by David Fulmer
Fulton Tower served as the jail for both the city of Atlanta and Fulton County. Located at the corner of Hunter and Whitehall streets, it was a three-story brick complex of two wings with a sixty-foot spire up the middle, hence the name. The top floor was taken up by administrative offices, interrogation rooms, the infirmary, and the chapel. The wings of the ground floor were set aside for white prisoners and the basement for colored, each with a section reserved for women. There was an exercise yard that had also been the location of the gallows up until local politicians decided that hangings did not suit a modern city like Atlanta, and tore the structure down. Nonetheless, a visitor gazing at the skyline of the city would note that the highest profiles were the dirty smokestacks of the downtown factories and mills and the ominous profile of the Tower.
Joe and Sweet were delivered to the front desk, then taken into processing rooms, where they were stripped, sprayed down with cold water, then powdered for lice. Their street clothes were replaced by striped one-piece prison overalls that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in years. Together, they were escorted to the worst cell in the foulest corner of the colored section, a concrete box with a hole in the floor and nothing else, not even a bare pallet. The walls, plaster over brick, were damp and the smell was nauseating even in the chill. Joe couldn’t imagine how unbearable it would be in summertime.
A general racket of shouts, cries, and crazy whimpers echoed along the corridor, and Joe and Sweet weren’t locked in for ten minutes when they heard the sounds of some poor prisoner taking a fearsome beating. Everybody got quiet, listening as the noise went from bellows of agony to pained shrieks and then into girlish whimpers as the bulls worked the fellow over. Finally, the cell door clanged shut and heavy steps clumped away. From the silence, the victim might have been dead in there.
Sweet turned to give Joe a cold look that said, look what you got me into. It was true; Sweet hadn’t done a thing, except to have a little sister who had a yen for bad companions. Tangling with one such character had cost him a three-year stretch in Milledgeville. Now another one had him locked in a filthy and putrid cell that he might never leave.
There was nothing Joe could say, even if Sweet would listen, which wasn’t likely. The black man turned his back and stared through the bars at nothing. Joe got the message and crouched on the floor to wait for the next chapter in this nightmare, and to fret over what might have happened to Pearl.
Pearl had just stepped onto the porch of the house on Lyon Street when a detective and a cop in uniform appeared on either side of the porch. The patrolman whistled and a police sedan came around the corner from Fort Street.
They acted bored as they got her settled in back and carried her across town. She was taken into the section of the Tower reserved for colored women and placed in a cell with a hard case of questionable gender.
“What’d y’all bring Miss Dolly today?” her cellmate grunted.
Miss Dolly, almost six feet tall and two hundred pounds if she weighed an ounce, was done up flapper-style and sported a mouthful of badly made false teeth. She looked Pearl up and down, grinning like she had been presented with a meal on a platter, and Pearl got ready to fight.
One of the two matrons who had brought her in told Pearl not to worry about Miss Dolly, because she might be getting transferred to another section soon. When Pearl asked what section that would be, the matrons exchanged a glance. The talker of the two said that since they weren’t about to allow her in the white section, there was only one other place for her to go.
“But don’t you worry, honey,” the matron said as they walked off. “They pro’bly go ahead and put you in with the white boys.”
The Captain fumed around his office in a rage of indecision for another hour before coming to his senses and realizing that sending flying squads to Decatur Street and Central Avenue could be a stupendous blunder. He was sure Chief Troutman was looking for an excuse to fire him and that would do it.
The Captain still held the trump card: He was the only one who had any hope of closing the burglary case. So he caught himself in time to rescind the orders. Except for one sporting house on Central Avenue, neither thoroughfare was open for business anyway. He sent word for the cops to stand down, then mulled at his desk until he came up with another ploy.
He used his telephone to make a quiet call to the mayor’s office and was passed through a series of functionaries, only to be told that the mayor wasn’t available, which didn’t surprise him at all. Still, he managed to get the mayor’s assistant on the line, and Mr. Gilbert agreed to come to police headquarters to meet with him and the chief.
Not ten minutes after he laid the telephone in its cradle, a call came from upstairs. Chief Troutman wanted to see him at two thirty. The Captain sat back, imagining how Troutman must be fuming at being outmaneuvered again. He was delighted by the progress of his scheme, and called out to Lieutenant Collins to inquire after Rose and Sylvester and Pearl Spencer.
“They’ve got Mr. Rose and Sylvester in the hole at the Tower,” Collins replied as he stepped into the doorway. “Miss Spencer is on the women’s side.”
“Good enough.”
“How long do you want to hold them?”
“Long as it takes,” the Captain said decisively. “They need to know I mean business. One of them’ll crack. You wait and see.” He arranged some papers on his desk, then told the junior officer about the meeting in the chief’s office. The lieutenant recognized the shifty ploy and also what a dangerous game Jackson was playing.
“Come back at two fifteen and we’ll go up together,” the Captain said.
Collins understood. When it came time to face the chief and the mayor’s man, Jackson wanted a cohort, a witness, and maybe a scapegoat.
