Magic City Blues, page 9
“And she cuffed you to the car door to keep you from running off?”
“Says she’s going to take me in as a material witness.”
It might be the best thing. Abby would be safe, and I would have room to maneuver and find out what the hell was really going on. It had been so easy to convince D’Agostino not to call the cops. Sure, she was on “vacation” but she hadn’t called for backup after putting a couple of bad dudes in the trunk of a car. Instead she’d shown up at Martin James’ office less than five minutes behind me. If you looked at it in a certain light, she hadn’t rescued me from Martin. She had rescued him from me.
What the hell was going on? D’Agostino had violated about twenty different police regulations since I’d met her. The deeper I got into this thing, the more confused I got.
Was D’Agostino bent? That would explain why she was playing fast and loose here. But she seemed like such a straight arrow. Maybe not a by-the-book detective, but there are a lot of people who bend a rule or two at their job. Maybe she was on Carlton Doyle’s payroll and was supposed to make sure I didn’t fuck up too badly. Maybe she owed Martin James a favor. Or maybe she was playing a game I couldn’t see, hoping to reel in a big fish like Doyle. Maybe it was just about the murder of Britt Parker. I didn’t know, and the more I thought about it the more it made my head hurt.
“Here comes Wonder Woman now.”
I turned and watched D’Agostino swagger toward us with her confident cop walk. Her hands were hanging loose at her sides, and her shoulders were relaxed. Her arms swung naturally at her sides, and there was nothing there that told me anything at all.
“Hey,” she said. “I see you found her.”
There was a steady hard thumping coming from the trunk of the Lincoln, and D’Agostino slapped her palm against the lid.
“Shut up before I shoot you idiots,” she said, and the sound immediately stilled. Whatever D’Agostino had done, it had scared the hell out of those two. She drew a weapon from her waistband and I saw that it was mine. She reversed it and handed it to me butt-first.
“Thanks,” I said, and checked the cylinder to make sure it was loaded. I was careful not to point it anywhere specific. Instead, I held the weapon along the length of my thigh. It was a double-action revolver. No need to pull the hammer back. Just point and pull the trigger. I didn’t put the gun away. Not yet. D’Agostino’s eyes narrowed, and Abby moved discreetly away from us, out of the potential line of fire.
“Now,” I said. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Two guys kidnapped you.”
“Yeah.”
“You got away from them, overpowered them, stuck ’em in the trunk. Then came here.”
“That’s right.”
There was no tremor in her voice that betrayed emotion of any kind. She didn’t care if I believed her or not. In my experience, that was the voice of a person who had nothing to hide, a person telling the truth. But my experience with innocent people was limited. Almost everyone I knew was guilty of something.
“Why here?”
“Same reason you did,” she said. “Martin James pops up in an investigation, I want to know why. By the time I got here, you’d already busted open the door.”
“You thought he’d sent the kidnappers?”
“Yes,” she said, but there was hesitation, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes when she answered. It was the first time I’d caught her in a lie.
I looked over at Abby, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I took a deep breath and holstered my weapon. Then I slapped the trunk of the car.
“What do we do with these two?”
“The proper thing would be to haul them in and charge them with kidnapping, assault on an officer, whatever else I could think up.”
“Yeah, you been wanting to arrest somebody since this whole thing started. But you do that, you’re in trouble with the job.”
D’Agostino nodded. Abby was very carefully not looking at us as we talked.
“All right,” I said. “We know what’s proper. Now let’s talk about what we’re going to do instead.”
Abby’s eyes were very wide, and D’Agostino smirked at me a little.
“Something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She told me, and about halfway through I started to laugh, really laugh. Finally I held up a hand to stop her.
“Okay, I get it. Let’s do it.” I shook my head. “Jesus Christ, remind me to never piss you off.”
Twenty minutes later, D’Agostino had the Lincoln parked in long-term parking at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. She pocketed the parking slip and slid out of the car, locking the doors behind her. Abby and I waited in the Mustang, watching as the detective walked toward us.
