“We want this handled as expeditiously as possible, Mister Canby,” Kimball said. “Chief Thompson has fashioned the title of special inspector for you. He tells me there is no precedent for such a position on the force, so you will have carte blanche as to how you proceed. But your progress must be, as I said, expeditious.
“The concerns voiced by Mister Greenberg this evening are legitimate. The exposition is in dire straits. Men stand to be ruined if attendance is not robust. I have invited the governors of every state in the Union to attend for a day in November, and as Grady said, General Sherman has indicated that he might join us as well. Those will help, but they are weeks away. And they will do precious little if word spreads that we have some kind of maniac at large in the city. Already the Negro community is in an uproar. There are intimations that they will not support the exposition so long as these crimes remain unsolved.”
“Hang the niggers,” Gordon said. “It was foolish to count on them in the first place. What Negro would pay to see a cotton exposition after he’s been picking it all day?”
“Regardless,” Kimball said, “we are in a delicate situation that must be resolved.”
“Mister Grady has agreed to cooperate fully in his coverage of your investigation,” Billingsley said. “Care will be taken in how this affair reaches the public’s eye.”
Canby smiled at Grady, who seemed suddenly engrossed by a pattern on the table’s surface.
“I have your word on that? No meddling?”
Grady scowled. “None. But I’m on record as saying you’re not the man for the job.”
“Hell, yes. I second that,” Gordon said, looking around the table. “This man served in the goddamned Union army!” Gordon turned his fierce face to Canby. “I mean no personal insult, sir.”
Vernon stood and put a hand on Canby’s shoulder. “I vouch for Canby. He will see this through.”
“Damn it, Billingsley,” Gordon said, craning his neck toward the older man, “you were there with us at Gettysburg! I can handle reconciliation so far, but—”
Billingsley’s eyes were clear through the smoke as he leveled them on Gordon. “I was there, and I saw blue dead on the field as well as gray. Let the dead bury their dead, I say. This matter has already been decided.”
“Indeed, it has,” Kimball said, rising wearily from his chair. “Business is business. And this is big business.” He nodded to the men around the table. “Gentlemen, good night. Mister Canby, good luck. Atlanta has placed her trust in you.”
The others stood, too, and began to file out of the paneled doors, hands on each others’ shoulders, voices sliding easily back into the tone of cultivated banter common to Atlanta’s men of means, as though there had been no tension in the meeting, as though the success of this and every future venture were ultimately assured.
As he followed Vernon out of the smoky room, Canby could already feel it—the sense of being carried on a tide to a destination beyond his choosing. It was, at its core, the same feeling he’d had through his time in the army: the sense of being propelled into another action by the wills of men removed from the fray, who would never be touched by the dirty work of its execution. That these men chose to give it a name as benign as the Atlanta Spirit did not change the nature of the tide. He knew that by any name, it was power. And that its undercurrents were ruthless.
October 4
THE MORNING SUN SHONE INTO THE VALLEYS between the buildings of downtown, glowing brightly on the window glass as it crept down the stories toward the street vendors setting up their wares on the board sidewalks. Canby watched the inching progress of the light from his penthouse window, trying to take in every detail of the city. From the top floor of the Kimball House he could see nearly out to Kennesaw Mountain, and from there and from every cardinal point of the compass he could see railroad tracks emerging in the distance and winding their way down through the hills toward Atlanta, light glinting off the hard-polished steel of the rails. Terminus had been the city’s original name, because all the rail lines ended here. Even the streets, in their motley arrangement that defied the grid of city blocks he’d seen in other towns, followed the rail lines in a crooked, crosshatched patchwork of lines. And all the lines met in the building across Pryor Street from the hotel, in the roundhouse where they terminated in a convergence of metal that marked the city’s center, its heart.
He liked Atlanta best in this light, the morning light that promised bustle and energy, hope for the day. It was the light that had greeted him and Angus each morning as they walked down Whitehall Street to open his father’s little school. Angus would throw open the school doors and light the woodstove as Canby washed clean the slate board and they readied for the arrival of Angus’s pupils, the day’s work waiting to begin. In the early morning, in Atlanta, one felt that all things were possible.
