Line of Succession

Brian Garfield

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media ebook

SUNDAY,

JANUARY 2

10:45 P.M. EST The girl’s body was found by a man in a raincoat. It was in an alley near the intersection of Euclid and Fourteenth Street Northwest—a black neighborhood of brick row-houses and urban ferment.

At first the man in the raincoat shrank from the body: he stood against the wall breathing shallowly, blinking, but in the end he knelt by the girl and began to search near and under the body, although there was little hope. If she had been mugged there would be no handbag.

A car was going by slowly. The man in the raincoat ignored it until it stopped, but then it was too late. The spotlight swiveled onto him and pinned him against the wall.

He threw up an arm in front of his eyes and heard the car door open and chunk shut. There was a voice:

“Turn around. Hands high against the wall.”

The man in the raincoat obeyed. He knew the routine. He splayed his feet a yard out from the base of the wall and leaned against his palms. The patrolman frisked him and found nothing and moved with a crunch of shoes to the girl’s body.

The second cop got out of the squad car. The first cop said, “DOA. Send in a squeal—we’ll want the wagon.”

The man in the raincoat heard the first cop get up and take two steps forward. The cop’s voice had changed: before it had been weary but now it was taut, angry. “What in the hell did you do that with?”

“I didn’t do nothing.”

He felt a sudden grip on his shoulder and the cop pulled him upright from the frisk position and cracked the handcuffs against his wrists.

“Now sit down.”

He slid down with his back against the brick wall. The drizzle ran down inside the collar of his raincoat and he hitched around on his buttocks to free enough cloth to cover the back of his neck. The spotlight was in his eyes and he kept them squinted almost shut.

“You vicious bastard,” the cop said, very soft.

When the boot caught him in the ribs he was half expecting it and he managed to ride with it, toppling over on his side; it hurt but it hadn’t broken anything. He stayed on his side with his cheek in the gravel. He had learned submission a long time ago. If you showed any fight at all they would kick the guts out of you.

The cop’s feet shifted and the man in the raincoat got ready for another kick but then the other cop came from the car. “Take it easy, Pete.”

“You didn’t see what the son of a bitch did to her. Take a look.”

“Just take it easy. Some lawyer sees him all black and blue they’ll turn him loose and hand us a reprimand.”

“Since when can anybody see black and blue on that spade hide?” But the cop didn’t kick him again.

The other cop went over to the dead girl. Breath whistled out through his teeth. “Sweet Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he do it with?”

“Beats me. He must have ditched the knife.”

“Took more than a knife.”

“I’ll have a look around.”

The first cop started to prowl the alley, and the second cop came over to the man in the raincoat. “Sit up.”

He obeyed. The cop was above him and when he looked up he could see the cop’s fleshy white face in the hard beam of the spotlight. The cop said, “You got some identification? Move your hands real slow.”

The man reached inside his raincoat and took out the little plastic case. The cop took it from him and lifted it, turning, to get it in the light. All it contained was a numbers slip, a welfare card, Social Security and a single dollar bill.

“Franklin Delano Graham,” the cop said. “Jesus Christ.”

11:20 P.M. “I think he’s telling it straight,” the lieutenant said.

The sergeant propped himself against the hip-high partition that delineated the lieutenant’s corner of the detective squad room. “Hell, he’s a junkie. He wouldn’t know the truth if it kicked him in the face.”

“Then what did he do? Mangle the girl like that, grab her bag, go away somewhere and hide the bag and the stuff he mangled her with, and then come back and hang around waiting for us to pick him up? I can’t buy that.”

The sergeant looked across the squad room. A dozen desks, men sitting at half of them. Franklin Delano Graham was on a bench against the far wall, guarded by the patrolman who had brought him in. Graham’s black face was closed up with the singular bleakness of a junkie who knows he’s not going to get his next hit in time.

The sergeant said, “I guess that’s right. But I’ll book him anyway.”

“Send him over to the methadone clinic.”

“What for?” But the sergeant went to his desk and sat down to type up the forms.

The lieutenant was on the telephone. “Have you got a make on the dead girl yet?”

11:35 P.M. Alvin stood just inside the window keeping watch on the street. The sill was a half inch deep in dust and there was a large white-painted X across the outside of the panes. He could see through it past the front steps to the sidewalk where Line and Darleen stood under the street lamp in tight vivid colors, both flaunt-it-baby black and lean, looking too casual to be sentries.

The bombs lay in a row on the table, and Sturka worked on them with studied concentration. The five people from California sat on wooden boxes in a little circle at the far side of the room. Peggy and Cesar were near the table watching Sturka work on the bombs; Mario Mezetti was in the corner on the floor, absorbed in rereading Ché’s diary.

Alvin looked out the window again. The air was misty but the drizzle had quit. When cars passed, the wind whipped away white exhaust spumes from their tailpipes. A few black people moved along the street and Alvin looked at their faces. Probably tomorrow wouldn’t change their lives at all. But you had to try.

Sturka was hunched over the long refectory table. No one spoke; it was a silence of discipline and sweat.

The room was broken plaster and splintered floorboards. Mario had cellotaped the photo of Mao on the door and beneath it one of his humorless posters, Long Live the Victory of the People’s War. The Californians’ suitcases were stacked neatly by the table and Peggy was using one for a seat, smoking a Marlboro and watching Sturka build his bombs. There was a gooseneck high-intensity lamp with an extension cord which Sturka moved from mechanism to mechanism as he worked on them. A pile of lumpy knapsacks on the floor, a scatter of ashes and dirt and empty styrofoam cups, and a stale sense of abandonment: the block was marked for demolition and that was why there were whitewash crosses on the windows.

Everything was laid out with professional neatness as if for a display—the five handbags and briefcases, innards exposed; the plastic gelatine and the wires and batteries and detonators and stopwatches.

Peggy was restless: she came to the window and looked out past him at Linc and Darleen on the curb. She touched his sleeve. “Bad vibes, Alvy?”