“Christ, Irons, you didn’t leave nothing,” Mott said.
“We can still do it,” Irons said, standing up slowly, the hood and robe accentuating his size. Dale, puny beside him, realized he had unleashed something he would not be able to restrain.
“There’s no sense tying him up if he won’t even know what happened,” Dale said. This was a right royal mess. They’d gotten the beating part done, had goddamn excelled at it, but without the target knowing why they were doing this, the ultimate meaning would elude them. It was reduced to savagery, randomness. Letcher would wake up with no clue why he’d been attacked. That righteous something that had filled Dale’s chest dissipated, leaving him cold and empty.
Then they heard the Lean-To’s door open, only the lights had turned off and they couldn’t see who’d opened it. They could only hear the voice, her voice, and it was pure rage: “Stay the hell away from him!”
So many things that Dale had not expected. Clouds were fleeing suddenly, because the moon was back in view and he could see—just a bit, the moonlight not strong but enough—and the figure by the building was in a pose that struck true fear in his gut, even before he heard the boom of her rifle.
After the boom, Irons backed up a couple steps, weirdly, spastic. Then it was like his legs gave out, and the immense man crumpled. Then a second boom, and Dale flinched even more than he had the first time, because he understood what was happening now. He didn’t think he’d been hit yet by the rifle the woman was holding, but Mott screamed in pain.
She was hollering at them to stay away. Dale finally remembered that he had a .38 in his pocket. It was like the inner gears of his brain had gotten jammed, sabotaged by something, but finally he was reaching for the gun and his joints were the opposite of jammed, they were moving too fast, so fast he nearly dropped the gun but he managed to cock the hammer and fire twice.
“Run!” Mott screamed, racing down the hill toward their car.
Dale looked down and got just enough of a view of Irons to know he should not be looking there, that he’d see that image in his nightmares for a good while, perhaps forever. Red everywhere, the man’s skull no longer oval, not remotely geometric at all.
Dale fired a third time, running backward while he did so, and then the sole of his boot caught a particularly wet patch and he slipped, landing on his ass. His hood askew, he couldn’t see a damn thing, so he tore it off, turning to run toward the car, firing behind himself blindly.
Inside the car, Mott held his left shoulder tight. Dale began to ask if he was all right but Mott screamed at him to turn on the goddamn car.
Another rifle blast and Dale heard an impact. He backed out as fast as the car could go, which was actually quite fast, and hit a tree. “Fuck!”
“Drive, goddammit!”
Some shifting and he managed to turn around and then came another blast and this time he felt something toward the rear of the car. He floored the gas and they were back on the main road seconds later when what looked like a ten-point buck leapt across the lanes, within mere feet of the car. It was gone as soon as it had come, like some apparition from Dale’s addled mind, such a vision that it would have seemed an ominous portent if not for the fact that the damn thing was a few minutes late, all the bad had already happened, and Dale hadn’t the faintest idea what he’d do next.
4
BOGGS WOULD ONE day remember that season as the time all the trees fell. The newspapers would find elaborate ways of explaining the phenomenon, something to do with the unusually dry spring and summer starving the root systems of stately white oaks and sweetgums and Shumards, leaving them brittle as matchsticks. And then the hard rains and gusts of the late-summer storms, gales that would continue to swoop in despite the turning of the season to autumn as if so full of fury and rage they would not heed any calendar, tearing across the Georgia piedmont with such suddenness that tornados spun in their wake. No twisters touched down in Atlanta, thank goodness, but the winds and the sudden downpours combined with the dry roots, many of them so ancient that their time had come regardless of such meteorological irregularities, and down the trees came.
