The Dying Crapshooter's Blues (18 page)

The landlady smiled tightly as she curled her painted fingernails around the bill. “Daisy,” she said. “She used to work for me when I ran the house down on the Avenue.”

“That was before you went away?”

Mrs. Cotter's face got hard. “Before I got set up and sent down the river. Got on the wrong side of the wrong cop. Floyd was gone, and so I didn't have a chance. I should have had my
hand slapped, but I did three years.” She took a moment to calm herself. “Anyway, I knew Logue when that was his beat and I introduced the two of them. She's still down there. She's clean and lively. I never minded sending a fellow her way.” She stopped to sip her coffee. “In the last year or so, I got the idea that John was sweet on her. You know, the way some fellows are with a sporting woman. Like that.”

“John?”

“John Robert. He just went by J. R.”

“What about family?”

“I asked him about that when he first came here, and all he would say was something about
my baby.
I tried to talk to him and he just got this look on his face. So I left it alone. I pretty much left him alone.” She heaved a sigh. “And now he's dead. Well, my lord.”

“All right, then,” Joe said. “He goes to work and pretty much stays drunk and once a week or so, he goes to see Daisy the working girl. Do I have that right?” Beverly nodded. “No other visitors?”

He saw something pass across the landlady's eyes. “Well . . .,” she said, “someone came around just the first of last week. Monday or Tuesday. It was in the early evening. The sun hadn't been down too long. I heard voices up in his room.”

“Who was it?”

“I don't know. I didn't see.”

“Did you hear anything they said?”

“It wasn't that loud.”

“Then what?”

“Then I heard someone on the stairs. The front door opened and banged shut. That was all. Whoever it was, was gone.”

Joe kept his gaze fixed on her face. He wanted to let her know that he was wise to the fact that she had seen or heard something. No matter what she said. She had probably eavesdropped on the argument and then poked her nose through the curtains to see Logue's visitor making his exit. Still, something told him not to push it.

“Did you ask Logue about it?”

“The next day, I did. He said it was nothing.”

“What do you think?”

“I don't think anything,” Mrs. Cotter said.

Now Joe saw a glint in her eyes that told him she'd gone as far as she was going to go. She was letting him poke around in Logue's quarters, which meant she was playing some kind of angle of her own.

He sat back and took one more sip of his coffee to please her, then said, “I'd like to see the room now.”

The landlady treated him to a sidelong glance. “You going to tell me what you're after?”

“You don't need to know that part.”

“You're right, I don't,” the landlady said, and stood up. “I'll get the key.”

 

They climbed the stairs without speaking. Mrs. Cotter led him down the hall, stopped at the last door on the right, and unlocked it for him.

“I'll be fine from here,” he said.

She watched him for a tense second, probably wondering if she was making a mistake. Then she said, “You hurry, hear?” and went back down the stairs, leaving him alone.

Joe pushed the door open and stood at the threshold for a moment before he went in, perking an ear for any boarders who might be listening from behind their doors. He had an extra sense about silence that he had picked up from years of creeping about houses. This one did feel just a little too still for his comfort, but he couldn't worry about that now.

He closed the door gently and found himself a cramped
space, twelve feet by fourteen, so compact that he figured he would be able to case it in a matter of minutes. An iron-framed bed took up most of the far wall. A chest of drawers with a washbasin and mirror on top was at the foot of the bed with a ladderback chair alongside it. One dirt-streaked window looked to the north of the city. The only adornment on the dingy plaster was a Coca-Cola calendar. Joe noticed that Saturday the fifteenth was circled in pencil.

It was a forlorn place, a lonely man's cell, the kind of quarters that always made him dispirited, and he didn't want to hang around any longer than was necessary.

Though he had forgotten most of what he had learned as a detective, he was still a pretty fair thief, and could work a room for worthwhile goods in quick order, covering all the hiding places that made people feel clever until they realized that someone like Joe had found them.

