Now I made sure my voice sounded deadly serious. “Did you know he actually saved all the cocoa cans-in his personal collection?”
“No, I didn’t,” Andrew said.
Chapter 15
Monday, April 30
I woke up in a surprisingly good mood for a Monday. I hadn’t caught up on any of my yard work over the weekend. And I wasn’t one inch closer to finding Gordon’s murderer. But I had managed to exorcise a demon or two, my what-if-Lawrence-hadn’t-strayed demon in particular, and good gravy, I was just feeling better about things. I took James on a longer walk than usual and doubled up on his treats. I put on a spring blouse and a pair of lightweight khakis. I dug around in the jewelry basket on my dresser for my bluebird brooch.
I got to the morgue right at nine. I made my tea and got to work marking up the weekend papers. At noon I headed down the hill to Ike’s.
“Morgue Mama!” he sang out. “I didn’t know you were rewarding us with your presence today.”
“I didn’t know myself until five minutes ago.”
“Well, it’s good to see your face,” he said. “I just hope you’re in the mood for chicken salad.”
“Sounds delightful.” I sat at a table by the window. It gave me a beautiful, unimpeded view of the empty storefronts across the street.
Ike brought me my tea then got busy making my sandwich. “What kind of bagel you want that on?” he bellowed over the top of his espresso machine.
“Surprise me,” I bellowed back.
He chose pumpernickel. He piled the chicken salad high. He went crazy with the cream cheese.
Ike’s lunchtime rush only lasts about twenty minutes. As soon as things quieted down he joined me, bringing me a free bag of potato chips. “You getting anywhere with that murder?” he asked.
It tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “You’re pretty well plugged into the black community-right?”
He laughed and helped himself to a potato chip. “I’m black, if that’s what you mean by plugged in.”
I knew I was blushing. “Let me try that again-What’s the general opinion of Shaka Bop?”
He laughed harder. “Good Lord, Maddy, that was even worse than before. There are eighty thousand black people in this city. We don’t exactly get together every Saturday night in some big hall and vote on general opinions.”
If he could tease, I could tease. “No? We white people do.”
“Oh, I know you do!” he answered. “Oh, I know you do!”
We laughed and ate potato chips and then we got down to a serious appraisal of Shaka Bop.
Shaka, of course, was still going by his real name when David Delarosa was murdered. One night at Jericho’s, during his last set of the night, he announced his plans to leave town. It came just two weeks after the police tried to pin David’s murder on him. He hooked the neck of his saxophone over his shoulder and pulled the microphone to his lips. “If Hannawa don’t love Sidney Spikes no more,” he said in an affected sharecropper’s voice, “then ol’ Sidney’s through with Hannawa.” It was an angry good-bye. We begged him to stay but we understood when he didn’t.
I remember Effie and Chick being especially upset that the city’s racist police had driven Sidney away from the people he loved. But to tell you the truth, I had the feeling that he was ready to move on anyway. He was a very talented musician. His reputation was spreading. It was time for him to move on to a bigger city and a bigger life.
The bigger city Sidney chose was San Francisco. As the years went by, word got to us that he was playing up and down the west coast, from Vancouver to L.A., that he was making occasional forays into New York to record. Sidney seemed to be on the cusp of fame. But the 1960s were not good to jazz musicians. Clubs closed by the bucketful. Record labels switched to rock and roll and soul. I remember Gordon reading us a letter from Sidney at one of our parties. It was a sad letter. Sidney said he’d been forced to “hang up my horn for a while” and take a job as a mechanic at a garage in Oakland.
In 1968 we learned that Sidney had joined the Black Panther Party. We also learned that he’d changed his name-legally changed it-to Shaka Bop. I was divorced from Lawrence by then. And I’d pretty much stopped running with the old Hemphill College crowd. But I do remember Gordon and Effie dragging me to Hannawa’s first McDonald’s about that time, to see what all the fuss was about. I remember Gordon explaining to us over those miserable little hamburgers that Shaka was the name of a great Zulu king during the early nineteenth century, famous both for his brilliance and his brutality.
Anyway, Shaka moved back to Hannawa in 1973. He formed a band and played at weddings and block parties. He helped organize a food bank for the poor. He ran for City Council and lost. He opened a small auto repair shop in Thistle Hill, a gritty inner city neighborhood just south of downtown.
A few days after Gordon’s funeral, I’d gone to my files in the basement and dug up a feature we’d run on Shaka back in 1978. It was one of the last stories Cynthia Buckland wrote for The Herald-Union before moving up to The Columbus Dispatch:
HANNAWA -Shaka Bop says he isn’t just fixing cars, he’s fixing lives.
Since moving back to Hannawa five years ago, the popular jazz musician and one-time member of the radical Black Panther Party has been making sure that the city’s working poor can get to their jobs.
“Being poor isn’t easy,” said Bop, who was born on the city’s south side as Sidney Thomas Spikes in 1933. “You get a job that doesn’t pay anything and it’s nowhere near where they let you live. Maybe you can get there by bus but maybe you need a car.”
And those cars, he pointed out, are hardly brand new.
“You scrape together a few hundred bucks and buy an old beater,” he said. “You pray every morning it’s going to get you to work and you pray all day long it’ll get you home at night.”
That’s where Shaka Bop’s Auto Run Right shop in Thistle Hill comes in. Bop and his team of talented young mechanics work with missionary zeal to keep the city’s old cars on the road, whether customers can afford to pay for the repair work or not.
“Half the time we charge only half of what other garages would charge,” Bop said. “And half the time we charge nothing but a smile.”
“You’re not saying Shaka Bop had something to do with that professor’s murder, are you?” Ike asked. His voice was uncharacteristically defensive.
I pawed the air. “No more than I’m saying he had anything to do with David Delarosa’s murder. But he was a part of the crowd Gordon ran with. On the periphery of it anyway. Back then and now. Maybe he has some helpful impressions.”
Ike squinted at me. “And that’s why you came to see me today, is it, Maddy? To see if Ike the Black Man had some helpful impressions of him? Before you ask him for helpful impressions of others?”
“Something like that,” I admitted.
Ike softened. Pretended to pout. “And I thought it was my chicken salad.”
“I’ve offended you.”
He didn’t move in his chair. But I could feel his soul reach across the little table and give me an enormous hug. “Oh, Maddy,” he whispered, “why does this world have to be the way it is? Everybody categorized by this and that? What was God thinking?” He took the last potato chip from the bag and broke it in half. He didn’t hand my half to me. He slipped it straight into my mouth. “We black people have a very high opinion of Shaka Bop. Including this black man. It pissed us off when they hauled him in fifty years ago and it would piss us off again if he got unnecessarily dragged into this.”
I sucked on the chip like it was a communion wafer. My knees were quivering from the intimacy Ike had allowed to flower between us, as innocent as it was. “I hope I haven’t unnecessarily pissed you off, Ike.”
“You know, Maddy,” he said. “I have always wanted to meet the great Mr. Bop in person. When you gonna go see him, anyway?”