Called by a Panther Read online

The huge man said to me, “You coming in, or what?” I went in.

  The room was dark. Though there were a couple of candles burning on shelves, the main light came from foot-wide gaps above the boards in the side windows.

  There were two card tables in the middle of the room and they supported sheets of paper and empty beer cans in equal numbers. Along one wall another table bore a mimeograph machine. In the middle stood a kerosene stove, but it did not seem to be on. At the back there was a door, but from the size of the whole building it couldn't have led to anything bigger than a closet or a toilet.

  Near the door an empty chair clearly belonged to my “host.” Half a dozen other unopened folding chairs leaned against walls. Two more chairs near the card tables were occupied. Both men were black. One was thin and wiry. The other, a bald man wearing a lumber jacket, was even bigger than the large white man who had opened the door to me. From the Bear's description, Cecil Redman had to be the wiry guy.

  Redman wore a floppy cloth cap that I recognized as green because it happened to be in a shaft of light. He squinted at me as I came in. “What you want about some goddamned liquor bill? I don't owe no liquor bill.”

  “I'm not a debt collector,” I said.

  “So what you be?” he asked.

  This question seemed to be of interest to all the men. The six eyes suddenly felt weighty.

  I had considered a couple of stories—lies—I could tell if I found Redman. But under the pressure of close scrutiny I decided to settle for a truth. “I'm a private detective,” I said.

  Redman's cheeks rose with displeasure. “Say what?” He turned away. “Aw shit,” he said.

  The other men exchanged smiles and the lumberjack said, “Told you, Cecil. Didn't I tell you she a mean black devil bitch? Didn't I say? Didn't I say?”

  My host said, “She's gonna get you, Cecil. She's gonna get you. Thousand bucks a week, minimum.”

  Redman jumped up and faced me. “I ain't got no money. You ask my club members here. I ain't got money. You and the bitch can take me to jail but it ain't gonna get blood out of my stone.” He turned to his friends in turn. “Have I got money? Have I got money?”

  Neither man said anything at first but then the lumberjack said, “Except for the stash of cash under your bed.”

  My host's hoots of laughter drowned out what I lip-read Cecil to be saying. In a fit of frustration, he overturned one of the tables. Beer cans rattled like machine-gun fire and a few sheets of paper hovered in the air and landed on the cans. Redman's gesture did not quiet his colleagues or appear to concern them.

  I bent to pick up the papers. My host righted the table. And Cecil sat down.

  It seemed a good time for me to speak. I said, “I'm not here representing anybody who is trying to get money out of you.”

  I guess I have more stage presence than I realized. Everyone fell silent.

  Redman said, “Well, what you want, then?”

  “Do you remember, beginning of February, seeing four women with suitcases?”

  The big men continued to study me. Cecil said, “Suitcases? Man, what you on at me about suitcases?”

  “Behind an empty house, just north of 23rd Street.”

  “There a lot of empty houses round here,” he said. “That's what we fighting.”

  “We? You mean the club?”

  “Action group,” the lumberjack said. “We are an action group.”

  My host asked, “Where do you live, mister?”

  “South side. Virginia Avenue.”

  “Wait till the money guys get it in their pretty little heads to push out that way. You see how you like it they take your goddamned house and make it a zoo or an Inner Loop or a IUPUI.”

  The acronym for Indiana University and Purdue University at Indianapolis is pronounced “youie pooie.” It was not said with affection.

  “The gentrifiers are out my way now,” I said. “I live near Fountain Square.”

  “So you know what we're talking about,” my host said.

  “I know about not having a place of my own, but I don't understand why all the houses around here are empty or why they've been empty for so long.”

  “Because the people who lived in them all their lives are too poor to be permitted to stay in them now downtown's being fixed up, that's why,” my host said.

  “They make us a historical area,” the lumberjack said.

  “And our places get condemned,” Redman said.

  “And then the pretty boys come in and fix up our houses and make all the money,” my host said.

  The lumberjack said, “But we working on it, man.”

  “How?”

  “We got ways,” he said.

  My host was more forthcoming. He said, “We track down who owns the buildings and what the plans are for them. We write letters saying how people need places to live. We talk to folks in the neighborhoods. We do leaflets and stuff.”

  I looked at the mimeograph machine and then looked back at the three men in their candlelit room.

  The lumberjack said, “Don't underestimate what the little man can do if he tries. My daddy was down Montgomery and he told me how all that happened.”

  I didn't know what he meant.

  “You think the bus boycotts come from admen and TV commercials?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I tell you how that happened, man. That happened because when Rosa Parks got arrested for being too damn tired to give up her seat on the bus to some damn white man, there was guys like us down there got mad about it, that's how.”

  Redman and my host nodded.

  “Them guys run some leaflets off and started spreading them around and it was them leaflets said, 'Boycott the buses.' That's where it started, it sure did.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Oh no, you don't,” he said. “There wasn't but a hundred leaflets. Ain't no way a few itty-bitty pieces of paper going to start the Montgomery bus boycotts that led Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to international significance and got civil rights going, now is there? Not all by themselves.”

