The Dying Crapshooter's Blues

by David Fulmer

  “You know who did? I’ll give you a chance to talk.”

  “I don’t, sir.”

  The Captain jabbed a finger. “We’re going to stay on this until it’s closed. Don’t think we’re not.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand that,” Pearl said in the same unaffected tone.

  “So if you have anything, now’s the time to tell us.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say, sir.”

  The policeman glared down at her another few seconds, then snapped, “All right, go.”

  Pearl rose to her feet in a languid uncurling, like rising smoke. She wouldn’t meet the Captain’s hard eyes as she turned away.

  If it had been left there, she would have won the round. But Captain Jackson had something in reserve, and waited until she had reached the dining room door before saying, “Hold on.” She stopped. He took a significant pause. “What about Joe Rose?”

  For the first time, her front seemed to waver, and the Captain stifled a snicker of satisfaction.

  “What about him?” she said.

  “You tell me.”

  Pearl blinked and shifted her weight, hesitating before she spoke. “I know him, yes, sir,” she said. “By way of my brother, Sylvester. He works at Lu—”

  “I know your brother,” Jackson broke in. “And I know Rose, too. I’m going to bet he’s back in town. As a matter of fact, this looks like one of his capers. What do you think?”

  She didn’t have an answer. He let the silence hang for a few seconds; then, looking pleased with himself, gave her a quick nod of dismissal. “I said you can go.”

  He watched her disappear through the doorway, then turned to Collins and saw an inquisitive stare, exactly what he’d hoped for. He wanted the junior officer to witness his police work. With any luck word of it might get back to the chief, maybe even the mayor. Let them all chew on it as they waited for him to come through and save their hindquarters.

  “All right, detective,” he said in a voice that was unusually crisp. “Let’s have a look upstairs.”

  Her coat bundled and hat pulled down low, Pearl Spencer walked away from Inman Park and back toward the city, her thoughts in a whirl.

  What had transpired in the dining room at the mansion had been like a scene from a movie, played without the cards. She read what was going on behind the cop’s blade of a gaze. It was not so much of a surprise how his conniving was laced with the familiar signs of a simmering rage. She had encountered it dozens of times, white men who looked upon her with desire, hated themselves for it, then hated her in turn, which seemed to ignite the hunger all the more . . . and on it went.

  It was an old story, and the number of octoroons, quadroons, and mulattoes on the streets of the city was the evidence. What were less visible were the tales of women of color murdered by men who could not face their shame over giving in to their instincts.

  As she walked along the morning street, she wondered if the Captain had picked on her simply because of her looks. Even now, some of the men and women she passed glanced, then stared at her. Though her skin was the deep brown of West Africa, her features leaned more to Egyptian: oval face, aquiline nose, slanted eyes. Indeed, with her strong curves, Pearl missed being a stunning work of womanhood only by some rough edges; there were those, and the blades of light that nestled in her black gaze, which could hint at crazy. When she moved, she tended to a certain stalking grace, as if she was hunting something.

  She was never one to behave, either. Like an actress changing roles for a show, she could shift from a musing quiet to brash and noisy; from shyly fawning to alley cat wild; from sweet and kind to mean as a snake. When she did domestic work in a house, she would turn almost invisible. Though anyone who bothered to look would notice that she was different.

  So much so that she had been able to hold her own with the likes of Captain Jackson right until the end, when he knocked her sideways by throwing out that name, as of course he knew it would.

  Now she glanced over her shoulder, wondering if the cop might have her tailed, figuring she would run to him. In fact, she had an urge to do just that: hop on the next streetcar heading downtown and present herself at the door of his room at the Hampton Hotel. She smiled, knowing exactly what would happen if she did it.

  But instead of taking that ride, she turned the corner at Jackson for the three-block walk to Lyon Street, knowing she’d find Joe Rose soon enough.

  The Captain calmed down after he sent Pearl Spencer away and got his mind on the business at hand. He spent a quick few minutes in the upstairs bedroom of the mansion, then came back down with Lieutenant Collins on his heels.

