Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  He asked Susanna to dance with him again, hoping that might help. Halfway through the next song, she batted away one of his hands that had perhaps wandered too far south. They started again, and later when he tried to kiss her neck she arched away from him. He shook his head, annoyed. They stood there, looking at each other, a desert island surrounded by spinning cyclones of happier couples.

  “I’m not looking to move so quickly there, Cyrano.”

  “I’m just trying to have a good time, girl.”

  She shook her head and muttered something he didn’t catch. He watched her return to the booth, saying something to Delia. Whatever she said must have been something very bad indeed, because her two friends glared at him with murderous intentions.

  Damn. It could have been such a wonderful evening, Susanna. He walked back to the bar.

  Zo and his partner were sitting at a table in the far corner, conspiring about something.

  Once again, Smith did not recall making a decision to visit their table, yet suddenly he was there. Sitting opposite Zo.

  “No one invited you,” the other man said.

  “I didn’t catch your name, friend,” Smith said. “And you know what? That’s a very good thing for you. Because you wouldn’t want me to know who you are or where you live. You can skedaddle while I have a word with Zo here.”

  “He for real?” the man asked Zo.

  “It’s all right, man,” Zo said. “I’ll be by.”

  The man left his drink behind, as if he believed he would soon be back.

  The trumpeter was singing into the microphone about how his woman had sold all his dogs.

  Delia appeared behind Smith, berating him with, “You got some nerve, Tommy Smith. After I vouch for you to one of my friends, you treat her like that? You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Zo laughed, only too delighted to see the hated officer taken down a notch.

  Tommy turned to face her, annoyed that she’d ruined his entrance. “I am ashamed, Delia. And I’m sorry. Now, to make it up to you, I’m gonna tell you a little story about my friend Zo here.”

  “I don’t want to hear no story.” She was about to back up but he grabbed her wrist with his right hand. With his other hand he removed his revolver from where it had been rather precariously nestled at the small of his back. The left hand and gun were now resting on the table, and Zo leaned back at the sight of it. Delia’s eyes were saucers.

  “That’s all right, that’s all right,” Smith said to her, keeping his eyes only on her, as if completely unconcerned with what the lowlife opposite him might do next. “This is to make sure my man Alonzo doesn’t try to walk away before I finish. Put your hands on the table, Zo.”

  Palms as flat as his expression, Zo complied.

  Delia’s face was rigid as he released her hand. Tommy reached forward with his other hand and picked up the glass that Zo’s friend had left behind. Booze. He hadn’t touched a drop since March. The glass felt cold and magical in his hand. He felt his heart pound, but his decision had been made.

  “You watching this, Zo? Be sure and get a good look.” He tipped back the glass and swallowed the contents in a single gulp. Rum and something. Fruity and easy to drink but still that illicit warmth he hadn’t felt in months.

  “Oooh-wee,” he said. “Been a while.” Then he reached for Zo’s drink, the man himself a statue as Smith took it, shook the ice a bit—it looked like straight liquor—and downed it. Bourbon. It burned so he had to stop himself from coughing and ruining the effect. “Whoa, you go for the strong stuff! Goodness, all that liquor in me, there’s no telling what I’m liable to do!”

  Smith leaned back in his chair now, the gun and his left hand still resting on the table, casually so, as if he were cradling a glass and not a gun with six shots.

  “Now, Delia, couple of weeks ago, one of my fellow officers got suspended for no good reason. Lost a lot of pay and a lot of respect. You know how that came about?”

  He locked eyes with Zo, whose forehead looked even sweatier than Smith’s. “See, there are special rules governing how officers of the law must behave, even when we aren’t on the clock. Funny thing is, my fellow Officer Bayle has never had a drink in his life. He’s a very religious man. It happens that one night he’s reported to have been out drinking and carousing and causing a scene. So he gets suspended. Thing is, he’d been home in bed that night, not that he had an alibi for it, other’n his wife. But that made it awfully difficult to fight the charges.”

  Delia said, “Tommy, please put that gun away.”

  “I will directly. But I’m almost to the good part. The man who reported him was a cop, a white one, who claimed he’d been at the club that night. The thing is, the white cop actually hadn’t been at that club at all. That little fact came out later, when he had to testify under oath to an internal committee investigating the charges. You got that? An internal committee. We take these things seriously in the police department. But it makes you wonder, if the white cop hadn’t been there, what made him think Officer Bayle had been out drinking?”

  Delia’s voice quavered, “Tommy, I want to go home.”

  “You will, Delia, I promise you that. Just hold on. You see, Zo, when you decide to be a rat to the police, there’s usually a record of it. Maybe you didn’t know that. But it comes out eventually, even to us nigger cops who have to work in the basement of the YMCA. We have ways to see these reports, too, you know, and lo and behold, this white cop, Dunlow’s his name, he says that he had it on good information from his boy Alonzo that Sherman Bayle was drinking that night.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” Alonzo said.

