Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  The brothel was an old Victorian whose dark purple paint job did not look quite so garish at night as it did by day. At this hour, it almost blended in with its neighbors, except for the fact that in those other homes, the lights were out.

  Rake parked beneath a crape myrtle whose sagging branches were years overdue for a trim. He could hear jazz from a record player calling through the open windows.

  He hadn’t even knocked on the door yet when it was opened by a black woman with long curly hair. She wore a scarlet silk dress with a purple design of dragons and Asian script, and several necklaces of varying lengths. Some were gold; others held red or blue or purple stones. The getup made her look like some Negro-geisha-gypsy blend, Rake thought. Her hair was gray in places and she might have been twice his age, but he was struck by the beauty in her powerful eyes.

  “Well, hello, a man in uniform,” she said theatrically. She was used to commanding a room, even one as small as this foyer. There was a closed door behind her, and through its beveled glass Rake could just make out human shapes. The bouncy swing jazz and the angled panes made those forms move in strange ways. “I assume this is pleasure, because you and I have never done business.”

  Her voice was dripping with innuendo yet he proceeded with the most officious voice he could muster. “Ma’am, I was hoping to ask you a few questions about a gentleman I’ve seen frequent this place.”

  She raised her right, fastidiously plucked eyebrow. “Really, you’ve seen a gentleman frequent this place? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I was hoping you could explain to me why Brian Underhill drops by here so often, but only for a couple of minutes at a time.”

  “Bad lay?”

  “How about another reason?”

  “I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know the name. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do—”

  He grabbed one of her forearms before she could move. She gave him a scolding look, and he released her, but not without a rough squeeze to let her know she’d best not try again to slip away.

  “Ma’am, as I’m sure you know, we have some Negro officers now. And I must say, they are rather anxious to shut you down. They don’t like having a whorehouse in an otherwise respectable colored neighborhood. And you know what, ma’am? They shouldn’t. I wouldn’t want one in my neighborhood either. But it’s cops like me who have been keeping them from raiding you. So I would appreciate it if you dropped with the playacting and just answered my questions straight for a moment. Or maybe I’ll add a white voice to the black choir that’s trying to convince the head of Vice to shut you down.”

  She sighed, then leaned against the door. “I hate dealing with rookies. You can be so tiresome with your ethics and procedure and whatnot.”

  “I’m sure I’ll grow out of it soon enough.”

  “You will.”

  “Tell me about Brian Underhill.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to identify yourselves when you come knocking on folks’ doors?”

  “My name is Officer Dennis Rakestraw, ma’am.”

  “All right, that’s better. Now, why don’t you start by telling me just how little you know about Mr. Underhill?”

  “I know he’s an ex-cop and he comes here so briefly that the only thing he could be doing is exchanging money.”

  “That’s it?”

  He felt belittled, so he said more than he should have. “He’s also suspected in the murder of a young Negro woman.” Which wasn’t true—he wasn’t officially a suspect, except perhaps in Rake’s eyes. “So I’m asking again, why does he come here?”

  “He’s not a john, honey. He’s a competitor.”

  “He does what you do?”

  “He thinks of himself as a . . . talent scout.”

  “He takes your girls?”

  “The right kind.”

  “What’s the right kind?”

  “Whatever his people are looking for.”

  “Who are his people?”

  She laughed. “He certainly doesn’t tell me.”

  “Come on. The girls he takes, you’ve never been able to ask them who it was he took them to?”

  Her neck seemed to contract as her jaw lowered, and she didn’t look like she’d be laughing again anytime soon. “Officer Rakestraw. We’re talking about a former policeman who takes my best-looking girls to the nicest neighborhoods in town. People who wouldn’t dream of coming down here, but want it all the same, and need it to come out to them. Now, who do you think his clients are?”

  “What do you get out of it?”

  “He gives me a little something, and I do mean a little.” So despite the fact that Underhill was only an ex-cop, he still managed to make her feel that he had enough friends in the Department that she couldn’t cross him. He would come along and raid her roster whenever he needed to, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. “He thinks it’s enough to make me not mind that I’m losing my girls. It’s not.”

  “Losing your girls—you don’t mean you never hear from them again?”

  “I usually don’t.”

  “Does anyone hear from them?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Her face was blank, the kind of blank that shows a clear preference that some other subject be discussed. Rake felt chilled. He couldn’t tell if she meant that the girls simply vanished into some other life or if she was implying that they were eventually killed.

  “What can you tell me about Lily Ellsworth?” he asked.

  “I’ve never had a girl with that name.”

  He wished he was better at spotting lies. And he had the feeling he was up against a true bullshit artist. He didn’t have a chance against her, he just had to ask a lot of questions and try to piece her answers together later.

  “Really? I would not be pleased to find out later that she was here and you lied to me about it.”

  “Officer Rakestraw, I’m being forthright. I’ve never heard the name Lily Ellsworth before. Now, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t here once, but under a different name. I’d bet half the girls in here are using names other than those their parents baptized them with, but how am I to know? If you really want to know if this girl was ever here, show me a picture of her.”

