by David Fulmer
“I haven’t heard anything.”
Though there was no one else in the alley, Joe dropped his voice. “The way he tells it, a cop did it.”
“Yeah?” Albert said, raising a thin eyebrow. “He say which cop?”
“A patrolman named Logue.”
“Logue?” The detective came up with an incredulous look. “I know him. He’s an old street bull. And a drunk. I mean, hopeless. He keeps getting busted down, so he still walks a beat. He ain’t the murderer type, that’s for sure. He probably couldn’t hit the side of a house.”
“Little Jesse says he walked up and shot him, just like that.”
“Then it was probably some kind of spat.”
“That’s not what Jesse says.”
“And you believe him?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Have you seen him around?”
“Who, Logue? Not lately, I ain’t. We travel in different circles.”
“I need to find him.”
Albert gave him a long look. “What for?”
“Because . . .” Joe shrugged. “Because I’ve known Jesse for a while. He’s all right.”
Albert laughed and shook his head. “He’s a pimp and a card-cheat sonofabitch, Joe. He ain’t no goddamn good and never was.”
Joe looked down at the bricks frowning. “Yeah, well . . .”
Albert was waiting for more, but he really didn’t feel like explaining.
A few seconds went by. Sounding amused again, the detective said, “So your friend was working at that party.”
“Seems so.”
Albert straightened from his slouch and buttoned his coat. “Probably be good for everybody to get that business settled real fast.” He held a hand over his hacking mouth. Then he said, “You need to ask her if she saw or heard anything. If you happen to run into her, I mean.”
He strolled away, leaving his friend leaning in the doorway.
“I still need to talk to Logue,” Joe called out softly.
The detective raised an acknowledging hand and cut around the corner onto Ivy Street.
Joe lingered in the alley, deciding what to do. He knew that if Pearl didn’t come around, he’d have to track her down. Not yet, though; not with what Sweet and the Captain and Albert Nichols had said knocking around in his brain. Finding her could wait a little while longer.
Instead, he walked out of the alley and ambled south to the Ivy Street overpass, stopping in the middle to gaze down at the tangle of tracks leading in and out of Union Depot. Something in his purview was moving at all times, a constant shifting and snaking pattern, as cars by the hundreds rolled in and out. After what he’d gone through that morning, he wondered if he’d be better off riding away in one.
The long train came huffing from beneath him and into the shadow of the station and brought thoughts of the one part of the Captain’s story that always made him feel better.
Though it was true that Grayton Jackson had always appeared to the denizens of Atlanta like a chunk of granite, in truth his bulwark had a gaping chink that came in his five-foot-three-inch pleasingly plump cupcake of a wife, May Ida.
Had Joe not learned firsthand that her tale was genuine, he would have taken it for one of the kind of crazy fiction created and then embellished for the delight of men who drank in speakeasies and had nothing better to do with their time.
Growing up in a little town just east of Atlanta, May Ida had been somewhat chubby—Junoesque in the parlance of the day—and much sassy. Upon meeting her, a stranger’s gaze would be drawn immediately to her eyes, bosom, and bottom, all of which were prominently rotund. She was pretty in an old-fashioned way, the nubile farm girl of the jokes when she left herself plain, a Kewpie doll when she put a little powder and paint on her face.
Emerging from the innocent haze of her childhood, she developed an alarming fascination with her body and the pleasure it could generate. By the age of sixteen, she seemed to be constantly in heat. May Ida loved the boys, and then the men, and they loved her right back, on what was a daily basis, or so said the hometown wags.
No one could say precisely when, where, and to whom she had surrendered her innocence. Once she had, though, she was a filly bolting from the gate, and a marvel when it came to finding locations for interludes: closets, attics, root cellars, toolsheds, barn lofts. She was democratic with her favors, too. Around the village of Scottsdale, they’d tell you she had initiated more boys than the Scouts. She even batted her eyes and twitched her plump tail at some of the young Negroes, all of whom immediately ran the other way. Once she was introduced to French pleasure, she acted as if she had invented it, and went about showing off her new skills with abandon.
