“I stumbled.”
The Bishop called cheerfully from the stairway inside the building: “Come on in, Lieutenant. We’re waiting for you.”
Browder swung around and looked at the doorway for a moment. His face was dark with suspicion. Then he went through the door and up the stair and Muddy Marshall and I followed.
The Bishop was standing at the head of the stair. The hall behind him was semi-dark. The door to Ralph McDonald’s real-estate office was closed and no light showed over the transom. The Bishop was balanced on his heels and cane, the forward thrust of his stomach helping to keep his equilibrium.
He said: “We knew you’d be right down, Lieutenant. So Eddie and I came on ahead. We’ve been waiting. We would have gone in and had a chair, but the door’s locked.”
It was too, thanks to that spring lock. Lieutenant Browder didn’t have to use the fire-escape though. He had McDonald’s keys.
Chapter Three
The Social Cesspool
It’s always fun to watch the Bishop and Browder together. They don’t exactly hate one another, but there’s no love lost between them. On the other hand, each respects the other.
Browder is a rather handsome, middle-aged man. He’s a show-off and he has a good sense of the dramatic and he loves publicity. He will keep a case running just as long as the public stays interested. He lets out information to the papers a little bit at a time, so the readers get the impression that Lieutenant Browder is constantly zooming from spot to spot gathering new facts backed by scientific proof. But he’s no fool. He’s had two trips to the F.B.I. training school and he really knows his stuff. He’s a man on the way up and he takes himself with deadly seriousness and he’s honest. He’d work up a vagrancy case against Mrs. Roosevelt if he believed her guilty.
The Bishop never admits to any interest in details. He stood back now looking bored and having a drink while Browder worked. And Browder’s thorough. He must have wound up with every fingerprint in that office. He probably knew the Bishop and I had been there, but he was waiting until his prints were developed, waiting until he had proof before he did anything. He worked that way.
The only thing he asked was: “Where’d you get that black eye, Eddie? And that lump on your jaw?”
The Bishop said: “Ain’t it pretty? On him a black eye has lavender edges. He can’t help it, but he’s beautiful.”
I said I must have got the bruises when I stumbled into Marshall.
Marshall’s nose was still leaking blood into the handkerchief he held.
“You caused me bodily injury and harm,” he said. “Distress and duress. Duress per minas. Violence sufficient to inspire a person of ordinary firmness with fear of loss of life or limb. Maybe I ought to sue.”
He was a young lawyer only three years out of law school and he was supposed to be good, but some persons said whiskey would surely get him. He had a heavily fleshed face with red-veined pads beneath the eyes. Of course, he didn’t drink as much as the Bishop, but then the Bishop was a rare alcoholic genius who drank, as he said, “just to keep his throat wet,” and liquor rarely had any effect on him.
It was Marshall — he’d been at the Red and Black Club when McDonald was shot — who had told Browder about the ten thousand dollars. “The sinister circumstance,” Marshall said, having a drink with the Bishop at the water cooler, “is that I knew the combination to this safe. Ralph had to leave town tomorrow on business and I was supposed to put this coin of the realm in the bank. Perfectly legal transaction, you know. Witnesses, et cetera. Signed voucher from bank. And now the damn money’s gone. How can I put it in the bank?”
The Bishop seemed to be growing bored. He said good-night to Browder and Marshall and we left.
Driving back uptown I asked the Bishop where was the political angle in this case, the angle that had him so interested. “Ai God!” he said. “It’s all around you. This is South City! This is the Cradle of the Confederacy and Richmond is just an upstart. There ain’t another town in the world like this one.”
He was off on one of his favorite topics now — the foibles and idionsyncrasies of South City society and politics, which are often one and the same thing. He always said this was the reason he had stayed with the Democrat for forty-two years, “and never a day without a laugh.”
“But where does politics fit in here?” I asked.
“Where the hell did the murder take place?” the Bishop said. “In a gambling house. And the party was given by one of the city commissioners. Now there’s hardly a prude in South City who’ll object to a city commissioner giving a party in a gambling house — as long as it’s not made into an open scandal. But let the party get spread in the papers, they’ll kick out the commissioner. There’s always going to be gambling and gals in this town, because the town wants ’em. But the town wants ’em kept quiet. Why? Well, nobody can live comfortably without sin. And a lot of folks can’t live comfortably with it, once they admit they’re living with it. This is just South City’s way of preserving the fairest flower of its youth untarnished — and satisfied.”
“But the murder’s already committed,” I said. “It has to go in the paper.”
“Sure. But everybody connected with this thing comes from old, prominent families. If it’s solved quick, finished, folks will hush it up. They won’t talk about it, except to their friends, and nobody’s feelings will be hurt by thinking they’ve got corrupt city commissioners. But let it drag on for days, with that prude Browder feeding out facts like gasoline on a fire, and Hank Murray will get himself elected by it.”
“What kind of guy is Murray?”
The Bishop had a drink straight, which is rare, and spat out the window, which is rarer. “A self-respecting corn cob wouldn’t wipe itself on Hank Murray. He wouldn’t clean up this town — but he would make sure the graft went in his own pocket.”
“Where does it go now?”
“Believe it or not, part of it goes into the police pension fund. And part goes to the Community Chest. And who the hell knows where the rest goes? But it’s a good town. Lower taxes than any you can name. And not much city debt, and not much real crime. It ain’t heaven, but it ain’t Birmingham either.”
I said: “It’s a wonder you haven’t exposed this in your column. I thought you wrote the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
The Bishop had another small snifter, swallowing this one slowly, and as if he liked it. “When I first went to work on the Democrat I wrote the whole truth. I wrote the whole truth about the South City baseball team for three days and after that they wouldn’t let me in the park. I had to climb a tree and use a telescope to cover the games. The team found out about it and sawed the limb half in two so next time I climbed up there the limb broke. That’s when I broke my leg. It could have been set easy enough, but the doctor I went to happened to own stock in the baseball team.”
The last time the Bishop had told me how he lost his leg he’d said it was shot off when he was too slow getting out of a window on the one occasion in history when a train on the South City-Mobile Railroad came in ahead of time. There were a vast number of stories about how Roscoe Atticus came to be called the Bishop and about how he lost his leg, but nobody could swear to the truth.
Back at the Red and Black Club, where I’d left my ancient bus, I got out and the Bishop slid under the wheel of his own car. “I almost forgot, Eddie. Did you feel anything in Steiner’s pocket before he socked you?”