Colored Heat-Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six

                I left Sally Ann’s house shortly thereafter and already knew where I was going, even though I didn’t tell anyone.  I especially didn’t want to tell Sheriff Martin that I was going back to Peter Crane’s house, since I didn’t know if it was still considered a crime scene and someplace I shouldn’t set foot in.

                I drove over to Crane’s house and parked down the street.  It had gotten dark while I was at Sally Ann’s, and there was no one out on the street when I arrived.  I walked down the sidewalk and around the side of Crane’s house, then I stood in the shadows and watched the street for signs of movement, or for any lights going on in the houses nearby.  The house next door was shielded from view by a fence and by several pecan trees that had grown over it. 

All was quiet, so I snuck quietly up onto the front porch.  The front door was still unlocked and I walked right in.  My heart was racing as I closed the door behind me.  I had forgotten to bring a flashlight and it was pretty dark in there, though moonlight shone through the parlor windows.  I was hesitant about going upstairs, where I had found Crane the night before, so I decided to spend some time looking quietly about the first floor.

                I started by taking the first two framed photos off of the wall along the staircase.  I went into the parlor and sat under the biggest window, and the moonlight spilled over the photos so that I could see them just fine.

                The first photo, the one I had noticed most the night before, showed Crane and his wife in their youth.  He was in an Army uniform and she was in a dress of the times, with hat to match.  I studied it for a moment, mainly to memorize the faces just in case I saw them in a picture somewhere else.  Then I looked at the other framed photos, each in turn, taking in all of the details.  I saw other black men and women in two of them, and guessed that they were family members.  A young woman was, I assumed, Crane’s daughter who worked at the hospital.

                I hung all of the photos back up on the wall and looked around at the parlor.  The furnishings were old but well-preserved; I imagined that they hadn’t had much wear and tear in recent years.  There were knickknacks on little, dusty tables, and there were crosses and a Bible and religious pictures scattered about.

                I went through the dining room and the kitchen briefly but didn’t see anything that struck me as being helpful, so I walked through the darkness back to the stairs.  I didn’t relish the idea of going back up, but I went anyway.  I paused on the landing at the top of the stairs, then approached Crane’s bedroom, the first door on the right.  The curtains were drawn and it was very dark, so I went over and pulled them apart, slowly, just enough to let the moonlight filter in and cast oblique shadows around the room.

                There was a Bible on the small table next to the bed, and I flipped through it but didn’t find anything inside.  There were some random clothes and shoes shoved under the bed.  I opened a closet door and found some very old suits and hats and a pair of black shoes with a thick layer of dust covering them.  There was nothing in the old man’s room that would help me, and I was beginning to wonder why I was wasting my time searching his house.

                I went out into the hallway and looked to my right, toward the bathroom.  I had seen enough of that the night before to last me quite some time.  I walked the few steps down the hall to the remaining door and tried the knob again, but it was locked, as it had been the night before.  I stopped a moment to consider what I was doing and had a moment of uncertainty.  Yet I had come to this house where I knew I shouldn’t be, I had come in and searched a place where I would get in a lot of trouble if I were found.  I decided that I had come too far to stop at a little thing like a locked bedroom door, so I gave a hearty push and the lock gave and the door swung open.

                The room smelled sour and musty and unused.  It was as dark as the other bedroom, and I found my way over to the windows and pulled the curtains open enough to let me take a look around.  It was clearly a woman’s room, with a woman’s flowery touch evident in all of the decorations.  It hadn’t been occupied for ten years or more, judging from the style of the covers on the bed and the layer of dust that had settled on everything.

                It had to be Mrs. Crane’s room, the bedroom of Sally Ann’s Momma Hattie.  I imagined that she had died years before and her husband had closed up the room and stayed out of it ever since.  There were more framed photos on the wall, and I inspected each one, looking at a young, vibrant Mrs. Crane and her husband and daughter.  There was an old address book next to an old black telephone on a small telephone table in one corner of the room, and I flipped through its yellowed pages quickly and put it down.  I opened the closet door and saw dresses and hats and, on a shelf, a cardboard box.  That was what I had been looking for, and I pulled it out and over by the window.

