Most of the blood had pooled in one spot, but some of it drew a jagged trail for ten feet, ending at a smaller pool. Perhaps they had dragged him, or, once they’d left him, he had tried to crawl toward his house but hadn’t made it far before collapsing.
One of the neighbors surely saw something. Yet none had opened their doors to ask what was going on. Smith and Boggs were trying to be quiet, but still, someone must have known they were here, watching them through barely parted curtains.
Then headlights swallowed their flashlight beams and made them redundant.
“Took them longer than I thought it would,” Smith muttered as the squad car silently pulled over.
“What are you boys doing out here?” a voice barked.
Smith stepped closer to the open window of the driver, whose face he couldn’t yet make out. The “boys” only made him angrier, and he had half a mind to shine his flashlight directly in the cop’s face. The other half of his mind knew that would be a terrible mistake.
“I’m Officer Smith and this is Officer Boggs.” He leaned toward the window, no doubt closer than the driver wished a Negro to be. He could see the driver now, a middle-aged white cop whose thin, rough cheeks seemed to cave into his face, as if some inner tension were slowly sucking him into nothingness. Never seen him before. “A relative of mine was assaulted here a few hours ago.”
The white cops got out of their car and walked over quickly. Boggs stepped close as well, to show he would not be intimidated. He and Smith both had weapons hidden away in ankle and small-of-the-back holsters. They never would have come here at night unarmed. But they knew that openly displaying firearms would have sent any white witnesses to their gun cabinets.
“This ain’t your territory, and you’re out of uniform besides,” the one who’d been driving said. Boggs recognized him: Brian Helton, one of the cops who enjoyed goading the new Negro officers even more than most. He’d been a friend of Lionel Dunlow’s, the sadistic bully who’d been Rakestraw’s old partner. After Dunlow had mysteriously disappeared two years ago, Helton had been very vocal indeed about his opinion—shared by many others—that the colored officers must be responsible. So they’d all been questioned, despite McInnis’s outraged objections. Boggs and Smith had confessed that they’d despised Dunlow, just like the others did, but they had lied when they’d claimed to have nothing to do with his disappearance.
“We’re not on duty,” Smith said. “We just came over from the hospital. Either he was attacked as he was walking home, or he was beaten somewhere else and dumped here.”
“Walking home? Here?” the other cop asked. He was tall and had more padding in his shirt than he should have, his cheeks doughy and pale, the hair beneath his cap light. Everything about him made Boggs think of a biscuit. “There’s your problem, then.”
“How’s that?” Smith asked.
“This is a white neighborhood, that’s how,” Helton answered for his young partner. “He shouldn’t be here.”
“He’s not breaking any laws living here,” Smith said, “and you know it.”
“How ’bout disturbing the peace?”
“The one who got beat up was disturbing the peace?” Boggs snapped.
“How many assaults have there been in this neighborhood in the last three months?” Helton asked. “I’ll tell you, since it’s my beat: zero. Now he moves in and look what happens, less than a month after him showing up.”
“I think your cause and effect are a little backward,” Boggs said, seething. His partner looked on the verge of attacking Helton.
“I think everything about this situation is backward. It’s backward he thinks he can move here and not have trouble. It’s backward the city thinks it can pin badges on the likes of you and turn you into cops.”
“Doesn’t look like you’re much of a cop yourself,” Smith said. “Man gets beat nearly to death on your watch and you don’t know anything about it?”
“Who says we don’t know anything about it?” the younger partner said. Which won him a quick, angry look from Helton.
“Well, let’s hear what you know, then,” Boggs said.
“He don’t know what he’s talking about,” Helton said with a dismissive shake of his head. “And neither do you. Unless you want to see more violence out here tonight, you’d best get a move on, now.”
“We can take care of ourselves,” Boggs replied.
“Apparently Tommy’s relations can’t.”
Smith stepped closer to Helton. Boggs grabbed Smith’s left forearm to keep him from going any farther.
