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.
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