“May I have an attorney, please?”
“We’ll send for one of your choice here directly,” Vernon said. “In the meantime, we talk a little longer. Read it.”
His face slack, Greenberg read, “‘Mom that negro down here did this when i went to make water he said he would love me and push me down lay down and play like the night-witch did it he said, but that long tall black boy did it hisself.’” Greenberg set the note back on the tabletop quickly.
“Is that Mary Flanagan’s hand?”
“I would not know.”
“Does it sound like her to you?”
“It sounds like gibberish. I have no idea what it means.”
“Do you not find the message troubling?”
“Of course I do. I find all of this affair something beyond troubling.” Greenberg glanced down at the note and nodded. “You should talk to Campbell as well.”
“Campbell?” Vernon asked.
Greenberg’s exasperation was nearly palpable. “Yes, Fortus Campbell! The janitor!”
Canby let the silence hang in the room a full minute before he spoke. “Detective Underwood is interviewing him now in the colored section downstairs.”
“There’s your Negro,” Greenberg said. “There’s your tall black boy, like the note says.”
“Yes,” Canby said, tapping the table with his finger. “But so much of this does not add up. Campbell did not find the body until this morning. Where was the body before? And Underwood found this note downstairs, by the furnace.”
“I tell you, Campbell is shiftless. I’ve written him up several times.”
“And Mary Flanagan was not seen at home after Saturday morning,” Vernon said. “Which makes you the last person to have seen her alive.”
“So much of this does not add up,” Canby said.
Greenberg was shaking his head. “These mauthers often come from troubled backgrounds. Their families don’t know their whereabouts much of the time. Perhaps she was somewhere, and seen, on Sunday.”
“Wait a minute,” Grady said from the corner. He was flipping the pages of his notebook.
“Mauthers?” Vernon said.
Canby felt his pulse quicken. He tried to catch Greenberg’s eyes.
“Spell that out?” Grady asked.
“Greenberg . . .” Canby said.
“Pardon me. British slang. I suppose I picked it up while I was in Leeds. A mauther is a factory girl.”
“M-A-U?” Grady asked.
“T-H-E-R,” Greenberg finished. “Why?”
Canby was rising, hooking Vernon’s elbow as he stood. “No more,” he said. “No more for now.”
He hustled Vernon out the door and into the hallway. He was grateful for the general din of the station outside the questioning room, for the bustle of cops coming and going and the muttering of the most recently apprehended where they sat shackled to the bench by the booking counter.
“This man needs a lawyer, Vernon,” Canby said as they leaned against the wall.
“For whatever good it’ll do him. Hot damn, Thomas, that’s as good as a confession.” Vernon was grinning. “We’ve got this thing wrapped up.”
“I think Greenberg is not our man.”
“You heard him in there, Thomas. What more do you need?”
“Greenberg is a company man, Vernon. A factotum, an office man. Can you really conceive of him being capable of what’s been done?”
“I’ve been around long enough to know I don’t know it all. Stranger things have happened, Thomas. And that man just handed himself over to justice.”
“Vernon—” Canby began, but Vernon cut him off with a wave of his hand. He leaned close to Canby’s face.
“Must I remind you that I’m under a great deal of pressure to wrap this thing up?”
The door to the interrogation room swung open. For a moment Grady’s small stature seemed to fill the doorframe, then the door was shutting behind him as he pushed past them in the hallway, his face aglow. He was halfway to the station’s exit before Canby spoke.
“Grady!” he called, but Grady did not turn and they watched him move down the front steps at a clip. Within an hour his presses had begun to roll.
October 20
ON HIS COUCH IN THE NEW AND LESS OPULENT rooms he’d been given on the fifth floor of Kimball House, Canby stirred. His dreams were a wash of swirling figures, faces in mist. And behind the images, sounds: door hinges and footsteps, the clinking of glass. He strained toward waking, reached beneath his pillow for the pocket revolver he’d put there. A hand settled firmly on his forearm.
