by David Fulmer
The circle of uniforms shifted and Joe caught sight of the victim, lying on his back on the alley bricks, his thick arms splayed out. Logue was dressed in his street clothes and wore no overcoat.
“Any suspects?” Joe said.
“What do you think?” Albert said, and eyed Joe narrowly. “Did you get to talk to him?”
“I didn’t,” Joe said. “I only had last night to track him down and he wasn’t around.”
“Looks like he was on his way to getting a bullet between the eyes.” Albert’s voice was flat. They watched the activity around the body for a silent half minute.
Joe said, “He’s dead because of Jesse Williams, Al.”
“You know what I can’t stand?” the detective said abruptly. “I can’t stand these fellows who spend a few months walking a beat and then think they’re detectives.”
Joe laughed shortly as Albert pulled his packet of Chesterfields from a pocket. He offered one to Joe, who refused. The detective lit his cigarette, coughed, and blew a thin cloud. “You want to play cop?” he said. “How about that theft out in Inman Park? Why don’t you play cop with that one?”
Joe waited a moment before saying, “She came around the hotel last night.”
The detective turned to look at him. “And?”
“And we didn’t talk about it.”
Albert came up with a lazy smile. “Too busy with other matters?” He puffed on his cigarette, and the smile evaporated. “You know you’re out of your damn mind, messing with her right now.”
Joe gave a bleak nod.
“Did she snatch those jewels?”
“I don’t know.” The detective treated him to a hard stare. “I don’t.”
“She was there and you didn’t think to ask her?”
Joe avoided his friend’s eyes.
“Uh-huh,” Nichols said. “Well, you might want to do it. Because if it was her, it’s going to bite you, too. The Captain’ll see to it. That’s why he brought you in yesterday.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Joe said. “But she didn’t take those goods, Al. She knows better.”
“Because you taught her?”
“I explained some things.”
Albert nodded slowly. “Well, maybe she just happened to be working there. It still don’t look good.”
Joe said, “I know.”
“So?”
“So I’ll talk to her.”
The detective regarded him for another second, then turned his attention back to the busy scene around the body. A photographer was bending down, snapping pictures on a box camera, the flash powder popping white in the gray morning.
“What about him?” Joe said. “You know his story?”
The detective coughed into his hand, then said, “There ain’t much. He was from somewhere around Smyrna. Worked as a sheriff’s deputy up there for a couple years, but they couldn’t put up with his drinking and ran him off.”
“And he came to Atlanta?”
“That’s right.” Albert paused. “What I heard was that was the Captain’s doing. He got him hired.”
Joe was surprised. “When was that?”
“Ten or eleven years ago. He never did much of a job, but he never made any trouble, either. Never bothered anybody. He took care of the bag down here. Or he was supposed to. He couldn’t ever get it right, with the drinking and all. He’s just one of Jackson’s boys, just waiting to get his twenty in.”
“You know where he stayed?” Joe said.
Albert tapped some ash away. “He kept a room in a house on Cain Street. At the corner of Walton.”
“Anything else?” Joe said.
Albert shook his head.
“It ain’t much.”
“That’s all I have, and it’s all you’re gonna get,” the detective said snappishly. He waved his free hand in abrupt anger. “This is police business, goddamnit!”
Joe said, “He shot Williams, Al. And now he’s dead.”
Nichols wasn’t having any of it. “Don’t you have other things to worry about?” he said. “Like what your friend Pearl Spencer was doing in that mansion right about the time a bunch of jewelry went missing.” He flicked what was left of his cigarette into the gutter and made his way back into the alley to join the crowd of cops that had circled the body of Officer Logue again.
Joe got the message and turned to leave. As he walked off, he happened to glance across the street to see Lieutenant Collins slouching against the fender of an APD sedan, smoking a cigarette of his own and gazing calmly back at him. He stopped at the next corner and looked back. Collins had moved away from the automobile, crossed the street, and was stepping up to tap Albert Nichols on the shoulder.