  Mr. Marks was waiting, still alone. Captain Jackson was annoyed that he had yet to encounter any of the family members. Insisting on questioning at least one of them would be too dicey. There was no way his roughhouse, bullying tactics would work in this place. He sensed that he had a good thing going and didn’t want to nix it by pushing too hard.

  So he explained it to the attorney. “The jewelry box never should have been left unsecured like that,” he said. “Any thief with an ounce of sense would know where to look. It probably took no more than two minutes to get up to the room, locate the box, get the goods, and get back out.”

  Marks shook his head, no doubt used to his clients’ foolish behaviors. Though he did seem properly impressed with the Captain’s blunt efficiency.

  “I supposed they thought they were safe, because their guests are not the type to steal,” he said.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “No, sir, I would not,” the attorney said, in a tone of voice that the Captain appreciated.

  “Do you have a complete list of the missing pieces?”

  Marks reached inside his jacket and extracted a folded sheet of paper. The Captain glanced over it. “What’s the value?”

  “In the six-thousand-dollar range, depending on the appraisal,” the attorney said.

  “Did they have insurance?”

  “Yes, of course. But they want the jewelry back. They were special pieces.”

  The Captain folded the paper and handed it to the lieutenant without comment.

  “What will you do to recover them?” Marks inquired.

  Captain Jackson gave him his best cool gaze. “That doesn’t need to concern you. And neither does the apprehension of the guilty party.”

  “I understand,” the attorney said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Not at this moment.” The Captain turned on his heel and he and Lieutenant Collins headed for the door.

  No matter how late or how wild his Saturday night, Willie McTell always found his way to church come Sunday morning. This Sunday, he walked along Old Wheat Street with his Braille bible in his coat pocket and his guitar hoisted on his back. He never traveled anywhere without the twelve-string Stella and the Good Book.

  It was a lifelong habit. His mother, God rest her soul, had rarely missed service at the country church back in Happy Valley, down east in McDuffie County. When Willie was nine, they moved eighty miles away to Statesboro, and there was another church, this one in the black-bottom part of town and a bit more prosperous.

  She was fervent in her attendance, and as Willie grew up, he came to understand this was partly because she harbored a desperate hope that Jesus might pour down his grace and make her son’s blind eyes to see.

  His affliction was the cross she bore. As an ignorant country girl of fourteen, she had laid down with the wrong man, a gambler, moonshiner, and guitar picker who had moved on without a glance back, leaving her and then the blind baby boy he had fathered. And God had punished both of them for her sin.

  So at the very least, Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings found mother and son in their customary pew, right down in front. It was there that music first stirred Willie’s soul, the sweet and sonorous gospel songs and the wild shouts of emotion from the amen corner, all in praise of God and supplication of his mercy.

  That wasn’t all he heard, hard a
s his mother tried to shield his young ears from the other music that was around, what they first called “gutbucket” then “blues.” It was low-down, vulgar, sinful, and a raw reminder of the man whose last name they both carried.

  Still, she couldn’t strike her son deaf, even if she wanted to, and the devil’s music was everywhere: on the street corners, at the Saturday markets and fish fries, pouring out from the burlapped windows of the unpainted clapboard shacks at the country crossroads where they sold moonshine by the pint and where all the men and half the women toted pistols or razors. Young Willie was so completely enraptured by what he heard inside and outside the church doors that when a well-meaning Statesboro neighbor gave him an old six-string guitar, the path of his life was set.

  His mother tried to take the guitar away for his own good, and he fussed and pouted until she gave in. She taught him every church song she knew in hopes of keeping him on a godly path. It didn’t work; with his eyes blinded, he sopped up everything he heard, and along with gutbucket blues, he mastered ragtime, popular tunes, coon songs, and dance numbers. He could play in the dark delta style, rag it all bouncy like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller, or deliver a ballad in the way the singers along the Piedmont did it.

