Darktown (18 page)

Boggs had resisted asking Little what the worst thing was. He'd told the fellow to buck up, stay strong, pray on it, all those clichés he hated voicing because he didn't know what else to say. Many of them had confided in each other their fears, their second thoughts that perhaps this occupation wasn't such a great idea after all. In such moments it was the other fellow's role to remind his colleague that they were doing this for a reason, that they couldn't afford to back down, that they would collectively lose so much if any of them put individual concerns first by quitting. Little was a bookish fellow, seemed more suited to working for his uncle's newspaper. Boggs was worried he'd be the first to fold.

And now it was Boggs whose spirits needed lifting. He stood in front of these fools he'd arrested and wondered if this was worthwhile.

Two hours after he had called for a wagon, the thunder started. As if the rain had been awaiting the thunder's permission, the skies opened, the shower pelting them hard enough that the unconscious men woke up, with no idea where they were.

A full
three hours
after Boggs had made the call, another wagon finally arrived.

The officers woke the men up, all of whom had fallen back asleep.
Groggy and sore, some of them looked resigned to their fate, and some looked like they had only the vaguest understanding of what was happening. Then the wagon pulled away and the officers walked north.

The rain had been intense but brief, gone in twenty minutes. Even with their ponchos, they were drenched. Boggs's cut forehead was stinging worse than before. Every time they took a step they heard their soaked socks sloshing. They would have blisters in the morning, they knew from experience.

All Boggs wanted to do was walk. Run, really, but he'd settle for walking. Walk across the entire city, exhaust himself, feel the sweat coat his body. Push himself to new limits, walk 'til he collapsed. Civil war soldiers on both sides had walked miles a day for weeks on end. Slaves walked even farther, no doubt, though usually not in a straight line but the same rows, over and over, endlessly. How far had his forbears walked? Could he make it to any state lines if he started now? But again,
Why bother?
As if things were any different in Alabama or North Carolina. Things were as good as they could be for a Southern Negro here, in Atlanta, blocks from Auburn Avenue. At least, that's what he'd always been told.

How long would it take to walk to Chicago, where so many people had ventured in search of a better life?

He worried that maybe he was just weak. When he'd returned from the war, bitter and angry from his meaningless time spent at that army camp, soul afire from all the insults his white superiors had leveled at him, his father had told him that maybe Lucius's relatively comfortable upbringing in the Sweet Auburn community had insulated him from the hatred the reverend had grown up with. Those sage words hadn't been what Lucius wanted to hear, but he feared his father was right.

Boggs and Smith walked on. The city had been so quiet before the storm but now it was like someone had adjusted the volume, water gushing from downspouts, water dripping from eaves, the random explosions of cars driving into puddles, the secondary showers of rainwater falling from heavy boughs.

Then they heard new sounds: laughter, and the breaking of a bottle.

“Wait,” Smith said.

More laughter, and Smith turned into an alley. Boggs didn't want to follow, wanted to just walk and walk. But follow he did.

The alley snaked between two squat brick buildings that, by the looks of them, had been planned as housing for a nearby mill expansion that had never happened. It was home to an odd-jobs Negro named Andrews who they'd seen a few times while monitoring Chandler Poe, the bootlegger that Judge Gillespie had let off. Smith crept up to an open window and looked inside, Boggs just behind him.

Three men sitting at a table, playing cards, chips and coins scattered between them. Glasses of yellowish liquid standing sentry by each pile. They saw Andrews, Poe, and a portly, balding man Boggs didn't recognize.

Smith saw a bottle near his feet. He picked it up and, without warning his partner, tossed it against the side of the building. A pop, glass shards chinking all over. Boggs jumped back.

The laughter from inside stopped. Smith ducked his head below the window and crept farther into the back. Boggs flattened himself against the wall.

From inside the voices were asking each other what it was and who was there, each of them sounding drunker and more confused than the one before him. One of them said they should check it out, exactly the bit of stupid bravery Smith had been counting on.

The men stumbled out, down the three wooden steps and into the alley, nothing but silhouettes until they were close enough for their faces to be caught in the lamplight that shone through a window. None of them had thought to bring a flashlight or even a candle, and none of their eyes were as adjusted to the dark as the two cops' they still couldn't see.

Smith wanted to use his fists, would have greatly preferred the sensation in his knuckles and up through his arm and shoulder, but he didn't care to leave such evidence on his flesh. So it was with his billy club that he swung crosswise against Poe's left cheek. The cracking bone was the only sound as the bootlegger fell.

