“ ‘Shut him down,’ that’s our goal?” Boggs asked. “He’s racked up a heck of a body count for us to settle for shutting him down.”
“I agree, and if I felt I could get the Department to seriously look at him, I would. We can keep gathering evidence and hold on until a prosecutor cares enough to make another case against corrupt officers. In the meantime, we’ve shown him that it’s going to be too much trouble for him to start another operation.”
“What if you’re wrong, and he does start taking cuts from Feckless?” Boggs asked.
“Then we pounce,” McInnis said. “Meantime, I’ll get on the line with the prosecutor and do whatever I can, without giving away much about our source. And if you have reason to suspect this Quentin Neale killed Forrester and Crimmons, you need to find him. Did Malcolm tell you anything about how they handle their deliveries?”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
Once they were outside and a safe distance from the Y, Boggs stopped on the sidewalk and asked Smith, “When did you learn all this about Feckless and Malcolm?”
“Sitting watch with him last night.”
“There’s more you didn’t tell McInnis.”
“That’s right.” Smith tried to convey that Boggs was wandering into dangerous territory. “There are things he can’t know.”
“What about me, your partner?”
Maybe he’d been a fool to think he could keep anything from Boggs while working with him so closely. Perhaps he’d been a fool to tell McInnis anything. If he really wanted to protect Malcolm from the consequences of what he’d done, he’d need his partner’s help.
Smith asked, “We trust each other, right? I can rely on you?”
“Of course you can.”
“The shooter from the night at the telephone factory? The one camped out across the street? It was Malcolm.”
After Smith sketched out the details, Boggs shook his head. “That’s murder, Tommy. Family or not, we can’t bury a murder.”
“Can’t we? Didn’t you do that once? I helped you then, didn’t I?”
Boggs didn’t seem to appreciate the reference to a horrible night they’d shared two years ago, when they were rookies. “That was different. This isn’t self-defense we’re talking about.”
“He says it was an accident, and besides, no one can prove anything. No one saw him.”
“Where’s the rifle?”
“Where no one can ever find it. I made sure of that.”
He’d never realized how big Boggs’s eyes could get. “You did?”
“Like I said, I only figured this out last night. Then I come home and barely two hours later he’s arrested for the theft, which I know he didn’t do. He hadn’t had a chance to get rid of the gun yet, so I had to do it for him.”
“You had to? You had to obstruct justice? Do you hear what you’re saying?”
“Don’t you quote the criminal codes to me, preacher’s son. Or the Bible. Aren’t you the one who was telling me how special family is? Aren’t you marrying a girl who got mixed up in this same kind of thing?”
Boggs’s jaw dropped but he couldn’t seem to find words to fill the space. Finally he said, “She didn’t commit murder, Tommy. Good God, don’t you see the difference?”
“Maybe I do see the difference, and I’m tired of how much better it looks from where you’re standing! I hate what he did, Lucius. All right? I hate that he got mixed up with that nonsense and I hate that he pulled the goddamn trigger on someone. And I know we hear all kinds of bullshit, but what he was telling me about only getting involved because he couldn’t find a real job, and wanting to get back out as soon as he can—I don’t know if I believe that, but he does. Now, it’s bad enough he’s gotta sit in jail for this bullshit robbery, but if he gets a murder charge added to it? I’m not taking chances with my brother-in-law’s life. If the choice is letting him walk for a murder or having him killed in jail, then yes, I’m letting him walk.”
They stared at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment.
“Tommy . . . Are you honestly proposing we let him get away with what he did?”
“I’m saying I’ve already made my decision. So now you get to decide whether or not you’re going to go after him, and get me charged with obstruction while you’re at it.”
“That’s not fair. We’re in this together.”
That phrase had never sounded so meaningless.
“Are we? Are we together, Lucius?”
45
AFTER HIS SHIFT, Rake drove in circles throughout his neighborhood, partly to see if there was any more activity and partly because he wasn’t sure what his next move should be. Already today, both Coyle and Dale had threatened him with the same thing: talking about his own involvement if he dared arrest either of them. He’d allowed himself to be compromised. The weapons usually at his disposal had been rendered useless.
He finally stopped by a pay phone near the park and called Dale.
“I know who sent you to beat up Letcher. It was your buddy Delmar Coyle.” He waited a few seconds for it to register. “He’s not your friend, Dale. He used you as a pawn, because he knew you’d fall for it.”
He explained the rest, reveling in Dale’s silence and empty denials, his expression of shock that someone he thought was an ally could do that to him.
“You don’t believe me? Fine. Go talk to him yourself.” He gave him Coyle’s address and hung up.
Three hard knocks and the plumber’s door opened. Thames looked alarmed to see Rake, but that may have been because Rake had nearly punched a hole in the door.
“Can I help you, Officer?”
“Yeah, I need help dislodging some shit. Yours.”
“Excuse me?”
He looked over Thames’s shoulder but couldn’t see enough to know if his wife was in.