  It was his luck to also possess a sweet voice, high and strong and full of texture. Along the way, he switched to twelve-string guitar and found the lush ring and drone suited him all the better. He played fast and loose with dancing fingers, sometimes using a bottleneck or straight razor like they did in Mississippi. He came to believe to his soul that he was as good as anyone around, and no one who heard him disagreed.

  So, like his father, now long gone, he played the devil’s music for a living. He hoped God would understand, and believed sincerely that a morning in church after a night on Decatur Street was a small payment in the direction of his salvation.

  He had even more reason to cross that sanctified threshold this morning. He had felt death’s cold shadow creeping around the street corner the night before, and it gave him a spooking he couldn’t shake. Little Jesse might be on a slow train to hell, but the poor boy was on his way all the same.

  Willie knew Jesse as a wild and reckless gambler who used crooked dice and marked cards. It was little wonder that someone had shot him. He had always expected that either a wronged woman or cheated man would be the one to do him in. Jesse swore it was an Atlanta policeman. Something wasn’t quite right about it. Though who knew what kind of trouble followed a fellow like him?

  Willie mulled it some more, recalling how Robert Clark had scurried away, wanting no part of whatever had happened. Robert had to know what kind of juju he was risking by leaving Jesse to die alone. And yet he had bolted from the scene like a scared rabbit.

  Passing Pittman Place, Willie turned his thoughts from that sorry business to brighter news. Word had gone around that the Columbia company was sending some folks to Atlanta to make records. Someone had told him about the article in the newspaper stating that the record people would be setting up in the Dixie Hotel on Tuesday, and he planned to be there. He walked on, shuffling through his long list of songs and thinking about what he might play for the people.

  Presently, he reached Decatur Street and stopped on the corner to listen for a moment. The broad boulevard, with its markets, barbershops, billiard rooms, and backroom and basement speakeasies, was a beehive of music and motion six nights a week. On Sunday morning it lay as still and quiet as the wake of a parade. All he heard were echoes.

  Moving along the street, he took in the squalor that had been left for the light of day: the fetid odors of garbage, manure, and raw whiskey; the taste of the black flaking smoke from the Georgia Railroad Yards; the scrabble and squeak of rats running through the gutters; and the grunts of drunks who had spent the night in doorways. Had he been sighted, he would have seen the terrain rise sharply on the other side of the tracks to a ridge upon which resided the state capitol, its gold dome a heavenly umbrella now half obscured in the gray morning mist.

  Willie knew the avenue as well as any other, and his ears guided him to the corner of Hilliard Street and then into Schoen Alley. He counted off the steps to the bottom of the wooden stairs and climbed up, careful to keep his guitar from banging the banister. When he knocked on the door, a woman he didn’t know let him in, and he passed through the tiny kitchen, where two or three people were loitering. From the smell of their cheap colognes, he figured them for local rounders, either standing guard or with nowhere else to go.

  He felt his way to the bedroom doorway and stopped. Right away, he heard Little Jesse’s labored breathing and smelled the dried blood and sour odor seeping from his ravaged innards. The other rounders in attendance spoke up, greeting him, all except for the one sitting in the corner.

  Before he could figure out if it was death himself who had taken a seat in the room, he heard Joe Rose’s voice.

  “Come on in, Willie,” Joe said. “We’re just waiting on the doctor.”

  Over the morning hours, the word about Little Jesse had gone around, and as the afternoon began, more people showed up at his rooms. Not a few of the whores arrived still in their Sunday church dresses and hats. Everyone had advice, and not a word of it was worth anything. All stripes of small-time crooks, sports, and rounders came and then went as soon as a bottle was empty. The women, most of whom Jesse had worked at one time or another, came and stayed. One, a thin and homely whore named Martha McCadden, took over tending to the victim. Joe had left word that he wanted at least two men around at all times.