  She said that like it was a bit of obvious police work he was a fool not to know. He felt the blood rise to his cheeks.

  “Light-skinned, long dark hair, birthmark on her right shoulder. Nineteen, thin, moved to Atlanta from Peacedale sometime in the last year. Last seen in a yellow dress and a silver locket. That help?”

  She threw up her hands, red and blue stones catching the dim light. “Maybe. But light-skinned, long-haired girls from the country do grow on trees, so a photo would be better.”

  He was deeply tired of this woman. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you seem remarkably unfazed by the fact that one of your girls was murdered.”

  “First of all, she wasn’t one of my girls—at least, I don’t know for sure without that photo. And second of all, alas, I’m remarkably used to it.”

  “So this sort of thing happens a lot to your girls.”

  “How new at this are you, son?” She put a hand on her hip and cocked her head a bit. “A black whore gets killed, that ain’t exactly front-page news. The only thing I am fazed by right now is the fact that a cop is here bothering about her. Why? What was so special about this girl?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe I’m just too hung up on my pesky ethics right now.”

  The hand fell from her hip and her expression changed to one of sympathy, or mock sympathy. Her fake emotions were difficult to keep up with.

  “I know you’re very tired, Officer. I know just the thing for a tired young man like you, something that will truly perk you up. I have an amazing array to choose from. Mr. Underhill doesn’t take all my best girls, if you’d
like to see for yourself ?”

  She stepped to the side, so he could see that one of her hands was at the inner door’s knob, ready to turn if he said the word. It was undeniably tempting as he stood there, realizing that behind that door were untold pleasures. Rake had been with only three women, two of them whores in Europe. He had sworn that nonsense off when he’d returned from the war alive, and he considered himself lucky to have Cassie, even if they were always exhausted lately, sex having become a distressingly rare occurrence. Still, plenty of other cops indulged, so why not him? Why did he have to be such a saint?

  He could hear those voices whispering in his ear, but he did his best to ignore them. He held up his left hand, thumbing his wedding ring.

  “This mean anything to you?”

  She laughed. “Should it?”

  He tipped his cap. “Good night, Mrs. Dove.”

  She laughed again, as if she’d never heard anyone address her that way.

  He was halfway down the steps when she said, “It’s rather sad, I must say. You coming to me for this information. I would think an officer in your position would be able to ask one of his colleagues what he needed to know about me. Yet you came here.” He looked back at her and saw she was shaking her head, this time wearing not so much a sympathetic expression as a pitying one. With a trace of malice. “You must not have many friends on the force.”

  He would wish for a long while that he’d come up with a better retort than “Good night,” before walking back to his lonely Ford.

  19

  BOGGS AND SMITH’S unofficial, off-the-books, and mostly amateur investigation into the murder of Lily Ellsworth was producing little in the way of information and much in the way of risk. They needed to limit the number of people they spoke to, to decrease the chances that McInnis or one of the other white cops might figure out what they were doing. Which hindered their efforts greatly. And they hadn’t yet made the trek out to Peacedale to pick up Lily’s letters back home. Though Boggs suspected the missives held a trove of information, he kept putting off the trip. Going out into the country, a land where the white men ruled even yet more ruthlessly than they did in Atlanta, was no minor errand. As he plotted it out in his head—he’d need to borrow a car, and go with Smith, and stash some guns in the car just in case—he realized how accustomed he was to moving about a city where he had a powerful family, important connections. But the country? It would be like that South Carolina army camp once again, and the horrible little hellhole of a town outside it, where the buses never stopped for Negroes and where failure to move off a sidewalk at the right time could be your last mistake.

  So they’d done what they could in Atlanta, tracking down landladies and former roommates of the deceased and hoping they weren’t causing enough of a stir to alert whichever white cops (all of them?) so desperately wanted this case unsolved.

  The first place Lily had stayed in the city had been a rooming house, seven blocks south of Auburn, a place Boggs occasionally had reason to visit when trying to locate a suspect or witness. It was run by an older black couple, the Paulsons, who had moved to the city as teenagers themselves and now made a point of providing a clean, wholesome place for migrants to live as they got established. Or so they always claimed. From time to time, people rooming there had been arrested for this or that petty crime, but no one at the precinct had reason to think the Paulsons were involved in anything.

  When Boggs and Smith visited, Mr. Paulson dimly remembered Lily. She had stayed with them for six weeks, he recalled. She had been polite and well mannered for a country girl, the old bald man had said, and had kept her room immaculate. That’s all he knew. No visitors, and certainly no male guests (that was not allowed), and no reason to have suspected anything harmful might occur to her. He expressed surprise to hear of her death, but it didn’t faze him. Many people came into and out of his three-story rooming house, and he seldom heard from them again. This was life in the city, he said, and he played his role as gatekeeper and hoped the people who moved on found better places, but that’s not always what the Lord has designed. Sometimes those gates opened to dark things.

  Paulson checked his books and said that Lily had moved there in the first week of March and left in late April. He knew no more.

