Yours, Mine, and Ours Read online

  I was getting a headache. Or I could smell blue. Maybe that was it. Is this what it was like to smell blue? Because it was really aggravating. It felt like my head was going to split

  chapter sixty-three

  in two.

  “What is the significance of these photos?” I asked Behrman, a greasy, twitchy man I had immediately disliked on sight. My second sight of him had not changed my first impression.

  At my tone, George swung around in a hurry, looked me in the face, then said to Emma Jan, “Shiro’s in the house.”

  “Very good, George. Tomorrow we will work on your multiplication tables. Mr. Behrman? Answer my question, if you please.”

  “It’s … it’s just research. Are you okay, Officer? You sound funny.”

  “I have a touch of DID.”

  “It’s going around,” George said, then snickered.

  “What, is that like Asian Flu?”

  “Just like it,” I agreed. “Research for what?”

  “What do you care? Look, Phil and I aren’t your guys. And if you thought we were, we wouldn’t be having this talk in my house, we’d be downtown. I don’t know why you’re really here and I don’t care. So why don’cha head out?”

  “But we have so many questions,” George whined, and I knew he was going to drop the bomb on them. I was so pleased I would be there to watch. “Hey, I have an idea. You tell me about the mug shots. And then I’ll tell you something about yourself you didn’t know.”

  “What bullshit is this?”

  “You’ll liiiiike it,” George wheedled. This was a gross exaggeration at best, an out-and-out lie at worst.

  I had no problem with either. I caught Emma Jan’s glance, and grinned. Her eyebrows arched, and the corner of her mouth twitched. I knew I was right about her. She liked a fight. Any kind of fight.

  “It’s okay,” Loun said, giving Behrman what George would call a manly shoulder-chuck. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Hell, they’re the government.”

  “It’s true,” Emma Jan said, winking at me. “We are.” She waved and mouthed, “Hi, Shiro.”

  Waved? She waved at me? Like she had spotted me in the middle of a parade?

  Hmm. That was not the most inappropriate analogy for what was happening …

  I waved back, making an effort not to roll my eyes. A wave. Good Lord.

  “I just meant that maybe it’s good that they know how The Good Citizens got started. Then they could spend more time getting the scum off the streets and less time hassling white patriots.”

  Oh, I loved it. The patriot card. It had been used throughout the ages to justify all sorts of nauseating atrocities. “But we’re patriots!” As if that changed anything. As if it justified everything.

  I was a patriot, too. America was the finest country on the planet and I was lucky to live here. That does not mean I would use my love of the country to justify serial murder. And I was mystified by those who would.

  “Tell you what, these mug shots? These are how The Good Citizens got started. Back in the day, my family lived in South Carolina, where they had a real colored problem.”

  “Oh, I’m gonna love this story,” Emma Jan said dryly. “I can already tell.”

  “Is a ‘colored problem’ like a pestilence problem?” I asked, and dropped a wink at Emma Jan. “Or would you say it is more like a plague? Rats, maybe? Mosquitos in summer?”

  “Shut up,” George said curtly and, surprised, I did. When he focused, when he forced his sexually-obsessed sociopathic me-me-me mind to seize a puzzle and solve it, he could become admirably laser-esque. “Go on, Phil.”

  “Right. Anyway, my family—these’d be my great-great-grandparents—they were having a colored problem but nobody wanted to do anything about it. They were farmers, they just wanted to be left alone to do their shit.” Encouraged by our complete attention, Loun plunged ahead. “But two little white gals were killed by a black buck right around that time—they were eleven and eight, the girls were. Black bastard wanted to cut himself a piece and I guess they fought him, or cried or something, so he beat ’em to death.”

  Silence. George, Emma Jan, and I were afraid to breathe. Sometimes, when suspects were on a roll like this, you could find out more than you thought because they would say more than they planned.

  “That must have been dreadful for your family,” I said. I tried to look meltingly sympathetic. Damn. This was a job for Cadence. She could pity a rabid timber wolf who’d devoured premature babies for lunch. “Very very … dreadful.” Ugh. This sort of thing was not in my skill set.

