Paper Son, page 12
20
First thing in the morning—all right, it was seven, not six—I made hot black tea without a granule of sugar in it, phoned the Café Café in Oxford, and asked for Anna Rae Ferguson. A peppy, over-caffeinated young woman told me Anna Rae worked the ten to two shift, called me “baby doll,” and advised me to have a blessed day. I recommended the same to her, and hung up.
“Detect anything?” asked Pete, coming into the kitchen in khakis and a pink polo shirt. He opened a canister and began spooning grounds into a Mr. Coffee.
“Detected an appointment with Anna Rae Ferguson.”
“She know about it?”
“No.”
Pete nodded and measured water. Just as coffee aroma began to permeate the air, HB next door set up a wild barking. That turned out to be Bill, coming in through the kitchen. Pete stuck his head out and thanked the dog. I handed Bill a mug of coffee as he crossed the threshold.
“I look that bad?”
“No,” I said. He didn’t, either; his hair was wet from a shower, and he was freshly shaved. “It’s just, I know you won’t be able to make breakfast before you have your coffee.”
“I’m cooking?”
“I hear you make good omelets.”
While Pete showed Bill around the kitchen, I called Callie Leblanc. She was in early, as I suspected she would be, and not entirely thrilled to hear from me, as I suspected she wouldn’t be.
“You have something?” Hearing her clipped words, I could almost see her in her office, shoulder pushing her phone to her ear while she made notes in a file with one hand and tapped her keyboard with the other.
“Just a question. Does the sheriff have Jefferson’s laptop?”
A pause, papers rustling. “No. Is it important?”
“I don’t know. You’re sure?”
Breath hissed. “This office makes it a point to document the items clients are arrested with. And whatever evidence comes in later. Jefferson didn’t have a laptop in his possession. Since his arrest, deputies have searched the store, his apartment in Oxford, and his car. They’ve found nothing else that’s been entered in evidence.”
Which meant, I realized, no drugs. Be grateful for small favors.
“All right. Thanks.”
“Why are you asking about the laptop?”
“Nothing specific. But he has one, and you never—”
“If you find it, you’ll call me.”
This was not a question, so I just said, “Yes,” and then repeated, “Thanks,” because I had a feeling Callie Leblanc didn’t get thanked enough.
After breakfast, we drove to H. Tam and Sons. A sun stronger than yesterday’s brought colors and sharp shadows to the buildings and bare trees. The Clarksdale streets were wide, planted, and pleasant, but the cheerful morning sunshine made the empty storefronts and lack of bustle all the more obvious.
“Pete, what happened here? You can see this was a prosperous place. Why the decline?”
Pete tapped the window glass. “King Cotton. Used to be you needed labor, by which I mean actual folks, to plant your cotton, pick it, and bale it. All that’s mechanized now, starting forty, fifty years ago. No living to be made as a field hand anymore, so lots of folks left. That means no one to shop in the stores, so they close. Rich planters, they’re still here, running their million-dollar machinery up and down the rows. And people like me, who get our living elsewhere. But you’re trying to make a few dollars in Clarksdale—hell, anywhere in the Delta these days—it’s mighty hard.” He sighed. “You know, in some ways, this mechanized farming, it’s like that online gambling. What I mean is, what’s the point? I know, I know, the point is to make money. But what’s it for, you’re living by yourself in an empty world?”
“That’s pretty poetic there, Pete,” said Bill.
“Yeah, sorry. Poetry’s a hazard of the gambling trade.”
We pulled around the corner. “Look here,” I said. “There’s Henry an’ them.”
Pete laughed. Bill shook his head. “I’m warning you, it won’t end well.”
Henry stood as we parked and got out. “Heard there was some excitement here last night,” he said.
“A man can’t have secrets in this town, can he?”
“You know that’s right. Things okay inside?”
“If by okay you mean same mess as yesterday but not worse, yeah, I suppose so. Whoever they were, they didn’t get in. Pelton and them ran ’em off. Couldn’t tell us anything about them, though.”
Henry’s eyebrows went up. “You ask them? At the club?”
“Reception was a little chilly, but they did their best.”
“These two go over there, too?”
“They’re the detectives.”