“This is so mean,” Abby said.
“Yeah, I would’ve just shot them in the head.”
“Jesus, Kincaid.”
My left hand gripped the steering wheel loosely and my right fiddled with the gearshift. When D’Agostino hopped in the Mustang, I held out my hand for the keys. She looked at me quizzically for a moment, but handed them over. I put the emergency brake on and left the car running while I moved to the trunk of the Lincoln.
I popped the trunk and peered inside. There were two burly-going-to-seed white guys each laid on their sides in the trunk. Their hands were indeed pinned behind their backs with zip ties. I grinned down at them, chuckling to myself.
“Hey—” one said, and I shut the lid. His voice sounded muffled and far away.
When I got back in the Mustang, Abby asked me why I’d gone to look at the men who had taken them.
“Studying to be a proctologist,” I said. “I never pass up a chance to look at a couple of assholes up close.”
On our way out of the parking area, I tossed the keys into a garbage can.
“Are we just going to leave them there?” Abby asked. “It’s really hot.”
D’Agostino was quiet for a moment as she thought.
“It would serve them right,” she said, “the assholes. But no, I’ll call somebody from the airport police and give them the plate number. They’ll sweat a little, but they’ll be fine. I think.”
I concentrated on my driving. I had to find a place to stash Abby while I looked for Becks Towson. I needed more information. I wasn’t a detective—not in the least—but if I wanted to keep Abby safe, I had to know what was going on.
One thing I was sure of: If Towson had anything to do with this, things were about to get a lot more dangerous. So whatever I did with Abby, she had to be one hundred percent safe. Times like this were when it was a real pain in the ass to be an independent operator. I didn’t have a network of safe houses, no friends on the cops I could go to—well, maybe one—to keep my charge alive in my stead.
“So how do you feel about babysitting?” I said. D’Agostino looked at me while I watched Abby in the Mustang’s rear-view mirror for a moment. We were stopped at a train crossing on 41st Street South, about two blocks away from the Avondale Common House and Distillery, watching the freight trains pass by with the speed of arthritic turtles.
“You want me to watch Abby while you go off and perform some thrilling heroics?”
I ran my hand through my hair, flinching a little when my fingers brushed the swollen side of my face.
“Becks Towson is more likely to talk to me than you,” I said. “Not because you’re a woman.”
“Because I’m a cop.”
“Yes,” I said. I put the Mustang back in gear as the last freight car passed. We moved down the block past the brewery on one side and the 41st Street Pub on the other.
“Saw’s is up here, isn’t it?”
“Wanna grab lunch?” I asked. “I’m starving.”
“Me too,” Abby said.
Saw’s Soul Kitchen is a part of the Avondale neighborhood’s gentrification, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t some of the best barbecue in the world. The building isn’t much more than a pile of bricks stained black by time and smoke. Freshly chopped wood is stacked in the back of the building, and they smoke their pork slowly, starting at some ungodly hour of the morning to be ready for their lunch rush. I pulled over at the curb, and the women got out. The line was out the door and probably had been since they opened that morning. I put some cash in D’Agostino’s hand and told her to order for all three of us. I found a parking spot about three blocks away, and by the time I joined them, D’Agostino and Abby had already ordered. They were sitting together, laughing at something—I had a feeling it was me—and D’Agostino looked up when I arrived at the table.
She looked from me to Abby, who was still smiling a little.
“Yeah,” D’Agostino said finally, “I think I can pull babysitting duty. For a little while.”
Fourteen
Becks Towson wasn’t an easy man to find, but I kept at it for a while. I started at the Gable Square Saloon at the corner of 8th Street South and 10th Street South, a location you wouldn’t think could exist in a major modern city. But this was Birmingham. With its location, the bar should have been a favorite of the college kids. Instead, its clientele skewed older, mostly Black with a few working-class white folks mixed in. The place didn’t have a bad reputation—or a reputation of any kind, really—and so it was a perfect place for a guy like Towson, who didn’t care to attract attention.