                I sat down on the floor and opened the top of the box.  It had that musty smell of old, decaying paper, and inside were photographs and letters and old keepsakes that Mrs. Crane had kept over the years.  Something made me go over to the telephone table and get the address book as well, which I put on the floor next to me.

                The moonlight filtering through the window cast strange shadows around the room as I began to look through Hattie Crane’s memory box.  There was a packet of letters tied together with ribbon.  I undid the ribbon and some fragments of paper floated to the floor.  I carefully unfolded the batch of letters and began to read the first one.  It was dated “June 2, 1932,” and written to “My dear Peter.”  It was a love letter, formal and romantic in the way we no longer write, with plenty of misspelled words and bad grammar.  It had lots of heart, though.

                I paged through the next few letters, and saw that she had kept occasional ones from the following years, presumably during the time of their courtship and engagement.  The letters ended in 1936, when I suppose she and her husband were wed and they no longer needed to write to each other.  I folded the papers back up, tied the ribbon back around them, and put them gently next to the box.  Next I found some souvenirs from the 1930s and early 1940s, all pre-war stuff.  There was a newspaper clipping about Paul Robeson.  There was a church flyer about a recital.  The papers were all old and quite brittle.

                Then I found a stack of black and white photographs, about three by five inches, with jagged white borders.  And, about halfway through the photos, I knew I had found something.  It was a picture of two men, both laughing, standing in front of a building that looked like it could be the original Oak Street Bakery.  One of the men was black, and a quick look at the other photos told me it was definitely not Peter Crane.  The other man was white, and his facial features and build were amazingly familiar to me.  He was a dead ringer for Lester Macaboo III, and I was certain it was Lester Sr.

                The two men were standing next to each other in front of the bakery, and the white man’s clothes were of the style they used to wear in the late 1940s--baggy tweed pants and a wide, short tie.  The black man was dressed in work clothes that looked like coveralls.  The men were not touching, but they were surely sharing a joke.  The hands of the white man were fuzzy, as if he had been moving them around when the photo was taken.  It had every indication of a picture taken quickly, without preparation or thought.  It was certainly not posed.

                I studied this photo for a few moments, then put it on the floor in a pile of its own.  The rest of the photos were family shots of the Cranes and their daughter; though I looked carefully, I did not see another picture of the black man in the photo.  I put everything back in the box and placed it back in the closet, saving the single photo for myself.  I was about to leave, satisfied at what I had found, when I noticed the address book I had placed on the floor next to me.

                I opened it up and flipped to the page marked “M,” wondering if I’d find an entry for “Macaboo.”  There was none.  I paged through the rest of the book but didn’t see anything of interest till I got to the back.  On a small scrap of paper was written the initials, “F.T.,” and a five-digit number.  I put this and the photograph in my back pocket, closed the curtains, and left the room.  I closed the door carefully to make it less obvious that I had broken in, and went back downstairs.

                I checked around quickly to see that I hadn’t disturbed anything too much, then I closed the parlor curtains and let myself out the front door, closing it behind me.  I stood in the shadows on the porch for a few moments,  growing accustomed to the night and making sure no one was around.  I walked back to my car without being seen and drove home.

Colored Heat-Chapter 25

Chapter Twenty-Five

                It was almost seven by the time I got to the police station and, as I had suspected, the sheriff had gone home for the night.  Lucas let me use the phone at the front desk to call Sally Ann’s house, and she answered.  She told me to come right over, since they had just finished dinner.  She sounded glad to hear from me.

                I drove over to Bowie Lane and parked in front in my usual place on the street.  Sally Ann was waiting just inside the screen door as I bounded up the front porch steps.  “Hi, Carey,” she said, and let me in.

                “Hi, Sally,” I said.  “Is he here?”

        “Yes, he’s still in the kitchen.”

                At that, Sheriff Martin came out of the back of the house into the living room, buttoning his shirt cuffs and looking as if he had just finished a good meal.  I could hear Mrs. Martin running water in the kitchen to do the dishes.  He shook my hand and told me to sit on the sofa.  “How goes the investigation, Carey?” he said.  “I’m afraid I haven’t come up with much of anything today.  There was some trouble over on South 11th Street that called me out of the office.”

        “Anything important?” I asked.

