| |
MacGregor Way was actually two streets. North MacGregor and South MacGregor were rambling drives divided by Brays Bayou and a greenbelt that wound to a dead end into MacGregor Park. The area also constituted the heartline of Houston’s largest black community, a roughly triangular piece of the city with its apex just south of Chinatown where state and interstate highways conjoin in a mass of tangled pavement before spinning off in separate freeways. The two descending sides of the triangle were Interstate 45 on the east, stretching south to Galveston, and State Highway 288 on the west, running south past Hermann Park and the Texas Medical Center toward the Loop. The southern Loop itself formed the bottom of the triangle.
The neighborhood that constituted MacGregor Way was known as Nigger Oaks by white racists and by the poorer and bitterer blacks of Houston who were resentful and suspicious of the wealthy blacks who lived there. MacGregor Way had had a rocky history. It became a neighborhood of ostentatious wealth in the 1930s when the city’s growing affluent Jewish community found itself barred from the parvenu enclave of River Oaks, then developing west of downtown. They made the winding boulevards on either side of Brays Bayou their own by displaying there the fruits of their vast and growing mercantile wealth. Grand homes, grand lawns, grand ways.
By the end of World War II, the black ghetto of the Third Ward, which had its center along Wheeler Avenue nearly twenty blocks north of MacGregor, was bulging with impoverished and laboring class blacks. By the fifties, when blacks all across the South were bidding for their rights to sit at the front of the bus and eat a ham sandwich at the variety store lunch counter, the blacks of the Third Ward spilled across Blodgett Street and headed for the neighborhoods around MacGregor Way. Within a decade they had claimed the serpentine boulevards for themselves, and the young blacks who broke new ground by going to college in ever increasing numbers in the sixties entered the seventies as the aggressive new elite and moved into the mansions the whites had fled.
MacGregor Way became the center of one of the wealthiest black neighborhoods in the country, occupied by powerful men and women whose lives were still closely identified with the black community but whose influence went far beyond it.
It was nearly ten o’clock at night when the Lincoln pulled to the curb in front of a two story brick home on South MacGregor and stopped. The driver turned off the car’s lights but did not cut the motor. He simply waited. In a few moments the light went out in an upstairs window, and soon the front door opened and a tall black man in a suit stood in its light talking to his wife. He bent down to kiss his little boy, who had wiggled past his mother’s legs, and then turned and came along the sidewalk toward the car. It was a long walk. The front door of the house closed behind him.
He opened the door of the Lincoln and slid in beside the white driver. Both men were big. The front seat was full. The car lights came on, and the Lincoln eased away from the curb and moved slowly along the greenbelt.
“We have a problem, Grover,” the driver said. “It’s serious.” Grover Ellis automatically reached into his coat pocket for a cigarette. He feared conversations that started like this. He lit the cigarette and turned slightly in his seat to look straight at the driver.
“I think you fucked up,” the driver said. He was wired. He was finding it difficult to remain calm, not scream at the damn nigger.
“Well,” Ellis said, “what is it?”
“A guy sneaked into the warehouse the other night and videotaped the whole show.”
Ellis turned cold. He felt the earth shift its center, felt it wobble in its turning, knew that it would shake itself to pieces. “God Almighty,” he said.
“It’s going to be blackmail, Grover. Lot of money at stake. Lot of reputations at stake. Your ass at stake, Grover.”
“God Almighty.”
The driver slammed both big hands down on the steering wheel so hard Ellis thought it was going to snap off the column. “Son of a bitch, boy! Is that all you can say?” He slammed his hands down again, and the car rocked. “What happened? How did he get in there? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Ellis could hear his own baritone. It sounded baritone. It didn’t always sound baritone from the inside. “Who you talking about? Who did it?”
“You jiving me, Grover? You nigger-jiving me? You doin’ it to da honky, man? You tryin’ ta do a job on da white peeples?”
The driver’s voice was mocking, syrupy. He· was furious. Ellis could almost see the red in his face through the green glow of the dash lights.
Ellis forced himself to present an outward appearance of reason able composure, to sound calm. Inside, he wanted to open the door of the car and jump.
“If you don’t calm down,” he said, “and explain this to me in a rational way, we’re not going to get anywhere. Are you through getting that nigger stuff out of your system?” He leaned against the car door and stroked his mustache with a long, graceful finger.
There were several reasons why Grover Ellis wasn’t intimidated by the racist baiting. Foremost was that he was simply not the sort of man to be intimidated . . . by anything. Handsome, articulate, educated, shrewd, and ambitious, he had almost the identical attributes as his companion in the car. Only their color and their family histories differed; beyond that they were practically brothers. In addition to these commonalities, they had been friends since college. The friendship had been initiated by the white man, not in an ingratiating sort of way but simply because he liked what he saw in Ellis. When Ellis got out of law school, his friend threw a lot of clients his way and a lot of business opportunities. Even the relationship that had gotten him into this cursed situation.
No, the racist baiting did not bother him because it didn’t ring true with Ellis’ years of experience with the white man. The guy was emotional. He’d probably send Ellis a Rolex after the whole thing was over and make a sentimental speech. That was the way he was. The thing about the white man was that he wasn’t consistent. He’d pull your fingernails out with pliers and then send you to the best doctors at the Medical Center and have them give you new ones. Maybe Teflon ones, better than what you had. Give you a lifetime pension. A new car.
The driver seethed in silence as he turned left at Calhoun and then turned left again, going back in the direction from which they had come, except on the other side of the bayou, on North MacGregor.
