Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  “Whoa.” Reginald’s expression turned to the kind of cold blankness Lucius had seen on strangers while walking his beat, strangers who were about to throw a punch. “That’s out of line.”

  “You’re not holding your tongue about Julie.”

  “I’m talking about you. I want to make sure you’re doing this for the right reasons. That’s all.”

  “I am. I promise you that. She’s not a reclamation project. She’s everything.”

  A few quiet seconds passed, awkwardly, hands in their pockets, afraid to make a disturbance. All the while, despite how strongly he’d spoken, Boggs wondered if he was indeed making a terrible mistake. He couldn’t tell his brother about Jeremiah, at least not yet.

  “Then I’m glad she’ll be in the family,” Reginald said. And with that, he lifted his sweet tea in a toast. Lucius met the glass with his. After a pause, Reginald added, “I suppose Florence is getting a tad spoiled.”

  “I’m sorry I said that. You know I love her.”

  “It’s all right. You say that again, though,” and he theatrically puffed out his chest, adopting a mock tough-guy grimace, “and it’s fighting words, little brother.”

  Lucius laughed. “You’d lose that fight, office man.”

  Heading outside, Reginald asked if they had any idea who’d attacked Smith’s brother-in-law yet. Boggs admitted they didn’t, but he expressed hope that at least some of the white cops over there would insist on order.

  “Well, I hope that’s the last of it,” Reginald said. “It’s more than just housing, you know. A lot of money’s at stake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of our vice presidents, Clancy Darden, he’s also a big investor in real estate. He built up some lots over by the public housing on the West Side in the thirties. Anyway, this isn’t widely known, but he recently bought another big tract of open land northeast of Hanford Park. If the color line keeps shifting and Hanford Park becomes colored, he’ll get to build more houses for Negroes on that new land.”

  “Great.” Boggs still lived with his parents, saving money, but he desperately wanted a home for Julie and Sage. He had recently done some house shopping himself with a “realtist”—so called because Realtors didn’t admit colored members—but had been discouraged by the prices. The scarcity of housing for Negroes drove up the cost. If more houses, like the ones Darden wanted to build, became available, maybe Boggs could get a place after all.

  “But if white folks in Hanford Park fight back and that area stays all-white,” Reginald went on, “he’ll need to unload that land to white builders, probably for a lot less money.”

  Boggs hadn’t thought through the economic implications of the attack before. He thanked his brother for the tip.

  Hours later, at the end of an uneventful shift, Boggs called Records again and finally reached the one clerk who didn’t hate him on principle.

  “Evening, Sheila,” he said after recognizing her voice. “This is Officer Boggs.”

  “How you doing?”

  “Can’t complain. Still got a job.”

  “Hey, me, too. We must be doing something right. What can I get for you?”

  He had never met her, the only Records clerk who would dare help the Negro officers, so long as her colleagues weren’t listening. The third or fourth time they’d spoken, he’d learned her name, but that was all. She’d pulled a number of files for him over the years, most of them routine (if a white clerk actually doing her job when requested by a Negro officer could ever be considered “routine”), but some rather sensitive. She had won his trust, though still he knew to tread carefully. She only called him when the other clerks had stepped away, and she frequently rushed off the phone when one of them returned. He didn’t even know what she looked like.

  “I’m curious about the arrest records for a Jeremiah Tanner. He’s probably twenty-three or twenty-four. Recently got out of Reidsville and I need to know why.”

  She called him back fifteen minutes later.

  “I can have that file over to you tomorrow, but it might not have all you need. You’ll have to go to the G-men for that.”

  “Why?”

  “Mr. Jeremiah Tanner, who by the way is twenty-three but has a birthday coming up on November 2, got himself busted for stealing cigarettes off the trains.”

  “That’s a federal crime?”

  “It was in May of ’45. War was still on.” She was talking with something in her mouth, probably a cigarette. “Judging from some of the files of his colleagues here, he was part of a group that had been boosting from the trains while they worked on the freight lines at Pullman Yards. Some of what they’d looted were smokes from army cars headed to Fort Benning. APD did the arrests, but then the G-men must have heard army property was involved. Charged him with smuggling, theft from the military, and aiding and abetting the enemy.”

