by David Fulmer
A few minutes before six o’clock, a jailer appeared to unlock the cell.
“Let’s go, Rose,” he said.
“Go where?”
“Captain wants to see you.”
“What about him?” Joe said, gesturing to Sweet.
“He ain’t none of your business,” the jailer said. “Now let’s go.”
They took him two floors up to the end of a hallway and into a windowless interrogation room with a heavy door, the kind that would mute shouts, cries, and moans. Inside, the Captain and a thick-bodied young man wearing corporal’s stripes on the sleeves of his uniform were waiting. A table had been pushed against the side wall, and two of the three wooden chairs had been shoved into the corner. The third one remained in the center of the floor.
The Captain was leaning against the back wall, his arms folded across his chest. The corporal, a little shorter than his superior but as thick as a barrel across the middle, slouched in the corner on Joe’s right, an immobile lump, though Joe had no doubt the man could snap out of his crouch and be on him. He had seen the type before, a hard case with the kind of dead eyes that revealed nothing save a talent for delivering serious pain or worse. Gun bulls who had been on the job too long had that same look, a general statement that they would crush a man or an insect with an equal amount of efficiency of emotion. All of them had wretched histories that they paid back every waking day.
Captain Jackson nodded curtly to the chair. Joe sat down. The Captain stared at him for almost a half minute, the gaze fixed somewhere past him. Joe waited. Finally, without moving a muscle except for those around his mouth, Jackson said, “Your gal steal those jewels?”
“What gal is that?” Joe inquired. In the heartbeat’s pause that ensued, he realized he had made a mistake. The next thing he knew, he was sideways, the left side of his head had collided with the floor, and stars were exploding behind his eyes.
The corporal had apparently been instructed to listen for just such a gambit, and had come out of the corner in one large stride to smack Joe with a hand as broad and thick as a beefsteak, knocking him out of the chair. Instinctively, he curled into a ball. When his vision cleared, he saw that the corporal had retreated into the corner, slumping and yawning as if nothing had happened.
Captain Jackson was regarding him with a flat expression. “Get up,” he said. “We’re going to try it again.”
Joe rose to one knee, his ears still buzzing. After a few seconds, he righted the chair and pushed himself into it, blinking to clear his head.
“She got those jewels?” the Captain said in exactly the same tone of voice.
“If she does, she didn’t tell me so,” Joe said.
“What did she tell you?” the Captain said. “You didn’t spend all your time in that room at the Hampton fucking, did you?”
Joe wasn’t surprised that they’d been watching. It made him wonder why they hadn’t come after the two of them sooner.
“She’s got a story about what happened that night,” he said.
“She does, does she?” the Captain said. “And you believe it?” He stopped and his thin lips barely curled. “She’s a fine-looking piece for a colored gal. And I’d guess that once she spreads them legs, you’d believe just about anything she says. Wouldn’t you?” He studied Joe for a grudging moment. “All right, let’s hear this story of hers.”
Joe said, “She got hired on to work at the Christmas party.”
“I know that part.”
“One of the other girls passed her a note. She thought it was from me.”
“Was it?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Then where’d it come from?”
“Some fellow handed it to the other girl outside. It was dark and she couldn’t make out his features.”
“What did this note say?”
“For her to go down to the basement and unlock the outside door.”
“And that’s what she did.”
“She thought it was from me.” Joe felt his face reddening. “So . . . yes, she . . . she did it.”
The Captain said, “So she gets this note and goes downstairs, thinking you wanted to get in and rob the home. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Except for the last part,” Joe lied.
The Captain cocked his head. “What about the last part?”
“She thought it was me, but she figured I just wanted let in to see . . . to meet her.”
Jackson shifted his weight from one leg to the other, his first sign of life, and came up with a smile that was cold and jagged. He said, “You telling me that she thought it an invitation to go down to the basement to meet you for a quick fuck? Do I have that right?”
“She didn’t know I was in town, so it—”
“I didn’t ask if she knew you were in town,” the Captain snapped. “What I did ask was did she think the note was an invitation to go down to the basement to meet you for a fuck.”
Joe said, “I guess that could be true.” As he hoped, the Captain was too caught up in the fuck part to catch his falsehood.
“All right, then,” Jackson said. “She goes downstairs with her drawers all wet, ’cause she thinks she’s about to get some Indian dick, and unlocks the door, expecting you to be standing there with a hard-on.”
“We call it a totem pole,” Joe said.
He had the sense not to crack a smile and wait to see if the Captain or the corporal did. It would have been a long wait; both policemen held their dead stares. He might as well have delivered the quip to two blocks of Georgia pine.
“See, I don’t know . . . I’m not sure if I’m Indian or not,” he offered lamely.
“Expecting you to be standing there with a hard-on,” the Captain repeated, as if he hadn’t heard a word.
Joe nodded, in one crazy corner of his brain thinking, Yes, pretty much like your wife did that day, knowing that if he was insane enough to actually make such a crack, he’d never get out of there alive.
“But you claim you weren’t around,” the Captain continued.
“That’s right. Nowhere near.”
“Where were you at the time?”
“I was at the Ace Club in Lime Row. With a young lady.”