  Mrs. Paulson, who had been asleep that night but had called Boggs just two hours ago, knew a bit more. She had chatted a few times with Lily, especially when she’d first arrived. The girl had seemed friendly and more than a bit wide-eyed at this city she found herself in. Mrs. Paulson was used to seeing people who had fled one bad situation or another and had witnessed all manner of deception and evasiveness, but when she’d asked Lily why she’d left her family and come here, the girl’s reply had simply been that she was tired of the country and wanted more. Mrs. Paulson had found her believable.

  She also had the name and last known address of the girl who had shared bedrooms with Lily, which Boggs took down for later.

  The next place Lily wound up in, for a mere two weeks, was another rooming house, in a better neighborhood, only a block off Auburn. The rooms there were larger, and each guest had her own space, so Lily had been moving up in the world. But the owner of the place barely remembered her, and couldn’t think of anyone else who might. Boggs decided he’d drop by again; maybe he’d meet someone who knew something, but he didn’t put much hope in it.

  That left one more address: Mama Dove’s. A brothel two blocks north of Decatur Street. A place Boggs and the other colored cops very much wanted to put out of business, but they had been told repeatedly not to invest their energy in that. The reason was clear: the white cops didn’t mind the place, Mama Dove gave out good information, and it was in a Negro neighborhood, so no one on the force cared, apart from Boggs and his colleagues, but that was a battle they couldn’t yet fight.

  Which meant Lily had made her way from starter boardinghouse to better boardinghouse to working for a congressman to whorehouse, in barely four months.

  How?

  After a few repeat trips to the rooming houses where Lily had lived, Boggs and Smith finally found a couple of girls who’d boarded there at the same time as Lily, a few weeks ago. The first girl said Lily had been shy but warm, slow to open up to strangers. She’d thought they were on the verge of a friendship when Lily had taken on her job at the Prescotts and became so busy that they only met one other time, for a late ice cream. A second former roommate said something similar, and neither could think of anyone who would’ve wanted to hurt her, no rivals or beaus, not even any other friends.

  The more Boggs heard what a sweet, nice girl she’d been, the more bothered he became.

  So at six one morning he got out of bed, far earlier than he wanted to after another long evening of walking the beat. He got dressed and hurriedly drank a coffee and walked out. It was light already, his parents’ small yard wet with dew. The birds sounded surprised to see him at that hour.

  It hadn’t taken him long to figure out the address of Miss Julie Cannon, Lily’s replacement at the Prescotts. Between her last name and knowing what church her family worshipped at, he had more information on her than if he’d known her social security number. Finding her at home proved more challenging, as she worked long hours for the Prescotts. Catching her on the way to work seemed his only option.

  She lived with her parents in a divided bungalow, two mailboxes out front and letters on the doors. It was a run-down block, just north of the tracks and in the area that Boggs’s parents preferred to avoid.

  He’d been there barely five minutes before the door opened and Julie stepped out, in a loose-fitting gray housedress and hair pulled into a bun.

  “Morning, Miss Cannon.”

  “We know each other?”

  “We met a couple of days ago but I wasn’t straight with you. My name is Officer Lucius Boggs of the Atlanta Police Department.”

  She’d been giving him that bo
y, I don’t have time for your flirting ways look of pretty girls the world over but now the edges softened, just a tad.

  “You came to the Prescotts the other day.”

  He’d recalled her being attractive before, but she seemed to look twice as good this time. Perhaps he’d been too nervous the other day at the Prescotts, or he’d been put off by the coldness she’d so fully inhabited as part of her job saying No to unwanted visitors. Maybe it was just the low sunlight off her round eyes or the coffee he’d gulped too fast, but he found himself thrown off.

  “I did. I was hoping to ask you a few questions.”

  “Are you trying to get me fired?”

  “No, Miss Cannon. But I do need your help.”

  “I have a bus to catch.”

  “And I have an amazing ability to walk and talk at the same time.”

  That boy, don’t be flirting look returned, but with it was the tiny hint of a grin. Then she was walking, and fast. She hadn’t been kidding about being in a hurry.

  She said, “So, you told Mrs. Prescott that you were the last maid’s brother?”

  “I lied to your boss about that. Her name was Lily Ellsworth. And she was murdered.”

  Julie stopped. She stared at him and he felt guilty for inflicting this look in her eyes, and for the way her right hand gripped her left forearm, as if he’d struck her. This certainly was the first she’d heard about her predecessor’s death. Had the Prescotts deliberately kept it from her, or did they not even know?

  “What?”

  “Someone killed her. About a week ago.”

  “Wh . . . Why? How?”

  “I’m working on the why. As for the how, someone shot her through the heart.”

  She lingered on that for a few seconds. “What are you playing here?”

  “I’m not playing anything, Miss Cannon. I’m just trying to do my job, and do it discreetly so that, like you said, no one gets fired.”

  She shook her head and muttered, “I’m gonna miss my bus.” She resumed her earlier pace. “If you have questions to ask you’d best get around to asking them.”