Darktown (21 page)

“If there's something you're trying to say, you black bastard, you'd best quit with the riddles and say it straight.”

“Smith and Boggs killed Poe. That's what Shane's too afraid to tell you.”

This time Dunlow turned to face Zo.

“Say again?”

“They came by a few nights ago, when Poe was here. Real late, almost morning. Shane and some boys was all just setting here, not troubling nobody, and then those colored cops took them out back and started beating on Poe.”

Dunlow was watching Zo very carefully.

“You were there?”

“No, but Shane told me about it.”

Dunlow looked back at Shane and tightened his grip. “Then why the hell ain't Shane telling me himself?”

Shane opened his eyes and nodded. “It's like he say. I told him about it. They just come out and beat on us, mostly on Poe. I ain't seen Poe since.”

“And which of the nigger cops was it?”

“The loud one, Smith. And that uppity one he got.”

“Boggs?”

“Him's the one.”

“They just came over here and beat him for nothing?”

“Yes, sir. They say . . .” Shane's voice trailed off and he looked down again. He did not relish delivering this news.

“They say
what,
goddamn it?”

“They say this ain't your neighborhood no more,” Zo again supplied the voice for the terrified Shane. “That it's theirs. They beat on Poe to teach him that lesson.”

This was too much for Dunlow to respond to. The old cop was silent.

“Then what?” Rake asked for his partner. “And I want to hear it from the actual witness this time.”

“I don't know,” Shane said. “They told me to get inside and not say nothing, that's what I did. Got right in this room here. They stopped, by and by.”

“You didn't see them take him anywhere?” Rake asked.

“Nossir, Officer.” They didn't yet know or fear Rake's name the way they did Dunlow's.

“You hear them drive away?” Dunlow asked. An odd question, since the Negro officers didn't have squad cars. Boggs and Smith were always on foot. How would they have transported Poe to the West Side? Did either of them even own a car?

“I, I don't recall no car. Mighta been one. Just don't know. I went to bed, and when I woke up, Poe was gone.”

Shane was staring at Dunlow's gun. Dunlow finally noticed and holstered it. He moved his other hand from Shane's neck, patting him on the shoulder.

Then Dunlow turned back to the table. He grabbed the coins that lay there, as well as a few dollars. “This will pay for Chandler's funeral.”

He stuffed them in his pockets. Then he punched Zo square in the nose. The Negro's head snapped back and the rest of his body followed, the chair toppling straight over. The other two backed up, their chair legs scraping against the floor.

“I believe ol' Zo took a bit too much pleasure in delivering that news,” Dunlow informed them. “Anybody else need reminding whose neighborhood this is?”

All eyes were on the floor as Officer Dunlow took his leave, his partner a step behind.

17

SERGEANT JOSEPH MCINNIS
had barely sat in the lonely guest chair of Captain Dodd's office when he was asked what the hell the niggers were up to at “the Butler Street so-called
precinct.
”

Dodd's was a small, cramped office that, judging from the lack of window and the scuff marks on the floor, had once been a storage room of some sort. The shelves had been removed and a thick desk had somehow squeezed its way through the door. Dodd had been captain for ten years, nearly as long as McInnis had been a cop. Dodd had a lot less hair than he'd had ten years ago. McInnis couldn't say that he liked the captain all that much, but he seemed a reasonably fair man to toil under, so long as no one on your team did anything disastrously wrong.

McInnis had a feeling that someone on his team had done something disastrously wrong.

He had been doing his rounds at the main headquarters, checking paperwork and the logs from the
real
cops, and was about to head over to the Butler Street Y, as was his strange and hated custom these last few months. The lone white cop over with the coloreds—with nary another white soul to chat with—the only time he was able to interact with other whites on the job was during these all-too-brief preshift moments and during the times when he was out on the street managing chaos at major arrests, trying to make sure his Negro officers didn't screw up while also trying to keep the white officers from flat-out attacking his “men.”

“I had a long conversation with Dunlow this morning,” Dodd said.

McInnis didn't know what blanks he should be filling in. He'd read the logs, and nothing had leaped out as being particularly unusual. “Yes?”

“They didn't put this to paper yet, as I told them not to. I don't want
it blowing up beyond that which it'll already blow up to. But Dunlow's fingering two of your men for murder.”

