Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “This is our business,” Smith said. “Enforcing the law is our business.”

  “Law?” Raymond laughed. “Law ain’t never concerned itself with us before, less’n they want to jail one of us for something somebody else done.”

  “Well,” Boggs explained, “it’s different now.”

  “I ain’t remember saying I wanted it any different. I want you off my porch.”

  “We have a right to be on this porch because we heard gunshots and I’m looking at a man with a busted forehead,” Boggs said. “That’s called probable cause.”

  “Look, folks,” Smith said, speaking slowly, “I know everyone’s all revved up right now so let’s just calm down a spell. We’re here to help you. Because we’re two crazy men who actually like to help people for a living. It’s like being preachers except we get to carry these,” and he lightly tapped the handle of the sidearm in his holster.

  “You don’t need to be dealing with people who cause you trouble on your own porch and try to break in and shoot you, all right?” Boggs said. “You don’t need that. You can tell us who it was, and we’ll take care of it. We can help you.”

  “I don’t need your help. I see that sumbitch again, I’ll take care of him.”

  “No,” Smith said. “That’s what we do.”

  “You beat folks up?”

  “No, but we arrest people who’ve broken the law and we put them in jail.”

  “I ain’t want him in jail, I want to beat his ass, and that’s exactly what I’ll do next time I see him.”

  “A second beat-up person is not what we want,” Boggs said. “We want you to stop beating on each other every time you disagree about something.”

  “Don’t you talk to me like I’m some child.”

  “Sir, I’m trying to help you and—”

  “I told you I don’t need your help! I ain’t some child, I’m a man. I know how to uphold my honor when some fool like that try and mess with me. He think he got away with it but he don’t. Next time I see that Emmett Jones, I’m gonna—”

  “His name is Emmett Jones, good,” Boggs said. “Where does Mr. Jones live?”

  “You stop playing those police tricks on him!” the man’s wife interjected. She removed the kerchief from her husband’s forehead. “See how he done that trick on you?”

  “It’s not a trick, ma’am,” Smith said. “If you say this Emmett Jones assaulted you and shot at you, we can have him in jail tonight. He’ll be tried, and if he’s convicted he’ll—”

  “Dammit, I said I didn’t want him arrested, I want his ass beat.” He took the kerchief from his wife and again tried to stanch the bleeding. “I don’t need some pretty-talking boy in a nice uniform to be doing no convicting for me. You saying I ain’t my own man? I know how to defend myself. Last winter when Moody Hills come by and stole all my firewood, what you think I did to him? I tracked him down and clocked him with a piece of that same firewood and that took care of that.”

  “You’re the one who assaulted Moody Hills?” Smith asked. “He was unconscious three days.” They’d never made any progress on that one; they’d simply come upon a man lying outside his home beside a pile of logs, back during their first week on the force.

  “I didn’t say that! I didn’t say that!”

  “You see!” his wife hit him in the chest. “He playing those police tricks on you again! You gots to stop talking!”

  “That was a different time Moody got sent to the hospital anyway!” Raymond shouted at the officers. “Time I hit him was different from that time!”

  Boggs folded his arms and began rapidly losing the desire to talk to this couple. Yet talk he did, for a few more minutes, and if this had been the debate club at Morehouse College, then surely the judge would have awarded Boggs all the points. But here on this dilapidated and unlit porch in the darkness of night, the verbal sparring won him nothing. Trying to introduce the concept of law and order to a people who had never been given reason to trust it, and who therefore found justice in blood feuds—they were so much more honorable, and interesting, and, well, bloody—was a terribly long and frustrating process.

  Boggs jotted down snippets in his small notebook. More questions, fewer answers. The couple adamantly refused the need for medical care, and they didn’t want to file a report, thank you, but the gunshots alone dictated the following of certain procedures. Boggs walked down the street to call in the gunshots from the nearest call box, and Smith began knocking on the other doors of the apartment building, hoping for witnesses and already knowing the kinds of half-asleep nonanswers he would receive.

