the MP/CID experience to work, he joined his hometown force. In time he married, had two girls, rose to detective. A lot to prize. So little to make of it.

With every success he felt it, the nagging absence, wanting to confirm his hunches with his brother, hear his voice say, “Right, Denny. Absolutely. Good job.” All these years later, it haunted him. He felt half a man with his brother gone.

Strangely, that truth hit home all the more with every murder he worked. John T. Boyle was just the first of many reckonings. Because, year after year, it was Willy’s death he needed to get right. And couldn’t. No matter what he figured out, no matter how many cases he broke, nothing came whole. In the end, there was always
just this
. He had to content himself with defending that, the unnerving, unsatisfying incompleteness to everything. Not merely letting it slip away, like it was nothing at all.

Just this
is not nothing. That, he supposed, would be his last illusion.

Three black-and-whites were parked outside the home of Carvela Grimes, Francis Templeton’s great-aunt, by the time Murchison and Stluka pulled up. Murchison glanced up and down the listing street as he stepped out of the car. The houses, once the best on the hill, looked unkempt, forgotten. Porches tottered with broken slats. Junk cluttered walkways. Pits and rotts charged fences that shook from the force of their bodies and their barking filled the night. At every window along the block, one or more backlit forms peered out.

An officer named Manzello stepped forward to report. Grinning up at the nightbirds, he said, “One minute they’re staring out at us, the next they’re watching
Cops,
see if they’ve gone live.”

A second uniform, named Stritch, came up behind, sniggering through his gum. He was a north county boy, tall, farmhand thin, and knobby, with dingy blond hair he combed straight back along the sides. It made his face something of a shock. The smile didn’t help; his teeth were a disaster.

“You guys seen these?” Stritch held up a handbill torn from a nearby telephone pole. Herbal Viagra, it advertised. Reading from it, he said, “‘Shoot ejaculate thirteen feet!’”

He laughed. Murchison tried not to look at his teeth.

Stluka said, “Goes to show you, Stritch. Ain’t size that matters. It’s distance.”

“Yo, babycakes.
Go deep!
”

“What’s the story so far?” Murchison asked, glancing up at the Grimes house.

Manzello answered. “The guy you’re looking for, Francis Templeton, looks like we got a skip. We told the old lady lives here—”

“You didn’t just bust in, right? You knocked.”

“Detective, please. Think like a man, work like a dog, act like a lady—that’s our motto.”

“Talk old folks into anything,” Stritch chimed in, “you say it nice enough.”

Everybody looked at him. Manzello said, “Been moonlighting in sales, Stritch?”

“Gents?”

“Let’s see.” Manzello again. “The old lady, we told her we know this Francis character is staying here. Reliable source, blah blah. We explained our purpose, Detective, and requested admittance. She lets us in. We searched, found his clothes, that’s it. Tried to get the old girl to give him up. She said she’d talk to her lawyer tomorrow at church and come down Monday to the station. Till then, she’s not talking.”

“A lawyer at church.” Stluka took a stick of gum from Stritch. “The appointed time is nigh.”

“The woman,” Murchison said, “she still up?”

“Be a surprise if she wasn’t. We just wrapped up inside the house about, what?” Manzello turned to Stritch, thumped his arm. “Five?”

“Five, sure.” Stritch rubbed the spot Manzello had thwacked. “Ten tops.”

“Thanks.” Murchison turned around and took the steps two at a time, up the sloping front yard to the porch. Stluka trailed behind. Above the door, someone had nailed a hand-painted sign, its lettering carved into the wood:

J
UST
A
NOTHER
D
OPELESS
H
OPE
F
IEND

Murchison knocked twice, tried the knob. Locked. He thumbed the bell, knocked again, harder. The door cracked open finally, revealing a bolt chain, beyond which a small, aged Black woman in a plaid robe peered out through eyeglasses with one cracked lens.

“Mrs. Grimes?”

“Miss,” she corrected. Her voice was cool and proper. But a thread of fear ran through it, too. “I told the officer—”

“Miss Grimes, my name is Dennis Murchison. I’m lead detective on the matter we’re working on. It’s a murder, a man named Raymond Carlisle—”

“I knew the gentleman. I told the officer I would meet with my lawyer.”

