Ellsworth turned his head and, for the first time, looked Sharpe in the eye. “I did not hurt her.”
From the other side, Clayton lowered his body and drove a fist into Ellsworth’s rib cage. Had the farmer seen it coming, pride might have clamped his jaw shut, but because he was turned the other way he cried out.
“Shoulda squared him up for a solar plexus shot,” Helton critiqued from the observation room.
“Then they can’t talk,” Big Nose corrected him. “Can’t even breathe after that. The point is to get a confession, dummy, so he needs to be able to speak.”
“Still.”
“They’ll resort to that if they have to.”
Ellsworth seemed to be having trouble breathing nonetheless. His palms were still flat on the table but had gone slack, and his face hung too low for Rake to see his expression.
“You forgetting yourself, Otis? That happens in cases like this, when you realize you’re out of options. Normally a nigra knows how to behave, but when you’ve done as wrong as you have, you start feeling those things don’t apply to you, am I right?”
It took a few seconds for him to say, “It wasn’t me, sir.”
Clayton slapped him in the face. Just hard enough to be insulting. And to inform him that his face would not be off limits.
“She was running from you, wasn’t she?” Sharpe asked. “She’d seen you looking at her. She knew what was coming.”
Ellsworth shaking his head.
Clayton, who had walked around Ellsworth’s chair to trade places with his partner, delivered a mirror-image blow on the other side of the man’s ribs.
Rake wished he hadn’t come. He did not enjoy watching this. Yet Helton and Big Nose sure seemed to. He stood and took two steps and reached for the doorknob.
Helton said to Big Nose, “Yeah, now he’s leaving.”
Rake’s hand lingered on the knob. He asked, “When are they going to ask about Underhill?”
“Who?” Helton asked.
“Brian Underhill. The last man she was seen alive with.”
Big Nose had been staring straight ahead, but he turned to Rake. Watching him very carefully.
“I don’t expect they’re going to ask about him,” Big Nose said slowly and clearly, the kind of voice that almost has body language with it even though he didn’t move.
“Why not? Maybe the father’s aware of some past history between her and Underhill?”
“I can’t listen with your yapping,” Big Nose said. “Louder’n a hound dog with no bone. Go make yourself useful somewhere.”
Rake left. Stung by the remark, he would indeed make himself useful. In the hallway, he knocked on the interrogation room door.
Silence for a few beats. Then the door opened, only a crack. A sliver of Clayton’s face, sweatier up close than he’d appeared in the window. Eyes hostile. “What?”
“Ask if he knows the name Underhill.”
It took longer than it should have for Clayton to reply. As if the adrenaline in his blood was so thick he couldn’t switch back to a less charged encounter. “Excuse me?”
“The last person she was seen alive with was a white man named Brian Underhill. She was in his car, the evening of July ninth, in Darktown.”
Clayton blinked a few times, breathing hard. “Says who?”
“A couple of the colored cops. They saw them together.”
Clayton shook his head. “Colored cops? Fuck you.” He closed the door and got back to work.
11
BOGGS WAS LIVID as he made the long walk home. He’d put himself at great risk—he could expect a tongue-lashing from McInnis and possibly a suspension, or worse—and he’d not a thing to show for it. Now white cops were likely interrogating Ellsworth, no doubt violently. Why had he expected anything different?
All those votes he’d helped register, and their number one reason for colored cops was to stop police brutality. Yet their hiring didn’t seem to be changing that. It still happened, everywhere, in the station and out on the streets. He’d known what was coming by the way the two detectives had led Ellsworth away. This and Dunlow’s beat-down the other night seemed to make it official, as with an APD stamp: Boggs was nothing but a meaningless figurehead.
He never should have told the Daily Times reporter. He should have let the family continue in their ignorance, let the mystery of whatever happened to Lily drag on. That would have been hell, too, but a different kind. He’d merely swapped their hells. That’s all that Officer Lucius Boggs had the power to do for his fellow Negro citizens: give them a slightly different hell.
The only way to salvage the day would be to do something that would again put him at risk. Was he that stupid? Was he about to get himself fired? Was this one farmer and his dead daughter worth it?
He stopped and walked back to the station.
Atlantans did not often see colored men loitering outside the police headquarters, yet that’s what Boggs was doing. He stood at the corner across the street, near a light pole marked with red tape denoting it a bus stop. Atlanta Constitution in his hand, though he wasn’t really reading it. He skimmed the occasional story but mainly kept his eyes on the station.
The white detectives had steered Ellsworth toward the interrogation room about an hour and a half ago. For all Boggs knew, the man had already been released. Or perhaps he’d been booked. Boggs hoped not. His goal was to talk to the man, but he wasn’t sure what his exact plan was, how long he’d allow himself to stand here.
He was a cop staking out a police station.
He’d been there ten minutes when two white cops, emerging from the station, saw him, muttered to each other, and stood watching him from across the street.
Boggs cursed under his breath as they jaywalked toward him. He didn’t recognize them, but he wondered if they knew him. It would no doubt take him years to know all the faces of the dozens of white cops, but how long until every cop had memorized the eight colored faces among them?
