by David Fulmer
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
Willie shrugged. “Gone. Run off.”
“Guess he thought it was over,” Jesse wheezed.
“Joe?” The girl had edged closer and was staring at the colored man who was sprawled all bloody on the sidewalk. “What happened? Is he going to be all right?” This was not the way she expected her night to end. Still, even as her painted mouth curled in distaste, her eyes glittered with fascination at the sordid sight.
Joe ignored her for the moment and surveyed the crossing streets. Two men had appeared at the corner of Piedmont, peering their way. A Negro boy who looked too young to be out at that hour was shuffling across Courtland, staring with wide eyes. A Model T sedan passed by, slowing, and the face of the driver turned. Joe knew the streets well enough to understand that if they didn’t do something, the word would travel that there was a man bleeding to death on the corner of Courtland and Edgewood, and there’d be a crowd of vultures in no time.
“We need to get him off the street,” Joe said. He stood, brushing the grit from his trousers, and beckoned the kid. “You want to earn a nickel, son?” The boy bobbed his head. “Run down to the Diamond Pool Room on Auburn and tell whoever’s there that Joe Rose needs them up here. Tell them Little Jesse’s been shot. You got it?” The boy nodded again and started off at a trot. “Tell them we need a hack to carry him home,” Joe yelled after him.
Willie grinned in spite of the grim business at hand. Joe Rose always seemed to fill the air around him, and without being one of those rough, bullying types, either. Though it was true that sometimes the man’s mouth got him into trouble. The last time was down home in Statesboro, and Willie had to talk the both of them out of a rough corner.
The blind man spent a moment musing on Joe showing up like that. But then he usually did appear out of nowhere. Whenever the first snow fell on one of his Yankee haunts, he would leave for a warmer clime. He never made an entrance that anyone noticed. Like tonight, when he stepped from the darkness and into the aftermath of a shooting.
And of course there was a girl at his side. That was the other thing about Joe: He collected all sorts of women. Willie had never figured it out. Maybe he was handsome, though Willie didn’t think it was his looks. He was just one of those characters who trailed something that some females couldn’t resist. So Willie knew that pretty much whenever he heard Joe’s voice, he’d smell French perfume, too.
Though he could be loud, he was staying quiet now, watching over poor Little Jesse as the night crept toward dawn.
“Joe?” The woman pulled her coat tighter around her thin frame. “I’m cold.”
“Well, go on up to the hotel,” Joe said absently.
“By myself?”
“Go ahead,” Joe said. “It ain’t but two blocks. Tell them you’re with me. They’ll let you in.”
She gave him a peeved look, then stared at Jesse for another moment before turning around and swaying up the avenue in the direction of Ivy Street.
From his slouch, Little Jesse watched her tail twitch away and sighed. “I guess I wouldn’t mind if that was the last thing I ever saw.”
Joe and Willie snickered and Jesse stirred some more, groaning.
“Willie,” he said, sounding all mournful. “Promise you’ll sing me a song over my grave.”
Joe treated him to a wry look. “You can hold off on that,” he said. “I believe you’re too goddamn wicked for one bullet to finish you.”
Little Jesse coughed out a pained laugh. From the west came a slight rumble of winter thunder. “Listen,” he said. “Is that—”
“It’s about to start raining, is all,” Willie said. “You stay calm.”
“Help’s coming,” Joe told him.
Little Jesse moaned once more, hollowly, and Joe knelt down again and, removing the bloody handkerchief, pulled a clean one from his own pocket and pressed it on the wound. Jesse flinched from the pain, then closed his eyes and let out a long breath.
Whatever had happened on that cold, dark corner, Joe could see that the damage wasn’t yet fatal. It appeared Little Jesse Williams would survive at least another day. Otherwise, he would have sent the kid for the hoodoo wagon instead of a hack.
Mayor John Sampson was on his way home from the Payne mansion, bundled along with his wife in the back of the Essex phaeton that was one of the fringe benefits of his office. The mayor and his spouse were spared the whip of the cold air by heavy overcoats, a horse blanket, and the precise engineering of the automobile. The phaeton was tight as a drum, and the heat of the twelve-cylinder engine was efficiently diverted into the passenger compartment.
