Darktown (36 page)

33

AFTERWARD, WHEN DUNLOW
woke in his bedroom with a mouth so sandpaper dry that water wasn't so much something he craved but something that didn't even exist, couldn't exist, and his head was pounding and he felt nearly ill enough to roll over and empty his insides then and there, he closed his eyes again and waited and waited for the awfulness to pass and eventually just enough of it did for him to raise himself out of bed.

What the hell had he done?

Tonight was his off night so at least he had that to be thankful for, but here it was five o'clock in the evening and he was waking up with a hangover from all he'd done that morning. The house was quiet, which meant his sons weren't home, thank God, though his wife was probably in the kitchen or sitting on the front porch.

He sat there a while, trying to return to life. The phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, it's Bo.”

“Hey.”

“Listen, I thought you'd want to hear it from me first. There ain't gonna be no charges against the nigger cops, not murder anyhow. Homicide got someone else to confess to killing Poe.”

“What?”

“Some moonshiner. Name Illinois Richard mean anything to you?”

Dunlow thought, which was hard. “Former boxer. Got here from Birmingham maybe three years ago.”

“Well, he and Poe had a rivalry and were fighting over territory and he says he just happened to be walking down the street one night and there's Poe all beat up. So he used his knife to finish the job, then
dumped him in that creek on the other side of town. Boggs and Smith may have roughed Poe up, like your witness said, but they didn't kill him.”

Dunlow was standing now, pacing despite his headache and the short length of the cord. “Bullshit! Why the hell would the nigger confess to that?”

“Two beat cops caught him this morning at the scene of another homicide. His girlfriend. No question on that one, and I guess he figured he'd be all manly and let us know about the other big deeds he's done.”

“Hellfire. Smith and Boggs put him up to it. Had to.”

“Lionel.” Peterson paused. “I don't like it no more'n you do. But Homicide is certain they got their man for Poe. There's no way the nigger cops are gonna take no blame for it. They get off scot-free.”

“They still gotta answer to me, goddammit!”

Peterson's voice shrunk in direct proportion to Dunlow's. “I know.”

“So get your ass over here and we'll make our plans.”

“I'm on shift.”

“That don't mean nothing.”

“
Dunlow.
I'm calling you from the station.”

Dunlow didn't care if some switchboard operator might be overhearing. Let them. Let them know that there were still some men willing to make sacrifices for everyone else.

“Get your ass over here later, then. I'm off tonight.”

“Well, that's the other thing. It doesn't appear that many other men have the same appetite as you do on this.”

“What?”

“I'm saying we don't like it any more than you do, but the idea of taking action against uniformed officers of the law don't seem like such a great idea, all right? I know they ain't real cops and you know it but the mayor doesn't seem to agree and neither does our chief.”

“You're turning yellow, that it?”

“I ain't yellow.”

“Yellowness is goddamn seeping out of this phone every time you open your mouth.”

“
It ain't being yellow, Dunlow.
It's knowin' there's a time and a place, and this ain't it.”

The next thing Dunlow knew he wasn't holding his phone anymore; it was smashed to pieces all over his bedroom. He would not lower himself to beg his fellow white men to aid him. He would not plead his case and he sure as hell would not repeat his mistake with Rake, trying to level with them and reveal things about himself he'd previously told no one. The time for talking was goddamn past.

He changed into fresh clothes, grabbed his keys and his gun.

34

“EVERY TIME WE
tried to help that family, we only made it worse.”

Boggs had hoped Smith might disagree, but his partner was silent.

“I never should have gotten the murder in the paper. I should have left the family alone out there to just wonder whatever happened to her. They would have thought she'd disappeared, married some fine schoolteacher, and disowned them. They would have used that money to go north. The local cops wouldn't have been on the lookout for them.”

Why were they doing this? Why continue with the sham of being “Negro officers”? They could do no real good. They were not permitted to correct the biggest problems, and when they dared try, they created worse disasters.

“It's not worth it,” Boggs concluded as he pulled up to Smith's apartment building. So much had occurred since he'd picked him up that morning, it was amazing the sun hadn't yet set on the same day.

“We'll try to get in touch with them again tomorrow. See if there's anything we can do for them.”