  Smith smiled. He opened the fingers that had been holding the gun and slowly slid the firearm until it was in the center of the table. Then he pulled his hand back, resting it at the edge of the table. The gun perfectly between that hand and Alonzo’s two. Smith’s other hand rested on the edge of an empty chair, just a few inches from where Delia stood stock-still.

  “I ain’t here to be lied to. I’m here because I want you to confess the truth, in front of my old friend Delia here. That you’re a goddamn rat, that you’re a traitor who’d give up another Negro for a few dollars from a white man.” Wailing trumpet in the background. “Tell it, Zo. Admit what you are.”

  Delia said, “Tommy, come on, I don’t need to be no part of this.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed, his eyes still on Zo. “I’m sorry, Delia. Good night.” He lifted his right hand from the chair to wave her away.

  She backed up slowly, and even though she was out of his peripheral vision now he had a sense she had backed up only a couple of steps, as if she didn’t believe he’d released her or as if she realized now that she had to see this moment through.

  Smith continued: “You lied to Dunlow about seeing Officer Bayle drinking. Because maybe you were sore at Bayle for how he busted your buddy the week before. Or maybe the whole story was Dunlow’s, and he just needed a spineless nigger to sign off as witness, and you raised your little hand.”

  Applause as one song ended and the next began. If anyone else in the joint had noticed there was a loaded revolver sitting in the middle of a table like some lethal napkin dispenser, they hadn’t run screaming or dived beneath any chairs.

  “Because, the thing is, you ain’t that different from a lot of people who just cannot abide seeing a black man in uniform. I know a lot about that, matter of fact. I served in the war, Zo, not that you did. You were in jail at the time, if I remember right. But some of us did our duty.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “People just can’t abide a black man in uniform. I’ve known that a long time. My father, he served in the First World War. Did yours?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I never knew my father, either. Reason I didn’t know mine is because he served, and he su
rvived the trenches and the mustard gas and all that, yes he did. Glory be and all that doughboy shit. Then he came back to Georgia and his little infant son Tommy and his pretty wife, and you know what happened? Just a few months later, when he was marching in a parade with some other proud veterans? Got himself lynched. Beat to a pulp and hung from a tree. Because the white man, no, he cannot stand the sight of an uppity Negro in a nice uniform like that. It is the last thing he wants to see. Or the second-to-last.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t but seven or eight months when it happened. Sad thing is how many people seemed to forget about all that, you know? Those were some bad years, lotta black veterans strung up when they came back home, but everybody wants to forget. Thing is, I can’t forget, because it’s who I am. I’m a goddamn antiamnesia medication. And it’s happened again, hasn’t it? Just a few years ago, black men coming back in uniform and strung from trees. Shot dead or strung up or both. That’s bad enough without us realizing that other colored folks don’t like to see us in uniform, either. Low-down good-for-nothing folk like you.”

  They stared at each other a while then, and now was the part of the song where the cymbals started crashing, and with each impact the revolver bounced a bit on the table. Sliding ever so closer to Zo.

  “Come on now, Zo. You tried to get Bayle fired, and now you can do even better than getting a colored cop fired. You can shoot one down. Because here’s a cop being drunk and disorderly and irresponsible with a loaded weapon.”

  Zo stared him down.

  “Pick that gun up,” Smith said. “Show everybody how you feel about niggers in uniform.”

  The music seemed to have stopped. People were standing still, as this was no longer a private concern.

  “I don’t want no trouble,” Zo finally said. “I’m going home now.”

  “Not. Until. You. Say. It.”

  Zo’s nostrils flared. “Fine. Dunlow leaned on me, so I signed it. Happy? Big cracker’s been throwing his weight so long, he knows how and when to lean on someone. And now you’re here to take his place, ain’t you? Doing a fine job so far.”

  “I ain’t no Dunlow.”

  Zo stood. Very, very slowly. “I don’t know what the hell you are.”

  Smith watched as Zo moved past the table, just in case he decided to reach for the gun, but he did not.

  When Zo was gone, Smith pocketed the piece. Not sure if he was relieved or disappointed, knowing only that the rush was fading, the moment gone already.

  “Tommy Smith,” Delia said, “you are plain crazy.”

  “Only sometimes.”

  “I think you ought to head home.”

  He stood and noticed that her friends were gone. He offered to escort Delia to her place, as a woman shouldn’t be out alone at night. She looked like she wasn’t sure if this was a good or horrible idea. The music started again and people were averting their eyes.

  He was nearly out the door, trailing Delia—realizing, now that he thought of it, that she wasn’t all that bad-looking, had a fun body on her, and this evening might be salvaged after all—when he saw that Ruffin was standing at the doorway, far from his station at the bar, a hand extended. Smith reached out and clasped it.

  Tommy Smith was a strong man. Yet the hand that clasped his nearly broke his wrist.

  Before Smith could pull his hand away, Ruffin had clamped his other hand on Smith’s elbow, and that grip was even tighter. Ruffin leaned in close, looked Smith in the eyes, and, in a voice just quiet enough that no one save Smith would be able to hear, commanded, “Don’t you disgrace us, now.”

