It’d been before Edna Garson and before Julie Masters. It’d been before the Morning Sentinel had drummed Lockington out of Chicago police force service. It’d been in the early spring of ’84. The Billy Mac Davis for President bandwagon had swept out of the south and into Chicago, a gala caravan of red, white and blue chartered buses. SUDDENLY, A CHOICE! the placards had proclaimed. There’d been a rally at the Chicago Stadium on West Madison Street and Lockington had been there, heading up a five-man plainclothes pickpocket detail. Rufe Devereaux had attended for whatever reasons CIA operatives attend such functions—possibly the apprehension of subversives, Lockington had figured.
It’d been a rip-snorting Sunday afternoon affair replete with satin- and sequin-attired country singers and denim-clad guitar pickers. It’d packed all the fervent, feverish vibrancy of an old-fashioned, fire-and-brimstone Dixie revival meeting. The stage had been awash in American flags, the Chicago Stadium pipe organ had boomed and blasted, fifteen thousand people had joined in the singing of “America the Beautiful,” and Lockington had come down with a severe case of goose-bumps, because if there’d have been anything that he’d have appreciated more than fifteen thousand people singing “America the Beautiful,” it’d have been fifteen million people singing “America the Beautiful.” Lockington was a hard-nosed, two-fisted, dyed-in-the-wool patriot.
The Sunshine Brothers Quartet had sung “Church in the Wildwood” and “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again.” Then Bobbie Jo Pickens had been introduced. Bobbie Jo Pickens had been a tall, middle-aging, hoarse-voiced, blonde vocalist in a tight-fitting gold lamé gown. She’d strode confidently to centerstage to grab a microphone stand, straddle it, roll her hips, twitch her groin, and belt out “Sleepwalkin’ Mama” to the accompaniment of a wailing electric guitar and a slow bluesy piano. She’d brought the house down. The switch from gospel to honky-tonk had been abrupt, but Billy Mac Davis had been touching all bases. Following a rambling prayer by a cadaverous Pentecostal preacher, Davis had stepped to the lectern to tear into the Loyal Order of Moose, the Citrus Growers’ Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and similarly dangerous organizations. He’d been a chunky, silver-haired, wild-eyed, arm-waving foot-stomper, one step short of full swastika rank and mere inches removed from an insane asylum. He’d spouted a venom-marinated doctrine calling for the immediate deportation of all blacks to Africa, the return of every last Mexican to Mexico, and “trial by the people” for white liberals.
Through it all, Rufe Devereaux had been studying Lockington, seeing in him, perhaps, the quintessential subversive, and Lockington had been keeping a suspicious eye on Rufe Devereaux, waiting for him to dip into somebody’s hip pocket. Eventually they’d run out of patience, approaching each other to demand identification. Identification produced, they’d laughed about the incident, shaking hands to slip across West Madison Street and into a skid-row ginmill for a few belts, and while they’d been drinking, two black men had set fire to one of Billy Mac Davis’s red, white and blue buses, and a Mexican had picked Lockington’s pocket.