Captain Jackson did not fail to notice the flicker of cool contempt in Collins’s expression as he excused himself, and he didn’t like it. He felt his sharp distrust of the lieutenant return even stronger. The man was not a team player and a little too smart for his own good. In other words, he did not treat every word that dripped from the Captain’s mouth as gospel and did not go along with the action on the street. Lately, he seemed to be running his own detective agency, maybe in cahoots with Sergeant Nichols. The Captain swore that if somehow he did end up in the chief of detectives’ chair, those two and a few others he didn’t like would be gone.
The police car came roaring up from behind, the siren sending up a wail like a suffering cat. Jake saw the car in the mirror and pulled over to let it go by. Instead of passing, it slowed and pulled off thirty feet back. Two uniformed officers stepped out, taking their time, and started a slow stroll up to the sedan.
Mr. Purcell looked out the back window and said, “Now, what the hell is this?”
One of the cops stepped to the driver’s-side window, the other to the passenger side. Jake was about to ask the officer what was wrong when Mr. Purcell put a hand on his arm to silence him.
The policeman bending down to Jake’s side took a long moment to gaze at the both of them. Then he said, “Y’all like to step out for a moment?” He straightened and moved back a few feet.
The two men opened their doors and got out to find the two policemen staring at them flatly, thumbs hooked over their gun belts. The one who had done the talking wore sergeant’s stripes. His partner wore no insignias on his sleeves, a rookie. Both of them were too heavy for their frames and their faces were pale and doughy. They looked enough alike to be brothers, and maybe they were.
The sergeant shifted his gaze from Mr. Purcell and Jake and peered into the backseat. “What do we got here?” he asked.
“We’re employed by the Columbia Record Company,” Purcell said. “Those are master recordings we made in Atlanta, and we’re taking them back to New York.”
“New York,” the sergeant mused. “Is that right?” He rolled his head from Jake to Mr. Purcell and back again. “You’re the ones, then.”
“Beg your pardon?”
The offic
er ignored the question. “Let’s have a look in the trunk.”
Purcell nodded slightly, and Jake stepped around with the keys. The second officer stood back a few feet more, eyeing him as if he was prey, fixing on his features. Jake was thinking, He knows I’m a Jew, and kept his own face impassive. He opened the trunk to reveal the recording machine and the cutter. The two cops studied the tangle of boxes, dials, and wires as if it had come from outer space.
“What’s all that?”
“It’s a recording machine.”
“All right, then.” The senior officer addressed Mr. Purcell. “We got a call about y’all. Seems there was a complaint swore out in Atlanta. Says you had a nigra in your hotel room. That’s against state law and city ordinance.”
“Then why weren’t we charged at the time?” Mr. Purcell asked politely.
“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” the cop said.
Mr. Purcell said, “Are you about to arrest us now?” It sounded like a challenge. It was meant that way. He had decided that if they wanted a fight, they could have it.
The sergeant seemed to grasp this in some dim way, and hesitated, unsure of what to do. “What you got here was obtained illegally,” he said.
It was a ridiculous argument, and Purcell would have smiled had he not been so annoyed.
“So we got to confiscate it,” the sergeant finished.
“Confiscate what?”
“Whatever it was you did with the colored man you had in your room.”
Mr. Purcell gazed at the sergeant without speaking for such a long time that the junior officer felt compelled to hitch his gun belt and speak up. “You hear what he said, mister?”
“I heard him.” Without shifting his stare or changing his tone, Mr. Purcell said, “Jake, get the list.”
Jake turned to stare at the older man as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Get the list,” Purcell repeated.
Jake went into the backseat and rooted around until he found the binder that held the tally of the recordings, the names of the performers with corresponding numbers. He crawled out and handed it to Mr. Purcell, who ran a finger down the top page.
“Thirty-two A, B, and C,” he said quietly. “Get those disks for the officers, please.”
Biting down on his anger, Jake went into the backseat once more, this time pawing through one of the boxes of masters until he located the correct ones. He lifted them from the box as if they were made of fine china and handed them out.
“Here we are,” Mr. Purcell said. He took the disks in their paper sleeves from Jake and held them out before him. The sergeant drew back, at a momentary loss as to what to do, as if he had expected the two Yankees to make some sort of pathetic plea. He hefted the three disks for a few seconds, then handed them to his partner.
Mr. Purcell’s eyes rested on the boxes briefly as they were passed. “Can we go?” he inquired.
“Yeah, I s’pose y’all can go,” the sergeant said. “Just don’t come down here tryin’ no more of this kind of shit, y’understand?”
Mr. Purcell didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Officer? I want to tell you that what you’ve got there might be worth a large amount of money someday.”
The sergeant frowned. “What now?”
“I’m telling you that someone would be wise to hold on to those,” Mr. Purcell said.
He saw the glimmer of stupid greed in the policeman’s eyes. He left it there, motioning Jake back into the car. The younger man, seething over the surrender, refused to look at him. Instead, he glared at the mirror and watched the two cops move back to their car, heads together as they conferred over what they now possessed.