  “Well . . .”

  “No, there ain't. But what happened down there was this. Some of them leaflets got dropped on the sidewalk and in the gutter and there they was, laying around. And what happened was some guy picks one up and says to himself, 'Shit, man, them damn niggers is going to boycott the buses!' And this guy, he runs off to the Sunday newspaper and they print this big story threatening all the bad things going to happen to the niggers if they do try a boycott.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “And what happens then is that all the preachers sit down to their grits and collard greens and shit on Sunday morning and they read about the boycott in the paper. Only they didn't know nothing about it before. But they do now and they go out to their pulpits and say to all the folks in church, they say, 'You go boycott the buses, if you want to. You go use your feet to lead us to freedom.' That's what they said and that's what they did and that's the truth. So don't you look around here and say to yourself, these guys can't change nothing. Because we can. And we will.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “You've made the point.”

  “All right!” the lumberjack said. He slapped his knee. His two colleagues echoed him. “All right!” “All right!”

  I nodded.

  Then my host said slowly, “Which still don't sort out just who you are and what you want.”

  I pulled out my license card and showed them. “I'm a private detective. I've been hired by one of the four women with the suitcases I mentioned. She noticed Cecil watching them and took down the plate number on his pickup.”

  “Aw shit,” Redman said.

  “Then this woman thought that she saw Cecil again and that got her worried and she thought about it and finally she's hired me to find out what Cecil was doing hanging around. And that's it.” And that was it, more or less.

  I said to Redman, “Do you remember those women with the suitcases?”

&nbs
p; “Aw shit,” he said again.

  “Did you recognize any of them?”

  “Rich bitch white women come walking around down here? How the hell am I supposed to recognize one?”

  “But then she saw you hanging around.”

  “Aw shit,” Cecil said. “Aw shit. It against the law to stand outside a house?”

  “So you do know one of them?”

  I tried not to sound too excited.

  “I don't know people like that!” he said, but he was fidgeting and uncomfortable. “I did kind of remember this one bitch and she reminded me of something.”

  “What she remind you of, Cecil?” the lumberjack asked. He was readier than my host to move on to a little sounding. “What she remind you of? Something you ain't had for so long you almost forgot what it is?”

  Cecil said, “Aw shit.”

  “So you followed her?” I said.

  “No I didn't follow her, man. I didn't need to follow nobody. I knew where she lived.”

  “How?”

  ” 'Cause,” he said, looking from one of his colleagues to the other, “ 'cause my old lady's momma clean for that woman's family most her life, that's how.”

  “Your old lady?”

  “My wife, man.”

  “The one you thought had hired me?”

  “How many wives you think I got?” he said, his face expressing pain.

  The lumberjack said, “He gotta keep him a list. He gotta count on his fingers.”

  “Aw shit,” Redman said as the other two enjoyed his discomfort. But then he said, “So seeing this white woman reminded me, like I hadn't seen Louanne for a long time.”

  “He think she miss him sooo bad,” the lumberjack said.

  This time Redman joined in the laughter. He pointed to me. “Well, the man told you it was February. I thought I'd take her a goddamn valentine.”

  “A valentine?” my host asked.

  “Man, women like all that shit.”

  “But Louanne's too smart to fall for that, isn't she?”

  “She's a smart woman—”

  “Now she rid of you,” the lumberjack said.

  “Yeah, well, maybe so. But she still got her moods. My Louanne may have her a pair of brass balls but she always go soft as mush for valentines and that stuff.”

  I said, “But if it was Louanne you wanted to see, why did you go to the white woman's house?”

  ” 'Cause I didn't know where Louanne live. So I gonna ask Momma.”

  “What you give Momma in exchange?” the lumberjack said.

  But Cecil said, “What that white woman think I'm doing there? Waiting to rob her or something? Shit. I ain't no goddamn thief.”

  I said, “So, what's the name of the woman your wife's mother works for?”

  “Man, I don't remember no goddamned name.”

  “But you know where her house is.”

  “Yeah. Louanne fill in sometimes for Momma and I picked her up once or twice.”

  “So where is the house?”

  “Big brick place up on 91st Street.”

  “You know the number?”

  “No I don't know no goddamned number but I go up College and turn west and there ain't but one with this big iron fence all around it.”

  I nodded, trying to look casual about having been told where a member of the Scum Front lived.

  But the big man who had opened the door to me suddenly frowned and said, “Hey.”

  It was a hostile noise and everybody was surprised by it.

  “Tell me something, mister,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “If you're a private eye investigating for some woman, how come you got to ask him what the woman's name is and where she lives?”

  It was a reasonable question.

  It was an awkward moment.

  I said, “Come on, man. It's part of my job. I have to check and make sure he's talking about the same woman and the same house I am, don't I?”

  I stayed a while longer with the HQs and before I left I asked if I could make a financial contribution to their cause. Maybe a donation about the size of the cost of a case of beer.

  “Hey,” the lumberjack said, “Christmas done gone and come round again already.”