“Now, now, Thomas, it wouldn’t do to draw down on a friend, would it?”
Canby cracked open an eye. It felt swollen nearly to a slit. “Vernon.”
“In the flesh,” Vernon said. He cleared a space on the coffee table and sat, selecting from the detritus scattered there Canby’s nearly empty bottle of Jameson and an Atlanta Constitution.
“This paper is three days old,” he said.
“I couldn’t stand to read any more.”
“I don’t understand you, Thomas. How often have we had a case so neatly wrapped up as this one? You should be pleased.”
“You saw Greenberg at the preliminary hearing. Was that the demeanor of a guilty man?”
“They all plead not guilty, Thomas. And they all act like they never dreamed of finding themselves there.”
“I need to tell you something.”
Vernon raised a hand and turned his head to the side. “Not me. Tell it to the judge. You’re due in court at nine.”
Vernon studied the label on the Jameson bottle for a moment. “Rest your mind, Thomas. The case is closed.” He turned the bottle up and drank, then held the bottle out to Canby. “Here. A dram to get you going.”
Canby drank, his throat clenching. His parched mouth, which had a minute before been cottony and coppery at once, burned and then was numbed. He settled back on the couch.
“I can’t do it.”
“Of course you can.”
“I know Greenberg is an innocent man, Vernon.”
“That is for the court to decide. Your job is to get on that stand and tell them what you have seen. The rest is the court’s bailiwick.”
Vernon tapped the Constitution against his knee. “You’ve missed some fine testimony, laying up in here. One of the factory girls came forward and said Greenberg made advances toward her. His landlady says he’s been asking about another set of rooms, to bring in one or two of ‘his girls.’ That’s sworn testimony.”
Canby looked at him blankly.
“You could have been reading about it,” Vernon said, and tossed the newspaper onto the table. He rose and walked across the room. Canby heard him drop the plug into the bathtub and turn the water on full-bore. After a moment he reappeared in the doorway and leaned against the jamb. He studied Canby for a long moment until the younger man rose from the couch and began unbuttoning his shirt.
“And I don’t need to tell you a good showing today will ensure you a place on the force again.”
Canby nodded. Behind Vernon, wisps of steam had begun to issue from the tub and to cloud the doorway. The carpet beneath Canby’s bare feet was sumptuous—rich, dark, and new like all of Kimball House, save for the wrecked room upstairs.
Vernon stood aside for Canby to enter the bathroom. Canby shrugged out of his nightshirt and eased into the steaming tub.
“You’ll make me proud,” Vernon said.
“One time I didn’t.”
“It still pains me to think about that shitty mess.”
“Not your fault.”
“Tell me, Thomas, was the greater good served by you taking the fall for that whore? Was Mamie O’Donnell worth it?”
“No,” Canby said as he settled into the steam and water. “Turns out she wasn’t.”
HE’D HAD SOME WARNING, of course, from the editions of the Constitution he had read recounting the opening days of the trial, from the breathless accou
nts of Grady and his stringers; he should have known to expect a circus. But what he and Vernon found as they descended from the hansom was beyond the scale of any trial he’d yet seen: a pandemonium of crackers, carpetbaggers, goober-grabbers, sharps, and dandies moiled and hustled across the lawn of the Fulton County Courthouse hawking wares and bartering for seats inside. There was even a redheaded boy of ten or eleven selling sandwiches so that those lined up for the best positions in the gallery would not have to give up a coveted seat for noontime recess. As if all of them had come here to celebrate, collectively, their own private hatreds. Early in the week the papers had begun calling it the trial of the century, but now the crowd and the energy seemed to have doubled themselves. All gathered this morning for the double bill of testimony from Fortus Campbell and Thomas Canby.
Canby and Vernon had not walked a dozen paces from the hansom when a rawboned man detached himself from the crowd and pressed his red face close to Canby’s.
“You gone put that jewboy away today, ain’t you?”
