Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

“I never thought it would be easy,” he said, keeping his voice down in hopes that hers would join him at this level. “But I thought it would be honest.”

  “No, I’m just a lying hussy, Officer Boggs! Can’t trust me for nothing!”

  He held up a hand. “Stop it, please. You’re making a scene.”

  “Oh, it was fine when you were the one yellin’, but not me, huh?”

  “Julie, I need to get back to work.”

  “Yeah, you need to get back, all right.”

  She turned and walked into the house, passing her mother. Mrs. Cannon stood there staring hard at him, anger writ there, seeing him not as family but as something hostile she needed to protect her daughter from. She shook her head and closed the door.

  23

  “POUR ME SOME of the good stuff, Feckless, on the rocks.”

  The bar’s owner raised an eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t partake.”

  Smith asked, “You gonna rat me out?”

  Atlanta police officers were not supposed to drink. Plenty of white cops did—some while on shift—yet the Negro cops knew that if they dared cross that line, they ran the risk of losing their jobs should someone report it. Smith had reached the point where he was willing to take that risk, small though it was. He was among friends here at the Rook, which had become one of the destination night spots on Auburn Avenue. Packed on the weekends, it hosted bluesmen and jazz bands not just from the South but from across the country, folks like Dizzy Gillespie, Bird, and Thelonious Monk stopping by on tour. Past two in the morning, Smith wasn’t the only one who’d clocked out, as members of a local jazz band, silk ties loosened and faces still gleaming after their set, sat around a table eating their late-night snack of fried chicken. A few other stragglers were scattered at tables, Smith the sole man at the bar. Out of uniform, of course, he’d cocked his gray straw boater slantwise to make him harder to spot through the dark of the place, just in case anyone here felt like informing on a cop.

  The owner of the Rook, pouring a double bourbon into Smith’s glass, was Lester Feck, aka Feckless. As a kid, the daily attendance call of “Feck, Lester” had at some point merged into his nickname. He’d worked moving freight at the rail yards for years. Smith had heard stories that Feckless had not always been an upstanding, law-abiding fellow, that perhaps some of the money he’d used to buy this place had come via illicit pursuits. But that was ancient history. It wasn’t where we came from that mattered, it was what we did once we got here. Smith understood that more than most.

  “One of those nights, huh?” Feckless asked, pouring himself one as well. He held his glass in a toast. “The hell with today. Here’s to showing them tomorrow.”

  “Amen.” Smith wouldn’t have minded drinking with Boggs—he felt they could use a few moments like this—but he could only imagine the reaction he’d receive from his partner. Alcohol? In our bodies? Just getting the man to shoot the occasional round of pool had been an accomplishment.

  Yet in all other respects, life was easier for Boggs. Just was. Born to the right parents. Preacher money and a preacher house, even a preacher car they could borrow in emergencies. Boggs complained plenty about his old man, but he didn’t seem to realize how lucky he was to have him in his corner.

  Tommy was heartsick for Hannah and Malcolm. They’d both worked so hard, climbing and climbing, hoping to reach not quite Boggs-level society but at least a little piece of the American dream. And when they finally thought they’d attained that much, it was being snatched from them. Violently.

  There had to be something Smith could do about the Columbians. Jesus, putting those signs all over Hanford Park like they owned it, no shame at appropriating the symbols of the very country we’d just won a war against.

  “Lightning men,” Smith’s battalion had called the SS troopers. But they were all lightning men. Not just the Columbians but the Klansmen, too, and the neighborhood association that had offered to buy Hannah’s house as if that were a legitimate, regular ol’ business arrangement shorn of threats. And the other white people, the ones who had allowed those lightning bolt signs to be posted and had not objected, the ones who claimed not to hate Negroes but who surely didn’t want to live near them and didn’t mind when other whites grabbed bats to settle things—they were all lightning men. Some of them were just more honest about it.

