“I’m not a cop.”
“You’re a smart guy. You don’t think you can help the dumb crackers?” He smiled smugly at me. “Don’t you want show up us peckerwoods?”
“I can find out who killed him.” I didn’t know why I said that, except for the fact that I somehow believed I would be investigating my own murder. I wanted to know who would kill me.
“You didn’t think that man over there looked just like me?” I asked.
“You all look alike to me.”
I felt stupid for having set that one up.
“Stay around and show up the poor white folks,” he said.
“I think I will,” I said. “I’ve asked some friends to come here. They’ll help.” Truth was I didn’t know whether either of them would come, and I certainly didn’t know whether they would help or whether they could help. But I wanted someone to know that someone knew where I was. I was, in effect, trying to cover my ass, my tremendously exposed and vulnerable ass. My black ass. “Where’s this room that I can rent?”
“My house,” the Chief said.
The Chief’s house was a clapboard box set on cinder-block footings stuck far off the road in the center of a clearing of thin pines. The slow night drive there in his somewhat less foul-smelling police car was a bit nerve-racking. The idea of this white, rednecked, little southern town sheriff, or whatever he was, driving an unarmed, naïve, and solitary and stupid black man into the deep woods was unsettling at best, surreally terrifying at worst. The headlights panned across the yard and settled on the house. It was predictably dark, and it had the look of a man who lived alone.
“It ain’t much, but it’s paid for,” he said.
“How much for the room?” I asked. “We never talked about that.” I was afraid of what he might say. He knew that I had a thousand dollars on me. I wondered again if he knew about the rest of the money. Even if he wasn’t involved with the people trying to get my money, perhaps Scrunchy had told him on the phone about my business in Montgomery.
“You know the kind of money you’re carrying around is enough to get a boy killed,” he said.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
We walked into the front room. The Chief walked through the darkness to a standing lamp in the corner and switched it on. There was a saggy sofa, the original color of which was a mystery, and a matching stuffed chair. There was a rolltop desk under a window. There were no curtains on the windows. There were no rugs on the linoleum floor.
“You never told me how much the rent is.”
“You don’t have to pay me anything,” he said. “Have a seat.” He moved some magazines from the sofa, but I sat on the chair.
I sat.
“You want a drink?”
“I guess.” I was uncomfortable. I was especially uncomfortable with the fact that he was all of a sudden acting cordially. “What are we drinking?”
“Rye whiskey,” he said. He took a bottle from the desk and brought two glasses to the coffee table in front of me. He sat on the sofa, leaning forward. He poured the whiskey. “You like rye?”
“Never tried it,” I said.
He laughed. “Drink it slow.”
I sipped the drink. It burned my throat, but I didn’t gag or cough, thus surprising myself, and so I think I let go a little smile.
“Good, ain’t it?” he said.
On top of the desk was a dark lamp and a photograph. I stood and took the glass of whiskey with me. I was determined to nurse the three fingers he had poured for as long as possible. I walked over to the picture, looked at it without switching on the lamp. It was of a woman.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“My mama,” the Chief said. “She’s dead now.”
“Did she live with you here?”
His eyes narrowed. “No, she did not live with me here. Does this look like the kind of house a decent lady would live in?”
I looked around at the bare windows, the dingy walls. “This house isn’t so bad,” I lied.
He knocked back the rest of the whiskey in his glass and automatically poured himself another. “How you doin’?” he asked. “That’s enough whiskey for you, boy. Your judgment is already impaired.” He laughed.
“Maybe so,” I said. I sat back down.
“What do you do back there in Atlanta?”
“Nothing,” I said, quite honestly.
“How do you make your money?”
“Inheritance.”
“So, you’re rich.”
“You could say that.”
“Well,” the Chief said. “Around here, we’re poor, dirt poor.”
I nodded.
“You got a girlfriend?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
His curiosity was strange and a bit annoying. I watched his lids get heavy. “I don’t. Do you have a girlfriend?”
He laughed. I must have looked as if I were pitying him because he said, “No pity, now, boy. I don’t need your pity. Nosiree, I do not need your pity.” He poured himself another glass.
“Do you drink like this every night?” I asked.
“What if I do?”
I shrugged. “Expensive habit,” I said, pretty much because I could think of nothing else.
He knocked back that glass and glared at me before closing his eyes, either because he could no longer stand to look at me or because he couldn’t keep them open. I was trying to figure out where I was and why. I understood that I was in his house because he had more or less arranged it, but it was also clear that I was there because I was afraid to be anywhere else. I didn’t know whether he was aware of my hidden money. He certainly knew I had a thousand dollars, which seemed to be a fortune to most of the residents of Smuteye, though he seemed unimpressed enough. Certainly this man didn’t believe that I could help him solve a crime. However, I in part had chosen to remain because I needed to solve the murder; I believed somehow that the body I had seen in the freezer was my own. I sat there through the night as the dust and mustiness bothered my nose, the policeman’s snoring filled the room, the sick light from the lamp at once too harsh and too dim.
The morning came with my stupid ass still sitting in that same lumpy chair. Watching. Watching the red, puffy, snoring face of the Chief. Watching the rain. As soon as there was light, there was rain — a hard-driving rain with wind that bent the pines severely. While he continued to sleep I got up and walked into the kitchen. To my surprise, it was not the sty I expected. It was in fact spotless. The sink was extremely white and the short curtains above it were crisp, bright yellow, and pulled aside evenly. One cup and one saucer were left on the drying rack. I actually turned to look at the doorway to the living room to be sure I was still in the same house. It was so strangely clean that I felt uncomfortable and so returned to my chair.
“Storm,” the Chief said, waking, rubbing his eyes. He sat up and poured himself another drink. “You sleep?”
I shook my head. “What now?”
“You’re the one that wants to find a killer.”
“What do you know about me?” I asked. “I mean what did the bank man tell you about my business with him?”
“He just told me he remembered seeing you.”
I wanted to believe him. “He didn’t tell you what my business was?”
The Chief just looked at me.
“Do you think that dead man looks like me? And don’t give me that shit about how we all look alike.”
“A little.”
“A lot.”
“Okay,” he said. “A lot. What’s your point?”