Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “Hell no. No point. Man was just arrested and didn’t roll over on anyone.”

  “Maybe he did roll over on someone and we don’t know it.”

  “If he did, we would know it. I sure as hell would know.”

  Dunlow stopped in front of a small bungalow that seemed to be sinking into the earth around it, which it probably was. Maybe the roof had been level to the ground when it had been built, but it wasn’t anymore, the north side a good two feet higher than the south.

  “This is Shane Andrews’s place, right?” He was a gambler and petty criminal who’d fed them some information on a burglary a few weeks back.

  “That’s the man.”

  Rake reached for the radio to update Dispatch on their location, but Dunlow grabbed his hand.

  “They don’t need to know where we’re at all the time. And we don’t need no help on this. Shane and Poe go back. They worked the labor camps outside Charleston together during the war. Card games and flimflam, then bootlegging for whoever needed the help. Eventually rode the rails here to do the same thing.”

  The house had appeared dark at first, but the longer they sat there they noticed that when the night’s breeze parted the curtains in one of the windows, faint light trickled through. No other windows in the neighborhood were illuminated.

  Rake slowly crept into the alley. He heard voices. Laughter. The clink of some coins, or maybe chips. That sound alone gave them the right to knock down the doors, at least according to Department policy.

  The windows in back were dark. Rake carefully tested the knob, which turned. As he slowly opened the door, which did not squeak, he heard the much louder sound of Dunlow crashing through the front door.

  “Police!” Dunlow called out. “Hands up, all of you!”

  Rake raced through the kitchenette, pulling his gun from his holster.

  He made it through a hallway. He heard men pleading for mercy or forgiveness or pleading simply that this not be happening, then he heard the sound of contact and a groan and then the sound of something hitting the ground. The fear that he might be allowing his partner—­loathed though he may be—to get killed on his watch made the finger on his trigger feel suddenly very heavy indeed.

  He kicked open a door and found himself in an unfinished living room, or squatting room to be more appropriate. Most of the walls were stripped and there was a large fireplace that wasn’t being used in that season but otherwise provided both heat and cooking many months a year, like some ranchers’ hut in the wrong geography. It was likely a crash pad for dope fiends, a large empty space to fill with empty people’s emptiness. Right now it was full of four Negroes, all of them standing, all of their hands in the air. Two tables were decorated with drinks, cards, chips, and dollars.

  Actually, there were five Negroes, as Rake hadn’t initially noticed the one who was on the ground at Dunlow’s feet. Rake was pointing his gun everywhere he looked, but Dunlow held only his billy club, which apparently had dealt with someone already.

  “Hands on the wall, goddammit!” Dunlow ordered. “You boys know how this works.”

  The four did as they were told. Dunlow smirked at Rake’s gun, then nodded toward the lined-up bodies. Rake patted them down and found nothing but a couple of knives and a screwdriver, which he duly collected. From behind, he could tell that one man was thin and nothing to worry about, two were average build, and the fourth was a monster he’d need to watch close.

  “Sit your asses back down,” Dunlow said when Rake was finished. Rake checked the man on the ground. He had no weapons but he did have a pulse, so Rake left him there.

  The four others sat and watched Dunlow like overgrown schoolchildren who were not yet sure which violation they were about to be punished for.

  “Let’s see here,” Dunlow mused. “We got Shane, Alan B., Zo, and Big Moe.” He paced in a slow circle around the two tables at which the men sat. “Usually when I find y’all together, Chandler’s here, too.”

  Rake was trying to watch all four to see if any of them betrayed any guilt, or at least knowledge. Shane Andrews was fortyish, pug-nosed, and stout, and he looked mostly just scared. Alan B. was another Rake recognized, a tall thin one who looked like he’d be helpless in a fight. Big Moe must be the enormous fellow, who stood at least six two and even sitting seemed like a force of nature ready to be unleashed. He was young, perhaps Rake’s age, but fear furrowed his brow. The fourth, a round-faced Negro who must have been Zo, was a stranger to Rake, and his face was expressionless.

  “Where’s Poe?” Dunlow bellowed. “Where the hell is Poe?”

