I tried to get comfortable against the ripped vinyl, but my hands were tied behind me and my suit coat was bunched up. I pressed my face against the cool, dirty window and looked at my Skylark as we rolled away. Just down the road from the Smuteye Farmers Savings and Loan was the Smuteye Police Station.
Deputy Horace rooster-strutted into the crumbling station house with me in tow. “I got him, I got him,” he said in a singsong. When the big-haired dispatcher asked him who, he said, “The killer, the killer.” I wondered as I observed the woman sitting at the ancient radio set whom and to what would be dispatched in Smuteye. Horace pushed me through the first room and into the dank back where the cells were. He opened a barred door and roughly shoved me in. I stumbled, but I didn’t fall. I sat on a metal bed that was attached to the cinder-block wall and looked up to see a filthy white man sitting on the bunk opposite me.
“Nice suit,” he said.
“Got it in Montgomery,” I said.
“Good place to buy a suit. What are you in here for?”
“I don’t know. You?”
“Stealing,” he said.
“Stealing what?”
He shrugged. “I steal a lot of things. It’s kinda what I do.” He studied me for a second. “You ain’t from around here.”
“The suit give me away?”
He laughed. “Funny nigger.” Then, “Naw, just the fact that I ain’t never seen you before.”
The arrest in the diner and drive in the cigarette smoke — soaked squad car and the hustle back to the dingy cell all seemed unreal enough that I felt simply lost. Now, sitting in the cell across from my fellow prisoner, the reality of the situation settled on me. I began to shake. I held out my hand and looked at it.
“Scared?” the man asked.
I nodded.
“At least you ain’t no fool.”
I was in fact terrified. It was a ghostly kind of fear, a kind of distant growl or rumble in the ground. I was in jail and being accused of murder. I had a notion that I could just get up and walk out, but I knew that was just a way to get myself shot. And I didn’t want the last words I heard in life to be, “I got me one.” My stomach felt empty and icy and hot and crowded all at once. My stupid foot tapped with a mind of its own, and I stupidly watched it.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Poitier.”
“That French or something?”
I nodded.
“My name is Last.”
“Last?”
“Yeah, last face you’ll ever see.” He laughed hard.
There was commotion in the front of the station. I lay back and looked at the ceiling. Horace came to the door and told me to get up. “Come on, boy, the Chief’s here, and he wants to see the killer I caught.”
“Who is it that I’m supposed to have killed?” I asked.
“Woooeee, don’t you talk pretty, boy,” the deputy said. “Just get your black ass up and out here.”
The bald, wide Chief was sitting in his office trying to get a drawer open. “Horace, didn’t I tell you to fix this here drawer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, did you fix it?”
“Not yet.” Horace pushed me in the middle of my back farther into the room. “Chief, here’s the prisoner.”
“You a killer, boy?” the Chief asked.
“I’ve killed no one,” I said.
“See how he talks, Chief.”
“Shut up, Horace.”
“Just where were you yesterday morning?” the Chief asked.
“I was in Montgomery.”
The Chief bit his lower lip and looked up and out the window. “Anybody see you there?”
“A banker named Scrunchy.”
“Horace, did you ask the prisoner any questions?”
“No, sir. But I ain’t never seen this boy before. And he had all this money on him, just stuck down in his pocket.” The deputy pointed to the wad on the desktop in front of the Chief. “That’s close to a thousand dollars.”
The Chief counted the money and frowned at Horace. “Pretty close.” He looked at me. “This here is a lot of money, boy.”
“Not really,” I said.
“Whoa, he say ‘not really.’ You hear that, deputy? He say ‘not really.’ ”
“I heard it, Chief.”
The Chief picked up my wallet, opened it. “Not Sidney Poitier,” he said, looking at my license. “That your name?”
I nodded.
“Where you from, boy?”
“Like the license says, Atlanta.”
“Atlanta,” he repeated. “Big city. What you doin’ here, boy?”
“Passing through. And don’t call me boy.”
“What do they call you in Atlanta?” he asked.
“They call me Mr. Poitier.”
“Well, Mister Poitier, you can go on back to your room now while I call me a fella named Scrunchy in Montgomery. What bank was that?”
“First National Bank of Alabama.”
“You do a lot of business with banks, do you?”
“Some.”
“Take him on back there, Horace.” The Chief gave me one last disdainful glance. “Then I want to see you in here, you hear me?”
“I hear you, Chief.”
Deputy Horace took me back to the cell and I sat on the same bunk and looked across at the same face. “So, what’s your name?”
“Why, I’m Clark Gable.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“You can call me Billy.”
“I’ll do that.”
“So, they say you killed somebody,” Billy said. He was sitting way back on his bunk, his back against the wall. I noticed that he had one boot off.
“That’s what they say.”
“Well, I don’t believe it,” Billy said. “You don’t look like you could kill nobody.”
I understood this to be intended as an insult, and the thought occurred to me that I should take it as one as a matter of decorum, but I didn’t. I looked at him looking at me. “You’re right, I couldn’t.”
“Hmmm. So, who did you kill?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I take it you live around here. What do you do? To pay the bills, I mean?”
“A little of this. A little of that. Now and then. Off and on.” He ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Steal.”
Horace came back to the cell door. “Okay, boy, on your feet. Chief wants to see you again.”
I followed the deputy back into the Chief’s office. Horace pushed me to the chair in front of the desk and gestured for me to sit. The Chief was chasing a fly around the room with a swatter. He missed again.
“I suppose you can do better,” he said as he sat.
“Did you call the bank?” I asked.
The Chief called into the outer office. “Horace, get your sorry ass in here right this second.”
Horace entered and sheepishly walked over to stand by the window. He looked at his shoes.
“I want you to hear this, Horace,” the Chief said.
“Yes, sir,” Horace said.
“Well, Mister Poitier, I called the bank in Montgomery, and I talked to this Scrunchy, and it turns out he remembers you.”
“Therefore?”
“Therefore?” the Chief repeated, leaning back in his chair and looking at me with his head tilted. “Therefore? You hear that, Horace? Therefore.”
“I told you he talks fancy. Don’t he talk fancy?”
“Shut up, Horace,” the Chief said without looking at the deputy. “Therefore, Mister Poitier, you couldn’t have killed our dead man. And you know something? I don’t like you.”
I said nothing. I glanced over at Horace. He seemed amused. His ugly face seemed ready to break into a giggle.
The Chief looked at Horace, too. “And I sure as hell don’t like you right now, Horace.”
Horace straightened.