“What do you know about what happened?” he demanded. “First a brick through their window, which I bet you didn’t even do a damned thing to look into, and now this. Who did it?”
He felt the awful possibility then: white cops might have done this to spite Smith. Cops over on this side of town could have been attacking Malcolm at the same moment that cops on the other side had been warning Smith and Boggs to lay off the drug trade.
“Well, Tommy, let’s just say that we all seem to know more about some things than we’re saying, don’t we?”
“You’re never going to give up thinking we had something to do with Dunlow, are you?” Boggs asked. “Not even after Internal Investigations told you we had nothing to do with it.”
“No. I am never going to give that up.”
“Can I ask what the hell y’all are talking about?” asked Biscuit.
“Ancient history,” Smith said.
“In any case, take this as friendly advice,” Helton said. “Hell, or unfriendly advice, I don’t care. You might want to get yourselves back to your part of town right now. There appear to be some white folks who aren’t as friendly as us roaming about tonight.”
The cops got back into their car and drove away. Only then did Smith realize Boggs was still holding him by the forearm, as if he feared his partner would chase them down.
Ten minutes later their search still had yielded nothing when they were startled by a voice shouting, “Police! Put your hands up!”
They turned toward the street. The beam of a flashlight illuminated Boggs’s chest. A figure was striding toward them, and with the glare they couldn’t see anything but a fuzzy shape.
“We’re police!” Smith shouted back. “Officers Smith and Boggs! Who are you?”
“Christ,” the voice said, not an answer but a sigh of exasperation. The flashlight pointed at the street now as he did something funny with his arms. “It’s Rakestraw. What are you doing here?”
They stepped onto the street, close enough to see him stashing a sidearm into the belt of his blue jeans. The realization that a gun had been trained on them hardly calmed their nerves. They’d been furious driving over here, and everything that had happened since had only made them angrier.
“Checking a crime scene,” Boggs said.
“This isn’t your beat.”
“Yours, either,” Smith said.
“I live two blocks away.”
“My sister lives here.” Smith pointed behind him. Then he shone his flashlight on one of the pools of blood and explained what little they knew.
“I had no idea,” Rake said. “I was just walking ’cause I couldn’t sleep.”
“With a gun?” Boggs asked.
“Sometimes. Anyone file a report?”
“Not yet,” Smith said.
They had worked with Rake, hesitantly and from a distance, on a murder two years ago. No one else knew about their temporary alliance, which would have been considered treasonous to the other white cops, and could have gotten Boggs and Smith disciplined for going beyond their bounds. They still weren’t sure if Rake could be trusted.
“How long has this been Helton’s beat?” Smith asked.
“About a year. I’m sorry for your relative. I hope he’s all right. But I wouldn’t hold your breath on a fellow like Helton looking into it.”
“Or anyone else,” Smith said. “Someone threw a brick through their window the
other night, and no cop even took a report. And I don’t recall any arson arrests after folks burned down the Calvins’ place a couple years ago.”
“There was an investigation, but no arrests,” Rake answered, and seemed to think of something for a moment, his eyes far away.
“I’m gonna walk the block,” Smith said, as if he couldn’t stand being around Rakestraw this long. “See if I find anything.”
Once he’d left, Boggs said to Rake, “Neighbors must have seen or heard something.”
“I’m not knocking on doors.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not my beat. And the folks who live here have a right to be left alone and not bothered about things like this.”
Boggs hated that answer, its skewed view of rights. He took a breath. “If you can’t make it formal, you can at least ask around, casually, at the next neighborhood cookout. You live here. You must hear things Helton doesn’t.”
Rake hesitated, and before he could deliver another lame response, Boggs pressed, “I did you a favor once.”
“We helped each other then.”
“Then I’m just asking as one cop to another. I want to know who did this.”
“This has been a hell of a week for me promising favors,” Rake said, Boggs not catching his meaning. “But, yes, I’ll see what I can find out for you. In return, you can do me a favor: don’t come over here again. Showing your faces only makes it worse. If it isn’t Helton causing trouble, it’ll be someone else, and you know it.”