He also happened to own the place, as well as Giuseppe's, the little Italian restaurant next door. I was pretty sure that Towson’s name wasn’t recorded on a deed anywhere, but in the parts of the city where gentrification hadn’t reached its lily-white hands yet, Becks Towson was very much the Man.
I hung out at the bar for a little while, making a draft Coors Light last longer than it should have. The bartender, a lean and tall black man with a neat mustache and hair cropped close to his head, wandered down toward me during a slow moment and squinted through the dark.
“You waiting for somebody?” He asked. His voice was carefully neutral.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for Becks.”
The bartender’s hands hung below the bar. I wasn’t sure what was down there below eye level, whether it was a baseball bat or a scatter-gun. What I did know was that the guy looked like he could handle himself.
“I don’t know anybody by that name,” he said, and I grinned at him. It was a real grin, there and gone, blinking on and off like a truncated caution light.
“You lie to your friends, and I’ll lie to mine,” I said. “But let’s not lie to each other.” I finished the beer and pushed the empty glass toward the bartender. He rinsed it and put it aside in a rack meant for an industrial dishwasher, pulled a clean, frosted glass from the cooler, and drew me another beer.
“So when is Becks usually in?”
For a moment the bartender didn’t say anything. Behind me there were a few quiet, solitary drinkers scattered at tables around the room. In another part of the bar, I could hear the click of billiard balls rolling and ricocheting on green felt. Then he leaned across the bar and whispered.
“Fuck you, sow belly.”
It went like that all over metro Birmingham. I bought overpriced beer while suburban white boys ogled doughy strippers at Sammy’s, then questioned supposedly ignorant bartenders at both the Furnace and Platinum until I couldn’t take it anymore. The bouncer at the Palace had already heard about me and wouldn’t let me in. At Mike’s Crossroads, I was told to take a hike after my first drink. At each place, I left a business card with my name and number on it.
No one would admit to knowing Becks Towson.
Out in Ensley, in the western part of Birmingham, Club Volcano was the closest I came to getting into a physical altercation. As soon as I got out of the Mustang, a group of men began to drift toward the front door of the bar, blocking my way. I paced forward until I was about twenty feet away.
“Nice night for a beer,” I said. “I’m buying, if y’all are interested.”
The men—each of them six feet tall or more—glanced at one another. Some wore T-shirts and jeans. Others wore wind pants and the scrappy kind of sleeveless undershirts we used to call wifebeaters in a less-enlightened age. The air was redolent with the smell of cheap beer and expensive weed.
“Appreciate the offer,” one of them said. He was narrow through the waist and hips,wearing a tight-fitting shirt that showed well-defined ridges of muscle in his shoulders and chest. His goatee was trimmed neatly, and his teeth were very white underneath the sodium-arc lights of the parking lot. “But we got the word, and the word is to keep you out.”
“I’m looking for someone,” I said.
“I know,” he looked around at his companions. “Everybody knows who you looking for, man. He ain’t here. He ain’t ever gonna be here, either. You get it?”
I looked into their faces. There was nothing there for me. Each man was closed off, sullen-looking, ready to pound someone’s head in. And unfortunately, right now that someone was me.
“Yeah, I get it,” I said. “Becks wants me to lay off. But why? All I want to do is talk to him.”
The spokesman of the group shrugged.
“Nobody say. I don’t care ’bout why. I’m the gun, you know. The man points me at a problem and I go bang. The problem goes away.”
I ran a hand through my hair and risked a look up at the velvet night sky. Then I blew a breath out.
“You’re that good, huh?”
He flashed a broad grin, and then suddenly affected the accent of a bored British lord. “My fellow, you simply have no idea.”
