The Scribe (7 page)

“Tell us, then. Everything.”

She stared at a point on the floor as she spoke. “I keep a close eye on my girls. They'll steal me blind if I don't. Her and Monte, I call that the cost of doing business. And they kept it to off-hours, I know.

“She had four customers last night, the last one at eleven o'clock. She was downstairs at the bar at last call.”

“And after that?”

“After that, I don't know. Nobody saw anything, Thomas. That's what's got me scared. There was a crowd of men downstairs at closing time, but none of the girls remember seeing her go up with one of them.”

“What can you tell us about them, the men?”

“I was with a customer. All I know is what the girls have told me. Businessmen, mostly. Monte saw them all out at midnight.”

Canby felt his pulse quicken at the word
businessmen
. “White men?”

“It was closing time, I said. All the Negroes are gone out of here by ten on account of the curfew.”

Canby turned this information over in his mind as a long silence hung in the room. After a moment, Mamie reached for a cigarette in an ivory box on the table beside her. She waited a moment for Canby to offer to light it, then shrugged and struck a match on the top of the box. She inhaled the smoke deeply. The process seemed to help her regain her composure.

“You don't approve of this, do you? This house, this life?”

“Hardly.”

Mamie exhaled and stared at Canby through the smoke, her eyes piercingly green. “Then why did you take a fall for me four years ago?”

“I do not know. I suppose I hoped for a better return on it than this.” He held her gaze until she looked away. She flicked ash from her cigarette and when she looked up again her eyes lit on Underwood and the coquettish gleam had returned to them.

“Mister Underwood,” she said, “Thomas here does not think that a white woman should lie down with a black man. You still don't, do you, Thomas?”

Canby looked at the floorboards an instant longer than he intended to. Then he looked up at one of the draped windows, careful to keep Underwood's face in his peripheral sight as he did it. “No. I do not think so.”

He thought he saw a flicker of emotion in Underwood's face, whether indignation or agreement or anger, he could not tell.

Mamie threw her head back and laughed. “Well,” she said, “the first time made a believer out of me. Paul had a piece on him that would make a girl—”

Canby cut her off with a wave of his hand. “You had made good for yourself. A good marriage.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes. To an impotent planter's son, with a train of slaves in tow and debt up to his eyeballs.”

Canby turned now to look at Underwood. “I knew Mamie O'Donnell when she was still called by her Christian name, Frances. We grew up together, Underwood, Frannie and I. With our friend Julia Preston, who lives in Vinings now. In
the same part of town, and as classmates at my father's school down on Whitehall Street, until Frances married a wealthy man from Newnan named Pritchard Gorman. He built this house for her.”

Underwood nodded cautiously.

“We were all proud for her. Immigrants' children rarely did so well. The Gormans weathered the war and even survived Sherman's siege, though they lost their slaves. All but one. Gorman's brother.”

Frances O'Donnell corrected him with a long exhalation of smoke. “His half-brother. Paul's mother was a slave.”

“And then in '75, Pritchard Gorman walked into this room with a Colt pistol and shot Paul five times. He saved the last bullet for himself. Frannie alone survived.”

Frances's eyes were misty and distant when she spoke. “Paul loved to read. I taught him, even though Pritchard had told me not to. It was our secret. We were reading Walter Scott that day,
Ivanhoe
. What a story! The chivalry of it, Thomas. Love beyond time and place, just love itself!”

She rearranged the shawl on her shoulders and looked aside. “Next thing, we were in the bed. We stayed there all afternoon. I never heard Pritchard on the stairs.”

“I have never understood why he killed himself,” Canby said. “Surely he could have arranged a divorce, with a lot less scandal.”

“Because he heard me, Thomas. He heard my cries, me calling Paul's name the way I'd once called his. It kills me to remember it now.”

Canby shook his head slowly, but she was too caught up in
the memory to note the gesture. Her forgotten cigarette smoldered in one small hand in her lap.

