The Dying Crapshooter's Blues (16 page)

That wouldn't work and he knew it. One taste of Pearl was never enough, and the thought of being without her again made his chest ache. And she wasn't the only thing holding him; he was obliged to Jesse, too.

For the hundredth time, he wished he'd kept his mouth shut about his brief stint as a Philadelphia police officer and his shorter career working for the Pinkertons in Baltimore. He didn't remember when he had first announced these facts, though he assumed he had done it to impress some woman. He just had to show off that one time (or was it more?) and found himself with a reputation. So instead of looking forward to a day seeing friends, scouting income sources, and then getting back to Pearl, he had work to do.

At the washbasin, he splashed some water on his face to wake up and clear his head. He turned around and bent to pick up the slip of paper from the floor and unfold it. On a sheet of hotel stationery, someone had scrawled the words:

 

Maddox Street, off Pratt

 

He studied the message for a few seconds, then tossed the paper on the bed, among the mussed sheets.

 

Sweet had been up drinking coffee as he got ready to head off to work when he heard the key rattle in the lock. He stood in the kitchen doorway, his thick arms crossed, as Pearl stepped inside, looking sleepy and happy. She stopped, then rolled her eyes when she saw the reproach in her brother's gaze.

Sweet opened his mouth, closed it. There was nothing to say and they both knew it. She had run to Joe Rose and Joe had let her stay, in spite of Sweet's hard warnings. What could he do with them?

Pearl started for her bedroom, leaving him fuming in the doorway. Halfway down the short hall, she turned and came back, stood before him, and stretched on her toes to kiss his dark, rough cheek. She could feel him wilt a little as he let out a sigh from deep in his chest. He raised a hand to hold her chin in his palm.

“Little sister . . .” He started but couldn't finish.

Pearl gave him a sad smile of her own and backed away.

While she was changing clothes, she heard the front door open and close as he went out into the cold darkness.

She had misjudged the time, hoping to creep back in while he was still asleep. It was later than she thought, though, and he had been waiting for her. She could tell by the look on his face what kind of look she was wearing on hers, and how much it vexed him. He knew where she had been, who she had been with, and what she had been doing. Though it saddened her to hurt him so, she was relieved to see nothing more in his angry stare over chasing after Joe Rose.

For all their quarrels, Pearl loved her brother desperately. He had been her protector in their dead father's place. He had done his best to keep her on the straight and narrow, and had gone to prison for killing a man who had tried to get rough with her. Now he believed she was betraying him by dallying with a rounder like Joe.

She knew Sweet blamed himself for starting her down the wrong path with his own evil ways. The difference was that he had changed. Prison had taught him a number of hard lessons, the most important being that he didn't ever want to go back. He had left his criminal days behind for the straight life, taking a regular job and steering clear of his old cronies. Then he dragged home a series of hardworking, churchgoing
Negro
men, hoping one would catch her fancy. None of them took; she was too far gone on the likes of Joe Rose. Sweet fumed, sure that part of the reason she took to Joe was to confound him and the decent people around the Fourth Ward neighborhood.

Dropping her clothes into the wicker laundry basket, she pulled on a white cotton shift that was worn soft by use and crawled under the blanket. If she had known she was going to get caught like that, she'd have stayed at the hotel. She lay there longing for Joe, feeling the heat tingle down to her last nerve.

She dozed, swirling down into darkness, then came awake, pitched out of a nightmare that featured Captain Jackson standing before her like an evil god, his green eyes glittering as he got ready to devour her, one way or another. Even in the chilly bedroom, the sheets and pillow were damp with her sweat.

She got up and stumbled to the bathroom, then padded out to the kitchen to make coffee and fix something to eat. All the while, the Captain's grim, cold, accusing sneer hovered before her eyes and didn't disappear until she managed to conjure Joe's face again.

 

Joe came out onto the sidewalk, glanced over Lulu's facade, and walked on. Sweet Spencer was the last man on earth he wanted to see this morning.

