Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to have to arrest you on vagrancy charges,” Rake said.

  “My family owns this land. Look it up. And I ain’t a vagrant. I have money.”

  “How do you earn it?”

  “I have supporters.”

  “Supporters? Like you’re running for office?”

  “I have supporters.”

  “You were onstage at that rally at the Sweetwater Mill a few years back, weren’t you?”

  “Can’t say for sure. We did a lot of rallies then.”

  “I recognize you. I was working there at the time.”

  “And now you’re a gorilla in a cop suit. How ’bout that.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “I have a right to say what I want on my property. And you still haven’t said why you’re bothering me.”

  Rake removed the lightning bolt sign from his back pocket and unfolded it in front of Coyle. “This look familiar to you?” It was covered in black dust from the fingerprinting lab—they’d turned up one set of prints, not Coyle’s.

  “Seen signs like ’em, a few years ago.”

  “You put any of these up recently?”

  “I ain’t saying I did. But there’s no law about posting signs.”

  Actually, there were all sorts of such laws, but Rake wasn’t interested in thumbing through the bill-posting regulations to determine whether the display of that specific leaflet on that particular street pole was allowed or not.

  Four years ago, Coyle and his gang had committed several assaults and bombed Negro homes on the transitioning West Side. Now he was free, and it was happening again.

  Rake said, “It’s funny; if you put this sign up in Germany right now, you’d be arrested.”

  “But here in the States we have freedom of speech. You can call that funny if you want.”

  “Where were you the night of the seventh around eleven, twelve o’clock?”

  “Here. Asleep.”

  “Anyone able to swear to that?”

  “I’m not married, if that’s what you’re asking. What’s this about?”

  “A Negro was beaten nearly to death, right by one of those signs.”

  “Good.”

  Rake stared him down just enough to let on he didn’t appreciate that, but not so much as to let Coyle think he could knock Rake off stride. “You enjoyed prison that much?”

  “I hated it. Most folks in there are dumber’n posts. Don’t know the first thing about politics or history. And I’m in no rush to get back there, which is why I have nothing to do with what happened to that nigger, whoever he was. Just because he got beat up where one of those signs was doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it. If he got beat up on the same block as where somebody was flying an American flag, would you arrest a veteran for it?”

  “I am a veteran, and I’m going to give you one day to take down every one of these signs, wherever you and your little buddies put them. Exactly twenty-four hours from this moment. And then, if I ever see one of them again, I will stuff it down your throat myself.”

  Coyle’s reaction to the threat was an ironic smile. “Yes, sir, Officer, sir.”

  Rake stepped closer. “You think this is funny?”

  “No, I think abuse of power is profoundly serious.”

  Rake knew he needed to cool it. But he wouldn’t back down to this moron. “You have a fondness for the Nazis?”

  “They know what they want and how to get it.”

  The present tense in that sentence was as galling as its sentiment. “Maybe you didn’t see all the bulletins while you were over here shirking duty, but they lost the war. So I don’t think they were terribly good at getting anything, other than killed.”

  “You know what’s really terrible about it?” Coyle asked, stepping to his side, slowly, to give himself some room. “It was the damned Reds that beat ’em. Everybody over here likes to make like it was our doughboys and capitalist power that brought them down, but that ain’t so. It was the Red Army driving them back, making them put most of their resources on the Eastern Front, making it easy for us to take Normandy and go from there. Everybody here feels good about it, but they’re kidding themselves. All along, we had been warning people that it was the Communists who were the ones to worry about, not the Nazis, and they went and proved us right. Our government had agreed with us, until Pearl Harbor confused ’em. If the damn Japs hadn’t done that, we would’ve let Hitler take Europe and wipe out the Reds and the Jews. Then we wouldn’t have the Reds taking over like they are now.”

  “I don’t recall there being anything ‘easy’ about Normandy, but maybe that’s how it seemed from over here. Watching the movie reels between John Wayne pictures.”

