“Not until you answer my question.”
He closed the door to his cruiser and walked toward her. She could see her reflection in his shades, trapped, small, insignificant. “You’ll either get in your car or be arrested,” he said.
“What is the matter with you? Why are you doing this?”
He stepped closer, his body blocking out the sun. “Put your hands on the fender.”
“Do you have me mixed up with someone else?”
He fitted his hands on her shoulders and turned her sideways. “Lean on the car.”
“No.”
He slid his right hand down her spine, flattening his fingers on her shirt, pressing it against the sweat that peppered her back, moving her forward. “Now spread your legs,” he said.
“What?”
“Do as you’re told. Spread your legs.”
“I will not. You will not treat me like this.”
The thumb and index finger of his left hand tightened on her shoulder bone. “Are you carrying any weapons?”
“No. You’re hurting me.”
“Lean against the car.”
The pain traveled along her shoulder into her neck, causing her left side to wilt. She felt her eyes watering. “Let go of me,” she said. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else. I haven’t broken any law.”
“You made an illegal lane change. You went through a red light. You smell like you’ve been drinking.”
She widened her feet, her hands now on top of the fender. He loosened his left hand but let his thumb rest on the back of her neck, kneading her skin. Then he ran his right hand inside her thighs. “You bastard,” she said, turning around.
He grabbed her by the shoulders again and shoved her against the car, hard, jolting her teeth. “What’s that on your breath? Mouthwash?”
“I had one beer at the drive-in. You saw me drinking it.”
“Do you want to empty your pockets, or do you want me to do it for you?”
“You have no right to do this.”
“Last chance.”
She pulled her pockets inside out, her face hot with anger and shame.
“That’s a good start,” he said. “Now give me your driver’s license and registration.”
Her hands were shaking when she took her wallet from her purse and removed her driver’s license and handed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now give me your registration.”
She leaned over the seat to open the glove box.
“Hold on there,” he said, leaning on top of her, his hand reaching past her, his loins touching her buttocks. “I don’t want you pulling a surprise on me.” He popped open the glove box and raked the contents on the floor. “Pick it up.”
“Pick what up?”
“Are you deaf? You don’t speak English?” he said, his breath on her neck.
“You’re not going to get away with this.”
He backed out of the seat and came around to the other side of the convertible. He opened the door and grabbed her by one wrist and dragged her onto the grass, twisting her arm. “You think you can threaten a police officer?”
“I did no such thing.”
“Oh yes you did, lady. You were asking for this when you turned in to the park.”
“Liar.”
“Just keep talking,” he said, rolling her onto her stomach, pressing his knee into her back. He cuffed her wrists, pushing the steel tongues deep into the locking mechanism, bunching her skin. He pulled her to her feet, his fingers sinking deep into her upper arm.
She fought with him and tried to kick his shins. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her into the air, his mouth against her cheek, close to her ear, his phallus hard against her rump. “You’re quite a handful,” he said. “Maybe after this, you’ll learn not to drink and drive.”
Chapter
19
MY ANGER DIDN’T serve me well at the police station. Rosita had been placed in the drunk tank. The charges included driving under the influence, resisting arrest, and threatening a police officer. Her bail had not been set. I couldn’t get her out of the tank, and I had been allowed to talk to her through the bars for only five minutes.
“She has to stay in there until tomorrow morning?” I said incredulously to a desk sergeant.
“She has to be arraigned. That’s how it works. She’s from overseas?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Maybe they do things different there.”
“What are you saying?”
“If you don’t agree with the system, change it,” he said, resuming his paperwork.
When you live in a democracy, there are certain things you believe will never happen to you. Then a day comes when the blindfold is removed and you discover the harsh nature of life at the bottom of the food chain. I could hear myself breathing; my skin felt dead to the touch; I had never felt as inadequate in dealing with a situation. “What’s the arresting officer’s name?”
The sergeant looked up again. “Slakely,” he said.
“Is he in the building?”
“Possibly.”
“I want to talk to him.”
His eyes drifted down the hallway to a coffee room that had a Coca-Cola machine and a table where several cops were sitting. “He’s a hard-nose, but the people he brings in usually deserve it,” the sergeant said. “Do yourself a favor. Get a lawyer. Don’t pick a fight with the wrong guy.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He didn’t answer, nor did he look up from his paperwork again. I walked to the doorway of the coffee room. I didn’t have to guess who had put my wife in jail. He was eating a sandwich, his long legs splayed, his fingers covered with grease and crumbs. He was the only man in the room whose eyes immediately met mine.
“Are you Officer Slakely?” I said.
He stopped chewing and set down the sandwich. “What can I do for you?”
“Why did you make up those lies about my wife?”
“Who says they’re lies?”
“I do.”
“This is a restricted area.”
