Dan O'Shea - Penance

“As I said, detective, I didn’t attend David’s meetings with Stefanski. Certainly, he’d meet with him from time to time.” Clarke seeming less and less comfortable.

“He have a decent relationship with the guy?”

“I really don’t understand your focus here.” Clarke sounding a little short now.

“The murders happened at Stefanski’s place and they were pretty ugly. You see that level of violence, lots of times that points at something personal.”

“I don’t know how to respond to that, detective. I’ve heard stories, of course, about Stefanski. A bit of a reputation. I suppose this could have been something aimed at him, something David got caught up in.”

“Kind of a late night, though, wasn’t it? Midnight?”

“Nature of the beast in an election.”

“OK, another thing. I understand that David owned a gun.”

A little laugh from Clarke. “Quite a row about that, actually. His father insisted, after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and after King’s. He wanted David to be able to protect himself. Silly, really. I mean, look at those shootings. What good would a gun have done either man?”

“It was a Walther, a PPK?”

“I wouldn’t know, detective. We used to do some skeet shooting, summers out on the Long Island, so shotguns I can tell you something about. Pistols are beyond me.”

“Small automatic, the kind from the James Bond movies.”

“That would be David. He did have a sense of style.”

“He carry it?”

“He did that night, actually. I saw it in his briefcase that afternoon, for all the good it did him.”

1971

Five men were in the conference room at City Hall when Declan Lynch arrived shortly after 9.30am.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Lynch. “Just got word to come down when I got to the station.”

“No problem, Lynch,” said Riley. “Thanks for coming.”

Riley had his coat off, over the back of his chair, and his cuffs turned up over his wrists. Two almost identical guys in black suits sat across the table with a tape deck sitting in front of them. Crew cuts, that tight-ass look Feds usually had. Bob Riordan, head of Hurley’s Red Squad — an informal police team charged with tracking peaceniks, Reds, the Weatherman, Black Panthers and, Lynch figured, probably Republicans — sat at the near end of the table. At the far end sat a compact man, perhaps five feet nine inches, in a tan summer suit, three-button natural shoulder, a white shirt, and red and blue rep tie.

Riley waved around the table. “Gentleman, this is Detective Declan Lynch. Lynch, Riordan you know. Over here we have agents Harris and McDonald, FBI COUNTERINTELPRO. They coordinate with Riordan on, well, whatever needs coordinating. And over here we have Ezekiel Fisher. Zeke, you wanna tell Detective Lynch what you do?”

“No,” said Fisher.

Riley chuckled. “It’s alright, Lynch. Same answer I always get. It’s OK. He’s a friend of Hurley’s. Anyway, he helps out.”

“So what’s the drill here, Riley?” Lynch asked.

“Couple things. First off, it’s the mayor’s kid we’re dealing with here, so he called J. Edgar, told him he wanted some help on it. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Fine by me,” said Lynch.

“Second, papers are already going bat shit with this, and you know how the old man feels about press, especially around his family. So he wants to play this real tight. Wants to keep it to the players here in this room until we need something else.”

“Again, fine by me, but my captain’s gonna wanna know what I’m up to.”

“Commissioner’s talking to your captain now. You need anything from him, you got it, but he don’t need to know shit,” said Riley.

“Gonna make things ticklish for me, just so you know.”

“Lynch, this turns out, you can get your ticket punched any way you like. It don’t, Captain’s the least of your problems.”

Lynch paused a minute, stared Riley down. Not like he didn’t know that, didn’t mean he had to like it.

“OK,” Lynch said finally, “so what are we doing today?”

“The old man, he was telling me that Junior was catching some shit from this one nigger group — the AMN Commando. Panther types. Wanted that looked into.”

“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Interviewed Hastings Clarke yesterday. He brought them up. Seemed like he wanted to raise the radical black angle and shoot it down at the same time.”

Riley nodded. “Junior was a little sensitive about race stuff. It’s all the rage with these guys, brotherhood of man and all that shit. So Clarke wants to keep the coloreds on his side. The thing, though, is the old man, he hears maybe some of these guys had a hard on for Junior, he checks em out, calls Riordan, who runs things past our buddies from Washington here, and God knows who Zeke runs things past. Thing is, this comes up,” Riley nodded his head at the tape deck, “and we thought you should hear it.” Riley nodded at the Feds, and MacDonald clicked the tape on.

Negro voice, sounded like anyway. Giving a speech in front of a pretty raucous crowd. “We ain’t waitin’ no more. We ain’t askin’ no more. Rights ain’t some scraps we wait for from the massuh’s table. We don’t need them from nobody — we own them. We was born with them. All we need to do is keep Whitey from takin’ them away. Pursuit of happiness? You ask any Black man wants to work for what any white man gets for free. They be takin’ it away. Liberty? You ask our brothers locked up in white jails because they march for their rights or fight for their rights. They be takin’ that away. Life? You ask Fred Hampton bout that when you see him, shot in his bed by the Chicago pigs. Butchered in his bed. They be takin’ life away. But we gonna let them take ours? No. By any means necessary. Fight in the streets if we gotta. By any means necessary. Butcher the pigs if we gotta. By any means necessary-” The Fed clicked the tape off.

“Butcher the pigs?” said Lynch.

“Thought that might ring a bell,” Riley answered.

“Who’s on the tape?”

Zeke Fisher sat forward in his seat, folded his hands in front of him on the table. “He calls himself Simba now, which is Swahili for lion. His real name is Harold James, Jr. Born August 3, 1948 to Rosa and Harold James in Mobile, Alabama. Moved to the south side of Chicago in September of 1955. He was a player with the Black Panthers here, mostly with some of the social programs they were running around the South Side. After the Hampton shooting, he turned severely militant.”

“He’s organizing the gangs,” Riordan said. “We got some informants on the inside of that. Hampton had that supposed gang truce, all that crap about the niggers gotta stop fighting each other, gotta fight us instead, so this James guy knows that crowd. What’s he’s doing now is trying to turn that into his own little army.”

Harris, the FBI guy, spoke up. “We’ve obtained tapes of other speeches in which this butcher the pigs rhetoric has come up. He’s very hostile to the police — to any authority, really.”

Lynch felt like he was sitting through a sales job — everybody in the room adding his piece to the pitch.

“The thing is,” Lynch said, “why would some guy who’s known for this butcher the pigs line go and paint it on a wall?”

“That’s a valid question,” said Fisher. “I don’t think we can look at this like a traditional crime where the intent is to avoid detection. This was a political act. I believe that James wants to create a direct conflict with the political authority, and especially with the more liberal politicians that, in essence, are his competition. He wants to create an unbridgeable barrier between the radical movement and traditional political solutions. In essence, he wants a rebellion.”