  There was no way he or Boggs could go after the all-white Columbians directly. Their only hope was that Rakestraw would keep his word, but that seemed unrealistic. The top Columbians had been jailed when they started talking about overthrowing the government, so maybe the rest would make the same mistake. But maybe they’d learned, and they’d act just mainstream enough that the other white people would accept their occasional violence for the benefits it brought them, benefits like all-white neighborhoods and complacent Negroes. They were no different from the Redshirts who crushed Reconstruction generations ago, just the latest in the glorious Southern tradition of terrorism and lawlessness.

  “How’s Malcolm?” Feckless asked as he cleaned the marble-topped bar.

  “Hospital’s gonna let him out in a couple days. He has a long way to go. You hold the job for him, all right? He’s good for it once he’s on his feet.”

  Feckless looked insulted. “He don’t have to worry about that. Once he’s ready, he can get back to work.”

  That morning Smith and Boggs had driven out to Hannah’s place and relieved her of the latest batch of hate mail. Two letters, both of them typed, and both recovered from the trash again, even though he’d asked her to save whatever came. One of them mostly concerned itself with what the writer would do to her, rape being but one of the threats. Smith had always seen threats as signs of cowardice, signs that the speaker didn’t possess the will to do and therefore could only say, but reading those letters while Malcolm lay in the hospital showed how wrong he was. The letter addressed to Hannah made him sick, made him want to pound on every door in the neighborhood and force them all to read it, make their wives and children read it.

  They had brought the letters to McInnis, asking him to send them to the lab for fingerprinting, along with the lightning bolt sign Smith had torn down. The sergeant’s reaction to this display of initiative? Scolding them for collecting evidence pertaining to another precinct’s case, for stepping on other cops’ toes. But there are no toes to step on! Smith had snapped. They didn’t investigate the brick through their window and they probably aren’t even investigating this. McInnis had thought long and hard then, before finally nodding and telling them he’d see what he could do.

  Smith read some of the Atlanta Daily News in the dim light while Feck cleaned glasses. The front page bore stories about battles in Korea, a controversy over alleged misuse of Truman’s loyalty oaths, and a profile of a former member of FDR’s “black cabinet” accepting a position at Morehouse. The paper’s crime stories, he’d always thought, were terrible: cursory and written with little understanding of how the city actually worked. He’d have to give one of their crime writers, Toon, an earful the next time they crossed paths.

  “Listen,” Feckless told him. “I appreciate what you’re doing. Very much.”

  Smith just nodded. He felt powerless, not in the mood to hear praise. He asked, “What do you make of Thunder Malley going down?”

  “Let’s just say I’m not shedding any tears over the fact that he’s off the streets. Glad y’all took care of that.”

  Smith scowled. “We didn’t kill him.”

  “I know, but I heard how you brought him in. White folks took care of the rest.”

  The bourbon in his stomach turned into acid. “It’s not like there was some arrangement, we catch the dogs and they put ’em down.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. Don’t take no offense. You wanted him to go to trial, and good for you to think that way. But there were some powerful folks who didn’t want that man to ever testify, and that’s how it goes.”

  We should have known that, Smith thought. And may
be he had, he’d just been stubborn. He’d wanted to show everyone, from the white cops to the poorest Negro on the streets, that he could arrest any lawbreaker, no matter how tough or protected the man claimed to be.

  Maybe it wasn’t so terrible how things worked out. Thunder wasn’t on the streets anymore. They had sent a message, and the citizens knew who was in charge. Didn’t they?

  He lifted the glass, nothing but three sad memories of larger ice cubes. “I’ll take another.”

  When Feck returned the full glass, it rested atop an envelope. Smith looked up at Feck, who peeled the triangle away and revealed cash stuffed inside.

  “For taking that man off the street. He shook me down plenty, and I’m glad I don’t need to deal with that no more.”

  That there was a lot of money, Smith saw. And for a moment, yes, he was tempted. He thought about his need for a down payment on a house or apartment of his own, thought about his lack of a car, even the worn state of his favorite blazers.