  Loun nodded, his broad face darkening as he recalled the family tragedy. “Yep. Tore my folks up, tell you that right now.”

  “Your folks back then, or your folks now?”

  “My daddy told me the whole story when I was just little, so I’d know life was precious and you can lose someone you love without any warning at all.”

  “A difficult lesson for a child to understand. It must have been…” Dammit! Why could I only think of one word? Cadence, I never thought I’d say this, but I very much wish you were here right now. “… dreadful?”

  He nodded sadly.

  Too sadly.

  That was when I realized Loun’s sorrow was as fake as my sympathy. And it made sense. He had never known the girls; likely he had never known anyone that far back in his family tree. They would have been names in a newspaper clipping to him, all his life. Never more. It was impossible that they should be more.

  So why, then, why should he be torn up about their murder, dreadful thought it was? Answer: he was not.

  But he could use it to justify bigotry. He could use it to justify all sorts of horrid behavior. So he did. And here we all were.

  “The kid that did it—and it was a kid, some black teenager—he got the chair, and back then they didn’t fuck around with ten years of appeals.”

  “Like Bundy,” George offered. Ah, George … he could be clever when he wished. A shame he was so rarely motivated beyond what he needed in order to embellish his sex life. “You believe that guy? Killed all those poor girls and then the state of Florida got to pay for all his appeals! The best day’s work Florida ever did was zapping that guy.”

  Loun and Behrman brightened. A kindred soul! A man, a white lawman, who understood their rage and pain and loss! Why, perhaps they had misjudged the fellow! “Yeah, man, say it twice,” Loun said while Behrman nodded agreement.

  “Do you know how much that rat bastard cost the taxpayers?” George was on a brilliant roll. I smirked at Emma Jan when Loun and Behrman could not see. “Over five … million … dollars! You know what it costs to execute someone? A thousand. A thousand bucks—the new suit, the last meal, all that comes to about a grand. Shee-it, you guys heard of Andrei Chikatilo? That Russian psycho who killed something like forty kids?”

  “Fifty-six,” Emma Jan added. “Over half were under seventeen.”

  “Like the lady said,” George said with a courteous nod in her direction. “And this fucker’s guilty as shit, right? He confessed—”

  “So—” I began, but Emma Jan shook her head. “So he did,” I said. “Except what happened was, because it was Iron Curtain time in Russia, their law-enforcement methods were a little on the gulag side. Three homosexuals and a convicted sex offender were arrested and after a while ‘confessed.’ Soviet Russia, right? No Miranda rights. They killed themselves after the interrogations, yet dead kids still kept piling up.”

  George remained undaunted in the face of that unpleasant truth. Nothing new about that, either. And no reason to confuse Behrman with unnecessary facts. “Right, Chikatilo confessed and knew gory details and led them to bodies they hadn’t found. Right? Guilty as shit, right?”

  We all nodded, possibly the only time the four of us were in agreement on something.

  “So get this, boys, they put his psycho ass on trial, they find him guilty, they get all their ‘So long, Comrade Psycho’ ducks in a row, they take him to a back room
and they put a bullet in his ear. You know how much a round for a nine-mil Beretta costs? Twenty-seven cents! Tell me that’s not a bargain.”

  “Shit!”

  “Goddamned right.”

  Never had I felt so close to George before. Right now I felt he was … was … almost human!

  He was still doing a wonderful job feigning regret. “Now, come on, boys. Tell me you couldn’t find a better way to use five million bucks. Think what The Good Citizens could do with that kind of money.”

  “See, that’s a prime example of the government screwing up, and honest Americans having to pay for that screwup.” Loun nodded as he spoke, clearly enchanted with the words of wisdom dripping from his mouth. “But back then, when our girls were murdered, they didn’t screw around. The buck who killed them, he fried for it not even three months after he killed them.”

  “Wow, three months?” Emma Jan asked. She then feigned embarrassment. “Sorry, you probably don’t need to hear that from me. It’s kind of embarrassing for me, knowing that somebody from my … Well. I’m just real sorry about the girls. Maybe I should step outside while you guys finish…?”