He had not felt such promise last night, riding in from Decatur. Stone Mountain had loomed like a wall of iron off to their east, its vast face glowing dull gray in the moonlight. Canby had turned the conversation back to the new detective, the black man. Vernon’s great experiment, or else gamble. A striver, Vernon called him, who scrimped his janitor’s pay for tuition at Atlanta University, taking a class or two as often as he could manage. The son of slaves and born one himself, but ambitious: the type that might have a long-simmering resentment for the likes of Alonzo Lewis or L. J. Dempsey.
“You’ve helped him along quite a bit in that regard, haven’t you?” Canby had asked. “You gave him a hell of a promotion.”
“Indeed. He is the first of his kind. We’ll turn up the heat on that kettle and see if it boils.”
“If he’s the killer.”
Vernon had lowered his hat over his face and leaned farther back in his seat. “If he’s not,” Vernon said, “he’ll make a hell of a decoy, won’t he?”
Then Vernon had dozed, letting the champagne and the rocking of the hansom take their effect on him, leaving Canby to muse over what kind of black man might inflict such ruinous violence on two of his own. It struck him that what Vernon took for gut instinct could well be nothing more than ingrained prejudice. In Vernon’s early years in the department, the officers were paid for each arrest they made. You did not need a crystal ball to guess which section of the segregated jail stayed the fullest in those days.
Then, as they crested the last rise of the Decatur road and headed down into town, Canby had watched the lights of smokestacks coughing soot and fire into the night, seen the sign at the city limits that read WELCOME TO ATLANTA. WE HOPE YOU’LL STAY AWHILE. Vernon had stirred when the horses’ hooves began to clatter once the road gave way from dirt to macadam. Gaslights began to appear, flickering atop their poles along one side of the street.
Canby turned from the window at the sound of a knock on the door. It was nearly a morning’s walk from one end of the suite to another, he thought, as the knock came again. His feet seemed to sink into the thick Brussels carpet as he picked his way around one piece of walnut furniture after another toward the door. When he opened it, the heavy door swung smoothly on its brass hinges.
A black man perhaps ten years his junior stood in the doorway, dressed in a simple suit of sage linen and with a matching hat held across his chest.
“Cyrus Underwood, sir,” the man said, nodding.
Canby studied him for a moment, noted the smoothness of his cheeks, the cast of his eyes. Gauging whether they held any of what he had come to call the night sickness in them. Then he held out a hand. Underwood took it, uncomfortably.
“Come in, then.”
“Can’t come in the room, sir. Rooms in Kimball House are whites-only.”
“Horseshit. Come in and wait while I get myself together.”
Underwood stepped into the room, looking it over as he shut the door behind him. His eyes lingered for a moment on the sheet draped across the sofa where Canby had slept and on the pistols laid out on the coffee table in front of it. He watched as Canby strapped the holster hol
ding his .32 Bulldog revolver across his chest, then pulled up his left pants leg and fitted a Colt’s New Line pocket revolver into his boot.
“How many do you carry?” Canby asked.
Underwood shook his head. “They haven’t issued me a sidearm yet, sir.”
Canby paused in pulling his jacket over his shoulders. “You have a badge, don’t you?”
“Yessir,” Underwood said, holding it out proudly. “But Chief Thompson says we’re to take things in stages. Right now I’ve just got a badge and a whistle.”
Canby said, buttoning the jacket, “Perhaps we’ll see about that today.”
But then he thought about the telegram that the hotel steward had awakened him to read a half hour before, its terse description of the whore who’d been butchered in an upstairs room at Mamie O’Donnell’s last night. That was to be their first destination today. And about Vernon’s description of the two victims who had preceded her, the chief’s suspicions of Underwood. He studied the black man as they left the room and made their way down the hall to the lift.