Blame the Negro for causing trouble, Boggs thought. Disturbing the peace.
Footsteps, and they turned to see Smith’s silhouette walking toward them. He was holding something in his hand, a sheet of paper that flapped gently with each step.
“Took this from the telephone pole at Myrtle and Spruce.” As he stepped closer, the flyer’s capital letters made its message especially clear: “Zoned as a White Community.” Below it was a lightning bolt, blood red. “Last time I saw one of these,” and he tapped the bolt with his free hand, “I was in a tank in Germany.”
14
RAKE DIDN’T EVEN try to fall back asleep after returning home. He was still burning with the shame and embarrassment he’d felt when, talking to Boggs and Smith, he’d realized his own brother-in-law may have been the assailant. It had turned his stomach, talking to Negro officers and feeling like his own family’s foibles were out for all to see.
Why? He tried to puzzle this out. Unlike most of his fellow officers, Rake did not despise the Negro cops. He’d probably had more conversations with Boggs than any other white cop except for Boggs’s sergeant. He was glad the city had hired them, because if they could prove themselves worthy, then the city would hire more, and soon their numbers would be enough to adequately patrol all of their own neighborhoods. Then, white cops like Rake would never have to venture into colored neighborhoods again.
Rake had told Boggs he would look into the assault mainly as a way to keep Boggs and Smith away. This was his family and his neighborhood. Having Boggs and Smith around would inflame the tensions that were already inspiring many to join that new neighborhood association Cassie had told him about. He hadn’t liked the idea of the group taking donations to pressure the Negroes away, and he’d told her as much. It just felt unseemly; if the group didn’t succeed in their scheme to buy out the neighbors, he’d asked Cassie, what would their next tactic be? Assault? She’d argued that the donations idea was expressly designed to avoid violence; they had chosen dollars and checklists as weapons, rather than bricks and bats. So why wouldn’t Rake support them? He had grudgingly agreed, partly because he saw her point and partly because he didn’t want to argue anymore. So yes, if she really wanted to contribute, he’d allow it.
That had been yesterday. And now that there had been an assault, he wondered if he’d been right all along. Maybe he should look into the neighborhood group as possible suspects, see who was involved.
The first thing he did that morning was walk through the neighborhood and tear down the White Community signs, of which he found four. He had torn down two others a few days ago, and some of these new ones had been affixed to the very same poles from which he’d torn the first set down. Which meant they may have been put up last night, possibly by the assailants.
The signs were the unmistakable mark of the Columbians. He couldn’t believe they were back, but he knew he shouldn’t be shocked anymore. The real shock had come four years ago, when he had returned from the war and discovered an identical sign in the neighborhood where he and Cassie had been renting an apartment. It wasn’t the White Community that had stunned him so much as the accompanying lightning bolt.
When he’d grown up, Atlanta, like so many cities, had its share of Silver Shirts and Black Shirts and other Fascist groups, all of them blaming the hard times on the coloreds and the Communists, the Papists and Jews. Rallies were held across the city, even a march through downtown, spearheaded by men claiming that the nation’s problems were due to FDR’s Jew Deal and his socialistic, labor-organizing cronies. When we declared war on Hitler and Mussolini, those groups had gone quiet, but now that peace had returned, those voices had grown louder again, as if Fascism were merely a fashion that had gone out of style due to wartime scarcity, like long dresses and pleasure drives, and now it was back, at least in certain circles.
In ’46 the Columbians, clad in brown Nazi-style fatigues with lightning bolts on the sleeves, encouraged their fellow white Atlantans to take up arms against the uppity Negroes who’d returned from Europe with dangerous ideas like equality. Strong white men must stand up to keep the races separate! We must fight for the American white workingman! Rake remembered a rally they’d held at Sweetwater Mill, where he briefly worked—and where Dale still did. He’d been disgusted by the Nazi salutes (they even greeted their leader with “Heil!”) and dumbstruck to see that such things could persist after the war, and here. One morning he had passed a group of them in the small green space that gave Hanford Park its name, doing calisthenics and conducting quasi-military drills.
