A Negro and an Ofay (The Tales of Elliot Caprice Book 1) Read online

  A NEGRO AND AN OFAY

  The Tales of Elliot Caprice

  Danny Gardner

  PRAISE FOR A NEGRO AND AN OFAY

  “Fans of Walter Mosley and George Pelecanos are going to devour Danny Gardner’s brilliant new book. A Negro and an Ofay breathes exciting new life into noir fiction.” —Jonathan Maberry, The New York Times bestselling author.

  “Elliot Caprice is a terrific character with his own Midwestern territory and Danny Gardner tells his stories with style and cunning.” —Peter Blauner, The New York Times bestselling author and co-Executive Producer of CBS’s Blue Bloods.

  “Immersive, poignant and utterly enthralling. Written from the middle of America’s great racial divide, it’s satirical, cool and irrevocably honest; imbued with an inherent nobility that rivals any modern day hero.” —Tom Avitabile, bestselling author of Give Us This Day.

  “A Negro and an Ofay is a smart, crisp, historically accurate, and unapologetically racial narrative that signals the arrival of a strong, necessary voice in crime fiction. This is the best debut you’ll read in a long time.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of Zero Saints.

  “Hard-boiled don’t get much harder than this. Danny Gardner hits all the right notes, but with enough swagger and voice to make it completely his own. Elliot Caprice is a fantastic character, stuck between two worlds—black and white, good and bad—and I really hope to see more of him.” —Rob W. Hart, author of South Village.

  “One of the best tools Gardner has in his toolbox…is his sense of humanity.” —Scott Waldyn, Literary Orphans Journal.

  “This young author is not only the heir apparent to Chester Himes and Walter Mosley, but the subtle social commentary laced almost invisibly within the beautifully crafted saga of an African American police detective fighting the ramifications of a frame that derailed his career, along with routine racism in 1950s Chicago, shows the promise of a contemporary James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison.” —Will Viharo, Digital Media Ghost.

  “…it manages to be smart, historical, and about identity/racial issues while retaining all the entertainment value that pulpy thrillers bring to the table. This is a book with a carefully crafted plot that touches on a lot of issues that were as relevant six decades ago as they are now, but it’s also a hell of a fun read packed with jazz, fights, sex, and the kind of dialogue that makes readers remember the name on the cover.” —Out of the Gutter Review.

  “This is a stunning debut! A powerful combination of brilliant storytelling and a breathtaking grasp of dialog subtext that strongly reminds of Mamet. Gardner is destined to become a big name in this writing game.” —Les Edgerton, author of The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping.

  “Elliot Caprice is a trouble magnet and that makes for a great character.” —Simon Wood, author of The One That Got Away.

  “There’s a naturalness and ease about this book despite a complex and dense plot. It flows effortlessly, and the dialogue has a wonderful cadence to it. I feel like if Gardner told me a tale on the spot, it’d be surprising, dramatic, and entertaining. To me, that’s a born storyteller, and it comes through loud and clear in this electrifying debut.” —Sarah M. Chen, author of Cleaning Up Finn.

  “Plenty of hardboiled patter and a dense plot with a great sense of place and wonderful dialogue.” —Eric Beetner, author of Rumrunners.

  “It finds a way to address issues of race and class without getting sidetracked, and, in fact, builds these issues seamlessly into the plot instead. What results is a totally unique detective in Elliot Caprice, who struggles with issues that feel both familiar and totally alien to the genre, not to mention the reader.” —Michael Pool, Crime Syndicate Magazine.

  “Gardner speaks truth through fiction. A Negro and an Ofay forces us to look into the brutal mirror of our past in the hope we might understand our future. With his sharp as a whip crack writing, Gardner may just change the world” —Paul Bishop, author of Lie Catchers.