Joe kept going, cutting between the closed-down 91 Theatre and Ike Clein’s billiard hall and into Schoen Alley. He climbed the stairs and knocked, and the thin whore Martha let him in without a word of greeting.
A different pair of rounders sat at the table, drinking short glasses of whiskey and playing penny-ante poker with a dirty deck of cards. Martha looked morose and weary as she sipped from a cracked coffee cup. Her mourning had started early. There was no sign of any of those characters who had sworn to Joe that they’d come join the vigil, but then they were a late-rising crowd.
He stepped into the bedroom and found Little Jesse looking worse for the wear, his face gaunt and bone jutting, his eyes with a dead cast. Still, Jesse managed to rouse himself a little when Joe appeared, enough to ask about all the commotion out on the street. A couple fellows had been in and out jabbering about a dead cop.
Joe glanced toward the doorway to make sure no one was listening, then whispered that what he’d heard was true and that the dead cop was Logue.
Jesse was as astounded as a man in his condition could be, raising his head to croak, “Jesus! They know who done it?”
“They don’t,” Joe said. “Why? Do you?”
Jesse grimaced as he let himself down again. “How would I know that?” He wouldn’t meet Joe’s eyes. “Damn. Shot dead. That’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it?”
Joe agreed that it was. “So now what am I going to do?”
Jesse eyed him. “Whatchu mean?”
“The man you say shot you is dead.”
“I ain’t just sayin’ it. He sho’nuf done it.”
“Right,” Joe said. “And what I’m telling you is with him gone, I’ve got next to nothing. Robert Clark, maybe. But that’s all.” He paused. “Unless there’s something you haven’t told me.”
Little Jesse gazed at him, and Joe could see something going on in those dark eyes. Another second passed, and the gaze shifted away.
“You need to keep looking,” he said. “Maybe you can find out who it was shot that damn cop.”
“It ain’t that simple, Jesse.” Joe took a moment to settle his annoyance, then said, “Do you know something or don’t you? Because I don’t see where I can go from here.”
“You gonna let them get away with it?” Jesse treated Joe to a resentful glance. “Yeah, who cares if some cracker cop shoots another nigger? Is that what you mean to say?”
The talk outside the door ceased. Joe felt his skin prickle and his face get warm.
Jesse came up off his pillow, his gray face flushing with sudden emotion as he jabbed with a shaking finger. “You know that cop’s dead because of what he done to me, goddamnit! Now I’m layin’ here fixin’ to die and you say you can’t do nothin’ to make it right?”
Joe said, “All right. Calm down.” He could sense the silence and feel the stares from the doorway. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Well, I appreciate it, Joe.” Wearied by the outburst, he closed his eyes. “Willie comin’ ’round?” he asked momentarily.
“I’m sure he’ll be by later on,” Joe said.
Jesse’s mouth curled into a slight smile. “I hope so. He needs to get on up here and finish my song. So I can hear it ’fore I go.”
Joe heard movement and looked up to see Martha standing in the doo
rway, watching Jesse as if already pining his passing. Joe never got over his amazement at the kind of devotion the man in the bed inspired from his floozies.
He got up from his chair, leaving it to her.
The news about Logue had greeted Captain Jackson the minute he walked through the front doors. He listened in silence, then asked for Lieutenant Collins and was told he had gone to the crime scene. He sent a man to fetch him and when the lieutenant appeared a half hour later, the Captain waved him into his glasswalled office and asked for a report. Collins delivered the details of the crime, no frills, the way his superior liked it. Patrolman Logue was a victim of a homicide; as yet, there were no suspects and no apparent motive, other than a possible robbery.
After Collins finished, Captain Jackson didn’t say a word, keeping the blank and brooding look on his face, as if he hadn’t been listening. Collins had seen it before and knew to allow time for the information to sink into the Captain’s brain and digest.
