Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  His footprints? He beamed the ground again, checking the gravel where he’d walked. The ground was dry and he didn’t think he’d left behind any tracks, nothing a plaster could be taken of, nothing to provide an investigator with even a guess as to what his size was. Of course, he also couldn’t tell what size shoes the killer had worn, or even how many men there had been.

  His heart was pounding but his hands were steady. He knew that he needed to make a decision, needed to do so now, and that whatever he decided would likely determine the next few weeks, or months, or years of his life.

  “Us,” Underhill had said. With such confidence. The calmness of knowing you’re part of a group, that they had your back. Rake had felt that, too, during the war, but here on the force he felt the opposite, that his fellow officers were ready to drive the dagger into his spine.

  Rake hurried back to his car, beaming behind himself again to make sure he hadn’t dropped anything. He got in the car and closed the door. He drove home taking a circuitous route, checking behind himself, careful not to drive by any busy locations where any businesses might remember him.

  Cassie was sound asleep in her bed, as were the kids. Rake washed his hands, the cuts on his knuckles stinging, before sitting down on his couch in a dark living room to think.

  23

  “ARE YOU STILL interested in that fellow you were asking about the other day? Underhill?”

  Boggs had been filling out paperwork at his desk when the phone rang. It was the unseen woman in Records, the second one, who had called him back and actually helped him.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s dead.” Her voice, as before, was hushed. She was talking quietly while her colleagues were away from their desks.

  “What happened?”

  “Got the report right here. Officers Delroy and Reardon came upon the body at 12:31 a.m. Just filed their report a little bit ago. Shot twice, close range, small caliber. His body appeared to have been there for at least twenty-four hours, it says. Morgue’s still working on it.”

  He asked her for the location, scribbling it down with the nearest pencil, then reaching for a street atlas. He didn’t know the area well—it was a white part of town, blue collar.

  “Body was found at a factory that’s been closed a while,” she said. “We make a few busts there most weeks, some reefer peddlers and prostitutes, and the occasional moonshine drop-off.”

  “Wonder what a guy like him would be doing out there.”

  “They’re working on it, I can assure you. That last murder you were calling about, the colored girl? They could care less about that. An ex-cop is different.”

  He was amazed she was calling him with this, or with anything. And the fact that she referred to Lily as “colored” rather than the more derogatory “black” did not escape his notice.

  “What else can you tell me about him?” he asked. “You mentioned he was forced out last time.”

  She told him how Underhill was one of the cops fired for being involved in running numbers.

  “Do you know if he’s still friendly with any officers today?”

  “Hell, in this city you’re a cop for life, even if you lose the job. I’m sure he has plenty of friends over here. Which is why you should be mighty careful if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.” She let that sink in for a moment. “You should be able to ask your commanding officer for updates on his case if you want them. But if he stonewalls you, give me a ring.”

  “Thank you very much for calling me, ma’am. I appreciate it.”

  “We aren’t all against you, you know.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, most of us are, I guess. But there’s more of us for you than you’d probably think. We just can’t advertise it.”

  “I understand.” He didn’t, not really.

  “Anything else you want to know?”

  “Yes, one thing.” He took a breath. “Is there really a pool among the white cops, to have one of us killed?”

  A pause. “Wish I could tell you otherwise, but yes.”

  “I appreciate your honesty.”

  “I mean, it isn’t a literal pool as in an actual collection of dollars that they’ve passed around to give to the guy who finally decides to put a bullet in one of you. But it’s real in the sense that people do talk about it a lot.”

  “And if people talk about something, then it must be real.”

  He could hear her smiling when she said, “Don’t be smart, Officer Boggs.”

  He was smiling, too, when he hung up. So much so that he didn’t remember until a few hours later that, the first time they had spoken, he had called simply to ask for the arrest history of Brian Underhill. He hadn’t said anything whatsoever about Lily Ellsworth that time. Yet today she had noted that his earlier call had been about “that colored girl” who’d been killed.

  So how did she know that when he’d called about Underhill, it was to look into Lily’s murder?

  The next day, Boggs stood waiting for his partner in the vast shadow of a magnolia tree in the Fourth Ward. Three little kids were climbing on the tree’s thick branches, one of which was only a few feet off the ground and extended parallel for a good fifteen feet before suddenly plunging into the earth and emerging a meter away like some sea serpent turned arboreal.

  It was that kind of late-afternoon hot that would only get hotter up until the moment the sun disappeared, the dampness in the air thickening nearly to the point of suffocation. Dark was still many hours off when Smith approached and they walked toward the home of Lily Ellsworth’s former teacher. Boggs had visited the previous day and had been told by a pretty young woman that her husband wasn’t in.

  The narrow bungalow was in need of a paint job but Boggs had certainly seen worse. The garden was well maintained, thickets of seven-foot-tall brandy-wine canna flanking the house, their tropical leaves like wings and their red flowers like dragon’s faces, jaws agape at the sun. Below them pink-veined caladium leaves, large as elephant ears, hung limp in the still air. The bungalow’s windows were open, the sound of an electric fan whirring inside. This was a neighborhood they walked on their beat, but they seldom had reason to enter any of these homes except to take down robbery reports. The families here had decent jobs, and their accumulating possessions attracted thieves.

