The point was for the client not to come in contact with me or somebody like me. Such drops were routinely middle-of-the-night, nobody-likely-to-be-around affairs, so the risk of leaving a box or a bag of money unattended for a short while was minimal.
What the client didn’t know, and what the Broker surely must have, was that a guy like me wasn’t going to accept a risk like that, minimal or not. Either I or my partner would always go early, find a vantage point and watch, picking up the package as soon as the client had cleared the scene.
The night was cool and just a little breezy. Still in the windbreaker, I was comfortable enough, but with all these trees and bushes around for the wind to ruffle, I got to thinking, every whipstitch, that I heard something suspicious.
I didn’t have long to wait. About three-thirty, he showed up, wearing a black raincoat and a black fedora, looking about as subtle as a bad guy in one of those Charlie Chan movies. He was carrying a black bag like doctors used to when they made house calls — Gladstone bag? Whatever, he was half-kneeling and tucking it under the bench when I came up behind him and said, “Starting to feel like fall, Mr. Jackson. Perfect football weather, don’t you think?”
He rose, still clutching the bag in his gloved fist, whirling toward me, eyes wide, brow knit. “What the hell is—”
“Nothing to be worried about,” I said, left hand raised like a traffic cop about to blow a whistle. “We’re just going to sit down here and have a nice little chat.”
My words didn’t diminish his alarm. He could easily see the nine millimeter in my right hand, which had to be troubling for him even though I held it down at my side, the extended noise-suppressor snout touching my jeans well below my knee.
He did not sit down. He swallowed, forced his expression to smooth out, and said easily, “Mr. Blake, I can’t believe you’re here.”
Yet here I was.
“This,” he continued, “is a major breach. You know goddamn well I was guaranteed not to have any direct contact with... with you.”
He was choosing his words carefully. Despite the silenced weapon at my side, I could be an undercover cop wearing a wire, as far as he knew.
“The reason I insist we talk,” I said, “is I suspect you committed a breach of contract yourself. If you can satisfy me that you haven’t, I’ll just fade away. If I’m not satisfied, I will contact my middleman and he will decide where we go from here.”
Alarm had been replaced with confusion. “And what then? Will the contract be carried out or not?”
“Let’s sit and talk.”
He frowned, gestured around us. “Out here in the open like this? Are you out of your mind?”
I hate two-part questions.
“It’s after three-thirty A.M.,” I said. “No security walks these grounds. Maybe a cop car will go by at some point. So what? We’re not easily visible from the street, and as long as one of us isn’t on his knees in front of the other one, we don’t look like we’re breaking any laws. Can we please sit?”
We sat.
“You put me in a bad position, Mr. Jackson.”
He was not looking at me, staring straight ahead, across the floral clock and into the trees. “How is that?”
“Things have been going on that I didn’t know about. That I should have known about. You took out a second contract, didn’t you? That must have required a few steps, and fancy ones, because I don’t think the people you hired would have taken something on directly from a nigger...”
Now he looked at me, eyes blazing.
“...as they would crudely put it. Funny, thinking of you doing business with Nazi types, KKK clowns. Because I think, and this is just my reading of it and I’m no expert, that you’re sincere about your activism.”
He looked away again, across the trees, his jaw firm. “Of course I’m sincere.”
I shook my head, smiled a little. “You’ve had to play second-fiddle to Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd for a lot of years. You, a skilled public speaker yourself. You, who are not naive like the Reverend is. You know that sometimes corners have to be cut. That the ends have to justify the means — like raising money by trafficking in the same illegal drugs that the Reverend has worked so hard to fight. I mean, it’s not like dope is going away — not until a lot of things change in this country. And that’s a gradual thing, right?”
He sighed. Then he turned the dark eyes on me, and very quietly he said, “The Coalition is going broke. We face bankruptcy. Donations and speaking fees and those modest book advances and royalties — we can’t function on that paltry income. Something had to be done. Something has to be done.”
I nodded. “Oh, I get it. I see it. Utilize the Reverend’s prison pal, André, who on his own had slid back into old bad habits, let’s say... and use him to do some sub rosa fund-raising. Just a temporary thing, till the coffers get filled. But that isn’t enough, is it? As long as Reverend Lloyd is around, with his pesky morality and his annoying Christianity, you simply cannot keep the Coalition funded.”
He stroked his mustache with a thumb and middle finger. “I don’t see why this is any of your concern.”
“Here’s a hint: it’s my ass on the line. You have the skills and the vision and lack of ethics needed to take the Coalition into solvency and on to the next level. You’ve got the perfect plan — transform Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd from a pain in your ass into a superstar martyr. Everybody says he’s the next Martin Luther King. You mean to finish the job.”
His upper lip curled. “Am I being lectured by a fucking assassin?”
I held up the traffic cop palm again. “I know, I know. I seem out of line. And I understand why you acted so desperately... yes, desperately. You knew or strongly suspected that the Reverend was on to you. And I spoke to him earlier tonight, when I was doing bodyguard duty in the Ville — and found you were right. Lloyd was planning to sack both you and André after the big speech Saturday — still plans to oust you. But he doesn’t want any bad publicity to harm the good he hopes to do with that speech. He thinks, he really thinks... and I guess this proves you’re right, thinking the Reverend has his head up his ass... that George McGovern is gonna be our next president. I have the political savvy of a hedgehog, and I can see it’s ridiculous.”
He swallowed. His eyes were hooded now. “When did you know... that I...?”
“That you’re our client? Not as soon as you picked me out as the probable hitter. After which, you made it all too easy for me. You paved the way for me to join the team, really rolled out the welcome wagon. You made sure I was along on the weekend campus trip, even got me a room by myself so I wouldn’t be hampered if I decided that DeKalb was the place where the Reverend needed to die. And when you said you wouldn’t put up with dope smoking on the campus trip, you sounded a little too knowledgeable — ‘mowing grass,’ ‘blasting a joint.’ Oh, and you being the guy who makes all those arrangements, the campus bookings and so on... plus the ranking guy riding on the bus... that made me think you just about had to be arranging the drug deals that André was carrying out.”
His eyebrows went up. “And from that you knew I was the client?”
“Any doubt that you were went the fuck away when you arranged for me to ‘guard’ the Reverend at his house tonight. And let me tell you, it would’ve been an easy hit. And it’d be easy tomorrow night, too.”