Telegraph Avenue

Oakland pimp. Wound up right where he was supposed to, a year, maybe two, ahead of schedule.”

“And you’re the one who hurried him along.”

“I had no reason to want to hurt the man,” Flowers said carefully.

“He was trying to make his mark,” Luther said. “‘Establish the legend.’ Impress Huey Newton. See, Huey, when he wants somebody gone, he knows all he has to do is wish it out, loud and clear. Like Peter O’Toole, what’s that movie?” Arranging his features into a kingly scowl, busting out a fairly respectable O’Toole. “‘Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?’ Chan the Man’s standing right there to make old Huey’s wish come true.”

It was not easy to read the face of Chandler Flowers. He had long since, years ago, composed its features with the same care that he had brought to interweaving the dead fingers of Cochise Jones. If you were telling him a joke or a sad story, he would smile as need be or incline his head in sympathy. Mild amusement, ready understanding. Archy had never seen anything in that unreadable fist of a face like he was seeing now. It might have been pain or regret. Maybe it was only wistfulness. His eyes were a pair of shadowy tunnels boring deep into the mountain of the past.

“‘Establish the legend,’” he said almost fondly. “That does sound like me at the time. I will give you that.”

“Ready, willing, and able to do whatever you needed to do, not to have to end up right where you are now. Whatever was the opposite of this.” Luther opened the compass rose of his right hand to direct their attention to the zones of irony all around them. “The opposite of what Chandler the Second wanted you to do. Shining on going to college. Dating white girls. Enlisting in the navy as a common seaman. Joining the Black Panther Party.”

Flowers crinkled his eyes with pleasure, enjoying the memory of the industry he had shown in scandalizing his father. He started to laugh, a scattering of droplets on a hot skillet, sounding like his nephew Walter. “That is the truth,” he said. “You got that right.”

“Trying to give your old man a epileptic seizure,” Luther said, keeping a straight face around the edges of which laughter leaked like light around a door. “Infarction of the heart.”

“I did my best,” said Flowers.

“‘You’re a stain on the name!’” Dusting off, like an old side of vinyl, the tight-assed, stuffy-nosed voice of some long-dead black man, putting it on. “‘Chandler Bankwell Flowers, you are a stain on the name!’”

“A stain on the name, good God, I totally forgot he used to—”

“Surprised you never tried turning faggot,” Luther said. “That would of done it real quick.”

The silence that followed this declaration, while nanometric, was abrupt and revelatory.

“Uh,” Archy said, feeling his cheeks flush, but Flowers’s face had resumed its folded-hands composure. “So, what, were you both in the Party, or…?”

“Nah, that was his bullshit,” Luther said. “I didn’t want no part of that business. I just went along for the ride.”

“Oh, yeah, okay. Because you are so opposed to bullshit,” Archy said. “You and bullshit, strangers to each other.”

“It was all a long time ago,” Flowers said, and in his voice there was a nasal, seddity echo of Luther’s impersonation of Chandler the Second that had, Archy realized, been there all along. “Water under the bridge.”

“Yeah?” Luther said, playing with the man, enjoying the company, Archy would have said, of his old running buddy. “Why you still so worried, then?”

Placid, leaning back, hands folded over the convexity of his abdomen in a weird echo of the way he posed his dead men, Flowers said, “I’m not worried, Luther.”

“Then why’d you change your mind about Dogpile? All of a sudden. The minute I go around, pay a visit to Gibson Goode, suggest that he ask you what happened to Popcorn. How come you threw in with Dogpile, then?”

“I’d like to hear the answer to that one,” Archy said.

Flowers just smiled that unreadable smile, forged in the fire of a hundred sessions of the Planning Commission, people popping up all around Hearing Room number 1 to ask the unanswerable, demand the undeliverable, give vent to the unassuageable.

“I told you my reasons, Archy, the other day when we spoke. I realized that however much personal love and loyalty I might feel toward that beautiful store of yours, not to mention all the history it contains—black history, Oakland history, neighborhood history, my history—it was selfish of me to oppose Mr. Goode. A Dogpile Thang is an opportunity for the community as a whole. Now. Today. In the present moment. Not to mention, and now I’ll be honest, an opportunity for some people near and dear to me, too, such as my sister Candida’s youngest son, my nephew Walter, in all his rack and ruin. An opportunity for people such as yourself, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Now, that is truly some bullshit,” Luther told Archy. “Chan, you knew this thing with Popcorn was going to come back on you someday. From the day you settled your ass down, followed in the footsteps, started pumping that formaldehyde, you been living in dread it would come out.” He turned to Archy. “I got evidence, son. DNA.” It was his turn to lean back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, flapping the rooster wings of his elbows. “Shit lasts a million years. Put it under a microscope, clone yourself a damn triceratops. One day, check it out, some Jurassic Park motherfucker’s going to come along, clone Chan Flowers for a prehistoric Oakland ride, Chan be standing there when Laura Dern goes by in her Jeep. Shit, Chan, I bet I can even lead them to the gun! That Mossberg’s probably still there in the woods, tangled up in some weeds and shit.”

“You’re in the weeds right now,” Flowers said. “Way out in the weeds, Luther.”

“What do you have?” Archy said.

“A glove,” Luther said. “Chan was wearing it when he did Popcorn Hughes, has Popcorn’s blood DNA all over it.”

“A glove,” said Flowers.

“You remember, it was your brother’s, Marcel’s. Little purple glove from the costume he was wearing—”

“A glove!” Flowers enjoyed or pretended to enjoy the idea that an accessory, a minor item of haberdashery, could ever inspire the kind of anxiety that Luther had described. “A glove, been in some crackhead’s back pocket thirty-one years? Even if it turned out to be real,” wanting Archy to come in with him on scorning this one, “I mean, even if the blood on this glove turned out to be mine, or Popcorn Hughes’, or Jimmy Hoffa’s, what does that prove?”

Here it came, bright and true as a streaming banner: the smile of Cleon Strutter, showing his hand.

“Just give me a hundred thousand dollars,” Luther said, “we never need to answer that question.”

“Luther, for real?” Archy said. “Blackmail?”

Tossing the word across to his father like a grappling hook, feeling one small barb catch hold. Luther looked down at his feet in their slippers, then up at Archy. Nodding. Good with it. “If you want to call it that,” he said.

“It’s true, you really clean and sober?”

“Thirteen months, one week, and five days,” Luther said.

“For, like, honestly, the first time in, since, what, the late eighties?”

Luther allowed that was probably accurate.

“So this is the real you, then. That right? Luther Stallings, clean and sober: a scumbag blackmailer.”

The flag of Luther’s smile failed, then caught a fresh breeze and streamed freely.

“I’m just trying to make a movie, son. Revive my fortunes. Maybe that seems like an impracticable plan to all y’all cynical motherfuckers, don’t have dreams of your own. I guess I’m sentimental. Foolish. I just thought maybe my oldest, longest friend might want to help me out.”

“Help you again,” Flowers corrected him. “Archy, he’s been trying to blackmail me on this alleged murder for years. It is not a recent phenomenon linked to sobriety.”

Archy picked up that bit about alleged murder and worked it like a smooth stone in the palm. He went back over the conversation so far, trying to remember if Flowers had admitted to or acknowledged any wrongdoing at all. He didn’t think so.

“Help me again,” Luther conceded. “On a grander scale. Basically,” he told Archy, “what happened, see, I had kept the glove the night of the killing. I don’t know why. Just held on to it like a souvenir of, you know, wild times. A few years down the road, when I got deep into the deepest badness of my life,