“What are you doing here, boy?”
“Waiting,” he said, looking up from his paper. The two cops both seemed younger than him, high school a very recent memory, maybe a year or two of odd jobs before deciding to take the police test. Boggs knew he was going to have to get better at identifying and describing faces, but right then the only way he could describe them was young, white, angry. Might as well have been identical.
“You’re loitering,” the other one said, “so you’d best move along now.”
The other one glanced at Boggs’s bandage. “Looks like you’ve been beaten up already, be a shame to have it happen again and—”
“My name is Officer Lucius Boggs and I’m waiting on someone.”
The white cops looked at each other. “Ah hell,” one of them said.
The other stepped more closely to him. “You don’t belong here. Get back with your kind.”
“I’m waiting on someone.” He tried to keep his face relaxed. He had been trained for years to avoid exactly the sort of confrontations that he now found himself having, repeatedly. After three months, it hadn’t become any less disorienting. “I’ll be gone once he’s arrived.”
“Who are you waiting on?”
He wanted to say, That’s my business, and mind yours. He wanted to ask them if they had a beat they should be walking. He sorely wanted to mouth off, and right then he didn’t even mind being outnumbered two to one. But they had thousands at their backs.
So he tried to look friendly. Even smiled. Hating himself for it. “How long have you been on the force, three months like me? Is this how you want to start off?”
The bluff didn’t work. “You have any idea how much money we’d make if we knocked you down to size? There’s a big pool on your head.”
“I’ve heard that.” Boggs’s adrenaline was spiking and he could feel a tremor rise in his che
st. He was afraid he’d start shaking from the energy and look scared. Or he’d have to unleash that energy by hitting one of them. He wasn’t sure which would be worse. “It was seventy-five dollars a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it? It reach a hundred yet? Didn’t know a Negro could be worth so much after slavery.”
One of the cops smiled. But the other leaned closer to Boggs and said, “You ain’t worth shit.” Staying in Boggs’s space for a moment. Then he backed off and the two white cops walked away.
They looked over their shoulder at him twice in the time it took them to walk a block, until they were out of view.
Boggs’s heart was still pounding and he had to pace off the high. Lord almighty. He wanted to hit something. He tried to calm himself down, realizing he was only going to attract more attention by pacing like a strung-out junkie.
Twenty minutes later, Ellsworth emerged from headquarters. He was walking even more slowly than he had been that morning. Before, it had been fear. Now, it was pain: Boggs could pick up the clenched teeth by the set of the man’s jaw, could see the limp from across the street.
“Mr. Ellsworth,” Boggs called out as he crossed. Ellsworth flinched, stepping back. The quick movement made him suck in his breath and put a hand to the left side of his rib cage. His face appeared unmarked, but the detectives had known to aim low. Also his hat was gone. “I was hoping we could talk for a bit.”
“Done enough talking.” His voice tiny.
“Please, sir. I’d just like to ask you a few questions about your daughter.”
“Your white men already did that.”
Ellsworth started to shuffle away. Boggs held up his palms. “I don’t ask the way they do.”
Ellsworth ignored him. Boggs let him pass. He watched as Ellsworth stopped for a moment, as if to gather himself, and take another few steps. The man could barely walk.
“How long do you think it’s going to take for you to get to the station like that? Two hours?”
No reply. One more step, then another. Then stop.
Boggs walked over to him. “Let me get you a cab and we’ll ride over together. There’s a spot near the station where I can get you some lunch. You could use some water, I bet.”
Ellsworth glared. “What do you want?”
“The white officers don’t care what happened to your daughter, sir. I do. Will you let me help you?”
Ellsworth gazed up the street. Boggs wondered how many rows this farmer had hoed in his many years and he realized that, to Ellsworth, walking a mile on smooth sidewalks with broken ribs might not rank near the top of his hardest days. He wasn’t sure if Ellsworth was calculating the distance or trying to remember train schedules, seeing flashes of whatever the detectives had done to him or trying to remember the last time he’d seen his daughter alive.
The farmer sounded deeply resigned as he said, “I’ll let you try.”
It took a few minutes to hail a cab that would transport Negroes, but finally they were on their way. The fare was an extravagance Boggs normally would not permit himself.
They’d been in the cab only a few seconds when Boggs realized that Ellsworth smelled of urine. The farmer’s shirttails were hanging out, though they’d been tucked in when he’d arrived at the station. Shame had compelled him to cover the evidence.
They were silent as they rode through downtown. They passed restaurants that would not have served them, some of whose waiters or chefs would attack Boggs if he dared walk in—an eighteen-year-old visitor from New York had been so treated a few weeks ago, Boggs had read in the Daily Times. He passed office towers that only granted admittance to Negroes who shined shoes or cleaned bathrooms. He passed white women who would no doubt scream if he made eye contact with them. “Reckless eyeballing” was the official charge police filed in such cases; since becoming a cop, he had looked up the statute to make sure it existed. It did.
