The Scribe (6 page)

“Yessir,” Underwood said, holding it out proudly. “But Chief Thompson says we're to take things in stages. Right now I've just got a badge and a whistle.”

Canby said, buttoning the jacket, “Perhaps we'll see about that today.”

But then he thought about the telegram that the hotel steward had awakened him to read a half hour before, its terse description of the whore who'd been butchered in an upstairs room at Mamie O'Donnell's last night. That was to be their first destination today. And about Vernon's description of the two victims who had preceded her, the chief's suspicions of Underwood. He studied the black man as they left the room and made their way down the hall to the lift.

By the time the lift operator had shut the metal grate and the lift had groaned into its downward motion, Canby had qualified his misgivings. As they trundled down the dark shaft, passing one richly carpeted floor after another, he thought that if what Vernon had telegraphed about the new victim's body was true, the issue of arming Underwood was superfluous. If this Underwood were the man capable of such work with a knife, he had no need of a gun.

T
HEY WAITED AT
the intersection of Pryor and Alabama streets for fifteen minutes as Canby tried in vain to hail one cab after another as the hacks spurred their horses past the white and black men standing together on the corner. Finally, Canby stepped out in front of an empty carriage, the driver already shaking his head as he drew back on the reins to avoid running him over.

“Can't carry colored.”

“Today you can,” Canby said. He held his badge out, close enough for the man to see its number—000—though he knew that the hack would not recognize it as the chief's own.

“Ain't going to do it, Officer. I got a regular clientele won't ride with me if I do.”

Canby looked the carriage over closely. “Where's your license tag?”

“It's in here in the toolbox somewhere,” the man said, beginning to look uncomfortable.

Canby scanned the light globes that framed the driver's seat.
Both of them were unmarked. “Why is your license number not painted on your lamps?”

The man shifted on his seat. “Been meaning to get to that,” he muttered.

“All right, then. We'll have to impound this vehicle. Officer Underwood, you take the reins.”

“You can't do it!” the hack cried. He seemed genuinely bewildered.

“Of course I can. You're in violation of a city ordinance. You could lose your license, as well,” Canby said, “if you have one. Regardless, the cab gets impounded until the next court session.”

“What about my horse? You going to impound him, too?”

Canby thought it over for a moment, then pulled the Bulldog from its holster. “No,” he said as he cocked the hammer back and placed the barrel against the horse's broad forehead. “I'm going to shoot the fucking horse.”

After that, the driver had set his horse in motion and Canby and Underwood rode in silence nearly to Wheat Street before the younger man spoke.

“This has been a rare morning for me, sir,” Underwood said.

“How's that?”

“Well, it's not yet nine o'clock and I've already been to the top of the Kimball House and ridden near a mile in a car that ain't colored-only.”

“Sounds like the start of a good day.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, you don't act like you were raised in the South.”

Canby studied the buildings outside for a moment before he spoke. “I was raised in it, but not of it. My father was from Ireland. He brought me up to think it is unnatural for one human being to own another. I suppose you could have called him eccentric.”

From the corner of his eye, Canby saw the beginnings of a smile on Underwood's face as he turned to the window.

But he was not smiling as they saw the garish façade of Mamie O'Donnell's saloon loom above the street in front of them. Canby knocked on the roof of the cab for the hack to stop, then stepped out onto the clay road and studied the crowd of Negroes milling about the front of the place. Word had apparently gotten out and the community had gathered in collective witness to another murder of one of their own.

The saloon had once been a grand old house at the city's outskirts, but had been converted by gaudy signage and knocked-out walls to serve its present purpose. It was situated precisely where the macadamized road ended and the red clay road began, at the limits of white Atlanta but not yet into the Negro settlement of Shermantown—the perfect locale for collecting girls of either race and at a proper yet not inconvenient distance for the city's businessmen to come and go with discretion.

The Negroes seemed to be in restless motion, now surging toward the saloon's porch, where a giant of a man stood yelling at them to go away, then falling back when he reached for the bullwhip looped at his waist.

