The Perfect Crime, page 18
‘So, you’re the White, huh?’
‘Not sure what you mean by “the,” but, yeah. I’m White.’ He leaned forward, put his elbow on the table, and cocked his head. He gave me an expectant look over the rim of his reading spectacles. ‘Sir,’ I said.
He sat back again and reassumed his regal pose, satisfied I’d given him his respect. I wondered if he’d assume the same posture if the Old Gray Wolf Dennison had been sitting there next to him. Didn’t matter, though. I was hanging on by a finger’s grip to the bottom rung of that particular ladder. He wouldn’t but have to sneeze to see me fall to my death.
‘The way I hear it, White, you’ve done some excellent work at Anna Wilson’s sporting house over on Douglas Street. They used to have their fair share of troubles with some ne’er do wells trying to skip out on paying the ladies after they had a taste.’
‘Folks got to pay. One way or the other.’
‘Indeed, they do, White. Indeed, they do. But it’s the way you went about collecting a few of those payments that caught my special attention. These gentlemen to your right and left are often content to simply beat a man to a pulp. But you?’
‘Can’t touch the product if their fingers are broke.’
He barked out a laugh. ‘Once again, I cannot argue, White. How much are we paying you to guard those lovely bodies at the mansion on Douglas?’
I ran a hand through my greased locks. ‘I’m eating most nights.’
‘How’d you like to eat every night?’
‘That’s an appealing proposition. I’m in.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He smacked the table. ‘Well, all right. Here’s the score. You follow politics, White?’
‘I never had much use for them.’
‘A smart lad, you are. Well, Mr. Dennison’s got a keen interest in them. The right man in office keeps money on the tables, booze in the bottles, and the whores in their beds. You following me so far?’ I nodded. ‘Right now, the wrong man is in the mayor’s office if we expect to live the lives to which we’ve grown accustomed. Pickhandle’s got no love lost for the honorable Edward Parson Smith. I don’t believe I have to tell you what happens when Mr. Dennison is unhappy, do I?’
‘I reckon that’s why you called me here, sir.’
‘Yes it is, White. Do you read the newspaper?’
‘Don’t care much for the news, sir.’
Nesselhous rolled his eyes. ‘But you are aware there are such a thing as newspapers and that this particular region of Omaha has its own, am I right?’ I nodded again. ‘We’ve got a reporter over there at the Daily Bee willing to write up tales of these violent and savage niggers accosting and assaulting our lovely white women – with a bit of necessary embellishment, of course, should some form of said accosting occur.’
I sat up straight. Though it was one of the hottest days of the summer, the back room went cold as a cooler. ‘Is that true? I ain’t heard nothing about that.’
Nesselhous leaned forward again and glowered at me. ‘The truth is what we say it is, boy.’
It felt like I had a knot in my neck. I swallowed around it. ‘Yes, sir.’
He relaxed. ‘Now, thing is, we need some good old-fashioned eyewitness accounts of these acts to really get folks riled up. Get people thinking Mayor Smith isn’t the successful progressive reformer that he makes himself out to be. That he’s failing the upstanding, hard-working white folks of our fair city. Of course, it’s not like we can go about asking the niggers to incriminate themselves in something that would likely get them killed, can we? That, White, is where you come in.’
Nesselhous reached down into the booth and produced a can of shoe polish. He slid it across the table, along with two stacks of cash that doubled the wad I saw the officer counting.
‘What is it you want me to do with that?’
‘Not so bright after all,’ Nesselhous said loudly to his cronies across the room. They laughed a little too hard. He knew it, as he looked to be more annoyed with them than me. I chuckled in spite of myself. That was a mistake. Nesselhous’s face darkened such that I thought someone had actually turned the lights down in the room. He lifted the shoe polish and waggled it back and forth. ‘You’re going to smear this shit all over your face. Then you’re going to wait outside the movie theater just down the street. Pick a white woman, I don’t care much who, and scare the ever-loving shit out of her. Rob her. Rough her up, if it suits your fancy. Just make it good.’