  Boggs knocked on the door. Two hours before roll call, they were both in civilian dress.

  The door was answered by the same woman as before: pretty and slight, eyes warm and round as chocolates. Bags under the eyes, though: the first time she’d had a little toddler with her, and this time she was holding a sleeping infant.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Hurst. Is your husband around?”

  He’d not told her he was a cop yesterday, opting instead to lie and say he was an old friend from Morehouse. Not because he necessarily thought the man was a suspect, but still, he didn’t see any reason to leave advance notice that a policeman was coming by. She had said her husband was at work, teaching summer school, and that late afternoons were best, so here they were. She didn’t look suspicious to see him back again, and with another man this time. Maybe she was just too tired to be suspicious. She said she’d get her husband, the screen door snapping behind her.

  Smith raised his eyebrows the way he always did after spying a good-looking woman.

  The screen door opened again. Nathaniel Hurst was a tall man, two inches on Boggs and one on Smith. He looked the part of the teacher, thin and with glasses, his shoulders hunched forward a bit, as if he was used to lowering himself to reach his students. His forehead was shiny and his red plaid shirt was opened one more button than would be socially acceptable if it weren’t so ungodly hot.

  “Afternoon, gentlemen. Can I help you?”

  Boggs extended a hand. “My name is Officer Lucius Boggs, Mr. Hurst.” Hurst’s hand greeted Boggs’s
after a two-second pause. “This is my partner, Tommy Smith.”

  Another handshake, and Hurst, taking them in now, unhunched his shoulders and grew an inch.

  “We were hoping to ask you a few questions.”

  He said fine and motioned them to sit in the old wooden chairs on the cramped cement porch. “It’s even hotter inside,” he said, as if to excuse what could have been seen as a lack of hospitality.

  Smith, rather than joining them on the chairs, chose to stand and lean against the porch railing, looking down at the teacher. Wasps as orange as tangerines zipped past.

  “What can I help you with?”

  The chairs were low to the ground, so Boggs’s elbows were on his knees, his hands folded as he said, “We’re looking into the murder of a former student of yours. Lily Ellsworth.”

  The teacher nodded, his expression appropriately somber. “Yes.”

  Smith asked, “You knew she was dead?”

  “It was in the Daily Times a couple of days ago. I was . . . shocked. I still am. She . . . She was a very sweet young woman.”

  Boggs took out a small notebook and pencil and asked, “What else can you tell us about her?”

  “Well, as you apparently know, I taught her in Peacedale. For a number of years. She was probably, I don’t know, twelve when I met her? Could hardly read, like the other kids that age over there. I was the new teacher, just a year or two out of Morehouse, and I taught her for, I guess it was five years.”

  “So until about a year ago?” Boggs asked.

  “That sounds about right.”

  Boggs wrote that down, and only mentally noted the fact that Hurst seemed to be saying “about” and “I guess” more than an educated man like him probably did in normal conversation.

  Boggs asked more questions and heard what he’d already been told elsewhere, that Lily had moved to Atlanta because she tired of the limitations country life put on her. And no, I’m sorry, I don’t really know who her friends were, don’t know with whom she’d been consorting in her last days.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know. It might have been . . . three months ago.”

  “At a Racial Cooperative Council meeting?”

  He looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “What exactly was she helping you with?”

  Hurst rearranged himself in his chair. They were pretty damn uncomfortable, Boggs had noticed. “We drafted a lot of letters. Petitions to elected officials, letters to other groups with whom we wanted to develop a relationship. Some outreach to Negro high schools and colleges. The kind of slow drudgery that some people have to undertake in hopes that it leads to something greater.”

  Boggs found it odd how everyone described the group in such boring terms. Nothing to see here.

  “What brought you to Atlanta?” Smith asked.

  “I was tired of the country myself. I went out there because I wanted to help kids, kids like Lily. And I feel that I did. Again, that girl could not read at an age when she was already starting to turn into a woman, and I opened the world for her, and for many others. At least, that’s what I’d tell myself after really bad days when I wondered why I bothered. I did it for a few years. It was rewarding in some ways, but it was also grinding me down.”

  “Yet you’re doing the same thing here, teaching?” Boggs asked.

  “I got a job at Booker T., yes. That, too, has its challenges, but at least I get to live in Atlanta.”

  “So you and Lily moved here at about the same time.”

  “If we did, that’s just a random coincidence. My wife and I left Peacedale a year ago, moved up to Macon, but after only a few months we decided to come back to Atlanta. I hadn’t been in touch with Lily that last year, and only after she made it to Atlanta did I meet her again, at one of the Council meetings. I was very surprised to see her there, but also, honestly, flattered.”

  “What do you mean?” Boggs asked.