“The city attorney’s office is right down the hall. I come here all the time.” I dropped a nickel in the Coca-Cola machine. I pulled a Coke out of the slot and stuck the neck in the bottle opener and pried off the cap and set it in front of him. “Do you other fellows want one?” I asked.
They looked at me, blank-faced.
“Your wife is in jail for a reason. You’re not making things easier for her,” Slakely said.
“I pulled her out of a pile of corpses in a Nazi death camp. She spat in the face of an SS colonel. The only reason she didn’t do it to you is she didn’t want to bring down trouble on me.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“A cop who’s for sale.”
“You’d better haul your ass out of here.”
I nodded. A jar of tomato sauce sat on the table in front of him, a steak knife inserted in it. I looked at his throat, the malevolence in his eyes, and the ignorance and hostility and fear that lived like a disease in his face. “You violated her person, didn’t you?”
“She told you that?”
“She didn’t have to. It’s written all over you. I’m going to expose you for what you are, bub. I’ve never met a cockroach that did well in sunlight.”
I heard his chair scrape back as I walked out of the room. But he didn’t follow me into the hallway, and I knew I probably would not see him again. Like all of his kind, he would disappear and be only a footnote in a script written by someone determined to ruin our lives. I wished Grandfather were with me. I wished he could tell me what to do. I wanted the moral clarity and violent alternatives available to him when he took on John Wesley Hardin in 1881. The advent of modernity had empowered the bureaucrat and the
coward and the bully, and I would not see my Jewish girl from the Book of Kings until morning, when she would be led into court handcuffed to a chain, her hair in disarray, her clothes grimed from sleeping on a floor stained with spittle and cigarette butts and the overflow from a broken toilet.
HER BAIL WAS three thousand dollars. Her car had been towed to an impoundment, the bumper bent out of shape, the fender scratched by the wrecker’s steel hook. When we came home, she immediately went into the shower, and I put her soiled clothes in the washing machine. I opened all the windows in the house, inviting in the sunshine and the wind and the smell of burning leaves as a way of counteracting the pall that seemed to be settling on our lives.
Our attorney, an old family friend named Tom Breemer, found out that during the Depression, Slakely had worked private security for a fruit company in California and had been involved in the shooting death of a labor organizer.
“How’d he get out of it?” I asked.
“The records disappeared. He was a chaser in a navy brig during the war. He’s been divorced twice. Colored people get off the street when they see him coming. He worked vice in Galveston. That’s the long and short of it.”
“Somebody is paying him to hurt us,” I said.
“Maybe, maybe not. This is going to be a tough one, Weldon. There’s a witness. A woman riding a bicycle said she saw Mrs. Holland try to kick Slakely.”
“That was after he brutalized her.”
“I’ll try to get the charges reduced,” he replied. “That’s about as good as it’s going to get.”
After I hung up, Rosita came out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her.
“How do you feel?” I said, trying to smile.
“I’m fine.”
I sat with her on the side of the bed. Through the window, we could see the tops of trees swaying above our neighbors’ roofs and a plane towing a Burma-Shave ad across the sky. “We may have to pay the fine and be done with it,” I said.
“Do you know where he touched me? Do you want to know what he did to me with his penis?”
“We’ll get him, Rosita. We’ll get the person who hired him, too. We just need to get the court situation out of the way.”
She pulled her hand away from me. “By giving in to it? That’s how we get it out of the way?”
“I’m trying to be realistic. Rhetoric doesn’t help. Those charges could get you up to a year in jail.”
“You don’t realize how your words hurt me.”
The doorbell rang downstairs. Our bell was an old one, installed in the 1920s, the kind you twisted. I don’t know why I thought of that; maybe I associated it with an earlier time, when I delivered newspapers in a small Texas town and I had no consciousness of the evil that men can do to one another.
The bell rang again. I went downstairs and opened the door. No one was there. I saw a kid on a service cycle drive away, his lacquered-bill cap low on his eyes, his cavalry-like breeches puffed around the thighs. A flat cardboard mailer addressed to Rosita lay on the doormat. I carried it upstairs, tapping it against my leg.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s for you. The return address says ‘Blue Bird Record Company.’”
Her face showed no recognition. She removed the towel wrapped around her body and dressed with her back to me.
“You want me to open it?” I asked.
“No, I’ll do it.”
“I confronted Slakely yesterday. If I had my way, I’d shoot him.”
“He’s a functionary.”
I had run out of words. “I’ll fix us something to eat,” I said.
I went downstairs and began making sandwiches and a salad. I kept hoping she would join me of her own accord, slicing tomatoes and bread crust and cucumbers, smiling and talking at the same time, ignoring my cautionary words, as was her way.
Twenty minutes passed. I took an ice tray from the freezer and cracked it apart in the sink. I filled two glasses with sun tea and inserted sprigs of mint in the ice and lemon slices on the edge of the glass. I could hear no sound from upstairs. “Lunch is ready!” I called.