“Miss Grimes, you’re not a suspect.”

It wasn’t entirely true. She wasn’t a suspect in the Carlisle killing, obviously, but she could be charged for harboring a fugitive. It’d require specific intent, and even if they had it, given these circumstances—an abscond on a two-year-old warrant, an elderly woman—only a brass-assed head case would want to prosecute. Not that there weren’t candidates available in the DA’s office. Especially with a killing in the picture.

“Of course, ma’am, speak to an attorney. Please, do. But I’m wondering, did anyone actually explain for you what this is about, our being here?”

A small, finely boned hand appeared, gently clutching the side of the door as though for balance. The paint had been rubbed away on the door at the very spot her hand rested. He pictured her standing at that same spot, the same way, off and on for years.

“What I have been told,” she said, “I do not believe.”

“I’d like to explain things, if you’d let me.”

Behind him, he could hear Stluka clearing his throat. The woman frowned and blinked.

“By all means. Do. Tell me.”

“May I come inside?”

The woman’s eyes flashed toward Stluka. “Just me,” Murchison promised. The old woman stared silently for a second longer, then eased the door closed, slipped off the bolt chain, and opened up again, stepping back for Murchison to pass.

The house was a two-story saltbox, built turn of the century, long before the wartime federal housing took over the hill, Jameson Carswell after that. The rooms were small, the walls thin, as though it had been a summer home for some old San Francisco family. Those days were long gone. Settlement cracks splintered out from every window and fanned across the ceiling; the paint on the walls had yellowed with age. Area rugs dotted a scuffed wood floor.

She led him into a living room furnished with a sofa, a recliner, scattered chairs. A TV, an old RCA console stereo, and a sewing machine lined the back wall. Needlepoint pillows dotted the couch.

The place had been dusted recently, and the job had been done right—none of that myopic, haphazard swiping you’d expect from an old woman. Maybe she had help, Murchison thought. Francis Templeton, felony abscond, dusting.

Murchison sat down on the sofa as Miss Grimes settled herself into the recliner, modestly covering her legs with the folds of her robe, beneath which she wore flannel pajamas, with white socks and bedroom slippers on her feet. Murchison waited for her eyes to turn toward his.

“The reason we want to meet with Francis, he’s the only alibi Toby Marchand has at this time. You say you knew Mr. Carlisle. You know that he and Toby—” He gestured with his hands as though to suggest vaguely a relationship. He was hoping, out of impulse, Miss Grimes would fill in the blank. She merely sat there, hands folded in her lap, watching him. “If Francis Templeton can confirm Toby’s story, it would help us eliminate Toby, Mr. Marchand, as a suspect. Now, I realize Francis has reason to fear cooperating with us. He’s an abscond. There’s an outstanding warrant, he’s probably looking at incarceration.”

“I know nothing of that.”

“I understand.” There goes specific intent, Murchison thought, unless we can prove she’s lying. “What I mean is, whatever trouble your nephew faces, it doesn’t have to be a major hurdle. He might be able to six-oh-two the whole thing, work it through his counselor, if he comes forward right away. The longer he puts it off, the less likely he’ll catch a break. The judges down South can be harsh, I realize that. But I’ll personally go to bat for him, if he comes in tonight. This morning, whatever. But it has to be soon.”

He let another silence fall between them, hoping again it might encourage her to offer up some small detail they might be able to use. She regarded him as though he were drifting inside a fish tank.

“If you have truly and honestly stated your reason for being here, then you are even more misguided than I suspected.” She lowered her chin and scowled over the rim of her damaged glasses. “Any suspicion you might have that Toby Marchand did anything whatsoever to his father except take care of him—devotedly, I might add—is nonsense.”

Murchison felt grateful that Stulka wasn’t in the room. For a small, frail old woman, there was a hardiness to Miss Carvela Grimes, a clarity, that Stluka would interpret as insolence. At the same time, Murchison thought, Father. She identified the victim as Toby’s father. No hem or haw. He spread his hands, as though to say he would, or could, concede her feelings, but before he could interject a single word she resumed speaking.

