Текст книги "In The Blood"

Автор книги: Jack Kerley

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Chapter 14

It was eight thirty a.m. when Harry and I pulled into the failing strip mall on the south side of Montgomery. The offices I sought were on the end. There had once been windows, but they had been bricked over after a shoebox loaded with four sticks of dynamite exploded on the sidewalk outside. The two occupants of the office had been back in the files, or they would have been shredded by glass and shattered by concussion.

Nothing was taken for granted any more. There were no windows and the door was metal.

Near the entrance to the lot I saw a hulking bubba type slouched in a battered pickup with the door open. He had a square face and had gone days without shaving. His plaid shirt had the sleeves cut off, showing hard and tattooed arms. He shot me a look, flicked the cigarette to the pavement. I checked my rear-view and saw him pull a cellphone.

“You see that guy, Cars? Mean-looking piece of work.”

“Probably just sitting and eating,” I said. “But around here’s where you should let your natural paranoia shine.”

“Cuz it ain’t paranoia if they’re really following you, right?”

“Bingo.”

I parked at the far end of the building. There was no name on the metal door, just a number. But I knew the name: Southern Legal Defense Program. Though the name suggested a program to help indigent defendants, the SLDP was a monitoring organization that kept close tabs on hate groups. The organization had contacts ranging from law enforcement to prison leadership to informants inside the groups. In a recent case information supplied by the SLDP and a couple of similar watchdog groups helped convict two former Klan members of a series of lynchings that had occurred in the early sixties. The Kluxers were now in their late seventies, and I was delighted they got their earthly retributions in before whatever lays in the distance exacted the Universe’s toll.

Much harsher, I hoped.

There had, predictably, been the usual cracker chorus bemoaning the perps’ current ages and calling the investigation a vendetta against a few old men, as though time had washed their crimes away. I recalled video footage of their lawyer, a beady-eyed guy in a loud suit, standing at the courthouse mics after the guilty verdicts, yodeling about injustice to a crowd with few but vocal sympathizers.

Thus the bomb, one of several revenge schemes aimed at the group in its forty-year existence.

I’d known the SLDP’s director since my first year on the force, back when I was in uniform. A murder had occurred on my beat, horrific, a fifty-year-old black man beaten to death with ball bats.

I’d been asking around on the street about the unsolved murder – it couldn’t even have been called a case because I was in uniform – for a couple months when I got a call out of the blue from a guy named Ben Belker. It was curious that he’d heard about my interest, because I was just a beat cop. Belker said I should talk to a guy named Hawley Cage.

Long story short: Cage turned out to be a member of a group called Aryan America Only. Except he was also an informer for the SLDP. Cage told me of interesting boozy conversations he’d overheard at a meeting. Long story shorter: I vetted the info, passed it to the dicks on the case, and a month later they arrested two psychopathic Klanners who’d killed the old guy after he’d yelled at them to slow down in the street because kids lived in the neighborhood.

It turned out Ben Belker had worked for the SLDP for years as a field operative and was now its “survey director”, meaning he assimilated and analyzed data on hate groups to make sense of their comings and goings. If anyone was anyone in the various movements, Ben kept tabs on them.

Ben was at the door as I entered, as skinny as a sapling, brown hair looking like it was combed with a wolverine, big eyes widened by nerdish black-frame glasses. A pen stain soaked the pocket of his work shirt. His shoes were gray Hush Puppies, one untied. He clasped me in a hug as tight as an auto compactor. When we released he slapped the side of my head. Harry seemed content to stand back and watch the drama.

“Jeez, what was that about?” I asked, rubbing my head.

“When was the last time you were here?”

Time has never been exact to me. I tried to recall my last visit.

“Has it been a year, Ben? Year-and-a-half?”

“Three. After promising we’d get together at least twice a year.”

“My bad.”

“OK,” Ben grinned, “I’ve hugged you ’cus I love you, smacked you because you’re a prick, now introduce me to Harry Nautilus and let’s get down to business.”

Harry frowned at the mention of his name.

“Have we met before?”

Ben held his finger up in the hang on motion, went to a computer, tapped a few keys. He waved us over to look at the screen. I saw Harry and me in a crowd in Mobile’s Bienville Square, a prominent civil rights leader at a podium a dozen feet beyond. The event had been two years ago.

“Here’s another,” Ben said, pulling up a second photo from the same day. Both shots were slightly unfocused. “And I think there’s one more…”

Harry didn’t look happy, but kept his counsel and watched Ben select from a sheet of tiny photos, making an enlargement that fit the screen.