  Christ, he’d been drinking too much already.

  “I don’t do that,” he said, looking Feck in the eye.

  “Pass it on to Malcolm, then. He could use it.”

  “He’d be very grateful. But you can give it to him yourself.” Smith stood and walked away, leaving the full glass behind as well, and wondering what lay at the end of the road he hadn’t chosen.

  Two blocks away, McInnis stood alone in an alley off Butler Street, near a squad car he’d spied there. Eddie B.’s was a late-night joint that, he knew, occasionally hosted illegal gambling nights. He’d been there ten minutes when Billy Logan walked through the joint’s back door. Logan, a white cop, stopped when he spotted McInnis. No one else was standing around at this hour, and if they were, they were up to something.

  Billy Logan was up to something.

  “Mac. How are ya?”

  “Can’t complain. How’s Cindy?”

  “She’s good, she’s good. And the boys, they’re at Grady already, can you believe it?”

  “Time does fly.”

  A black Pontiac with whitewall tires drove by slowly. McInnis watched it turn down another street and said, “What brings you to my beat?”

  “Just needed some information.”

  “Information you’re carrying in your wallet, or in a stuffed envelope, maybe?”

  Logan’s face soured. “What gives, Mac?”

  “I just find it funny, how cops who work a couple miles from here still find a way to make more money in my precinct than I do.”

  “I never got the sense that was a priority with you.”

  “That’s because it’s not. But murder is. Tell me about Thunder Malley.”

  The change of subject seemed to throw Logan, who paused. “He’s dead.”

  “No kidding. The cop who shot him and the other cop he was supposedly escaping from were both rookies.” And both of them, McInnis had learned, were assigned to one of the same squad cars whose drivers had threatened Boggs and Smith in an alley a few nights ago. He kept this detail to himself for now. “I don’t see kids that green getting the gumption to gun a man down in the station like that, unless they were following orders.”

  Logan’s shoulders sagged. “You sure you want to get into this?”

  “Get into this? Look around you, Billy. This is where I work now. Every day. I am in this.”

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to butt heads with some of these fellas.”

  “Let’s try this another way. That money in your pocket? Maybe I should walk right into that club and tell those gamblers they don’t need to pay you off anymore, that this isn’t your precinct and it’s not the way we do things here in Sweet Auburn.”

  “All right, all right. Your funeral. The Thunder Malley thing, I don’t know this for a fact, but I imagine it’s Slater. He’s the sergeant to those two rookies, and let’s just say he’s got a nicer house than a fella of his means would normally have.”

  McInnis shook his head, bad memories returning. “Does he advertise that?”

  “He’s not an idiot. He ain’t living in a mansion, he just knows how to be comfortable without showing it off. Rumor is, Slater has family up in the mountains, cousins who used to run some stills. They’ve been scaling that back, growing something a tad more profitable.”

  McInnis mulled this over. “So Slater’s cousins up north move their product down here, and Thunder Malley’s boys sell it in the Negro neighborhoods, while Slater keeps them all safe for a percentage. Now that Malley’s dead, Slater must be scouting for his next opportunity.”

  “I don’t know anything more and I don’t care to.”

  “See no evil, hear no evil? Funny attitude for a cop.”

  “And it’s helped me survive this long, hasn’t it? Maybe we aren’t all as vain as you, gunning for glory. It’s not every cop’s dream to run a sting like you did.”

  “Vanity, that’s what it was? Huh.”

  Slater’s beat was downtown, yet McInnis knew—from reading arrest reports and officer logs, and from talking to old friends at headquarters—that Slater was a regular visitor to this area.

  “Billy, I need you to stop taking your cuts in Darktown.”