  Fluent in German, Rake had served first in army intelligence, translating missives they intercepted from the Nazis, and then as an advance scout. He hadn’t landed on D-Day but had come over soon after, then had been dropped behind Nazi lines in France, stealthily moving his way across the ravaged landscape. More than a year later, he’d been one of the first to see the Dachau concentration camp. For two months it had been his job to arrange tours of that unique circle of hell, marching German civilians through the gas chambers and showing them the skulls, forcing them to acknowledge what had been occurring on their watch, under orders of the leaders they had put in office. Like pushing a house-training puppy’s snout in its own shit, showing them their sins, ensuring there could be no denials. You were wrong and we are right.

  He tried to contain his rage as he addressed this man for whom the Nazis remained role models, “You sure seem to possess quite the military knowledge for someone who wasn’t there.”

  “I know how to read. Words on the page and between the lines.”

  “Mind if I take a peek inside and see what sorts of things you’re reading?”

  “Yes, I do. That’s my home and what I read is my private affair. Get a warrant. For God’s sake, I haven’t been out but a month and I’m not harming anyone. Why don’t you spend more time cracking down on the niggers tearing the city apart? It’s all over the papers, murders and rapes. Instead of patrolling the dangerous areas, you’re out here bothering me.”

  “Tough talk from a fellow who doesn’t have an alibi for that night.”

  A tan Chevy sedan rolled down the street, slowly, as if it had been planning to pull over and park but now saw the squad car and realized its plan was unwise. The driver started a three-point turn on the grass of the dead end.

  Rake walked toward it, holding out a hand. The car stopped.

  “Turn off your engine. If you’re here to talk to Mr. Coyle, please, don’t let me stop you.”

  The driver and the passenger looked at each other. They had the same buzz cuts as Coyle, the driver’s blond and the passenger’s brown. The passenger nodded, and the driver cut the ignition. Rake rested his hands on his belt, one of them on the handle of his gun, as he invited them to come out slowly. Coyle walked over as well.

  “Well, howdy, boys,” Rake said. “Is this an official gathering of the master race?”

  “We don’t want no trouble,” the blond said. He looked barely eighteen, if that, and his passenger a few years older. Neither was as thin as Coyle, and Rake sensed in them a calm kind of wariness, like they were not unaccustomed to risky environments.

  “Can I see your ID?”

  “I do something wrong, Officer?”

  “I just like to know to whom I’m speaking.”

  Back in the “house,” the dog started barking again.

  The driver’s ID said he was Neville Connors, twenty-two years old last month, with an address nearer to tony Inman Park than Rake would have figured of someone who spent time with trash like Coyle. The passenger claimed not to have his wallet on him but volunteered his name as Joey Boyd Green.

  “You out here to plan the next bonfire with Delmar, get out your hoods and whatnot?”

  “Fuck the Klan,” Joey snapped. “They call us goons, but they’re just a
bunch of pussy business owners who don’t have the gumption to do what needs to be done.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Tear it all down,” Neville said, “so we can build it all up.”

  “Democracy is weak,” Joey said. “It’ll collapse on itself, and when it does, we’ll be ready to set society right. We’ll be ascendant.”

  “That’s a mighty big word.”

  “It means we will rise.”

  “I know what it fucking means.”

  “Joey B., shut the hell up,” Coyle said.

  “No, please,” Rake said. “I’d love to hear more about this revolution. I want to make sure I’m on the right side when it comes.”

  “We don’t want any trouble with the law,” Coyle said. “And all they were doing was coming to say hi to me. That’s not illegal in this country, yet.”

  “No, but beating up Negroes is.” Rake asked them where they’d been the night Greer had been assaulted; Neville claimed to have been asleep after a long day working at Sweetwater Mill—where Dale worked, interestingly—and Joey said he’d pulled an overnight job working road repair downtown. Then Rake repeated his warning about the lightning bolt signs.