  Boggs almost laughed. “Aiding and abetting, are you serious?”

  “He plea-dealed his way out of that one but still got the five years.”

  “Who was the arresting officer?”

  “Eugene Slater.”

  Boggs knew the name: Slater had been friends with Rakestraw’s corrupt former partner, Dunlow. Based on association, Boggs figured Slater was just as involved in scams and grafts as Dunlow had been. Did Slater help arrest a gang of Negro smugglers because they weren’t paying him a cut, or because they were competing with a similar operation he’d been running?

  “Can you send that file over?” he asked.

  “Sure, but it’s a mess. All higgledy-piggledy.” He could hear her shuffling papers. “Oh, hello. Gets better. Looks like the fella they really wanted to arrest was one Isaiah Tanner, Jeremiah’s brother. But they never got to him, because he was killed first.”

  Boggs had asked Julie if there was anything else he needed to know, anything at all. The walls in this tiny basement seemed to be closing in on him. “Who killed him?”

  A pause as she exhaled, reading. “His murder is marked ‘Unsolved.’ Looks like Jeremiah was a suspect, but they never charged him or anyone else for it.”

  Julie told me Jeremiah wasn’t violent. She said she’d never been scared of him before. Had she missed something, or had she lied? He tried to make sense of this. Think beyond himself and Julie, ponder a move that might not make things worse for a change.

  He asked, “What was the name of the FBI agent heading the case?”

  27

  MIDAFTERNOON AND THE Rook looked closed. After Jeremiah knocked on the glass door, it opened and a tall, light-skinned Negro in a green sport coat and black tie shook his head at the mere sight of him.

  “We’re closed.”

  “I want to talk to Feckless. I’m an old friend. Jeremiah Tanner.”

  The man stared him down. “Wait here. And you do yourself a favor: call him Mr. Feck.” The man had some mild kind of accent, from a city Jeremiah didn’t know. “I only hear ‘Feckless’ from a few folks, and you ain’t one, understand?” He closed the door.

  Clouds had claimed the skies above Jeremiah, and he feared rain with the animalistic terror of one who has no roof, no change of clothes.

  The man returned with a flat expression, opening the door all the way. “Get in. This way.”

  Jeremiah followed a step behind, smelling wood cleaner, cigarette smoke, and a sour tang from the night before. The floors shining, the maroon-painted walls adorned with framed pictures of Negro boxers and entertainers, the ceiling itself a relief map of intricate plaster molding, the glass chandelier over the dance floor sparkling even with the lights off. A Negro owned this?

  “You stink, man.” The man cursed under his breath as he led Jeremiah to the gleaming bar, behind which stood a man he’d never seen looking so good. His hair was longer than Jeremiah remembered and combed back with pomade, sleek as any white man’s. His medium-toned skin somehow looked lighter than Jeremiah remembered it, but maybe that was just because it was so clean, well shaven but for the narrow musta
che above his curling smile. His eyes hazel, Jeremiah remembered that now, lending an almost feline power to his gaze.

  “Jeremiah Tanner. Been a long time.” He extended his hand. He wore a black-and-gray-checked blazer over a crisp white shirt and red tie knotted in some complicated kind of way.

  Jeremiah shook, conscious of the grime layering his fingers, and the funk the doorman had already commented on. Was there anything in his hair? Probably was.

  “This your place, huh?”

  “It is indeed. You came at the wrong time, though. Come by ’round midnight you want to see yourself a show. Ben Webster’s in town, taking some time off Ellington’s band to do a little tour of his own.”

  He could tell this was supposed to be impressive, so he nodded.

  “Sit down.” After Jeremiah had obeyed, perching himself atop a stool hewn from ash and topped with red satin, Feckless said, “You just got out, didn’t you?”

  “Few days ago.”

  “You hungry?”