The Captain’s eyebrows hiked. “Is that so? Is this young lady around to provide you with an alibi?”
Joe said, “I don’t know where she is.”
“Uh-huh.” The Captain stared. “So after Miss Spencer sees you ain’t there, she goes back in, but instead of locking the door, she leaves it the way it is. Why would she do that?” He seemed to be thinking out loud, and turned to the corporal, as if the dullard might illuminate him on this point. When the patrolman didn’t offer any comment, he said, “That was how the perpetrator got in, then. We checked. The butler recognized every person that came through the front door, and they all had invites. So it sounds to me like Miss Pearl Spencer’s an accomplice.”
Now he unfolded, bending down, laying his hands on his knees, and getting on eye level with Joe, fixing him with a cold, green gaze. Unconsciously, Joe drew away.
“You know I can keep her locked up as long as I want,” the Captain said, his eyes brightening. “And I think I’ll do that. I’m going to hold her until you come up with something I can use. You can do that, seeing as you’re a goddamn detective now.” His snicker sounded like an icicle breaking. “And if you don’t deliver, and I mean quick, I’ll just hand her over to our male inmates for the evening. If I still don’t get results, then I’ll introduce her to Corporal Baker here.” He tilted his head in the corporal’s direction. “He needs some amusement. And that brother of hers? We’ll put a charge on him. Aiding and abetting, maybe. He’ll go to Milledgeville and this time he won’t come back. You won’t see either one of them for a long time, and when you do, I can guarantee you won’t like it. You know what ten years of hard time can do to a man? Or a woman?” He stared at Joe another few seconds, then straightened. “You’ve got twenty-four hours to come up wit
h something.” He started to move toward the door.
“Why me?” Joe demanded, and then flinched, expecting the corporal to be on him.
The Captain stopped and his cold smile came back. “Why you?” he said. “Because you deserve it, that’s why. You’re a no-good thief. You’ve been getting away with stealing from decent folks in this city for too long. Because you keep going into places you don’t belong. Because you went and stuck your nose in police business over some goddamn pimp. Because you put your goddamn totem pole up a woman who’s guilty as hell. Because I told you what I wanted, and you still came here empty-handed. Because you don’t cooperate. That’s why you.”
He straightened to his full height and took a moment to tug at the lapels of his jacket as if he was adjusting a suit of armor.
“Now I’m going to cut you loose,” he said. “And the next time I see you, you better have something. You can run, but you’ll be leaving Miss Spencer and her brother to me. And your friend Sergeant Nichols. Him, too. You understand?”
With that, he turned away and marched out. As soon as the door slapped closed behind him, Corporal Baker took two strides and swung his other hand, this time catching Joe on the left side of the head and knocking him out of the chair again. A reward for his insolence toward the Captain, he had seen this one coming and still couldn’t avoid it. As he lay there with his head vibrating, the cop walked out the door, leaving him to get up on his own power.
The two turnkeys who had brought him there were waiting outside to grab his arms and escort him downstairs. As they passed through the first-floor lobby on the way to the back door, he saw Albert lurking a few steps down one of the corridors. Apparently, the detective had gotten word that he was there and had shown up to make sure he wasn’t murdered in his cell. Joe felt a thump in his chest at this unexpected kindness and made a move to call out, but Albert gave a sharp warning shake of his head and quickly turned away.
After they finished with Rose, the Captain told Corporal Baker to go fetch the car, bring it around back, and wait. Baker did not ask how long he would be waiting, or where they would be going. Baker never asked about anything. It was one of the things the Captain liked about him.
Once the corporal went away, Jackson descended the back stairs to the basement and negotiated several corridors to reach the guard’s desk. The officer on duty turned over the keys without hesitation and directed the Captain to the cell at the end of the row.
Pearl heard the footsteps approaching. The bolt slid back and the door swung open, creaking with rust.
“Good evening, Miss Spencer.” The Captain stood staring at her for a long moment. “I just had a nice talk with that friend of yours, Mr. Rose,” he said, and then stepped into the cell and closed the door behind him.
The Buick rattled over another mile of dirt road and then it was asphalt again. The night was falling and the headlamps picked up a signpost announcing another sixty miles to Charlotte.
Jake Stein hadn’t said a word since they drove away from the policemen, fuming in silence over the way Mr. Purcell had surrendered the best of what they had recorded, and to a couple bumpkins who were assuredly Klansmen. He responded to the older man’s attempts at conversation with monosyllables, and made a point of ignoring his lectures on the amusing trivia they passed along the way.
Finally, exasperated, Purcell ordered him to pull over, and Jake steered the sedan onto the berm, then sat flexing his fingers on the steering wheel. The professor stayed silent for so long that he started getting antsy. He gave up, and looked over to see those gray eyes regarding him kindly.
“I had to do it,” Purcell said. “Otherwise, they might have taken everything. And then they’d be waiting for us when we come back. And we will. We’ll do even better. No rushing.”
“But we lost those disks.”
“They’ll turn up someday.” He smiled wistfully. “You might be an old man and I’ll probably be gone. But they’ll surface. You wait and see. And then you can come to my memorial service and tell me I was right.”