Our eyes locked for a moment, and I saw that he was serious. Whatever else this man was, he was dangerous. I looked carefully from him to the others who stood, I saw now, a little apart from him.
“Then why do you need all the backup?”
He raised an eyebrow at me and then cast a look back at the men standing behind him.
“The man say beat you real good if you don’t leave. Say not to kill you if I can help it.”
“So?”
“So they for you,” he said. “They here to keep me from it.”
He paused, thinking about it carefully, then lifted his hands to his shoulders in a dramatic shrug.
“If they can.”
I thought about it for a long second. On the one hand, I was pretty dangerous in my own right. I’d hurt people—killed some, too—so I wasn’t really worried about this guy. Still, it paid to be wary. I was on my own in Ensley, an area considered by many to be one of the most dangerous parts of Birmingham. And no matter what he said, there were eight of them and only one of me. Inside, there was a wild flame of anger that burned, screaming at me to fight, to bust some heads, to roll through all of Becks Towson’s people until he had no other choice but to talk to me or kill me.
But even though that flame was hot and loud in my soul, my brain won the day. I put my hands up, making sure they could all see that they were empty.
“I’ll go,” I said. “But pass a message on for me, if you would.”
The muscular black man never moved.
“All I want to do is talk to Becks. Fifteen minutes of his time, that’s it. I’m not going to quit until I find out what I want to know.”
He nodded at me finally, and I got back into my car and left.
In rapid succession, I hit the Tutwiler Pub, the Seven Lounge, the Owl, and the House of Cognac. In each place, I got the same thing: stonewalled. No one had seen Becks Towson. No one would even admit to knowing his name. In every bar, I seemed to be the only white face. If I wasn’t so intrepid, I might have felt a little nervous. I went through the western side of Birmingham, the area they called Dynamite Hill in the 1960s as the racist white people began setting bombs to drive the Black people out, to frighten or kill them. It got so bad that they started calling the city ‘Bombingam’ after a while.
I moved along the streets of Midfield and Fairfield, driving along the burned-out husks of Brighton and Roosevelt City. The whores on the streetcorners were brazen. If you slowed for a stop sign or traffic light, they’d reach out and slap the hood of your car to try to make you stop.
I was an alien in this place, a being with only a passing knowledge of the landscape and customs of the human beings who lived in the tract houses huddled close together like survivors of a long-forgotten war. And then I was in Bessemer, that odd appendage twenty miles outside of the city. You won’t see it on the ‘Welcome to Bessemer’ signs, but this place is the murder capital of Alabama, and one of the top 10 cities in the country for murders per capita.
It was also home to one of the only authentic juke joints left, a place called Gip’s. It’s a little roadhouse tucked into a residential street—Avenue C—and it’s hard to find. You’ll hear it before you see it, sweet blues played low down, dirty and mean, the way it was meant to be played. There’s no sign out front, but you can find the place marked with a string of white Christmas lights around the door.
Henry Gipson ran the place for years. He was a large, heavy black man whose smile was wide. When he shook your hand, he shook the whole thing, his mitts enveloping yours in a warm, tender grip. Grip wore bright clothes and fedoras with wide brims. And if you could find his place—and if you were very lucky—you’d get to hear him take the stage and play.
Nobody would hear him play anymore. Gip had gone down suddenly and permanently a few weeks before my visit. You could say it was expected—Gip had celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday at least nine times that I knew of—but the man had seemed like a permanent fixture at the bar, his big brown hand cupping a crinkled can of Budweiser.
The folks who loved Gip were trying their best to keep the tradition alive, but once I paid the customary ten-dollar cover and stepped inside, I could tell the air of the place was funereal. A shoulder wedged into the crowd at the bar bought me a little space, and I ordered a beer and let the atmosphere of the blues soak into my soul. The bartender, a thin older black man with white hair and a bar towel tucked into his belt for an apron, came back with a tall glass full of amber liquid, and I gulped down nearly a third of it in one swallow.
