A burger joint was Hanson’s idea of fine dining. I got coffee, a cheeseburger, and fries. The coffee tasted as if a large animal had crapped in it, but the burger and fries had just the right amount of grease; you wrung out their paper wrappers, there was enough oil to satisfy a squeaky hinge.
Hanson said to Leonard, “You doing OK?”
“Not really,” Leonard said, “but another hundred years, things will get better. You didn’t just invite us to eat so you could cheer me up, did you? You got something on your mind?”
Hanson experimented with his coffee. His was good too – I could tell the way his upper lip quivered. He put the cup down and got out his cigar and put it in his mouth, talked around it. “I knew your uncle. He’d been down to the station.”
“For shooting my neighbors in the ass,” Leonard said.
“And he reported them a half-dozen times. We take them in, they get out, they start over. It’s like fighting back the Philistines with the jawbone of a hamster.”
“A game,” Leonard said.
“Yep,” Hanson said. “And there’s a nasty, persistent rumor that some of the cops take bribes.”
“Naw,” Leonard said. “Say it ain’t so.”
“All I got to say on the matter is I’m not one of them, and you damn well better believe it. As for your uncle, he fancied himself something of a policeman. You know about that?”
“I know he was a security guard. That he wanted to work in law enforcement. Wanted to be a detective. I remember he read a lot of true-crime magazines and books, read mysteries. Anything associated with crime. I know he tried to get a job on the police force, but by the time he tried he was too old, and before that, they weren’t gonna have no black man on the LaBorde cops.”
“Trust me,” Hanson said, “it ain’t no bed of roses now. We still got the legacy of Chief Calhoun.”
“As I remember,” I said, “in the late sixties the first Chief Calhoun gave his cops six feet of looped barbed wire with a wooden handle and told them to use it on some civil rights folks, a peaceful assembly downtown. He had his cops hit the protestors with the wire. Women and children. The town council was so broken up about it, they issued all the cops new batons and brought some martial arts guy in to show them how to use them. The batons left more legitimate marks.”
“That Calhoun was before my time,” Hanson said. “But his heritage lives on. Fact is, except for the rhetoric, chief we’ve got now, his son, makes the original Calhoun look like a liberal. I’m the only black on the police force, and it’s not because they want me. Calhoun sees me, his stomach hurts and his dick shrinks up. A nigger with a gun makes him nervous, makes him dream of white sheets and burning crosses. Worse, I’m a former city nigger, a concrete and neon jigaboo. Add insult to injury, I been here nearly ten years and I’m still an outsider, and last but not least, I’m a good cop.”
“And modest,” I said.
“That’s my most pronounced trait,” Hanson said.
“You didn’t invite us to lunch for this either,” Leonard said, “to tell us you knew my uncle and the department thinks you’re a nigger. You damn sure didn’t bring us here to tell us what a good cop you are.”
“I’m not sure I brought you here for any reason makes sense. I wanted to ask some more questions, kind’a.”
“The sphinx would make more sense than you do,” Leonard said. “You haven’t asked a question one.”
Hanson sipped the bad coffee without removing his cigar, said, “I don’t have any reason to doubt your uncle committed this murder.”
“Hey,” Leonard said, “thanks for the news flash. But I’m gonna tell you something. My first impression was same as everyone else’s. But I’ve thought on things some, and my uncle could be an asshole, but he didn’t kill any kid. I knew him better than that. There’s something else to all of this, I don’t care how it looks.”
Hanson shrugged and spread his hands. “Chester came to the station talking about child killings not so long ago. You know that?”
“No,” Leonard said. “What do you mean he talked about child killings?”
“What I’m saying, is there may be more murders, more bodies than this.”
“Didn’t think you were ripping up my flooring looking for nickels had fallen through the cracks,” Leonard said, “but you still haven’t answered my question.”
“And if he was murdering children,” I said, “why would he tell you?”
“Frankly, everyone thought he was nuts,” Hanson said. “I think he was too, toward the end there. As to why would he tell us? Throw us off. A cheap thrill. Or he was trying to prove what a good cop he could be. Uncover the murders, but not turn up the killer.”
“Which you think was him,” Leonard said.
Hanson shrugged again.
“A friend of ours thinks Chester may have had Alzheimer’s,” I said.
“Could be,” Hanson said. “But Chester said there were child murders, and now there are. One, at least.”
“Didn’t you guys check into what he said?” I said. “You do that sort of thing, don’t you?”
“When we’re not at the doughnut shop… All Chester said was there were child murders going on in the black neighborhood, and that no one outside of the neighborhood gave a damn.”
“Was he right?” I asked.
“There were reports over the years of missing children.”
“How many years,” I said.
“Ten at least. And according to the files all those cases had been looked into, but nothing had been solved. According to written remarks made by a couple of officers no longer on the force, they felt the parents had done the children in because they were too much trouble to care for, but they couldn’t prove it, and they didn’t give a damn. In fact, written at the bottom of one report was ‘One less nigger won’t hurt anything.’ That was just ten years ago. Civil rights is sinking in slow here. At least in the area of law enforcement.”
“There’s always a difference when a crime is a black crime,” Leonard said, “especially if it’s against another black and done in the black section. Black man killed a white, cops’d be on the case like hogs on corn. Listen here, Lieutenant, this lunch is scrumpdillyicious and all, but you’re trying to be too clever. You’re talking, but you’re not saying anything. You’re trying to see if I’ve got any strings you can play, aren’t you? Think maybe I’m holding something back, something could help your case?”
“Could be you’ve forgotten something,” Hanson said. “Could be you know something about him from the past might have something to do with now, the murders.”
“Knew anything, I’d tell you. Him being my uncle or not. Maybe ’cause he is my uncle. You don’t have to burger-and-coffee me to find things out. I told you about the keys, the coupons, the paperback of Dracula. Turned the skeleton in, didn’t I?”
“That’s what you’re doing?” I said to Hanson. “Trying to see if Leonard knows more than he’s told?”
“He ain’t hip,” Leonard said to Hanson. “He can’t see the signs they’re on his face.”
“Yeah, hip’s a problem,” Hanson said. “But you may not be so hip yourself, Leonard. I’m merely being polite here. Getting you away from that place, feeding your face and your partner’s too. I mean, I got a few questions, but they’re all routine.”
Leonard smiled at Hanson.
Hanson smiled back.
A couple of sharks trying to outflank one another.
Leonard said, “Why don’t you run your program by me one more time, and you can leave out the cryptic stuff that’s supposed to scare me, stuff where I’m supposed to think you know more than you know, so if I know more than I’m letting on, I’ll get scared and go all to pieces and spill the beans.”
Hanson said, “All right then. The bare bones. Your uncle said there were child murders. There was no evidence of that. Just evidence that over the years children had come up missing. It wasn’t a case I was familiar with. I gave the file notes on missing kids in the black section a once-over. It didn’t look good, but there wasn’t anything there to go on. What your uncle wanted was for us to give him a team, some men to work with, and he was going to solve the case.”
“He said that?” Leonard said.
“Said he and his associate would prove to us something was happening and who did it.”
“Who was his associate?” I asked.
