Black Light

of hit men, had not worked. He realized now that sheer violence wasn’t the answer; stealth was. Cleverness, planning, nerve, execution.

Again, by God, underneath his melancholy and his acid distaste for Duane Peck, he was oddly happy. Swagger. This guy was brilliant. He was the best that Red had ever come against, smart and brave and calm and resourceful. If many guns couldn’t do it, what could?

Hmmmmm. Maybe one could. How else to kill a sniper but to snipe him?

In his orderly mind, he tried to list his advantages. First, though Swagger of course knew he was being hunted, he had no idea by whom or why, other than the general suspicion that it had something serious to do with issues of forty years ago which he was currently investigating. That gave Red the opportunity, really, for any kind of approach. And the more he thought, the more he realized that the key to today lay in yesterday. There had to be a way to put something before Swagger, something which beckoned him and which he could not deny, whose call he would answer even if he knew it might kill him. In that way, the cautious and wary man could be destroyed.

Red was in a curious state: he throbbed with creativity. He understood the shape, the values, the thrust of the project he was undertaking, he just did not yet know the details, the connections. Yet, really, the details could come later. It was the excitement of creation that overwhelmed him so.

He set to work. He had to understand everything about forty years ago. The past held the answers.

With that in mind, he went back into another room where an ancient wall safe lay. It held the treasures and secrets of his own father’s empire. He had a moment here of sentimentality, as his fingers touched the worn old knob of the dial. He knew his father’s fingers had touched it thousands of times. He thought of his father: that shrewd and disciplined man, self-taught and vast of insight, part tyrant, part genius, who came from nowhere. Really, that was the thing. The man came from nowhere. He was born dirt-poor and barefoot in a sharecropper’s shack in Polk County in 1916, amid appalling conditions of nutritional deprivation, impoverishment, brutality and the general coarseness of life in that station and that time. He had been beaten savagely, which is why he never beat his only son. He had been laughed at and called hillbilly and white trash by the quality, who secretly feared him, as they feared all long-boned, pale-eyed members of the rural proletariat.

Yet he’d come up to Fort Smith in 1930, a fourteen-year-old boy, on his own because he was smart enough to sec nothing could happen in Polk County and if there was a future, it lay in the city; he’d gotten a job as a numbers runner for Colonel Tyree, who ran the town then from a grand suite in the old Ward Hotel. It wasn’t a big job, a comer’s job, just a job running numbers for a criminal organization that would not mourn him for a second if he fell under the wheels of a train or was ground to pulp by the wagon teams that still dominated Garrison Street in those days.

But like the gift he passed on to his son, Red, Ray Bama had a talent for numbers, for lightning calculation, and understood that the secrets of the universe lay within. (None of Red’s own children had such a thing, but then, bless them, they didn’t need one.) He was wary and shrewd, and his rise was the classic American gangster’s, which mirrored the Horatio Alger myths of the larger population: that in crime, as in industry, the hardest, most tireless worker and the shrewdest, most able calculator ended up the winner. He went from running numbers to running pawnshops to shylocking to managing casinos and cribs to investing; there were always three or four layers between himself and his violence, though three times assassins attempted to nail him. He trafficked in flesh but did not partake of it; he lent money but never borrowed it; he sold drugs but never took them, nor allowed anybody around him to take them. He understood the dynamic of the separate black and white populations. Though he was, even at some remove, a killer, he never committed other crimes, which some would judge more harshly: he was not a racist and did business with black gangsters, eventually taking over their rackets, not out of fear but out of trust; he was not a psychopath, and only killed when it was necessary; he never killed families or siblings; he never killed indiscriminately; he never tortured or brutalized. He was the last thing a redneck pauper should have been, an honorable gang lord, a gentleman.

But of late Red had been thinking that there was more to his father than his professional triumphs. It wasn’t that he succeeded, eventually; it was that he had the imagination to conceive success in the first place and that the most precious gift he gave his only child wasn’t a business or an inheritance or a network of connection, though all were nice. No, it was his … whole life.

