For answer Denton turned his back to the witness stand and walked swiftly to the prosecutor’s table, held a hand out to an assistant, who placed a file on his outstretched palm. He flipped through the pages, glancing up now and again at Canby.
“When did you first begin in the employ of the city of Atlanta, Mister Canby—originally, I mean?”
“January 1866.”
“After you mustered out of the army?”
“That is correct.”
“Which army was that?”
“The Union army, Second Division, Seventeenth Corps,” Canby said. He could hear, in the jury box, a chair leg grate against the floorboards.
Denton seemed surprised at the answer. “You fought for the Union?”
“I enlisted when the siege ended.”
“The Second Division? Was that not General Sherman’s own command?”
“It was.”
“Hardly the action of a patriotic Atlantan.”
Canby took a deep breath. “My father died during the siege. He was killed during the shelling. I had a score to settle.”
“With General William Tecumseh Sherman?”
“The shelling killed my father. Sherman ordered it done. I intended to take an eye for an eye.”
Denton waved the pages of the file in the air, the long arc of his arm pantomiming exasperation. “You intended to kill General Sherman?”
“If I could, yes. I was fourteen years old. He’d killed my father. I still see a kind of sense to it.”
Again Denton rattled his papers, but Canby saw that two of the jurors were nodding. The shadow of a grin was visible on one of the men’s faces, beneath his beard. Perhaps one whose house had been razed by Sherman. Canby looked out over the spectators and saw that Robert Billingsley had slipped in among those standing at the back of the courtroom. Saw that on the older man’s face, too, was the trace of a smile.
The judge lifted his gavel, then, seeming to think better of using it, leaned forward and gave Denton a baleful glance. “May we, Mister Denton,” he said in a careful cadence, “expedite this process?”
“Of course, Your Honor. For the record, Mister Canby, you were appointed in 1866 by the Reconstruction government of the United States to a newly constituted police force of the city of Atlanta. You served as patrolman, then night inspector, and finally rose to the rank of detective in 1875. Correct?”
“Yes.”
Denton flipped a page in his file. “And the record states that in March 1877 you were dismissed from the force on charges of embezzlement, graft, and improper commerce with a woman known to the city of Atlanta as a prostitute.”
Canby had to wait as the gavel pounded, and the grumbling from the gallery abated, before he could answer.
“That’s what the record says. But it’s not true. I’ve known Mamie O’Donnell since we were children. It was a loan.”
“A loan? No doubt that is what I’d call it if I found myself in such a compromised position.” He cut his eyes to the jury box and added, “Which of course I would not.”
“Vernon Thompson can tell you it’s not true.”
“Really? Because the papers I have before me bear Chief Thompson’s signature. All of them do.”
“Vernon had no choice. They finally managed to run off the Reconstruction appointees in ’77 when the new constitution was ratified. I was lucky to have stayed on that long.”
“Who are they, Mister Canby?”
“The Ring.”
“The Ring again! Would that we all had a nebulous Ring on which to pin our misfortunes and moral failures!” Denton dropped the file on the prosecutor’s table. “Your Honor, I believe I can indeed expedite this process. Mister Canby, in short, you are a disgrace to the men of Atlanta’s police force.”
Denton moved up close to the witness stand, leaning toward Canby. He was close enough that Canby could smell the brilliantine in his slicked-back hair.
“Whatever I am, Greenberg is not your killer.”
“Even further you descend! Based on your highly circumspect expertise and this sullied record of prior employment with the city, you advocate on behalf of this man. You would vouch for a child of the slums of Europe, risen to some prominence of late, yes, but no Atlantan. Hardly even an American.”
Canby looked out over the courtroom, wishing sorely he could steal a sip of whiskey from the flask in his breast pocket. Henry Grady sat in the front row with an open notepad propped on the knee of his crossed legs, pressing the point of a pencil to his damp lower lip. In the back, Billingsley still stood among the others, his eyes hawklike with scrutiny. Canby looked over to Greenberg, slumped wretched-looking in his chair behind the defendant’s table. Canby struggled to swallow before he spoke.
“Mauther is not the word the murderer intended.”
