“What happened?” he asked. “They called me on the radio with an OIT here.”
“Well, they were right,” Necessary said. “An officer was in trouble, but he’s not now so you can take all these people into the rear of the house and get their names and find out if they saw anything.”
Just as Krone was herding the last of the blacks through the door that led to the rear of the house, we heard another siren. A red-and-white ambulance edged its angry way through the black crowd and two white attendants got out and started rolling a stretcher toward the house. Two squad cars, their sirens also moaning, arrived just after the ambulance. Four white cops spilled out of the cars, took a look at the sullen crowd which must have grown to 750 by then, and started edging toward the house, their hands on their holstered gun butts. Necessary, watching, shook his head in disgust. “Christ,” he said, “all we need is for one of those rednecks to shoot some nigger.”
I let the ambulance attendants in and they frowned when they saw what was left of Morze who still whimpered and squirmed in the green chair. The older of the two looked at me and grimaced. “I reckon we’ll have to take him all the way down to Charity emergency,” he said and frowned again as if he didn’t much care for long rides.
Necessary tapped the attendant on the shoulder. “What’s the closest hospital?” he demanded.
“I suppose the Colfax Clinic is, but — shit — we can’t take a nigger there.”
Necessary shot out his right hand, grasped the attendant’s shirt front, and jerked him close. Their faces were no more than six inches apart. “You’re going to take two niggers to the Colfax Clinic,” he said softly, “and they’re going to get the best treatment there is by the best doctors there are. You understand?”
The attendant nodded — a little vigorously, I thought.
“And if you get any static from anyone at the Colfax Clinic, you tell them that unless these two niggers get the best treatment there is, then Chief Necessary’s gonna get whatever kind of court order he needs to close that place down tight by six o’clock tonight. Now you got that?”
The attendant nodded again, even more vigorously than before. “Yessir,” he said. “I understand.”
Quickly, the two attendants loaded the whimpering Morze onto the wheeled stretcher. I moved over to Jones and helped him up. “You’d better go with him,” I said. Jones nodded and grimaced at the pain as he stood on his wounded leg.
“Here,” I said, and took his left arm and draped it around my shoulder. We moved slowly out of the house, past the four cops, and into the crowd which by now numbered at least a thousand. It was a sullen, too quiet crowd. They pressed in close to the wheeled stretcher and there were some gasps and oh mys when those near enough caught sight of Morze’s bloody, blinded face. I helped Jones limp close behind the stretcher.
Morze suddenly popped upright and screamed: “Nick! I can’t see, Nick! Where’s Nick?” Then he collapsed on the stretcher as I helped Jones to kneel down by him.
“I’m here, Bill,” Jones said softly. The man on the stretcher nodded and stared wildly about with his sightless eyes. “You gotta do some thing, Nick, you gotta do something for me.” He said that loudly enough for those who pressed close to hear it.
“Come here,” Morze said, “come here, Nick.”
I helped Jones go closer. “You gotta do it, Nick.”
“Whatever you say, Bill.”
Then he whispered his dying request and there were only two who heard it, Nick the Nigger and me. “Burn it, Nick, burn the fucking place down.” Then William Morze whimpered once more and died.
I helped Jones rise. He looked at the crowd of dark faces that encircled him. “What he say, Nick?” one large black man demanded. “What Saint Billy tell you t’do?”
The word spread quickly through the crowd — Saint Billy done told Nick what to do. Other voices near the stretcher started demanding the instructions. Nick the Nigger looked around carefully at the encircling black faces. Then he looked at me and smiled faintly. “This one’s for you, Dye.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” I said.
“Help me over to that one,” he said, indicating the large black who had first asked what Morze’s final request had been. I helped him over. He looked at the man for several moments. The man stared back patiently.
“You want to know what Bill said?”
“We gotta know,” the man said.
Nick the Nigger nodded several times, not taking his gaze from the man’s face. “Bill said cool it. That’s all. Just cool it.”
I helped Jones limp the rest of the way to the ambulance. The word had already flashed through the crowd and it was beginning to disperse by the time I helped him into the rear of the ambulance where he sat next to the dead William Morze.
“We’re even now, Dye,” Jones said, just before they closed the doors.
“We always were,” I said.
Chapter 42
By three o’clock that Friday afternoon Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux was pounding on Necessary’s desk and demanding that Swankerton’s police force be withdrawn from Niggertown. “They got the First National for fifty thousand,” Robineaux yelled and slammed his fist down on the desk for the ninth time in forty seconds. “Fifty thousand!” he yelled, “and it was forty-eight goddamned minutes before a cop showed up. Forty-eight minutes!”
Necessary leaned back in his chair with his feet propped up on the desk. He nodded at the mayor. “The FBI’s looking into it,” he said. “They’re pretty good at bank robberies. I think they catch about half of them.” He looked at me. “Or is it a third?”
“I think it’s half,” I said.
The mayor sputtered and pounded the desk again. “You got a crime wave going on, Necessary! A goddamned crime wave!” Boo Robineaux, the mayor’s son, looked up from his copy of The Berkeley Barb and smiled at his father. A little contemptuously, I thought.
Necessary took his feet down from the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “Now you can take your pick, Mayor,” he said coldly. “You can have yourself a full scale race riot that can wreck this town or you can put up with a few extra holdups.”
“A few!” Robineaux yelled, his face taking on an apoplectic shade of red. “You call eighty-nine armed holdups a few?”
“Better than watching the whole town burn,” Necessary said and put his feet back on the desk.
“Listen to me, Necessary. Listen to me now! If you don’t get those men out of Niggertown within the hour and back to protecting life and property over here, you won’t be wearing that badge by sundown.” The mayor pounded his fist on the desk again. “I’ll have your ass, by Christ, I will!”
“Who you working for now, Boo?” I said.
The mayor’s son jerked a thumb at his father. “It,” he said.
“Well, now, Mayor, just calm down a little,” Necessary said. “As soon as the feelings about old man Morze’s death sort of simmer down over in Niggertown, I’ll call the men back.”
“Goddamn it, Necessary,” the mayor yelled, “there ain’t no trouble in Niggertown! The trouble’s all over here.”
“I’m exercising my professional judgment, Mayor Robineaux,” Necessary said coldly. “Law and order is my business — not yours.”
Robineaux pranced over to the black tinted window and waved at it. “Look out there! They’re robbing the fucking city blind and you sit there and call it law and order!”
The idea had come to Necessary on our way back from Morze’s house. When he was through explaining it to me, I turned to him and said: “Homer, Orcutt would have been proud of you.” I’d never seen Necessary look happier.