  Silence. Dunlow circled them.

  “I’m surprised at y’all’s lack of cooperation. No one ever talks to the police no more, huh? I’m trying to help you out here. I’m trying to find a man that hurt a Negro. If I were to find one of you been hurt, I’d be doing the same thing right now.”

  Silence.

  With one hand, Dunlow grabbed Andrews by the neck and pulled him to his feet, pushed him back three steps, and slammed him into a wall. Rake kept his hand near his reholstered firearm and stepped closer to the other three, lest one of them think now was a good time to be stupid.

  “Where’s Poe, Shane?” Dunlow spat in Shane’s face.

  “I don’t know!” Eyes wide. His old yellowed T-shirt strained against a belly that was rising and falling very, very quickly.

  The look in Dunlow’s eyes was clear to Rake, who had seen it many times before. Dunlow kept one hand at Shane’s clavicle, pinning him against the wall and threatening to move up to his neck. With his other hand he removed his sidearm from its holster. He pointed it at the ceiling and held it no more than three inches from Shane’s head.

  “I ain’t done nothing, Officer Dunlow!”

  “When was the last time you saw Poe?”

  “Few nights ago. Right here.”

  “You don’t know where Poe is now?”

  “No, no, sir.”

  “So you don’t know what he was doing the other night on the West Side?” Dunlow asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Dunlow lightly tapped the side of the Negro’s head with the barrel of his gun. If his finger were to accidentally hit the trigger, he would shoot the ceiling, and not the man’s skull, Rake told himself. Hoping he was right.

  “And you don’t know how he got himself stabbed to death out there?”

  From Rake’s perspective, it was hard to gauge a man’s reaction to certain shocking news when he was already terrified.

  “Poe dead?” Shane asked.

  “Poe dead.”

  Rake kept scanning the faces of the other Negroes, but their expressions ran from fear to resignation. They had seen this act before.

  “You were with him a few nights ago,” Rake said to Shane, trying to stay relevant. “As you’ve already told us.”

  “I didn’t touch him, didn’t lay a finger on him! Me and him tight!”

  Again Dunlow tapped Shane’s head with the gun. “I didn’t really think you had the stones to do such a thing.”

  “That’s true, Officer Dunlow, that ain’t me.”

  Dunlow waited a few seconds, drawing it out. “Then who was it? One of your boys here?”

  Andrews paused. Dunlow pulled him back from the wall and slammed his head into it. Fissures opened in the gray plaster, chunks sprinkling onto the floor.

  “Now don’t be thinking, dammit! Just answer my question!”

  Dunlow slammed his head again. Plaster dust grayed the Negro’s hair.

  “Even if he does know something, he’s afraid to tell you,” Zo said from his seat. Rake took a step toward him. Zo seemed alarmingly unfrightened.

  “Is that a fact, Zo?” Dunlow asked while keeping his eyes on Shane.

  “Seems so to me, Officer Dunlow.”

  “Way I figure it, he should be god
damn afraid not to tell me.”

  Shane himself had his eyes shut now, as if by excusing himself from the conversation he might also disappear from the scene. Yet Dunlow’s hold was plenty secure.

  “He is,” Zo said. “He most definitely is. But he’s afraid of them colored cops, too. Maybe more.”

  “If there’s something you’re trying to say, you black bastard, you’d best quit with the riddles and say it straight.”

  “Smith and Boggs killed Poe. That’s what Shane’s too afraid to tell you.”

  This time Dunlow turned to face Zo.

  “Say again?”

  “They came by a few nights ago, when Poe was here. Real late, almost morning. Shane and some boys was all just setting here, not troubling nobody, and then those colored cops took them out back and started beating on Poe.”

  Dunlow was watching Zo very carefully.

  “You were there?”

  “No, but Shane told me about it.”

  Dunlow looked back at Shane and tightened his grip. “Then why the hell ain’t Shane telling me himself?”

  Shane opened his eyes and nodded. “It’s like he say. I told him about it. They just come out and beat on us, mostly on Poe. I ain’t seen Poe since.”

  “And which of the nigger cops was it?”

  “The loud one, Smith. And that uppity one he got.”