“Is it not? By your demonstrably deficient methods of deduction, what word would you have put forward as this madman’s message?”
“I do not know.”
Denton nodded curtly, cocking one eyebrow. “No idea?”
“Not mauther, certainly. That much I’m certain of.” Canby heard a murmur beginning among the spectators. Again, he swallowed with effort. “Because I carved the U. Originally it was an L.” With his finger stretched out in front of him, Canby described the gesture in the air.
Later Canby would not be able to recall the exact sequence of events as he registered them from his vantage on the witness stand—whether first he saw Vernon’s head drooping toward his chest or noted the declamatory outrage of Denton’s turning toward the jury box or Underwood starting from his chair in the colored section and straining to be heard over the burst of noise from the gallery or the nearly athletic fervor with which Grady began to scribble notes on his pad. Or the sad resignation he thought he saw in Billingsley’s eyes, or Greenberg’s face falling into the palms of his rising hands.
“Your Honor,” Denton cried, with a sigh audible over the tumult and a gesture toward Canby of inexpressible disdain, “the prosecution rests.”
Canby hung his head, thinking how sorely he wished that the rest were indeed silence. No such merciful oblivion for him. Though he shut his eyes he could not shut out the roar of the spectators’ outbursts and the hammering of the judge’s gavel on the sounding block, quickening, but sure as the sounding of a knell. The whole of this din filling his ears, the announcement of and accompaniment to his utter and final disgrace.
October 23
CANBY SAT ALONE AT A BACK BOOTH OF LOVEJOY’S Saloon with the Constitution spread out before him and the nearly empty bottle of Jameson at his elbow, his tattered copy of Emerson’s Essays beside it. Here at Lovejoy’s for a second night because the Big Bonanza was now strictly off-limits and the Shamrock, over on Pryor, had proven to be another old haunt too full of ghosts. Killing time. He was reading with half-drunk bemusement the latest installment of a series called “Negro Atlanta” by an ambitious young reporter named M. C. McMillin, who had announced that he planned to tour as much of black Atlanta as he could discover. Canby took a swallow of whiskey as he read.
“Few people in Atlanta ever stop to consider how the colored people of the city live. We see them every day; they are about us and work for us, and at night go to their homes; but what these homes are and where they are, and the little picture that each hearthstone presents, we never think of,” this McMillin reported, indulging in what Angus Canby would have called a too-pronounced fondness for the semicolon. “But by far the largest proportion of Negroes are never really known to us; they drift off to themselves, and are almost as far from the white people, as if the two races never met.”
The story ended with a list of sites the reporter planned to explore in the following weeks: Pig Alley, the Anthole, Beaver Slide, Hell’s Half Acre, Snake Nation. All of them regular stops on the police beat. Places that Canby remembered well as highly inhospitable to the likes of M. C. McMillin. He wondered how the young man’s zeal would fare in those most sullen and volatile corners of
the city.
He closed the newspaper and looked once more at its front page. This special afternoon edition of the Constitution that had run, for the first time in its short history, a double-bill feature of “Atlanta and Her Enemies” at the bottom of page one. Canby studied his likeness sketched in newsprint next to Greenberg’s, whose Semitic features had been sharpened and darkened, some shadings of charcoal, perhaps, employed to heighten the shadows of his face, giving it a sinister aspect. Canby himself looked the worse for the portraiture: nose a bit bulbous, bags beneath his eyes.
And above the crease, “GUILTY” spread over all four columns in outsized letters. He scanned the article again. The jury had, at least by appearances, deliberated overnight before reaching its verdict. But it was the Constitution’s presses that had really delivered the verdict, and would deliver the sentence as well, Canby thought. Greenberg’s defense had filed an appeal immediately, the article said. Word of mob justice for Greenberg had been circulating among the lower classes of whites. For his safety Greenberg was being kept in Fulton Tower instead of the city jail, moved now to the infamous cell for the condemned that the guards called Spot 12, in the front of the tower, near the door and the watch desk. There he would be under the supervision of two guards at all times save the third shift, when the guards retired for the night and the jailer took the wee hours alone, “save for the company of Mary Flanagan’s murderer, kept under lock and key but scarce a half-dozen strides away.”