Henry shook his head. “You full of surprises, Pete. Well, we here to help you clean up.”
Pete looked at the three men. “You and Bobby Lee, maybe. Sam’s here for his malt.”
“I clean up better with a malt,” said Sam Shoemaker, grinning his wide grin, rubbing a hand over his shiny head.
“Ain’t nothing you don’t do better with a malt,” grumbled Henry. “Though I can’t say as I ever seen you cleaned up.”
Pete disarmed the siren lock on the front door. Bill and I followed him in, and the others followed us, Sam propping the door open so fresh air could begin to herd out the ghosts of spilled coffee and stomped Cheetos. Pete flicked on the lights, crossed to a humming cooler, and threw a can of Colt 45 to Sam. “Anyone else?”
“Too early for me,” said Henry. Bobby Lee also shook his head. Henry leveled the coffee station and plugged it in. He grunted in satisfaction when the red light came on, and stepped back, searching the debris. Lifting an unbroken pot, he said, “Gonna make some coffee, you got no objection, Pete.”
“Why would I object? Knock yourself out. Running water at the sandwich counter. Y’all other layabouts, there’s garbage bags, brooms, what have you, over in that closet there. Bill, Lydia, you want to come in the back with me, see if we can find that computer?”
“What computer would that be?” Bobby Lee asked.
“Jefferson’s,” I said. “A laptop.”
“You think it’s here?” Sam asked.
“Wouldn’t be looking for it if we didn’t,” Pete said. “Sheriff doesn’t have it, so chances are Jefferson left it behind.”
Henry washed and filled the coffeepot while Sam grabbed work gloves from the closet. To the sound of rustling and clinking from the store, Bill, Pete, and I searched the back rooms where Leland had lived.
Pete had clearly made a point yesterday of picking up the papers that had carpeted the floor. After a fruitless laptop hunt through the living room—Bill had the kitchen and bathroom, Pete the bedrooms in the back—I took a break and lifted a faded advertising photo of the Great Wall.
“Pete?” I said in the direction of the bedroom door. “Have you ever been to China?”
“Me? Nah.” Pete straightened up from where he’d been bending at a dresser drawer. “None of us. Even Daddy, once he was here, he never went back. Sent for Paul and Mama when Paul was about three.”
“Paul was born in China? I didn’t know that.”
“Not surprising you didn’t, seeing as how until the day before yesterday you didn’t know us Delta kin existed. Yeah, Mama was pregnant when Daddy left China. Couple years later, Daddy’d been working in a store down in Merigold, had himself a stake, was fixing to open a place of his own. Sent for Mama and Paul. Then came the Great Flood.”
“Nineteen twenty-seven,” I said.
“I’d be impressed, I didn’t know who told you that yesterday.” Pete snorted, sounding just like my mother. “Towns wiped out, thousands of people in emergency-type tent camps. Malaria, typhus, nothing to eat but canned beans. Daddy didn’t want none of that, so he went up to Memphis soon as he could. Worked at some friend of a friend’s laundry. Mama and Paul stayed in San Francisco for a few months, then met him up in Memphis. By that time, the water was down. Some towns were just rubble, Merigold included, but Clarksdale was rebuilding. So they came here.” Pete looked around. “Kinda looks like the flood came back, ninety years later.”
His shoulders slumped, and again, as much to distract him from what we were seeing as anything else, I asked, “Did your daddy tell that story a lot, Pete?”
“Used to tell it all the time. Wanted us to remember how the flood interrupted his family reunion, put off his shopkeeping plans. And how even at that he was luckier than most, because so many people lost family, lost everything.” Pete looked at me. “Didn’t your folks do that? Tell their story, how they came over, so you wouldn’t lose it?”
“Yes. Except I know now that they left out the part about my grandfather the gambler.”
“Well, yeah. Some things, you don’t necessarily want folks to know. Look here, we aren’t finding this computer, are we?”
“Doesn’t look like we are,” Bill said, joining us from the kitchen. “Maybe we should leave it be, get on over to Oxford.”
“‘Leave it be’?” I repeated. “‘Get on over’? Never in all the years I’ve known you have I heard phrases like that coming out of your mouth.”