  “It’s a beautiful tribute to a writer that his work automatically engenders echoes of the greats. Over and over, as I was reading Danny Gardner’s masterful debut, I had the impression I had somehow stumbled across a previously undiscovered work of Chester Himes, or Jim Thompson, or Walter Mosley—or all three magically rolled into one. A Negro and an Ofay has the same gritty intensity, the same attention to historical detail and incisive moral (or amoral) reflection, and the same collection of unforgettable characters that I expect from those iconic writers. But Gardner’s voice is completely and uniquely his own, and he brings to this novel a clarity of insight and a pitch-perfect sense of story that are truly astonishing. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing great things from this Young Turk, and I can’t wait to read what he comes up with next.” —David Corbett, prize-winning author of The Mercy of the Night

  Copyright © 2017 by Danny Gardner

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  A Negro and an Ofay

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Titles from Down & Out Books

  Preview from Bad Boy Boogie, a Jay Desmarteaux Crime Thriller by Thomas Pluck

  Preview from Resurrection Mall, a Penns River Crime Novel by Dana King

  Preview from American Static, a Crime Novel by Tom Pitts

  To Chicago, my love.

  May your south and west sides rise again.

  CHAPTER 1

  As he came to, with blurred vision, he detected light. It didn’t shine so much as claw at the brick walls, like the slender fingers of angry ghosts. An endless flight of concrete stairs coiled away from him. He was headed downward, though not by his own volition. He remembered drinking in a roadhouse joint. “Black Night” was playing on the juke. He understood how Charles Brown hated to be alone. A shot of corn. A friendly chippie. More corn. An offered dance. By the time Brown’s brother was in Korea, he heard hard words behind him. “Get your hands off my woman, red nigger.” The absolute wrong thing to say to him when he had been drinking. “Fuck you” this and that. A shove. The juke stopped. A fist for that fat, greasy, chicken-eatin’ mouth. He heard something behind him.

  Then black.

  His head hurt. He heard ringing. Assumed blood in his ears. A moment later, it sounded like jangling. He figured chains or keys. His hands were bound. His wrists were cold. He thought he was cuffed.

  Hoped he was cuffed.

  He had accommodated himself to incessant disorientation while in Europe, where he would climb out of his tank and find himself immersed in bullets and bombs and shouts and screams. In the din of war, he learned to disregard the senses that failed him and focus on his singular survival. That’s how Elliot Caprice returned from the Battle of the Bulge with all his limbs. And most of his wits.

  He shifted his feet.

  “Take it easy, boy.”

  Boy.

  “Sh
it, I’m in the bing.”

  “Shut your hole,” the fat jailer holding his feet said. He hadn’t seen the skinny jailer holding him by his arms until he rolled over after they dropped him on his face.

  “If you can talk, you can walk,” Skinny said.

  “Easy to see which one of y’all picks up the donuts in the mornin’,” said Elliot.

  “You are in the custody of the St. Louis County Sheriff. You’ll be detained until you can appear before a judge. Got it, smart guy?” Fatty said, just before he kicked Elliot in the ribs.

  Elliot rose to his feet. Skinny pushed him down the stairs.

  “Why am I here when I vaguely remember bein’ dry-gulched in Belleville?”

  “You had a police issue thirty-two on your person,” Skinny said. He produced a key ring. “Get comfortable. Make friends.”

  He shuddered as the cell door slammed behind him. It sounded eerily similar to the lid of his M18 Hellcat. The blast of body heat combined with the cold limestone felt just like ol’ Lucille’s air-cooled engine exhaust. He was rudely reminded of the involuntary smells men create when their glands respond to despair; sweat and filth, rushed through the air on panicked breaths. Elliot immediately turned back toward his jailers.

  “Look here, constable. How’s about my phone call?”

  “No calls on Sunday. Gotta wait until morning. Could be in front of the judge by then,” said Skinny.

  “That’d be too bad for you, halfie. Beatty is a hangin’ judge,” said Fatty.

  “I’m colored. They’re all hangin’ judges.”

  “Ya know, Nathan White,” said Fatty, as he looked at the docket. “You keep that attitude, you may not get in front of the bench. You’re in the Meat Locker, pally.”

  The infamous Meat Locker was the massive desegregated holding cell underneath the St. Louis County Courthouse. As broad as it was long, it was nearly standing room only. Only a few pendant lights hung overhead so inmates depended upon street light that passed through the barred, narrow windows above. Elliot wondered if anyone walking by knew what was down there, in the depths, stowed underneath St. Louis’s poor excuse for a palace of jurisprudence.