  He did not feel hungry, he was hungry, to his very core. Hunger was all he’d been reduced to, a physical state so extreme it crowded out any emotion. He hadn’t felt anything in a day, maybe two. Since the jail slop he’d been give after his arrest at Julie’s house, he’d eaten not a single solid meal, begging scraps off some old acquaintances one night and even scavenging food from trash barrels that very morning. He had known hunger in prison, but, without a scheduled meal on the horizon, this was even yet worse, not only a constant sucking at his stomach but also a never-ending headache, a tremor in his limbs.

  “Leon, whip me up some scrambled eggs!” Feckless called out to an unseen helper.

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I don’t need to see a man starve to death in front of me, neither.”

  “Appreciate it.” He looked around the place, noticing that the sour-faced doorman was lingering by a pool table, out of earshot but watching. “This place is amazing. Ain’t been in something like this in . . . ever. Things worked out for you.”

  “Timing, son. I used to play drums in a ragtime band, before you knew me. Got me a refined sense of timing. Knowing when to make a move. Seemed to me, time was right to move out of our other business. And soon thereafter, it started falling apart.”

  He’d always wondered why Feckless hadn’t been arrested with the others. Maybe it was as simple as timing—when the FBI came along, it had been a few months since Feckless and Isaiah had parted ways. He couldn’t recall the reasons and had assumed there had been some falling-out between Feckless and his brother.

  “I moved my money into legitimate pursuits,” Feckless continued with his biography. “I invited your brother to do the same, matter of fact. But that wasn’t his style. He liked what y’all were doing, didn’t cotton to my crazy thoughts about going straight.”

  “No. Going straight don’t sound like him.”

  “His tragic flaw. See, that world we were in, it don’t get no bigger. If you want something on a higher level, you need to move into a new world. That, my old friend, requires the kind of boldness and thinking Isaiah did not possess.”

  A bald, heavyset Negro in a cook’s apron emerged from the kitchen with a plate of scrambled eggs and a heaping helping of grits. The plate held more food than Jeremiah had eaten in two days. Feckless filled a glass of water while Jeremiah tried not to shovel the food in as fast as he wanted to.

  “Funny seeing you again,” Feckless said. “Like seeing Isaiah, too, that’s how much y’all look alike. Like a vision from the grave.”

  He’d heard people say he and his brother had the same eyes, the same serious brow. He himself had never noticed any similarities, certainly not in their bodies, Jeremiah gangly and long, Isaiah broad and powerful.

  Feckless said, “Some folks say you killed him.”

  So there it was. “Yeah. I heard that a lot.”

  “Other folks say it was a cop, and you kept your mouth shut instead of telling on him.”

  “I never hurt my brother,” Jeremiah said after finishing the last bite. “I heard some folks say it was you. But I never believed that.”

  Feckless let that linger. “That’s good. Means you’re not here for some vengeance thing.”

  “No.”

  “One thing I’ve wondered, though. Lotta the old boys from that ring wound up dead. But you didn’t.”

  “Lord has bigger plans for me.”

  Feckless watched him for a second, in pure amazement, then burst out laughing. So hard his eyes watered.

  “Oh yeah, Pure-boy. It really is you. Big plans, all right.”

  When Feckless finally stopped laughing, and had taken a sip of water to wash down Jeremiah’s ridiculousness, Jeremiah asked, “I was wondering, you having this place and all, if there was anything I could do for you. I was a hard worker on the rail yards, before that other stuff. ’Fore I was led astray. And you being legitimate now, I was wondering, you know . . .”

  His voice trailed off as Feckless changed his expression into a hardened stare, so abruptly Jeremiah wondered if he’d missed something. This new, rougher-edged Feckless said, “You keeping silent all that time, I guess that sort of silence proves loyalty. That what you want me to think? That supposed to impress me? That your résumé?”

  “People can think what they want. Including you. I just need work, that’s all. If you don’t have nothing, that’s fine.” He stood up. “Thanks for the food, Les. Good seeing you.”

  He’d made it ten steps when Feckless said, “Hold up.” Then he addressed the big doorman. “Hey, Q, do me a favor and grab Pure-boy a mop. Might be we could put him to some use after all.”