  “Guess I’d feel more comfortable about things,” Neville said slowly, “if I knew the police were helping keep vermin out of white neighborhoods.”

  “We enforce the law,” Rake said. “We’re plenty busy these days without having to keep our eye on kids who fill their heads with nonsense from the wrong side of the war.”

  “We’re not kids,” Neville said.

  “Well, you certainly sound short of full-grown men when you spout fairy tales like this one just was,” and he motioned to Joey Boyd. “Next time you feel like falling in love with a second Lost Cause, ask Delmar how he enjoyed prison. And stay the hell out of Hanford Park.”

  The sound of Max barking was finally drowned out by the squad car’s engine. Rake circled around the end of the road, his wheels slow in the mud as the three young Columbians stood still like deranged yard ornament statues, watching him leave.

  18

  THE CELEBRATORY FEELING that coursed through the Butler Street precinct after the arrest of Thunder Malley proved short-lived.

  Less than twenty-four hours after the arrest, at their 6 p.m. roll call, McInnis stood before them stone-faced and announced, “Thunder Malley died in custody early this morning.”

  Ten men were punched in the gut.

  “He was being transferred to a cell when he broke out of an officer’s control and began strangling him. Another officer shot him, twice.” McInnis held in one hand the limp pages of the report he was now recapping, his language equally bloodless. He dropped it on the nearest desk, Smith’s. “You can take turns reading it. I know it feels like it cancels out a lot of hard work from all of you.” He glanced at the bruises on Smith’s face, the tight expression on Dewey’s lips. “These things happen. Let’s get out there and have a solid night and watch each other’s backs.”

  With that, they were dismissed. Yet they stood in place, except for Smith, who grabbed the report and read it, which didn’t take long. Next Boggs read it, then the others, as McInnis walked toward the large map of their beats that was adorned with thumbtacks denoting crimes and persons of interest. As if he’d just conveyed an utterly trivial message.

  These things happen.

  Smith cursed under his breath after reading it. Dewey picked up a mug and swung his arm toward the wall, magically creating hundreds of pieces of porcelain. Smith didn’t even mind that it was his mug, he was so enraged by the news. Boggs couldn’t believe it, but he could. Every time they tried to make real progress, it blew up in their faces. He tried to walk a moral path, yet it was littered with the bodies of his good deeds—and too many other bodies.

  “This is a joke, Sergeant,” Smith said.

  “I don’t like it, either,” McInnis claimed.

  “We’re supposed to just accept this?”

  “As opposed to what?” McInnis waited a long moment, the silence making his point. “You’re not allowed to resign, in case any of you are considering it.” A bad time for a joke. They had already lost three officers to resignations since ’48; each had offered different reasons, but they knew the truth, that it crushed the soul to accept the contradictions of their job day after day, to be both authority figures and second-class citizens.

  “White cops are undermining us in our own neighborhoods,” Boggs said. “We’ve heard they were protecting Malley’s operation. They liked taking a cut from the big man, but once he was put in a spot where he could possibly inform on them, they knew how to shut him up.”

  “I’m hearing a lot of speculation. And no names. Do you have any?”

  Silence. Smith recalled how Malley had taunted them that night, warning that they were making a mistake, that he had “friends” who would have him out of jail by morning. He’d been right, but not in the way he’d meant.

  “It’s one thing to accuse a white officer of taking kickbacks,” McInnis pointed out. “It’s quite another to accuse one of murder.”

  Hopefully McInnis was only pretending to be obtuse. He couldn’t be under any illusions as to the purity of their fellows on the force: before their time, he had been involved in a sting that resulted in a number of officers being fired for running an illegal gambling ring. The Department-wide animosity it earned him was likely the reason he was exiled here to the Butler Street Y. Ever since, he’d become hesitant to engage in battles he couldn’t win.

  “They’re undercutting us at every turn, Sergeant,” Dewey said.

  “We can’t do our jobs,” Boggs added, “if white cops are backing the people we’re trying to put away.” And then killing them when the Negro cops got too close.