“Excuse me?”

“Black bootlegger named Chandler Poe got himself beat to hell and stabbed, probably a few nights ago. Coroner said he got worked over and then cut up, dumped at the canal on the West Side.” Which is why McInnis hadn't seen it in any of the logs, as that wasn't his ward. “And Dunlow says two of your boys done it: Boggs and Smith.”

McInnis was not one to cross his legs. His feet were flat on the floor and his knees were right angles as he asked, “Based on what?”

“Based on one eyewitness so far, and they say they got another. We got investigators on it. So, I ask again, what in the hell have you been teaching those niggers?”

McInnis sorted some things in his head: the recent logs by Boggs and Smith reported no interactions with Poe, not since they'd gone to the courthouse for the trial that had let the man off.

“These eyewitnesses, they claim they saw my officers kill Poe?”

“One witness so far, but yeah.”

“Who?”

“Nigger named Shane Andrews.”

McInnis laughed. “So we got one dead Negro bootlegger, and then a live Negro bootlegger saying that a
cop
killed the other one. And we're choosing to
believe
him? You know Dunlow. This is the same cop tried to frame one of my boys for drinking.”

“You can't say he was trying to
frame
him, Mac. He mighta been right, and just couldn't prove it. Or it mighta been an honest misunderstanding, confusing Negroes.”

“Dunlow knows one damned Negro from the other, you can be sure of that. He's out to take my boys down, and you know it.”

Dodd shook his head and sighed. “Christ. I don't enjoy this so much either, Mac.”

“Well, all due respect, you don't have to deal with it every waking moment like I have to. Now, I like to think I've done beyond an adequate job with the resources I've been given. I've eight Negroes under my command, and you want me to turn them into policemen, and—”

“It's not
me
that wants that.”

“All right, blame the mayor, fair enough. Point is, I'm out there on an island doing what I can, and maybe they all ain't the greatest officers the city of Atlanta's ever produced, but I'll be damned if some middle-aged overweight beat cop is going to accuse any of
my
officers of being murderers.”

Dodd considered this a moment. He had not expected such a reaction. “I didn't mean to imply this reflected poorly on you. I just wanted to do you the courtesy of explaining everything before you found out some other way. The process is moving along. I got two detectives looking into it, and I imagine they're going to want to talk to Boggs and Smith. When that happens—”

“They cannot talk to my boys.”

“Excuse me?”

“If Internal Investigations wants to file a formal complaint about the conduct of my officers, it can do so. Short of that, my officers don't have to answer a detective's questions, and you know that.”

Dodd looked like he was choosing between anger and shock.

“What, you're trying to shield your niggers now? You're so sure they didn't do this, but you're shielding them?”

“I'd like to think I'm doing what any other commanding officer would do, sir. My men don't have to be a part of some crazy witch hunt started by a lazy cop who's upset that he just lost one of his most reliable bribes.”

Dodd folded his hands across his chest. “Sergeant McInnis. I want to make sure I understand something. And I want to make sure
you
understand it. I got a veteran white cop saying that your nigger rookies done lost their heads and beat a criminal to death. And you are allowing your own pride about training them to blind you into choosing the wrong side.”

“
My
nigger rookies, like you said. Anyone that wants to accuse my niggers of murder will go through me. That's protocol.”

“I call it damnfool pride.”

“ ‘You say tomato' and all that.”

Dodd said, “Look, Mac, I know you didn't want this posting, but—”

“Damn right I didn't.” McInnis stood to leave. “I know a suicide mission when I see one.”

“Sit your ass back down.”

It took much swallowing of pride for Mac to sit his ass back down, but sit it back he did. Just like take the post he did, when Dodd told him to. Just like train the Negroes he did, when Dodd told him to. He had been a sergeant for four years now, the first year spent on an antinumbers investigation that—he'd known the moment he'd been assigned to it—would win him far more enemies on the force than friends. And he'd been proven correct. Yet he'd done the job because it was important, because it was the right thing, and because he'd been ordered to by superiors he'd respected and trusted. Crooked cops had controlled gambling rings across the city, so he'd shut them down. And as thanks? First he'd been sent to an undermanned Homicide squad that was in charge of some of the most forlorn areas of Darktown and Buttermilk Bottom, the kind of post that offered nothing but sad murder after sad murder, his commanding officers not really caring whether the right criminals were punished so long as enough Negroes were put away that the rest of the population took the hint and settled down. The kind of posting that left an enterprising young sergeant with effectively zero chance of impressing anyone. And then, when he thought he'd finally done his time and was deserving of a better post?
Hey, Mac, we're hiring some niggers, and you got a nice new basement office, deep in the jungle.