Vernon stepped between the two men. “Back away from my deputy,” he said.
The man raised his callused hand and backed up a half step. “Don’t mean no harm, Chief,” he said. “But it was my sister-in-law’s cousin that Jew raped and murdered.”
“I know your kin, Malcolm. Thomas is going to do the right thing.”
“I hope so. I surely do.” The man shuffled away, the heels of his brogans dragging, and took a seat on a wagon bed pulled to the courthouse square’s curb. A half dozen men who shared his raw features made way for him to sit, the gaggle of them perched all over the wagon. None spoke when he rejoined them, but a stream of tobacco juice shot into the dust near one wagon wheel.
Inside, they had just taken their seats when the gavel began to rap to commence the day’s proceedings, and in short order Fortus Campbell had been sworn in and seated in the witness box. As though relishing his position higher than all but the judge, he scanned the crowd of white faces below him haughtily. Canby watched him a moment, then turned to get a better view of Leon Greenberg where he sat at the defense table. The man’s bespectacled eyes seemed to be trying to bore through Campbell.
The prosecutor rose with a sheaf of papers in his hand. He wore French cuffs and a silk bow tie and his hair was slicked back against his skull, his face as clean-shaven as Canby’s. Vernon leaned in close to Canby’s ear. “Solicitor General Franklin Denton,” he said. “I hear he has ambitions for the mayor’s office.”
“Will he have the Constitution’s endorsement?”
“If he can close this case before the exposition is over, no doubt he will.”
“And Judge Reinhardt, is he still active with the Ring?”
Vernon only stared straight ahead. His eyes narrowed as he watched Denton walk to the witness stand, studying the papers in his hand.
“Fortus Campbell, you work in what capacity at the Georgia Pencil Company?”
“As janitor.”
“Is it typical for you to be in the factory on a Saturday afternoon?”
“Saturday and Sunday are my busiest days.”
“Doing what, exactly?”
“Sweeping up shavings, oiling machinery. Getting things ready for Monday start of work.”
“And what was unusual about Saturday, the eighth of October?”
“Greenberg was acting funny.”
“Mister Greenberg,” the judge said.
Campbell nodded slowly. “Mister Greenberg was acting funny.”
“Funny in what way?”
“Nervous-like. From the time we both come in about seven till he went upstairs to his office. Told me he’d stomp on the floor if he needed me. He ain’t never done that before.”
“And you were working on the ground floor?”
“Right. Sweeping up, burning trash in the furnace.”
“And you told the police you saw Mary Flanagan enter the factory and go upstairs at what time?”
“Bout noon.”
“And after that?”
“Heard a scream.”
“And you did what?”
“Well, I dozed off. I’d just had my lunch. That furnace room gets warm. I took my break.”
Denton shuffled his papers. “And sometime later you were awakened?”
“Heard Mister Greenberg stomping on the floor. Went upstairs and saw Mary on the floor of his office, kind of crumpled-up, like. He was acting funny for sure, then. Gave me a hundred dollars out of the cashbox and had me set down and write that note they found.”
“He dictated the note to you?”
“That’s right—dictated it.”
“Let’s be certain we have these events straight for the record,” Denton said. He turned to face the jury. “Mister Greenberg was the only person on the second floor of the factory that Saturday. You saw Mary Flanagan go up the stairs alive, then later that day saw her dead in Mister Greenberg’s office. At his feet.”
“That’s right.”
“Nothing further, Your Honor.”
As Denton sat down, Greenberg’s lawyer rose from behind the defense table. He was a thin, pallid man who moved with the bearing of one aggrieved.
“Proceed, Mister Loehman.”
Loehman let a long moment of silence play out, staring at Campbell, before he spoke. “Is it common to hear screams in the pencil factory?”
“Not unless someone get something caught in the machines.”
“Let me specify: Is it common on a Saturday, when the machines are down, to hear a scream?”
“Nope.”
