By the time I reached City Hall, the hourly employees had gone home. But I knew a Type-A workaholic when I met one, so I figured the mayor would be there, laboring late on the city’s business.
I walked through the empty lobby of the low, one-story building, then down the long hall to the suite of city offices. Previous mayors stared down from the buff walls, none of them distinguished enough to stare back at. The mayor’s secretary had covered her typewriter and punched out, but sure enough, the ranking Republican of Port Frederick was still on the job, on the phone. Her voice floated out to me through the closed door of her office.
Quietly, I opened her door just enough, to stick my head in to let her know I was there.
The mayor looked up, startled.
So did Ted Sullivan and Goose Shattuck.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I thought you were on the phone, Barbara, didn’t know you had visitors. Is this a private confab, or is there an advisory committee meeting tonight that I have forgotten about?”
“Jenny,” the mayor said overheartily. “Come in.”
She was echoed in her enthusiasm by the two men, both of whom rose to offer their chairs. It was an unnecessary bit of chivalry, there being an empty chair between them. I took it, wondering, now that I had three birds in the hand, how I was going to feed them all at one time.
“Nothing private going on here,” Goose boomed, then turned red. “We were just shootin’ the bull about . . . things.”
“Things?” I said.
“Sure,” Ted said. “Things. You know. Things.”
“Right,” I said. “Things.”
Barbara smiled graciously. “I can’t remember the last time you just dropped in like this, Jenny. Anything special on your mind today?”
How could I find out from all of them what they were each doing the second week of February two years ago without arousing their suspicions? Stalling, I said, “I just dropped by to say hello.” The conversation was getting more inane by the second. “Well, actually Barbara, that’s not true. All right,” I said as if coming to a difficult decision, “we’re all friends here, right?”
“Oh yes, Jenny,” they assured me, as one.
“Well, friends . . . tell me what folks around town are saying about my dad. Do they think he’s guilty of anything more than bad judgment? I came to you, Barbara, because I felt that if anyone would have her ear to the pulse of the city, you would.” Speaking of pulses, I fairly throbbed with sincerity.
The mayor avoided my eyes. Nor did Goose or Ted rush to be the first in the competition to answer me.
“Since you’re here,” Barbara finally said, addressing a corner of her desk, “you might as well know . . .”
“Barbara!” Ted said sharply. “Don’t you think . . .”
“Hold on,” Goose said, quietly for him. “Maybe we ought to give this some more thought before we . . .”
But the mayor looked squarely at me, ignoring them.
“What the gentlemen are trying to discourage me from saying, Jenny, is that we are gathered here this afternoon to discuss your role on the Liberty Harbor Advisory Committee.”
“Are you?” I said.
“Yes. It’s nothing personal, you understand, but I’m sure you would be the first to appreciate the importance of the, well, reputable standing of the committee within this community. I’m sure you recognize, as well, the importance of our committee pulling together as one team for the good of the harbor, and therefore the town. Liberty Harbor and Port Frederick come first, as far as the committee is concerned.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess.”
“It pains me to say it,” she continued.
“I’m sure it does.”
“Now, Jenny.” Goose covered one of my hands, which rested on the arm of my chair, with one of his own great paws. I slipped my hand out from under his and placed it in my lap where even he was not likely to chase it
“It pains all of us to say it,” Barbara persevered, “but we cannot help but wonder if your continued presence on the committee might not represent a rather indelicate conflict of interest.”
Actually, I had been thinking of resigning for the very reason that Barbara put forth: it was an indelicate conflict of interest for a daughter to participate in a project that her father was suspected of wanting to destroy. But hearing her say so gave me an idea about getting the information I needed, so I decided to play it dumb. And angry.
“You mean,” I said, putting a sarcastic edge on my own thoughts, “that folks might ask why I’m getting involved with a project they think my father wants to destroy?”
“Yes,” the mayor said gratefully, “I’m so glad you understand. It’s really very decent of you.”
“Nothing personal,” I said, with increasing bitterness, so that even she began to get my phony message. “Right, Barbara?”
“Right!” Ted said enthusiastically.
“Absolutely,” Goose boomed.
