Chapter 13

Liz gasped when she saw the torn skin on my face. “I need you to take me to the hospital to get stitches for my face and to have my left elbow treated. I think that it is sprained, but I am not sure. When asked, I was hurt when I fell. My walker will make that easy to believe.”

Liz didn’t have a driver’s license, but I had been teaching her to drive. I was not worried, since she just had not taken the time for the exam. She drove me to the hospital, and she called Dad while I was seen to. He showed up and took care of the paperwork. My mother saw no point in coming with him to the hospital. For all I knew, she was disappointed that I was still alive. Oh, well...

I left the hospital that same day with 21 stitches and a sling for my left arm. Well, there was no way that I was going to be driving for a while. Okay, Liz would go in for her driver’s test on Wednesday. That was the day the examiner was in town. In the meantime, I would ride to work with Dad.

By the time school started, my face was healed without even a scar that I could brag about, and my elbow was back in operation.

My mother had come home unexpectedly on a Saturday and had caught Liz and me in my bed fucking. This was when my elbow was still weak, so she had been the one on top. To this day, I don’t know whether my mother was more shocked over the fact that we were fucking or that Liz was on top of me. She reacted exactly the way I had expected and ordered Liz to get out of the house. Furthermore, she ordered me never to see Liz again. I really got pissed off and told my mother to “fuck off!” I had wanted to say that to her for some time, and I did not miss the opportunity

I told her that neither Liz nor I were going anywhere until I talked to Dad. That reduced her to tears and she ran to her bedroom and slammed the door. She left our door open, by the way. Liz was still there when Dad got home, but my mother snared him first. They had a terrible row that lasted about 20 minutes. After that, Dad came to my room for a discussion of the situation. Liz and I were dressed by then.

The upshot of the discussion was that my mother was going to stay with her parents in Arlington until I left the house or broke up with Liz. Dad said not to worry about it. The only person inconvenienced would be my brother, if anybody would. He admitted that he and my mother had not had sex for about a year, and he had not missed her all that much. He didn’t say so, but I figured that he had a girlfriend who was taking care of him. The important point was that Liz could spend time in my bed anytime she wanted to as long as her parents would go along with it.

Liz called home and, after a tearful conversation, decided to move in with me that afternoon. We moved the last of her school clothes on Sunday. My mother came back after about six months, but she never would talk to Liz or me if it were not absolutely essential. I think that she was shocked that nobody seemed to care.

About this time, both of my grandfathers died, and Granny moved to Montgomery to live with her other son. Liz and I still went to Arlington as often as possible to visit with Grandmother, and I think that pissed off my mother, though I am not sure which one she was the most annoyed with.

Liz and I started our senior year of high school with a minimum of fuss. We were trying to figure out what we were going to study in college. I’ll admit that I was influenced by what I saw on TV, but I had decided that I wanted to be a “Private Eye.” I had experience in fighting against people who tried to take advantage of other people, and I figured that I could earn money by doing that professionally. I know now that I was about as naïve as it was possible to get, but it was very easy to be that way in your teen years.

After thinking about it awhile, Liz and I figured that we could open our own business with me as the investigator and Liz as the office manager and telephone contact. With that in mind, we both decided to major in business administration. I asked Dad what he thought about my career choice, and he was not all that enthusiastic about it, but he did say that I should do what made me happy.

His main advice was that any job could get to be tedious if I didn’t enjoy it. He did agree that taking a course in business management could not hurt because that would set me up for a lot of possible careers. He was a bit more supportive when I told him that Liz and I wanted to go into business together.

This turned out to be a pretty boring year at the high school. I did squelch a few bullies, but that was the extent of my “public service” as far as the high school was concerned. However, it was just after Christmas that I had an opportunity to work on a real case. Specifically, a high school girl, a Senior, was raped and murdered. The police fooled around for about two weeks with the case, but seemed to be stymied.

The local newspaper took up the case as a crusade and offered a $2,000 reward to anyone who could come up with any information that led to an arrest. That was when I really got interested. The kind of clues that the police would normally look for just did not exist. For example, the girl had been strangled, so there was no bullet or other such evidence for the cops to follow. When she was found, the girl was naked and stuffed into a croker sack.

The coroner’s office had determined that she had been raped, but there was nothing useful in that other than to say that a man had somehow been involved in the case. The coroner could not even be sure that the deposited semen in her vagina was the result of rape or if it had been consensual. Everybody assumed that it was a rape, but it was not proven. That was just the simplest and most logical conclusion. Remember, this was taking place in the 1950s, and there were not a lot of scientific tests that could be done back then.

I figured that I should attack the problem from a different angle from what the cops were doing. I thought that I might learn something useful by interviewing the high school girls who knew the victim. That’s where Liz came in. The girl was new to the school this year, and few girls, if any, knew her very well. Liz didn’t even know her name until it was printed in the newspaper.

That’s where we found out that the girl was named Sarah Enfon, and she had recently moved to Hampton from Atlanta. Her father worked for an importer of South American guano for sale as fertilizer. He spent a lot of time in Cuba expediting deliveries to southeastern Alabama. It seemed that many people in South America who sold to the US liked to operate out of Cuba. When not working, they had a lot of fun in Havana.

Liz was asking around among the school girls trying to find a friend of Sarah whom I could interview. Dammit, she could not find a single girl who would admit to knowing Sarah that well. Either they were lying, which I doubted, considering the way females like to gossip about each other, or they were telling the truth that Sarah stayed by herself.

I found that suspicious and tried to find out where she spent most of her time. It turned out that Sarah never went on dates and never visited any of the local teen haunts. Dammit, what did this girl do? I couldn’t believe that she spent all of that time studying.

Her father was relatively wealthy, and they lived in the ritzy section of town on what amounted to a private estate. They had several household staff who lived in separate housing on the estate. One of these people was a chauffeur whom I suspected doubled as a body guard. He was only a few years older than Sarah, was Cuban, and disappeared at the same time Sarah did.

What was interesting was that the chauffeur was of mixed race, but with a very light colored skin, so he was not welcomed at most bars and such in Hampton during this period of strong Jim Crow segregation. Therefore, he rarely left the mansion unless he was driving Mr. Efron or Sarah somewhere. He did drive Sarah to school and pick her up there, and she was always seen in the front seat sitting very close to the chauffeur.