Sweet didn't understand about Pearl and him at all. The thought of them together got his blood up, because Joe was a criminal and a bad influence, because mixing was dangerous
even if he was an Indian, and because he had a reputation for doing women wrong. While Joe didn't mistreat Pearl, he didn't court her, either, and Sweet took that as some sort of an affront to the family pride.

Though Joe wasn't a coward, Sweet scared him the same way fathers and brothers had made him quail when he was chasing skirts as a kid up north. In those days, if a young villain laid with the daughter or sister of an immigrant family, the men would demand their own justice. The choices were marry, run, or die. It was primitive, tribal, and mired in blood, and no one argued the point.

Joe with Pearl wasn't quite the same, of course; she was a grown woman. And Sweet couldn't afford to commit violence on Joe or any other man or he'd risk going back to prison. Still, Joe knew better than to push him. He couldn't just show up at the café as if nothing had happened, either. If Sweet didn't already know about Pearl's visit, one look at Joe's face would fix that. It was a small relief that he didn't have the time to stop for breakfast. Or so he told himself.

Instead, he bought a biscuit with ham and a carton of coffee from the wagon that was parked at the corner of Broad Street. Leaning next to the window of the Oppenheim Cigar store, he watched the pedestrian traffic while he ate his breakfast. It was a sweet idle; the young women looked pretty bundled in their winter coats, though too many of them were too thin. It was the style of the day, and he didn't care much for it.

He finished his biscuit and coffee, dropped the trash into a can, then headed south on Peachtree Street. A half block on, he dug in his pocket for the note and stared at the four words. He couldn't tell if the hand that had scrawled them was masculine or feminine, done in poor penmanship or by someone in a rush. He had stopped to ask at the front desk, only to find that the clerk wasn't the one who delivered it. Joe knew that anyone familiar with the Hampton could enter undetected.

Walking along in the brisk morning, he passed a number of men hurrying by with stringed instruments in hand, and he remembered what Willie had said about some people from the Columbia record company setting up at the Dixie.

When he got to the corner of Decatur Street, he noticed the unusual flurry of activity farther down the block, with cops in blue uniforms, milling from police headquarters to the east end of the avenue. He corralled a Negro newspaper boy to ask about the fuss.

The kid was excited. “They found a cop down Maddox Street!” he crowed. “He been shot. I mean dead!”

Maddox Street, off Pratt.
Joe muttered a short curse under his breath, thanked the kid, and started off again, taking a roundabout path to the corner of Moore and Decatur. He lingered there, watching the cops who were grouped around the mouth of the alley on the opposite side of the street. An ambulance from Grady Hospital had been parked at an angle to the curb, and a crowd of pedestrians, mostly colored, a number of them familiar, stood apart in little circles, pointing and whispering.

Joe spotted Albert Nichols and ambled across the street, just another curious spectator. After a minute, the detective noticed and walked over just as casually to greet him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked in a low voice.

“I got your note,” Joe said.

Albert frowned. “My what?”

“It wasn't from you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” Joe said. “Is it Logue?”

Albert nodded.

“What happened?”

“Shot twice,” Albert said. “Once in the chest, once in the forehead. A small-caliber pistol at close range. He was robbed, but I think that came after. Somebody found him like that.” He grimaced. “Fucking animals.”

The circle of uniforms shifted and Joe caught sight of the victim, lying on his back on the alley bricks, his thick arms splayed out. Logue was dressed in his street clothes and wore no overcoat.

“Any suspects?” Joe said.

“What do you think?” Albert said, and eyed Joe narrowly. “Did you get to talk to him?”

“I didn't,” Joe said. “I only had last night to track him down and he wasn't around.”

“Looks like he was on his way to getting a bullet between the eyes.” Albert's voice was flat. They watched the activity around the body for a silent half minute.

Joe said, “He's dead because of Jesse Williams, Al.”

“You know what I can't stand?” the detective said abruptly. “I can't stand these fellows who spend a few months walking a beat and then think they're detectives.”