The second hand on the clock finished its circuit. In an absent tone, the Captain said, “Any evidence at the scene?”
“No, sir, it’s clean.”
“What about witnesses?”
“No, sir, not yet,” Collins said. “I think it’s unlikely. The shooting occurred in the dead of night. And the body wasn’t discovered until early this morning.”
“Who’s down there now?”
“Sergeant Nichols is in charge,” Collins said. “He’s got—”
“Nichols?” Jackson seemed to come awake with a frown. “Who assigned him?”
“I did, sir. He’s our best—”
“He’s to be pulled off that duty,” the Captain cut in curtly. He snatched up his fountain pen. “Take care of it. Get him off and you take the lead. We don’t need it hanging around, so wrap it up.”
He didn’t wait for a response as he bent his head over some papers.
Detective Collins stepped out of the office with the clear understanding that while Captain Jackson didn’t care much who had murdered Logue or why, he did care who was managing the investigation. The Captain didn’t like Detective Sergeant Albert Nichols because Nichols was an honest cop. There was that, and his friendship with Joe Rose, a sly customer whom the Captain also despised.
As for Officer Logue, he was no loss, a hopeless drunk and sorry excuse for a police officer who would not be missed. The murder represented a problem solved.
Lieutenant Collins considered that Grayton Jackson was the coldest fish he had ever encountered, one who didn’t care for much beyond his own weird and narrow purview.
Collins mulled this as he stepped into the corridor, on his way out to relieve Nichols. Glancing back through the open office door, he caught sight of the Captain hunched over his desk, his jaw set in a steely clench as he gazed at a point in space. The rectangle of a face was cracked by a strange grin that reminded Collins of one of the ghastly comedy masks that was often carved on the facades of the theaters, paired with a tragic twin. The Captain’s face displayed that same cruel humor, and Collins was glad to have an excuse to escape it.
Joe was thinking about Pearl as he walked across town, recalling Albert Nichols’s testy suggestion that he talk to her about the Inman Park caper. He should have done it when he had her in his room, but Pearl, as always as slippery as a fish, had bewitched and hypnotized him and then escaped before he could get around to it.
Now, instead of heeding Albert’s advice, he was ambling merrily along on his way to do exactly what the detective had warned him not to do. He was heading in the wrong direction to study the wrong crime, doing Little Jesse Williams’s bidding instead of Albert Nichols’s. Though even Albert would have to admit that it wasn’t so simple to separate the two. The same night, within hours of each other, in fact, and Joe Rose was caught up in both. What were the odds?
Joe couldn’t believe it was coincidence that the policeman who shot Little Jesse had himself been murdered not two nights later, though he also knew it wasn’t a matter of revenge. The idea that some miscreant would try to even the score by killing a cop was ridiculous. Logue might have been a useless drunk, but he still wore a badge, and there was no quicker route to the gallows in the yard at Fulton Tower than to gun down an officer of the law. Jesse Williams did not have the kind of friends who would go that far. Not even his women would kill to avenge him.
The only thing that did make sense was that Logue had been murdered to keep him from talking about Little Jesse or from making another foolish try on his life. So had there been bad blood between Jesse and the drunken police officer? And if that was the case, why wouldn’t Jesse say? Why beg Joe to puzzle it out and then hold back information? What secret was he willing to carry to hell or whatever his next stop would be?
The questions kept mounting, and Joe realized that Jesse had hooked him into his grim little drama, but good. That was one thing; God only knew what would happen if he left Pearl to the Captain. The two of them had him coming and going.
He was running out of time, too. He didn’t know how long Jesse would last. The cops might already be well on their way to burying any evidence that might remain, right along with Officer J. R. Logue’s body. If he got too close and made the wrong person nervous, he could find himself charged with a crime. The burglary in Inman Park would do nicely.
He was in such an intense brood over all this that he got turned around and had to spend some time wandering the streets just west of downtown until he found the house where the late officer J. R. Logue had kept a room.