  Rarely was I surrounded by such superb actors. A definite treat. I could weep in sheer gratitude. Truly.

  “Naw, naw,” Loun said, moved to generosity by a repentant African American agent for the federal government. “We don’t have a problem with you. It’s real good that you overcame your background and now you’re defending the law.”

  Ah, yes. Her trauma-ridden childhood spent in the slums of Tuxedo Road in Atlanta, where she and her family had lived across the street from the mansion once owned by former Coca-Cola president Robert Woodruff. Emma Jan had access to a seven-figure trust fund, and this moron assumed she must have risen in triumph from a crack-whore mother and absentee gangbanger father. I wonder which of her degrees from Harvard would better help her overcome the terrible burden of her wealth?

  I worried, sometimes. I worried that we did not apprehend villains because we were so smart, but because they were so stupid. It was a thought to keep anyone up at night.

  Emma Jan, meanwhile, was shrugging modestly. “I don’t mind telling you, it was a tough road.” Yes, indeed. The horror of being accepted at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. The shame of driving last year’s Lamborghini. The terror of relentless harassment from various charities all hoping for a donation. I am amazed she had lived through the nightmare.

  Loun was in an expansive mood now that he saw respectful civil servants and a contrite Negress. Negress! Heh. I never got to use that word.

  “Listen, it’s not on you at all. I’ll tell you something my daddy explained to me when I was just a kid … something that I’ve noticed holds true again and again. Now, you might not like it, miss, but it’s got the ring of truth to it.”

  This … this should be something. This should be spectacular. I felt like jumping up and down.

  “One black alone is perfectly okay, a black alone can be a really good guy. You wanna go bowling with him, you don’t mind working with him, you have him over for dinner … you know. But.” He started wagging a stern finger at Emma Jan. “But, you get a bunch of them together? They turn into niggers. That’s where that term ‘wilding’ came from. You get a bunch of blacks together, they can’t help but bring out the savage inherent in all of ’em.”

  My. I had never heard the word “inherent” in the same paragraph as “wanna” and “’em.”

  George started cracking up, and Emma Jan joined him. I laid no blame, but did think they might have tried to stay sober just a minute more.

  “That’s so great!” Emma Jan gasped. “We’ve been wondering what to call ourselves all this time. It’s really been bugging the membership, you know, for our secret enclave meetings? Wait until I tell the Queen!”

  “So let’s see. Pride of lions.” George began to tick them off his fingers. “Flock of geese. Herd of cattle. Murder of crows. Nigger of African Americans. She’s right. It’s perfect.”

  Loun was smiling uneasily, not certain if they were mocking him or laughing with him. It was a testament to the man’s foul ego that he could even entertain the thought that they might not be mocking him.

  “Anyway,” Behrman said, clearly annoyed to be left out, “back when this happened, they decided to form a group of like-minded men, true men. So The Good Citizens were born.”

  “Born from the tragedy of what happened many years ago to your relatives? The dead girls?” I had to ask, because George and Emma Jan were still trying to put an end to their Nigger of African Americans hysteria. “That was how this whole thing began?”

  “Yeah. Those are pictures of boys who were caught and tried fairly after their disgusting crimes against white girls. And that gal…” Pointing to the white woman in the period dress. “That’s one of the dead girl’s relatives, she’s my great-great-great-aunt. Hmm … might only be great-great…” He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged.

  “That’s why we keep their pictures, theirs and hers. To remind ourselves that what happened back then can’t be allowed to happen again, ever. And her picture to remind us how it started, and how one woman with a heart full of love can change things. She’s the one who got us all started on the path. She never forgot her murdered kin. She never forgot that justice can be swift if you want it badly enough.”

  “Her heart was full,” I agreed, “but I doubt it was full of love. Let’s not debate.” I held up a hand to forestall his protest. “Let us instead talk about how you can assist us with the JBJ killer.”

  “I told you,” Behrman said, “I told you the last two times you was here, I didn’t have anything to do with those white boys showing up killed.”

