Deputy Clarence “Buck” Brownell dabbed at the sweatband of his straw Dobbs hat with his handkerchief and said, “If the darkie says I broke his collarbone, he’s lying.  All I done was repossess his damn car.  You’ve got my written report, and I’ll stake my reputation on it.”

“Hogwash,” said Sheriff Bob Wilgus.  “If your brother-in-law wasn’t a County Commissioner, you’d still be cracking the whip over those poor devils at the turpentine camp in Lufkin, and everybody in town knows it.” 

Buck watched the revolving fan fluttering the flypaper strips and wanted circulars and didn’t say anything. 

The Sheriff spat a plug of Red Man into an empty tomato can on his desk.  “It ain’t like Pastor Jenkins is some young troublemaker,” He said. “He’s seventy years old, and he leads the biggest African Methodist Episcopal congregation on the Gulf Coast.  Those radio sermons of his are mighty influential.  Plenty of stevedores and warehousemen passed the plate to buy him that automobile. 

If he calls a work slowdown, he could paralyze the entire port, including the rail yard and the freight terminal.  I won’t allow some petty chiseler with a badge to disrupt business, not during these hard times.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Buck said. “Us boys on the vice detail pick up your cut from every slot machine, casino, and notch parlor in the county, remember?”

“That’s how come you ain’t behind bars already, you wet-brained jackass,” Wilgus said.  “Give the Reverend’s vehicle back to him, and depart my jurisdiction before sundown.  Your brother-in-law says his baby sister will be happy to get shed of you.”

“I had a repossession order recorded by the Clerk of Courts,” Buck said. “You got proof I done anything illegal, go right ahead and charge me.”

“If I did, you’d wind up in Huntsville State Prison lickety-split,” Wilgus told him. “Boyd Rogers, your peckerwood partner, has signed a stenographic statement, telling how you bought a 1933 Cadillac all weather Phaeton from his dealership, and how you two conspired to swindle Reverend Jenkins out of the eight thousand he paid you to sign the title over. 

Rogers will further testify that you pistol-whipped that old man senseless when he tried to stop you from hauling his car away.”

Buck said, “Listen here, Willie Jenkins was deceiving the General Motors Corporation by trying to buy that car in the first place.  Preacher or not, GM won’t sell Cadillacs to Negroes.  And anyway, he was three days late reimbursing me for the acquisition fees.”

Bob Wilgus stood up and came around the desk. He was a head shorter than Buck Brownell, but hard as a pine knot.

“Put your badge on the desk, Brownell,” He said. “And don’t ever let me catch you in Galveston County again.”

***

“That’s a honey of an automobile, mister.”

She was a bold-eyed little hillbilly gal, wearing a starched nurse’s cap and apron over her thin wash dress.  She looked to be around nineteen years old.

She was leaning against a bench near the seawall in San Jacinto Park, rolling a baby buggy back and forth with one hand.  She came closer, trailing her fingers over the bright red Phaeton convertible’s hood ornament. It was a chrome statuette of a longhaired nymph, leaning into the wind in a dream of flight.

 “I wouldn’t mind riding in a big old 16-cylinder Cadillac some time,” The girl drawled. “I love to go fast.”

Straight from the piney woods, Buck thought, and probably owned but the one pair of drawers her Momma made her from a corn meal sack before she got to town.  One snap of my fingers, and she’d forget all about Baby Snooks and jump right in here beside me. 

But I’ve got bigger fish to fry. 

He gave her a rueful grin, and drove over to Solly Weissbrot’s Haberdashery in the Strand. 

Solly could rattle off every man on the vice detail’s measurements from memory.  Buck roamed the shop and picked out a wool shearling coat, three western-cut suits, six silk shirts, six suits of underwear, a stockman’s Stetson, and pair of hand-tooled boots. 

When he stood before the three-sided mirror in one of his new outfits, he looked like some scissor-bill from the Petroleum Club. 

He left his old Palm Beach suit and two-tone shoes in the dressing room, and instructed Nate, Solly’s youngest boy, to forward the bill to him in care of the Sheriff’s Department. It came to just over three hundred dollars.