  “My teaching had given her a political spirit—I’d seen that in Peacedale. And then to see her come to a political gathering here, it meant something to me. I was proud of her.”

  And proud of yourself, Boggs thought. His attention was diverted by a small lizard darting out of the tall grass past the opposite end of the porch. He looked back at Hurst. “What can you tell me about her family?”

  “Not much. I only met them once or twice. Farm family. Sharecroppers. The conditions for our people there are not good. Again, I tried to help, but . . .” He shook his head.

  “Her father gave the impression he didn’t like you,” Smith pressed. “Said you put all sorts of ideas in her head. Made her leave her family.”

  Hurst slowly took in some breath and leaned back, palms flat on his thighs. “I suppose it would look that way to an uneducated man. And yes, I suppose if I’d never taught in that school, Lily would still be illiterate, and milking someone’s cows, and be pregnant and poor. And, I suppose, alive.”

  Boggs wanted to pause before asking another question, to see if those emotions would build, but his partner felt otherwise. Smith asked, “What did she think of the congressman?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one she worked for.”

  “That—oh, yes, that’s right. Prescott. I don’t know if she ever met him.”

  Alarms were blaring in Boggs’s skull. He could tell by the way Smith slightly leaned back that his partner heard it, too, the completely false way in which the teacher had pretended to not remember and then remember something, the very thing he wished these officers had not mentioned.

  “What did she tell you about working there?” Boggs asked.

  “Nothing. I mean, I recall her mentioning that she worked as a maid for his wife. But I didn’t exactly ask her for details about being a housekeeper. I assume it’s rather dull.” And to complete the fake act he grinned a bit, as if this were a joke now, three men rolling their eyes about the tediousness of women’s work, as if they’d forget why they were here.

  “You’re absolutely sure she never mentioned anything else about working there?” Boggs asked. An obvious lifeline tossed to a man who was perhaps now realizing he was at risk of drowning.

  Hurst wouldn’t take the lifeline. “I’m sorry. And I’m afraid I’ll be in trouble with the wife if I don’t head back in and help feed the little one.”

  Hurst stood, as did Boggs, but Smith kept leaning against the porch railing.

  “You were sweet on her, weren’t you?” Smith said with a slight grin.

  Hurst stiffened. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “What are you trying to imply, Officer?”

  “I don’t think I implied anything, I think I stated it awful clear. Or should I go ask your wife?”

  Hurst had appeared quite bookish before, but now a fire was lit in him, and Boggs saw him differently, catching a glimpse the way some women might see him, a tall and handsome man with a strong jaw and hands that were ready to do things.

  Hurst said to Smith, “Are you threatening me?”

  Boggs felt great envy at how Smith could appear so utterly cool in the face of someone who looked like he was ready to take a swing at him.

  “Mr. Hurst”—Smith was still casually leaning against the railing—­“are we wearing our uniforms right now? Did we park a squad car right there on the street for your landlady to see? Have we been unfriendly? Are you wearing handcuffs?” He let those images linger for a moment. “We could have done this different, but we were hoping you’d help us out. We were hoping you’d cooperate. Now, if you don’t, and if we decide there are things you aren’t telling us, then there will be uniforms, and there will be a squad car, and there will be handcuffs. But we wouldn’t be the ones putting them on you. It would be white cops. Cops that we ourselves don’t even like.”

  Hurst s
hifted his eyes between them for what felt like a very long time. Long enough for a car to drive past, long enough for the baby inside to start crying for one reason or another.

  “You think I haven’t been forthcoming with you. I can assure you, I had nothing to do with whatever happened to her.”

  Boggs asked, “What is it that happened to her?”

  Boggs may have been mistaken—the moment felt so charged and his own emotions were swirling now—but it seemed as if Hurst was on the verge of tears.

  “I respect that young lady too much,” Hurst finally said, “to say another word to you about her.”

  Without bidding them good day or wishing them luck in catching her killer, he opened the screen door and left them there.

  They waited a moment, then left. They walked along the west side of the street to stay in the shade.

  “That was a stab in the dark,” Smith said, “but damn if I didn’t hit something.”

  “You hit something, all right. But do you think they had an affair, or he only wanted to have an affair with her? Or something else?” Asking half because he wasn’t sure and half because he knew Smith had vastly more experience with affairs.

  “I don’t know. But we’d best keep our eye on that boy.”

  A few steps later, Boggs said, “He wasn’t talking like she’d done something wrong. More like she’d done something shameful.”

  “Or something shameful been done to her.”

  Less than an hour later, after roll call, McInnis called them into his office. They avoided the temptation of glancing at each other guiltily. Yet each said a silent prayer.

  McInnis sat down at his desk, sighed, and waved a file folder at them before dropping it on his desk. “Since you seemed so interested in it, I thought I’d let you know the Ellsworth case has been closed. It was the father after all. He confessed.”

  Boggs was stunned. “To whom?”

  “Two of his friends. He told them, they told the Peacedale sheriff. When the sheriff showed up to arrest him, he ran. You can imagine the rest.”