“You were not broken into yesterday. Own up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about your master plan to abscond with money belonging to the community. Including some belonging to me.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“You staged the break-in and made a false statement to police. You made another false statement this morning when you ID’d the Greers as the thieves. That’s a serious offense, especially considering that two innocent people are in jail because of it.”
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You framed them. And if you’re too much of a coward to admit it, I will prove it by the end of the week, because you’re a damn fool and your accomplices left behind plenty of clues.” A bluff, but one he hoped would goad the plumber into talking. As Parker had pointed out, Rake had no evidence other than the fact that glass had fallen the wrong way, and, worse, no officer had taken any pictures of it. He needed Thames to believe he was on the verge of arrest. “Unfortunately for you, I live here, and I take what happens in my backyard seriously, so I’ll be doing the real detective work. If you want to make things easy on yourself, now is your chance to confess.”
Thames looked scared. That might—might—have been because he had an angry cop on his doorstep, but Rake chose to believe it was the guilty kind of fear. Thames now understood that not everyone had been conned by his get-rich-quick scheme.
After a long silence, Thames said, “I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”
“Sure. You have one day to turn yourself in, Mr. Thames, or you’re looking at serious jail time and an entire neighborhood full of people who’ll want to see you punished, severely. As you know, I live one block away, and I excel at punishing people. You have a good night’s rest.”
46
“ARE YOU JEREMIAH Tanner?”
Jeremiah had just finished his supper of hamburger and a Coke at a diner around the corner from the Rook when a Negro policeman walked in from the street and straight up to him. The policeman looked a few years older than himself, his skin a shade lighter, and his uniform was crisp, like the
shirt was mere minutes from its latest date with an iron. Brass buttons shone, as did the badge at his breast and the crest on his perfectly centered cap.
“Yes.”
“I’m Lucius Boggs. I think we should talk.”
“Officer Lucius Boggs,” Jeremiah corrected. Who possessed some of the straightest and whitest teeth Jeremiah had ever seen on a Negro. He took off his cap and sat down opposite Jeremiah, folding his hands on the table almost as if in prayer. His nails were uncracked.
Jeremiah quoted, “One’s pride will bring him low, but he who is lonely in spirit will obtain honor.”
“Proverbs. Yeah, I heard you knew your Bible. Well, my father’s a preacher, so there’s nothing I haven’t heard. Any lesson or quote, it’s been imprinted in my skull.” He tapped the side of his head with one of those perfectly manicured fingers. He was one of those front-pew Negroes, his mama with a wide-brimmed hat she bought at some Auburn Avenue milliner, cost enough money to have clothed Jeremiah’s whole family for a year, and his daddy passing around the collection plate, money for their clothes and jewelry and watches, not to mention their house and car. The Lord had been good to them, so much better than to others.
“We went to Pentecostal Holiness,” Jeremiah said.
“I know the place.”
“Probably think we were all snake-stompin’ fools, right? That what you high rollers call it?”
“Just different ways of worshipping.”
“Yeah. How I worship, I try to do good things. Try to remember He looking over my shoulder, telling me, Jeremiah, there is a path. You got to find it and walk it and not be led astray.”
Boggs nodded slowly, like he was trying to understand.
“Jeremiah,” Boggs said in a voice that meant We’re changing the subject now, “you know why I’m here.”
But do you know I have a revolver in my pocket, Officer Boggs? Do you know that the bullets Officer Tall gave me have since been put into the chamber, by myself? Do you know which pocket the gun’s in? Do you know how close your forehead is to the barrel?
“Do I?”
“Yes,” Boggs said. “You do.”
This was how Boggs’s life worked: for days he’d been hoping to find Jeremiah, without success, and then tonight when he and Smith needed to get to another part of the city quickly, who should he happen to see through the window of a diner? He had stopped on the sidewalk involuntarily, knowing he didn’t have time for this. Feckless’s shipment was due to the stash location in Summerhill in two hours, if Malcolm’s information was correct. But Boggs couldn’t walk past Jeremiah. He’d told Smith to give him a minute; Smith stayed outside, observing the exchange through the window, should the need for assistance arise.
But what could he reasonably expect of Smith anymore? He was still reeling from what Smith had said about disposing of a murder weapon for Malcolm. Was this who they’d become? He couldn’t believe that they, of all people, were working around the law. For decades Atlanta Negroes had policed themselves, taking important matters to their preachers or business leaders for adjudication, or settling disagreements with their fists. Those days were supposed to be over now, thanks to Boggs and Smith and their colleagues. It was their job to step in and help their community, to solve problems using the law. Yet Smith was helping Malcolm conceal a crime, and he’d given Boggs similarly illicit advice about Jeremiah, recommending that Boggs find a way to “remove” Jeremiah from the situation.
Now Boggs found himself face-to-face with his adversary. He said, “You need to stay away from Julie.”
A charged moment of eye contact. Then Jeremiah looked away again. “She’s got my boy.”
“You need to stay away from him, too.”
“Says you?”
“Yes, says me. I can give you lots of different reasons to choose from. The legal reason is, she signed a restraining order after you busted into her house, and that order means you’ll get arrested just for getting near her, you understand?”
