The Dying Crapshooter's Blues (3 page)

The rooms were over a pawnshop, a convenience for any rounder. Once they got Little Jesse laid out on his iron-framed bed, Joe sent someone to find the doctor. Within a few minutes, one of Jesse's women appeared, then a second, the jealous fires in their hearts quieted by the sight of him laid out in such a poor state, drifting in and out of consciousness and moaning in pain. They dabbed their painted eyes with handkerchiefs, though even in their anguish their thoughts went to who might be taking his place.

A little bit later, a trio of sports showed up after a night in the Decatur Street speaks. One of them poked around and found a bottle Little Jesse had stashed. Drinks were poured and glasses raised to Jesse's speedy recovery, though they all guessed he was a goner. The vigil had begun.

With these characters on hand to watch over Jesse, Willie and Joe descended the rickety stairs to the alley, shook hands, and went their own ways, Joe to the Hampton Hotel and Willie home to his room on Alabaster Street to dress for church.

On the stroke of eleven, as the bells tolled to end Sunday services at Peachtree Baptist Church, Detective Lieutenant Daniel Collins was pacing the sidewalk with an umbrella over his head as cold rain pattered on the sidewalk. The doors opened and the congregation began filing down the broad stone steps. Collins craned his neck until he saw a familiar face and gave a short wave.

Grayton Jackson spied him and broke away from his pretty, plump, and chattering wife to make his way down the marble steps and through the morning drizzle, looking odd and uncomfortable out of uniform as he ducked under the umbrella.

The younger man whispered in his ear. Jackson, known simply as “the Captain,” kept his blank stare riveted on the wet sidewalk. When Collins finished, he responded with a blunt nod, dismissing him, and then moved to the bottom of the stone steps to wait in a brooding silence for his wife to stop talking and get moving.

 

Joe opened his eyes to the lonesome bleat of a truck horn on Houston Street and looked up at the familiar delta of cracks on the water-stained ceiling. Before he could come fully awake, he
sensed the heat of a body next to him and turned his head slowly, in case there was a shock waiting. He had woken up to some fiercely ugly women in his day. Not that he cared that much; homely faces sometimes came with bodies that were completely lovely, full-muscled hourglasses built for a good time. Anyway, it wasn't like he was some matinee idol. He just needed to prepare himself when it was time to greet his guests in the morning light.

Though not this morning. The woman next to him—
Adeline,
that was her name—was pretty, pale, raven-haired, with long lashes, a delicate painted mouth, and a body as slender as a flower.

Joe knew her type. Though she came from a decent family and had enjoyed a proper upbringing, she smoked and caroused and found shady characters like him to take her to back-alley speakeasies to drink and dance. She had approached Joe boldly the last time he was in town, casting her eye upon him at a speak and then walking directly away from the fellow who had brought her there and right up to him. He dropped a hint that he stayed at the Hampton when he visited Atlanta, and there had been a note from her waiting at the desk when he checked in.

He had taken her to a little club on Lime Row where they offered a trio of a piano, trumpet, and guitar, along with bottles of half-decent gin. Adeline drank like a sailor, danced up a frenzy to the gurgling jazz, and didn't sober up until they came upon Little Jesse Williams lying on the cold sidewalk with a hole in his stomach.

Joe had walked the six blocks back from Schoen Alley in the drizzly half dawn to find her fast asleep in the bed. Normally, that wouldn't stop him from diving between her legs, but he was tired, and the scene on the street, and then in Jesse's rooms, had darkened his mood, so he let her be.

Turning his head to look out the window, he saw that the sky held a deep gray dinge as the rain kept falling. He slipped from under the sheets and moved through the dim light to the sink to
splash some water on his face and gaze at the reflection in the mirror.