                “No, not really,” he replied.  “Just a fistfight.  Couple of guys arguing over a girl.  Heat gets to people sometimes.”

                “It gets to me most of the time,” I said, and we all laughed.

                Sally Ann went to the kitchen to fix me a glass of iced tea.  When she came back I took a sip and told the sheriff what had just happened.  “Lester Macaboo III,” he said, not smiling now.  “I’ve known that boy all his life.  His daddy’s oldest son, supposed to be his pride and joy.  He wasn’t always all they wanted him to be, though.”

        “What do you mean?” I asked.

                “Well, he didn’t do all that well in school,” he began, and while that isn’t always a requirement for a successful businessman, there was more.  He got into some trouble at the college, as I recall, though I wasn’t on the case that time.”

                “What sort of trouble?”

                “I believe they call it a Peeping Tom,” he said, and both he and Sally Ann burst into laughter.  “He was in one of the fraternities up there and I suppose they got involved in looking through some windows at a girls’ sorority.  I don’t know if Lester was unlucky, dumb, or just more interested than anyone else, but he was caught sneaking around in the bushes outside one of the girl’s windows.”

        “What happened to him?” I asked.

                “What usually happens to people from rich families,” he replied.  “Nothing.  I think the police called Lester Jr., who pulled some strings and kept it quiet.  I don’t believe Lester III got in any trouble at all.”

                “He never does,” added Sally Ann.  “I’ve heard that he was a pretty wild driver in his younger days, but he never had his license taken away.”

                “That’s true, but he’s lucky that all of his trouble was on county roads,” said Sheriff Martin.  “I’m not sure he would have been so lucky within the town limits.”

                “That so,” I said, starting to wonder if Lester Macaboo III and his family were above the rules.

                “Well,” said the sheriff, “I’d like to think so.  However, as you can imagine, if I ever tried to cross Lester Jr. I’d have to have some pretty strong backing.  He gives plenty of money to the campaigns when election time rolls around, from the city council right up to the President.”

                “The last President was here once, at the Macaboo house,” Sally Ann said.

        “You’re kidding,” I replied.

                “Nope,” she said.  “It was the biggest thing in town a couple of years back.  Remember, Daddy?”

                “How could I forget.  My entire staff had to keep an eye on them, and every county cop and more came to town that day.  I don’t know what all the fuss was about.”

                “So the Macaboos are more than just big fish in a small pond,” I said.

                “You might say.  Have you ever heard of the different levels of rich?” the sheriff asked me.

        “No,” I said.

        “There’s rich, very rich, and Texas rich,” he told me.   “And the Macaboos are Texas rich.”

                I thought about that for a moment.  “You know, Sheriff, I have a funny feeling that the Macaboos are somehow mixed up in what happened here on Juneteenth.”

                He looked at me seriously for a few seconds, then said: “What’re you saying?”

                “I haven’t got it all figured out in my head yet,” I said, but I think it’s like this.  Something happened here in Ransom a long time ago.  It had to do with the black workers at the Oak Street Bakery and Lester Macaboo Sr.”

        “Lester Sr.?” said Sally Ann.”

                “Yeah,” I replied.  “Like I said, it was a long time ago.  Anyway, something happened, but I don’t know what.  It was a big deal for a while and then it was settled.   I think that something happened recently to stir it up.  I don’t know what yet, but it has something to do with the bakery again, and the Macaboos, and Raymond Mackenzie.”

                “Whew,” said Sheriff Martin.  “That’s a lot of speculation.”

        “You’re right, but I think I’m onto something.”

        “Go on,” he said.

                “Whatever happened with Raymond is somehow connected to Lulabelle’s getting shot at the parade,” I said.  “I don’t know why she was killed but it has something to do with Raymond.  And do you know what else?”

        “What?” he said.

                “Whoever came into my grandmother’s apartment and turned off her oxygen was looking for something.”

        “How do you know?” asked Sally Ann.

                “I found a closet door slightly open and some things moved around in the closet.  I think they were looking through a box of old photographs.  I don’t know if they found what they were looking for or not.”

                Sally Ann looked surprised.  “When did this come up?” she asked me.

        “Just now,” I said.

                “So why didn’t you notice it before?” Sheriff Martin said.