The mayor felt the glasses of champagne he’d drunk swimming through his brain as he watched the city—his city—pass by the windows.
The Christmas charity marked the end of a sterling year. A dark-horse candidate, he had been elected on a platform of ridding Atlanta of police corruption so rampant that he often claimed that half of the city’s criminals wore badges. He had pledged to root out the blight, and so he had, shocking the citizens by actually keeping his promise and demoting his chief of police and chief of detectives, both of whom were dirty, incompetent, or both. In that one move, he made an example of them and a statement that things were going to change.
This bold stroke was lauded from every corner of the city, and there were whispers of a run for governor almost before he had rightly moved into his City Hall office. The crowd of wealthy patrons at the Payne mansion had greeted him like an untrumpeted Caesar back from the wars. He smiled as he recalled several of the lovelier ladies fawning over him, and the sight of their heavy bosoms jutting under the lights of the chandeliers as gay music swirled in the background.
He was jerked out of his reverie when a police sedan roared up alongside the phaeton with lights flashing. The passenger-side window was open and a uniformed officer was waving urgently.
“Pull over,” the mayor ordered, and his driver steered the Essex to the Irwin Street curb. The cop hopped out of the sedan and trotted to the rear window to whisper a message.
The mayor, a pious and God-fearing Baptist, uttered a rare curse before snapping at his driver to turn around and head right back to the mansion, where a cache of jewelry had been stolen even as at least a hundred of the city’s most prominent business and political leaders were hailing the new mayor’s crime-fighting triumphs.
It had taken less than a quarter hour for the boy to arrive back on the corner with a gang of sharps and rounders from the Diamond in tow. All rough types, they knew to bring clean towels from behind the counter to help stanch Jesse’s wound. They stood in a circle, shoulders hunched against the chill, casting furtive glances and muttering oaths.
All of them knew Little Jesse Williams as a gambler, sometime thief, and all-around sport who had been working Atlanta’s streets and alleys since he was a kid. Over the years, he had cheated them out of their money and jacked their women, but the man was in such bad shape, maybe even at death’s door, that for the moment all grudges were laid aside.
Still, they were to a man deeply superstitious, so there was a collective sigh of relief at the sound of hack wheels on the macadam and the ring of horseshoes on the streetcar rails. An ancient Negro named Henry had been roused from his bed in Thompson’s Alley and had hitched his equally aged nag to his hack. The wagon, used daily to haul junk, creaked out of the Edgewood Avenue darkness and drew to a halt at the corner. Henry looked down at the man on the ground with his blank old eyes as the horse huffed little clouds into the cold air.
With Joe directing, the boys gathered round to lift a groaning Jesse into the bed of the hack. Joe and Willie climbed in with him, and Henry snapped the reins. The Negro boy and two of the rounders followed along behind. The rest of them watched the wagon roll off as the first drops of dawn rain began falling on the corner, washing away all traces of Little Jesse Williams’s blood.
When Mayor Sampson stepped into the parlor to speak to the Payn
es, his face was pink with chagrin. When he came out, it was crimson with anger. At times like this, he wished he was a tall man who could simply tower over a fiasco. He was especially dismayed to find that at least a dozen of the attendees, including some of the city’s most energetic gossips, had not yet left, and that there would be no way to keep the word from spreading. He forced his legs steady as he crossed to the telephone set in the foyer. Snatching up the hand piece, he asked to be connected to the home of the chief of police.
Across town, Chief Clifton Troutman sat on the edge of his bed, listening to Mayor Sampson rail at him like he was some schoolboy. After the mayor had hung up the telephone, he sat numbly, trying to figure a way to fix the awful mess that had just been dropped in his lap.
A chilly drizzle was falling by the time they arrived at Schoen Alley, and Joe hopped down to supervise the clumsy business of getting Jesse up the wooden stairs, through the tiny kitchen, and into the bedroom of the apartment that was kept surprisingly tidy by the string of floozies who had reason to be in and out. Willie followed along, his face grim.