  “Boggs?”

  “Him’s the one.”

  “They just came over here and beat him for nothing?”

  “Yes, sir. They say . . .” Shane’s voice trailed off and he looked down again. He did not relish delivering this news.

  “They say what, goddamn it?”

  “They say this ain’t your neighborhood no more,” Zo again supplied the voice for the terrified Shane. “That it’s theirs. They beat on Poe to teach him that lesson.”

  This was too much for Dunlow to respond to. The old cop was silent.

  “Then what?” Rake asked for his partner. “And I want to hear it from the actual witness this time.”

  “I don’t know,” Shane said. “They told me to get inside and not say nothing, that’s what I did. Got right in this room here. They stopped, by and by.”

  “You didn’t see them take him anywhere?” Rake asked.

  “Nossir, Officer.” They didn’t yet know or fear Rake’s name the way they did Dunlow’s.

  “You hear them drive away?” Dunlow asked. An odd question, since the Negro officers didn’t have squad cars. Boggs and Smith were always on foot. How would they have transported Poe to the West Side? Did either of them even own a car?

  “I, I don’t recall no car. Mighta been one. Just don’t know. I went to bed, and when I woke up, Poe was gone.”

  Shane was staring at Dunlow’s gun. Dunlow finally noticed and holstered it. He moved his other hand from Shane’s neck, patting him on the shoulder.

  Then Dunlow turned back to the table. He grabbed the coins that lay there, as well as a few dollars. “This will pay for Chandler’s funeral.”

  He stuffed them in his pockets. Then he punched Zo square in the nose. The Negro’s head snapped back and the rest of his body followed, the chair toppling straight over. The other two backed up, their chair legs scraping against the floor.

  “I believe ol’ Zo took a bit too much pleasure in delivering that news,” Dunlow informed them. “Anybody else need reminding whose neighborhood this is?”

  All eyes were on the floor as Officer Dunlow took his leave, his partner a step behind.

  17

  SERGEANT JOSEPH MCINNIS had barely sat in the lonely guest chair of Captain Dodd’s office when he was asked what the hell the niggers were up to at “the Butler Street so-called precinct.”

  Dodd’s was a small, cramped office that, judging from the lack of window and the scuff marks on the floor, had once been a storage room of some sort. The shelves had been removed and a thick desk had somehow squeezed its way through the door. Dodd had been captain for ten years, nearly as long as McInnis had been a cop. Dodd had a lot less hair than he’d had ten years ago. McInnis couldn’t say that he liked the captain all that much, but he seemed a reasonably fair man to toil under, so long as no one on your team did anything disastrously wrong.

  McInnis had a feeling that someone on his team had done something disastrously wrong.

  He had been doing his rounds at the main headquarters, checking paperwork and the logs from the real cops, and was about to head over to the Butler Street Y, as was his strange and hated custom these last few months. The lone white cop over with the coloreds—with nary another white soul to chat with—the only time he was able to interact with other whites on the job was during these all-too-brief preshift moments and during the times when he was out on the street managing chaos at major arrests, trying to make sure his Negro officers didn’t screw up while also trying to keep the white officers from flat-out attacking his “men.”

  “I had a long conversation with Dunlow this morning,” Dodd said.

  McInnis didn’t know what blanks he should be filling in. He’d read the logs, and nothing had leaped out as being particularly unusual. “Yes?”

  “They didn’t put this to paper yet, as I told them not to. I don’t want it blowing up beyond that which it’ll already blow up to. But Dunlow’s fingering two of your men for murder.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Black bootlegger named Chandler Poe got himself beat to hell and stabbed, probably a few nights ago. Coroner said he got worked over and then cut up, dumped at the canal on the West Side.” Which is why McInnis hadn’t seen it in any of the logs, as that wasn’t his ward. “And Dunlow says two of your boys done it: Boggs and Smith.”

  McInnis was not one to cross his legs. His feet were flat on the floor and his knees were right angles as he asked, “Based on what?”

  “Based on one eyewitness so far, and they say they got another. We got investigators on it. So, I ask again, what in the hell have you been teaching those niggers?”