                “I haven’t been in her apartment very much the last couple of days, and when I was I wasn’t thinking.  It just hit me a little while ago, after Lester left.”

                The sheriff looked pensive and we were all quiet for a moment.  Then he spoke.  “You’d better be careful, Carey.  The Macaboos may be down-home folks and they may be your cousins, but they’re powerful people.  I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

                “Neither would I,” Sally Ann said, perhaps a little too quickly.  She looked embarrassed, so I smiled at her.

“Don’t worry about me,” I told them.  “I won’t do anything stupid.”  I then proceeded to doing something

very stupid--I went off again detecting on my own and found something that would lead me to the killer, though

I had a little more work and a little more traveling to do before I came to the end of the story.

Colored Heat-Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four

                I got back to her apartment at six o’clock on the nose and, much to my surprise, Lester Macaboo III’s car was parked in front.  His Cadillac stood out on the street and I thought I saw more than one curtain pulled aside across the street, with aged eyes peering out.

                I pulled up behind him, parked, and got out.  He must have been watching me because he got out right after I did and shut the door.

                “Hi, Lester,” I said.  “How’ve you been?”  His face was dark with anger.

                “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked me.

                “What are you talking about?”

                “You’re no cop and you’re no private eye either.  Why don’t you get yourself back to New Jersey and leave this town alone?”

                I was nervous and my voice was a little shaky, but I stood my ground.  “I have as much right to be here as anyone.  My grandmother is in the hospital, for one thing, and for that reason alone I’m not going anywhere.  What do you care?”

                Suddenly, he smiled, like he was running for mayor.  “Let’s not talk like this out here in the street,” he said.  “Why don’t we go inside?”

                I agreed, and led him into my grandmother’s apartment.  I sat on the couch and he sat in the easy chair, his large frame barely fitting.  He crossed one long leg over the other and spoke once again.

                “I understand you’ve been looking around, talking to people.”

                “Where did you hear that?”

                “What do you care?” he said, making fun of me.  “I have a lot of friends in this town.  People tell me things.  It’s pretty hard for a stranger to come in and make as much noise as you’ve been making and not get noticed.”  He paused for a second.  “Sheriff’s daughter’s pretty cute, isn’t she,” he said, looking at his boot as he rotated his toes in a small circle in the air.

                It was my turn to get angry.  “What the hell business is it of yours if I’m seeing Sally Ann Martin?” I said.

“Who asked you for your opinion?”

                He just smiled at me, the way a parent smiles at a petulant child.  “Now simmer down, Carey.  I didn’t mean anything by it.  Just making an observation, that’s all.”  He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in the chair.  “How’s Mary?” he asked.

                I calmed down, too, at the thought of my grandmother’s improvement in the hospital.  “She’s doing better, thanks.  I think she’ll be able to come home this weekend.”

                “That’s good.  My advice to you would be to see that you take good care of her and stop fooling around in places where you don’t belong,” he said.

                I decided that the battle wasn’t worth fighting, at least not just then.  But I didn’t want to let him get away completely clean.  “I was over to see Aunt Millie this afternoon,” I said as he got up from his chair.

        “I know,” he told me.

                “She said something strange.  It was about some problem with the blacks at the bakery a long time ago.  Do you know anything about that?”

                “Momma Millie’s an old woman, Carey,” he said.  “She recollects things that never happened and sometimes she can’t recall what she had for breakfast.  Don’t put much stock in what she tells you.  It’s no great mystery.”

                “Okay,” I said.  I didn’t pursue it with him and he left, but I figured that if he denied it there must be some truth to it.  Aunt Millie can be pretty lucid for an elderly woman, and besides, it was all I had to go on.

                I closed the front door after him and headed through my grandmother’s bedroom toward the bathroom.  As I walked through the bathroom door I stopped short.  Something had caught my eye as I passed.  My grandmother’s closet had sliding wooden doors, and one of them was partially open.  I didn’t remember it being that way before.

                I went over and slid it the whole way open.  The clothes inside were pushed toward the middle of the rack where they were hanging, and her personal effects were moved around.  There was an old cardboard box of photos that had been pulled out and put back quickly.  The top was open.

