The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear (22 page)

As soon as we stepped inside, it felt like we had entered a cave—cool, dark, vaguely dangerous. Two hulking men, one white, one black, were in the doorway. They wore identical blue blazers and turtlenecks emblazoned with the Body Shop logo. They nodded at Walter. “Officer,” the large white one said.

“Walter,” the black man said, nodding.

Jessie giggled, taking in the club: a half-dozen girls, a pair of Japanese businessmen, a couple of college students, an attractive couple in their late thirties who seemed to have ended up here after a night on Bourbon Street. Two of the dancers slowly walked over to check us out and I realized I'd seen one of them when I was here before. “Hey, big boy, good to see you back,” she said, then gave Jessie a look. “This is tasty.” Jessie beamed.

Their long, sequined gowns glinting in the reflected light of the mirror ball hanging from the ceiling gave them the look of forties movie stars. One was short and Asian, pretty, with high cheekbones and white teeth. Her unnaturally large breasts burst from the gown. The other was tall and blond, just a few chromosome twists from gorgeous. But her jaw was too large for her face and her teeth were oversized. There was a bit of horse somewhere in that gene pool. Not a bad-looking horse, but still.

“Hi, girls, you look fabulous,” Jessie said, and seemed to mean it.

They smiled at Jessie but closed in on Walter, Paul, and me. “Lap dance?” the tall blonde asked. She drew out the words in a long Texas drawl.

I pulled Walter, who was staring appreciatively at the two women, aside.

“You know these guys?” I asked, tilting my head toward the beefy men in blazers.

“It's a small town,” he said. I nudged Walter toward the two men. They looked at us with blunt, bored expressions. “We're here to see Tyler,” I told them. This was met with absolutely no response at all.

“He's not here,” the black man finally said. He looked at Walter Robinson. “This a friend of yours, Walter?”

Walter smiled. “Cops don't have friends who aren't cops. You guys know that.” They nodded and didn't argue. “Tyler here?”

“Nope. Haven't seen him since yesterday.”

“Can we just take a look in his office for a second?” I asked, standing beside Walter.

“Fuck you,” the black man said evenly.

I looked at Walter. “We need to get in the office.”

Walter sighed. “Okay, look, guys, you come with us, but my friend says we have to look in the office, and I think we have to look in the office. Christ, let's make this easy, okay?”

The two men looked at each other. Their necks were so large that it made it seem like their heads had been placed on top of posts. The black man seemed to be in charge. “You want to know something, Walter, I really don't give a shit. You want to look, you look. What the hell.”

He led us down the same neutral hallway that I had walked down the day before. Paul and Jessie followed us. The door to Tyler's office was open. The large metal cabinet was unlocked; the gun racks inside were bare. The drawers to his desk were pulled out, empty. The large Confederate flag that had hung behind his desk was gone.

“He left,” the large black man said flatly.

“Why?” I asked. Somehow I had never really expected to find Tyler, but seeing his office like this gave me a sick feeling of dread.

The black man chuckled. It was an odd sound coming from the overbuilt body. “Let's just say he didn't say. Took everything but his stereo,” the black man said. “Too damn big to move.”

I walked over to the metal shelves holding the sound system. The same CD player was connected. I hit play and in an instant the song I'd heard in the office the day before boomed through the speakers. This was why I wanted to come back to the club. It was loud, grating, mixed with crowd sounds. A live recording. A harsh voice wailed:

Racial pride ain't no racist hate.

Cops beat down, no it's not too late.

On the news, in the streets,

Doin' it right, still take heat.

Point a finger,

Truth don't matter,

Got a gun.

Get it done.

Whole world's gone crazy.

We're losin power but it just won't last.

Screw bodycam. Change is comin and it's comin fast.

Babies in the crib

lyin in wait.

grow up to game the system,

But it ain't too late.

Clock strikes. Time ticks.

Hold on. Don't quit.

Turn back time to when America was goin' strong.

Keep the faith. Do what's right because it's all gone wrong.

Our walk, long walk. Our fight.

Get yourself straight. Get it right.

We're losin power but it just won't last.

Screw bodycam. Change is comin and it's comin fast.

The song ended.

“Always listening to that shit,” the black man said. “He loved it. You know what he called his piece-of-shit band? The Confederate Dead. He thought that name was funny as hell.”

“C.D.,” Jessie said. “You want to play that again?”

“Damn,” the white security guard said. He was now giving Jessie a careful look. She did look great. “Worst stuff in the world.”

I played it again.

“What's Tyler to you, anyway?” the black security guard asked.

“He's our brother,” Paul said quietly. Then, when I glared at him, he added, “Half brother.”

IT TOOK ME ONLY
an hour and a half to get there. It had been years since I'd made the drive, and remembering how short it was only made me feel worse about how long it had been since I'd seen Renee.
Renee.
The name had been a touch from her half-Cajun mother.

Paul hadn't argued against me going alone. He was
happy
for me to do it. We needed to find Tyler, and the best place to start was with his mother. The woman—the girl—who had been my babysitter when she was fourteen and my father had seduced her, if that was the right word.

