He walked over to the squad car, opened the door marked “Buckle Up Atlanta” and ran the name Vernon Kemp past the computer. While he waited to hear the result, he patted down the white guy. This didn’t take long. Except for a few loose bills and coins, maybe ten dollars in all, his pockets were completely empty. Lamont was still digesting that when HQ got back to him with details of Vernon Kemp’s record: one conviction for assault, one for possession, plus eight arrests where charges were not brought. Six months skid-bid in all. Kemp was known to have links with a gang called the Jams, who controlled most of the drug trade on the west side of Capitol Avenue.
So far, despite a few anomalies like the God-botherer’s pistol, it was pretty much the kind of thing that Wingate had expected. It was only when he looked through the contents of the suitcase that it started to get weird. He thought these would be as predictable as Vernon Kemp’s background, but he was wrong. Underneath the upper layer of pamphlets and a Bible lay a box of ammunition, a Sony camcorder, a roll of duct tape and five sets of handcuffs.
This made it look more like a dirt-on-dirt hit, what cops called a twofer: two dead assholes for the price of one. Whatever these guys had been aiming to do with that stuff, they were not only ofay but very definitely not OK. And sure as hell not jamming for Jehovah, either.
Lamont’s beeper went again, a drive-by at Central and Glenn, by the interstate exit. He told them he’d get over there ASAP and headed off to get a few statements to pad out the file. This being Pittsburgh, he didn’t expect a whole lot of cooperation, and he wasn’t disappointed. The only thing all the witnesses agreed on was that no Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to their door that evening. Apart from that, the stories varied wildly. Some people even denied hearing shots, although the burner that punched that crater in the white guy’s chest must have been a pound at the very least, and there was no way you weren’t going to hear anything that size going off right outside the house. Others admitted hearing shots-estimates varied from one to a dozen-but with a single exception no one had seen anything except Oprah.
The exception was Donna Grifton, an elderly woman living alone at 322 Carson. It was she who had called 911 in the first place.
“I heard some kind of noise in the street,” she told Lamont. “Like a car door slamming, something like that. I’d been expecting my niece to come and visit, thought maybe it was her. I was on my way over to see when I heard this other sound, real loud. I knew that weren’t no car door. I heard guns before, and this was a gun all right.”
Lamont nodded.
“And what did you see?”
“Hardly nothing. Time I got across to the windowlight, it was over. The gun went off again, and then I heered some kind of hollering. Only thing I see’d was the three of them laying there up the street. That’s when I called.”
Back at the scene, the garrulous drunk was still trying to tell his story to the beleaguered patrolman. Lamont Wingate felt the senseless shame he always did when a person of color started acting up. He knew this was dumb, a kind of Uncle Tom reflex, but he went over anyway and told the bum to quit acting the fool or he’d “bust him under statute triple four seven one A.” There was no such statute, but Lamont had never known the threat of invoking it to fail. It was that “A” that got to them, he reckoned.
But this particular citizen seemed unimpressed.
“I ain’t acting no fool,” he protested civilly. “I’m just trying to explain to this here police what happened here tonight.”
“The hell he was!” the patrolman retorted. “What the sorry son of a bitch’s been trying to do is tell me his entire life history since he got up this morning.”
“That is an arrant untruth,” the drunk replied in a hurt tone. “I may have been a mite circumstantial, but you got to understand I got liquor goggles on. Yet I see life not darkly, through a glass, but whole and entire. Everything is connected, so where to begin?”
He turned to Lamont Wingate.
“You law?” he said.
Lamont nodded.
“I saw the whole thing,” the drunk said with an air of bravado.
“Name?” said Lamont, getting out his notebook.
“Ulysses Grant.”
“Right! And I’m Robert E. Lee.”
The drunk produced a laminated card from his pocket and handed it to Lamont. It was a library pass made out in the name of Ulysses Grant. Lamont inspected it briefly, then handed it back.
“Where do you live, Mr. Grant?”
“Everywhere! In each creature and plant, and every human being that draws breath, as we all do, Mr. Lee. But I stay in that house right there.”
He made a gesture taking in half the street. Lamont sighed.
“OK, what did you see? No, let me rephrase that. What do you have to tell me about what happened tonight? That might be of interest to a body who don’t presently have the benefit of them goggles you mentioned, that is.”
Ulysses Grant frowned at him.
“Let me try and draw my mind up to these Lilliputian proportions. Damn, but it’s difficult! Makes me feel all dizzy-headed. OK. Whitey one enters left, seen from my box up there on the rise. Moons along the street like he’s subject to pull a car clout, something. Enter whitey two, stage right. Spies number one and comes over like he’s seen a ghost, which I have on many occasions experienced myself, the spirits of the dead rising sometimes as thick as steam from a street grate, and not surprising when the soil beneath our feet is stained its fine rich tint with the blood of our ancestors, Mr. Lee.”
Lamont Wingate tapped his notebook with the tip of his pen.
“I was on a cruise schedule, Mr. Grant, I could stand here and listen to you all night. As it is, you don’t cut to the chase, I’ll have to carry you downtown, hand you over to someone with the leisure to do your fine rhetoric the justice it surely deserves.”
Ulysses Grant gave a glare which mingled apprehension and defiance.
“Downtown? I ain’t been there in forty years. I don’t need anything they got to offer, ’sides which I hear it’s all been gussied up since these Yankee companies moved down here ’cos life is cheap. The War between the States might have broken the chains of slavery, Mr. Lee, but it replaced them with the chains of wage slavery, which are a hell of a sight harder to …”
He broke off, catching the look in Lamont Wingate’s eyes.
“The chase,” he said hurriedly. “Whitey two blows up at whitey one. Then the brothers arrive.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Recognize any of them?”
Ulysses Grant smiled vastly.
“Them niggers all look the same to me,” he said.
Lamont Wingate nodded.
“Go on.”
“They go to clean out the white guys. Number one breaks bad, bucks Vernon there. Someone else takes the guy down, then the other. Exeunt right.”
“I believe the correct word is ‘exit,’” Lamont observed with a malicious gleam.
“Then your belief is misplaced, Mr. Lee, account of there was two of them. You exit. Y’all exeunt.”
Utterly defeated, Lamont Wingate packed up his notebook, returned to the patrol car and called in to find out why the guys from the morgue hadn’t showed up yet. The dispatcher told him that one of the other detectives had gone to look into the drive-by, so Lamont went back to his car and drove off, munching on one of the light bread sandwiches his wife had packed and mentally composing his prelim on the Pittsburgh shooting.
On the face of it, it sounded like a no-brainer. Vernon Kemp and a couple of dudes he was down with see these two suits and go to hit on them. Kemp’d likely been aching to get a body for some time, keep any of the Jams from trashing his rep, prove he had the juice. That side of it he could see. The problem was the other guys. If the drunk was to be credited, they’d fired first, two on three, and staring down the barrel of some major ordnance. That didn’t make no sense. And what the hell were they doing there in the first place, with a suitcase full of restraint equipment and a video camera, passing themselves off as a direct-sales team for the big kahuna?