Late one night a red oak that had been planted in the eighteenth century, making it possibly older than this nation itself, fell across the length of Auburn Avenue, crushing the top two floors of a brick building and wiping out the fortunately empty offices of two accountants and an attorney. Then there was the magnolia that lost a massive limb, the rest of the tree just fine but that one thick bough plummeting onto the wrought iron fence of the elderly Camilla Drummond, widow to one of the first Negro bankers in Atlanta. The impact of the fall knocked over several candles that she was still fond of using in lieu of electric lights, igniting a blaze that the too-late white firefighters were unable to extinguish. She escaped in time, but passed a week later, of a heart attack, as if she realized the Grim Reaper had her in his sights and she was unwilling to fight him. The next month a hickory crushed eight fortunately empty cars on Houston Street.
For Boggs, it got to the point that, when he was on duty walking the streets off Auburn Avenue—the wealthiest Negro street in the world, according to some magazine reporter, a fact proudly repeated by civic boosters—if he heard too loud a sound, one of his first assumptions was that somewhere a tree had fallen.
But what he heard now was altogether different, and more painful: a woman’s piercing scream, an arrowhead lodged inside him. Each time she paused for breath it was like pulling the prongs out, hurting worse because he knew it would come back, and it did, louder than before.
Boggs and Smith made eye contact for a moment as they listened, then ran toward the building from whence the scream came. Smith pounded on the door and started to call out “Police” before it swung clean, and he hurried inside, Boggs a step behind.
The hallway was poorly lit and narrow, the walls marked with water stains. Three doors led to different apartments, as the old house had been partitioned into separate quarters.
A barefoot girl walked down the steps from the second floor. Eyes wide. Maybe seven years old, pigtails and a long dress. Somewhere above them the woman was still screaming.
“Who’s yelling?” Smith asked her.
The girl’s voice was so soft they barely heard her. “They say someone’s dead.”
Two right hands fell onto the handles of holstered guns. “Where?”
The girl pointed up the stairs. They ran past her, Boggs telling her to stay down here.
The stairs led to a tiny landing, the beginning of what had once been a hallway, only a wall had been dropped into it and now three more doors led to three more apartments.
The screamer was using words now, “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!”
They drew their weapons and opened what they thought was the correct door, which wasn’t locked. Then into a clean kitchenette, the old wooden floor creaking beneath them. One wall was decorated with a child’s pencil drawings. Then a short hallway and into a small bedroom, two beds squeezed in a corner, and on one sat a young boy. On the other bed a lump, covered in sheets. A body?
Smith stepped into the room and leveled his gun at the lump, keeping its fatal gaze clear of the boy on the other bed. The boy was maybe three, Boggs guessed, and he didn’t move even as these two armed men entered his bedroom.
Boggs pulled at the sheets. The lump was a little girl, about the same size as the boy, perhaps his twin, huddled into the fetal position, eyes red and cheeks covered in tears. She was shaking but otherwise she didn’t seem to notice them.
Smith pointed his gun up at the ceiling.
The screams grew louder, coming from the next room.
There was no closet or anyplace anyone could possibly have hidden in this tiny room, so they left the kids and walked into the hall and into another small bedroom, and there on the floor, on her knees, was the screaming woman. Her hair had been in a bun but strands had come loose, ragged, her fingers had been pulling at it and there was blood on the shoulders of
her dress, from her hands, which were holding someone, what used to be someone, now just a body, his face bloody. The wall to the side of the bed and one of the pillows were a deep, deep scarlet, the darkest red it can be without being black.
She paused for another breath and she turned to face them. At the sight of their guns she pulled her hands away from the body, but then she grabbed it again when she realized the body would have fallen onto the floor if she had fully released him, so she held him awkwardly, poised between the need to display her open palms to the police and her fear of what would happen if she ever let the man go again.
Boggs stepped forward, scanning the bed for a weapon. Had she shot him accidentally, was there a fight? That tended to happen. Had he killed himself, and had the weapon fallen nearby, and she could grab it and do Lord knew what with it given her current state? He didn’t see one.
He would later rethink this moment and recall that there had been no smell of cordite, and he noticed right then that there was little mess, no immediate signs of struggle, though there would be time later to look for clues, piece together a narrative.
“Ma’am, are you hurt?” he asked, putting his pistol back in its holster. “Have you been shot?” He gestured toward her bloody shoulder.