They passed hotels that would not admit him, and passed the ridiculously costumed Negro bellhops who were those establishments’ only colored employees. During the Depression, hotel managers had been accused by the Silver Shirts and the Brown Shirts and other Fascist groups of betraying their white race by hiring Negroes at a time when so many whites were starving. One of Boggs’s cousins had been fired back then, laid off like most of the Negro bellhops when the hotel managers had seen the logic of the Fascists’ argument after a parade of uniformed goose-steppers marched down Peachtree Street. Now that the Depression was a memory, some of those white bellhops had moved on to better work, and Boggs’s cousin once again had the honor of carrying white people’s baggage.
Boggs paid the fare at Terminal Station. Across the street was a café at whose window Negroes were permitted to purchase food to be eaten elsewhere. Ellsworth insisted he wasn’t hungry, however, so they skipped it and entered the station. The wide doors gaped open to allow some air flow, and they walked in and saw the high arched ceilings above, the marble floor shining despite being trod upon by thousands already that day. They walked to their left and entered the cramped colored waiting room, where there was no air flow and hardly any room to sit. The end of one bench had just enough room for Ellsworth’s narrow frame. Boggs stood in front of him.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Boggs said, feeling badly that he hadn’t the opportunity before. He kept his voice low, though surely others could hear them. This was hardly the ideal spot for an interview, but it was all he had.
Ellsworth was looking away. His eyes not really there.
Boggs felt coldly professional as he took the small notebook out of his pocket. He asked for Lily’s full name and age, then asked, “Could you tell me why she was in Atlanta?”
“I don’t know. She stubborn.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think she do better out here, I guess.”
“How?”
“Search me. But she never was one for hard labor, you know. She no farmer’s wife.”
“You work your own land?”
“No. But I get by.”
“So she came here to be a maid somewhere?” It was unlikely that a colored girl from the country could find better work than as domestic help; the few textile jobs open to colored women would have been taken by native Atlantans, and since the war had ended such openings had become scarce. “Why couldn’t she do that somewhere closer to Peacedale?”
Ellsworth shook his head and made a face like If you had daughters, you would not ask such logical questions about them.
“Why Atlanta?”
“She had a fight with my wife. They weren’t getting on so well.”
“She a hard girl to raise?”
“They got on fine, most times. Things happen here and there. I don’t ask about that, you know? They just need to get on well enough to get that food on the table, keep the little ones in line. All I ask about. They having some fight or lip or whatnot, I only step in if it happens in front of me.”
“Do you know where she was when she got here, where she was living or working?”
“Yeah, she wrote us some letters. Had return addresses on ’em.”
“Do you still have them?”
“Wife does.”
“I’d very much like to see them.”
“Well, you have to come out and look for ’em, then. I ain’t coming back.”
“I’d be happy to.” He asked for Ellsworth’s address and wrote it down.
“You come during the day, I be out in the fields. And if you come at night, well, you don’t want to be doing that.”
“I’ll be fine, sir.”
Ellsworth watched him, his face unreadable as a stone that hasn’t been engraved yet. “Yeah.”
“Was there anything in her letters, Mr. Ellsworth, that made you fear for her safety?”
“Didn’t like the idea her being here, that what you mean.”
�
�But did she ever write anything specifically that struck you as—”
Ellsworth shaking his head was enough to get Boggs to stop.
“Did she ever mention the name Brian Underhill?”
“No. Who that?”
“Just someone we’ve been keeping our eye on. How about Lionel Dunlow or Denny Rakestraw?”
More head shakes. “Don’t recall any names being mentioned. ’Cept that one, the senator.”
“The senator?”
“She got a job working as a maid to a senator. Senator’s wife, that is. Senator wasn’t around.”
Boggs tried not to look shocked. “Which one?”
“Don’t recall.”
Boggs could not believe that the man would not know the name of a senator his daughter was working for. But at the same time, he could. “When was that?”
“May. Strawberry season. I was looking at the letter, and when my wife had her turn, she scolded me, said I got sweat on it. Smeared some of the words.” A tiny smile, easily slain.
“Did you mention any of this to the police in the station?”
“Didn’t ask about that. Only want to ask about me. They hinted disgusting things. I’m a man of God. I read the Good Book. Lily taught me to, matter of fact. And I’m in there every Sunday and some other days besides. Those police, they hinted disgusting things.”
“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Ellsworth.”
“Why you keep calling me Mr. Ellsworth?”
“It’s your name, sir.”
Ellsworth shook his head and his eyes looked angry, like he couldn’t understand why this odd city man was talking in code. “It’s Otis.”
“All right, Otis. But I’m not like those cops.”
“No kiddin’. How you even a cop?”
“We do strange things here in Atlanta.”
“Yes, you do. I ain’t been here in years. Not coming back for years, neither. Maybe not ever.”
“In that letter, the one when she was working for the senator, did she say anything about him or his wife? Or their house or the job?”
“Not much to say about domestic work.” An empty laugh. “She didn’t write us about dusting and whatnot. You know, just saying hello and asking after the crops and the family and such.”
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