“I never married, Detective. The man to whom I was engaged died in the Second World War. He enlisted so that I and he could live in a better world than the one we’d known growing up. I moved here from Birmingham, Alabama, with my brother and sister in 1942. I was fourteen, the youngest. My brother was drawn by the work at the shipyard the war offered. I met my fiancé—his name was Reginald—I met him at a USO function here at the naval base. He was one of the laborers loading ammunition at Port Chicago farther down the strait.

“Reginald trained with the navy in Michigan, he was looking forward to fighting. He was young and proud and he wanted to prove himself. He was not alone. When President Roosevelt offered combat training to Negro recruits, every man in the community wanted to enlist. Across the South, in the cities, out here. They wanted to make a statement, that they were Americans, second to none. They prized liberty more than anyone, and would defend it with honor. But the training was nothing but public relations. They were not assigned to combat, because white soldiers and sailors wanted Negroes nowhere near them. They would not even so much as donate blood if it would go to Negro casualties.

“My fiancé and the other men became cheap labor, getting sub-union pay for backbreaking work. Dangerous work. I assume you know about the explosion at the ammunition loading dock. I remember that day well, even today. I heard the explosion, felt the shudder in the air, and looked east and saw the smoke in the sky. I knew something terrible had happened. I knew where.”

She reached out to rearrange the folds of her robe across her legs. A slight twitch in her cheek betrayed an effort to control an old emotion.

“Reginald was not one of the mutineers who refused to go back to work afterward—demanding to be assigned to combat instead, for which they were humiliated and court-martialed. And Reginald wasn’t one of the ones who returned to loading ammunition. He was one of the ones they never found. He was on the dock at the time, doing his duty. Like everyone and everything around him, he was annihilated.” She twisted her small, thin hands in her lap. “This happened, Detective, for the sake of your freedom and mine. Our freedom to sit here and ask and answer disgraceful questions. The freedom of your men to run roughshod through my home without notice, laughing like thugs. Enlighten me, please, Detective, enlighten an old woman, how exactly do you presume to honor my fiancé’s sacrifice?”

If Murchison felt grateful before that Stluka wasn’t in the room, it was nothing compared to how he felt now. He himself felt torn, resentful of the lecture—there’s a body bag in my background, too, he thought. You want to traipse out the dead, use them as some sort of moral collateral, I’m wise to you. And yet he felt stung by her words, too.

“Miss Grimes—”

“No, sir, I am not through, not yet.” There was a halt in her voice. The sound of fury almost spent. “You have asked about my great-nephew, and so I am obliged to respond. Francis has already paid handsomely any debt to society honestly owed for mistakes he made. And they were mistakes, Detective, not crimes. He has put that all behind him, moved on, and done well. For others as well as himself. For me. He has been my friend, my companion, my helper. Any further attempt to punish him is nothing short of sadistic. That is not to say, however, that it is surprising.” She adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose, her hand trembling. “There is nothing worthy of us as a people, as a society,” the word drawn out,
so-sigh-a-tee
, “to be gained from incarcerating a young man like Francis. Suspecting a young man like Toby Marchand. It is an outrage, the fact you are wasting your time on these two young men, instead of spending it wisely in pursuit of a killer.”

Leaning toward him, for emphasis, she repeated, “
A killer.
”

Murchison waited a moment, to be sure she was finished. His stomach felt sour and knotted, all the bad coffee through the night, now this. “I can’t remark on what may have happened to Francis before. The law at times, I agree, can seem perverse.”

“Perverse? If it were only perverse, I could understand. Do you know, Detective, of a journalist named George Washington Cable?”

Not another history lesson. “I don’t, Miss Grimes, but—”

“He investigated prisons in the Reconstruction South. Freed slaves, denied work, got snared in police sweeps and charged with vagrancy, petty theft, drunkenness. Black prisoners outnumbered white by eleven-to-one in Georgia, sixteen-to-one in South Carolina. A larceny conviction could earn you twenty, sometimes forty years in prison, during which you’d be rented out for work by the warden—slavery in everything but the name, it was said even then—building turnpikes and levees and railroads, or sent back into the cotton fields, down into coal shafts, shackled, dressed in burlap. Which is more malicious, Detective? For a starving man to steal a hog, or for twelve jurors to send him to the coal mines for twenty years for doing it?”