  McInnis sorted some things in his head: the recent logs by Boggs and Smith reported no interactions with Poe, not since they’d gone to the courthouse for the trial that had let the man off.

  “These eyewitnesses, they claim they saw my officers kill Poe?”

  “One witness so far, but yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “Nigger named Shane Andrews.”

  McInnis laughed. “So we got one dead Negro bootlegger, and then a live Negro bootlegger saying that a cop killed the other one. And we’re choosing to believe him? You know Dunlow. This is the same cop tried to frame one of my boys for drinking.”

  “You can’t say he was trying to frame him, Mac. He mighta been right, and just couldn’t prove it. Or it mighta been an honest misunderstanding, confusing Negroes.”

  “Dunlow knows one damned Negro from the other, you can be sure of that. He’s out to take my boys down, and you know it.”

  Dodd shook his head and sighed. “Christ. I don’t enjoy this so much either, Mac.”

  “Well, all due respect, you don’t have to deal with it every waking moment like I have to. Now, I like to think I’ve done beyond an adequate job with the resources I’ve been given. I’ve eight Negroes under my command, and you want me to turn them into policemen, and—”

  “It’s not me that wants that.”

  “All right, blame the mayor, fair enough. Point is, I’m out there on an island doing what I can, and maybe they all ain’t the greatest officers the city of Atlanta’s ever produced, but I’ll be damned if some middle-aged overweight beat cop is going to accuse any of my officers of being murderers.”

  Dodd considered this a moment. He had not expected such a reaction. “I didn’t mean to imply this reflected poorly on you. I just wanted to do you the courtesy of explaining everything before you found out some other way. The process is
moving along. I got two detectives looking into it, and I imagine they’re going to want to talk to Boggs and Smith. When that happens—”

  “They cannot talk to my boys.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If Internal Investigations wants to file a formal complaint about the conduct of my officers, it can do so. Short of that, my officers don’t have to answer a detective’s questions, and you know that.”

  Dodd looked like he was choosing between anger and shock.

  “What, you’re trying to shield your niggers now? You’re so sure they didn’t do this, but you’re shielding them?”

  “I’d like to think I’m doing what any other commanding officer would do, sir. My men don’t have to be a part of some crazy witch hunt started by a lazy cop who’s upset that he just lost one of his most reliable bribes.”

  Dodd folded his hands across his chest. “Sergeant McInnis. I want to make sure I understand something. And I want to make sure you understand it. I got a veteran white cop saying that your nigger rookies done lost their heads and beat a criminal to death. And you are allowing your own pride about training them to blind you into choosing the wrong side.”

  “My nigger rookies, like you said. Anyone that wants to accuse my niggers of murder will go through me. That’s protocol.”

  “I call it damnfool pride.”

  “ ‘You say tomato’ and all that.”

  Dodd said, “Look, Mac, I know you didn’t want this posting, but—”

  “Damn right I didn’t.” McInnis stood to leave. “I know a suicide mission when I see one.”

  “Sit your ass back down.”

  It took much swallowing of pride for Mac to sit his ass back down, but sit it back he did. Just like take the post he did, when Dodd told him to. Just like train the Negroes he did, when Dodd told him to. He had been a sergeant for four years now, the first year spent on an antinumbers investigation that—he’d known the moment he’d been assigned to it—would win him far more enemies on the force than friends. And he’d been proven correct. Yet he’d done the job because it was important, because it was the right thing, and because he’d been ordered to by superiors he’d respected and trusted. Crooked cops had controlled gambling rings across the city, so he’d shut them down. And as thanks? First he’d been sent to an undermanned Homicide squad that was in charge of some of the most forlorn areas of Darktown and Buttermilk Bottom, the kind of post that offered nothing but sad murder after sad murder, his commanding officers not really caring whether the right criminals were punished so long as enough Negroes were put away that the rest of the population took the hint and settled down. The kind of posting that left an enterprising young sergeant with effectively zero chance of impressing anyone. And then, when he thought he’d finally done his time and was deserving of a better post? Hey, Mac, we’re hiring some niggers, and you got a nice new basement office, deep in the jungle.