She didn’t slow down once she left school. None of the local fellows would court such a coquette, and whatever job she found was nothing more than a portal into more amorous adventures. Her family didn’t know what to do with her. They couldn’t afford the kind of sanitarium that might offer a cure for her affliction.
It was then that an unlikely salvation appeared, in the person of Grayton Jackson.
The Captain, who was then a sergeant, hailed from the village of Marietta, and so had no knowledge of May Ida’s lurid past. He was a man without social skills whose only intimacies had been the occasional cold caresses of Atlanta whores. A fellow police officer who knew both his situation and the plight of May Ida’s family stepped forward, and Sergeant Jackson was encouraged to ask for her plump hand.
The marriage was seen as a way to kill two birds with one stone, providing him with domestic comforts and at the same time corralling a young woman’s bawdy behavior. The idea was that if anyone could put a harness on May Ida, it would be a severe, no-nonsense sort like Grayton Jackson. For him, it was a way to get a spouse without the discomfort of courting, a ritual at which he would have been hopelessly inept.
It was unclear how May Ida had been talked into this farce. From one side of the city to the other, there was much laughter when the two exchanged their vows. A justice of the peace conducted the ceremony, and the couple moved into a small house on Plum Street, around the corner from the Luckie Street School.
Despite the hopes of the concerned parties, the plan failed. May Ida soon realized that monogamy was not to her liking, even less so when it involved a frigid and dour mate like Grayton Jackson. For some weeks after her wedding, she fidgeted about in an overheated flush, all but bursting from her clothes. It was her good fortune that the Captain couldn’t tolerate children and had no thoughts of hitching her to that harness. In truth, he was married to his job. Most days, he was up and gone before dawn and didn’t come home until late.
With so much free time and unfulfilled ardor, May Ida went back to entertaining men, though she now had to be more creative about it, lest her husband find out. No more bricklayers who could work like plow horses, dull but steady, lasting for hours. She could now engage only sly and nimble men, the kind who could thrill her in the time it took to hard-boil an egg and then get away clean.
The Captain became her unwitting accomplice. He was always grousing over the breakfast or dinner table about this rounder or that one, calling them by their full names or monikers and describing their wiles in much detail. As she sat listening to him relate the antics of these felons, May Ida felt flashes of heat in her lap. The Captain did nothing to quench the fire; he was mostly a feeble man in that respect, the complete opposite of the virile front he presented around police headquarters.
In any case, May Ida knew what she wanted, and went about sending her Negro maid to the rough sections of the city to find the sharps and invite them around. The backyard of the house was shielded by a fence that was a riot of morning glories and honeysuckle vines and let out into a narrow alley from West Pine Street, so her paramours could come and go as if invisible, which was one of their talents, anyway. Once the sun was up and the flowers had opened, it was safe.
The whispers started right away, and soon crazy stories about May Ida abounded. Th
e rounders chuckled over retellings of her fountains of protest as she parroted lines from dime novels of the romantic sort and from the cards that appeared between scenes in the moving pictures.
“Oh, sir, I won’t do any such thing!” she’d cry. “How dare you! You are so impudent! I should have you thrashed!” All the while the lover of the moment would be removing various articles of clothing to expose her pink, moist, trembling flesh.
“Oh, stop!” she would wail, as some rake descended on her like a fly diving into a honeypot. “Don’t you dare! Wait until my husband learns what you did!”
In fact, her husband never learned what she did. If it seemed odd that a police officer of the Captain’s expertise could not discern his own wife’s deceits, it was also true that for all his cruel proficiencies, Grayton Jackson was a fool. He was so arrogant that he never bothered to learn about his betrothed’s history before the nuptials, and it never occurred to him that his wife would dare open her rosy thighs for any man she could entice, no matter how rabid her appetites. And he was busy, his attention diverted by the mechanics of collecting graft, the abuse of hapless “suspects,” and finding new ways to lay his lips ever more gently upon the buttocks of his superiors.