There was no response.
I dried my hands on a dish towel and gazed out the window at the sun spangling inside the trees. I saw my neighbor’s vintage automobile parked on an unpaved driveway, just the other side of our unfenced yard. For a second, the year was 1934 again and I was looking at the stolen vehicle driven by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. I’m hard put to explain why I would associate that particular moment with the arrival in our lives of the Barrow gang. I think it was because I had never understood them, or perhaps I had never understood what they represented. Some considered them nothing more than pathological killers. Grandfather believed they were lionized by J. Edgar Hoover for political reasons. Others saw them as products of their times. I guess I believed they were all three.
But why would I dwell upon them now? The answer was simple. Something far more wicked than a group of semiliterate, small-town bank robbers was wrapping its tentacles around Rosita and me and also Linda Gail and Hershel Pine. Worse, the people trying to hurt us were using the law to do it.
Rosita was sitting on the bed, wearing only her skirt and bra. The cardboard mailer was on the floor. She had opened it with a pair of scissors that lay beside her. A ten-by-twelve-inch black-and-white glossy photograph rested on her knees. Her eyes were wet when she turned and looked at me. She picked up the photo with her left hand and held it in the air, waiting for me to take it.
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s self-explanatory.”
Even as my fingers touched the edge of the photograph, I knew what it showed. Or at least I thought I did. I saw Linda Gail propped on top of her lover, her breasts bare, her face gone weak with orgasm. It was the same photo Harlan McFey had shown me, except the bottom half of his copy had been torn off. “This is a trick photograph,” I said.
“That’s not you putting the blocks to her? That’s the term for it, isn’t it?”
“That’s my face. I suspect someone photographed me at a distance and superimposed one negative on another.”
“I can see the scar on your chest. That’s the shrapnel wound you received at Saint-Lô.”
“Somebody photographed me at a beach or at a swimming pool. Don’t buy into this, Rosita.”
“I’ve been too kind,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Linda Gail is not the eater of the apple. She’s the serpent in the Garden, but she’s too stupid to know it. Her selfishness and vanity and ambition are at the center of all this. She’s manipulative and treacherous. I hate her.”
“This isn’t like you, Rosita.”
“Stop it. If they sent this picture to me, who else do you think they’ve sent it to?”
I stared at her. In my mind’s eye, I saw Hershel opening a mailer similar to the one on the floor and pulling a ten-by-twelve glossy from it. I went downstairs and called our office in Baton Rouge. The phone rang a long time before the secretary picked up, out of breath. She was an elderly lady who had graduated from Millsaps College in Mississippi. “I’m sorry. I just went outside to get a delivery,” she said.
“Where’s Hershel?” I said.
“He left late yesterday for Houston. He was planning to go back today, but he said he had everything tied up here, so he was leaving a day early.”
“Was he all right, Miss LeBlanc?”
“He seemed quite happy. Is something wrong?”
“Not at all. You said you just had a delivery?”
“Yes, a beautiful bouquet of flowers. They’re from Mrs. Pine. The card is tied on the vase. I couldn’t quite help seeing what’s on it. I hope Mr. Pine won’t be mad at me.”
“What does it say?”
“You’re sure it will be all right for me to do that?
”
“Yes, it’s fine, Miss LeBlanc.”
“It says, ‘I just signed a contract made in heaven. Love, your Louisiana sweetheart.’ Isn’t that wonderful?”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “Have there been any other deliveries or important mail I should know about?”
“None that I can think of.”
“I ordered a phonograph record from the Blue Bird Company. Did you receive a package that might have a record inside it?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m so happy for Mr. and Mrs. Pine. They’re such a fine young couple.”
I eased the receiver back into the cradle, hardly aware of what I was doing.
I dialed the office downtown. Hershel had not checked in. I asked the secretary about special deliveries we might have received, or packages that might contain a phonograph record. There had been none. I called Hershel’s house in River Oaks.
“Hello?” he said.
“How you doin’?” I said.
“Everything is great, except I overslept.”
“That’s good. You need some extra sleep.”
“I just got off the phone with Linda Gail. Wait till you hear this. She got a five-year contract with Warner Brothers. She’s going to star in a movie about the French Underground. My little Linda Gail is an actual movie star.”
“That’s something, isn’t it?” I said.
“All those worries I had, they didn’t mean anything, did they?”
“I guess not.”
“She’s flying in tonight. Let’s go out on the town.”
“We’ve had some trouble, Hershel,” I said. I told him what had happened to Rosita.
“Who’s this cop?” he asked.
“He’s not important. It’s the people who hired him we have to nail.”
“In the meantime, this guy needs to be taken off at the neck.”
“That’s what they want.”
“You think this bastard is working for Dalton Wiseheart?”
“That’d be my bet.”
“I feel awful about this, Weldon. I wish I’d been there.”
“Let me call you later.”