I put down my spoon and followed. “Hugh Britton called. Mr. Patterson has been shot. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”
“My gun is in the nightstand.”
“I know where your gun is.”
“Keep it close.”
“I’ll lock the doors.”
The hospital was just up the hill from our little brick house, and I ran all the way through the fine, heated summer night. The little windows of the postwar cottages on the gentle slope glowed with soft light, and in the tiny square yards children played and grimy men drank beer and worked on cars. Women sat on stoops and smoked cigarettes in hair curlers, and I ran by them all up a curved drive, past all the cars and a few ambulances, and into the dull, attic heat of the hospital lobby.
I found John Patterson speaking to two doctors with a large gathering of newsmen and photographers. They popped off flashes from their boxed Rolleiflex cameras, John’s face sweating and dull eyes vacant in the quick strobes of light. They asked him questions about his father and the rackets and the reputed Phenix City Machine and he didn’t answer them, unblinking in the quick strobes, until I grabbed his elbow and steered him into a hallway, where he just stared down the long vacuum of tile and linoleum and nurses and doctors in antiseptic white.
John hadn’t been back from the service long, a World War II combat veteran who’d served from Africa to Austria with France in between. He’d been briefly recalled to Korea but ended up with some legal work in Germany before returning home to partner with his father. He was a stocky guy with a heavy brow, the kind of man who’d rather be in a boat fishing than be involved in anything political. But John was a loyal man, loyal to his friends and his family, and I knew he’d spent the better part of the year dropping his practice to crisscross the state to campaign for his father.
They took him into a room in the emergency ward, never telling him a damn thing, where he found his father on a gurney, hidden under a white sheet. Sheriff Matthews was there with Chief Deputy Bert Fuller and the county solicitor, Arch Ferrell, and when John walked into the room you could only hear the
Sheriff Matthews sucked a tooth. Bert Fuller leaned against the wall and fanned himself with his cowboy hat. And Arch Ferrell rubbed his face, his finger trembling across his jaw.
Mr. Patterson lay there dressed in a brown suit with a bloody white shirt and blue tie. His mouth was open, teeth shot away, and blood spotted upon his face, his eyes open and staring into nothing particular, glazed and empty.
“I don’t want a goddamn hand on him,” John said. “I’m sending for Dr. Rehling in Opelika. He’ll do the autopsy. No one is to touch him.”
Matthews, Fuller, and Ferrell didn’t say a word. Fuller just looked to me and then back to John, fanning his face some more and then slipping his hat back on his head. I watched as John took a breath and then reached into his father’s pockets, taking his wallet and keys, and removed a wristwatch loudly clicking off the seconds.
I followed John out into the hall. He tucked his father’s belongings into his own pockets.
“Murphy, will you stay?”
I nodded, and he walked back to the lobby.
Soon Arch Ferrell came outside and he looked at me, dressed in my Texaco coveralls: “We’ll do everything we can.”
“Who’s gonna run this?”
“Sheriff Matthews and me, of course.”
A slight sheen shone across Arch’s forehead and upper lip. His breath smelled of cheap whiskey and cigarettes. Arch was the city’s war hero – one of the first into Normandy and one of the last out of Germany – and was known to tear up at the Foreign Legion post when they played the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Arch took a long breath. He knew me only from the service station and looked at the grease on my nails and across my uniform as he smoothed out the tie on his chest. He was shorter than me, with pointed features and large ears. The hair on the side of his head had been buzzed tight, the top curly and uncombed.
“I’ve got to get back to the scene,” he said. “The coroner will be here soon.”
“We’re waiting for the state.”
“This doesn’t involve the state. Mr. Patterson was one of our own and we will handle it here in town.”
“Nope,” I said. “No one goes in that room until the state examiner gets here.”
Arch shook his head with great disgust. “You RBA people won’t rest until you turn this whole thing into a goddamn clusterfuck.”
His right hand flexed and clinched. I didn’t say anything, just watched his face turn a bright crimson as he held his breath. “Y’all just want to be heroes,” Arch said. “But I think it’s a little too late for that.”
He turned and walked away.
I stayed there for hours, as everyone in town and every newsman in the state turned up at Homer C. Cobb Memorial. The flashbulbs were endless; twice, I had to stop newspapermen from entering the room with Mr. Patterson’s body.
Hugh Britton, who installed carpet by day but did counterintelligence for the RBA at night, stayed with me, not uttering a word, until the state medical examiner arrived. Later, we sat outside by the fountain, smoking cigarettes.
That’s when I saw John Patterson, wandering in and out of the cars parked along the hill. I found him, sweated through a casual yellow shirt, and he looked up to me from the hot asphalt as if seeing a man he’d never met.
“You okay?”
“I can’t find my car.”
He steadied himself against the hood of a red DeSoto Deluxe, finding purchase on the hood ornament, a likeness of DeSoto himself.
A Russell County sheriff’s car slowed, Bert Fuller leaning out the driver’s window and asking, “You need a ride?”
John nodded, stepping through Fuller’s headlights and climbing in the passenger’s seat. Fuller looked at me standing there and gave a slight grin before turning back to John and saying, “If I find the sonofabitch, I’ll bring him right to you. You got my word on that, partner.”
Fuller checked the tilt of his cowboy hat in the rearview before knocking the car in gear and moving out slow and steady down the hill.
THE FIRST LIGHT ON THE RIVER WASHED OVER THE CRIME scene and over the tired faces of men standing in that narrow shot of alley taking pictures and measuring Mr. Patterson’s last steps and answering newsmen’s questions and talking and talking. I hadn’t been home since the hospital, and I waited with Hugh Britton outside the ropes they’d set off to keep the gawkers back. John Patterson was there, talking to investigators who’d come down from Montgomery, and we were left with little to do in that early gray light but stand back and drink coffee and shake our heads and wait for John to tell us what to do next. Some Phenix City deputies waded through knee-deep kudzu at the far end of the alley, poking sticks into the green leaves and kicking around with their feet. Another man in a black suit finished up looking through Mr. Patterson’s car and then called out to a deputy, who opened up the rope and motioned for a wrecker to come on in and take the Olds away.
Cameras clicked and clicked, with an undeniable headline of DEATH CAR, the pocked glass on the driver’s window evident as the wrecker turned onto Fifth and into the weak light.
“Where they taking it?” Britton asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
I walked down the middle of the street – there was almost no traffic – and watched as the car turned slow down Fourteenth and then took a hard turn back behind the courthouse to the county jail.
By that time, Britton had caught up with me. He was a wiry, little gray-headed man, and he was out of breath standing by my side as I pointed behind the courthouse.
We walked around the edge of the big brick courthouse and looked down into the little cove surrounded by