“Y'all get your asses on home!” the man shouted, his face reddened. “Ain't nothing to see, anyway. Get back!”

Someone in the crowd said something about the dead girl and the man uncoiled the whip in an instant. It lashed out over the crowd and snapped on the top of a head. Canby saw the black hair glisten a second later.

“Who's next?” the man bellowed.

Canby walked to the porch steps wearily, the Negroes parting to make way for him, and the hack forgotten as the driver pulled away without accepting payment from Underwood. Canby had worked another case here, a murder-suicide, back in '73 that still haunted him. Climbing the steps, he felt the weight of the saloon's history descend on him. He heard Underwood's steps behind him come up short as Canby faced the giant white man on the porch.

The man snarled at Canby through a beard streaked with tobacco juice. “What the fuck do you want? We're closed till sundown, partner.”

Canby nearly reeled at the odor of rye fumes the man breathed out. He showed him his badge and the man backed up a step.

“I'm here to see the nothing that's here to see.”

The man shook his head. “Mamie says only the chief himself comes through. No flatfeet.”

“This is Vernon Thompson's badge. Stand aside.”

The man crossed his massive arms across his chest, the bullwhip drooping alongside his leg. “Mamie said—”

“Aren't you Monte Amos? Jack's boy? You haven't turned out to be much.”

The man spat on the porch boards and wiped at his beard with the back of a hand. Then he looked at Canby through
watery eyes. “Yeah, I reckon I could have been an officer like Daddy. Or a detective on the take.”

Canby took a deep breath and leaned in close. “If you make me bring Chief Thompson down here, I guarantee you'll spend the rest of the year locked up for prostitution, pandering, and whatever else I dig up inside.”

Amos's stare faltered. “Be careful what you ask for, mister. You don't want to see it.” His eyes were red-rimmed—more red, Canby realized, than from drink alone. After a moment, he straightened up and stepped out of the doorway.

“Nobody never could tell Thomas Canby what to do,” he said. “You go on in and take your nigger-boy with you. I got a wager one of you'll come out screaming.”

C
ANBY FELT
a great inrushing of breath the moment he threw open the door, like a punch to his gut. He regretted it an instant later as his lungs filled with the smell of the room, a combined odor like that of a charnel house crossed with a skinning shed, the biting tang of spilled blood mixed with decay.

The room was furnished in bordello red, with heavy velvet draperies on the windows and furniture in the same material—all of it a deep crimson that made it difficult to distinguish where the upholstery was unmarked and where it was splattered with the blood that had been slung across the boudoir.

The dead woman lay in the bed.

But, Canby saw as his eyes moved across the room slowly and he stood frozen in the doorway, she was also on the
couch, on the rug, and in the washbasin on the lingerie chest. What lay on the bed was not only headless but also eviscerated. Even from across the room he could see into the gash in her abdomen and note that the dark cavity of her torso was empty.

Behind him, he heard Underwood cough dryly, a sound deep in his throat not far from retching.

“Are you all right?” he asked without turning.

“I don't think I'll ever be all right again,” Underwood said.

Canby's eyes fixed on the dead woman's intestines, which had been draped on the back of a settee like streamers. Below them, in the center of the cushions, lay the heart, its arteries neatly severed. He thought the black object in the washbasin was her liver, but beyond that, there was a profusion of organs he could not name. He stepped into the room carefully, watching his feet, and motioned for Underwood to do the same. He knew already, with a sense of pity and revulsion that made his stomach churn, that he would have to lift the head from its place.

Strangely, in this room awash in blood, the girl's hair was unmatted. It still glowed softly in the light of the gas lamp, lustrous, in black ringlets. It covered her face, which was buried in the intersection of her legs.