By the time the lift operator had shut the metal grate and the lift had groaned into its downward motion, Canby had qualified his misgivings. As they trundled down the dark shaft, passing one richly carpeted floor after another, he thought that if what Vernon had telegraphed about the new victim’s body was true, the issue of arming Underwood was superfluous. If this Underwood were the man capable of such work with a knife, he had no need of a gun.
THEY WAITED AT the intersection of Pryor and Alabama streets for fifteen minutes as Canby tried in vain to hail one cab after another as the hacks spurred their horses past the white and black men standing together on the corner. Finally, Canby stepped out in front of an empty carriage, the driver already shaking his head as he drew back on the reins to avoid running him over.
“Can’t carry colored.”
“Today you can,” Canby said. He held his badge out, close enough for the man to see its number—000—though he knew that the hack would not recognize it as the chief’s own.
“Ain’t going to do it, Officer. I got a regular clientele won’t ride with me if I do.”
Canby looked the carriage over closely. “Where’s your license tag?”
“It’s in here in the toolbox somewhere,” the man said, beginning to look uncomfortable.
Canby scanned the light globes that framed the driver’s seat. Both of them were unmarked. “Why is your license number not painted on your lamps?”
The man shifted on his seat. “Been meaning to get to that,” he muttered.
“All right, then. We’ll have to impound this vehicle. Officer Underwood, you take the reins.”
“You can’t do it!” the hack cried. He seemed genuinely bewildered.
“Of course I can. You’re in violation of a city ordinance. You could lose your license, as well,” Canby said, “if you have one. Regardless, the cab gets impounded until the next court session.”
“What about my horse? You going to impound him, too?”
Canby thought it over for a moment, then pulled the Bulldog from its holster. “No,” he said as he cocked the hammer back and placed the barrel against the horse’s broad forehead. “I’m going to shoot the fucking horse.”
After that, the driver had set his horse in motion and Canby and Underwood rode in silence nearly to Wheat Street before the younger man spoke.
“This has been a rare morning for me, sir,” Underwood said.
“How’s that?”
“Well, it’s not yet nine o’clock and I’ve already been to the top of the Kimball House and ridden near a mile in a car that ain’t colored-only.”
“Sounds like the start of a good day.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, you don’t act like you were raised in the South.”
Canby studied the buildings outside for a moment before he spoke. “I was raised in it, but not of it. My father was from Ireland. He brought me up to think it is unnatural for one human being to own another. I suppose you could have called him eccentric.”
From the corner of his eye, Canby saw the beginnings of a smile on Underwood’s face as he turned to the window.
But he was not smiling as they saw the garish façade of Mamie O’Donnell’s saloon loom above the street in front of them. Canby knocked on the roof of the cab for the hack to stop, then stepped out onto the clay road and studied the crowd of Negroes milling about the front of the place. Word had apparently gotten out and the community had gathered in collective witness to another murder of one of their own.
The saloon had once been a grand old house at the city’s outskirts, but had been converted by gaudy signage and knocked-out walls to serve its present purpose. It was situated precisely where the macadamized road ended and the red clay road began, at the limits of white Atlanta but not yet into the Negro settlement of Shermantown—the perfect locale for collecting girls of either race and at a proper yet not inconvenient distance for the city’s businessmen to come and go with discretion.
The Negroes seemed to be in restless motion, now surging toward the saloon’s porch, where a giant of a man stood yelling at them to go away, then falling back when he reached for the bullwhip looped at his waist.
“Y’all get your asses on home!” the man shouted, his face reddened. “Ain’t nothing to see, anyway. Get back!”
Someone in the crowd said something about the dead girl and the man uncoiled the whip in an instant. It lashed out over the crowd and snapped on the top of a head. Canby saw the black hair glisten a second later.
“Who’s next?” the man bellowed.