Dale had even flirted with joining them, expressing his admiration for their show of strength and bravado. Rake had just fought and won a war to rid the world of Fascism, whereas Dale’s closest exposure to a battlefield had occurred at his local cinema, on account of the heart murmur that rendered him 4-F. Yet here the dust had cleared and apparently it was all right to don the enemy’s uniform. So much about Rake’s return to peacetime had been deeply disorienting, like he’d entered some fractured cosmos that had been improperly assembled from broken pieces.
Shortly after the war, Rake and Cassie had bought their house, thanks in large part to a GI Bill loan. That same month, a group of Columbians badly beat Negroes in another neighborhood a few miles north. The group held a rally in front of a Negro’s new house, and a head Columbian made a few too many comments about overthrowing the governor and the president as part of their master plan for creating a utopian all-white nation. With that, he and two others were jailed for usurping police powers and inciting a riot. Only a few short months after they had appeared on the scene, the group vanished—or so Rake had thought.
Because who was putting up the signs in Hanford Park if not them? It was possible they were the ones who’d attacked Smith’s brother-in-law. It also was possible Dale himself was guilty. Rake had warned Dale to lay off the new Negro neighbors, but betting on Dale’s intelligence and good faith had never been a good idea.
There was another possibility, convoluted but troubling: Dale said he’d made his night ride to Coventry so that the Coventry Klan would return the favor. So perhaps a posse of hooded, robed goons had driven down from the sticks to beat up a Negro in Hanford Park, and the Columbian signs were just a coincidence. Perhaps every variety of hate was converging on Rake’s neighborhood.
Rake took a short walk to the house of his first partner, the brutal and disappeared Lionel Dunlow. A massive oak dominated the front yard as thoroughly as Dunlow ha
d dominated everyone around him. The small bungalow cried out for a new paint job and the lawn could have been mown; Rake recalled Dunlow complaining about his lazy sons, and it saddened him to see that they hadn’t picked up the slack in his absence.
He knocked on the door. Through an open window he heard a radio program finish its report on Joe McCarthy’s latest speech, then move on to the latest from the Kefauver hearings on organized crime.
The last two years had not been kind to Dunlow’s widow. Her hair had gone from slightly gray to completely white, and she’d cut it severely short, as if to spite the world.
She had refused to believe Dunlow was dead for the first six months, but the Department’s investigation, after weeks of fruitless searching, eventually went cold. After which reality and the need for survivor’s benefits had overcome her denial. An empty casket had been buried with full police pageantry on the coldest February day of 1949.
“Officer Denny.”
“How are you, Janisse?”
“Sun rises, sun sets. In between I manage to get by. You any closer to finding out what happened to him?”
This was why he’d hesitated coming here. Reliving this history was not pleasant.
“I wish I could say I was.”
“Well, then. You come by for any reason other’n to make me feel bad?”
“I was hoping I could talk to your boys a minute. They around?”
“What’d Knox do this time? Or maybe I don’t want to know.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing. I just need to cross something off a list.”
She looked two miles past caring anymore. “They’re around back.”
The backyard, too, was overgrown, and at the very back sat Dunlow’s old work shed, whose roof appeared to have collapsed recently. In front of it was a mess of possessions that the two Dunlow boys were rummaging through to see what was worth saving. Old bicycles, piles of wood planks, collections of rusty paint cans. Rake said howdy to Knox, twenty, and Buddy, eighteen. Knox wore a sleeveless T-shirt that displayed his muscular physique—he was six four, Rake guessed, and his recently shaved head confirmed the rumors that he’d enlisted for Korea. Buddy was no slouch himself, but he was thinner and appeared almost tiny beside his brother.
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