  I had found where the Frog lived! I was very pleased with myself as I turned onto College at 25th Street. On the opposite corner a hand-painted sign offered me “Buffalo, 99%/lb,” but I declined and headed north toward 91st.

  I had the drive to consider what I would do when I got there. But no way was I not going to have a look.

  Chapter Thirty Five

  COLLEGE AVENUE IS A PRIMER for the neighborhood changes on the north side. From the interstate that is part of the Inner Loop up to Fall Creek, College is one of the most decimated streets of the rubble belt. On each block there are empty houses, stores or schools. The area's atmosphere of abandonment is inescapable.

  Once across Fall Creek—about 28th Street—the tone changes. This neighborhood used to be “white” but now the blacks uprooted by the development and yuppification downtown have filled it. This shift has caused a knock-on exodus, neighborhood by neighborhood. But the farther north you go, the higher the prices get and that slows change. By 49th Street you have a “Kitchens of Distinction.” The first “pub” is at the corner of 52nd.

  After that Broad Ripple is Indianapolis's artsy-craftsy area and it remains the only part of the city where a mixed-race couple can walk hand in hand with a chance of not being hassled.

  College crosses the canal before you hit the first condos, and White River before there are residential areas with private security patrols.

  By the time I turned west on 91st Street I had driven seven miles and was almost at the city line.

  I was also approaching a decision. The closer I got to the Frog's house, the less comfortable I had become. Looking at a house is not a one-way phenomenon.

  The resident of the house might look back.

  So before I went very far on 91st I pulled over.

  Was I ready to let the Scum Front know that I had cracked their security? If the Frog was walking her Rottweiler or scolding her gardener or even just counting money in the window and she happened to look up. . .

  What then?

  I couldn't figure out what criteria to apply to make decisions.

  My unease skipped agitation and went straight to panic when a police car pulled up behind me.

  Chapter Thirty Six

  THE PATROL OFFICER WAS a woman about five four.

  For an instant I thought about driving away. Running.

  I touched the key in my ignition.

  But why? What from?

  I closed my eyes and could barely hear myself think from the noise of my breathing.

  But I heard her tap on my window clear enough.

  I rolled it down and said, “Is there a problem. Officer?”

  “Would you mind stepping out, sir?”

  I didn't move at first.

  She said, “Outside the car, please, sir.”

  I opened the door and moved to get out. It was hard. My muscles were on a slowdown. Finally I made it. I leaned against the car. I felt faint.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I feel faint,” I said.

  “You look awful,” she said.

  “I was driving along and I didn't feel good so I pulled over.”

  She studied me. I was sure she knew I was lying. I thought that—somehow—she knew everything. I wanted to drop to my knees and beg forgiveness.

  She moved forward. I would have settled for just dropping to my knees. But she took my left hand and felt for a pulse. “Heart's beating pretty fast,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You hurt anyplace?”

  Only in my brain. “I have a headache.”

  “No chest pains?”

  “No.”

  “Left arm feel normal?”

  Absurdly I felt it with my right hand. “Yeah,” I said. “I'm all rig
ht. I'll be all right.”

  “Have you felt faint before?”

  “Once or twice. But I'm going to see my doctor.”

  “You should,” she said. Then she seemed to get an idea. “You haven't been drinking, have you, sir?”

  “Drinking? Oh. Alcohol. No. No. Nothing to drink.”

  “Would you mind standing away from the car for a moment?” I moved away from the car. “Lift your right leg and hold it.”

  “Hold it with what?”

  “Hold it up, sir.”

  “Ah.” I did it. Then the left. I said, “I am sober. No booze. No drugs. No rock and roll. I just felt faint.”

  She nodded, but she looked closely at my eyes.

  I guess they were both still there because then she said, “Come back here a minute, will you, sir?”

  She walked toward the rear of my car. I followed. “See,” she said. “Tire's right down.”

  I saw.

  “I didn't know whether you knew,” she said. “That's why I stopped.”

  “I didn't know. Thanks. I have a foot pump in the trunk.”

  “Get it out, will you, sir?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Get your foot pump out, please.” I got it out.

  She took it from me. “If you're feeling faint, you shouldn't do anything strenuous,” she said. And she pumped the tire up.

  When she drove away I felt relieved, even elated. I got in the car, started it and pulled back into traffic.

  In less than a minute I saw the house that Cecil Redman had described. It was set back from the road, and the property was surrounded by wrought-iron fencing. But the iron gates hanging from red brick pillars were open.

  I drove in.

  I was a Go-for-It Detective as seen on TV. Right?

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  NO ONE ANSWERED THE bell at first. But as my finger was poised to ring it again, the door opened.

  I don't know what I was expecting. I got a seven-year-old boy.

  “I'm sick,” he said.

  I offered a hand. “How do you do, Sick?”

  He shook it and at the same time he turned away and giggled.

  “Is . . . is your mother at home?”

  “Yup.”

  When there was no advance on “yup” I said, “Sick, do you think you could get her for me?”