Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  “Well,” Smith said, “feel free to spread the word: we are bad for business.”

  Jones chuckled. “I ain’t spreading a damn thing, because we never had this conversation. If you’re serious about going after Thunder Malley, all I can say is I’m glad I don’t have your jobs. Now, I got a girl waiting on me. ’Night, gentlemen.”

  With that, he took a glance out of the alley to ensure once again that no one had seen him conversing with the police, then strutted down the street.

  9

  SHORTLY AFTER RAKE had walked his first beat in ’48, he had received an invitation to join the Klan. An envelope had been left in his locker—inside of his locked locker—with cryptic instructions to be at a certain intersection at a certain hour.

  Rake’s opinions on Klansmen, “the Negro question,” and other related matters owed much to that most important element of Southern character: one’s mama. Ingrid Rakestraw had been a child when her family emigrated from Germany to Savannah, then Atlanta. They’d arrived in the Georgia capital shortly after America’s entry into the Great War, when a propaganda campaign marked “Huns” as an inhuman enemy to fear. Huns raped nuns in Belgium and beheaded French children. They were thuggish by nature but cowards who would rather sink a ship from an invisible U-boat than confront an American on a fair battlefield. Although Ingrid could learn to bake cathead biscuits instead of German poppy seed rolls, serve red velvet cake instead of stollen, and wear the latest American fashions when her parents could afford it, she could not erase her thick accent, could not defend her older brother when he was beaten, frequently, by neighborhood boys for being a rotten Heinie, and could not deflect the bricks tossed through her family’s windows.

  Years later, she taught her sons never to treat others that way. Like most white folks, she and Rake’s father knew few Negroes, but the biggest beating Rake ever saw his father give his older brother was when Curtis and two friends had cornered and robbed a Negro boy. The word nigger was verboten in the house where Rake grew up. This opinion made the Rakestraws progressive on race, and it took some amount of courage to stand against the greater Southern tide—he knew that Cassie’s family, for example, believed quite differently—but in Atlanta they were not completely alone in their opinion that Negroes deserved better.

  So when that Klan invitation had appeared in his police locker, he’d ignored it.

  He had zero desire to join what his father had always described as a ragtag group of bullies and Neanderthals. After ignoring the invitation, he had been approached by Parker; they weren’t partners back then, but old friends.

  Parker had gently recommended that Rake reconsider about the Klan: “You might want to put away your high-mindedness for one evening and play along. Job can be hard enough without making things even tougher on ourselves.”

  “Play along? With a bunch of—?”

  “It ain’t what you think it is. It’s more like an Elks Club, with sillier uniforms. I signed on, but it’s not like I’ve rustled any Negroes or anything.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I’m trying to help you. If there’s an opening for detective and it comes down to two cops with identical marks, but only one is a Kluxer, which one you think they’ll pick?”

  Rake had heard that, too. A recent, much-discussed story in Newsweek had even claimed that a third of Atlanta cops were Kluxers. Still, he’d insisted to his friend, “That’s not true.”

  “Oh, that’s right, because you’re so perfect and pure that you’ll surely impress people soon enough.”

  Rake did think he would impress the right people. He did think he could advance without a Klan Kard. Hearing Parker speak of such things as if they were fanciful wishes made him worry that he was naïve.

  Now, two years later, he had worked his way up from where he’d started: patrolling rough neighborhoods with a corrupt partner who’d tried to drag him down, too. He had solved a high-profile case, and though the Department had kept the results of that investigation secret for political reasons, Rake had sat in a room with the chief of police himself, had won his way onto an unofficial fast track for promotion. He had a better beat and was now partnered with Parker, who perhaps wasn’t the most ambitious cop in the world but was a reliable fellow to have beside you when things went bad, and good company besides.

  Still, Rake knew he was far from the most popular man in the Department. His awful former partner, Dunlow, had gone missing under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a handful of loyal compatriots who viewed Rake with suspicion. Some, he gathered, suspected him of killing Dunlow, or at least being complicit in his murder. Others weren’t so sure but still hated Rake, convinced he represented a dangerous new breed, one not beholden to their beloved structures and traditions, one who must be taken down before he got too big.

  A few hours after Rake had driven up to question Letcher, he and Parker worked the night shift. They made an arrest for disorderly conduct; responded to a domestic altercation involving a cleaver, arriving just in time to prevent the situation from escalating to homicide, and caught two kids who’d been trying and failing to steal a new Packard.

  Driving back to the station to fill out paperwork and call it a night, Rake tried to sound casual as he asked, “I need to ask you a question about the boys in the white robes. Somebody I’m trying to protect, a confidential informant,” he lied, “got himself in a scrape. He claims he was recruited by a man from the Coventry Klavern who said they needed someone from an Atlanta Klavern to beat up a fellow in Coventry, some sinner who needed to be set straight. A white man.”

  Judging from Parker’s perplexed expression, this was news.

  “So my CI and some friends went up there, but while they were beating the fella up, someone shot and killed one of the Kluxers. Have you heard anything about it?”