Jeremiah grinned. Boggs had grown accustomed to that damn grin, the one so many men wore when they were hearing things they didn’t like and couldn’t stop. Boggs continued, “And the moral reason is that boy. He doesn’t need to see you. Doesn’t need to see what you became and where you’ve been. He deserves a chance, deserves to believe he can be anything and do anything. He shouldn’t have to think he comes from the gutter.”
The grin was gone but Jeremiah still wasn’t looking Boggs’s way. The tabletop and whatever was happening on the sidewalk outside seemed to hold more interest for him.
“Some folks call it the gutter. Some call it the alley. Some call it Darktown. We can’t help where we born, Officer Lucius Boggs.”
“But we can help what we do. You chose to run with the crowd you ran with. You chose to steal—from the military, of all places, with a war on. You had a job that paid and you went and ruined it, so you could look big to a group of fools.”
“Easy for you to say, preacher’s son.”
“Don’t give me that. Two of my fellow officers grew up on that same block. They didn’t turn out like you did, so don’t blame your address. Blame your choices.”
Eye contact again. “What else Julie tell you about me?”
Even though she was the subject of this conversation, Boggs didn’t even want to hear her name on his lips. “She didn’t say that, your record does. I’ve seen the files, read the transcripts.”
“What the white people say.” Jeremiah rearranged himself again. At first he’d been fidgeting, reaching for a packet of sugar and then dropping it back on the table, at one point scratching at the stubble on his chin. But now he was very still. His threadbare coat hung open, a white undershirt beneath it, dirty and yellowed in places. His left hand fell to his side and his right rested in his lap, both blocked from Boggs’s view by the table.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“There a law against having my hand in my lap?”
Boggs very slowly leaned back so that the table would not be an obstacle if he needed to reach for the gun in his holster. More forcefully now: “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Jeremiah lifted his hands, both of which were empty, and he held them there a moment, palms up, like a preacher beseeching the Lord to help him deal with the madness here on earth. Then he let them fall to the table.
“You may have been let off for Isaiah’s murder, but you still did plenty. So if I were you—”
“I paid my debts.”
“I were you, I would think about all those other cities that aren’t Atlanta. I would think of all the opportunities you might find if you weren’t in a town where the people who know you suspect that you killed your own brother. I would think this is the perfect time for you to start over, clean the slate.”
“Officer Lucius Boggs wants me gone.”
Hearing his name said that way reminded him, in a sickening way, of how Julie had done the same when they’d first met. She’d called him by that full, official name, in a singsong way that fell between mocking and flirting. Hearing Jeremiah use all three words, mimicking her without even realizing it, left Boggs cold.
“What I want is no trouble. You’ve done your time and I respect that. But I don’t see any reason to think you’re suddenly going to become an upstanding fellow. You have a job? You have a place?”
Jeremiah eyed him again. “Boy is my son.”
“Not anymore. You forfeited that right.”
“Never seen anything about that in the Bible. Never heard Jesus say a man forfeits his child.”
“There are cold hard facts you need to accept. There are consequences to your actions.”
“That boy, he’s a consequence to an action.” He eyed Boggs again, some viciousness there that hadn’t been visible before. “An action between two people, neither of ’em you.”
Boggs leaned forward. “You want to get dirty, now? That make it sit better with you? That give you the satisfaction you can’t get anywhe
re else? All right, Jeremiah. You had something, something good, and you lost her. But you talk dirty ’bout her one more time, you’ll be picking yourself up off the sidewalk an hour later.”
The viciousness still glinted in Jeremiah’s eyes. He held his head at a jaunty angle, his chin low, looking almost sideways at Boggs. “Been talking ’bout five minutes and now you get to the threats. Surprised it took you so long.”
Maybe Tommy was right: there was only one language a man like this spoke, and Boggs had been wrong to waste those first five minutes. He leaned back again, slowly, hoping it conveyed power and assurance, but worried it merely showed that he wasn’t sure what to do next.
“I hope I’ve made myself clear.”
“Maybe I like Atlanta,” Jeremiah said. No way was he going to give this traitorous house Negro the satisfaction of thinking he could be intimidated. “Maybe my old friends want me to work with them still.”
“That would be a mistake.”
“Maybe you ain’t the only cop I know.”
“Oh, you’re gonna sic the white cops on me? You think that scares me?”
No, Officer Lucius Boggs, the white cops are gonna sic me on you.
“Maybe it should.”
And maybe I should scare you, Officer Lucius Boggs. Maybe Julie should scare you. Yes, her. Because now I know your weakness, now I know what you fear. You fear sin. You are surrounded by it, and you have invited it into your family, so let’s see how you like realizing that.
Intrigued, Boggs said, “You know a lot about white cops, don’t you? Like Slater. What can you tell me about him?”
Jeremiah looked even less comfortable than before. He sat up straighter. “I don’t know.”
“But you know the man, don’t you? You and your brother were working for him.”
“I don’t know.”
“When the feds stepped in, everyone got arrested, but they let the dirty cop walk. How did that make you feel?”
Lightning Men Page 33