This is dumb, dumb, dumb,
Boggs was thinking as Smith drove the butt of his club into Andrews's stomach, doubling him over.

Andrews was vomiting and hadn't even fallen yet when Smith turned his attention to the third man, who was backing up as quickly as a drunk man could. “No no no, c'mon,” the man said, and he got his wish, as Smith chose to ignore him and instead picked Poe up off the ground.

“Police!” Boggs shouted at the bald man. “This your house?”

“No! No, sir!” the man said, backing up again until he'd tripped over the wooden steps.

“Then get yourself back home.”

The man ran off. A second later Boggs could hear him trip and fall again, then keep running.

Poe was trying to break free of Smith, who pressed him against the wall and then jabbed his club into the bootlegger's ribs. Poe wailed.

Boggs kicked, not too hard, at the fallen Andrews. “Back in your house, now!”

Andrews seemed only too happy to obey, moving faster than Boggs would have thought possible.

Smith let Poe fall to the ground. He swung at the bootlegger again, and again.

“Take your
god
damn
low
-life self out of my
god
damn
neigh
borhood!” Each of Smith's curses was accompanied by another swing. Poe enclosed his head in a protective ball of arms and hands, not that it helped.

“Where your white boy at now, huh? Where's your cracker cop now?” Again with the club, breaking fingers. “How much you paying him, you son of a bitch?”

Boggs turned and looked out of the alley, hoping not to see any bedroom lights flicker on.

“I'll pay you more, I'll pay you more!”

Wrong answer. Smith swung again, harder than before. Saliva hanging from his chin.

“This ain't Dunlow's neighborhood no more, you understand? It's mine! It's my goddamn neighborhood! Take your goddamn booze somewhere else!”

“Okay!” Poe pleaded. “Okay!”

Smith crouched down closer. “Oh, you're so damned smart, ain't you? You got the white cops and the judges behind you, huh? Well, you don't have me, got it? You do not have me, and if I see you in this neighborhood again, this will all seem like a goddamn slap on the wrist, got it?”

“I got it, I got it!”

Smith stood again, the tension in his shoulders seeming to predict
yet another swing, so Boggs stepped forward and clamped his hand on it. “Enough.”

Smith didn't reply, didn't even move his head to acknowledge that, but he didn't swing again either. Just stood there, recovering. He hoped Poe would be stupid enough to say something more, but Poe wasn't.

In twenty minutes their shift would be over, Boggs told himself. In sixty minutes he would try to forget this as he laid down his weary bones. Even though he knew he would never forget it, and he sensed like an added weight on his shoulders that this evening would haunt him and his partner in more ways than one.

14

MORE THAN ONCE
Rake had imagined himself accidentally shooting his partner. Just imagined it. Not actually planned it. Not actually sketched it out or hidden a drop weapon. Not actually asked some random ex-con to do the job for him in exchange for lenience next time. Things weren't
quite
that bad. But he had certainly imagined how nice it would be if his partner, by chance, accidentally died. Perhaps Dunlow might have a heart attack soon. Perhaps he would start bullying the wrong Negro, would pick on some strapping lad who had a nasty grudge and a weapon in his back pocket. Perhaps, if that happened, Rake would deliberately wait an extra second or two before intervening, just to make sure Dunlow was dead first.

Dunlow had been a beat cop for twenty years, and though he seemed to think this made him a better beat cop, superior somehow, what it really meant was that he'd never been promoted. Given the increasing number of beatings and shakedowns Rake had seen the man perform in their first few weeks together, Rake couldn't help but wonder what Dunlow might be holding back for later. What greater misdeeds he was concealing from Rake's view. Was Dunlow testing Rake, hoping to see how far he would go to do things Dunlow's way? Had Rake failed a test when he hadn't taken part in a bribe? Had he failed by calling the ambulance and wagon the night Boggs had been injured?

And what, if anything, did Dunlow have to do with the death of the Ellsworth girl?

“Anybody looking into who killed that girl in the trash?” he asked from the passenger seat, the night after his midnight talk with Mr. Calvin.

“I heard it was her old man.”

“Didn't he live out in the country somewhere?”

“Yes, but they do have trains. I'm hearing he came back into the city and got in a fight with her, shot her dead.”

That a father might shoot his daughter after a heated argument wasn't as unlikely as some would prefer to believe, Rake knew. If you're going to be killed, you probably know the person who's going to do it, and you may even be related to them. Love and lust, pride and insult, heat of the moment, things instantly regretted. But to then throw your daughter's corpse out like garbage? For Rake, that stretched the bounds of credulity, but for Dunlow, Negroes were capable of any atrocity.