Canby walked to the porch steps wearily, the Negroes parting to make way for him, and the hack forgotten as the driver pulled away without accepting payment from Underwood. Canby had worked another case here, a murder-suicide, back in ’73 that still haunted him. Climbing the steps, he felt the weight of the saloon’s history descend on him. He heard Underwood’s steps behind him come up short as Canby faced the giant white man on the porch.
The man snarled at Canby through a beard streaked with tobacco juice. “What the fuck do you want? We’re closed till sundown, partner.”
Canby nearly reeled at the odor of rye fumes the man breathed out. He showed him his badge and the man backed up a step.
“I’m here to see the nothing that’s here to see.”
The man shook his head. “Mamie says only the chief himself comes through. No flatfeet.”
“This is Vernon Thompson’s badge. Stand aside.”
The man crossed his massive arms across his chest, the bullwhip drooping alongside his leg. “Mamie said—”
“Aren’t you Monte Amos? Jack’s boy? You haven’t turned out to be much.”
The man spat on the porch boards and wiped at his beard with the back of a hand. Then he looked at Canby through watery eyes. “Yeah, I reckon I could have been an officer like Daddy. Or a detective on the take.”
Canby took a deep breath and leaned in close. “If you make me bring Chief Thompson down here, I guarantee you’ll spend the rest of the year locked up for prostitution, pandering, and whatever else I dig up inside.”
Amos’s stare faltered. “Be careful what you ask for, mister. You don’t want to see it.” His eyes were red-rimmed—more red, Canby realized, than from drink alone. After a moment, he straightened up and stepped out of the doorway.
“Nobody never could tell Thomas Canby what to do,” he said. “You go on in and take your nigger-boy with you. I got a wager one of you’ll come out screaming.”
CANBY FELT a great inrushing of breath the moment he threw open the door, like a punch to his gut. He regretted it an instant later as his lungs filled with the smell of the room, a combined odor like that of a charnel house crossed with a skinning shed, the biting tang of spilled blood mixed with decay.
The room was furnished in bordello red, with heavy velvet draperies on the windows and furniture in the same material—all of it a deep crimson that made it difficult
to distinguish where the upholstery was unmarked and where it was splattered with the blood that had been slung across the boudoir.
The dead woman lay in the bed.
But, Canby saw as his eyes moved across the room slowly and he stood frozen in the doorway, she was also on the couch, on the rug, and in the washbasin on the lingerie chest. What lay on the bed was not only headless but also eviscerated. Even from across the room he could see into the gash in her abdomen and note that the dark cavity of her torso was empty.
Behind him, he heard Underwood cough dryly, a sound deep in his throat not far from retching.
“Are you all right?” he asked without turning.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be all right again,” Underwood said.
Canby’s eyes fixed on the dead woman’s intestines, which had been draped on the back of a settee like streamers. Below them, in the center of the cushions, lay the heart, its arteries neatly severed. He thought the black object in the washbasin was her liver, but beyond that, there was a profusion of organs he could not name. He stepped into the room carefully, watching his feet, and motioned for Underwood to do the same. He knew already, with a sense of pity and revulsion that made his stomach churn, that he would have to lift the head from its place.
Strangely, in this room awash in blood, the girl’s hair was unmatted. It still glowed softly in the light of the gas lamp, lustrous, in black ringlets. It covered her face, which was buried in the intersection of her legs.
Canby gripped the curls, his fingers tightening reluctantly on them, and lifted. The hair came away in his hand. He stepped back quickly, nearly dropping the hair, and looked down at the scalp. But in place of a glistening skull he saw tufts of kinky hair, cut short. He turned his hand over and showed Underwood the inside of the black wig, its web of netting, then handed it to him. Underwood took it and held it between thumb and forefinger.
Canby sighed and put his hands on either side of the woman’s head, over her ears. One of them was sticky with blood. With his eyes averted, he lifted the head, heavier than he would have expected, then looked around the room for a suitable place to set it. None seemed fitting. He was loath to approach the chest of drawers with the liver sitting dark and slick in the washbowl, so he put the head on the couch, tilting it back against the buttoned cushion.
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