J. Jance - Without Due Process

“We’ll eat now,” I said. “There may not be time later.”

“How about you?” she said to Chief Rankin, who had picked up a menu and was regarding it with obvious distaste.

“What do you recommend, Detective Beaumont?” he asked. “You must know your way around the menu. You seem to be on a first-name basis with everyone in the place.”

It was bad enough being the chief’s guide dog here to begin with. I wasn’t about to stumble into the trap of suggesting anything. “It’s all about the same,” I told him.

Rankin scratched his head. “I guess I’ll try the salmon,” he said grudgingly, “if it’s not too greasy.”

In the Doghouse, at that hour of the night, them’s fightin‘ words. Lucille peered at me over her glasses as if to say, “Where’d you find this live one?” “You bet,” she said aloud, and disappeared.

The back room isn’t big, so Rankin paced back and forth in front of the open window. “Do you think they’ll show?” he asked.

“They’ll be here.”

“I wouldn’t do this in Oakland in a million years,” he continued, “not without a whole squad of sharpshooters to back us up. Coming here by ourselves is irresponsible, crazy. I never should have let Freeman talk me into it.”

Lucille came in to deliver Rankin’s dinner salad. She set the bowl of semi-wilted lettuce on the table. He looked at it but didn’t sit down. “Are there sulfites on that salad?” he asked.

Lucille smiled at him with a benevolent, sixtysomething, peroxide-blonde smile. “Honey, I couldn’t tell you. They only pay me to deliver this food. I never see what goes into it before the cook hands it over.”

I’d never seen Lucille put on her dumb-blonde act before. She’s a savvy lady who can work her way through a racing form in ten minutes flat. Rankin didn’t have sense enough to quit while he was ahead.

“I’d better not eat any then,” he said. “I’m allergic to sulfites.” Lucille swept the offending salad bowl off the table and marched from the room.

Rankin sat now, looking dejectedly at his hands. “I came up here hoping to get away from gangs, you know. My wife doesn’t want me having to work around them. She’d have a fit if she knew I was waiting here in a dive, meeting a bunch of them for dinner, without even any kind of bodyguard.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” I assured him.

We sat quietly for a few minutes. It seemed to take forever for the minute hand on my watch to move from one slash mark to the next. Eventually, Lucille reappeared laden with two platters of food. She set the chili burger in front of me and slung the other one onto the table, where it came to rest in front of Chief Rankin. He stared down at it, dismay written on his face.

“This doesn’t look like salmon,” he said.

“It’s ham,” Lucille told him firmly. “We’re out of salmon.”

With that she flounced from the room before a stunned Chief Rankin had a chance to reply. It was all I could do to keep from laughing aloud. Rankin had violated one of the prime unwritten rules of Doghouse behavior-offending a waitress-and Lucille had seen to it that he was suitably punished.

I think he would have gone after her, but just then the door opened again, and our guests sauntered into the room.

I’ve been told all my life that America is a melting pot. The Hispanics may have given rise to the general theme of cool macho dudeness, but urban blacks have elevated it to an art form, and these six dudes were the coolest of the cool.

They came wearing the uniforms and colors-blues, reds, and blacks-of their three diverging armies. They wore leather and gold chains and three-inch Afros with shaved spots over some ears. They stalked into the room, but there was no elbowing, no jabbing or jibing or trading of insults. They filed in silently with all the solemnity of young men attending a funeral. Behind veiled eyelids, they sized each other up, but no one said a word.

Our guests were a disturbing-looking bunch, and the dead silence made it even worse. It got scarier still when the last to arrive peered into the room and then went away, returning with a large leather briefcase, a Hartmann. He set the case on the floor near the door with a resounding thump. The case was big enough to hold a whole arsenal of handguns and other death-dealing weapons. My tie suddenly felt a full inch and a half too tight.

Lucille followed the case into the room, order pad in hand, no-nonsense mask on her face. “Who all’s eating?” she demanded.

One of the six seated himself directly across the table from Rankin. Staring at the chief with undisguised, malevolent hatred, he assumed the role of spokesman. “Depends on who’s payin‘,” he said.

Despite his premeeting case of nerves, Chief Rankin seemed to have recovered his equanimity. He met the young man’s gaze. “I am,” he said. “Have whatever you want.”

Lucille turned to the person closest to her. He may or may not have been twenty-one. Unlike Rankin, he had obviously been a guest of the Doghouse on numerous previous occasions. Without needing to consult the menu, he ordered a Bob’s Burger and a beer, but the spokesman squelched the latter.

“No drinkin‘,” he rasped, aiming his smoldering gaze on the offending henchman. “No beer. We’re here to take care of business.”

No one spoke while Lucille continued taking orders. At last she left the room. “It might be nice if we started with introductions,” Chief Rankin began. “I’m Chief of Police-”

“No introductions,” the leader interrupted. “We don’t need no introductions. We don’t need no nicey-nice. We’re here to talk business.”

“What kind of business?” Rankin asked.

“Look, I got me a business. I go to work every day. It’s a capitalist business. Sometimes I got merchandise to sell. Sometimes I buy. It’s a free country, and my business is s’posed to make me a profit, but I’m in this squeeze play, man. I’m gettin‘ it in the shorts from both ends. I don’t mind payin’ protection. Like I said, it’s a free country. Cops got to make a profit too. What I do mind is gettin‘ squeezed even after I pay my protection. That’s not cool, brother. That is not the American way.”

Rankin looked at him in amazement. “You’ve been paying protection money to officers in my department?”

The leader leered back at him. “I sure as hell ain’t been payin‘ it to the United Way!”

“Who are they? I want their names!”

“Whoa now, I tell you that, I’m breakin‘ my word, and all that money I spent on protection goes down the drain.”

“If you’re not going to name names, why are we here then? What’s the point?”

“The point is, I want to stay in business. Most black folks leave us alone and most white folks do the same. Some of ‘em get in our way, and we kill ’em, but most of ‘em leave us alone, and that’s cool, man. That’s good for business. Except now, everybody’s thinkin’ we did this murder thing, that we killed Ben Weston and all those little kids.”

He paused and snapped his finger. “Ben Weston? I coulda smoked that mother in a minute, but I didn’t-not him, not his woman, and not those kids, neither.”

For the first time, he looked away from Rankin and stared hard at me. “I give orders. I say shoot to kill. They kill. I say scare the shit out of ‘em. The bullet hits the mirror. Understand?”

I understood all right. It was as blatant a confession as I’ve ever been given, yet I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I’d ever be able to do about it. Still, it wasn’t a time to back off.

“Who were you trying to scare?” I asked. “Ben Weston or me?”

“Ben Weston busts my homeys. I been paying One-Time for protection so me and my boys don’t go down, but he’s doin‘ it anyways, hidin’ ‘em, makin’ ‘em forget what they’s s’posed to do. So I’m gonna scare Ben Weston, scare him real good, excepten he’s dead already and my homey’s too damn dumb to figure it out.”