“Oh dear,” Barbara said, frowning. “Now Jenny . . .”
“I would just like to know,” I said steadily, “why I am to be punished for a crime I did not commit. A crime my father has not been arrested for, accused of, tried for or pronounced guilty of. Why is that?” I was rather pleased with that orderly progression of dangling prepositions, but didn’t think I’d say so.
“Frankly,” the mayor said, “it’s for appearances.”
“Well, now Barbara,” Ted began to object, but she over-rode his finer feelings with ruthless honesty.
“Be realistic,” she advised me. “It doesn’t take a politician to appreciate the importance of appearances. It is imperative that our committee at least seem to present a unified, untarnished appearance to the community in order to preserve the harmony that has marked this project so far.”
“Harmony?” I said. “You call that flap over the Unmarked Grave harmony? You call those vigilantes harmony?”
“Jenny,” the mayor said then, “we have the votes.”
“How many?”
“Let’s just call it a majority,” she replied.
“Let’s not,” I said. “Let’s call it by name. You, Ted?”
He nodded, reddening and looking away from me.
“Goose?”
Another embarrassed nod.
“The Towers and Webster?”
“Yes,” said the mayor. “And I.”
“But not the Eberhardts or Jack,” I guessed.
“No,” she said.
“Well.” I rose from my seat and pretended to begin to leave. “It’s nice to know who my friends are.” Then, as if it had just occurred to me, I whirled on her. “Of course! The election’s coming up, isn’t it? Are you afraid of what people will think if you don’t run my father and me out of town on a rail? Are you that hard up for votes, Barbara? Are you so afraid of losing the next election that you’d sacrifice due process on the altar of your ambition? Almost lost it last time, didn’t you? I guess you’re not taking any chances this time!” I nearly choked on my own clichés.
“That was two years ago,” she said heatedly. “It’s a different picture now. Everybody knows I’m a sure winner. I don’t need to take any desperate measures to win.”
“Desperate measures?” I said, “What desperate measures did you take two years ago, your Honor?”
“It was only a figure of speech, Jenny, for heaven’s sake. Goose, you remember, you were on my campaign committee. It wasn’t all that tough a fight. I may not have won by the biggest margin in history, but I did win.”
“Hell, I don’t remember,” he said uncomfortably. “You expect me to remember something from two years ago? I could barely remember my name this morning!” He looked over at Ted Sullivan and forced a laugh. “Two years ago! What were you doing two years ago?”
The realtor seemed to flush beneath his tan.
“Be quiet, Goose,” the mayor snapped. I stared at her in surprise. She said to the realtor, “Forget it, Ted.”
Ted was shaking his head and looking down at the floor. “It was a tough year,” he said softly. “Toughest damn year of my life.”
“But you were elected president of the board of realtors,” I objected, drawing a furious look from the mayor.
“Yes.” His laugh was bitter. “They knew I didn’t have anything else to do, wasn’t selling anything, might as well be president.”
“Oh hell, Ted.” Goose was embarrassed again. It was true that Ted wasn’t the world’s greatest real estate agent, and never had been. “That’s ancient history. You’re doing great now. Hell, we’re all doing better.”
Ted glanced at me. “Right. I’m doing fine, aren’t I, Jenny? Just ask your friend Geof how many offers I’ve brought by for him to look at on that house of his. Sold it right out from under his nose, haven’t I?”
I looked at the mayor. Her attractive face was pale. I looked back at Ted to see a glance pass between them. My little tantrum seemed to be earning all sorts of unexpected dividends, although I would have sworn I had never before seen a spark of electricity pass between the mayor and the realtor.
Nobody seemed to know what to say next, least of all me. Finally, I improvised. “Well, don’t bother with the official vote, friends. I quit” I wheeled and flounced out of the room, nearly knocking Webster Helms on his thin ass.
“This is your idea isn’t it, Web, kicking me off the committee? You cooked it up in The Buoy yesterday with the Towers, didn’t you? Just another one of your bright ideas, like those damn vigilantes.”
“I can’t take credit for that, Jenny,” he said, somehow managing to sound boastful anyhow. “That was Ted’s idea. I just took the ball and ran with it.”