  Two hours later they were walking again when the skies opened and they took shelter beneath the awning of a hardware store. The monsoon was intense and the wind soaked their pant legs as they stood there otherwise protected, the tang of wet asphalt thick in the air already.

  Power flicked off, power flicked back on. Thunder rattled old windows.

  Of the eight, seven had served in the war. Two had medals to show for it, including Smith, awarded a Silver Star for carrying two badly burned fellow soldiers out of a demolished tank and through hostile fire. Six had attended college and four, including Boggs, had diplomas (a graduation rate exponentially higher than the white cops’). All were Atlanta natives. Before swearing their oaths, one had been a typesetter at the Negro Daily Times, one had been a butcher, two had sold insurance, one had been a handyman, one had taught, and two had been janitors. Xavier Little played a mean fiddle and was ruthless at chess. Wade Johnson was a skilled artist and had once hoped to be an architect before seeing that particular door closed due to his color. Champ Jennings was six three, had once been an amateur boxer, and carried, instead of a billy club, the sawed-off handle of an ax. All were Christian, six of them attending services regularly. Three were fathers. Their ages ranged from twenty-one to thirty-two. Each of them wondered how many of the others were seriously considering quitting.

  One of them was currently on suspension: Sherman Bayle, the ex-butcher. A kindhearted fellow, whom each of the others feared might be a bit too soft for this line of work. At twenty-nine, he was the second oldest, with three kids. Two weeks ago he was brought before Sergeant McInnis; someone had lodged a complaint that Bayle had been seen drinking in public. Bayle told McInnis it wasn’t so, he hadn’t even been at the nightclub in question. Yet a white officer, off duty, had driven past the club and he swore he’d seen Bayle leave the premises stumbling drunk. It was a white cop’s word against a colored cop’s.

  An investigation was ongoing. Bayle was suspended without pay. Most of his fellow colored officers had dropped by his house to offer their support, though there wasn’t anything that could be done.

  All of the other seven believed Bayle was innocent, but that hardly mattered.

  They were not detectives, only beat cops. They had no squad cars and were forbidden from entering the white headquarters. Their job was to enforce peace and arrest those observed to have broken the law, but they could not conduct investigations. One day, they each hoped, there would be promotions, but not now. Probably not for a very long while.

  Although Sweet Auburn boasted far more wealth than most white folks realized, and, on the other side of town, the West Side offered renowned Negro universities that many white folks didn’t even know existed, most of Atlanta’s colored neighborhoods were in dire condition. Few lampposts, sporadic-to-no garbage collection, several unpaved roads, no enforcement of housing codes. And, until months ago, no cops. The end of the war had brought a population boom to the city, with so many farmers fleeing sharecropping to find something only slightly less horrible. Families lived packed into one-room apartments, multiple families sharing a bathroom in some buildings, others in ramshackle dwellings tucked into the alleys lining the more decrepit blocks. Some of the neighborhoods still lacked plumbing, and more than once Boggs and Smith had the unfortunate experienc
e of pursuing a suspect who wound up trying to hide in an outhouse. These neighborhoods were minutes on foot from the street where Boggs had lived all his life, but his family had assiduously avoided them. It was like entering another world.

  The area was in desperate need of policing. Since the white cops ventured over only when they needed a Negro to conveniently arrest for some crime, the residents had no protection from pickpockets and thieves and burglars, scofflaws and roughnecks, moonshiners and drunks and rapists. Even the fine homes on Auburn Avenue were not immune from break-ins and the occasional sighting of a prostitute strolling past. And the sheer amount of alcohol in this until-recently officially dry city was enough to keep the rest of the South at least half drunk at all times.

