“I thought it might put your mind at rest to know that Land is nowhere near Detroit. Good morning.” He hung up.
Joe rolled over in bed and sat up with a grunt. The early morning greyness of his face was stippled with black beard. “Who the hell makes phone calls this early in the morning?” he said.
“A friend of mine.”
“I didn’t know Hefler was a friend of yours. That was the name I heard, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, but keep it to yourself. He asked me not to talk about it.”
“Is he after this Hector Land?”
“I said I wasn’t supposed to talk about it.”
“O.K., O.K., we won’t talk about it.” He yawned elaborately, giving me a view of the fillings in his wisdom teeth. “It’s just that I came across something last night that I thought might interest you. The paper put me on the background of the Land case. Only now I can’t tell you about it on account of we took an oath not to talk about it, didn’t we?”
I threw a pillow at his head. He caught it and threw it back.
“Spill it,” I said. “And don’t tell me I can read it in the papers.”
“You can’t read it in the papers,” Joe said more seriously. “It’s not that kind of a story. The city editor killed it but quick.”
I lit a bitter early morning cigarette, tossed him the pack, and waited.
“If Land deserted from the Navy,” Joe said, “he had some reason for it. I’m not saying he had justification, but he had what may have looked like a reason to him. The boy had a raw deal, there’s no getting around that.”
“What kind of a raw deal?”
“I’m telling you. Hector Land’s brother got killed in the ’43 riots. Somebody slugged him with a club and smashed his skull. Hector was with him when it happened, and he went hog-wild. He tore into a streetful of whites and started to throw them against the walls of the buildings. It took a squad of police and a straitjacket to quiet him down. But that’s just half of it. Do you know what the cops did then?”
“Jailed him.”
“That’s right. On a charge of aggravated assault. For beating up a couple of thugs that maybe killed his brother, he gets three months in the clink waiting for trial. He walks out of the clink into the Navy. That’s not a hell of a good background for making a black boy all eager and excited to fight a war for democracy and equal justice. Or is it?”
“It doesn’t excuse him for doing whatever he’s done.” I had to add: “But it helps to explain him. Is that the straight dope?”
“Straight out of the court records.”
“Hefler will want to know about it, if he doesn’t already.”
“There’s something else you can tell him,” Joe said in his monotonous grating voice. “When Hector went to jail his wife got fired from her job and started hustling to make a living for herself. She’s been hustling off and on ever since, until the last few months. A few months ago she suddenly got prosperous, and quit.”
“How do you know that?”
“From Kate Morgan. Mrs. Land’s ex-roommate.”
“Did Kate Morgan know where she got the money?”
“Mrs. Land said she got it from her husband. She didn’t say where he got it.” Joe’s mind skipped to another matter then, but I could follow his train of thought: “Could Wanless tell you anything about Black Israel?”
“Not a thing. Except that he didn’t know anything about it, and nobody else seemed to, either. They avoid publicity.”
“That’s suspicious in itself,” he said. “Your ordinary above-board Negro club or society is only too glad to get a little publicity. I asked Kate Morgan about it, but she wouldn’t talk. Maybe she didn’t know anything. I don’t know. It’s more likely she was scared. She saw what happened to Bessie Land.”
“Do you think Black Israel killed Bessie Land?”
“How the hell should I know? Anyway, it’s Hefler’s baby now.” He yawned again and retreated into his blankets.
I called Hefler back, and told him what Joe had told me. Then I got up and dressed. It was Hefler’s baby all right, but I couldn’t drop it. I had already made up my mind to go to San Diego with Mary. San Diego is a half hour’s drive from Tia Juana.
Part III
TRANSCONTINENTAL
6
TWO days later, on Saturday morning, Mary and I left Chicago on the Grand Canyon Limited. The best we could get on such short notice, even with a certain amount of priority, were parlor-car seats from Chicago to Kansas City, and berths from Kansas City on. When we boarded the train in the Chicago station we found that our parlor-car reservations entitled us to two seats in the club car.
The train was not due to leave for half an hour, but the club car was crowded. The air was hot and heavy with the undesired physical intimacy of wartime train journeys. People occupied their seats in attitudes of defiance, as if daring you to displace them. Mary and I found our seats, which were unoccupied, and sat down to wait for Kansas City and the semi-privacy of a compartment ten hours away.
The uneasy postures of everyone in the car, the atmosphere of suspended tension as if life had stopped and wouldn’t start again till the train moved, the shabby upholstery and worn carpet, reminded me of an unsuccessful dentist’s waiting-room. I said to Mary:
“In a minute a nurse is going to poke her head in the door and tell us that Dr. Snell is ready for the next patient.”
She smiled a little fixedly without turning her head.
I tried again: “I’ve often wondered why so many people go away on a train for their honeymoon. They know they’ll have neither comfort nor privacy. The honeymoon is one of the three or four most critical periods in life, but away they go to spend it in a box on wheels.”
“At least we’re not on a honeymoon,” she said. “I don’t see anybody else that is, either.”
She went on studying the other passengers, temporarily more interested in them than in my attempts at conversation. Our seats were at the rear end of the car, next to the bar. That was strategic. Across from us was a middle-aged woman in a grey fur coat which might have been chinchilla but probably wasn’t. There was a girl beside her, eighteen if she was a day, dark and pretty and bright-looking. Every man in the car had already paid her the tribute of a once-over followed by another once-over.
The girl’s eyes were soft and dark, but they weren’t shy. She was returning the once-overs. “Don’t stare, dear,” said the woman in the almost chinchilla coat. Evidently the relationship was that of mother and daughter.
My first impression had been that the mother was comfortably middle-aged and content to be out of the running. When she took off her coat I had my doubts. She wore a dress ten years too young for her, her bosom was carefully disciplined and exalted, and her waist was corseted to the point of exquisite extinction. The sort of woman, I thought, who is eager to be mistaken for her daughter’s older sister and never is. I found out later that her name was Mrs. Tessinger and her daughter’s name was Rita.
Rita’s interest in her fellow mortals refused to be slapped down. She was watching with the innocent arrogance of the late female teens a man of thirty or so who was sprawled in a seat on my side halfway down the car.
His face was long and sulky, blue-black where it had just been shaved. His eyes were small and black, set close together as if in competition. From his parsimonious temples receded a stiff brush of hair as black and coarse as the tail of a black horse. He wore a blue serge suit with an air of having been born in one. He made me think of a brunette Uriah Heep. It took me a long time to learn his name, but when I did I never forgot it.