“Voila!” Ben said. Harry and I leaned forward to see a shot of the two of us standing outside the front door of a local hotel. I was on the radio, Harry looking to his side at a crowd of sign-holding protestors. I remembered the day: a liberal Massachusetts senator had been visiting Mobile and Harry and I were put on guard duty along with half the force.

“I know there’s an explanation I’m going to accept.” Harry’s tone said it would be a challenge. Harry wasn’t big on unauthorized surveillance of himself.

“We weren’t specifically taking surreptitious photos of you, Detective,” Ben explained. “This guy here, ten feet away, is who we were tracking. Arnold Meltzer. He’s the head honcho of the Aryan Revolutionary Army, a pivotal white power splinter group attractive to a lot of biker gangs. You just happened to be there.”

Harry took a second to let it sink in, nodded acceptance. He studied the photo of a wisp of a man in his fifties, dressed in a light seersucker suit, his face almost totally hidden behind sunglasses. His mouth was a tight pucker, like he was about to lift a clarinet to his lips. He looked as threatening as a canary.

“This guy’s a Klan type, you mean? A real baddie?”

“These days, the danger is a lot bigger than the Klan. Thanks to the internet, white supremacist types are more organized than ever.”

“Obama’s presidency doesn’t change things?”

“People this broken just feel more threatened. It’s made them even crazier, full-blown paranoiac. The movement used to weed out the worst psychotics, but now it gives them leadership positions.”

Harry re-studied the photo of Arnold Meltzer. “And this little fella’s a leader?” He sounded dubious.

“Don’t be fooled by Meltzer’s stature. His ideas make him dangerous. As well as his influence and money.”

“Where’s the money come from?”

“Outlaw bikers are big in the drug-running biz. Mules. It’s whispered Meltzer’s into that big-time, like a contractor. He’s also the figurehead for the White Power movement in the South, revered by supremacists.”

Harry scowled at the photo. “I was nearly rubbing shoulders with the scumbucket and didn’t know.”

Ben said, “He’s not in any police files. I was scanning through the photos when I saw Carson. From his descriptions, I figured that was you next to him. I blew the photos up and saved them.” Ben grinned at me, a loopy Cheshire cat. “Something to remember Carson by since he never writes, never calls, never…”

I put my hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I’m here now, Ben. With another photo for you to consider.” I pulled three death photos of our baby abductor, handed them over. He stared, shook his head.

“Never seen him before. What’d he do?”

“Tried to steal a kid from a hospital.”

“I saw that bit of weirdness on the news,” Ben said. “I should have figured you’d be in the middle of it.”

He picked up a magnifying glass from his desk and studied closer. “I know that tat on his shoulder: WR. It shows sympathy with a specific biker gang.” Ben turned to the open door to the back offices, yelled, “Wanda!”

A second later a heavy thirtyish woman with braided hair pushed her head through the door. She wore one of those formless dresses people wear when they don’t give a damn for fashion.

“Yo?”

He held up the shot and she stepped into the office. “This is Wanda Tenahoe,” Ben introduced. “She coordinates the info on biker gangs; a big job, but Wanda has a photographic memory.”

“It’s good,” Ms Tenahoe corrected in a bright, musical voice at odds with her first impression. “Not photographic. Let me take a peek.”

She studied the photo. Yanked her thumb for Ben to move from his desk so she could sit. She pecked keys, faces flying past on the monitor. I wondered if the SLDP had face-recognition software. They seemed to have everything else to gauge the whereabouts of people, not just in locale, but spanning decades.

The computer beeped and four photos unfolded on the screen.

“Here we go,” she said. “Your baby-snatcher’s name is Terry Lee Bailes. There’s not much on him because he wasn’t singled out for individual surveillance, meaning he’s not considered particularly dangerous.”

I looked at Harry, mouthed not dangerous?

“I’ve got a few photos of him peripheral to other investigations. Here they come.”

We leaned close to the monitor. In the first two pix, the man we now knew as Terry Lee Bailes was on a scruffy, dented Harley parked with a dozen other bikers outside a roadhouse. The third was the same bar, a different day, a few different participants.

“That’s the Southern Gladiators’ clubhouse over by Jackson,” Tenahoe said. “It’s a bar where a lot of the WR biker-types hang out.”

“WR?” Harry asked. “White something-or-other?”

“How’d you guess?” Tenahoe grinned. “White Riders. They’re a nasty lot. Not real organized, not real smart, but murderously mean and loving to prove it. They’re also allied with the Aryan Revolutionary Army, its security and enforcement wing.”

Something caught Harry’s eye. He leaned close to the photos, scanning between them. He pointed to something only he had seen.