 Nate’s daddy wasn’t around to advise him, so the kid kept his trap shut and wrapped Buck’s purchases. 

Solly’s going to pitch a fit when he finds out I ain’t with the department no more, Buck thought. 

Well, what of it?  Bob Wilgus has been sopping up the gravy since he got back from France; let him pay for my new duds.  Comes to that, let the old turkey buzzard buy Willie Jenkins another Cadillac convertible. 

The notion made him grin as he stopped at an outdoor shine stand, and had his new boots buffed.  He stepped into the drugstore’s phone booth afterwards, and told the operator to ring Mama Tresor’s place.  Mama was a Cajun widow who ran the second priciest whorehouse on Post Office street.

“I’ll be by directly,” He said. “Is that Redbone boy still playing the piano in your front parlor?”

“Cecil? Yeah, he’s here.”

“Don’t let him go anyplace. I’ll want a word with Shirleen, too.”

***

It was one p.m. and most of the girls were still upstairs, sleeping off last night’s exertions.  Cecil Creighton was sitting at the battle-scarred upright piano, playing a Pinetop Burkes tune.  Cecil claimed his Daddy had been a Tchoupitoula Conjure man, and that he knew how to work root magic.

Buck stopped by the free lunch, heaping a plate with pigs knuckles and ‘tater salad.  He found a table and ordered a glass of buttermilk and a bottle of number twelve George A. Dickle.

Mama Tresor sat down beside him, and handed him an envelope full of greenbacks.  When the unopened fifth of dollar-a-shot sipping whiskey arrived, she looked pained. 

Buck wiped his mouth and handed her an old patrolman’s uniform cap.  He had unscrewed the Sheriff’s department shield from the front of it.

“Give this to Cecil,” Buck said.  “Tell him to pack his grip and wait for me in the red Caddy out front.  He can drive a car, can’t he?”

“I’ve seen him drive an Essex Tudor coupe, belongs to some Mex woman he stays with. Why, is he under arrest?”

“Not unless he tries to rabbit. I’ll want him to chauffeur me around on police business for a week or so. If he behaves, he’ll make a nice bit of money.”

“That’s just ducky for Cecil.  But what will I do for a piano player while he’s gone?”

“Bring the Monkey Ward catalog back in from the privy, and send off for a Victrola.  Which room’s Shirleen in?”

 “Upstairs, second on your right.”

Buck slipped the bottle into the fleece-lined side pocket of his new coat, revealing the 1917 Victory Smith .45 on his hip. He flipped two bits onto the table.

 “When the new phonograph gets here, buy a copy of Red Sails in the Sunset, my treat,” he said.

He ignored the bouncer on the landing, and entered Shirleen’s room without knocking. 

Shirleen was a skinny blonde with plucked eyebrows.  She was naked as an egg, squatting over a porcelain washbasin while she combed hydrogen peroxide through her tuft with a toothbrush.

“Girl, what are you doing?”

“Dying the carpet to match the drapes,” she said in a bored monotone. “I dream of becoming an interior decorator one day.”

That’s the movies I hear talking, Buck thought.  Now we got the whores imitating Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford, imitating the whores.

“How’d you like to make a fistful of cash?” He said.

“What would I have to do for it?”

“Same as you been doing, but not as much of it,” he said. “Pack your stuff. We’re going on a sales trip.”

***

Buck sat in the commander’s office at the Mississippi State Police barracks in Pass Christian, watching Colonel Bentley Goodis examine one of his business cards from the Galveston Sheriff’s Department. 

Goodis had a skull shaped like a light bulb and a waxed Doug Fairbanks mustache.  His cautious demeanor relaxed when he saw the Klan glyph Buck had scribbled.

“AYAK?” the Colonel asked. It was the invisible empire’s recognition acronym for “Are you a Klansman?”

“AKIA.” Buck said.  A Klansman I am. 

The two of them exchanged the secret handshake. 

Buck had joined the Klan for business reasons.  He had never bothered to buy the sheets or the other silly, over-priced regalia.

“What brings you to Mississippi, Brother Brownell?”

