delusions. “Hurt?”
“Who?”
“They’re dead.”
“Who?”
“Eddie and them.”
“Mary?”
“She dead.”
“What happened?”
“The car is dark at the bottom of a lake. I see them coming but I can’t move. My feet stuck down deep.”
I folded my hands and covered my mouth and nose. My head pounded from lack of sleep and a bad need for a cup of coffee. I felt blurry.
Then he started. He did it right here. The song. Right in the dead center of a nut-house exercise yard, he started performing. The voice was cracked but clear in its warped, weathered perfection. Almost as if it had been aging for decades for this one moment. The words were sung low and heated and with emotion. But his face was completely impassive. Fucking “Dark End of the Street” in a nut house. The world was upside down and I was excited and nauseated at the same time.
“They’re gonna find us,” he said. “They’re gonna find us, Lord, some day, you and me, at the dark end of the street.”
I waited for him to trail off into that twirling, dripping line of emotion about you and me as if that heartache of not being together in the daylight would last forever. But he didn’t. He left it there like the last words of a funky poem. A question mark. A structure too cool to be messed with.
“What happened?” I asked for the twentieth time. I wanted to take in the whole moment and savor it and write about it and let everyone in the world know that I’d heard Clyde James sing “Dark End” one fall morning in Memphis. But I couldn’t. I had gone too far from caring about moments and music and poetry and finding beauty in a crazy old man clinging to the one song that made him immortal.
I wanted to find out how he got hooked up with the Dixie Mafia. The sky began to turn purple and black and clouds streaked by in loose, torn colors.
“Who killed them, Clyde?”
He looked at me and smiled. A loose, goofy-old-man smile. His hands outstretched like a circus clown apologizing for dropping the oranges he was juggling. “Don’t you see? We all did.”
“Bobby Lee Cook?”
His eyes squinted at me and then stared back into the dark space filled with rusted machines that didn’t work.
“Let’s go,” U said. “That night messed him up something terrible.”
I didn’t move.
“I got a buddy who can get us the case file,” U said. “It’s all we can do.”
I looked at Clyde James as I stood. I cupped my hand around his shoulder, but I didn’t want to build a connection anymore. I think I just wanted to pass on some of Loretta’s love. I patted his back and gave him a smile that only confused him as he continued to hum his song.
Gooseflesh raised on the back of my neck as we walked away. I heard him speaking, not to me, but to the air. To anything that listened.
“All I am is a voice,” he said. “Lost in a dream.”
Chapter 52
The phrase public record is misleading. Most people think it means they have access to all the governmental information they want, anytime they want it. The truth is that the “all” part of the statement varies from state to state – mainly watered down to “some” – and the “anytime” means when they get around to it. Last year, I was helping a fellow tracker look for a death certificate on legendary bluesman Blind Blake in Atlanta and ran into a mighty long clusterfuck. He had the theory that Blake had died somewhere in south Georgia after being hit by a streetcar in the ‘twenties and that ole Blake’s death would show up somewhere in state records. My written request was never answered. My phone calls were greeted by polite paper sluggers, but no answers were ever given. A trip to Georgia confirmed that no one had even looked for the damned thing.
That’s the way it works. Most of the time you have to go to the office yourself. You have to be polite to those paper sluggers and, if you are lucky, they’ll crawl down into the cave or depths of hell or wherever those physical records are stored, and bring you back an answer. I’ve had tons of academics spin these great tales about conspiracies behind public records and how bureaucrats want to keep everything secret. Most of the time that’s bullshit. When searching for old files, your biggest enemy is apathy.
As I waited down at Davis Bail Bonds on Poplar, I hoped Ulysses was having luck getting what we needed released. I picked at a paper container of health food he’d bought for me. Some tofu squares in brown rice, broccoli, and cooked carrots. I hunted for a bottle of Crystal. Maybe some pepper. Nothing.
It was about 2:00 P.M. when he finally got back. He slid out of his leather coat, hung it on a mahogany rack, and turned down the jazz playing overhead before plunking down the thick stack of papers he carried under his arm.
I picked it up. About half a phone book.
U made some coffee and returned some phone calls while I took the stack into his lobby and flipped through the pages. He called out from his office: “Be careful with those pictures. I have to return them in the morning. Rest was a copy.”
James, Mary/Porter, Eddie
December 17, 1968
The first pages consisted of a detailed report from the Shelby County Medical Examiner. Eddie Porter had multiple injuries. Blunt trauma to the back of the head. Four of his front teeth broken loose. Two found in his stomach. Single gunshot to the base of the skull.
Mary James had died much more cleanly, if there was such a thing. She suffered four knife wounds to her face and a single gunshot that began underneath her jaw and ended up in her brain.
Both died from a. 38 caliber bullet.
The crime scene photos, a set of ten, had that same washed-out, grainy-color look of those old Polaroids from the early ‘sixties. Grandpa in weird black glasses. Mother with a beehive. Of course, these were larger, eight by tens, with some of the most disturbing images I’d ever seen.
I’d seen men killed. But staring into the warped angle in which pregnant Mary James lay, clutching her belly with eyes open, made me turn my head and flip the page quickly. These were too personal. I shuffled through the rest. The back of James’s head. Broken plates on the floor and a plane ticket in a pool of blood.
Two sets of bloody shoe prints. Blood smears in an old kitchen. I swallowed as if my own spit were contaminated.
But I was careful to look thoroughly at each page. Take the time. U brought me some coffee in a mug stamped with logo for his company and I leafed through charts and diagrams of angles that the shooter or shooters used. Everything I saw implied two men.
EVIDENCE LIST:
32 scene photographs
1 brick
1 plane ticket
1 kitchen knife
1 woven rug
2 chairs
1 Formica table fingerprint samples (doors and windows)
1 wallet personal papers from James’s home