“If they're alive.” He shook his head. “I wish I'd figured it out sooner. I would have known then, known to just stay away.” Instead, he'd wanted the satisfaction of solving it, of being the hero. That pride had already destroyed one family—what would it destroy next?

“Just go home. Get some sleep. Things won't seem as bad in the morning.”

Smith didn't sound like he believed his own words.

At home a note from the reverend explained that he and Lucius's mother were at a wake a few blocks away. At least one thing had gone right, then, since Lucius desperately needed to be alone.

He sat in the parlor for a good while. He hadn't turned on any of the lamps, and later twilight passed and he was sitting in darkness.

He walked into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and called Rake.

“I know why Lily Ellsworth was killed.”

“Tell me.” A baby was crying in the background and it sounded like Rake was walking into another room.

“She was Prescott's daughter.”

“
What?
Says who?”

“One of her brothers said that their mother told Lily a few months ago. Lily and her brothers always knew she had a different father, and she's much lighter than her siblings. They'd wondered if her father was a white man. She was teased about it a fair amount. Then one day Emma Mae told Lily the story: when Emma Mae was fifteen, she and her family had moved to the city. A couple of years later she was working as a maid for the Prescott family. This was back in the twenties. The head of the household—the father of Congressman Prescott—was a state senator at the time. Billy Prescott himself was a young man, still in law school, and one day he took advantage of Emma Mae.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“According to Lily's brother, their mother didn't explain how it all came to pass. But she said she stopped working for them soon after that, and then when her own parents saw she was pregnant, they moved back out of the city. That's why she never wanted her own daughter to move here. Bad memories.”

“So Lily just happened to wind up working for the same household? Why, so she could confront her father? Extort money out of him?”

“Maybe she did try to extort the family, and that's how she came into that money. Or maybe she just wanted to meet the man, look her daddy in the eye. Maybe she didn't have money on her mind at all, but once he laid eyes on her he saw who she was immediately, and he panicked and offered her the money to hush her up, and she was just too stunned to say no.”

Silence for a few beats. “How could she have confronted the congressman?” Rake asked. “I thought he's been in Washington the whole time she was in Atlanta.”

“I spent some time in the library the other day. A lot of time, actu
ally, over a lot of days, and I finally found a short note in the
Constitution
that says Prescott came to town in late May, around Memorial Day. Went to some gala downtown, in honor of the Confederate war dead. He headed back up to the city two days later.”

“And about two weeks later, Lily was shuttled off to Mama Dove's.”

“That's right.”

“Prescott's son lied to me,” Rake said. “He claimed she'd stolen from them but they hadn't wanted to report it, and that's why they fired her.”

Then Rake told him what he'd learned about the Rust Division.

Boggs tried to work it through in his head again. Maybe Lily had tried to blackmail Prescott, threatened to publicize her paternity. So he paid her off, hence the money, and hence the junior Prescott's lie to Rake about her stealing from them. Maybe Prescott
hadn't
killed her, and
hadn't
called in Underhill's help. Maybe one of Prescott's political friends had. Maybe Prescott had told someone else about his illegitimate daughter. Perhaps Prescott was softening his stance on Negroes precisely because of Lily, the memories she brought back of Emma Mae Ellsworth. Perhaps his affair with Emma Mae had been more than a dalliance—he'd buried all remnants of it, but they'd come back nonetheless, and now he was realizing that the races weren't so far apart as many liked to think.

“We're assuming the son knew, too,” Rake said. “Maybe he didn't. Maybe they never told him, didn't want him to know he had a Negro half sister. Maybe it's such a family secret that only the congressman himself knows.”

Silence on the line for a few seconds.

“But if they paid her off, then why kill her, too?”

No more than a minute after hanging up the phone, he was sitting at the table when he heard footsteps. His mother walked in from the hall.

“Sorry to startle you,” she said when she saw his expression. She was tall, only two inches shorter than him, and her straightened hair touched her shoulders. She was getting thinner, almost in proportion with his father's weight gain over the years.