  His voice angry, stern, paternal.

  “No, sir.”

  “There is a lot riding on you, son. And I expect you to bear that in mind day and night.”

  “I do.”

  “Don’t you go bring no shame on us.”

  “I won’t, sir.”

  Delia was a few paces away. She’d turned to look back at them, wondering what was taking so long. Men doing their talking. From that far away she couldn’t see the look in Smith’s eyes, but if she had, what would she have seen? Shame? Embarrassment? That anger again—or was it gone, had Ruffin quashed it?

  Ruffin released Smith’s hand and elbow. He leaned back, a big smile on the barkeep’s lips, so any patron who might be watching merely saw the owner thanking the officer for stopping by, another great night in Atlanta, come back soon and bring y’all’s friends.

  Smith walked out quickly, passing Delia, ignoring her “What’s the matter?” and walking straight home.

  16

  THE BODY LAY in the sort of position no living person would choose no matter how tired he might be. And the blackness around his mouth was not dirt.

  It was halfway down a ten-foot slope that led to one of the sewer creeks that had been dug out during the Depression. As this was a colored section on the southern edge of the West Side, the sewer pipes had never been laid. It was nothing more than a nasty, empty creek bed that filled with stagnant water after hard rains. Still, its original purpose was being served all the same, as it smelled like someone had been emptying privies into it.

  The body had fallen, or been thrown, headfirst, the boot soles facing up. Those soles looked pretty clean, Rake noticed, so he probably hadn’t walked out here. Been carried, then thrown.

  Nothing else about the body was remotely clean. His face was missing, chewed up by rats or vultures. Parts of his dark gray fingers appeared to have been gnawed on as well. Rake had picked up on the stench the moment he’d gotten out of his car. This close in and it was overpowering.

  Rake and Dunlow had been driving their shift when they’d been called to the scene, even though it was far from their beat.

  Two other cops and a plainclothes detective were standing beside the body. Everyone held handkerchiefs to their faces. By odd chance, each handkerchief was a different color (one red, one white, one blue, one green, one yellow), lending an almost festive air to the proceedings.

  “Little boy saw him,” one of the beat cops said. “He and his brother were playing hide-and-seek.”

  The squad cars’ headlights illuminated the earth between the road and the body, but still it was hard to tell if there was any spilled blood there, given how dark the earth itself was. Georgia’s red clay, Rake’s dad liked to say, was just like soil in the rest of America, but with blood mixed in.

  “This seems well covered,” Dunlow said. “What are we here for?”

  “He don’t have any ID on him,” the other cop said, “but looks to me like that could be your bootlegger. Ain’t just any nigger has hair like that.”

  Dunlow and Rake stepped closer to the body, walking carefully so they wouldn’t lose their purchase with the damp earth. Two flashlight beams were already on the corpse’s face, but Dunlow added a third. It was horrific to look at, parts of the skull visible, bugs everywhere. But that hair was certainly recognizable.

  “Well goddamn. Yeah, that’s Chandler Poe.”

  “Didn’t he just get out of lockup?”

  “Not much more’n a week ago. Probation.”

  “It appears that a few months’ sentence might have been more merciful.”

  “I’d say the moonshining market,” the detective mused, sifting soil with one of his hands as if searching for gold, “is getting a tad heated.”

  Normally they would wait for a coroner before disturbing the body, but because it was just a Negro, and a known hoodlum at that, the detective rolled the body over.

  “Goodness. That couldn’t have been fun.”

  Poe’s shirt and jacket were tar black, and torn patches of cloth were folded back weirdly, pressed by his body’s weight and then molded by the clay as if set in plaster. Bolts of cotton were flayed in every direction.

  “Multiple stab wounds, with a final coup de grâce,” the
detective said. He pronounced it “gracey” but no one corrected him. Maybe he was trying to be funny. “Don’t see any bullet wounds, but I’ll let the coroner tell me for sure.”

  “Need us for anything else?” Dunlow asked, spitting into the creek.

  “I’d say an arrest or two might be a good idea.” The detective sounded as if he were on the verge of sleep. “Assuming you know who he’s been running with.”

  Rake didn’t know all the details of Dunlow’s relationship with Poe, other than the obvious fact that Dunlow took a cut from the bootlegger. Rake had gathered from a few comments that it had been a years-long relationship. The way it typically worked was that bootleggers in the North Georgia mountains would drive into the city late at night, arriving at a warehouse in an abandoned building or underneath a bridge to quickly unload their barrels. The local distributors would transfer the stock to a truck and then disappear. Most of the money for the operations came from men with deep pockets, often men who had other, respectable businesses. The fact that Dunlow took his cut from Poe probably meant he did not get a cut from the distributors or the people on top, Rake thought, though he couldn’t be sure.

  “Think he was killed by the folks he worked for?” Rake asked as Dunlow drove past the spots most likely to be hosting a drinking and gambling session. He wasn’t bothering with the usual nightclubs and taverns, opting instead for residences known to host house parties. The kind of men he was looking for weren’t the type for the suit-and-music scene.