Now her voice was a broken, small, staggered cry, the same words as before but infinitely smaller, “Oh my God . . .”
Smith left to check the rest of the apartment again, make sure no attacker lingered, no weapon at hand, no injured children. Which would leave Boggs to begin the arduous and nearly impossible task of returning her to earth, bringing her soul back down, getting her to breathe and please Jesus don’t scream again, and explain to him what happened, what if anything she’d seen, and they were so very sorry for her loss.
Even sorrier than usual.
Because Boggs saw the photograph on her dresser, a portrait of the couple, the woman in what might have been a green dress with ruffles at the shoulders, the man in a plain suit and fat tie, and his eyes were familiar, familiar but different, because the man was smiling in the photo. But Boggs had no recollection of him smiling before. Who was he? It took a second, then he remembered the alley, and the moonshine and marijuana, and even the man’s presidential name from his ID: Woodrow W. Forrester. It was the fellow who’d been so panicked about feeding his babies and who had told them about the moonshine and marijuana drop, insisting this was not the sort of thing he would normally do, but he had to help his friend, and here he was dead less than twenty-four hours later.
After a Negro doctor had given Mrs. Forrester a mild sedative, they questioned her about her husband, whom she described as a good father, loving husband, regular worshipper at Wheat Street Baptist, the very church behind which they’d busted him.
“Was he much of a drinker?” Smith asked. Boggs tended to let his partner do more of the talking when they questioned women. Ladies just seemed to love the fellow.
“Never. Never touched the stuff. He’s not that type.”
Despite the denial, she didn’t seem to be wearing The Armor. The Armor was what Boggs called the facade victims’ families typically wore when they needed to protect themselves or the memory of their loved ones. Folks who wore The Armor sometimes had secrets to hide; even with the initial shock of a murder, The Armor was firmly in place as they parried the officers’ attempts to learn more about the deceased. They wore The Armor to keep the cops from learning how this loving father was in fact a womanizer whose lothario ways had gotten him in trouble with other husbands in the neighborhood, or this charming young son in fact had a habit of breaking into homes, or this grieving widow was herself a cunning bookie. Yet sometimes The Armor was worn by the innocent, who had nothing to hide but their dignity, and they were so deeply offended to be questioned by these employees of the corrupt City of Atlanta, these paid enforcers of Jim Crow, that they refused to play along. So when Boggs came up against The Armor, when his questions were deflected by those steely looks, he told himself not to hate the wearer, tried to remember that they may be innocent and hurt, and that The Armor was strictly protective. Yet he hated it every time he saw it.
Mrs. Forrester’s lack of The Armor was striking. She felt no need to protect her husband from questions that struck her as ridiculous.
“Do you know where he was last night?” Smith asked.
“Bowling. With his best friend, Lou Crimmons. They in a league down at Al’s Lanes.”
They both wondered whether this Lou Crimmons could be the regular dealer he’d told them he’d been covering for.
“Your husband bowl often?” Smith asked.
“Oh yeah, twice a week. Says it keeps him sane. I don’t mind—it’s better than other things a man could be up to at night.”
They left her apartment with a list of his friends and acquaintances but little else. She had no idea why someone would hurt her husband, let alone walk into his home and shoot him dead. The children, thank goodness, had been out when it happened and hadn’t seen anything.
As Boggs and Smith stepped outside, they lit cigarettes to deal with the stress of interviewing a new widow.
At last night’s shoot-out, the Negro who’d been killed, by a stray bullet from his own lookout across the street, was named Wilbur Hayes. He’d done time for bootlegging back in the thirties, as well as more recent stints for assault and battery. And the white man Boggs had knocked out was Hank Loring, who lived in Reynoldstown, south of the tracks and not far from Sweet Auburn. At roll call today, McInnis had informed them that Loring had already posted bond. This seemed rather hasty; McInnis had assured them Vice was pursuing the case, questioning both Loring’s and Hayes’s known associates to find out more about the trade, but Boggs and Smith didn’t buy it. From what they could gather, white officers were far more concerned with Boggs’s hubris: word was spreading through the Department that Boggs had knocked out a white man. The fact that reefer was being trucked into the Negro community seemed of lesser import.