  “Not a thing. I’m hardly an active member with them, I just do enough to keep appearances.” Rake was struck by how similar that statement was to what Letcher had said, joining only “to keep up appearances.” It made him wonder how many men did that, or claimed to. How could one divide the true believers from those who went along to get along—and did it matter?

  “Well, let me know if you hear anything.”

  “Hey, bud, I’m happy to help you most ways, but being your spy in the Klan won’t be one of them. I’m not looking to get myself killed.”

  “I don’t need a spy, I just need to find a fellow named Whitehouse.” He repeated Dale’s admittedly vague description of the man, then explained what little he’d gathered about Letcher. “What I’m trying to figure out is, why would someone send fellows from one Klavern into another town to rough somebody up, then vanish?”

  “It’s not unusual to ask folks from another Klavern to do your dirty work. Especially if the fellow’s white—that way you aren’t beating up your own neighbor, who might recognize you or your car. Hell, if Letcher is part of the Coventry Klan, this could be something they all voted on when he wasn’t there, ’cause he was out doing whatever it is that got him on their bad side.”

  “My informant says he left his hood at the scene, but that didn’t make it into the papers. I think the police up there might be trying to keep the Klan clean of it.”

  “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know,” Parker said. “But don’t get your hopes up. Those boys used to be big talkers, but they’ve gone quiet lately. They’re all convinced they’re being spied on.”

  “By whom? If so many of ’em are cops, who’d be doing the spying?”

  Parker smiled. “Fellows like you.”

  10

  “GIRL, YOU ARE huge.”

  Standing at her front door, Hannah Greer put a hand on one of her expanding hips and shot Smith a look. “That ain’t a polite way of putting it.”

  “Well, you got a whole lotta baby in there. Can you fit through all the doors in here?”

  It was hard for Smith to imagine how much more his sister would change in the two months leading up
to the due date. Hannah had always been rail-thin, and still was, every part of her petite as could be, with the one giant exception.

  “Maybe you can eat lunch somewhere else,” she said.

  Hannah was his cousin, biologically, but they’d been raised thinking each other siblings. Smith hadn’t been told until age sixteen that his true father had been lynched at a 1919 parade, when Smith was an infant, because he dared wear his uniform from the Great War, enraging the white people in his rural Georgia town. A few months later, after Smith’s grieving mother drank an eighth of rye and walked in front of a train, his aunt and uncle took him in, raising him as their son.

  “I’m kidding, you look beautiful and you know it.”

  He was joking to relieve some of the pressure about why he was really there. The brick on the dining room floor.

  It had been thrown the previous evening. Hannah had been woken by it, but her husband, Malcolm, a bouncer at a nightclub, worked late. She had called to let Malcolm know, but not until he arrived an hour later had he seen the note someone had left behind, on their front step. Hannah had placed it on the dining room floor alongside the brick, so Smith carefully picked it up with a handkerchief. NIGGER GO HOME in black ink on a white sheet of paper. It had been held in place by a rock.

  “You both touch the note?” Smith asked, and she nodded as he slipped it into a file folder from the briefcase he’d brought. You couldn’t fingerprint bricks or rocks, but paper was another matter. Though he doubted the attackers were that stupid. “First note like this you’ve seen?”

  “First one left here, but we’ve had a few in the mail.”

  Malcolm was at the local hardware store, buying a new window.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “Do you still have them?”

  “We’ve thrown them all in the trash.” She thought for a moment. “But trash day’s tomorrow, so there might be a few in the barrel if you really want to look.”

  “I do.” He would dig out whatever he could find. He wanted to take all the notes himself, pass them on to McInnis, ask him to get them fingerprinted. He could predict the response: This isn’t your or my beat, Officer Smith. The notes must be investigated by the officers in that neighborhood. So he told Hannah to call the police, get a cop here, and fill out a report, even though he doubted white officers would do much at all.

  “How you feel about the neighbors so far?”

  “We haven’t had a lot of conversations. No one came by with cookies or anything.”

  Two other Negro families had moved onto the block south of here about a month back, and apart from some threatening mail, their moves had been uneventful, as far as Smith knew. He wondered now whether they, too, had windows shattered but had kept quiet about it, or if things were escalating.

  “You have any friends nearby?”

  “The ones who told us about this place are on the other side of Beacon Street,” which used to be the unofficial border between the races. “I walk there a lot still, do my shopping at the grocer’s, even though there’s a white one that’s closer. Malcolm says it’ll get easier soon. But this doesn’t feel easier.”

  Smith had noticed two For Sale signs in the neighborhood when he’d walked here from the bus stop. He was willing to bet those signs had appeared after the Greers moved in.

  “What if the next thing they throw is a firebomb,” she asked, “like they did to that family a couple years ago?”

  “I’ll talk to the white officers,” he told her. He thought about Rakestraw, one of the few white cops who seemed somewhat decent.

