Stephen Hunter - Black Light

But of late Red had been thinking that there was more to his father than his professional triumphs. It wasn’t that he succeeded, eventually; it was that he had the imagination to conceive success in the first place and that the most precious gift he gave his only child wasn’t a business or an inheritance or a network of connection, though all were nice. No, it was his … whole life.

As Red drove the highways in his Mercedes, he’d sometimes see himself, but in overalls, weighted down by hopelessness, toothless and scrawny, destitute of self-belief. He’d think: Except for Dad, that could be me.

His father’s single bravest act had been to leave the country and reinvent himself as a city man. On the face of it, quite an accomplishment: no chums, nobody looking out for him, nobody easing the way, a scrawny poor-white-trash hillbilly from the remote Ouachitas, barefoot and unexposed to any kind of culture whatsoever, almost illiterate. Yet in a single generation, he was able to give his son a whole different world: a prep school education, four years at the University of Arkansas, exposure to ideas, possibilities, stimulations. His son never had to wake at four to slop the pigs or wake at five to bring in the wood to light the fire or work in the fields from dark till dark to chop enough cotton or plant enough corn so that the Man would leave a few kernels for the sharecropping family to live on. And his son’s children, they were so far removed from that they couldn’t even imagine it. To them, it was a bad movie called The Beverly Hillbillies , not funny at all, just about crude, backward, stupid trashy people.

I hope I’m up to you, old man , he thought. I will sure as hell try and be equal to your legacy .

Red’s father died in a bomb blast out front of Nancy’s in 1975; Red was working as a vice-president of what was then called Bama Trucking, Inc. His immediate response was not to mourn, but to prepare for the assault on his power, his position and his organization that inevitably followed the assassination of a boss. Yet, strangely, it never came, though some years later and some years after that, interlopers moved against him, both easily defeated.

Thus, the mystery of his father’s death became a prime obsession of his. He had spent over $200,000 on private investigation trying to solve the mystery. Why, when Lieutenant Will Jessop, the Fort Smith homicide dick who had been assigned the case, retired in ’88, Red put him on retainer ($50,000 per annum) to keep up the investigation privately. Red himself had used all his underworld contacts through a variety of subterfuges and come up, after all the time, effort and money, with nothing.

The problem with the case was simply that it yielded only one answer to cui bono . That is, Red himself. And he didn’t do it (though it had probably been said of him, he knew). Lacking a motive to sustain it, no other explanation made any sense. For example, no lieutenant of the organization benefited and no phone tap or private observation had yielded the slightest smattering of a clue; no out-of-towner gained anything from it. It could only be revenge for some long-ago act, but such deeds are usually messy and emotional, and this one had been accomplished with the most amazing efficiency, control and precision, the work of a true pro in the bomb business, suggesting access to higher levels of craft.

That’s what Lieutenant Jessop said too.

“Red, this boy knew what he was doing. This was the best goddamned bomb that anyone ever exploded in Arkansas, that I’ll tell you. He was a goddamned specialist.”

In time all investigations run down, and Red’s into his father’s death did itself after a hard decade and a half. Red finally gave it up and tried to make peace with the gaping hole in his life, the fact that whoever killed his father, for whatever reasons, had gone unpunished and was laughing even now.

I tried, Daddy , he’d think, when the bourbon got to him late at night and all the kids were down, and Miss Arkansas Runner-up 1986 snoozed contentedly in her $500 peignoir, I tried so hard .

With that recalled melancholy heavy on his shoulders, he spun the dial and opened the old vault. The past was broken down by years in ledgers, long lines of figures recording inflow and outflow, all costs noted, all sums accounted for. Every third page or so was covered with notes of explanation. His father wrote in small, perfect hand, dispassionately recording details. In that way, in very short order, Red learned all there was to know—or all his father wanted known and recorded—about the last two weeks in the month of July 1955. He met remarkable people: a Frenchy Short, for one, and a young army first lieutenant at Camp Chaffee named Jack Preece, but others too, a whole slew of clever, fast operators, men of zeal and commitment. Jimmy Pye was there, as well as boss cons and screws from the Bama organization in the Sebastian County Jail. And of course, Earl Swagger was there, and as he examined what lay before him, Red saw the logic behind what he had taken on faith, and marveled at the professionalism of all involved.

Of course one name was missing. It had to be, for it was not and could not be committed to paper; but Red realized instinctively what the ledger documented: the key moment in Bama family history, when the Bama gang ceased to be a gang and his father ceased to be a gangster, but in which it began its climb toward legitimacy, public power and glory and the bastions of respect and admiration it—he—now commanded.

Red poured himself another cup of coffee. He called the office, checked his voice mail, talked to his secretary. He called the Runner-up and told her he’d be late and she reminded him that his son Nick had a swimming meet that night and he said he’d go directly. He thought he’d get there by Nick’s event, the 100-meter backstroke, as that probably wouldn’t run until 9:30 and they could stop on the way back for barbecue.

Then he cleared his mind and began to study the documents that Duane Peck had procured. It seemed clear that they related to some other event of 1955, occurring almost in the same time period as the murder of Earl Swagger. What was the connection? No, wait: that wasn’t important. What, rather, did Bob Lee Swagger and the boy think was the connection, for what they thought would guide how they behaved.

The one document was a preliminary report from the Polk County Prosecutor’s Office on a bail hearing for one Reggie Gerard Fuller, Negro, seventeen, of such and such an address, Blue Eye, on a charge of murder in the first degree against one Shirelle Parker, Negro, fifteen, of such and such an address, Blue Eye. Shirelle must have been Lucille’s, the letter writer’s, daughter. The prosecutor, Sam Vincent—Red winced, thinking of Sam on those steps, an old man whose time was up—Sam was arguing that the crime was so serious that no bail be set and the defense lawyer, one James Alton of the County Public Defender’s Office, pled nolo contendere to the prosecution request, so of course the suspect was held in lieu of bail.

So: a murder, presumably of a black child by a young black man, July 1955.

Then he read the letter itself: two years later, the mother of the murdered girl pleads with Sam to reopen the case because she claims that this Reggie could not have done it.

Strange? You’d think a mother would want vengeance, not justice.

Perplexed, Red consulted his Rolodex and came up with the name of assistant city editor of the Southwest Times Record and put in the call. He got voice mail, left a message and got a call back in seven minutes.

“Mr. Bama, what can I do for you?”

“Jerry, don’t y’all keep all your old papers on file?”