  Elliot was amazed at how, although drunk and disoriented, he managed to give his alias. Nathan was his middle name, the first name of the uncle who adopted him as a baby—Nathan “Buster” Caprice. White was for the most mysterious half of his racial heritage. He resolved to use only one name, unlike the litany of aliases of the con men he encountered during his time on the Chicago Police Department. A liar is only as good as his memory. Elliot’s life depended upon his deceptions.

  He shambled through the bodies of poor unfortunates forced to integrate until he found a cot on the other side of the cell. The galvanized bucket chamber pots had overflowed. He’d missed the only meal of the day. He was booked on a Sunday. No small blessing. It gave him time to figure on his situation. The gun needed an answer. He was once a Chicago beat cop. His record would be examined. After that, the guards drop a dime. Elliot somehow hangs himself in the shower. The screws split the bribe. Fatty takes the bigger cut.

  He laid on his back with nothing else to do but serenade himself with curses. One for drinking too much. Another for his weakness for the blues. A third for the corresponding weakness for big-legged women. Above all, he cursed himself for not playing the game well enough at Bradley Polytechnic. When life had him by the short hairs, he often fantasized about being a good student who graduated on the Dean’s list. Then he could have traded on his near-whiteness to land a job in the front office of some industrial farm in Illinois. Could’ve had a nametag. Maybe a desk. Dated some chippie from the secretarial pool. Perhaps that would have kept him from enlisting in Patton’s Third Army. He would have never followed every other discharged colored to the big city. He wouldn’t have taken the police academy test while drunk, just to show how much smarter he was.

  He wouldn’t have ruined his life.

  “Hey, yella. That’s my cot.”

  Elliot opened his eyes. A mountain of a man had taken a seat on a cot across from him. He was dark as midnight and stood well over six feet, as tall as he was broad. He had the scarred hands of a fighter. The lines in his face outlined a massive skull underneath.

  “Yeah, white boy. Get it up,” came a much slighter voice.

  “You a cannibal, big man?”

  “What’s that smart shit you say there?”

  “How else you got a voice comin’ out ya ass, if’n you didn’t eat a fella?”

  A smallish man, no more than five feet tall, stepped from behind Mountain. If he felt better, Elliot would’ve laughed.

  “Watch it, light-skin,” the big man’s tiny flunky said.

  “Seems like y’all got yaselves a couple of cots already. Push on.”

  Elliot closed his eyes again, until he felt the jump of Mountain’s kick at the cot’s legs.

  “Ain’t nobody tell ya? They all my cots.”

  “You want a cot, you gotta ask us,” said Flunky.

  “Ovah there, jawin’ with the jailers, soundin’ like you Jimmy Cagney. You-dirty-rattin’ wit’ them ofays,” Mountain said. He assumed a fighting posture. “You ain’t white yet, high yella, but you keep tryin’. Now, up it.”

  “What yo’ name is, corn pone?”

  “This here is Frank Fuquay. Folks around our parts call him Big Black,” said Flunky.

  “What parts would those be?”

  “Yazoo County, Miss-sip!”

  “Yeah, Lawd!” Big Black said.

  “Is that so? My daddy was from around that way,” Elliot said.

  “Yo daddy, huh? No doubt sum’ cracker that took the long way home one night.”

  That was the last slur of his mixed race Elliot intended to hear. Big Black’s buddy was a short-stack, but it was still two against one. Uneven odds were nothing new to him, so he resolved to play it cool.

  “Tell you the truth, he was ’bout as inky as you.”

  “What you say?”

  “Yeah, boy. It took a whole lot o’ snowflake to dilute that much buck. You a tall drink of Darkest Africa, Big Black. Whycome you got no white in you at all? Yo granny wasn’t pretty enough for the slave foreman?”

  “I know you ain’t gonna take that, Frank!”

  “Shol’ ain’t!”