  To try cheering her up, he asked her for a quick tour of the new place. It needed plenty of work, as the previous owners hadn’t been much for upkeep. But it was an actual, freestanding house, and she and Malcolm had bought it. Neither of their parents had been homeowners. Hannah and Tommy grew up in a rented two-bedroom apartment until Smith hit puberty and the idea of him continuing to share a room with Hannah drove their parents to rent a three-bedroom a few blocks south of Auburn. Within a few years, the old man had passed away; their mother, a seamstress, now rented a place with one of her sisters, just getting by. Smith sent her some of his pay every month.

  “It’s a shame Daddy couldn’t see this,” Hannah said. Smith nodded as they gazed for a moment at the barely furnished living room, their memories briefly filling the space.

  “It’s amazing, girl. And it’s yours. No one’s taking it.”

  When Malcolm returned, he hung the new window while Smith checked the perimeter of their house for any evidence. Finding none, he sifted through their trash in search of more hate mail. He found four letters, two of them typed and one written in block letters. The typed ones appeared to have come from different typewriters, but there was enough overlap in the phrasing to suspect the same author. Then again, the language was hardly unique. Get your filthy nigger asses out of our neighborhood. You do not belong here. The longer you stay, the worse you’ll make it on yourself.

  After installing a new window and eating lunch, Smith and Malcolm smoked on the back deck while Hannah baked dessert, all of them insisting on normalcy as they awaited the police. When they arrived (if they arrived), Smith planned to hang back; he knew white cops would be even less inclined to help if they learned the victims were related to one of the hated Negro officers.

  “I didn’t fight a war just to come home and let some crackers bully me out of my own house,” Malcolm said.

  “Me neither. We’ll get to the bottom of it.” Smith waited a moment, then changed the subject. “How are things at the club?”

  “Swingin’,” Malcolm said in his double bass voice. “Feck’s got a good thing going over there.” His hair was a bit tight, as he seemed to like it, matching his thick beard. Hannah had married him three years ago; they’d known each other in high school. According to Hannah, he’d been a more outgoing sort before the war, but his time in the Pacific had changed him. Didn’t laugh as loud or as often. Smith, too, had seen more than his share of violence, having served in the 761st Tank Battalion, the famed Black Panthers, but he liked to think that his prewar personality remained intact. Maybe he was fooling himself.

  For a while, Malcolm had trouble holding down steady work. Hannah’s income as a maid was all that supported them for a time. Only recently had their situation stabilized, when Malcolm got the bouncer job. Then, a few months back, one of his uncles, a farmer in North Georgia, passed away and left them his land, which they sold for the down payment on this house.

  Smith asked, “You ever see some folks at the club acting pretty high from something that ain’t liquor?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You get the feeling that’s becoming more common?”

  Malcolm took a long drag on his cigarette. “Feck doesn’t tolerate that in his place. We toss people if they get out of control, but no, I’ve never seen anyone smoking it in the club.”

  “Good. We’ve been tracking some folks who are bringing it into the city.”

  “Surprised they have you doing that. Ain’t that something the white cops handle?”

  “They’re happy to let a few things slide so long as it’s on our side of town, but we’re working on changing that.” Two turkey vultures tilted their wings in the perfect sky. Owning a back porch must feel fabulous. “Something else I been wondering: you fellas ever had trouble with Thunder Malley?”

  Malcolm raised an eyebrow. “Why you ask?”

  Boggs had told Smith about crazy Bartholomew supposedly being able to place Malley at the scene of Forrester’s murder. Smith wouldn’t share that with Malcolm, but he said, “I know Malley leans on businesses for protection money. We’ve put a stop to most folks who do that, but he’s been a tough one to nail down. And now I got reason to believe he’s moving into moonshine and drugs.”

  Malcolm thought long and hard. Smith was accustomed to people turning silent when Malley’s name came up. “Man you should talk to
is Feck,” meaning Malcolm’s boss. “I don’t know if he pays for protection or not, but I know he’s no fan of Malley. In fact, yeah, I’ve heard Malley’s been moving drugs. Gets ’em from the mountains or something, from the same crackers who make the shine. Nothing I know for sure, just things I overhear.”

  “I’ll talk to Feck. Been meaning to catch some music anyway.”

  Smith checked his watch. He’d need to leave soon to be at the precinct in time. He wondered if the cops would ever come.

  “Ever hear of a fella named Quentin Neale?” he asked. “Goes by Q? Tall, light skin, from New Orleans?” Malcolm shook his head no, so Smith continued, “We’re hearing him and Thunder don’t much like each other. They in some kind of turf war.”

  “That’s a vote in his favor, then.”

  “But it’s the kind of not-liking that leads to a lot of bodies. Anyway, you hear anything about either of ’em, let me know.”

  Malcolm nodded and they sat wordless for a spell. The silence in this part of town was otherworldly.

  “Personally, how I see it?” Malcolm said. “Fellow wants to get himself high, dull his pain, fine. Man needs to get by somehow, and it’s better than taking out his aggressions on somebody else.” His eyes had wandered while he shared this, but now he looked at Smith. “I suppose you paid to feel different. But I woulda thought you’d agree, in here,” and he tapped his chest. “Live-and-let-live kinda fellow that you are.”