The distance from New Orleans wasn't why I hadn't seen Renee Hutchinson in years, so many I couldn't really remember. It was the embarrassment. No, that was too easy. It's embarrassing to show up at a party in a white dinner jacket when everyone else is wearing a tux. I'd done that once to an afternoon summer wedding of some friends of Sandra's in Newport. Goddamn Yankees. In the South it would have been perfectly acceptable, complimented as a bit retro. But those Yankees thought I was a waiter and asked me to get drinks for them all afternoon. Sandra thought it was hilarious. I should have ended it then, driven back to D.C. and left her there.

It wasn't embarrassment, it was shame. A good old-fashioned, Old Testament kind of shame.

She still lived in the same shotgun cottage bought with the money quietly raised by a couple of phone calls “up north” that Tobias had made. He never told us who gave the money, but it wasn't difficult to figure out that someone with Tobias's skills could make it pretty clear why it would be a disaster if a prominent movement figure like Powell Callahan were spotlighted with transgressions that no one would defend. And that was the thing—it was transgressions, as in multiple.

Everybody in their little inner circle—Tobias and the cozy crowd who used the movement as their own fishing pond constantly restocked with attractive women—knew that my father had a thing for girls far too young. If one scandal had hit the news, odds were that other girls, women now, would come forward. It had been going on for a long time. And then there was my mother. They all loved my mother and wanted to preserve her dignity, or at least what was left of it. So it was very, very important to make sure that Renee Hutchinson had what she needed to have her baby and start a new life and not blame the great Powell Callahan. No one would have called it hush money, but of course that's what it was. Not that the girl didn't deserve the money.

Shame. Shameful. That's what I felt. But I should be used to it. I've felt that way since I was eight years old and just sensed, in that way kids have of knowing stuff, that something was really wrong. I parked in front of the small house at the end of the block. When we left the strip club, Paul, Walter, and Jessie had dropped me off at the Superdome. I'd taken one of the electric cars General Motors had lent the convention to showcase their newest model. It was a terrible imitation of a Toyota Prius, but at least it was silent, and Renee didn't hear me approach her house.

She was where I expected her to be: outside by the marsh that had come to define her life and life's work. When she and her mother and baby Tyler moved into the house, it was on the outskirts of town, by a beautiful marsh. She finished high school with a GED and commuted to LSU while her mother took care of Tyler. She fell in love with a drummer for a band that toured for a while and came back home when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Bad cancer, ovarian, stage four. She didn't last long and that left Renee, now all of twenty, with not-a-baby-anymore Tyler. She did a little of this and a little of that until a local fertilizer plant wanted to expand near the house. It was a big, ugly thing spewing all kinds of dubious toxins, and the more enlightened locals united to block it. Four years later, the fertilizer plant was history and Renee had found her calling: she was an environmental activist. In a place like New Iberia, in the petrochemical corridor of south Louisiana, there was always a cause looking to be championed. It was against this perpetual do-goodism that Tyler, no doubt, had rebelled, fleeing to the army, his strange skinhead world, his strip club and security businesses. She had won awards and testified in Baton Rouge a dozen times, gone to D.C. to lobby Congress. It didn't hurt that she was beautiful and had a charm that I still remembered from when I was a kid.

Renee had contacted me a few times over the years for help on one cause or another. I had tried to open this door, or connect her to that person, and maybe I had helped, but there was always this awkward moment when it came time to describe how I knew Renee Hutchinson. I'd just say, “She's a friend of the family,” and it always came with that rush of shame.

I was staring out the windshield of the awful toy car lost in the past when there was a tapping on the passenger window. Renee was smiling, her face sweaty, garden shears in one ungloved hand. She was still beautiful.

We sat out on her back porch overlooking the marsh and drank ice tea. “If you want sweet tea, I hope you brought it, since I don't mess with sugar,” she said, with that same smile that was still so charming. And then she laughed when I pulled out a couple of packets stolen from the Windsor Court. I was planning to work around to Tyler slowly, as if I were just dropping by to see her, but of course she was too smart for that.

“What did he do?” she asked, before I could begin with my little charade. I started to protest but she just shook her head. “It's one of the busiest days of your life and you drive your cute ass out here to see Renee because you are being a good person and miss her? I love you, J.D., but that's bullshit and we both know it. You're here about Tyler. I knew that as soon as I saw you pull up in that silly car. What are you doing in that thing, anyway? It's what I'd drive.”

“GM gave it to the convention to use.”

“Is it really as bad as everybody says?”

“Horrible. It shakes over sixty-five.”

“So what did he do?” she asked again, with a sigh.

“I don't know. I'm just trying to find him.”

“He's not at that horrible club? He almost lives there.”

“No. He left. Where does he live, anyway?” It just occurred to me that Walter should have tracked down where he lived. What kind of cop was he, anyway? And what did it say about me that I hadn't asked him to check?