“My Klavern has entrusted me with a confidential mission,” Buck said. “I’m raising money for the families of white Christian law officers killed in the line of duty.”

“What’s secret about that, and why travel all the way up here to do it?”

 “The dependants of Klan members will have first claim on any funds we can raise.  We can’t solicit the money openly without reprisals from the atheistic Bolsheviks we got running the government nowadays.”

 “We don’t tolerate that New Dealer trash here in Mississippi.”

“That’s why we’re here, Colonel.” Buck said. “You reckon we could step outside? I’d like to show you something.”

The two of them left the barracks and crossed the parking lot. Cecil had parked the freshly washed and waxed Cadillac near the flagpole.  He jumped out of the Phaeton in his dark suit and cap, and smartly opened the rear door. 

Buck and the Colonel joined Shirleen in the back seat.  Cecil walked off a few paces and lit a cigarette. 

Shirleen smiled at Goodis and crossed her legs, showing him her silk hose and garters. 

Goodis said, “This is a splendid automobile.”

“It’s stolen,” Buck said. “I appropriated it myself, from Willie Jenkins.  He’s a colored preacher down home, thinks he’s the next Father Divine.  He has a radio program he uses to spread all manner of ungodliness and racial disharmony under the guise of religion.  As a result, my own secretary, Miss Delacroix, nearly became the victim of an unspeakable assault.”

“I’m shocked and saddened to hear it.”

“Don’t be.  The perpetrator tried to flee town on a shrimp boat, but he stole more anchor chains than he could swim with.  Colonel, we’d like to see your list of all the well-to-do Negroes, Jews, and Catholics residing between here and Pascagoula.”

 The Colonel shrugged and said, “As the Grand Titan of the Gulf Coast realm, my office requires me to compile that very information.  But what do you want with it?”

“I aim to sell them people this Cadillac, for cash,” Buck told him. “After they pay me, you state police boys come along and impound it.  When the buyers squawk, tell them the Caddy’s listed on a hot car Teletype out of Galveston, and threaten to arrest them for transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines.  They’ll be so scared of the G-men making a federal case out of it, they’ll fold.”

“That’s pretty slick,” Goodis allowed. “But where’s the benefit to my organization?  We Troopers have widows and orphans of our own, you know.”

Buck said,  “Every time your boys bring the Phaeton back to me, I’ll peel off five hundred dollars. You can disburse the money as you see fit, wherever the need is greatest. I’m sure that Miss Delacroix will be eager to express her gratitude, too.”

Shirleen clasped his hand to her chest and said, “Please say you’ll help, Colonel. I’ll thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

***

It was like peddling Eskimo Pies on the Fourth of July.  They sold the Cadillac twice before they even crossed the Harrison County line, first, to an Italian who owned a spaghetti restaurant in Long Beach, and again, two days later, to a Jewish dentist in Gulf Port. 

Between both sales, Buck made nine thousand dollars, minus the Colonel’s thousand-dollar commission. 

In Biloxi, he sold the Phaeton to a colored undertaker who ran a burial insurance society.

After the Troopers brought the car back to him, he was another six thousand dollars to the good.  He invested in a hand-tooled money belt. 

Shirleen spent the night with Colonel Goodis at a bird-hunting shack he owned on the Wolf River. 

She returned hung-over and feverish, covered head to foot with skeeter bites.

Cecil complained that he was tired of sleeping in the car.  He mentioned a juke joint, Anna Mae’s Café, where he could get a bed and free drinks for playing the piano.

Buck agreed that they had all earned a break.

He advanced Cecil fifty dollars, and instructed him to ask for them at the White House Hotel in five days.

Buck and Shirleen passed their vacation drinking, screwing, and ordering room service.  As soon as the bell captain saw the Phaeton, he offered Buck a chair in the high stakes card game held in one of the hotel’s honeymoon suites. 

Three nights later, Buck was seventeen hundred dollars to the good, and he had a new pigeon, a Greek who owned a fleet of fishing trawlers interested in the Cadillac.

When he returned to his room shortly after midnight, Shirleen was gone.  She had ransacked his suitcase, making off with his gold Elgin wristwatch, and six hundred and eighty dollars in petty cash. 