“No, sir,” the judge corrected.
“Nossir.”
“And yet on this Saturday, you heard a scream and did what?”
“Dozed off, like I said.”
“In a nearly empty factory, near midday on a Saturday, you heard a girl scream and then drifted off to sleep?”
“Like I said.”
“So you said. Unbelievable.” Loehman looked at the men in the jury box for a long moment. Then he walked back to his table, studied the papers there, and selected one. “Mister Campbell, you are well acquainted with the Atlanta Police Department, are you not?”
Campbell shifted in his seat.
“I will help you with your recollection. In the past eight years, four indictments on petty larceny, three convictions. One conviction for assault. You have been in and out of the chain gang several times. As has your father, no less. It seems crime runs in the family. If Mister Greenberg has committed any wrong in what we are discussing today, I submit it was in taking you into his employ from the first.”
Campbell sat silent.
“And yet you expect the jury to take you at your word above that of an honest businessman?”
“Wasn’t honest what he done to Mary. I seen it.”
“Your Honor?” Loehman asked.
“Only answer the questions put to you, boy. Nothing extra.”
“Yessir.”
“Mister Campbell, no money was discovered missing from the cashbox. The factory’s ledgers balance perfectly. The Atlanta police will confirm this. And you admit the note was written by you, in your own hand. Further, it was you who found Miss Flanagan’s body. Why is it, Mister Campbell, that it is not you on trial for your life here?”
“Objection. The defense is grandstanding.”
“Sustained. Save that for your summation, Mister Loehman.”
“I will do that, Your Honor. Most certainly, I will. Just one more question, Mister Campbell. Why in God’s name would a man like Leon Greenberg do something like this?”
“I do not know, Mister Loehman,” Campbell said. “But I don’t understand none of you peoples.”
The silence that followed was so entire that Canby could hear Loehman sigh.
“The defense believes Mister Campbell’s character and credibility render his testimony entirely suspect, Your Honor. We have no further questions for this witness.”
“Rebuttal?”
Denton l
ooked over to the jury box, surveyed the men seated there, and nodded to himself as though satisfied with what he saw. “None, Your Honor.”
“Thirty-minute recess, then. When we resume, the next witness will take the stand. Mister Campbell,” the judge said, “I am relieved to excuse you.”
“I TELL YOU, Greenberg is not the man.” Canby was entering his second hour on the stand, beginning to understand how the suspects must feel being sweated down at the station: it seemed that with every ebb in his energy, Denton gained the more resolve.
“Are you, sir, attempting to testify for the defense?”
“I’d like to get at the truth.”
“Your Honor,” Denton said, “the prosecution requests permission to treat Detective Canby as an adverse witness.”
The judge raised an eyebrow. “To what end?”
“That I might impeach him, Your Honor.”
The judge leaned back in his chair, his brow furrowed. “On what grounds?”
“I believe that Mister Canby, for whatever reasons of his own, intends to subvert the reasonable prosecution of this case.”
“Objection!” Loehman cried, rising. Judge Reinhardt held out a hand to him and Loehman slowly sat back in his chair. The judge’s heavy-lidded eyes left him and moved to study Denton, then Canby. Slowly, he lowered his hand and nodded at the prosecutor.
“Proceed, Mister Denton.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. Mister Canby, Chief Thompson has confided to me that you were brought back to Atlanta for your expertise, is that correct?”
“And at the request of the Ring.”
Denton seemed to subdue his smirk with some effort. “Surely you know the Ring has not been extant for years. Again I ask: You were engaged for your expertise, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then let us enumerate the progress that was made with that expertise. No killer was apprehended on your watch. Two additional victims were claimed—one your own deputy from Ringgold, and the other a child of tender years whose innocence was ripped savagely from her and upon whom depravities were performed of such a nature they cannot be discussed in open court. This, Detective, is the résumé you present before this court.”
“Regardless of what I’ve done or haven’t, Greenberg is not the murderer.”
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