Having suffered a drought, May Ida was eager to get caught up. The path from the back door through the morning glories and into the alleyway was worn bare by leather soles. Never the prude, she cast her eye on more than a few of her female friends and, in one case, had cast more than an eye on one of the young colored maids.
It didn’t take long for Joe Rose to hear the rumors about May Ida, and it was just a matter of time before she heard about him, a rounder who flew south like a snowbird in the wintertime and was reputed to have a wicked way with women. She sent the maid with an invitation.
Though Joe recognized a risky proposition, his curiosity got the best of him. He had heard the stories and had to see if any of it was true.
But he was smarter than the others and refused to go to her house. It was too risky. Instead, he invited her to meet him at the Dixie Hotel. So if there was trouble, she would be the one explaining what she was doing in a man’s room in the middle of a January afternoon. Not that Joe would just stroll away whistling. Even if he did escape, he’d never be able to show his face in Atlanta again.
So when the appointed day came, he paid a bellboy to bring her inside through the back entrance and upstairs by way of the freight elevator. She tapped on the door, and he let her in. She stood primly before him, her hands clutching her purse. After a few nervous moments, she let him lift the veil that was attached to the brim of her hat and shielded her identity from prying eyes, revealing a plump and pretty face. Her startling blue eyes blinked and skittered, as if she was unsure about what she was doing there.
Joe wasted no time reminding her. Within a few short minutes, he had her out of her clothes and in the bed, the comedy accompanied by her chorus of here now!s and you stop that!s. Meanwhile, she didn’t raise a finger to slow his advances.
Once he got her going, she was like a freight train rolling downhill. Liberated from any worries of her husband bursting in, she gave herself up to a rollicking good time, throwing herself about like a circus performer, contorting this way and that. The shrieks and moans that erupted from her throat were so ungodly loud that Joe had to push a pillow to her mouth before they got complaints. The sheets were soon soaked with sweat and various other fluids. It was a rodeo ride, for sure, and he uttered a silent prayer of thanks that he wasn’t called upon to satisfy her every day.
Or, he decided, ever again. Once the heat of the battle had subsided, he realized that May Ida was crazy, though in a happily delirious way. Her blue-eyed gaze was a step shy of deranged, and he figured it was only a matter of time before she crossed the line and did something so outrageous that the Captain would finally get wise. Then there would be the worst kind of hell to pay, and God help the poor fellow who had the bad luck to be the one caught between those dumpling thighs. It wasn’t going to be Joe Rose. From that day on, he avoided her. When her maid came around with another invitation, he gave the girl some money to say he couldn’t be found. Just to be sure, he made a point of moving from the Dixie Hotel to the Hampton.
Since that incident, he had nurtured a fantasy of meeting the Captain one day and saying, “Oh, by the way, half the criminals in Atlanta have fucked your wife, and we all agree that she’s a peach.” Then he thought about whether he’d like to be buried in Oakland Cemetery or some other resting place.
This made him all the more nervous being in the caustic Captain’s eye. And yet there he was, and there he would remain, until the man got what he wanted. He shook his head over ending up so innocently in this corner, and walked off the bridge as the trains huffed in and out beneath his feet.
It was a bright day, the temperature already in the high thirties, certainly not cold enough to keep the likes of Willie McTell indoors. Not to mention that feeling the warm sun on his face would dispel some of the gloom that he had carried away from Little Jesse’s rooms.