J. R. Logue didn't have much of anything in the way of possessions. There was nothing under the bed. On top of the dresser he found an ornate plate holding some loose change and a pair of cuff links. He went into the dresser drawers, poked around, and came up empty in the bottom three. The only thing out of place in the top drawer was a single photograph.

The frame was cheap, the photograph a little blurred, and the little girl posed clumsily and too far away. Yet she was a sweet-looking child with white blond hair, chubby cheeks, her whole face lit up with a smile. For all that, she looked lonely; or maybe it was that the photograph was the only personal item that J. R. Logue seemed to have kept. Joe wondered if she had been the cop's own child, a niece, or just someone he knew. She could be lost, all grown up, alive or dead.

Joe stared at her blurred face for another few seconds, then turned the frame over to check the back and found nothing hidden there.

He returned it to where he found it, closed the drawer, and
opened the narrow closet. Three police uniforms were hanging in a row, along with some civilian shirts and trousers and a gray suit that had seen some wear. A pair of dress shoes and a pair of house slippers were arranged on the floor.

Joe closed the door, then opened it again. Pushing the hangers aside one by one, he went through the pockets of the uniforms and found them empty except for some random bits of paper, packs of safety matches, and other scraps. He moved to the suit, and went over it until he came upon something solid in one of the inside pockets. Poking with his fingers, he drew out a blue booklet with
ATLANTA NATIONAL BANK
embossed on the cover.

Turning to catch the window light, he flipped the pages, noting the puny sums that had been added and debited, right up to the last entry. A deposit of two hundred dollars stood out in bold relief. The lone three-figure sum was dated Friday the fourteenth. Officer Logue had made a deposit equal to a month's salary the day before he shot Little Jesse.

Joe was puzzling over this when he heard the sudden crunch of automobile tires rolling to the curb in front of the house, followed by two slams, and a few seconds later, the squeaking of the hinges on the downstairs door. A rapping hand vibrated through the house.

“Police!” a muffled voice called.

Joe didn't know if he had been tailed or if the cops were trailing behind on their own, and he wasn't about to wait around to find out. He had a minute, two at most, to get out of there.

He glanced at the window. It would be a twenty-foot drop to the ground, and even if he could take the leap, the open sash would give him away. His only choice was to get into the hallway, run to the bathroom, and hope the cops didn't check it.

He could hear it now: “What's this criminal doing in your toilet, ma'am?”

He slipped out the door, closed it gently behind him, and
padded along the hall with a silent, splayfooted thief's gait. As he crossed the landing top of the stairwell, he turned his head slightly to catch a glimpse of a tall figure standing at Mrs. Cotter's door.

Just as he reached the other side he heard the footsteps start up the stairs. As the landlady led the cop to the second floor, she did Joe and herself a favor by climbing at a slow pace and talking loudly. He reached the bathroom in four strides, only to find the door locked. No one called out when he twisted the knob; it was likely one of those houses where each tenant kept a key.

The landlady and the policeman were halfway to the landing. He had another few seconds before they'd spot him, and he was trying to figure a way to become invisible when the door of the room on his left jerked open a few inches. A young woman with a round, freckled Irish face and red marcelled hair gazed at him, her green eyes wide and startled. Joe shot a fast glance down the hall and saw the toe of the copper's shoe on the landing. He pushed past the woman and closed the door behind him, hoping to God she wouldn't let out a scream.

She didn't; instead, she stood back with her hands clasping nervously against her bosom.

“All I want is a way out,” he said, holding up a palm to calm her. “That's all. But there's a copper out in the hall, if you want to call him. I won't make a fuss.”

She shook her head slightly, looking scared, though not anywhere near hysterical, and Joe noticed the tiny glimmer in her eyes. She caught her breath, then gestured with a short nod of her head toward her window. Joe stepped over to see a sloped roof that covered a side porch. He slid the lock and threw up the sash. Cool air wafted inside.

The girl said, “What are you doing here?”