They passed the southern edge of the University of Houston. This side of the bayou was losing the status it had once shared with its counterpart to the south. The residents on this side had not been as conscientious about keeping up their deed restrictions, which, in a city without zoning laws, was the only way neighborhood residents could protect their area’s integrity. Apartment houses, drive-in groceries, cheap taverns, fast-food franchises were moving in. In the daylight, you could see the litter of the changing ways strung along the bayou, the carry out boxes of fried chicken, the glitter of broken glass, beer cans and discolored paper cluttering the dried grass.
Now, in the evening heat, you could see people sitting out on the stoops of the declining low rent apartments. A couple of kids did a self-involved dance on the sidewalk to the music coming from a suitcase sized ghetto blaster sitting in an opened window.
The driver’s voice was controlled now. Barely.
“Grover, the feeling is, since you arranged the details at this end, and since it’s on this end that the fuck up took place, that the monkey’s on your big black back.”
“Shit!” Ellis’ baritone went up to alto, and now he was having trouble with his temper. “Will you please start at the beginning and tell me what’s going on?”
The driver did. With sarcastically slow deliberation, spelling it out as if to a retarded man, he told him everything, at least everything he needed to know. When he finished, Ellis was sweating. His mind was bouncing around the corners of the whole deal trying to find a place to crouch down and get organized. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say.
They came to a place along the greenbelt where they could pull off the street a few yards into a little caliche turnaround that overlooked the bayou. Highway 288 was behind them now, and the dark expanse of Hermann Park lay ahead. On the far edge of the park the many hospitals of the Texas Medical Center complex rose out of the darkness like self-contained cities, sparkling starships.
The driver cut the motor.
“Grover,” he said. “You better not be trying to indulge yourself here. You don’t scam him.”
“He thinks I’m behind it?” Ellis was horrified. He pushed his window button. He had to have some air, even the hot, muggy bayou air.
“I don’t know what he thinks, Grover.”
Ellis knew the only way to survive this was to try to come up with answers. He had to get his mind straight.
“That’s what it looks like from where I’m sitting,” the driver said. “You made the arrangements. We put it in your hands. You seemed to be the right man for it. Then Toy gets in there. The buck stops with you, Grover. I don’t know anything about it. And it’s a damn good thing.”
“I’m not scamming,” Ellis said. “Somebody screwed up.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” the driver said, “but I suppose you got somebody to do something, and they got somebody to do something, and they got somebody . . .. How many people are involved, Grover? What’d you do, give half the brothers in the ward a chance to cash in on this?”
“You want to know how I handled it?” Ellis said. It was almost a dare. “You never wanted to know anything before. It’s compartmentalized, remember? That protects everybody. He preaches that. You preach that. You want to open the compartments?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Grover. If this shit doesn’t get straightened out yesterday, I’m going to be ruined. Do you think I’m going to say ‘Fix it, Grover’ and walk off and trust you with my future?”
“Here it is,” Ellis said. “I went to the Fifth Ward with it. A good place to find people like you wanted. Guy named Boney Walker. I defended him a few years ago on a manslaughter thing. I figured he could handle it. I explained the setup. I finessed it. Didn’t come right out and say what it was.” He glared at the driver. “We’re not doing that, are we? We’re not saying what it is we’re doing. We’re not saying just how far we’ll go for what we want.”
“Get on with it, Grover.”
Ellis was having a hard time. He couldn’t remember how he had justified it to himself when he’d set it up.
“I told Walker the dollar amounts. What he’d get for each setup. I told him the winner’s fee would have to come out of his cut. The cheaper he could get them, the more money he’d keep. The amount of money staggered him. I told him he’d have to take care of the loser. It was his responsibility.”
Ellis lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out of the window. “To tell you the truth, I think he’s probably been taking care of the winner too. Getting all the money.”
“That’d be better for us. That way he’s the only one we’d have to worry about,” the driver said. “Is that it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s this Boney Walker. But how the hell does he get in touch with Toy? There’s got to be something more to it than this. It doesn’t make sense. What else do you know about Walker? Can he know Toy? Is that possible?”
Ellis was quiet, thinking. The tip of his cigarette flared red, died out to a faint glow. After a minute he said, “I don’t have the slightest idea. I don’t see how it’s possible.”
“You didn’t tell anybody else?”
“Come on! Who am I going to tell? Every time I think about it I’m afraid somebody’s going to read my thoughts. I was sorry I agreed to it the day I did it. You think I’m going to drag a lot of people into something like this? Jesus Christ!”
“Okay, okay. All right. Let’s think about this. Maybe Walker told somebody, and they told somebody, and—”
“I don’t see, by any stretch of the imagination, how that would get to Toy,” Ellis said. “I don’t believe this thing could have been set up with fewer people.” The end of the cigarette flared again. “I’ll tell you something. I have every confidence in the way I set this thing up. If it got out from my end, it was because of something no human being could ever expect to control. There comes a point in setting up a god damn stunt like this when you just have to trust people. Usually people you shouldn’t trust, wouldn’t trust, and can’t trust. That’s what kind of deal we’re into.” His baritone got low, almost to a hiss. “That’s why I was a fool to go along on this one. God Almighty!”
They didn’t say anything for a while. They just sat there in the dark by the muggy bayou, listening to the traffic on the expressway behind them, trying to get it all straight in their own minds, trying to see past the conversation, trying to envision a solution.
“I don’t know where it came apart,” Ellis said finally. “I don’t know, but I can start with the first man and find out.”
“Walker?”
“Yeah. If he was the source of Toy’s escapade I’ll get it out of him.”
“If he was, he’ll know he’s in trouble, and you won’t be able to find him.”
“I’ll find him.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
The driver started the car. “Where to?”