Street by street, Willie heard pockets of noise, caught their echoes, and sensed the way the air moved around in different places. Once he had settled in Atlanta the previous spring, it had taken him no time at all to map the city by way of sound. It was something no sighted person could ever understand. His blindness had so heightened his other faculties that people marveled at the tricks he could perform. Telling a one-dollar bill from a five simply by touching it, or picking out conversations across a street full of rattling automobiles. He could identify people by their smells and the way their clothes rustled on their bodies. It was this other sense, really a combination of his hearing, smell, and touch, that guided him through the city as if he was on a private rail. He didn’t need any help at all, though he sometimes lost his talent when a nice-sounding woman offered to guide him.
He was coming up on Houston Street, on his way to catch the lunch crowd on Auburn Avenue, when he heard Joe Rose call his name. Footsteps brought Joe to his side. He lifted his head and frowned a little. “A Chesterfield?”
Joe grinned and shook his head. “Damn Willie. You ought to be in a carnival with that.”
“I’ve been in a carnival,” Willie said shortly. “More than one.” They walked on a little ways. “Where you been this morning?”
“I paid a visit to the Captain,” Joe said quietly.
The blind man cocked his head. “About that Inman Park business?”
“That’s right,” Joe said. The word was on the street, and it didn’t surprise him that the blind man’s ears had swept it up.
“He thinks you done it?” Willie said.
“He thinks I might know who did.”
“You talking a—”
“Yeah. Her.” His mouth twisted in a dim smile. “She was working there when it happened.”
“Working there?”
“As a maid for that party.”
Willie mulled this news for a few seconds. “What are you gonna do about it?”
“Don’t know what I can do.”
As they made their way down the block, Joe was too distracted to notice the looks the odd couple received from both the white and colored pedestrians. They stopped at the corner of Pryor Place to wait for a creaking hack to roll by.
Joe said, “I asked him about Little Jesse.”
Willie said, “And he don’t know a damn thing. Ain’t that right? Don’t care, either. Just another nigger shot down on a Saturday night.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Joe said.
The hack passed and they started across the street.
Joe said, “All that time you’ve been over there, has he said anything else about what happened?”
Willie thought about it and said, “A couple times, I did hear him kind of mumbling some things I didn’t understand.”
“Like what?”
“It was the same thing a couple times over. The way it sounded, I first thought maybe he was praying.” Joe
looked at Willie for a moment, and both men laughed. “I know,” Willie said. “But that’s how it sounded.”
“You catch any of it?”
“A little bit. First he said, ‘I done it. Yeah, I done it.’ Then he said, ‘Don’t got nothin’. Nothin’.’ Like that.”
“That’s all?”
“S’all I heard.” They reached the other side of the street, and Willie raised his foot and stepped onto the curb without a hitch. He tilted his head in Joe’s direction. “What are you going to do now?”
“About what?”
“About Little Jesse.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “First I need to find that cop. Logue. See what he has to say.” He paused. “And Robert Clark, too. You know he came by Little Jesse’s? He ran off before I could talk to him.”
“Ran off? You mean like he was scared?” Willie said.
“Yeah, like that.”
“Well, he was shit scared Saturday night, all right.”
“You know where he stays?”
“I don’t,” Willie said. “He’s just one of them that’s around a lot.”
“Not now, he ain’t, and I need to find him,” Joe said. “You let me know if Jesse says anything else.”
“I will.” Willie frowned and shook his head mournfully. “But I don’t know if he’s gonna last much longer. That doctor didn’t do him no good at all. He’s gettin’ worse all the time.”
“Then he needs to speak the hell up,” Joe griped. “You can tell him that.”
“All right, Joe.”
An automobile pulled to a stop at the curb and sat, idling. Joe glanced over and said, “Quarter says you can’t name it.”
“Four-cylinder Sears,” Willie said absently. Joe went digging for the coin. “I don’t need the twenty-five cents, thank you.”
They lingered there for a moment. Jesse would be heading east on Auburn Avenue, Joe south to the Hampton.
“I’ll be back over there a little later on,” Willie said. “I want to be around while he’s still alive.”
“You really don’t think he can last?” Joe said. “He’s always been a tough one.”