People meeting Joe assumed right away that he was at least half Indian, which was likely true. After his copper skin, which went from light bronze in winter to the color of an old penny in summer, they noted his glittering black eyes, then his nose, which had curved like a bow until being broken in his first and only prizefight; and finally his smile, which was wide, white, and devilish, as if he was tending to a private joke. The way he got along so well with colored folks was more proof that he was something other than an American white man. Some people, not unkindly, called him “Indian Joe.” On the other hand, he'd gotten into bloody fights with drunks who took one look and decided that “Geronimo” or “Chief” was a more amusing moniker. The truth was no one could say for sure what blood ran in his veins, certainly not him.

When he was a kid, he made a game of imagining that his eyes and hair, as black as anthracite, had come from his father, an Italian, or from his mother, an Iroquois. Or that his compact frame was a gift from his Irish father or Greek mother. The planes of his face, round and oddly cherubic for a grown man, could have come from anywhere. Philadelphia was full of immigrants and had its share of Indians, so he could be anything. The nuns at the orphanage hadn't provided any clues, instead weaving a tale about how he'd been delivered to the doorstep like a gift from the angels. They weren't very good liars, and he suspected something bleaker. He never found out the true story. He had left out of that place at thirteen and had been on his own ever since, making his way by work and wits.

Those same wits had served him well. For the past seven years, he had been by profession a thief of goods that were worth the risk of stealing. That meant jewels, bonds, cash, and like prizes. He stole from rich people, because they had the nicest belongings and were often easy marks; also because he took pleasure in it.
The work was not too hard for a careful fellow, and the rewards could be ample.

He fenced the goods and used the money to keep him moving from place to place, spending modestly until his funds got low. Then he'd go looking for the next opportunity, some trinkets just waiting for him to pick up and carry off. Thus he cut an erratic trail from Philadelphia to Baltimore to New York, then from Atlanta to New Orleans to Memphis. Every burglary cop on the eastern seaboard knew his name, and yet not one of them could hang much of anything on him.

It wasn't a cakewalk, though. Get caught filching from a hobo, no one cared. Steal from a citizen of means and they'd move heaven and earth to find and punish you so you'd never forget.

Joe had known a slick sport in Philadelphia named Jack Johnson. “Just like the prizefighter,” he'd say. “But I ain't him.” As if it wasn't obvious; this Jack Johnson was rosy white. Poor Jack got caught with one hand up the skirt of a certain well-to-do businessman's wife and the other in a box of her jewelry, and you'd have thought he'd committed capital murder on a child. They took care of Jack, all right. Afterward, they said he hung himself in his cell. Joe claimed the body, because Jack had no one else.

There were other risks. A second-story man who went by “Red” for his bright orange hair had climbed a trellis of a Baltimore mansion on his way to cracking an upstairs window when some coot came out of nowhere and snapped a derringer in his face. It took away half his jaw, and the fall off the ladder broke his back. After that, Red lost his mind and children screamed in terror at the sight of him. He drank himself into regular stupors and was found frozen to death in an alley in the brutal winter of 1916.

So there were dangers, which Joe accepted as the risks of his illicit trade. For all the crimes he'd committed, his jail time had been limited to a three-month stretch in Radford. Along the way, he had spent a year as a policeman in Philadelphia and a shorter
stint as a Pinkerton detective in Baltimore. It just turned out that he made a better criminal than he did a cop.

He did not suffer pangs of conscience over his crimes, and never had qualms about stripping some rich citizen's home of anything that wasn't red hot or nailed to the floor. It could be truly said that here the nuns had failed. The one other place he displayed no guilt was with women. He had a long and tangled history of loving and then leaving them behind. If they didn't get wise and drop him first, that is. Women out for a thrill were dismayed when they realized he wasn't Robin Hood or Jesse James, just a common burglar. Only one of them understood that at all, and only because she'd done her own share of thieving.

From behind him, he heard the rustle of bedsheets, then a yawn.

“Well, good morning,” Adeline purred sleepily. Joe glanced into the corner of the mirror and saw her reflection as she threw back the blankets and stretched in his direction.

 

They kept the bed frame rattling and the springs shrieking for a good half hour, as her pallid flesh turned pink, then red, and she moaned as if she was in pain, all the while bucking up and down, her arms and legs flailing. When they were finished, she rose unsteadily to her feet, wrapped herself in the blanket, and, with a woozy smile, hobbled out the door and down the hall to the bathroom, her carefully coiffed curls now hanging down in wet rag-doll strands.