He set the tin of polish on the table with a soft clink. I stared at it, along with the money. I hadn’t ever seen that much money in my entire life. Money like that solved a lot of problems for me. Might could get me out of that dump I was living in so I could get myself a decent place to hang my hat and rest my head. It sure would be nice not to wonder where my next meal was coming from, or if it was even coming. That kind of money, spent right, brought comforts I ain’t never had. But what I had to trade for it? Turning on my own? Just cause I ain’t never owned up to who I was didn’t mean I was fitting to make someone else pay that price.
‘I don’t know, Mr. Nesselhous. Sir.’
‘What don’t you know, White?’
‘I mean, I don’t think anybody’s gonna buy me being any kind of colored fella just because I paint up my face.’
‘Now, White, I was led to believe you weren’t the thinking type. Don’t make a liar out of me.’
‘Wouldn’t do that, sir. I just think – I just don’t believe I’m the man for this particular job.’
Nesselhous leaned on the table. When I didn’t follow suit, he rolled his eyes and flicked his fingers at me, beckoning me to come in close. I obliged. His breath reeked of bourbon and tobacco. He ran a tongue across his yellowed teeth. It took a great deal not to grimace.
‘Here’s the thing … White,’ he said with a smirk. The way he did made the back of my knees go wet. ‘This isn’t really something you say no to. I mean, now that you know what I want you to do, how do I know you won’t go to the authorities and tell them what we’ve got brewing here? That’s if you can find one of them that isn’t on our bankroll. Used to be a time when that wasn’t the case, when they were all ours. Right shame what this town has come to, isn’t it?’ I nodded. ‘But that’s besides the point. You’re going to do this because I know what you think I don’t.’
‘Sir?’
He waved me in closer and, loath as I was to do so, I brought my face inches from his. ‘I’ll be honest, I only just now figured it out. Most people probably don’t give you so much as a second glance. Hell, some of them would need a stepladder to look you in the eye. But that nose, those dark eyes … a less educated man might not see it, but then I’m not less educated, am I?’
I was glad we were talking in hushed tones, because when I went to answer, my words damn near choked me. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’
He looked to the boys on either side of the booth. ‘How about them? You think they’d know if I asked them? And a few more just like them out back? You think they’d know what I’m talking about?’
That little voice screamed at me not to say one more Goddamned word. This time I listened. I nodded. He eased back into his seat with a smile fit for a cat stuffed full of canary. ‘I don’t know why it is you choose to get by the way you do – well, scratch that. Course I do. And I won’t lie, engaging in your deceits and working for me and the Wolf? That takes stones you don’t see every day. Normally, I’d handle things in a bit more permanent manner, but you doing this particular task for me? Betraying your own?’ He slapped the table again and laughed. I flinched and cursed myself for letting him see that. ‘Boy, White, that tickles me even more than killing you would. Be honest with me – you never thought your little subterfuge would land you in this particular sort of pickle, now did you?’
‘No, sir, I did not.’ As I said it, I thought about sliding the table so hard it’d crack his ribs and crush his spine. But his old boys were right between me and the door, and no telling how many others he had lurking around the saloon. Maybe I’d make it outside and taste the fresh evening air before they beat it all out of me. Nesselhous looked at me like my skull was made of glass – like he could see every thought the minute it came to be.
‘That hard look you’re giving me is making me nervous, White. You don’t want me nervous, do you? If I’m nervous, then maybe I should just exercise other options, if you get my meaning?’
I did. ‘When do I have to do this?’
He spread his arms across the booth once more. ‘If you had plans this evening, they just changed.’
•
I scrambled up the steps to my apartment. Out of breath, hands shaking, I stabbed repeatedly at the lock until the key slid home. I shouldered open the door, kicked it shut behind me and hurried to the bathroom. I turned the hot faucet on full and leaned my hands on the edges of the sink, trying to get my breathing under control. Then I turned to the side, dropped to my knees, and vomited in the toilet. I wiped at my face with the back of my hand. When I pulled my hand away from my mouth, the skin there was streaked with black polish. I threw up again.