Boggs and Smith were met at the corner by Champ Jennings and Dewey Edmunds, who had been canvassing the neighborhood. No one claimed to have seen anyone unusual enter or exit the Forresters’ building. No one even claimed to have heard any shots.
“Shooter used a pillow,” Boggs told them. “There was one in the bedroom with a hole blown through it, and burn marks.”
“So it was some’n knew him well enough to get real close,” Champ said.
“Or he knocked him out first. I didn’t notice a bruise, but the autopsy will say.”
“Ol’ lady in 2B across the street,” Dewey said, “she claims she didn’t see nothing, but I don’t care for the way she said it. Seemed real scared.”
“She’s hiding something?” Smith asked.
“She had a whole lotta crosses on the walls,” Dewey said, “so I laid in about Jesus wanting us to profess the truth and whatnot. She still said she couldn’t help, but she thought long and hard about it first.”
Champ rolled his eyes. “He invented a Bible verse, and she called him on it.”
“Goddammit, I ain’t no preacher’s son like Boggs,” Dewey snapped. “I was paraphrasing the Lord, all right? Paraphrasing.”
“There was no ‘Letter to the Sicilians’ in the Bible,” Champ said. “And if you’d let me talk more, I woulda got it out of her. Ol’ ladies love me.”
“I do not care to hear a thing more about what you do with old ladies.”
Boggs tried to ignore them, looking up at the apartment building they were discussing. He saw a sliver of light through parted curtains in one of the second-floor windows, and no sooner had he noticed it than the light vanished, the curtains closing.
“She’s skittish, that’s for sure,” Boggs said.
“Let’s see how she sleeps tonight,” Dewey said. “Let the guilt settle on her, then talk to her again.”
“Let me talk to her again,” Champ said.
“Fine,” Dewey said. “Bring your Bible and some love potions. Rub her shoulders real
good while you question her. Maybe her bunions, too.”
“There’s something else,” Smith said. He explained to Champ and Dewey the connection between Forrester and the previous night’s drop.
Dewey whistled. “So someone took him out for ratting about the drop.”
“And I gotta tell y’all,” Champ added, “when the white cops showed up last night? They moved me and Dewey away from those crates right quick. Like they didn’t want us to get too close a look at what was in there.”
Perhaps those white cops had been offended by the presence of Negro officers. Or perhaps they’d been taking protection money from the smugglers, and they were outraged that Negro officers were interfering. One of the white officers had even wanted to arrest Smith for Hayes’s murder, backing off only when McInnis stood up for his officer. Until the autopsy was complete and they knew what caliber bullet had killed Hayes, white cops would believe Smith was to blame.
“You ask me?” Dewey said. “The ol’ broad is smart to be keeping her mouth shut.”
5
THAT SAME EVENING, Rake’s night off, he sat at the kitchen table, worrying about his brother-in-law. Cassie was showering, after putting the kids to bed, but Dale had just called, telling Rake he urgently needed to talk in person.
Rake feared that the reason for Dale’s urgent request to talk came down to one of three things: to borrow money, to confess to something, or to invite Rake to do the kind of thing that would later require its own confession.
Rake dearly loved his sister, Sue Ellen, and it pained him that she’d paired with someone like Dale, the very manifestation of lowered expectations. Just smart enough to get himself out of the various troubles he was getting himself into. Just lazy enough to skirt by at the mill where he passed time until the next paycheck, much of which he spent at bars. Just loyal enough that he had not, as far as Rake knew, cheated on Sue Ellen, which was both good and bad, because if he ever did cheat on her then Rake would beat him senseless, which would be fun, and which might also persuade her to leave him, which would be spectacular. But then the two little ones would be fatherless. So Rake’s most realistic hope for Dale was that he might continue to be just enough to not make Sue Ellen too miserable and not drive Rake too crazy with his moronic schemes.
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