“Webster Helms,” the mayor called out to him, “if you ever give me the wrong time for a meeting again, just because you know I’ll vote against you, I will never appoint you to another committee!”
He flushed and looked apologetic. Some people are gluttons for punishment. And committees. I pushed past him and continued my dramatic stomp out the door.
Once in my car, I tried to sort through the information I’d gleaned from my theatrics and my hours at the newspaper. The mayor had faced a tough election last time, and would face angry voters this fall if the project fell through. Ted was feeling like a professional failure, despite the civic offices he held. And if he wasn’t having an affair with the mayor, she surely had sympathetic eyes for him. Webster, according to his own words in the paper, was a believer in the fast-track method of construction which had, more than once, been known to contribute to construction accidents and building failures. And Goose, feeling the need to prove himself once more, had probably underbid the project in order to get it But what did any of those frailties, idiosyncrasies and bits of gossip have to do with lover’s leap, the second week of February, two years ago? The Towers still looked like the best bet, but only because Betty had actually been in the vicinity at the right time. Beyond that, there was nothing to link them to murder or motive.
Well, I still had two friends upon whom to inflict my wiles and stratagems this evening. I swallowed the tamp of guilt which lodged in my throat and drove to the house of the minister of the First Church of the Risen Christ.
I caught husband and wife at home, between church meetings. From their backyard came the sound of children playing.
“Yours?” I inquired of Mary when she brought coffee and sugar cookies into the living room of the neat, two-story brick manse.
She glanced toward the back of the house and smiled. “Everybody’s,” she replied. “Actually, our three are teenagers, Jenny. I suspect they are driving around tonight, eating up their allowances on gasoline.”
We laughed together, comfortable in the shared memories of growing up that transcended race and neighborhood. “Cream?” I held out my cup. She poured for me.
“It’s funny that I didn’t know that about you,” I remarked. “The ages of your children, I mean. I’m not sure I even- knew you had three.”
“Well, we’ve probably known each other a long time without really knowing each other. It’s something we lose as adults, I think, that capacity for really personal friendship. Our friendships seem to form around work or causes or hobbies, focusing on only one or two elements of our lives, to the exclusion of everything else.”
“There doesn’t seem to be time to get to know people well.”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe we should try to make the time, Mary.”
She looked at me, and smiled. “Maybe we should, Jenny.”
Hardy came in from the kitchen carrying a plateful of sugar cookies. He sank easily into an armchair, put the plate on his lap and commenced to empty it. “It’s nice to have you visit us, Jenny,” he said. “Why haven’t we done this before?”
Mary and I exchanged looks and smiles.
“I’ve never been kicked off a committee before, Hardy,” I said lightly.
“Consider it a privilege,” he advised me. “I spent most of my youth trying to gain admittance to important committees. Getting kicked off of them is a luxury I’ve only recently begun to enjoy.”
I laughed. “You do give me a different perspective on things, Hardy.”
“Black skin will do that,” he said seriously. “Every time.”
“Now Hardy,” his wife said tartly, “martyrdom will not absolutely guarantee your canonization. He who feels sorry for himself ain’t no saint.”
He grinned at her, his face lighting with affection.
“Hardy, Mary,” I said, putting my cookie on the saucer which also held my cup, “I want you to know how grateful I am to you for being so loyal to me. But I was going to resign anyway.”
“Suspected you might,” Hardy said, munching. “Bad idea.”
I looked up in surprise. “It is? Why?”
“Don’t want to let the bastards get you down.”
“But it is a conflict of interest, Hardy.”
“Life is one long conflict of interests, Jenny, in case you hadn’t noticed. Listen to me, Sister Jennifer, you ain’t done nothin’ wrong nohow, and you don’t be takin’ no shit from nobody.”
“But Hardy.” I was laughing, feeling better about the world in general; he was, indeed, a minister to the ailing in spirit. “It’s not always appropriate to fight; sometimes the better course of action is to give in gracefully, and wait to fight another day.”