Stomach emptied, I stood at the sink again. Steam rose and fogged the mirror. The water from the faucet was damn near scalding. I splashed my face and hissed at the pain. Then I did it again. And again. The heat stung my skin, over and over, until I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to scrub at the polish to get it off, that maybe my skin would just peel from my skull. A swipe through the steam of the mirror proved otherwise. What I saw staring back at me sent the bile bubbling up again. A washrag sat on the back of the sink. I soaked it, lathered it up with the sliver of soap I had left, and scrubbed hard at my cheeks and forehead. I twisted it in my ears to drown out the recollection of that poor girl’s screams.
•
When I’d seen her leave the theater with her boyfriend, I damn near lost my nerve. Taking off and running wasn’t an option, though. Nesselhous sent his boys along to make sure of that. They walked the block, watching the theater as much as they were watching me. Every time some white folks came out of the show, I told myself, ‘They’re the ones.’ But I couldn’t do it. I had never been so scared in all my life.
The girl and her frail little fella were the last to come out. I was out of options. I ducked down in my spot among the weeds in the park across from the theater. And I waited.
Sure enough, they came down the path, arm in arm. Her man was a rail, a head shorter than his sweetheart. His steps were short and shuffled, and she looked to be helping him along a bit. A bead of sweat rolled down my painted forehead and hung at the tip of my nose. I blew at it until it dropped away, knowing if I wiped my face and messed up my disguise, Nesselhous’s boys would report back to him. I’d be as good as done for.
As the young couple got closer, I heard the girl call her fella Milton. That name was the last coherent thing I heard her say.
I jumped out my hiding place, hand shoved in jacket pocket like a pistol, and yelled for them to give me their money. The little bit of color Milton had in his face made its way to his feet as his missus screamed fit to wake the dead. And I panicked.
Before I knew what I was doing, my hand flew up and covered the girl’s mouth. She stepped back, letting go of Milton. The boy dropped to the ground like the sack of skin and bones he was. The girl’s screams made their way through my fingers and into my ears. I hadn’t never heard a sound like that in my life. I would have been content to never hear it again. On the ground, Milton fumbled for his wallet. I never saw if he got it out his pocket, because that girl’s shrieking did me in. I ran as fast and as far as I could, and I never turned to look back.
Back in the apartment, I laid on my bed and stared at the cracks in the plaster ceiling. My cheeks throbbed and my face felt swollen, what with all the scrubbing. Any minute now, someone on the other side of my door would be knocking. There was no two ways about it. Might be the law. Might be Nesselhous’s boys. Might be someone who saw me stick up those two kids come to drag me out and string me up, only to find what they thought was a white boy with some lingering streaks of shoe polish on his face.
Funny thing was, I was OK with all the anticipating. I didn’t have to lay there and think about what I’d done. What Mama would have thought of me. If she was twirling underneath the grass in that potter’s field over how I’d managed to let her down even after she’d passed on.
What choice did I have? Nesselhous had me dead to rights, and if I said no, wasn’t no way I made it out of there alive. Yeah, things was rough for colored folks who couldn’t get by like me. But the way he made it sound, they just wanted some rabblerousing to put that new mayor in hot water. What the hell did I care about politics? Things would calm down. Hopefully wouldn’t nobody get hurt too bad. Then I could take my money and go about my business. Sure, that’s what would happen. I told myself that enough times that I almost bought it. At least enough to close my eyes for a spell.
•
I woke up to that very rabblerousing just as dawn broke. All types of hollering coming from what sounded like right across the street. I peered out my window to see officers load some fella, couldn’t quite make out who, into the back of one of their cars and hightail it out of there. There was all manner of white folks on the street, yelling at the police, tossing bricks and bottles that fell just short of their bumper. Some of them—hell, a lot of them, took off running after the police. I hadn’t never seen nothing like it. I went to the bathroom and made sure I’d washed off the polish, then hustled on down the stairs to see what the hell was going on.