“Look how their bikes are parked. The gang’s machines are lined up straight and so tight they’re almost touching, but here, five or six feet away, is Bailes’s bike. Both times.”

“He’s not part of the group,” I said, suddenly seeing it. “It’s subliminal. He couldn’t park his bike up close and personal to theirs. The physical distance reflects a psychological distance.”

Harry nodded. “He’s not fully accepted by the group.”

“Incredible observation,” Tenahoe said, staring at Harry with undisguised admiration.

The last shot was Bailes with two other guys, smoking and talking. One guy’s palm rested on Bailes’s shoulder, like they were buds.

“Who’s the guy with his hand on Bailes?” Harry asked.

“The guy the shots were meant to catch,” Tenahoe said. “Donnie Kirkson. He’s a low-life scuzzer who operated as a conduit between movers and shakers like Arnold Meltzer and the rank-and-file types like the White Riders. Kirkson’s nasty business: aggravated assault, breaking and entering, wanton endangerment, drug busts, sexual assaults. He’s not bright enough to be a chief, but he probably killed or kicked the shit out of someone Meltzer considered an enemy, so he moved up to the equivalent of middle management.”

“You said ‘operated’, past-tense,” Harry noted.

“Kirkson got caught having sex with a fifteen-year-old runaway. He befriended her, then loaded her with alcohol and dragged her to a motel for four days. Kirkson took a six-year prison fall. He went in last winter.”

I looked again at the spread of surreptitious photos, always amazed at the minutiae Ben and his people could garner.

“Anything else you need?” Ben asked.

I handed him the list of names Bailes had ranted at the camera.

“Lessee here,” Ben said, tapping the list. “You know Adolf, and you know 88 is Heil Hitler, right? The James is probably James Burmeister, who randomly executed two black people on the street. John is probably John King, who dragged a black man to death behind his truck –”

“I remember that,” Harry said. “The victim’s name was Byrd.”

“Right. Buford would be Buford Furrow, who opened fire on pre-schoolers at a Jewish community center. And Pastor Butler is Richard Butler, the founder of the Aryan Nation, a supposed man of God who proclaimed Hitler a prophet, Jews the descendants of Satan, and blacks as mud people.”

“So Terry Lee was giving a big ol’ shout-out to previous hatemongers?” I said, feeling sickened.

“A lot of these screwballs believe in Norse myths – the Aryan thing, right? – your boy Bailes was probably figuring he’ll get his name scribed on the walls of Valhalla, right beside Adolf, Buford, James and the rest of the glee club.”

Harry and I thanked Ben and Wanda Tenahoe and started to the door. Ben said, “Anything else you need, Carson, just ask. We’ve got decades of info on low-life scuzzballs, with more coming in every day. Plus a wide range of operatives, informants, and sympathizers who keep up on the whereabouts of the worst of the lot. Some of them, we can tell you what they had for supper last night. And what pizza company they called to deliver it.”

Harry stopped and turned. “You know when they make phone calls, Mr Belker?”

An uneasy smile from Ben. “We might have a sympathizer or two in the phone companies. Folks who slip us call records of certain nasty individuals. Unless that’s illegal, in which case this is all conjecture.”

“Must be conjecture,” Harry said, jamming his hands in his pockets and heading for the door. “Hell, I didn’t even hear it.”

Chapter 15

“That’s some network those folks have,” Harry said, putting the cruiser in gear.

“It’s been in place for years. Some of their operatives are dedicated enough to take heavy risks, like being undercover in dens of hate. And as Ben alluded, they’re not above edging around the law to get the job done.”

“Keeping tabs on white supremacists has got to be one of the stranger job descriptions. How’d Belker get into the gig?”

“You remember the twenty-year-old white guy who came down South in 1973 to register voters, unionize the factories – Thomas Belker? Ben is his boy.”

It was one more ugly act in a national history of ugly racial acts. After only a week of trying to unionize a paper mill in a small town on the Sippi-Bama border, Thomas Belker had been abducted and beaten severely. Like many of the attacks of the day, the perps were never found.

Though Belker had the fortune to survive, his wounds were crippling and constantly painful. He was an icon of the populist movement, the naïve but hopeful kid from New York City who went to the Deep South to fight the segregation and work abuses that had lingered into the seventies. Pete Seegar had written a song about Thomas Belker, and his name was invoked at civil rights commemorations.

“I remember the day it happened,” Harry said. “I was just a kid. When I got older, there was something in me that wanted to track down his address, say thanks. But then I’d wonder what I’d say, how I’d say it. And, of course, I never knew where to write.”

“Ben’s dad lives in Brooklyn,” I recalled. “Send a letter.”

