EIGHT

I parked next to the L & N railroad yard and started up the street. On both sides were row shacks painted a flat green that peeled like dried bark. Except for cramped porches there was no shade and the street was pebbled with glass and gravel and lumps of tar and crowded with boys in cut-offs who pitched and batted a red rubber ball. Their parents—men in undershirts and women in cotton dresses—watched me from the porches.

On the third porch to my left a lone black man wearing Army fatigue pants hunched in a metal chair. At his feet were an old coffee can and a bottle of beer which sweated in the heat.

“I’m looking for Otis Lee,” I told him.

The man spat tobacco in the coffee can, took a long, deliberate swallow of beer, and said, “What you want?”

The preternaturally deep voice seemed to go with the rest of him. He was thick shouldered, with thick wrists and forearms and calloused hands. His face—deep black with large pores and a flat nose that looked broken—sat on a ringed, fleshy neck like some heavy object. But it was his eyes that set him apart. They were a bitter orange-yellow, the left pupil discolored by a white star. I stepped up on the porch, answering, “To talk about Lydia Cantwell.”

His stare was red rimmed and implacable. “You the police?”

“Henry Cantwell’s lawyer. I’m calling on people who knew Mrs. Cantwell.”

“I heard she was dead.” The words were devoid of feeling, as if it were a chance news item: a moon shot, the death of a stranger. “Workin’ for folks, that don’t mean you know them. I only worked there a month. Didn’t know that lady at all.”

And don’t give a damn, his expression said. “Mind if I sit, Mr. Lee?”

He looked me over with stony dispassion and then nodded perfunctorily toward the metal chair next to his. Sitting, I could see only a sliver of his house through the screen door: a worn chair, a television, bare floors, bare walls—a transient’s room. “Been in Birmingham long?” I asked.

He put down the beer and folded his hands, answering in a resentful grunt. “Maybe six weeks.”

“You from around here?”

“I’m from nowhere. Been in the Army thirty years, bein’ a drill sergeant. Just got out.”

I placed his accent then: the low, emphatic chant of a noncom after years of order giving. “How’d you happen to pick Birmingham?”

“I was born in north Alabama,” he shrugged. “Served at Fort McClellan. It’s a place I knew, so I came here.”

“How did you find the Cantwells?”

The porch was close and hot. A drop of perspiration ran down Lee’s forehead to the bridge of his nose. “How’s this gonna help you,” he finally said, “botherin’ me with these questions?”

“I don’t know yet.” I loosened my tie. “You have another beer?”

Lee’s strange eyes widened in something like astonishment. “I’m fresh out. I didn’t know you was plannin’ on resting here.”

“I thought maybe we could talk.”

“Look here,” he said impatiently. “I got out of the army with my children growed up, my wife gone off, nowhere to go, and nothin’ to do. I got some retirement and I figure this city’s as good a place as any to find work, maybe stay outdoors. So I get some temporary quarters and go around where the big houses are at to ask if they need a yardman. I figure I do that awhile, then get some nursery to hire me. I do Mrs. Cantwell’s yard a couple of days a week and one or two other folks’.” His voice turned thick and sarcastic. “Now, that satisfy you, or you figure I killed the lady?”

“That wasn’t what I was asking.”

Lee stroked his chin between thumb and forefinger. “Well, I figured you was fixin’ to ask me that. I know how much white folks always worry about black men rapin’ their women.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I’d wait awhile and just sort of spring it on you.”

He grunted, unamused, and turned toward the street. A bat thumped and a tall boy streaked after a fly ball, leaped twisting to hang in the air, and caught it. Lee watched him. “Mister,” he said slowly, “the only people I ever killed was in Korea and Vietnam—and they was yellow, not white.”

“Have any idea why someone would kill Mrs. Cantwell?”

“No way.”

“Anyone ever visit while you were there?”

He sipped his beer. “You mean men?”

“If there were any.”

“I wasn’t the doorman. Just did the yard. It’s the maid you want.”

“I’ve done that. That’s why I’m here.”

He drank more beer, too casually. I imagined his calculations: what had Etta told me, how much did I expect him to know. He finished swallowing. “Only thing I noticed was a green Cadillac parked there two, three times. Don’t know whose it was.”

“What kind?”

“New model,” he said grudgingly. “Dark green. One of the big ones.”

“Would Mrs. Parsons know whose it was?”

“Prob’ly.” It was said with contempt. “She was hangin’ ’round Mrs. Cantwell all the time.”

I leaned back. “Did Mrs. Parsons ever talk about Mrs. Cantwell’s father or the Grangeville case?”

“Didn’t talk to me about anything,” he said harshly. “What the Grangeville case?”

“An old trial. They electrocuted two black men for raping a white girl. I figured you’d heard of it.”

Lee took a contemplative sip. “How long ago that happen?”

“Forty years or so.”

“That makes me about eight years old, don’t it? I wasn’t readin’ then and killin’ black folks wasn’t news.”

There were cries from the street. The red ball bounced onto the porch, followed by a small boy with large, hungry eyes and a head too big for his body. Lee threw it back underhand and watched the boy run away to his game. Without turning, he said, “You interrupted my peace. Go back where you belong.”

I shrugged, standing. “Thanks for your time.”

He didn’t look up. “You gonna chase the cops over here?” he asked in a bored, accusing tone.

“Nope. I figure they can find you themselves.”

I started to leave. “What you say your name was?” he demanded.

I turned. “Adam Shaw.”

He plucked a wrinkled pouch of chewing tobacco from his pants pocket and stuffed some in his cheek, chewing with a grinding slowness as he looked me up and down. “Well, Mr. Shaw, you been askin’ questions like you own this place and me with it. How long you figure I’d last doin’ that at white folks’ houses?”

The hatred in his eyes was impersonal and years deep. “Not long,” I answered, and walked back to the car.

I sat there thinking as Lee watched me from the porch. Then I drove toward Henry Cantwell’s, stopping at the library for the book on Grangeville.