                I pulled the box out of the closet and put it on her bed.  Inside were a couple of books of old photos, as well as some yellowed envelopes with loose photographs inside.  They were pictures of me, my mother, and various family members.  The books held photos of my grandmother in happier, healthier days, with her father at the old farm.  The loose pictures were even more interesting.  They were black and white and appeared to be from the turn of the century.  Some were from my great-grandfather’s wedding party, showing men in top hats escorting elaborately dressed ladies over wooden platform sidewalks.  One showed them sitting in a Model T.

                None of the photos looked to have been tampered with, but they had certainly been glanced at or better.  By whom?  And why?  And, more importantly, when?  I wondered if this could have happened when my grandmother’s air had been turned off--I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed the closet door’s being open a little bit in all the confusion.

As I stood there, I became certain that that’s exactly what had happened.  Someone had come in looking for

something, and had tried to put my grandmother out of commission while they were looking.  Did they mean to

kill her?  I didn’t know, but I was mad about the whole idea.  And what were they looking for?  I had my suspicions about who it was and what was going on, but I needed more professional help to put the pieces all together.  That’s why I locked up and drove back to the police station to see if Sheriff Martin was still around.

Colored Heat-Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-Three

                I had spent enough time away from my grandmother and headed back to the hospital to check up on her.  By now, I was familiar with the area and I parked with ease and walked right in and up to the ICU.  The lady at the front desk smiled and said hello; I was glad to see that people were starting to recognize me.

                My grandmother was awake when I arrived; with the head of her bed cranked up, she was watching television.

“Hi, baby!” she said with a smile.  Her wrinkled face lit up when I came in and I gave her a hug.  She was looking better and regaining her strength and color.  “They tell me I may be able to go home tomorrow if everything goes right,” she told me.

                “Great!” I replied.  “Is there anything I can bring you?” I asked.

                “No,” she said.  “Just yourself every once in a while to keep my spirits up.”  I laughed.

                I sat there for about half an hour, alternately talking to her and just keeping her company and holding her hand.  Finally, she asked me if anything more had happened with Peter Crane.  I told her about my trip to the police station and the library.

                “You got me recallin’ things I ain’t thought about in years, baby,” she said.  “I was rememberin’ high school, and Daddy, and who knows what all.  Thought I might be dyin’ at one point, with all those memories floodin’ through, but then I realized it was just our conversation got me to thinkin’.”

                “You know,” I said, “there’s something funny going on with the bakery.”

        “What kind of funny?” she asked me.

                “I don’t know.  Somehow or other, everything is connected with the bakery at one point or another.  Lulabelle’s brother Raymond works there and is missing, and every time I look into it the bakery seems to be there somehow.”

        “What do you think that means?” she asked.

                “I wish I knew.  I’ve been thinking about something Aunt Millie said to me this morning, though.  She said that something happened a long time ago.”

        “Hm,” she said.

                “She said it had to do with Lester Sr. and some blacks and that it was a big deal for a time but then quieted down.”

                “And you think that has anything to do with what’s going on now?”

        “I don’t know.  I don’t have much else to go on, do I?”

                “No, guess you don’t,” she laughed.  Just then, a nurse came in with her dinner tray, and she told me to head home and let her eat in peace.  I told her I’d check things out at her apartment and make sure it was all set for her big homecoming the next day.

        “If I make it,” she added.

        “You will,” I told her.

Colored Heat-Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two

                The library was a small brick building that had been built at about the same time as the new Oak Street Bakery.  It was on Locust Street, on the corner of 11th Street, and it looked very serene with its green lawn and pecan trees and American flag hanging in the stillness of the late June afternoon.

                I remembered coming to the library during summer vacations as a teenager and sitting in its big chairs, enjoying the frigid air conditioning and reading detective novels while my grandmother was at work at the nursing home.  I parked in its well-kept parking lot and entered through the glass doors, and the air conditioning was as cold as I remembered it.  I walked in and looked around to get my bearings--nothing had changed.  The checkout desk was still on the right as I walked in, the water fountain on the left, next to a wooden bench.  The stacks were around the perimeter of the library proper, and chairs and desks were scattered in the middle of the big room.  There were a few young people there that Friday afternoon, as well as a couple of retirees reading the paper, but it was not crowded and it was as quiet as a cemetery.