  Jesse lay on the bed, gray and sick, drifting slowly through a morphine fog. Among the visitors, he recognized a couple shady characters, though he couldn’t quite make out their faces. Then he realized who they were and knew that they would be staying close by so they could escort him home.

  A few minutes before one o’clock, a ruckus started outside and someone called in to announce that Dr. Nash was there at last.

  There had been some discussion about carrying Little Jesse to a real doctor or to the emergency room at Grady Hospital, a few short blocks from where he had fallen. He refused, rasping out a curse at the suggestion. A bullet wound would instigate a police report, and that could bring all kinds of trouble, not the least of which might be Officer J. R. Logue or one of his cronies coming back to finish the job. Jesse muttered darkly that he’d take his chances.

  Weston Nash was a familiar character in the rougher parts of town. Well educated and from a good family, he had fallen under the sway of the powders he prescribed to his patients, then lost his medical license after a botched surgery resulted in a death. When he wasn’t answering a call to stitch a razor cut, take care of a hussy’s trick baby, or tend to a crapshooter with a police bullet in his gut, he spent most of his time holed up in quarter-a-night rooms around downtown with his solutions and syringes.

  On this Sunday, it had taken the better part of the morning for a couple of the rounders to locate him in a George Street flophouse and drag him out.

  He now came stumping up the back stairs and into the bedroom, muttering foul curses. Though he was a tallish man, he appeared bent and deflated by his addiction, like a furtive buzzard lurking near something foul. He wore an old suit that was rumpled and dusty and splotched with stains, a shirt that was yellowing at the collar, and a loud tie that hung askew. His face, florid pink with exertion, featured eyes webbed red behind tarnished spectacles and, in spite of the morning chill, his few remaining strands of hair were plastered with sweat to his pink skull. He came in huffing and snorting through his nose like a horse that had been run too hard. When he stopped in the kitchen and opened his black bag, Martha stepped forward and offered to boil the implements.

  Willie caught Dr. Nash’s odor before he even reached the room: a small cloud of sweat, old cologne, and something ranker. Who knew into what sort of fluids those unsteady hands had plunged lately?

  The doctor dropped his bag on the mattress and pulled down the bedsheet to examine the banda
ge that Martha had fashioned. With a nod of bleary approval, he pulled it away from the wound. Little Jesse grunted over the rough treatment.

  Nash pushed his spectacles up his nose, peered close for a few seconds, then straightened. “All right, now,” he said. “All of y’all get on out and leave us be.”

  Jesse said, “Joe and Willie can stay,” and the two of them sat back down while the others shuffled out into the kitchen to drink and smoke until they could come back and resume the watch.

  Nash eyed Jesse. “Guess you want a shot,” he said.

  “Hell, yes, I want a shot!” Jesse said. Joe and Willie laughed.

  The doctor fished in his bag for a brass syringe and a vial. As Joe watched and Willie listened, he opened the bottle and used the syringe to draw off half the liquid, then jabbed it into Jesse’s thigh without bothering to disinfect the spot. He hesitated before putting the solution back in the bag, as if thinking about helping himself.

  Within a few seconds, Jesse’s eyes went dim again and a lazy smile curved his lips. “That’s better,” he said. “And you can leave the rest.” He closed his eyes and dropped into a black well.

  “All right, I’m ready in here!” Nash called out.

  Martha brought the shining implements on a dish towel that looked none too clean. Nash nodded for her to lay it out at the foot of the bed. Martha stared in dismay at Jesse’s exposed wound before backing away.

  “Now what?” Joe asked.

  “Now I’m going to go in and see if I can get the damn slug out,” the doctor groused as he selected a scalpel. “Ain’t that what I’m here for?”

  “What if you can’t?” Joe asked him.

  “Then I can’t,” he said. He wiggled the blade in Joe’s direction. “You want to give it a try?”

  “Just don’t make him worse,” Joe told him.

  The doctor gave him a cold glance. “Or what?”

  Joe smiled without humor. “Or I’ll throw you down the fucking steps, doctor.”