“Fight over what?”

“She was sleeping with white men.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Around. Some of us actually talk to people when we walk our beat, rookie. Some of us actually get dirty, immerse ourselves in the life of the neighborhood. You'd be wise to do more of that yourself.”

“What do you know about that fellow we pulled over a couple of weeks ago,” Rake asked, trying to sound casual. “Brian Underhill?”

“Why do you ask?”

“That girl in the trash, Boggs says she was the girl they saw in Underhill's car that night. Said he hit her, then she got out and ran.”
And then you let the man go.

“Boggs says?!”
The car swerved from Dunlow's reaction. He stared at his partner. Gritted teeth. If eyes could be gritted, they would have been, too. “You're getting tips from the nigger cops? Are you goddamn crazy?”

He pulled onto the side of the road. Rake stared out the front window for a moment to escape the heat radiating from his partner's face.

“What the fuck do you think you're doing, consorting with them?”

“Dunlow, Jesus, Boggs mentioned something about her that time he and I were waiting on an ambulance. That's hardly
consorting.
” Later he would regret how quickly he had disavowed his talk with Boggs. But the force of Dunlow's reaction had startled him, and he could sense his partner busily erecting mental barriers to the other questions Rake had wanted to ask.

Dunlow nodded, realizing he'd gotten too worked up. He pulled them back onto the road.

“What I know of Brian Underhill is that he is not a murderer.” A freight train blew its lonesome wail. “He's a former cop. Worked fifteen, sixteen years or so.”

Rake knew this part already—he'd looked the man up. Wanting to know a few of the answers before Dunlow offered any, so he could note discrepancies. “What happened?”

“Damned lottery sting.”

Four years ago, a state-led investigation of the city's sundry lottery schemes had turned up plentiful examples of police corruption. Numbers running was one of the biggest businesses in Atlanta—some journalists figured it was possibly third only to trains and textiles. The not-so-little, not-so-secret dirty little secret was that Atlanta's finest were often involved, protecting the numbers runners, taking orders, receiving their cut.

Nine cops were fired after the investigation was splashed all over the
Journal'
s and the
Constitution'
s front pages, no doubt furthering the career of some district attorney or other. From the police's perspective, those nine cops were scapegoats taking the fall for senior officers. Rake had been in Europe then, but he still heard enough stories about the sting from aggrieved cops who complained about it the way they griped about a similar operation against the Kluxers a few years back.

“You know him?” Rake asked.

“Well enough. He was a detective on Homicide, and I'd occasion to work with him a few times. Didn't make all that much of an impression, tell you the truth.”

“He made enough of one for you to say pretty certainly that he isn't a murderer.”

“Are you interrogating me, Officer Rakestraw?”

Rake tried to use a sincerely surprised tone, which he realized he wasn't very good at. “I'm just asking a few questions. He's the last person to be seen with this girl, and he's—”

“According to the monkeys.”

“—the only lead anyone's got, so it seems worth pursuing.”

“And why is that? Educate me on your thought process.”

“Well, you yourself just said there's reason to believe she was sleeping with a white man. Maybe it was Underhill. Maybe they had a spat, or he thought she was cheating.”

“Best not to let a fellow like him hear you say that.”

“Why not? Because he's the kind of fellow who might shoot someone and throw the body out like garbage?”

“You think you're very clever.”

“Just trying to figure a few things out.”

“The report—which, by the way, you aren't the only person in this car that's read it—says she was shot with a .22. People may say some bad things about Underhill, but him carrying a little .22 ain't one of them.”

“What are some of the bad things people say about him?”

Dunlow shook his head. “Giving me a goddamn headache.”

At ten o'clock the next morning, Rake staked out the last known address of Brian Underhill, a four-story brick apartment building in Mechanicsville, south of downtown. The neighborhood had become overcrowded during the war, with so many men needed at the rail yards, and had remained overcrowded afterward. There was just enough foot traffic for Rake to feel slightly conspicuous there in his parked car but not so much so that he gave up.

He needed to know what this man's story was. The fact that Dunlow had all but warned him off only made this more necessary. Some basic research had revealed Underhill's address, a copy of his photograph (four years old now, but good enough), and a brief outline of his truncated career. If Rake had been a detective in Homicide, he would have had more resources at his disposal, and a legitimately helpful partner. But he was just a beat cop, and besides, it was clear now that Lily Ellsworth's murder would never be investigated. Eventually some Negro arrested for some other murder would “confess” to hers as well, and presto, the crime would be solved. No one would ever know, or care, who killed Lily.