  28

  BOGGS HAD KNOWN it was a problem when the FBI agent, reached on the phone, proposed meeting at the Rich’s lunch counter downtown. Now the reckoning had come.

  It had taken only one day but several phone calls to reach the agent who, according to Boggs’s secret helper in Records, had made the arrests that eventually led to Jeremiah Tanner’s imprisonment. He knew he couldn’t expect any help from the APD officer involved, Sergeant Slater, known for being a virulent racist. He was hoping the FBI man wouldn’t be quite so hostile.

  Boggs took an extra-deep breath as he entered Rich’s Department Store. He had shopped here only a few times. He and his family tried to buy what they needed from the Negro merchants in Sweet Auburn, where they were actually allowed to use dressing rooms and didn’t have to wait for white customers to be helped first regardless of how long they’d been waiting in line.

  He stifled a sneeze as he strode through the miasma of women’s perfumes at the cosmetics counter, then past the cases of jewelry, where he was watched very carefully indeed by the white clerks.

  The lunch counter was like a small diner grafted onto the side of the store, seven booths and a long L-shaped bar. Three of the booths were occupied by groups of women and some children, and at the bar sat one couple and three solo men. Boggs had never seen a photo of Special Agent Doolittle, who had quipped on the phone, “I’ll be the one who looks like an FBI agent,” and damn if he wasn’t right. He sat nursing a coffee and staring at a newspaper spread regally beside him, as if he had no qualms about taking up the space for three people. He was a particularly pale white man with dark hair combed to the side, slick with whatever product white men used. His suit charcoal gray, his tie black with three diagonal white stripes, he also would have been correct had he predicted, I’ll be the one who looks like a funeral director.

  Boggs was making his approach when the woman behind the counter snapped, “Hey, you can’t come in here!”

  Special Agent Doolittle looked up from his paper, confused. He glanced first at the irate waitress, then made eye contact with Boggs, who leaned closer to the FBI man, keeping his feet a more respectable distance away.

  “I’m Boggs. As you can see, we’re going to have to talk somewhere else.”

  Doolittle stared at Boggs. The entire room was watching them.

&nb
sp; “You need to leave!” the woman shouted at Boggs, louder than before. A waiter was hurrying their way.

  Doolittle held up his hand to stop them from their energetic enforcement of Jim Crow decorum. Still regarding Boggs, his face calm and unreadable, he said, “I just started my coffee. I’ll meet you outside in a few minutes.”

  Boggs stood outside the Broad Street entrance, trying not to look like a loiterer who might deserve the attention of a passing beat cop. He loathed coming downtown, where simply standing was cause for white people’s concern.

  Groups of secretaries skirted by on lunch break, fedoras bobbed as three men laughed at inside jokes, taxis dropped off and picked up identical fares. Nearly everyone smoked. A white man in a GI uniform almost bumped into Boggs. He hadn’t seen a man in an Army uniform in many months. Judging from the national news, the drama in Korea, it may become a more common sight again, which seemed hard to believe.

  After a good fifteen minutes, Doolittle finally emerged, stopping just at the border of what would have been too close.

  “So you’re Officer Boggs.” He paused. “You didn’t sound Negro on the phone.”

  “How do I sound now?”

  “Now I don’t so much focus on the voice as the face.”

  Had Boggs expected anything better? Doolittle spoke in a flat, midwestern accent of some kind. If anything, Boggs’s experiences with non-Southerners in the army had been even more awkward, as such men weren’t used to being so close to Negroes and were unclear as to the most effective ways to demonstrate their dominance.

  “I was hoping you could tell me a few things about Jeremiah and Isaiah Tanner.”

  “Let’s walk.” They headed south then turned on Peachtree, toward Five Points. Cars honked horns and streetcar brakes squealed as vehicles sat bumper to bumper. Clouds of exhaust and cigarette smoke marred the otherwise crystalline autumn sky. An enormous billboard reminded them that they’d feel better if they drank a Coca-Cola, Atlanta’s chief export to the world. “I was wondering why an Atlanta cop would want to revisit that case. Now I suppose it makes a bit of sense.”