Joe laughed shortly as Albert pulled his packet of Chesterfields from a pocket. He offered one to Joe, who refused. The detective lit his cigarette, coughed, and blew a thin cloud. “You want to play cop?” he said. “How about that theft out in Inman Park? Why don't you play cop with that one?”

Joe waited a moment before saying, “She came around the hotel last night.”

The detective turned to look at him. “And?”

“And we didn't talk about it.”

Albert came up with a lazy smile. “Too busy with other matters?” He puffed on his cigarette, and the smile evaporated. “You know you're out of your damn mind, messing with her right now.”

Joe gave a bleak nod.

“Did she snatch those jewels?”

“I don't know.” The detective treated him to a hard stare. “I don't.”

“She was there and you didn't think to ask her?”

Joe avoided his friend's eyes.

“Uh-huh,” Nichols said. “Well, you might want to do it. Because if it was her, it's going to bite you, too. The Captain'll see to it. That's why he brought you in yesterday.”

“Yeah, that's what I figured,” Joe said. “But she didn't take those goods, Al. She knows better.”

“Because you taught her?”

“I explained some things.”

Albert nodded slowly. “Well, maybe she just happened to be working there. It still don't look good.”

Joe said, “I know.”

“So?”

“So I'll talk to her.”

The detective regarded him for another second, then turned his attention back to the busy scene around the body. A photographer was bending down, snapping pictures on a box camera, the flash powder popping white in the gray morning.

“What about him?” Joe said. “You know his story?”

The detective coughed into his hand, then said, “There ain't much. He was from somewhere around Smyrna. Worked as a sheriff's deputy up there for a couple years, but they couldn't put up with his drinking and ran him off.”

“And he came to Atlanta?”

“That's right.” Albert paused. “What I heard was that was the Captain's doing. He got him hired.”

Joe was surprised. “When was that?”

“Ten or eleven years ago. He never did much of a job, but he never made any trouble, either. Never bothered anybody. He took care of the bag down here. Or he was supposed to. He couldn't ever get it right, with the drinking and all. He's just one of Jackson's boys, just waiting to get his twenty in.”

“You know where he stayed?” Joe said.

Albert tapped some ash away. “He kept a room in a house on Cain Street. At the corner of Walton.”

“Anything else?” Joe said.

Albert shook his head.

“It ain't much.”

“That's all I have, and it's all you're gonna get,” the detective said snappishly. He waved his free hand in abrupt anger. “This is police business, goddamnit!”

Joe said, “He shot Williams, Al. And now he's dead.”

Nichols wasn't having any of it. “Don't you have other things to worry about?” he said. “Like what your friend Pearl Spencer was doing in that mansion right about the time a bunch of jewelry went missing.” He flicked what was left of his cigarette into the gutter and made his way back into the alley to join the crowd of cops that had circled the body of Officer Logue again.

Joe got the message and turned to leave. As he walked off, he happened to glance across the street to see Lieutenant Collins slouching against the fender of an APD sedan, smoking a cigarette of his own and gazing calmly back at him. He stopped at the next corner and looked back. Collins had moved away from the automobile, crossed the street, and was stepping up to tap Albert Nichols on the shoulder.

Joe kept going, cutting between the closed-down 91 Theatre and Ike Clein's billiard hall and into Schoen Alley. He climbed the stairs and knocked, and the thin whore Martha let him in without a word of greeting.

A different pair of rounders sat at the table, drinking short glasses of whiskey and playing penny-ante poker with a dirty deck of cards. Martha looked morose and weary as she sipped from a cracked coffee cup. Her mourning had started early. There was no sign of any of those characters who had sworn to Joe that they'd come join the vigil, but then they were a late-rising crowd.

He stepped into the bedroom and found Little Jesse looking worse for the wear, his face gaunt and bone jutting, his eyes with a dead cast. Still, Jesse managed to rouse himself a little when Joe
appeared, enough to ask about all the commotion out on the street. A couple fellows had been in and out jabbering about a dead cop.