He found the nearest cabstand, and spread some money around.  A cabbie remembered driving a blonde and a colored man out to a crossroads near the agricultural hamlet of Gilchrist.

Gilchrist was a quarter mile from Anna Mae’s Cafe.  Buck drove out there, and peered through a side window.

Shirleen and Cecil were clinging to each other on the dance floor.  His gold watch was on Cecil’s wrist.  Buck drove to the nearest gas station, and called the Colonel.

***

Six carloads of hooded nighthawks arrived within the hour.  They busted a few heads, battered the joint’s piano into splinters, and blasted gaping holes in the tin roof with their shotguns before they took Cecil away. 

Buck took advantage of the excitement to drag Shirleen behind the shack and smack her around a little. 

In the tiny Gilchrist calaboose, Shirleen repeated the alibi Buck had given her to Town Constable Pettibone and several of his special deputies. 

“It started with some funny smelling hand-rolled cigarettes he gave me,” She sobbed. “After I puffed on them, I went into a swoon.  When I came out of it, I was in the back seat of the car, without a stitch of clothes on.

 He was rubbing some kind of Juba root onto me down there.  It made me feel dreamy and overheated, like I didn’t have any will of my own left.  Before I knew it, he commenced to having his way with me.”

She looked around the room and moaned, “Oh Lord, what’s going to become of me now?  I’m ruined.”

Pettibone patted her hand and said, “Don’t you fret Missy; nobody outside this room needs to know about it.”

“You’ve done all you can do, gentlemen, and I surely thank you.” Buck said.  “I believe I’ll take Miss Delacroix back to Texas now, to be with her Mama for a spell.”

***

A nasty squall was building in the gulf.  The hinges of the Phaeton’s convertible top were corroded by the salt air, and refusing to unfold. 

Buck wanted to get out of town fast.  He decided to outrun the storm, and worry about putting the top up later.  They left Gilchrist with a chill wind at their back and headed east, down Highway 90. 

When Buck spotted the dirt road the Constable had described to him, he turned down it, and sent the Phaeton jolting over an open field hemmed in by a stand of trees.  The field had once been some sharecropper’s bumblebee cotton patch, but it was abandoned now, over-run with dog fennel and Queen Anne’s lace. 

Buck stopped a few yards short of the smoldering remains of a bonfire.  The storm was catching up to them.

A swirling mist hugged the ground.  Buck counted off the seconds between thunderclaps and waited for the next flash of lightning.

“Look up yonder,” he shouted.

A burned and mutilated human form dangled from a red alder branch.  “That’s your doing, not mine,” Buck yelled. “You’re lucky I didn’t let those yokels haul your thieving ass out here and horsewhip you.”

Shirleen blinked at Cecil’s outraged corpse. 

The wind intensified, and the rain was coming down slantwise. “Is that Cecil?” she moaned. “Oh Sweet Jesus, what did they do to him?”

“Why, you want a closer look?” Buck shouted. 

He grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the car. 

She shrank away from him, but he seized the nape of her neck and marched her to the foot of the hanging tree. 

He pointed to the dead man’s charred arm and said; “You see that yellow metal melted into his wrist?  That’s the wristwatch you stole.”

He jammed the muzzle of his .45 into the soft flesh under her chin, and said, “We’re heading into Pascagoula now, bitch.  Try to rob me again, and Jesus gets hisself a new little sunbeam.”

He shoved her into the car, started the Phaeton, and pointed its nose back towards the highway.  Before he had driven ten yards, there was a sharp jolt from the undercarriage.  A tree stump had snagged the differential.

Buck took a swig of whiskey. He stripped off his shearling coat and gave it to Shirleen.  She draped it over her head and shoulders and slid behind the wheel. 

He found a sturdy six-foot length of broken tree branch, and wedged it under the Cadillac’s rear bumper.

“Give it some gas,” he yelled.

He draped himself over the branch and began seesawing back and forth. The Phaeton’s hundred-and sixty-five horsepower engine roared.