“It’s a different time now,” Harry said quietly. “And I still wouldn’t know what to say.”

A little more checking revealed that Bailes had lived in a trailer on the southern side of Mobile. I expect the motor court had started out nice back in the fifties, but time and weather had taken a toll on some of the lots and units. Others were in decent shape with sculpted hedges and neat little lawns. I figured these were owner-occupied, the park a mix of owned and rented units.

Bailes’s trailer was a rental, not a surprise. I suspected it had been in place since the court opened, its lines blocky and tired-looking. It was green, which probably helped disguise the mildew, but not much. Paint isn’t generally fuzzy.

Harry and I walked rickety steps to the door and he slipped the lock in a five-count. The door bottom squealed across the warped floor, needing to be lifted to swing clear. We stepped inside to a smell that wrinkled our noses.

There were plates on the table with cigarettes stubbed out in unwashed food remains. Maybe Bailes hadn’t done the dishes because there was a motorcycle engine block in the sink. If there was a décor motif in the trailer, it was Empty Beer Bottles, the Miller Lite period. A secondary motif was Aryan: a “flag” made from a sheet and hand-painted with a black swastika, poorly, draped over a slumping couch. I figured it was a thematic venue for reading Mein Kampf. Except for the couch, it was all outdoor furniture, probably swiped from patios. The smells of smoke, beer, garbage and mildew fought, with garbage the easy winner until Harry set the overflowing can outside and we opened the windows.

I checked the cabinets, finding canned goods, packets of tuna, popcorn, a five-pound bag of instant mashed potatoes, all from cut-rate outlets. The fridge held beer and ketchup and a package of gray hot dogs. Harry took the bedroom, emerging after a five-minute toss.

“Nothing in there but a porn collection and white-power pamphlets and books.”

We found mountains of porn in our jobs. I used to regard the bulk of it with an ironic amusement, but the content had darkened and now there were widely available magazines and websites that made me avert my eyes and wonder if we were all the same species.

Harry got down on hands and knees to check under the couch. He rolled his eyes, muttered, “Oh shit.”

“What?”

He pulled out a mousetrap with a shriveled body dangling from the clamp.

“Looks fresher than the hot dogs,” I noted.

We finished up. Aside from the white-supremacist and biker trappings, Terry Lee Bailes remained a cipher. Stepping outside into clean air blowing up from the Gulf, I resisted the impulse to strip to my skivvies and let the sun burn away any vampiric bacteria from Terry Lee Bailes’s stinking trailer.

We heard the near rumble of motorcycle engines and saw a trio of bikers through a copse of cypresses acting as a windbreak between the trailer park and the road. They braked to turn into the park. I saw the advance biker look our way and shout behind him and the trio fired their engines and thundered away.

“Goddamn I hate them big motorscooters,” grumbled a voice at our backs.

We turned to see a tight, wiry guy in his seventies. Though small of frame, he had the shoulders and stature of a man who’d once been fit and hard, his carriage as erect as a fence pole. He wore pressed khakis and a white strap tee, a blurry blue anchor tattooed on a bicep. His hair was short and steel gray.

“You’re cops, right?” he said, narrowing an eye.

“As true as the day is long,” Harry said.

“Bailes in jail?” the guy said, looking hopeful.

“Bailes is in the morgue.”

For a split-second it seemed the old guy was about to clap his hands in glee. But maybe he was gonna play air accordion.

“Did you know Mr Bailes, sir?” Harry asked.

“Our biggest conversation came after he moved here few months back. Thought he was some big-ass Hell’s Angel or something, a tough guy. I worked as an oiler in the Merchant Marine since I was seventeen years old. I never gave anyone shit, but I never took any either, you know what I mean?”

“I expect I do.”

“He come a-roarin’ in here the first couple nights on that damn Harley, gunnin’ the engine outside my window so I couldn’t hear the tee-vee from two feet away. The third day I heard him coming and put my forty-five in my belt…I got a permit, you wanna see?”

“I’ll take your word, sir.”

“I jammed that hogleg in my pants and headed to the door. Bailes pulled up under my window. The sound was like a goddamn train wreck that kept going. When I stepped outside he put a finger in one nosehole and cleared out the other one on the ground. He gave me a shit-eating grin with that lopsided face and said, ‘Loud enough for you, Pops?’”

“Your reply, sir?” I asked, knowing it was going to be the highlight of my day.

“I pulled that pistol out and said, ‘Almost as loud as your screamin’s gonna be when I blow a hole through your leg and into the crankcase.’”

“Bailes’s response, sir?”

“From that day on he cut the engine when he got close, glided up between the trailers.” The old sailor shook his head. “Gutless little pissant.”