Before he could respond, they heard a man's voice in the hallway, followed by something back from Mrs. Cotter. If the cop
knew his business, he'd be knocking on the young lady's door. Joe had to go. As he ducked out, he mouthed,
What's your name?

“It's Molly,” she whispered.

With a quick smile of thanks, he climbed the rest of the way out the window, then scrabbled to the edge of the roof, dropped on his gut, and went over the side. Once he had shinnied down the corner post to the wooden railing, he hopped to the bare ground. He cut around the back of the house and walked through the tiny yard and into the alley that led out to Cain Street. A thick oak tree gave him cover to spy on the police sedan that was parked at the curb in front of the house and the uniformed cop who was standing on the porch, looking bored.

As he stepped out from behind the tree, he caught a flash of color at a window, and looked up to see Molly standing there, peering his way. He waved at her and hurried off.

He began the climb up Cain Street toward Peachtree, feeling the tension going out of his bones. If the cops had caught him in the house, they would have taken him in for sure. If it wasn't for the red-haired Molly, he might well be on his way to jail.

As to Mrs. Cotter, there was no reason for the landlady to speak up on his behalf. Not for the three dollars he'd paid her, and not if she wanted to keep her tidy little situation. She'd done what she could.

At least he had gotten some information for his trouble. He now knew that Logue had lived a sorry drunken bachelor's sorry life. He had quaffed his whiskey and visited a Central Avenue whore named Daisy once a week. Other than that, he had stumbled fecklessly about the Atlanta streets he was hired to police and got drunk in the speaks instead of collecting from them. He had no business being an officer of the law, and yet he'd been kept on through a dozen besotted years. Somewhere in his sad drama was a child. This was the man who had set out to murder Little Jesse Williams.

Joe understood all too well that a policeman shooting a black man on a rough nighttime street was not so uncommon. When it happened, the officer simply offered a timeworn explanation.

Why, that crazy nigger drew down on me . . .
or
I ordered him to stop, but he ran so I fired . . .

It could have been that easy for Officer J. R. Logue, just one of those things that happened in a place where a low-down Negro's life didn't count for much.

Joe stopped on the corner of Spring Street to watch the bustling traffic for a few moments. He wished it was as simple as that.

Now there was another twist to the story. Joe dug Logue's bankbook out of his coat pocket and opened it. He stared at the page where the last deposit was noted as if trying to decipher some message there. Then he put it away. When the traffic passed and he started walking again, the muddy stream in which he'd been wading suddenly cleared a bit.

Logue had been paid to kill Jesse Williams. That was the reason for the visitor coming to the house and for the two-hundred-dollar deposit. When Logue failed that like he failed everything else, he had to be eliminated before he could open his loose drunkard's mouth or, worse, create more of a mess trying to finish the job.

Joe slowed his steps as his thoughts jumped ahead. What if getting rid of Logue was part of the plan from the beginning? He was a worthless drunk with no family or friends, and he wouldn't be missed, except by Daisy the prostitute and the little girl in the photograph. Maybe.

Huffing up the steep incline, Joe felt like he had just peeled back the skin on something, and realized that he wouldn't be able to walk away. The hook was set, but good. He'd gone too far and would need to finish this; or at the least, get something he could give to Albert Nichols. That would mean trying to pry
loose whatever Jesse was holding. It would mean tracking down the invisible Robert Clark and the sporting girl named Daisy who worked in a house on Central Avenue. It would mean paying a visit to Molly to see if she could tell him what the landlady wouldn't.

Finally, he'd have to do it all in a hurry and without raising sand. All he needed was for the Captain to find out what he was up to, and if he knew Willie McTell at all, the word was already on the street.

Joe Rose is bound to find out what happened to Little Jesse, y'all.

That's right, Joe Rose, the
detective.

By the time he reached the crest of the slope and turned south on Peachtree Street, he was so overheated by the climb and his agitation at being suckered in by a sharp like Jesse Williams that he took off his overcoat and slung it over his shoulder.