As Red drove the highways in his Mercedes, he’d sometimes see himself, but in overalls, weighted down by hopelessness, toothless and scrawny, destitute of self-belief. He’d think: Except for Dad, that could be me.

His father’s single bravest act had been to leave the country and reinvent himself as a city man. On the face of it, quite an accomplishment: no chums, nobody looking out for him, nobody easing the way, a scrawny poor- white-trash hillbilly from the remote Ouachitas, barefoot and unexposed to any kind of culture whatsoever, almost illiterate. Yet in a single generation, he was able to give his son a whole different world: a prep school education, four years at the University of Arkansas, exposure to ideas, possibilities, stimulations. His son never had to wake at four to slop the pigs or wake at five to bring in the wood to light the fire or work in the fields from dark till dark to chop enough cotton or plant enough corn so that the Man would leave a few kernels for the sharecropping family to live on. And his son’s children, they were so far removed from that they couldn’t even imagine it. To them, it was a bad movie called The Beverly Hillbillies, not funny at all, just about crude, backward, stupid trashy people.

I hope I’m up to you, old man, he thought. I will sure as hell try and be equal to your legacy.

Red’s father died in a bomb blast out front of Nancy’s in 1975; Red was working as a vice-president of what was then called Bama Trucking, Inc. His immediate response was not to mourn, but to prepare for the assault on his power, his position and his organization that inevitably followed the assassination of a boss. Yet, strangely, it never came, though some years later and some years after that, interlopers moved against him, both easily defeated.

Thus, the mystery of his father’s death became a prime obsession of his. He had spent over $200,000 on private investigation trying to solve the mystery. Why, when Lieutenant Will Jessop, the Fort Smith homicide dick who had been assigned the case, retired in ’88, Red put him on retainer ($50,000 per annum) to keep up the investigation privately. Red himself had used all his underworld contacts through a variety of subterfuges and come up, after all the time, effort and money, with nothing.

The problem with the case was simply that it yielded only one answer to cui bono. That is, Red himself. And he didn’t do it (though it had probably been said of him, he knew). Lacking a motive to sustain it, no other explanation made any sense. For example, no lieutenant of the organization benefited and no phone tap or private observation had yielded the slightest smattering of a clue; no out-of-towner gained anything from it. It could only be revenge for some long-ago act, but such deeds are usually messy and emotional, and this one had been accomplished with the most amazing efficiency, control and precision, the work of a true pro in the bomb business, suggesting access to higher levels of craft.

That’s what Lieutenant Jessop said too.

“Red, this boy knew what he was doing. This was the best goddamned bomb that anyone ever exploded in Arkansas, that I’ll tell you. He was a goddamned specialist.”

In time all investigations run down, and Red’s into his father’s death did itself after a hard decade and a half. Red finally gave it up and tried to make peace with the gaping hole in his life, the fact that whoever killed his father, for whatever reasons, had gone unpunished and was laughing even now.

I tried, Daddy, he’d think, when the bourbon got to him late at night and all the kids were down, and Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986 snoozed contentedly in her $500 peignoir, I tried so hard.

With that recalled melancholy heavy on his shoulders, he spun the dial and opened the old vault. The past was broken down by years in ledgers, long lines of figures recording inflow and outflow, all costs noted, all sums accounted for. Every third page or so was covered with notes of explanation. His father wrote in small, perfect hand, dispassionately recording details. In that way, in very short order, Red learned all there was to know—or all his father wanted known and recorded—about the last two weeks in the month of July 1955. He met remarkable people: a Frenchy Short, for one, and a young army first lieutenant at Camp Chaffee named Jack Preece, but others too, a whole slew of clever, fast operators, men of zeal and commitment. Jimmy Pye was there, as well as boss cons and screws from the Bama organization in the Sebastian County Jail. And of course, Earl Swagger was there, and as he examined what lay before him, Red saw the logic behind what he had taken on faith, and marveled at the