I turned to Mary. “Don’t you sometimes find in the movement that it is better to accept a loss today in order to win a bigger battle tomorrow? It seems to me that if my father and I bend over backward to accommodate these small, sensitive matters, the community will be more likely to feel sympathetic toward him when it really counts—like if he’s arrested for crimes he didn’t commit? Mary, isn’t that true with the black . . .”
“Yes,” she said, “it is, although my husband will deny it to his last sugar cookie.”
“Take those phone calls that Hardy and I received last week.” They looked embarrassed. “Hey, we might as well talk about them and take the sting away. Don’t you sometimes find that when racial slurs are made public, or when somebody does something like burning a cross on your lawn, it has the effect of turning some public opinion your way?”
“Interesting that you’d appreciate that fact,” Mary said. “A couple of years ago, we sponsored a forum on black leadership, and that turned out to be an underlying theme of it the idea of listening for the chords of sympathy that always break through when decent people are denigrated or abused, and then to play on that sympathy in order to obtain support for future, important concerns.”
“I haven’t heard much out of you two about the Unmarked Grave since Sunday,” I remarked. “Is this an example of that philosophy in action? Are you letting go of that, gracefully, and using the sympathy it engenders, in order to pin something important for the future?”
They looked at each other and smiled.
“You must think us very Machiavellian,” Hardy said wryly. “We are flattered at this compliment to our intelligence and farsightedness, but wizards at strategy though we are, we hadn’t thought that far ahead. We could hardly have predicted that the cross would end up in a man’s chest.”
His wife made a distressed sound.
“I’m sorry, honey.” He turned back to me. “We still want the grave, Jenny, but it seems a tasteless time to say so.”
“But what more do you want?” I pressed. “For yourselves, as black leaders, for the community?”
Again, they looked long at each other, but when the two pairs of eyes turned back toward me some of the directness and frankness had gone out of them.
“We only want the usual,” he said vaguely. “More jobs, more recognition, more admittance to the halls of power, more of our legal rights as citizens and our moral rights as people.”
But Mary burst our laughing. “And if you believe that, Jenny, we have some swampland in Florida we’d like to show you!”
“Mary!” he said, trying to look put out, but only looking amused. “Close the closet door before Jenny sees our skeletons!”
“What skeletons?” I said, laughing, too, but without feeling the humor. “Tell me.”
“No,” Mary said, wiping her eyes, and shaking her head with evident regret, “we can’t tell you. But we will, soon, I promise you’ll be among the first to know.”
“How will I know?”
“Oh,” said Hardy, “you’ll know . . . everybody will. But I’ll tell you this much: it came out of that forum two years ago, the one Mary mentioned. And it’s been building since then, like a fire inside us.” Indeed, the minister looked suddenly consumed by whatever desire it was that burned within him. Looking at him, listening to him, I was startled, then uneasy. Geof would find this conversation extremely interesting; I only hoped it delivered less than it seemed to promise in potential motives for murder.
“Jenny,” Mary said sharply, seeming purposefully to draw my attention away from her husband, “will you have another cookie?”
And that’s all I got out of them that evening, though I stayed another half hour: more sugar cookies, no more information.
I drove to the police station to discuss the day’s gleanings with Geof, but the sergeant on duty told me that Detective Bushfield had already gone home for the night. I called his home from the police station. Instead of the man, I got the telephone answering machine and heard my own voice asking me to leave my name and number.
“Police recruit Cain, reporting in,” I said. “Now leaving my post, will be en route to Pirate’s Cove where I will maintain a stakeout until morning. If you come to the shore tomorrow and wave a lantern twice, I will row over to pick you up and take you back to the boat for coffee. Ten-four. Over and out. Or, as my stepmother would say, kissy, kissy.”
I hung up, intensely missing him.
“Would you care for a cup of java, Miss Cain?” asked the fatherly sergeant with the drinker’s nose.
“I’ve already drunk enough to keep me awake through a boring lecture,” I admitted, “but yes, thank you, Sergeant.”
For the next half hour or so, I nursed the strong coffee and wound down from the day by observing the quiet comings and goings of the station at night. By the time I washed out my cup and placed it on the coffee tray by the sergeant’s desk, I was ready to return to the boat . . . and bed.