  Big Black’s swiftness would have startled Elliot, had he not set him up for it. From his lower position, he delivered a fierce heel kick to Frank Fuquay’s left knee, just above the patella. Most folks don’t know healthy joints have enough give in both directions to protect them from injury. Big Black found out the hard way. The glazed concrete floor, slick from the tears of the miserable, let him down. Frank fell forward. Elliot swerved out the way. Big Black hit the floor. Before his monstrous opponent could recover, Elliot knelt, grabbed him by the throat and placed his entire two hundred pounds behind the knee he slammed into Big Black’s chest. It made a loud sound. The sort a paddle makes when one beats the dust off a rug. The air rushed out of the bruiser’s lungs. Flunky stayed put, shouting commands.

  “Kick his ass, Frank!”

  “Shut up, Tony.”

  “Yeah. Shut up, Tony,” Elliot said, as he looked around at the other inmates. All were too miserable to get involved.

  “Let me see if I can tell it. Sixty-six runs right up through Yazoo. You two jackasses steal some shoes and make the trek on up to the big city. Ain’t that many pigs to stick up this way, so you opted to break the law. That’s how you in heah. That ’bout right?”

  “Fuck you,” the big man said. Tony finally fell silent.

  “See here, Big Black,” Elliot said. He squeezed his fingers tighter around the bully’s neck. “Instead of wastin’ ya time pickin’ on folks—Lord knows who you tryin’ to impress—y’all need to get your stories straight. In a minute, them ofays gonna slide some confession papers in front of you. As I doubt you know how to read, there’s a good chance your black ass gon be puttin’ his X on somethin’ someone else did,
on top of your own mess.”

  “You fo’ real?”

  “Happens all the time. They’ll string you up and have ya mama pay the shippin’ on your body. She’d have to take up a collection for your big ass. Better stop makin’ hay and start makin’ friends, Big Black. Somebody gonna have to write to yo’ mama about how her big, dumb baby boy wound up hangin’. Or you could write it yourself. If’n you know how to write. Okay there, Big Black?”

  Frank attempted a struggle. Elliot put more weight behind his knee.

  “Okay, Frank Fuquay. All the way from Yazoo County, Miss-sip?”

  Elliot glared into the Big Black Mountain’s eyes.

  “Gotcha, boss.”

  “What?! Teach this yella nigger a lesson, Frank!”

  “Shut up, Tony,” Big Black said.

  Elliot let his hand go slack. He lowered his voice to a whisper.

  “We’s all afraid up in here,” Elliot said. He allowed Frank Fuquay up off the disgusting floor. “And get rid of the little guy. He’s trouble.”

  “Fuck you, high yella!”

  Elliot took to his cot. He was content to rest after getting himself through a scrape without anyone coming up dead.

  For once.

  CHAPTER 2

  Even in the din of the jail, he was tired enough to sleep away the headache were it not for the memory of Izzy Rabinowitz’s voice, as clear as if he were in the cell with him.

  “The straight path ain’t for you, kid. You’re neither fish nor fowl. You’re meant to play the margins.”

  Truth told, the longest he stuck with anything was when he collected for Izzy’s outfit, which was from the time he was twelve until he went off to college at twenty. Since he took his first steps, he was resentful. An abandoned baby, bequeathed all of his parents’ piss and vinegar. A city boy trapped in farm country. Father meets Mother in Chicago, makes her pregnant. Dies in the race riots. Mother finds Father’s brother to abandon her bastard. Doc Shapiro, there at bastard’s breech birth, takes him under his wing to keep him out of trouble. Shapiro’s cousin, Izzy Rabinowitz, the loan maker, shows up at the back door of Doc’s small office. Out in the car was a thumb-breaker suffering six stab wounds to the torso. Bastard cleans up the blood without a flinch. Asks a lot of questions about what happened. Finally, bastard finds purpose. No more overnight stays in the Southville County jail for mischief and mayhem. No more beatings with the mule strap in Uncle Buster’s barn. Belonging. Acceptance. Praise. He was good—great—at doing dirty work for the most powerful Jew in the Midwest. That he never had the stomach for it was his little secret.