The rooms were over a pawnshop, a convenience for any rounder. Once they got Little Jesse laid out on his iron-framed bed, Joe sent someone to find the doctor. Within a few minutes, one of Jesse’s women appeared, then a second, the jealous fires in their hearts quieted by the sight of him laid out in such a poor state, drifting in and out of consciousness and moaning in pain. They dabbed their painted eyes with handkerchiefs, though even in their anguish their thoughts went to who might be taking his place.
A little bit later, a trio of sports showed up after a night in the Decatur Street speaks. One of them poked around and found a bottle Little Jesse had stashed. Drinks were poured and glasses raised to Jesse’s speedy recovery, though they all guessed he was a goner. The vigil had begun.
With these characters on hand to watch over Jesse, Willie and Joe descended the rickety stairs to the alley, shook hands, and went their own ways, Joe to the Hampton Hotel and Willie home to his room on Alabaster Street to dress for church.
Three
On the stroke of eleven, as the bells tolled to end Sunday services at Peachtree Baptist Church, Detective Lieutenant Daniel Collins was pacing the sidewalk with an umbrella over his head as cold rain pattered on the sidewalk. The doors opened and the congregation began filing down the broad stone steps. Collins craned his neck until he saw a familiar face and gave a short wave.
Grayton Jackson spied him and broke away from his pretty, plump, and chattering wife to make his way down the marble steps and through the morning drizzle, looking odd and uncomfortable out of uniform as he ducked under the umbrella.
The younger man whispered in his ear. Jackson, known simply as “the Captain,” kept his blank stare riveted on the wet sidewalk. When Collins finished, he responded with a blunt nod, dismissing him, and then moved to the bottom of the stone steps to wait in a brooding silence for his wife to stop talking and get moving.
Joe opened his eyes to the lonesome bleat of a truck horn on Houston Street and looked up at the familiar delta of cracks on the water-stained ceiling. Before he could come fully awake, he sensed the heat of a body next to him and turned his head slowly, in case there was a shock waiting. He had woken up to some fiercely ugly women in his day. Not that he cared that much; homely faces sometimes came with bodies that were completely lovely, full-muscled hourglasses built for a good time. Anyway, it wasn’t like he was some matinee idol. He just needed to prepare himself when it was time to greet his guests in the morning light.
Though not this morning. The woman next to him—Adeline, that was her name—was pretty, pale, raven-haired, with long lashes, a delicate painted mouth, and a body as slender as a flower.
Joe knew her type. Though she came from a decent family and had enjoyed a proper upbringing, she smoked and caroused and found shady characters like him to take her to back-alley speakeasies to drink and dance. She had approached Joe boldly the last time he was in town, casting her eye upon him at a speak and then walking directly away from the fellow who had brought her there and right up to him. He dropped a hint that he stayed at the Hampton when he visited Atlanta, and there had been a note from her waiting at the desk when he checked in.
He had taken her to a little club on Lime Row where they offered a trio of a piano, trumpet, and guitar, along with bottles of half-decent gin. Adeline drank like a sailor, danced up a frenzy to the gurgling jazz, and didn’t sober up until they came upon Little Jesse Williams lying on the cold sidewalk with a hole in his stomach.
Joe had walked the six blocks back from Schoen Alley in the drizzly half dawn to find her fast asleep in the bed. Normally, that wouldn’t stop him from diving between her legs, but he was tired, and the scene on the street, and then in Jesse’s rooms, had darkened his mood, so he let her be.
Turning his head to look out the window, he saw that the sky held a deep gray dinge as the rain kept falling. He slipped from under the sheets and moved through the dim light to the sink to splash some water on his face and gaze at the reflection in the mirror.
People meeting Joe assumed right away that he was at least half Indian, which was likely true. After his copper skin, which went from light bronze in winter to the color of an old penny in summer, they noted his glittering black eyes, then his nose, which had curved like a bow until being broken in his first and only prizefight; and finally his smile, which was wide, white, and devilish, as if he was tending to a private joke. The way he got along so well with colored folks was more proof that he was something other than an American white man. Some people, not unkindly, called him “Indian Joe.” On the other hand, he’d gotten into bloody fights with drunks who took one look and decided that “Geronimo” or “Chief” was a more amusing moniker. The truth was no one could say for sure what blood ran in his veins, certainly not him.