Canby gripped the curls, his fingers tightening reluctantly on them, and lifted. The hair came away in his hand. He stepped back quickly, nearly dropping the hair, and looked down at the scalp. But in place of a glistening skull he saw tufts of kinky hair, cut short. He turned his hand over and showed Underwood the inside of the black wig, its web of netting,
then handed it to him. Underwood took it and held it between thumb and forefinger.

Canby sighed and put his hands on either side of the woman's head, over her ears. One of them was sticky with blood. With his eyes averted, he lifted the head, heavier than he would have expected, then looked around the room for a suitable place to set it. None seemed fitting. He was loath to approach the chest of drawers with the liver sitting dark and slick in the washbowl, so he put the head on the couch, tilting it back against the buttoned cushion.

From its new perch the head stared back at them balefully. The eyes, Canby thought, were nearly unbearable. Such a mixture of horror and pain frozen in them.

Back in the war he had known the fear of battle and he realized with bone-deep certainty that it was nothing next to this. Nothing next to even the stories of the veterans who'd seen every battle. Staring down the maws of shot-loaded cannon, charging into the musket-bristling Hornet's Nest, could not compare to looking into the eye of the man who had done this.

And there, above the eyes, were two perpendicular cuts, forming an
L
. The flesh had already gone gray at the edges of the incisions, but the letter was clear, cut into the skin so forcefully that Canby could make out a scrape the blade had made on the skull beneath.

He lowered himself to a crouch and stared into the glazed eyes. They had been chestnut in color. Then he looked up at Underwood, gauging his reaction to the scene. His pallor
was reassuring, but his own brown eyes were fixed on the body, on the dead woman's thigh, where Canby now saw that a bite had been taken out of the soft flesh high on the leg, the outlines of the teeth as clearly limned as a bite from an apple. Underwood turned, a hand to his mouth, and bolted out the door.

Underwood's foot slid at the doorway, his shoe slipping on the blood-soaked floorboards. After he was gone, Canby stared at the smear he had left, his eye lingering on the long heel-scrape in the dark crimson, with a deep pang of grief in his chest.

“Y
OU
'
RE LOOKING WELL
, Thomas,” Mamie O'Donnell said, motioning for Canby and Underwood to take a seat as she settled herself on a long couch in her own rooms. She patted the cushion next to her, but Canby shook his head and remained standing. Underwood, though, sat and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his face with it as the madam looked Canby over with her emerald eyes.

“And you, too,” Canby said, “in spite of everything.”

“Have you got yourself a sweetheart up in—where is it?”

“Ringgold. No.”

“I'll mention that to Julia next time I see her in church,” she said, her mouth curling into a roguish grin. Then the grin faded. “Not right, how you ran out on her.”

“I know it,” Canby said. His limbs felt weary but he would not allow himself to sit down in this room.

“You didn't have to ditch her when you ditched Atlanta.”

“I felt like I did. Tell us what you know about the dead woman.”

Mamie looked away from him, shrugged, and rearranged the shawl around her shoulders. “She was a new girl. Kept to herself, mostly, though I suspect Monte has been tapping her for free in the afternoons.”

“Was he in her room last night?”

“I said in the afternoons. Monte knows not to leave the door at night unless I call him.”

“And you did not call him last night? There would likely have been screaming.”

“You think a whore screaming will draw a crowd? Honey, they get paid extra for making a ruckus.”

Canby sighed. “Have you seen the remains?”

Mamie leaned back against the couch, grinning wickedly. “Can't stand the sight of blood, Thomas. Every time I see it, means no business for a week.”

He crossed the room and gathered a fistful of her shawl in each hand. He drew her face up to his and whispered fiercely, “Let's take a walk down the hall. I think you need to see what's happened under your roof.”

She squirmed until he let her go and she fell back to the couch, tugging the shawl back into place as if she were cold. “I don't want to see it. I can't.”

She seemed to him, then, like the little girl he had known on Whitehall Street, before the war—small and vulnerable on the couch, despite all the cheap opulence with which she had surrounded herself. And beneath the bravado, he could see
now, she was truly frightened. He breathed deeply through his nose before he spoke again.