  So they had started by going after the booze. They busted pool halls that kept moonshine. They busted stills, literally tore them apart with crowbars and set fire to the piles. They shut down barbershops that sold illegal booze, pharmacies that sold illegal booze, even an old lady who ran a small nursery school but sold booze on the side. The closest thing to an actual investigation they’d pulled off had been a prolonged surveillance of several low-level bootleggers to get a better sense of the underground market’s supply chain. That had led to a handful of arrests; one of the bootleggers’ trial was just days away. Otherwise, their work involved being put in the middle of awful family situations: this son stabbed his father, that husband put his wife in the hospital, this wife is selling herself at night and now the husband found out and is chasing the pimp down the block with a cleaver in his hand.

  His second day on the job, Boggs had been trying to help a woman whose wayward sons’ friends had broken into her place and robbed it. He’d asked, “Ma’am, can you tell me what time it was when you were out?” and “What other things were taken, ma’am?” when her face turned into a scowl and she’d demanded, “Why you keep calling me ‘ma’am’ ?” He’d been thrown at first, no idea what she meant. The second time she’d said it, he replied, “Well, I can’t very well call you ‘sir.’ ” Which had not been what she wanted to hear; she launched into a tirade, accusing him of playing some trick on her. It took him a moment to realize that no one had ever called her “ma’am” before. Boggs had heard his own mother so addressed countless times, as she was a regal Auburn Avenue matriarch, wife to a preacher. But to this poor woman, it was a word for someone else. “You blind, son? You see a ‘ma’am’ here? I look like a white lady to you?” It had broken his heart.

  A few months later, it had happened so many times he’d grown used to it.

  Hours later, another storm had come and mostly gone, fading to a drizzle. Boggs and Smith walked in their ponchos, gutters playing their percussion all around them. Vast puddles sometimes forced them to walk in the middle of the road, and the city was glistening and new and everyone but them was asleep.

  They walked down Krog Street, passing bungalows painted red and yellow and blue. Another block north and they’d reach a small textile mill across the street from an empty, overgrown plot where a few weeks ago they’d helped two lunatic white men from the country retrieve a couple of stallions that had fled the men’s trailer after the men had pulled over in front of a nightclub for a few drinks.

  Their shift had more than an hour to go and Boggs was yearning for sleep when Smith stopped.

  “Oh, Lord.” He was sniffing, so Boggs did, too. Even in the damp air it was unmistakable.

  They walked in little circles, seeking its source.

  Smith knew the smell far more intimately than Boggs, whose war experience had not involved combat, much to his chagrin. But Boggs had come to learn that scent on two occasions these past few months, once when they’d helped a landlord kick down the door to an apartment whose tenant had not been heard from in days and once when they’d come upon a local drunk who’d had his final, lethal jolt of bad moonshine in an alley.

  Smith walked through the high grass of the abandoned lot, risking snakebites and red bugs and God knew what, using his long flashlight to see where he was going and to push back the overgrowth.

  As they neared the brick wall of a two-story building, their feet started crunching upon wrappers. They beamed the ground and saw that this was an unofficial trash dump; garbage spanned the length of the building, several feet high in places. The overall stench was even worse, and more varied now, but still that tang of death clung around them.

  Amid the weeds was some bamboo, and Boggs snapped off two shoots. He handed one to Smith and they used them to sift through the trash. Their beams illuminated paper bags and bottles and decaying food and worse things, all of their smells loud and radiant, made all the worse by the fact that the lot had been baked by the sun and soaked by rains and reheated and resoaked over and over again.

  Boggs’s bamboo hit against something solid. He pushed at the trash and moved it off whatever it was. Then he saw her. He didn’t recognize the skin as skin at first, because it was so discolored. But he recognized her canary-yellow dress.

  While Smith hurried to the nearest call box, Boggs said a prayer for her. He asked that the Lord keep her spirit, whoever she was. He asked that she find peace. And he prayed for the Lord’s forgiveness, because he had seen her in that car with the white man who hit her, and he hadn’t done anything to help her.

