Looking for Rachel Wallace

“Files,” Cosgrove said, “I don’t need to show no stinking files, gringo.” He told me once that he’d seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre four times at a revival house in Cambridge.

“You don’t have any files?”

He shrugged. “Some, but the good stuff is up here, in the old coconut. And there ain’t nothing on RAM. Doesn’t matter. Groups start up and fold all the time, like sub sandwich shops. Or they change the name, or a group splinters off from another one. If I had done that series day before yesterday, I might not have heard of RAM, and they might be this week’s biggie. When I did the series, most of the dippos were focused on busing. All the mackerel-snappers were afraid of the niggers’ fucking their daughters, and the only thing they could think of to prevent that was to keep the niggers away from their daughters. Don’t seem to speak too highly of their daughters’ self-control, but anyway if you wanted to get a group started, then you went over to Southie and yelled nigger nigger.”

He pronounced it niggah.

“Isn’t that a technique that was developed regionally?”

“Ahhh, yes,” Cosgrove said. “Folks down home used to campaign for office on that issue, whilst you folks up north was just a tsk-tsking at us and sending in the feds. Fearful racism there was, in the South, in those days.”

“Didn’t I hear you were involved in freedom riding, voter registration, and Communist subversion in Mississippi some years back?”

“I had a northern granddaddy,” Cosgrove said. “Musta come through on a gene.”

“So where are all the people in this town who used to stand around chanting never and throwing rocks at children?”

Cosgrove said, “Most of them are saying, ‘Well, hardly ever.’ But I know what you’re after. Yeah, I’d say some of them, having found out that a lot of the niggers don’t want to fuck their daughters, are now sweating that the faggots will bugger their sons and are getting up a group to throw rocks at fairies.”

“Any special candidates?”

Cosgrove shrugged, “Aw, shit, I don’t know, buddy. You know as well as I do that the hub of any ultra-right- wing piece of business in this metropolitan area is Fix Farrell. For Christ’s sake, he’s probably anti-Eskimo.”

“Yeah, I know about Farrell, but I figure a guy like him wouldn’t involve himself in a thing like this.”

“ ‘Cause he’s on the city council?” Cosgrove said. “How the hell old are you?”

“I don’t argue he’s honest, I just argue he doesn’t need this kind of action. I figure a guy like him benefits from people like Rachel Wallace. Gives him someone to be against. Farrell wouldn’t want her kidnaped and her book suppressed. He’d want her around selling it at the top of her lungs so he could denounce her and promulgate plans to thwart her.”

Cosgrove tapped his teeth with the eraser end of a yellow pencil. “Not bad,” he said. “You probably got a pretty good picture of Fix at that.”

“You think he might have any thoughts on who I should look into?”

Cosgrove shook his head very quickly. “No soap. Farrell’s never going to rat on a possible vote—and anybody opposed to a gay feminist activist can’t be all bad in Fix’s book.”

“You think the RAM people would trust him?” I said.

“How the fuck would I know?” Cosgrove said. “Jesus, Spenser, you are a plugger, I’ll say that for you.”

“Hell of a bodyguard, too,” I said.

Cosgrove shrugged. “I’ll ask around; I’ll talk it up in the city room. I hear anything, I’ll give you a buzz.”

“Thank you,” I said, and left.

17

I knew a guy who was in the Ku Klux Klan. His name was Manfred Roy, and I had helped bust him once, when I was on the cops, for possession of pornographic materials. It was a while ago, when possession of pornographic materials was more serious business than it is now. And Manfred had weaseled on the guy he bought it from and the friends who were with him when he bought it, and we dropped the charges against him and his name never got in the papers. He lived with his mother, and she would have been disappointed in him if she had known. After I left the cops, I kept track of Manfred. How many people do you know that actually belong to the Ku Klux Klan? You find one, you don’t lose him.

Manfred was working that year cutting hair in a barbershop on the ground floor of the Park Square Building. He was a small guy, with white-blond hair in a crew cut. Under his barber coat he had on a plaid flannel shirt and chino pants and brown penny-loafers with a high shine. It wasn’t a trendy shop. The only razor cut you got was if somebody nicked you while they were shaving your neck.

I sat in the waiting chair and read the Globe. There was an article on the city council debate over a bond issue. I read the first paragraph because Wayne Cosgrove had a byline, but even loyalty flagged by paragraph two.

There were four barbers working. One of them, a fat guy with an Elvis Presley pompadour sprayed into rigid stillness, said, “Next?”

I said, “No thanks. I’ll wait for him,” and pointed at Manfred.

He was cutting the hair of a white-haired man. He glanced toward me and then back at the man and then realized who I was and peeked at me in the mirror. I winked at him, and he jerked his eyes back down at the white hair in front of him.

In five minutes he finished up with Whitey and it was my turn. I stepped to the chair. Manfred said, “I’m sorry, sir, it’s my lunch hour, perhaps another barber … ?”