“I didn't realize you were home.” He wanted to ask her how much she had overheard, but was afraid to. Something in her eyes told him that she'd heard quite a bit. Part of the job description of a reverend's
wife is to be discreet enough not to eavesdrop exactly, but be helpful enough to tactfully act on any information she learned.

She sat down opposite him and watched him for a moment. Her face was very still. She asked, “Are you all right?”

“Not really.” He realized the light wasn't on and that it must look strange to his mother for him to be sitting in the dark. But she hadn't turned the light on either. “Long day.”

“Wasn't this your day off ?”

“I didn't use it too wisely.”

She was wearing a plain housedress and wore no makeup, the look she only allowed herself when it was late enough to be sure that no one would be dropping by. No sinners, no grievers, no one seeking counsel or the Lord or another supper.

“Maybe you should lie down.”

“Did you think I was a fool when I signed up?”

“Of course not.”

“You had this look on your face when I told you.”

“I was just surprised. You . . . you hadn't seemed to like the army.”

“I hated the army.”

“And I thought the police would be more of the same.”

“It's different. It's better in some ways, and awful in others.”

“I do know that people are glad you're out there, Lucius. They tell us all the time.”

It hurt him, in the back of his throat, to realize how badly he'd needed to hear this.

“Really? All I hear are the complaints.
Hey, why did you bust my brother's pool hall? Why did you arrest my cousin? How come you haven't kept the white cops off our backs?
”

“You've always been the type to fixate on the negatives. Or maybe people are more willing to tell me the positives about you. Mr. Thompkins said his pharmacy had been broken into four times last summer, but zero this summer. Mr. Royal mentioned he had a few knife fights at his club last year, but none this year, and he said the moonshiners aren't stealing his business as much. Principal Jones last week, he told me that seven different kids in his junior class wrote term papers about how they were going to be police officers.”

Lucius nodded. The lump in his throat was getting worse. Sensing this, she stopped talking, and walked over to the counter to pour him a glass of water. She handed it to him, then said, “You don't have to keep doing it if you don't want to.” Had she known he was thinking about quitting? Was it that obvious? “But I think you're doing more good than you realize.”

He drank the water, washing away the thickness.

“The scar is growing on me, by the way.”

He laughed. “Thanks.”

“I'm sure the girls will love it.”

“That hasn't been my experience yet.”

Then the phone rang. She was about to answer it when he asked her to let him, as if he'd known.

A woman on the line said, “Is this Officer Lucius Boggs?”

He recognized her voice and the sassy way in which she said it.

“Yes it is, Miss Cannon.” Like that, he perked up quite a bit. “What can I do for you?”

Julie said, “You told me to call you if I ever thought of anything or saw anything. Well, it's what I
haven't
seen that I think might be interesting.”

An hour later, Lucius, on his one night off, was walking the streets he no longer felt qualified to protect. It felt different to do this now, in his civvies, no partner at his side. He'd hoped to escape from his thoughts but he was doing only the opposite. He realized then that the mere act of walking in his neighborhood at night would never be the same again, that if he truly did hand in his badge now, he still wouldn't be able to reclaim his old feeling about Atlanta. The experience had permanently marred all his earlier memories, and any possible future would bear at least some imprint of these last few months.

Unless he left Atlanta.

There seemed no more illicit thought than that. Leave the city. Leave his family. Leave his connections. Leave the South. Leave his history. Leave his grandmother and her parents who were born slaves. Leave slavery and the War Between the States. Leave everything but the future.

He had thought that by taking this job, he was helping his people,
he was inching the rock of progress up the hill. But maybe he was wrong, and Uncle Percy was right. Maybe he was allowing himself to be fooled here, he was just another Negro casting down his bucket where he was, rather than moving someplace better.

Every day, thousands of Southern Negroes were doing it. Why not him? He had chosen a different struggle, a different way forward, and it sure as hell hadn't worked out. Here they were just niggers. Here he lived not in Sweet Auburn but Darktown. Here he was stubbornly holding on to the worst imaginable hand, as if hopeful that the next card would turn it into a royal flush. But the cards could not be read that way, and that perfect next card wasn't sitting atop the deck. Even if it was, some other hand would snatch it away, a white hand, and Lucius was making a fool of himself by playing along.