Across the street, a few people lingered in front of the home where the police had just been. They milled about, cursing under their breath, muttering about how whoever it was didn’t deserve to go to jail. I came up on one of them.
‘What’s everybody all up in arms about?’ I asked.
The fella shoved a paper in my hands. Morning edition of the Daily Bee. The headline read:
‘Black Beast.’
‘The most daring attack on a white woman ever perpetrated in Omaha.’
My guts twisted themselves into knots. I read on. The girl, Agnes, said she got grabbed up by her hair and dragged into the bushes while her feeble boyfriend, Milton got pushed around. I didn’t know if that was her storytelling or the paper’s, but I knew it didn’t matter none because it was what that mob believed.
I cleared my throat of all the guilt piling up in it. ‘So they took away the fella what done it?’
‘Yeah, some nigger renting a room in this here woman’s house. Somebody said they saw him coming back here around the time he would have done the deed.’
Not old Will.
I’d seen Will some nights coming home from work at the packing houses. Anytime we crossed paths, he’d always tip his cap at me, the bill pinched between those gnarled-up fingers of his. Never understood how he managed packing work knobbed up by that rheumatism. Though we hadn’t exchanged but ten words, I knew the man had a quiet, gentle nature about him. He wasn’t fit to rob no one, and he certainly wasn’t no beast—especially when I knew I was the beast in question.
‘They take him straight to jail?’ I asked.
‘Naw, over to the girl’s house to see if she says he’s the one what did it.’ He looked around at the bottles and mess everywhere, then lifted his chin at the people off in the distance still running after the police car. ‘If they make it that far.’
I looked down the road. The car had disappeared from sight. I handed the paper to the fella and stumbled back to my apartment feeling like I’d done one too many rounds with Dempsey himself.
•
Two days later, the courthouse was on fire.
There must have been thousands of white folks, some of them teenaged boys, far younger than me, standing outside the building while it burned. They screamed and hollered until their neck muscles strained and veins popped from their forehead. They gripped bricks and sticks. They looked possessed, and I suppose they was—by bloodlust and hate, feelings that had been brewing far longer than the two days since that headline ran. Not content to leave what they called justice in anybody’s hands but their own, they called for Will Brown’s blood.
A policeman got shoved through a glass door while the mob beat on the others. People got pulled from their cars and whupped up on. Gunshots cracked all around me. Some of the mob screamed like they were speaking in tongues about how they were going to teach these niggers a lesson.
That’s when I heard it.
The hollowed-out clip-clop of a horse’s hooves, somehow louder than all the chaos around me. A white boy no older than twenty atop the nag. A noose slung over its back.
Something in me broke.
Every time I shunned another Negro in public, every time I listened as white folks complained about this nigger and the next one, about the jobs they were stealing from them even though they were jobs they’d never deign to do themselves, every time I told myself I was smarter for passing myself off as one of these white folks, every indignity I’d both witnessed and perpetrated in the name of self-preservation, all of it became a match and set fire to the gasoline that replaced my blood, torching me in flames like the building in front of me, the building where Will Brown was praying for his life.
I added my voice to the shouts. But my words were not theirs. In fact, I didn’t say no words at all. I roared from someplace deeper than my throat, like I’d pulled the sound from the ground beneath my feet. I charged at that old boy on the horse, grabbed him by the waist, and pulled him off that mule. The minute he hit the ground, I commenced to pummeling. On my knees, sitting on his chest, I wanted to punch through his face until I hit the concrete underneath. Felt like I was going to do just that, until I felt greedy hands and fingers grab my shoulders and wrap around my wrists. A sweaty, hairy forearm wrapped around my neck. Somebody’s knuckles tried to touch my spine by way of my breadbasket, and all my air left me in a hurry. The bones of that forearm dug into my windpipe.