Did Rake care? Yes, he did. He didn't think a girl of any color should be killed, dropped in an alley, and forgotten. He took his responsibility to enforce the law seriously, even if others did not.

Not that he was motivated solely by pure intentions. What motivated him was this: the inkling, the strong hint, the tingle on the back of his neck that his partner knew far more about the murder than he was letting on. His partner, who had already tried to get one of the colored
cops fired for drinking based on zero evidence and who delighted in provoking them. Rake had never asked to be assigned to a corrupt cop, and he'd hoped he would eventually be reassigned. But waiting around for a transfer felt like a luxury he could no longer afford.

So he sat in the car and waited. He had lied to his wife and told her his shift was earlier than it was, all so he'd have two precious hours to follow Underhill before roll call.

The car radio on, he listened to the latest from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, where delegates had narrowly approved a civil rights plank, no doubt encouraged by Truman's surprising decisions to desegregate the armed forces and set up a federal Committee on Civil Rights. The vote outraged Southern Democrats; now the Mississippi and Alabama delegates had stormed out of the convention hall and were said to be forming their own States Rights Democratic Party, with Strom Thurmond their nominee. Some were dubbing them the “Dixiecrats” and said this splintering would all but hand the election to Dewey. Rake turned off the radio.

Sitting there in the hot car, nothing to occupy his mind, he found himself thinking about his brother. Curtis had been the joker in the family, the schemer. The one convinced they could make a fortune selling lemonade on the sidewalk, or by digging for treasure. One of his favorite tricks was to tackle his younger brother from behind, preferably when other people were around to see it. Rake's head was on a swivel from a young age, always aware that an ambush was possible, yet always surprised when it happened. Curtis's ability to plan an entire day around being in the right place at the right time was uncanny. The ambush/tackling phase had faded by the time Curtis was old enough to drive, and cause worse trouble. Curtis no doubt would have loved being a cop on a stakeout, waiting patiently for the subject to emerge, so long as there was someone beside him to tell jokes to for hour after hour. The realization made Rake miss him all the more.

Underhill did nothing of interest that first day, other than walking five blocks to a diner, eating a very late breakfast, and then walking home.

He did nothing of interest the following day, either. Yet Rake kept at it.

The third time Rake kept watch was at night, three in the morning, after his shift ended. He had expected Underhill would be asleep, but the lights were on. He had slid into a parking space, a block away from the building, when he recognized one of the cars parked on the other side of the street.

Dunlow's.

Rake got out of the car, closing the door silently. Dodging puddles from an earlier shower and walking on the grassy strip between road and sidewalk to be as quiet as possible.

From the car Rake had been able to see that the blinds were down in Underhill's second-floor apartment, the windows cracked open for some air. He squeezed between two holly bushes as he positioned himself along the side of the building, leaning on the damp wall beside a window.

This part of the city was remarkably quiet at night, other than the locusts. At first all he could hear was someone snoring in the first-floor apartment. Then he heard men's voices, just short of intelligible. Dunlow's voice. Another voice, which must be Underhill's. Was there a third? No, he didn't think so.

Then the voices got louder. He heard Underhill say, “This isn't your goddamn problem,” but Dunlow's response wasn't as clear, though he caught the word “problem” again. Dunlow must have been farther from the window, or had his back to it.

“Smartest damn thing you've ever done,” Underhill said. The next exchange he couldn't make out. Then Dunlow said something including “inside man.” The voices ranged in and out of clarity, though a few times Rake thought he heard them refer to “the Trust Division,” whatever that was.

“Because I want more,” he heard Underhill say. “I'm tired of taking the bones they toss. Got something worth a whole lot more now.”

Then quiet again. Rake felt less tired now, charged to be on the verge of discovering something.

Lügen haben kurze Beine,
Rake thought.
Lies have short legs.
Dunlow had acted—twice now—like he barely knew Underhill, yet clearly that wasn't the case.

He'd lost track of how long it had been quiet when he heard the
front door open.
Shit.
Dunlow was leaving already. The holly bushes on either side of Rake were taller than he was, and the nearest streetlight wasn't enough to reveal him. He squatted down all the same. After a few seconds, he could see Dunlow sauntering toward his old Dodge, opening the door, getting in. Driving away.

Whether Dunlow noticed Rake's car just across the street from his own was something Rake would have to wonder about.