“I’m reverting to my roots.”
“I think a wise man once said, it won’t end well. Oh, wait, not a wise man, a wiseguy.”
“Mighty funny, little lady.”
Three could play at any game: I rolled my eyes.
As we walked back into the store, Henry was hauling a garbage bag out to the sidewalk. Sam was sweeping, and Bobby Lee, standing in a now-clear aisle, lifted cans and bags of undamaged goods onto the shelves.
“Wow,” I said. “It looks great in here.”
“Wouldn’t go that far,” said Pete. “Looks a lot better, though, I’ll give you that. I guess y’all aren’t as useless as I thought.”
“Yeah, we are,” said Bobby Lee. “For the most part. Find that computer?”
“No. Don’t suppose any of y’all did?”
“That happened, you’d’ve heard the news.”
“Maybe he left it up in Oxford,” Henry said.
“Don’t think so. He always brought it with him when he came.”
“Also,” said Bill, “deputies searched Jefferson’s apartment in Oxford and didn’t find it.”
“Local deputies, or Oxford men?”
“Local boys went up there,” said Pete.
“Well, then, what they found or didn’t find, it don’t mean much, do it?” Bobby Lee rubbed his chin. “Still.” He walked to the counter. “Pete, I got your permission?”
“To do what?”
“Mess with your register.”
“Nothing in it. Be my guest.”
Once behind the ornate old register, though, Bobby Lee didn’t press any of the keys. Instead, he squatted down and peered up under it, at the bottom of the counter it sat on. “Yee haw.” Reaching in, he jiggled something. He pulled out a sheet of quarter-inch plywood and laid it on the floor. Grunting, he stretched to reach farther, and when he straightened up, he handed Pete a silver MacBook Pro.
“Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit! Bobby Lee Smith, how’d you know where the damn thing was?”
“Didn’t.” Bobby Lee’s grin was wide. “But the shelf, that’s what I was counting on.”
“Why?” I asked.
Bobby Lee, still smiling, reached to catch a celebratory malt Sam Shoemaker threw him from the cooler. “When I was a kid, I worked after school in a dry-goods store in Greenville. Old Jew named Kreloff, his place. Mighty nice fella. Always give me snacks, Dr Pepper when I wanted. Bought me schoolbooks one year when times was bad. He have a shelf like that, kinda hollowed out from the counter under the register. Like a false bottom in a suitcase, you know?” He pointed to the plywood sheet. “Old man Kreloff keep his passport there, his important papers. His thinking, anyone break in, they gonna open the register. Maybe if they get into the house in back, they gonna go through the desk drawers. But no one’s gonna think about under the register. Under the counter next the register, sure, because there’s shopkeepers keep a sawed-off or a pistol there. But under the register itself, nah. Some of them other Jew shopkeepers, they seen old man Kreloff’s shelf and they done the same. So it occur to me, Pete, maybe your daddy, he mighta knowed some of them, shopkeeper to shopkeeper like. He coulda got the idea from them. Might be he built that shelf his own self.”
“Bobby Lee, I got to start holding you in higher regard. I grew up here, sometimes run the store for weeks on end, and I never knew the first thing about that shelf.”
“I wonder whether that was where Jefferson usually left his laptop?” I said. “To be safe.”
“Or,” Bill said, “if he hid it when he saw trouble coming.”
“Wouldn’t’ve had to be he saw trouble,” Henry said. “Jefferson gets his living with that thing. Your tools, you keep an eye on them. Couple of months ago, that friend of yours, Pete, wasn’t it something like this someone went off with?”
“Who? Oh, you mean Lucky Culligan?” Pete turned to me and Bill. “A gambler who calls himself ‘Lucky,’ how about that? Man’s just begging to be knocked off his perch.”
“Who’s he?” I asked.
“Fellow I know. His second ex-wife, or maybe it’s his third, lives around here, so he comes down sometimes. Nice enough, but always has some new bright idea. Not one of ’em worth a bar of soap after a week’s wash. Yeah, he was down middle of September. Had this new laptop, was gonna make a fortune with it, but for crying out loud, Jefferson had to show him how to use it. Jefferson liked doing that, too.”