Buck felt a subtle tilt in the Cadillac’s center of gravity. Just as the front tires began to gain some purchase, Shirleen screamed. 

Buck straightened up, puzzled. He saw Shirleen scramble across the bench seat and tumble onto the ground.

A fresh bolt of lightning struck the trunk of the hanging tree, splitting it.  The corpse that had been there a moment before was gone now, and the noose was empty. 

A man-shaped shadow passed in front of the Cadillac’s headlights, advancing on Shirleen. 

She whimpered in terror, trying to scuttle away on her hands and knees.  A second blue-white flash of lightning gave Buck a fleeting impression of outstretched, claw-like hands, and a scorched, grinning death’s head, lolling on a broken neck stretched to twice its normal length. 

Buck yelled and drew his .45.  As he turned to run, he tripped over his own feet and fell face first into the mud.

He heard Shirleen babbling, begging for her life, and a howl of demonic laughter followed by a sharp crunch, like someone snapping a slate shingle.

Shirleen’s screams stopped. 

Buck pawed the ooze from his eyes.  When he got a closer look at what Shirleen had seen, he screamed too. 

He kept screaming as he fired his revolver six times, until the hammer fell uselessly against a spent primer.

***

Constable Pettibone was waiting for Colonel Goodis at the turn off on Highway 90.

The two men walked down the dirt road a few dozen yards until the hanging tree came into sight.

“A photographer from the Biloxi Sun Herald found ‘em,” Pettibone said. “He got a tip about what happened out here the other day.  He wanted some pictures to make souvenir postcards.  I called you right after I ran him off.”

“Did he get any pictures?” Goodis asked.

“Naw,” Pettibone said. “He had a mishap with his camera.”

The red Cadillac Phaeton was nearby, high-centered on a stump.  The Colonel took a closer look at the dead man dangling from a low branch. 

Bentley Goodis had seen more than a few men who had died at the end of a rope, but something about this one struck him as peculiar.

He realized that the empurpled, frog-eyed corpse was a well-dressed Caucasian.  A hemp noose lay neatly coiled near the dead man’s feet.  There were wads of paper currency strewn all over.

Someone had evidently strung the deceased up with his own money belt.  Well now Brother Brownell, Goodis thought, looks like you flim-flamed the wrong fellah, didn’t you?

“Over here, Colonel,” Pettibone said. 

One of Pettibone’s deputies opened both doors on the driver’s side of the Cadillac. Someone had propped a second dead man up behind the wheel. The body looked like a fire damaged store mannequin wearing a set of false teeth.

Goodis saw several large caliber bullet holes in the scorched head and torso.  The neck was broken too, with deep ligature marks under the jaw.  The corpse behind the wheel wore a Stetson, a shearling coat, and clutched a half-full bottle of George Dickle whiskey. 

A dead blonde woman sprawled across the back seat.

Someone had snapped her neck, leaving her head canted at a crazy angle.  Her blackened tongue protruded from her mouth, and the crows and jays had been at her. 

Goodis stared at Shirleen’s corpse for a long time. Finally he said in a flat voice, “I’m taking personal charge of this investigation. Collect the money belt and all the loose cash, and send for the coroner’s wagon.”

“What do you want done with them?”

“The county can bury them in Potter’s Field. Tell Doc to write them up as unidentified indigents.”

“What about the Cadillac?” Pettibone asked. 

That’s the question all right, Goodis thought.  I’ll tow it to the barracks and re-register it over in Alabama.

Pity it’s too much automobile for a man drawing my salary. I’ll present it to the Superintendent; tell him we confiscated it from a Yankee dope peddler after a routine traffic stop.  Maybe he’ll ask the governor to name me as his successor when he retirees.

“This vehicle is impounded by the Mississippi State Police,” Colonel Goodis said.  “You and I will divide the cash between us.”

Pettibone said, “That suits me just fine, but I’ve still got two murdered white people on my hands, one of them a woman.  What am I supposed to do about that?”

The Colonel said, “After what you boys done to the piano player, this looks like a revenge killing to me. 

Y’all might want to pay another visit to that juke joint one night soon, remind those people who’s in charge hereabouts.”

The End