“I loved them both. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

Canby nodded to Underwood that they should go. “You'll not want to hear it, Frannie,” he said, “but I pity you. I remember you in the yard of Dad's school. With Julia and the rest of us. I remember all your red hair, how it flew behind you when you ran with the boys—”

She rose from the couch in an instant, a full five inches shorter than Canby but imposing in her fury, and struck him across the face. The slap shook him to his boots. It took all of his resolve to stand still after it, to keep his hands by his sides, to blink back the water that started in his smarting eyes.

“Fuck you, Thomas,” she said. “Fuck
you
.” He could hear all of the Dublin she had never seen in the accent she put on the two words. “Whatever the hell did you ever do for me?”

“Not enough, I suppose.”

He rocked back on his heels as she threw herself on the couch. She covered her face with one hand, as if to conceal it, and turned toward the lamp. He thought, as he left the room, that the famed Mamie O'Donnell had given herself over to tears.

H
E MADE
U
NDERWOOD
wait outside the dead whore's room while he went inside it one more time, before the undertaker arrived to begin the long job of piecing her together for whatever sad, small funeral there might be. He imagined that Underwood
was growing impatient waiting on him, yet he stood for a long time in the room, looking at the wreckage of the girl's body once more, then staring for long minutes out the painted-shut second-story window, at the unmarked expanse of bare clapboard that stretched down to the alley some twenty feet below.

Underwood was in the hall when Canby emerged from the room and shut the door softly behind him. The younger man said nothing as Canby wiped the blade of his Case knife on a piece of black satin he had picked up inside the room. Canby spoke softly as he folded the knife and dropped it into his pocket.

“I want you to go straight to the
Constitution
offices and have Grady send one of his stringers here to cover this crime.”

Underwood began to speak but Canby silenced him with a raised hand. The hand kneaded the fabric deliberately for a moment before he spoke again.

“You bring him back and stay with him until he's through. The stringer has my approval to report everything he sees in there. He should note in particular the letter
U
on the victim's forehead.”

“But, sir—”

“It's a
U
now, Underwood,” Canby said, still working the cloth in his hand. “Let's see what our man thinks of that.”

H
ENRY
G
RADY
looked up from the stenographer's pad his reporter had handed him before hurrying on into the newsroom. He stared across the desk at Vernon, then down at the pad again, rubbing his smooth brow with one hand. Then he
tossed the pad on the desk and looked again at Vernon. “I can't print this,” he said.

“I realize it is graphic.”

“I don't mean the grisly stuff. I mean the thing itself.”

“Henry, you have a duty.”

“I have many duties, Vernon,” Grady shot back, “but none higher than my duty to Atlanta. Another horror story is not in her interest.”

Vernon sat back, breathed in the air of the
Constitution
offices, the overwhelming odor of ink that pervaded the place, that seemed to have soaked into the very timbers of the building. “Not in the interest of the exposition, you mean,” he said.

“I admit that another story like this runs counter to the spirit of the fair.”

“Is that your opinion? Or what you've been told?”

Grady raised a hand full of telegram papers. “I hardly have room enough for the
good
news, Vernon.”

“Run it on page four, then. Bury it in the back, at least. If Canby is right, our man will find it.”

Grady shook his head. Vernon realized he had leaned forward in his chair. He sat back and took a deep breath. This feeling of being thwarted by the Ring was new to him. It, and the pungent odor of ink, was making his head light.

After a long moment, Grady said, “What about your black boy?”

“He's awfully suspicious.”

“Giving him a badge couldn't have helped.”

“It keeps him close.”

“And this Canby. Why is it you insisted on him?”

“We did wrong by him in '77. We made a mistake.”

“Mistakes are for my competitors to make. Bring me evidence and I'll print a retraction.”

“He deserves another chance.”

Grady had opened his mouth to reply when Joel Chandler Harris, one of the
Constitution
reporters, walked into the room and handed Grady a telegram. Grady scanned it quickly, then rose and retrieved his jacket from the coat tree in the room's corner. He was beaming.