When he was a kid, he made a game of imagining that his eyes and hair, as black as anthracite, had come from his father, an Italian, or from his mother, an Iroquois. Or that his compact frame was a gift from his Irish father or Greek mother. The planes of his face, round and oddly cherubic for a grown man, could have come from anywhere. Philadelphia was full of immigrants and had its share of Indians, so he could be anything. The nuns at the orphanage hadn’t provided any clues, instead weaving a tale about how he’d been delivered to the doorstep like a gift from the angels. They weren’t very good liars, and he suspected something bleaker. He never found out the true story. He had left out of that place at thirteen and had been on his own ever since, making his way by work and wits.
Those same wits had served him well. For the past seven years, he had been by profession a thief of goods that were worth the risk of stealing. That meant jewels, bonds, cash, and like prizes. He stole from rich people, because they had the nicest belongings and were often easy marks; also because he took pleasure in it. The work was not too hard for a careful fellow, and the rewards could be ample.
He fenced the goods and used the money to keep him moving from place to place, spending modestly until his funds got low. Then he’d go looking for the next opportunity, some trinkets just waiting for him to pick up and carry off. Thus he cut an erratic trail from Philadelphia to Baltimore to New York, then from Atlanta to New Orleans to Memphis. Every burglary cop on the eastern seaboard knew his name, and yet not one of them could hang much of anything on him.
It wasn’t a cakewalk, though. Get caught filching from a hobo, no one cared. Steal from a citizen of means and they’d move heaven and earth to find and punish you so you’d never forget.
Joe had known a slick sport in Philadelphia named Jack Johnson. “Just like the prizefighter,” he’d say. “But I ain’t him.” As if it wasn’t obvious; this Jack Johnson was rosy white. Poor Jack got caught with one hand up the skirt of a certain well-to-do businessman’s wife and the other in a box of her jewelry, and you’d have thought he’d committed capital murder on a child. They took care of Jack, all right. Afterward, they said he
hung himself in his cell. Joe claimed the body, because Jack had no one else.
There were other risks. A second-story man who went by “Red” for his bright orange hair had climbed a trellis of a Baltimore mansion on his way to cracking an upstairs window when some coot came out of nowhere and snapped a derringer in his face. It took away half his jaw, and the fall off the ladder broke his back. After that, Red lost his mind and children screamed in terror at the sight of him. He drank himself into regular stupors and was found frozen to death in an alley in the brutal winter of 1916.
So there were dangers, which Joe accepted as the risks of his illicit trade. For all the crimes he’d committed, his jail time had been limited to a three-month stretch in Radford. Along the way, he had spent a year as a policeman in Philadelphia and a shorter stint as a Pinkerton detective in Baltimore. It just turned out that he made a better criminal than he did a cop.
He did not suffer pangs of conscience over his crimes, and never had qualms about stripping some rich citizen’s home of anything that wasn’t red hot or nailed to the floor. It could be truly said that here the nuns had failed. The one other place he displayed no guilt was with women. He had a long and tangled history of loving and then leaving them behind. If they didn’t get wise and drop him first, that is. Women out for a thrill were dismayed when they realized he wasn’t Robin Hood or Jesse James, just a common burglar. Only one of them understood that at all, and only because she’d done her own share of thieving.
From behind him, he heard the rustle of bedsheets, then a yawn.
“Well, good morning,” Adeline purred sleepily. Joe glanced into the corner of the mirror and saw her reflection as she threw back the blankets and stretched in his direction.
They kept the bed frame rattling and the springs shrieking for a good half hour, as her pallid flesh turned pink, then red, and she moaned as if she was in pain, all the while bucking up and down, her arms and legs flailing. When they were finished, she rose unsteadily to her feet, wrapped herself in the blanket, and, with a woozy smile, hobbled out the door and down the hall to the bathroom, her carefully coiffed curls now hanging down in wet rag-doll strands.