Albert Nichols was not surprised when Lieutenant Collins stepped up, looking sheepish, to inform him that he was being pulled off Officer Logue’s homicide. No more than he was when he arrived back at the detectives’ section to find a stack of file folders on his desk with a note on top directing him to review the contents of all of them for any leads that might have been overlooked.
It was a detective’s nightmare, a tedious scouring of other cops’ work for gaps or mistakes on cases that went back years, drudgery that would produce no results. Normally, the task would have been handed to the greenest rookie, if assigned at all. The detective was being punished for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. There wouldn’t be any chasing down leads on the shootings of Officer Logue and Little Jesse Williams. He was off that investigation, effective immediately; and as if to punctuate the message, whoever had carried the stack from the basement hadn’t bothered to dust it off.
He stole an idle glance around the room to see the detectives at the other desks conscientiously avoiding his gaze. It was like he had a mark painted on his forehead.
Captain Jackson’s office door was closed, and Albert figured that was a message meant for him, too. He was being pushed out into the cold. Not that he’d ever been welcome inside. The Captain didn’t like or trust him, a backhanded compliment. It said something if you could count a tyrant like Grayton Jackson as your enemy.
The detective stared numbly at the stack of musty folders for a few moments, then got up and wandered out into the hall. Gazing out the window at the trains rolling through Union Depot, he pondered this unpleasant turn of events, for which he could thank his old friend Joe Rose.
Joe located the house by asking a dirty-faced kid who should have been in school if he knew where a copper named Logue lived.
“You mean that whiskey head?” the kid said with a smirk, and pointed down the way.
The house was white clapboard, in good shape, standing solid on the corner of Cain and Walton streets, in the neighborhood to the west and below Peachtree Street. As Joe came up on it, he saw a neat ROOM FOR RENT sign attached to one of the porch columns. He made a quick survey of the intersection, then stepped onto the porch and went inside. The door on his right bore a number 1 and a little brass plate inscribed with the word MANAGER.
Joe knocked and waited. A woman of middle years opened the door. A bit on the fleshy side and handsome in the face, she sported wire-rimmed glasses and hair that was hennaed a dark red
.
“Good morning,” Joe said. “I’d like to see one of your rooms.”
Her gaze was cool and curious as she looked him up and down. “How long were you wanting to rent?”
“I don’t want to rent,” Joe said. “I just want to see inside one of them. Officer Logue’s.”
The landlady’s brow stitched. “What the hell are you talking about?” she said, her voice coming down a notch from polite to something closer to Joe’s native tongue.
“He’s dead,” Joe told her quickly. “They found his body this morning.”
The woman put her hands to the sides of her face. “Good lord!” she said. “The poor man! What happened?”
Her tidy apartment consisted of three rooms and a bath. She led him through the living room and into the small kitchen, where she waved for him to take a seat at the table. She poured him a cup of coffee from the pot percolating on the stove then topped her own. Though Joe wasn’t in the mood to sit, he knew he’d never get what he wanted if he didn’t accept the courtesy.
“You going to tell me your name, friend?” she asked as she sat down.
“It’s Joe,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Beverly Cotter. Mrs. Though the ‘mister’ is long gone. Thank god.” She regarded him more closely. “Joe Rose?” Surprised, he nodded. “I believe you used to be friendly with one of my girls. I never forget a face.”
Joe had already figured her for a madam. She had that look about her: kindly, but with iron in her backbone. A woman engaged in the commerce of sin who would go to church every Sunday morning. It was good news. She spoke his language and would know how to keep her mouth shut. At the same time, he could only trust her so far.
“So what happened to him?” she asked him.
“He was shot to death sometime last night,” Joe said.
“Where?”
“In an alley off Decatur Street.”
“Do they know who did it?”
“No. That’s why I’m here.”
She regarded him for another somber moment. “What’s your interest?” she said.