                I approached the card catalogue and looked up the Oak Street Bakery, but I didn’t find anything, so I went up to the front desk and asked the librarian where I could find the section on local history.

                She was probably about thirty five years old, which made her look rather old to me at the time.  Her hair was up in a librarian’s bun and she wore glasses and no makeup that I could see.  Her nametag identified her as “Miss Doe,” and I wondered if her first name was Jane, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask.

                She pointed me in the right direction and soon I was looking at a small shelf of books about Carollo County history.  I picked up two of them and went over to an empty table, sat down, and began to scan their pages.  I passed quickly over the pages about the settlement of the county in the early and mid nineteenth century and moved onto the oil boom of the early twentieth.  There was no index, presumably because it was a labor of love and the author didn’t think anyone would need one.

                There were pictures, but I didn’t see any of the Oak Street Bakery or Lester Macaboo, its founder.  I was luckier with the second book.  It mentioned the bakery in a section on successful businesses, but it didn’t say anything of use.  I decided to check the newspapers.

                Another trip to see the librarian and I was in possession of two rolls of microfilm, covering the Ransom Daily Record from its inception in 1922 to 1950.  I sat down at the microfilm machine and turned it on, threading the first roll and forwarding to an early issue.  I learned that the paper was a weekly at that time and that it was short--about twelve pages on the average.

                I enjoyed looking at those old papers for awhile, and sadly there was no index.  That would have to be quite a project for some ambitious smalltown librarian to undertake one day.  I scanned through that roll and put on the other one.  I found that the paper was not published in the war years from 1942 to 1944, but that it came back to life in 1945.  I reached the end of the roll without finding out anything about the bakery, but I admit I didn’t read every page.

I went up to the desk and exchanged those two rolls for the next two, which covered the years from 1950 to 1955.  The paper became a daily in 1954, and the task became more tedious.  Finally, I gave up and decided to ask the librarian if she knew about when the bakery was rebuilt.  Surprisingly, she knew a lot about the subject.

                “Why, sure I know about that,” she said.  “It’s one of the most successful businesses in town.  I wouldn’t be much of a librarian if I didn’t keep up on local history, now would I?”  She smiled and her face lit up and she wasn’t so dowdy after all.

                “There’s a file on local things over in the miscellaneous files.  I’ll show you.”  I followed her over to a large file cabinet, and she pulled out a folder chock full of old pamphlets and newspaper clippings.  “Here, look through these.  If you don’t find what you’re looking for we can look somewhere else.”  I was getting to like Miss Doe. 

                In the folder I found an article from the Daily Record with a big color picture of Lester Macaboo Jr. standing proudly in front of the newly-dedicated Oak Street Bakery.  The date was August 14, 1965.  The article told me that the bakery had officially opened for business the day before and was expected to be more successful than ever.

Further down in the article it got into the bakery’s history and how it dovetailed with the Macaboo fortune.

Here’s what it said:

The Oak Street Bakery was founded by Mr. Macaboo’s father, the late Lester Macaboo Sr., in 1946.  It began as a small bakery on Fourteenth Street and quickly rose to the top of its field.  Patrons in those days included the late Mayor Tompkins and Mrs. Chapman, among others.

The bakery prospered in the 1950s and began selling pecan pies through the mail in 1958, making it one of the early success stories in the mail order business in the United States.  Business grew so quickly in the last few years that when the late Mr. Macaboo died, his son began planning expansion into a new building.  That building is now a reality.

                That told me a little more about the bakery itself.  Another article, clearly from the society pages, told me about the Macaboo family itself.  This article was from June 19, 1962, and reported a party held for the tenth wedding anniversary of Lester Macaboo Jr. and his wife, Marilee.  The party was held at the Ransom Hotel ballroom and seems to have been quite a show.  The Macaboos were feted by Lester Sr., who must have died soon after, and it was clear that they were the toast of town society.  I also suspected that the status was rather new, comparing the tone of this article to the description of the bakery when it had first opened in 1946.

                Yet I didn’t learn anything that jumped right out at me, nothing that would help me with the mystery I was trying to solve.  I sat there for awhile, flipping through the articles, but I got impatient and put them back.  There was something nagging at my brain, something I had forgotten that was important, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.  I thanked Miss Doe and left the library.