Dodd said, “If you think you are deserving of special treatment because you're the only sergeant here that has to deal with nigger officers, you are mistaken. As I believe I've demonstrated over the years, I give no special treatment to anyone. We have jobs to do and we do them. Part of my job is to determine who killed that bootlegger, and if the evidence suggests that one of your boys did it, there will be a reckoning for that.”

Which McInnis interpreted as:
You will be to blame, Mac. If one of your boys killed a man and covered it up in his logs, it's on you. This whole damned Negro cop experiment will go down, which the rest of us will be quite thrilled about. But your career will go down with it.

“If your detectives muster up anything beyond Dunlow's word, I'll listen,” McInnis said, standing back up. He grabbed the doorknob. “ 'Til then, my boys have jobs to do, and so do I, sir.”

That afternoon, before roll call, Boggs made his return visit to the doctor to have the stitches removed. When he gazed into a mirror, he was disappointed by the result. Halfway between his right eye and his hairline was a two-inch scar, the skin the slightest bit whiter and redder than the rest, though the doc claimed the coloring would change with time. The scar would still be visible, though.

“It's manly,” the doc said, putting Boggs's money in his pocket. “Makes a statement.”

Yeah,
Boggs thought. It says,
I'm a fellow people throw things at.

At the Butler Street precinct, after roll call, McInnis invited Boggs into his office.

“Have a seat.”

Boggs obeyed, glancing at the two rivulets of water that were running down the wall. It had rained that afternoon, nothing torrential, but it didn't take much to make the walls run. When they'd first started using this basement as their office, they'd put rags and old towels at the base of the walls to prevent the water from spreading on the bad days. But then the rags started to reek of mildew, so they pitched them. They had to choose their battles.

McInnis seemed very interested in some paperwork on his desk. Time passed without a word from the sergeant, and Boggs realized that McInnis was deliberately waiting until the basement was clear of the other officers. When they heard the last pair of footsteps recede up the old wooden steps, McInnis finally looked up. He had small eyes, an icy clear blue that Boggs figured some white girls had once swooned over.

“What would you like to talk to me about, Officer Boggs?” Hands folded neatly on the desk, neck hunched just the slightest bit like he was preparing to pounce.

“I'm . . . I thought
you
called me in here, sir.”

“I did. There's something you want to talk to me about.”

Lord, Lord. White men and their games. How they loved to draw things out.

“I'm sorry, sir. I don't understand.”

“Officer Boggs. You're probably the sharpest one I've got. I see that. And a preacher's son to boot. Not the officer I would expect something
like this to be happening to.” A pause. “In general I would say that I have, top to bottom, a downright passable octet of officers. But I'm disappointed in you, Officer Boggs.”

Boggs had been bracing for a dressing-down about the Poe beating. He'd had time to rehearse his reaction, figure out the most believable lies. He and Smith hadn't conferred as much as they probably should have, hadn't made anything resembling a plan. Nothing beyond their terse conversation, immediately after the beating, that neither would discuss it.

He knew his partner had crossed a line, and surely there would be repercussions. They were both under pressure, yes, and the moments when Boggs considered leaving the force were outnumbering the ones when he felt good about his job, yes, but still—Boggs had never snapped like that. He told himself he never would, that it wasn't his nature, that he was better than that.

He wondered if that was true.

Maybe the beating wasn't such a big deal. Boggs had seen a few white cops administer beat-downs like that. If they were here to be cops, to learn how to do the job and do it well, what was the harm in emulating the veteran cops? Did they want to be better than them, or become them?

But what McInnis asked was, “What in God's name did you think you were doing at the station?”

Boggs relaxed, a bit. He knew he would be in trouble for this, but at least it was an infraction he could tell the truth about. “I'm sorry, sir. I felt that if the deceased's father could see a Negro officer's face, it might have made the process—”