They got in their car and waited until Jake turned the key, stepped on the starter pedal, and pulled out onto the two-lane, then followed, dropping off once they reached the county line.
As they stood waiting outside Chief Troutman’s office, Lieutenant Collins noticed that Captain Jackson had spent some time in the men’s room. His suit was precise, with not a stitch out of line, and his hair had been combed into a severe helmet. When the door opened, he marched into the chief’s office like he was on honor guard. Despite the gravity of the business at hand, Trout-man had to turn his head for a moment to hide his amusement at this preening display. It was all the more evidence that the Captain was losing his wits.
For his part, Captain Jackson was delighted to note that his preparation had been worthwhile. As promised, Mr. Gilbert from the mayor’s office was present, and no doubt ready to report back. There was no way Chief Troutman could bury him; and if the chief had agreed to the meeting in the hope that Jackson would make a fool of himself, he had miscalculated.
Still, it was his office, and the other three men had to wait until he crossed his arms and raised his thin eyebrows expectantly for Captain Jackson to begin.
“I want to report progress on the Inman Park burglary,” he announced without preamble. “I have three people in custody in the Tower, and at least one of them was at the Payne home Saturday night.” He leaned in the direction of the mayor’s assistant with a cloying little smile and said, “So you can tell the mayor we’re in sight of closing the case.”
The chief stood by, itching to ask Jackson why he had waited so long to bring in these suspects, then thought better of it. Any opening would lead to more of the show, and he saw how Mr. Gilbert was now regarding the Captain with some interest, though he couldn’t tell if the mayor’s man was impressed or amused by the dramatics.
Quickly, the chief said, “Very well, then,” and stood up to end the session. It wasn’t just that Jackson gave him the willies. He wanted him out of the office before he could completely win over Gilbert, who of course had the mayor’s ear.
The Captain understood this. His face flushed with the pride of victory and he all but bowed as he made his exit. Lieutenant Collins, who had spent the tortured minutes wanting to blurt out that it was all a sham, and that in fact the Captain had nothing except three bodies in jail, followed along behind.
Ten
Less than an hour after Pearl had been locked in the cell with Miss Dolly, the two matrons returned. Keys jangled and the door swung open.
“Out,” said the talker of the two, and that was all. There was no doubt who the order was meant for; Miss Dolly didn’t glance up from the yellowed pages of her romance magazine.
The matrons were regarding her with a cold apathy that frightened her, and she had to bite down on her fear. The cell door slammed shut, and they started down the corridor. When she glanced to her left and caught the quiet one treating her to a dirty stare, her stomach twisted.
They ushered her up the stone staircase to the ground floor, then turned into the north wing. She was sure of it now: They were going to put her in with the men and let those animals have at her. She clenched her jaw and braced herself, swearing she would not go through what they were planning. She’d fight, so they’d have to beat her unconscious or kill her.
They passed along the corridor between the cells, and when the men noticed her passing, a frenzy went down the line like a kerosene fire. They shrieked inhuman sounds and reached from between the bars with filthy, grabbing paws, the faces red and contorted and the yellowed teeth bared. The matrons slapped the hands back as if they were swatting flies. The swell of howls echoed crazily off the stone walls.
All the while, Pearl refused to turn her head, keeping her chin up and eyes straight ahead, inflaming the prisoners all the more. Some of them were actually shaking the bars like apes in a zoo. A few grabbed their crotches and started pulling just at the sight of her.
Though the ordeal lasted no more than a half minute, it felt like it took ten times that long to reach the squared space at the end of the corridor. On either side of this box was a cell with a solid wood door with a tiny slot of a window instead of bars, special rooms for some special kinds of confinement. The silent matron unlocked the door on the right, and her partner waved Pearl inside.
>
Now she wondered if they were going to install her there to let the men line up and take turns. Imagining this horror, she felt like sobbing for mercy. The door closed with a thump and the lock clacked behind her.
She waited until the matrons had moved off before settling herself enough to take a look around. The cell was ten feet wide and twelve deep, with mortared stone walls. There was an uncovered pallet on the floor and a privy hole in the corner. A window six inches high and a foot wide was cut into the back wall. The door was two-inch-thick oak with iron fittings. Through the heavy wood and stone muffled sound, she could still hear the men’s shouts from outside, though over the next minutes the chaos subsided. The other prisoners had either been put down or placated with a promise.
She walked the perimeter of the cell one time, encountering the usual small armies of roaches and other vermin swarming over the walls. She stepped to the window and peered out. The sun was a dim yellow circle above the brown cloud that rose from the rail yards, making the city look like an old faded photograph.
She turned away, in her misery thinking about Joe and wondering if he was going to come and save her. Not that she deserved it.
Joe and Sweet sat in the cell for the rest of the afternoon with no cigarettes, food, or water. The hole in the floor that served as a toilet was stopped up. With the sun gone, the only light came from a bare bulb outside.