Pete looked wistful, as though Jefferson’s enjoyment in teaching was something he wished he’d attended to before. “Anyways, just when Jefferson got him up and running on the thing, someone ran off with it. Well, nobody in Clarksdale didn’t know by then the thing was the key to Lucky’s fortune. Never could keep his mouth shut, Lucky.” Pete shook his head. “Lucky was real upset, too, you’re right, Henry. So maybe Jefferson, he had that in mind when he went and hid this.” Pete looked from me to Bill, and then at the silver rectangle in his hand. “Here, Lydia, you take this thing. I don’t even know how to open it.”
Belatedly, I thought about prints. “Put it on the counter, Pete,”
I said, and pulled a pair of latex gloves from my shoulder bag.
Watching me, Sam Shoemaker said, “Well, lah-di-dah!”
I winked at him.
Pete set the laptop on the counter, and I lifted its lid. When I turned it on, the familiar Apple chord rang out, but as I assumed he would, Jefferson had it password protected. I tried a few obvious things—his birthday, which Pete gave me; Clarksdale—with little expectation of success. And of success, I had none.
But I had an idea.
The number I needed was on my speed dial. Two rings, and then, “Cuz! Hi! Wassup, homegirl?” A hollow echo told me I was on speakerphone.
“Hi, Linus.”
“Hey, Lydia!” came another, more distant shout. Linus’s girlfriend and only employee, Trella, must be on the other side of the Queens garage that served as the home of Wong Security. “Want some coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”
“Can you live stream it here?”
“No, but we just got a new drone and Linus is dying to test it.”
“Yeah!” said Linus. “It’s totally bleeding-edge. Bet we could deliver coffee to Chinatown in twenty minutes and not spill a drop.”
“It would be still wasted. I’m in Mississippi.”
A pause. “Is that a new club?”
“No, it’s an old state.”
“Oh, wow. Mississippi, the South? For reals? What for?”
“A case. My mother sent me. And Bill, too. We’re both here.”
“You’re on drugs. Auntie Yong-Yun wouldn’t send you to the next room with Bill.”
“And yet, she did. We have cousins here, Linus. At least, I do. You only sort of do. They’re on my father’s side.”
“Now I know you’re on drugs.”
“The only drugs they have down here are meth, which may be part of the case, and iced tea with enough sugar to cause hallucinations.”
“Bring me some!” called Trella. She had a serious sweet tooth. Maybe I should introduce her to Pete.
“But,” I said, “what I do have is a laptop I can’t get into.”
“Oh, wow, the Bat Signal! Okay, Mighty Mouse is on the way!” I could hear Linus grin as he mixed his rodent metaphors. “What kind?”
“MacBook Air.”
I gave him the year and model and he gave me some things to try, but none of them worked.
“It’s owned by a serious geek, Linus. The cousin in question, Jefferson Tam.”
“That’ll make it more fun. But I think we may need to do it up close and personal.”
“I’ll send it to you.”
“Do they have the Pony Express down there?”
“We’ll find a way. Let me know when you get it. But Linus, use gloves, okay? In case there are prints. And once you’ve got everything on another drive, send this to be dusted.” Neither he nor Trella commented on my absolute faith in their hacking abilities. No disclaimer, no “We’ll try.” Everyone should have such cousins.
I gave him the name of the private forensics lab we use. “Tell them it’s for Bill Smith.”
“The name carries weight?”
“The name carries bourbon. Bill sends them a case at Christmas.”
When I thumbed the phone off, Bill asked, “He thinks he can do it?”
“I’m not sure he thinks we’re in Mississippi, or even that there is such a place as Mississippi, but the computer, yes, he thinks he can do it.”
At that point, we left Pete, the store, and the clean-up crew, took Jefferson’s computer with us, and got on over to Oxford.
21
Oxford came much closer than Clarksdale to fulfilling my Southern-town fantasies. No cicadas, no magnolia, no bougainvillea; after all, it was still winter. But brick houses with porches sat on tree-lined streets. A central square with two-story, arcaded, winking-light-strung shops surrounded a grassy island. On the island, a cupola-crowned courthouse was fronted by an angel-crowned Christmas tree.