“I saw him at the club,” I said. She tilted her head when I said that, surprised. “But when I went back, he was gone.” I shrugged. “I don't know where he lives or his cell.”

She nodded. “What's going on, J.D.? Why in the world are you trying to reach Tyler now?”

I had thought about this on the drive and had worked out what I would say. It was along the lines of “I heard he might be in trouble and want to help.” But then I thought about how terrible I'd feel if I ended up being another Callahan lying to her. So I told her everything. Every bit of it. When I finished, she got up, came back with more tea, and sat back down.

“I wanted him to do more therapy, after the accident,” she said. “But he said it made him feel like a coward.”

“A coward.”

“The sessions were mostly combat veterans and he was just a guy who was in an accident. He said he felt like a fake soldier. ‘A fucking fake soldier,' is how he put it. That club.” She sort of shuddered.

We sat there for a while, listening to the marsh. I'd put my phone on vibrate and I could feel it going crazy, call after call. Renee got up and came back with an address and a telephone number. “That's the last I had,” she said. “I think it's still good.”

I stood up and she hugged me and I'd have given anything to have willed away all the pain my father and the world had brought down on her. “Be safe,” she whispered, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Be safe, J.D.” She felt my phone vibrating and laughed. “You better go. I bet the whole world is looking for you.”

I laughed and pulled away. “I hate my life,” I said, and I don't think I'd ever meant anything more.

“Sometimes we do,” she said, “but it's all we've got.”

On the way out, I ducked into the bathroom. It was off her bedroom and filled with pictures of Tyler: baby Tyler, grade-school Tyler, Tyler in Little League, Tyler in the junior high band, Tyler playing guitar in his first rock-and-roll band, Tyler in the military with a few of his buddies. Most of the photos were from before his accident. He had looked so handsome in his uniform. There was one of him and a bunch of buddies when they had finished basic training, laughing it up, proud as can be. I stared at the handsome, unscarred face and wondered if he had any idea then of what the future held, if maybe underneath all that exploding joy there wasn't just a trace of sadness that hinted at the knowledge that this might be his peak. I looked at the crowd with him. And then I saw him: he was three down from Tyler in a row of sweaty guys in gray T-shirts. It took me a moment to be sure, but there wasn't any doubt. It was Somerfield George. I took the picture.

I followed Ginny as we worked our way through the double levels of security toward the area of the convention floor reserved for the press and campaign trailers. Everywhere you looked there were SWAT team members, FBI, Secret Service, with more automatic weapons than an Arizona gun show. It felt like we were entering a high-tech concentration camp.

“Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, looking around. “This is an Armstrong George wet dream. Forget about closing up the borders, let's just start right here at the convention.”

“It gets worse inside,” Ginny hissed. “They even strip-searched a couple of alternate delegates.”

“Ours? They strip-searched our goddamn delegates?”

Ginny shrugged. “Alternates.”

About a third of the Superdome floor had been curtained off for the press and campaign trailers. Thick cables snaked across the floor in an electronic maze. This had been one of my longtime concerns, that someone—Armstrong George or someone from the press—would drop a tap into one of the cables from the Hilda Smith trailer. I hated the idea that my cables might be running over Armstrong George's cables or CNN's cables.

Everybody thought I was crazy paranoid, and of course they were right. Right now I would have killed for convention spying to be the biggest problem I had. Instead I had one crazy brother beating up on me to extort money for his greater political good, another running a strip club, doing his skinhead thing, with maybe a little bombing on the side, an ex-girlfriend reporter who was on the loose, another reporter who I was crazy enough to sleep with and who now was learning everything about our little family house of horrors—these were real problems.

The Hilda Smith command trailer was a double-wide construction site trailer packed with radios, television monitors, and computers. Eddie Basha was sitting at a computer terminal. “Take a look,” he said right away, passing me a delegate list, then resumed screaming into an iPhone. His olive skin gleamed with a slick layer of sweat even though the trailer's air conditioner was turned to morgue level.

But I was watching the image of Armstrong George on the dozen television screens packed into the trailer. He was standing in front of the entrance to Mardi Gras World. The charred bus had been hauled away. As always, his son, Somerfield, was just behind him. I stared at him, wondering:
Do you know where Tyler is? Is Tyler with you? Did you get Tyler to plant those bombs?
I turned the sound up.

“The terrible tragedy that occurred here last night is simply more evidence that the social fabric of America is tattered and torn. We cannot let the lawless few continue to rip apart the threads of decency and shared purpose that bind this great nation together. Just yesterday, the president of the United States agreed with me as he called for these criminals to pay the ultimate price.”

“What a pompous asshole,” Eddie said to the screen, meaning Armstrong George, then resumed his harangue into the phone. “You tell your governor that win or lose, Hilda Smith still has six months to go as the second most powerful person in this goddamn country, and there's a certain investigation by the NCAA into some very suspect recruitment practices of that shit-kicking university your governor loves so much, and if it goes the wrong way, she'll have the United States Congress looking into it and he'll be a hundred and one before his team is done being investigated….Am I getting through here, Artie?”