Vernon returned the nod Harris had given him, studying the compactly built man. Harris's face was nearly as red as his hair.

“When will we have the next Uncle Remus story?” Grady asked, working an arm into his jacket.

“In time, Henry. Don't want to pump the well dry.” Harris sighed. “I'm afraid that old slave is becoming the master of me.”

Grady adjusted the rose that he kept in his lapel whenever the flowers were in bloom, a fresh one each morning. “Nonsense,” he said. “Six thousand subscribers hang on his every word. How about another one with Brer Rabbit?”

“I'm sick of that damned rabbit,” Harris said, turning back into the typesetting room. Vernon saw a silver flask protruding from his back pocket.

Grady frowned. Vernon knew how much he despised profanity. Knew, too, that the teetotaler hated liquor just as badly. In Harris, he tolerated the one and ignored the other. Harris was the best writer he had.

“You'll excuse me, I hope, Vernon. Pressing business.”

“You'll consider running the story, won't you, Henry?” Vernon said, standing. “Right?”

Grady glanced into the next room, where the typesetters were at work, their fingers moving over the great banks of type like spiders, picking letters swiftly, silently, and slotting them into the press that would begin rolling out tomorrow's edition sometime after ten this evening. At midnight the paperboys would arrive, jostling like monkeys for their allotment of copies. The pace of the newspaper's day made Vernon weary; Grady thrived on it.

“How much control do you have over that man?” Grady asked from the doorway.

“Who? Canby? Enough.”

“You're certain?”

Vernon nodded.

Grady walked back to his desk and picked up the notepad. He shook his head as he reread the notes there. “You'd better be,” he said.

T
HE CLOUDS
that had begun to gather on the western horizon were marshaling in earnest by noon, banding together in a long line the color of a bruise that seemed to billow as it moved toward the Chattahoochee River west of the city's border. Against their shadow, the gas-lit marquee of Lee Smith's Big Bonanza Saloon burned with defiant cheer, promising ease and comfort despite the darkening skies above. At night the marquee, with Smith's name emblazoned on either side, was visible from ten blocks away, making Mamie O'Donnell's place
look like a backwater joint by comparison. On any day, even on the brightest noon, Canby thought, the marquee would have blazed over Decatur Street like something dropped from some more exotic locale, New York perhaps, into the midst of Atlanta's gritty railroad and business district.

He remembered the
Constitution
stories about the opening of the place back in '76, even remembering Grady's breathlessly reporting that the huge French mirror behind the bar had cost $2,500. That was nearly a career's salary for a policeman. But Canby thought he knew why Vernon had picked the Bonanza for their lunch meeting—he felt sure that, just like when Smith threw open his doors five years ago, cops still ate free.

He stepped through the vestibule into the cool shadows of the frescoed walls and his footsteps fell silent on the grass rug on the marble floor, into which had been woven
BIG BONANZA
in tall red letters. From the dining room came the din of perhaps a hundred voices, jumbled speech echoing off the marble. He scanned the faces at each table for Vernon's, or perhaps for that of some other member of the Ring that Vernon had also summoned. After a few moments, a clergyman in black—Bishop Drew, he realized after a second—stood up at one table and waved him over. Canby watched himself in the huge bar mirror as he walked closer to the table, feeling a strange sensation of closing distance on himself, until he noted that his own face in the mirror wore a scowling expression. With an effort, he composed it, as Vernon would have done.

“Mister Canby, please join us,” the bishop was saying. He placed a hand on the shoulder of a portly man who had not risen from his seat. “Have you met Mister A. N. Wellingrath?”

“I have not,” Canby said as the bishop's cool palm left his. The other man did not offer a hand, so Canby nodded to him, then sat. He did not look up again until he had arranged his napkin carefully in his lap. When he did his eye fixed on A. N. Wellingrath's cuff links, which protruded from the sleeves of his coat. They were encrusted with tiny white diamonds—enough of them to look heavy.