  Logan shook his head like he was enduring an unwelcome joke, and the trick was to wait out the other fellow’s awkward laughter. Then he stepped closer so he could lower his voice. “So you want a cut, huh? These are relationships I built over years of hard work. And just because the Department decides to hire nigger cops doesn’t mean I—”

  “I don’t want a cut, no.” With Billy fidgeting and talking so quickly, McInnis made a point of being still, speaking slowly. “I just want you to stop getting yours in my territory. I know we go back, but I have a job to do and you need to respect that. Maybe I was inclined to look the other way before, but with people getting shot up, I can’t do that anymore.”

  Quick scowl, a good man deeply offended. “You talking about that shoot-out between your boys and Malley’s at Phelps Telephone? I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You say making a little extra bread is harmless, but I recall Slater saying something similar awhile back. Funny how kickbacks can eventually lead to homicide.”

  “Don’t lump me in with that son of a bitch.”

  “Bottom line, I have ten officers who stick to their beat. I need you and everyone else, including Slater, to stick to yours.”

  “He ain’t scared of them, Mac.”

  “Maybe he should be a little scared of them. Maybe he should be a little scared of me.”

  A nearby cat or two made downright beastly sounds to break the long silence.

  “You saying you’d use your cops to try to nail white cops? You actually proposing that?”

  Doing so, McInnis knew, would violate so many cultural mores that it would be career suicide. And maybe even actual suicide. But perhaps he could bluff them into believing he was just crazy enough to try it. He was aided by the fact that, a few years ago, he in fact had led a sting into a numbers running scheme that had been operated by several cops. That investigation—which he’d never asked for, but it had been assigned to him, so he’d done his job—had led to the arrests of a handful of officers and the firing of a few more. It also led to him being hated by most members of the force and exiled to the Butler Street Y. If anyone could be believed to be crazy enough to lay another sting for dirty cops, it was McInnis.

  “I’m not going to let other cops shit in my territory and make me and my officers look bad. Now I’ve asked you, politely. If that doesn’t work, there are other tools at my disposal.” Then he turned and said good night, walking back to his car.

  “You can threaten all you want, Mac,” Logan called across the street. “You can’t change the natural order of things.”

  “Let’s talk about it over lunch sometime.” Realizing that would never happen. “But in a different neighborhood. Because I don’t want to see you in this one ever again.”

  24

  L
ATE MORNING, THE house quiet with Cassie and the kids out at a park, Rake read the paper and enjoyed the solitude. An American minesweeper had become the first US ship sunk in the Korean conflict; Joe McCarthy was insisting on a more thorough investigation into the Communist infiltration of the top echelons in American government; and officials announced that the mysterious explosions in a Brooklyn neighborhood, initially feared to be a Red attack, had in fact been caused by a gas leak. Then the phone rang.

  “Is this Rakestraw, the cop?” A man on the line, whispering.

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “You interested in who beat up that colored fella on Oak Lane?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Sorry, I ain’t leaving no name. That’s why I’m calling you at home and not your station.” The whispering had seemed urgent at first, but Rake realized now that the man was disguising his voice, less a whisper than a hoarse gasp. This could have been a total stranger or someone Rake crossed paths with every day. “I saw it happen.”

  Rake reached for a pencil. “What did you see?”

  “Three fellas in Klan robes. One of ’em had what looked like a two-by-four. Some plank of wood or something.”

  “Baseball bat, maybe?”

  “No. Didn’t look that round.”

  The caller must have been very close to the attack, to discern that difference.

  “Why don’t you want to leave your name, sir?”

  The man laughed, deeper this time, accidentally betraying elements of his real voice. “You want people like that to come after you? I sure don’t. Look, I didn’t need to pick up the phone, so if you don’t really—”

  “Please don’t hang up. Were they on foot or in a vehicle?”

  “It was a sedan. White, I think? Or maybe tan? It was dark out, and the closest light wasn’t working or something.”

  Which was true: that one light had shattered and the city had yet to fix it. Unusual for this neighborhood, and enough to make Rake wonder if the attackers had come by the night before to throw rocks at the bulb.