  Smith threw up his hands. “It’s like expecting us to be firemen while white cops play with matches.”

  “I’m perfectly aware of the challenges here,” McInnis said. “But I don’t hear anyone offering solutions; I just hear complaints about reality. Dealing with reality is our job.”

  Was he telling them they needed to gather evidence implicating whichever white officers were involved in drugs? But they were expressly not allowed to conduct investigations, especially into the activities of white cops. Boggs felt his chest tighten at this contradiction.

  “We’ve heard that Malley had a rivalry with someone named Quentin Neale, or Q,” Boggs explained. “We don’t know much about him, we think he’s new in town, but he might be running drugs and shine, too. Maybe the white cops who’d been working with Thunder decided they wanted to back Neale instead.”

  Smith shook his head. “No, they just wanted to silence Malley. So they did.”

  Boggs looked up and said to McInnis, “There’s one more thing. We didn’t get their names, but two squad cars of white cops threatened me and Smith to lay off drug cases a couple of nights ago.”

  “When was this?” It was difficult to gauge McInnis’s reaction to anything, but he finally seemed concerned.

  Boggs and Smith explained the brief encounter, which they hadn’t even shared with their fellow officers. They hadn’t seen the point, as they hadn’t thought any good would come of it, and the story only made them seem impotent. Even now Boggs felt shame in relaying it.

  “Did you get the squad car numbers?”

  Boggs recited them.

  McInnis folded his arms and nodded, thinking. “I’ll poke around at headquarters and see what I can find. In the meantime, it’s three past six and I don’t have a single officer on the streets. Go put out the fires, gentlemen.”

  19

  RAISING TWO LITTLE ones was proving to be more of a trial than Cassie had anticipated. Yes, their needs were endless, but she’d expected that. What made the experience harder was that she pretty much only spent time with children and other women. As the youngest daughter with four brothers, she’d long realized that she preferred the company of males. Her humor tended to be coarse, her sense of decorum neg
ligible. The other housewives of Hanford Park wanted to gossip—about who had awful taste in decorating, about who might actually be Jewish, about who might be having an affair with her child’s football coach, about the principal’s wife’s drinking problem. Cassie would have preferred if the housewives themselves had drinking problems; that would have made them more entertaining. Instead, she was subjected to endless teas, as though they all aspired to some higher class, followed by chatty afternoons in the park. She’d rather chase Denny Jr. and Maggie around the yard, get her knees dirty, sweat a little, but the other mothers only wanted to sit down and chitter away.

  The sudden encroachment of Negroes into Hanford Park, terrible though it was, finally gave her something to do.

  Which was why she found herself sitting in the cafeteria of the small elementary school that her children would be attending in a few years. The adorably cute, tiny dining tables had been laid on their sides and leaned against the far wall, making room for a dozen rows of munchkin-sized wooden chairs on which sat, knees bent high like Brobdingnagians, forty adult residents of Hanford Park. They faced a small podium that stood in front of two windows that would have offered a view of the grassy field and swing sets if not for the fact that it was night, safely post-bedtime for the many parents who comprised a good portion of the Collective Association of Hanford Park.

  Denny was at work, as he almost always was in the evening, so she sat next to her sister- and brother-in-law, Sue Ellen and Dale. She’d told Denny she’d be going and he hadn’t objected. Then she’d told him she planned to donate to the neighborhood fund. He hadn’t liked that, and they’d argued again. This is our home, she’d said, and this is a peaceable solution. Why not support it? He’d finally capitulated, but she wasn’t sure if he’d merely done so to end the conversation.

  On the walls around them was a brightly colored phantasmagoria of children’s drawings, third-graders’ yellow self-portraits and first-graders’ verdant landscapes and kindergartners’ blobby scribbles like Rorschach tests only they could explain. Cassie’s own little artists wouldn’t get a chance to decorate this school if the neighborhood association didn’t do its job.