  4

  SERGEANT MCINNIS WAS the first to join them at the site. Two of the other colored officers, Wade Johnson and big Champ Jennings, made it minutes later.

  “You’re sure she’s the same girl?” McInnis asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Smith replied.

  “Thought you said you couldn’t see her face that night.”

  “Can’t really see her face anymore either, Sergeant. But she has the same dress and locket and hair.”

  McInnis crouched beside the corpse while Boggs shined a light. The body was bloated and purpled and not recognizably human. Pieces of it were missing, sometimes in chunks and sometimes little pecks, in accordance with the size of the scavengers that had feasted on it.

  “Damn. Couple days, I’d say.” McInnis stood back up. “Garbage collection is supposed to be once a week in this neighborhood, ain’t it?”

  “That might be official policy,” Smith said. “But I live a few blocks away, and it ain’t the case.”

  “Well, I want you to call in to Sanitation and find out the most recent time they’ve been by.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After three months of working under McInnis, none of them knew quite what to make of him. He had the exasperated air of a man who was perpetually one card shy of a royal flush, his patience thinned by that one maddening, missing card. He had a wife and, they’d heard somewhere, kids, yet he never spoke about them. His short dark hair had never noticeably grown or been cut, which meant either he trimmed it incessantly or it just somehow didn’t grow. The hair was free of gray, though he had wrinkles around his eyes, the weathered look of a fellow who’d been scowling for years until it became permanent. He was thin and—the few times any of them had occasion to see him pursue a subject on foot—startlingly fast. He was their boss. He called all of them by their last names and never asked about their home lives. None of them had ever heard him say “nigger” or “coon” or “monkey” or “ape,” yet they all felt certain those words were familiar to his tongue. He didn’t smile much. He ate meticulously constructed sandwiches that his wife (they assumed) wrapped in waxed paper for him, never going out for a meal, which (they assumed) was because he did not want to patronize the local colored establishments. He was in all likelihood the only sergeant in Atlanta who had eight rookies to deal with, regardless of race. They each sensed that he hated his job, at least since they’d been hired.

  “You’ll have to take the body out,” he said. “And then you’ll have to go through this whole mess for the murder weapon or anything else.”

  “Should we wait for Homicide, sir?” Jennings aske
d. “We don’t want them criticizing us for disturbing a crime scene.”

  “They’ll criticize you regardless of what you do. And this crime scene appears pretty well disturbed already. Besides, if we wait on them, we could wait so long the sanitation trucks beat them to her.”

  They didn’t need him to translate: white detectives couldn’t care less about a dead colored girl, especially one found in a dump.

  “Someone should question the fellow she was with that night,” Johnson chimed in.

  “Brian Underhill,” Boggs said.

  “He was in your report?” McInnis seemed interested in that name.

  “Yes, sir. Dunlow and Rakestraw took over once he was pulled over the second time.”

  “I’ll look into it.” McInnis considered something, eyes down. “C’mon, take her out.”

  Boggs and Smith exchanged a quick glance, then got on with the unfortunate business. The body was rock hard, and they heard ugly snapping sounds, what might have been bone or tendons, and the gross expulsions of gas as they wrestled her out. They carried her past the dump and the jungle of weeds, lowering her to the alley floor as gently as they could manage. Boggs trying very, very hard not to think about what they were doing, not to fully grasp it.

  The body was filthy, covered in everything from coffee grounds to wet newspaper to what appeared to be maggots. Jennings backed up a step, hand raised to his mouth.

  McInnis, handkerchief covering his nose and mouth, knelt down beside her. He tried to move her head, couldn’t, and settled for rearranging the hair that had been covering her face. It was foul and nightmarish and despite all the missing flesh there didn’t seem to be anything shaped like a bullet hole.

  He moved to her chest now, and there it was, a bullet hole leading to her heart. Not difficult to find at all, since the top of her dress was soaked black. There only appeared to be one, and the sight of it seemed enough for McInnis, who apparently figured the coroner could look for any others.