Canby folded the paper and looked out over the saloon. Nearly all of the patrons had gone. Even Joel Chandler Harris had left at some point without Canby’s noticing. There’d been an awkward moment between them when Canby came in: Harris looking up from his notebook to give Canby a short nod, then back to his work. No reporting at this hour, in Lovejoy’s, Canby figured. Most likely more Remus tales of Brer Rabbit or Brer Fox. Harris mixing his pleasure and business these days, with seven mouths to feed at home, maybe eight now. It had not been Harris’s byline under the stories about Canby and Greenberg. Canby pushed the paper across the tabletop, away from him.
A black boy of grammar school age was wiping down the empty tables and booths. Lovejoy was behind the bar rinsing glasses in the zinc.
“What time have you got, E.B.?” Canby asked.
“Closing time, Thomas.”
“That’s not a proper time, E.B.”
“Proper time is ‘late.’”
Canby refilled his glass and pressed the cork into the bottle with the heel of his hand. He sipped the whiskey and watched the black boy as he worked his way toward this last booth.
“You can take those,” Canby said when the boy finally got to him. He nodded at the newspaper and the bottle of Jameson. The boy rolled the paper and stuck it in his back pocket. He put the bottle on the bench across from Canby and began cleaning the table. Canby set his glass on the book of Emerson and moved both out of the reach of the boy’s dishcloth, pressed against the pine beadboard that lined Lovejoy’s walls.
“It’s a weeknight.”
“Yessir,” the boy said, dragging the wet cloth in circles over the table.
“That means school tomorrow.”
The boy looked up, a trace of a smile in his eyes. Canby imagined he was used to the drunks funning him and that he wanted to let him know he was in on the joke.
“I’m not kidding. School. Tomorrow.”
“Yessir.” The eyes dropped back to the table and the cloth resumed its circuit.
Canby reached into his jacket for his wallet, fat now with what Vernon had diplomatically called his ‘muster pay,’ and took out a dollar.
“Make you a deal. I give you this, you go to school in the morning.”
After a moment’s consideration the boy nodded and Canby gave him the bill.
“How far is home for you?”
“Nine blocks out to Shermantown, sir.”
“Be careful getting there. You shouldn’t stop to talk to anyone.”
“Yessir.”
“I’m serious, now.”
“Yessir.” The boy folded the dollar up. He took off his left shoe and stuffed the bill into its toe, then put the shoe back on and carried the bottle behind the bar.
Canby picked up his glass and the battered Essays and rose. He took a pull from the glass, then another, longer one, and set it on the bar as he said good night to E.B. Lovejoy.
Outside he stood under Lovejoy’s shingle and weighed his options for a moment before he admitted to himself that he had none, other than to spend another night sheltering at Vernon’s. He set out down Peachtree Street toward Butler. The hour was nearing midnight now but the streetlights were still lit, gaslight glowing for the safety of those travelers who continued to arrive in the city at all hours for the Cotton Exposition. He looked up in the night sky for some constellation but the city’s light was too bright to see past it. He supposed that boded well for Lovejoy’s boy on his way home, though he knew the gas grid had never extended out as far as Shermantown, likely never would.
He marveled at the rarity of being the only pedestrian on Peachtree. Late indeed, he thought. The wee hours. The late wee hours. He knew he’d had too much to drink. Was that the word the Constitution reporter had used, wee?
He stopped and looked around him at the stores shuttered for the night on the other side of Peachtree, the three-storied white mass of First Methodist South behind him, its slate steeple reaching up past the light of the lamps. Wee hours, the story had said. And the reporter had pointed out that the jailer took the last shift alone.
Then he was moving again, heading southward now to Porter Street, his footfalls sounding off the macadam of Peachtree as he stepped up his pace toward Butler and then Fair Street, toward the tower.
Midway there he heard the clatter of wagon wheels on the pavement and then he was running, cutting across a short block of Butler Street toward the lighted hansom racing up Hunter, shouting to hail it.