Jake was amused. “Come to your service?”
“You’ll be welcome,” George Purcell said. “Now can we please go home?”
Joe, woozy from the beating, stumbled his way across the aqueduct from Whitehall onto Peachtree Street until he found himself lost among the throngs of workers starting for home and Christmas shoppers heading for the stores. It was like he had entered another world. A light rain had begun to fall, and the faces of the pedestrians he passed were all turned down, whether in day’s-end weariness or the distraction of recounting the gift lists in their heads. No one noticed him and his bruises. No one knew that he had taken a beating. No one knew or cared about Pearl or Sweet still sitting in their cells in Fulton Tower.
When he arrived back at the Hampton, he was surprised to find Willie pacing up and down, his guitar strapped across his back. Random raindrops were dotting the sidewalk.
“What are you doing here?” Joe said.
“I come by to let you know about Jesse’s funeral, and the man at the desk told me the police pulled you in,” Willie said. His face was knit with concern, and for the second time in the past half hour, Joe felt a rush of gratitude at a kindness.
“What happened to you?” the blind man said, and without waiting for an answer, raised a hand and ran the tips of his fingers deftly over one side of Joe’s face, then switched hands and felt the other side.
“Who did that?” Willie said.
“One of the Captain’s boys laid me out good.”
“What for?”
“It’s this burglary business,” he said glumly. “They want me to give them something. Or someone.” His legs were feeling shaky, and he waved for Willie to follow him inside. No one at the Hampton would say anything about it, due to Joe’s standing as a regular and Willie’s blindness. Still, they moved to the far corner of the lobby, where they were mostly out of sight, and sat down in the worn chairs.
Momentarily, Joe felt a little better as the buzzing in his ears subsided. “What about Jesse’s funeral?” he asked.
“They burying him tomorrow,” Willie said. “Procession starts at Eaton’s on Nelson Street.”
“What time?”
“Ten o’clock. You gonna be there?”
“If I ain’t back in jail.” Joe closed his eyes. “Or worse.”
Willie was quiet for a minute. Then, thinking to change the subject, he smiled slightly and said, “You know I cut some records for the Columbia people, Mr. Joe.”
Joe opened his eyes. “You did?”
“They come by yesterday, in the afternoon.” Willie was smiling. “Took me ’round to the Dixie and I sang six songs for them. I didn’t say nothing when I got back because Jesse was doing so poorly. And he was gone, and . . .”
Joe said, “Well, good for you, Willie. Did you use that one you wrote for him?”
“Naw, I didn’t want to. I’ll cut it someday, though.”
“‘The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,’ is that right?”
“That’s it, all right.”
“So Little Jesse’ll go down in history.”
“Well, I don’t know,” the blind man murmured modestly. It was a pleasant interlude and they got quiet again, listening to the rain pocking on the window.
After some minutes went by, Willie said, “You figured out why he got shot like that?”
Joe paused before he spoke. He really didn’t want Willie dragged into the mess along with him. On the other hand, he was the one who had started it.
“I was starting to get somewhere, but then I got knocked off it. Jesse died, and then they found Robert. I still might have been able to keep going. Except this burglary in Inman Park got in the way.”
“That’s funny, ain’t it?”
“What is?”
“The way you couldn’t get to one because of the other.”
Joe stared at him for a moment, then looked away. The raindrops danced on the dark window ledge behind them.
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Presently, Willie tilted his head in Joe’s direction and said, “You think they’re mixed up some way? I mean what happened to Jesse and this here burglary business that’s got the Captain so riled.”
Joe treated him to a narrow-eyed look. “Why you ask that?”
Willie shrugged. “They happened right on top of each other, ain’t that so? And somehow you got stuck on one and then the other.”
Joe mused for a moment on how sharp Willie could be. Sometimes he saw things more clearly than a sighted person.
“Maybe they are,” he said. “I think Jesse knew why he got shot, but he was waiting to tell me why. Then just when he was ready to do it, he died.” He paused for a few seconds, brooding. “What I know is that the cop who shot him was in cahoots with the Captain at the same time the Captain was on the hook over that burglary.” He drew a circle in the air for his own benefit. “So you get to the end of one, and you’re at the beginning of the other. And I keep going around and around in there.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Willie said.
Joe shifted in his chair. “I have to get Pearl and Sweet out of the Tower. To do that, I have to find who the hell snatched those goddamn jewels. I just hope to God whoever it was ain’t left town, because I only have about twenty-four hours, and then it’s over.”
“What about Little Jesse?” Willie said.
“I can’t do anything for him now. He should have talked while he had the time. The only thing left is to put him in the ground. We’ll probably never find out what happened.” He shook his head glumly and said, “I wasn’t the person for that job, Willie.”
“But you’re all we got, Joe.” The blind man stood up, hoisting his guitar. “You want me to come by and fetch you on my way to the funeral?”
“Yeah, that’d be fine,” Joe said, now sounding like the weight of the world had landed on him.
Willie came up with a bemused look. “You know what your problem is?” he stated wisely. “You spend way too much time with black folks.”
Joe laughed, allowing that the blind man had a point. “Ain’t nothing I can do about that, either,” he said.