  “You did, actually, but it was nothing you consciously planned. That is the good news.”

  “The bad news,” George wheezed, wiping his eyes. “Whoo! Wow, I needed that. Nigger of African Americans. Good one, Loun. The bad news is, there’s a link between The Good Citizens and these crimes. You just don’t see it. But you can help us find the killer.”

  “I don’t see how. And we’re staying out of the government’s business. I’m real sorry those boys got killed, but that’s your job and your worry, not mine. We learned not to cooperate with the government ’round about when blacks started getting away with murdering white girls.”

  “You think that sort of thing is limited to the segregation-filled South of a few decades ago? People have been killing people for no good reason since the Dawn of Man. The Good Citizens are not special. They only think they are.”

  “Yeah, insultin’ our white brothers is gonna get you what you need,” Behrman sneered. “Rookie mistake, right?”

  “Are you sure you want Mr. Loun to hear this?” George asked. “Because it does not look good for you.”

  “He’s my white brother. Anything you say to me you say to him.”

  “That … is … excellent. And don’t cry about it later, don’t pretend I didn’t warn you.”

  “About what?”

  “Did you know your DNA was on the dog?”

  “What d—oh. You mean Dawg?”

  “Yup. I don’t know if you were kicking her with bare feet or if you licked her or what, but we got some of your DNA off of her.”

  “Sneaky government agents, shoulda seen that coming.” Loun’s voice was laced with contempt.

  “Yup. You shoulda. Anyway, we were running it to see if it’d help us with the JBJ murders. And it did, just not the way we thought.”

  “Are you gonna tell us, or keep talking without saying anything?”

  “Your great-grandmother was black,” George said pleasantly.

  Behrman flushed brick red to his eyebrows. I watched with interest; I had never seen anyone have a rage-induced stroke before. He looked at Behrman, startled, then replied, “Don’t even start that fuckin’ shit, I—”

  “Be careful, dumbass.” George was still sounding perfectly pleasant, but there was something wrong with his face.
His eyes. His eyes were wrong. “It’s extremely provable.”

  I would never tell him, but George sometimes made me nervous.

  “You … you fuckin’ liar, you—the goddamned government makes all this shit up, and losers like you swallow it whole, and—”

  “So drop some urine and prove me wrong.” He grinned. Well. Showed his teeth. “Or introduce your dick to a Dixie Cup. We’ve got all sorts of DNA to test you against. Except we aren’t the ones who need convincing. We know you’re a match to a black relative. You’re the one who needs convincing. You and alllll your buddies.”

  “Hey, you can just suck it through a hose, okay? I’m not … you can’t … I know my rights.”

  “Oh, boy.” Emma Jan shook her head. “You shouldn’t have said that. It’s a red flag to that guy; it’s a red flag to a bull hopped up on steroids and caffeine.”

  “She’s right, that’s the kind of badass I am. You catch on fast, New Girl.” Emma Jan waved his pseudo-compliment away. “What can I say, I’m the product of divorce. And since we have all the names of your fellow bigots, we could let them in on your dirty little secret. It’d be a civic duty kind of a thing.”

  “It’s not true. You can’t say that, anyway! I know my rights.”

  “You do, but only when you feel like it. The same umbrella you invoke to justify your poison-spreading nonsense also protects us.”

  “I’d fucking know if I was black, okay?” Behrman grimaced and I realized he was trying to smile but only baring his teeth. “I’m not. Check the mirror if you don’t believe me.”

  “Sorry, I’m off mirrors for the week,” Emma Jan said with faux regret. “Promised my shrink I wouldn’t so much as peek, at least until these guys were a little more used to my pecularities. Y’know, back in the day, the child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of a black were considered black. Ever heard of the one-drop rule? People like you thought it up. Well, some people like you. People on one side of your family. We know what the other side was up to, don’t we? Don’t forget about hypodescent—that whole ‘children born to mixed mothers and fathers are automatically considered members of the inferior class’ thing. Hey, you should be happy you’re an African American—”