Joe heard voices. One of the other guests had apparently been eavesdropping on the racket from their room and now made some lewd comment, to which Adeline, young lady that she was, snapped back a hearty “you can fuck yourself, mister!” The bathroom door slammed shut, shaking the walls.

Joe ran into girls like her wherever he traveled: wild, crude, and with little shame, no matter what the family background. He'd heard people claim it was the Great War that had done it,
something about letting loose as the world came to an end. He didn't know about that. He had been over there for the months right before the armistice and had seen it all: the total obliteration of the landscape; the blind, lame, and insane soldiers; the dead bodies stacked high with horrible contortions frozen on the faces of those who'd been gassed. He had felt death passing close by like a cold wind as he spent his days keeping himself alive, all the while never quite believing that he could. He knew he'd never forget it, and yet he still didn't understand why it turned good girls back home into rambunctious harlots.

Joe guessed it had as much to do with the vote. With that right, women started believing that they could enjoy the same abandon as the men, and were making up for decades of corsets, petticoats, and the chastity those devices helped enforce. Crowning all this was a sudden revolt against those pious zealots who had spent the past two decades trying to shove their chosen morality down the throats of one and all.

Whatever the cause, Joe was pleased with the results. Wild girls like Adeline had a yen for dangerous men, especially those who had seen death at close range, and so he had no trouble luring her into his web. She was ready to go. He also knew that once she'd had her time with him and whichever other rounders she could bed, she'd be ready to
leave,
and find herself a decent man so she could settle into the safety of marriage. Though she would remember the likes of Joe Rose to the end of her days.

So much for her. As he stared out at the gray morning, his absent thoughts drifted to Little Jesse and the strange violence that had unfolded on Courtland Street. Whatever had happened on that dark street, Little Jesse was about to pay for it with the last breaths of his life.

The detectives who had been in and out of the Payne mansion since the middle of the night hadn't learned a thing, except that objects that had been stored away in the master bedroom at the beginning of Saturday night's charity soiree were gone when it was over. Pricey jewelry that should have been stashed in one of the wall safes had been taken out for the ladies—mother, daughter, aunts, and several cousins—to pick over as they dressed. The box was placed in the top drawer of the dressing table because no one dreamed a thief would have the gall to slip in and out during the Christmas gala. There had been more than a hundred people in the house. And not just
people;
a fair number of the city's wealthiest citizens were in attendance.

The officers working the case had been instructed to show up in rough clothes, but that fooled no one, as the word had already started to seep out, just as Mayor Sampson had feared.

When nothing came to light by midmorning, Chief Troutman swallowed his bile. Unable to reach Captain Jackson at his house on Plum Street, he sent a message by way of Lieutenant Collins. Though the Captain's methods were sometimes astonishingly brutal and his moods completely unpredictable, it was also true that he could get a case opened and closed faster than
any other officer on the force. Still, it was true that he had been passed over when the mayor and Chief Troutman doled out the good jobs, and the chief wondered frankly if he would seize this moment to extract his revenge.

He needn't have worried, because when the Captain finally called back he was cooperative, promising in his blunt way that he'd deliver on the burglary as if it was a foregone conclusion. It was exactly what the chief wanted to hear, and he called the mayor right away to pass on the good news.

 

The name on his papers was Grayton Jackson, but he was to one and all “the Captain.” By most accounts, and for as long as anyone could recall, he had been commonly regarded as a son of a bitch.

He was a good-sized man, right at six feet and topping two hundred pounds on the scale, and tended to walk hunched over, with his arms hanging straight at his sides and his head thrust forward like a pug or a gorilla. His angular face was too thin for his body and a splotchy white. He was square and solid, and whether he was slapping some dirt-mouthed whore in the lockup or perjuring himself in a courtroom to get some worthless nigger or white-trash tramp sent up, he always put his full weight behind it.