THERE HAD BEEN no torchlight to herald their coming. No snorting of horses; no creaking of wagon wheels. Not even the sound of the jail door’s lock being jimmied. As the jailer told it, there was only the settling of a noose around his neck by hands unseen, the swift draping of a pillowcase over his head by figures behind him and out of sight. He was lashed to the bars of Spot 12 himself while Greenberg groaned inside the cage and they worked their way through the jailer’s pilfered key chain. They talked of Buckhead, the jailer said, where most of Mary Flanagan’s kin still were. And of the big oak out front of Henry Irby’s store, there at the crossroads.
So Vernon told it after nearly running Canby down in the middle of Fair Street with the police hansom. Vernon had been whipping the reins across the horses’ necks, speeding them northward to the rail yard and the Western & Atlantic depot, when a dark figure had stepped into the middle of the street waving his arms. Vernon said he’d had half a mind to mow down the fool, another drunk peckerwood the likes of which he was trying to intercept. But he had recognized Canby at the last moment and slowed the hansom just enough for Canby to jump into it. And now, pulling into the rail yard, he said that their likeliest chance of beating the mob to the tree in Buckhead was the W&A’s Number Nine Line. How much time had elapsed before the jailer had worked loose the knots and sent for Vernon was anyone’s guess. Right now their best hope was speed.
“Likely the bastard was asleep,” Canby said, climbing up behind Vernon into the smoking locomotive.
“Likely. But he also was scared. He’d soiled himself. That was quite evident.” Vernon leaned from the locomotive cab, half his body out of the engine and in the night air, hanging by the handrail, adroit as a yard hand himself. “Ho, there! Got those cars uncoupled?”
“That’s my job,” the engineer said sourly. He cocked an ear toward the rear of the train and, satisfied by what the clanking song of metal told him, nodded to Vernon. “We’re ready.”
“North, then. With speed.”
Vernon clapped the fireman on his shoulder, where h
e was shoveling coal into the firebox at a pace too slow to suit him. “Feed that box, you dirty Irish son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Stoke it up!”
The engineer tugged on the whistle and pushed forward the handle that unlocked the brake. Like a slumbering beast awakened, the engine began to churn and the locomotive to move, its wheels slowly gaining purchase on the slick rails. They pulled out from the shadows of the Western & Atlantic depot and northward through town, the steel wheels beginning to keen on the rails.
“And thus the Number Nine departs up the Marietta Line, hours ahead of the schedule,” Vernon said.
“And short of its freight,” the engineer added.
But Vernon seemed not to have heard. As he measured the progress of dark buildings against the pace the train was picking up, he seemed satisfied, or at least eased. He pulled a cigar from his vest and lit it, tossed the match over the rail. “There is yet time.”
“If they are on horseback.”
“Which they surely are. And one of them with Greenberg in the saddle afore him to slow the group down.”
“How long was the guard tied?”
“He figures an hour before he worked himself free.”
Canby smiled bitterly. “Figures? Then he surely was asleep when they broke in. We will have to do better. Are you well armed?”
“Quite. Yourself?”
Canby patted his jacket, where under the cloth and snug against his chest hung his .32 Bulldog. The pocket revolver tucked into his boot. Anse’s big Colt, he regretted, was still under the couch in Vernon’s front room where he had slept last night. And the rest of his arms still at the Kimball House, in the empty room there. He knew that whatever force they met at Buckhead would surely outmatch these meager munitions.
“We are a small posse, Vernon.”
“A small posse in search of a large one. How fucked is that?”
Because he had had the same thought himself, Canby did not bother to answer. Instead, as the city lights faded behind them, he watched the ember of Vernon’s cigar flare and ebb in the darkness, smelled its rich smoke fill the small cab of the locomotive with each exhalation before it was snatched away by the night wind. Once, they lumbered over a trestle, the wood planks popping like shots and the Chattahoochee roiling below. At regular intervals the fireman would feed the firebox, and each heave of coal into the box brought forth a shower of sparks before he shut the door. And at some point between the openings and closings of the firebox door Canby became aware of a muted glow on the horizon ahead.
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