Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  Boggs and Smith were silent for a moment. Then Smith said, “They shot him?”

  “Yes. He’s dead. It’s over.” McInnis paused. “I know you don’t like it, and it don’t look too good at all. But it’s done and it’s closed, and there’s nothing we can do. I just . . . wanted you to hear it from me and not some other cop.”

  Boggs was shaking his head. He felt dizzy.

  “You can read Peacedale’s report on your break,” McInnis said, tapping the folder. “But right now I need you to walk your beat, Officers.”

  “Yes, sir,” Smith said, because Boggs had no words for what he was feeling.

  Boggs felt Smith’s hand on his bicep, pulling him away before he might open his mouth and get himself fired.

  24

  RAKE TRIED TO act nonchalant when he heard Dunlow, Peterson, and Helton discussing a body that had been found the night before.

  “Who was it?”

  Dunlow looked up at him before answering. “Brian Underhill. Ex-APD.”

  They were in the headquarters, fans circling above without seeming to move any air. All the paperwork on every desk weighed down by humidity. It was two days since Underhill had been killed.

  “The one who was seen with Lily Ellsworth that night,” Rake said, as if he was dimly remembering this.

  Rake picked up the report. He tried not to look overly concerned as he read what the early morning officers had discovered. The body by the old plant, of course. Nothing about witnesses, thank goodness. A canvas of the neighborhood was ongoing, but Rake knew there were few houses in that area.

  The fact that the body had laid there for more than a day before being discovered allayed Rake’s fears—slightly—that the killer was APD. But the report noted that no shell casings had been found, which argued for a professional killer, or at least an unusually thorough one. Rake had run to the scene of the killing in less than a minute, yet the shooter had still cleaned his mess fast enough to vanish.

  “It was your night off that night, wasn’t it?” Dunlow asked his young partner.

  “It was. Yours as well.” He was glad the redness in his knuckles had faded.

  Helton used a handkerchief to shine his brass buttons, sucking in his gut. “It is indeed a difficult time to be a former officer of the law.” He glanced at Rake. “I’d hate to become one myself.”

  During his shift with Dunlow that night, news trickled in about the Underhill murder. Still no witnesses. The deceased’s ex-wife up in Dahlonega had been notified. They had no children and few other relatives. Friends and former associates were being questioned. Detectives were searching the man’s apartment, and Rake envied them, wondering what evidence might be hiding there, clues to the Ellsworth murder and Lord knew what other crimes.

  As low as his opinion of Dunlow was, he still didn’t think Dunlow was the type to plot in the shadows. If Dunlow truly had a problem with Rake, he would tell him to his face. Or just shoot him in the face. Men like Helton and Peterson, however, he was less sure about. Who were the other people Underhill had alluded to, the inside men he had on the force? How many of them were there, and how close were they to Rake?

  The next day, as Rake drove down Auburn Avenue, he realized he had never been here before except in a squad car. It was a mercifully cloudy day, not nearly as hot as usual, a portentous breeze making American flags taut outside the pharmacies and restaurants and insurance agencies. He found the number he was looking for on a mailbox outside a well-kept bungalow with a large porch surrounded by tall hydrangeas, their blooms the color of a clear morning sky. He wondered if he had the wrong address.

  Rake had been inside a Negro’s house before—when he was a boy, his mother had been friendly with a Negro woman she’d met somewhere, though he didn’t recall the particulars—but that was all. He had of course entered several colored residences in the line of duty, but what he was about to do was altogether different. He could not avoid the temptation to look over his shoulder as he crossed the street, to check the neighbors’ front lawns for witnesses. He was walking faster than usual.

  He rang the doorbell. The front door was open but the screen was shut.

  An older, dignified Negro with gray hair and a confident stride smiled at him, pleasant but with unmistakable wariness. Rake was not in uniform and wore a light green short-sleeved shirt tucked into slacks.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked, opening the screen door.

  “Yes, I’m looking for Lucius Boggs.”

  “That’s my son. Come right in.” He extended a hand. “I’m Reverend Daniel Boggs.”

  Rake shook the Negro’s hand, marveling at the palm’s whiteness. It was a firm handshake. This was very strange.

  “Officer Dennis Rakestraw.”

  “Good to meet you.”

  He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but he was impressed by the spotless and shining wood floors, the paintings on the walls, the framed photographs of the reverend posing with people who seemed to think they were important. In the far corner of the living room sat a piano.

  The reverend invited him into a dark study filled with more books than Rake had ever seen in someone’s house. The walls were completely covered with bookshelves, apart from a small window. A rotating desk fan tried to make the room bearable. Rake felt too uncomfortable to sit, so he stood beside one of the chairs as the reverend excused himself to summon his son.

  Rake read the spines of books on God, Frederick Douglass, the Apostles, the Crusades, Jesus, Thomas Aquinas, the Holy Spirit, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Greek tragedies, the Civil War.

  Footsteps, and the reverend returned with Lucius, whose face could not possibly have been any more scrubbed of emotion or betrayed thought.

  “Rakestraw. Good morning.”

  Before Rake could say the same, the reverend made a show of claiming to have some errand to go on, and out he went through the front door, despite the coming storm.

  “Please, sit. Can I get you some water or tea?”

  Rake declined the drink but not the chair. Though it would have been less stuffy on the porch, he was grateful for not being on display. He figured the reverend had put them here for that reason.

  “What brings you here?” Boggs asked.

  And so began the gamble. “You and I, we have a similar problem. Dunlow.”

  Boggs was watching him carefully.

  “I don’t like him any more than you do,” Rake continued. “I don’t enjoy seeing the way he bullies Negroes and keeps all the gamblers and bootleggers and brothels running. Cops like him are part of the problem.”

  “There are a lot of cops like him.”

  “Well, only one of them is my partner.” He took an extra breath to make sure he could dare say it. “And only one of them is a fellow who I think might have been involved in a murder.”

  “You like him for Lily Ellsworth,” Boggs said, looking away now. Rake couldn’t tell if that was a cue to end this line of inquiry or if the Negro was trying to appear deferential.

  “I’m convinced he at least knows something. He and Underhill go back, yet the night that we all pulled Underhill over, they acted like strangers.”

  “McInnis altered my report, too. When we found her body, I put in my report that Underhill was the last man seen with her. I handed it to McInnis so he could take it to headquarters for me. He must have retyped it.”

  Rake figured before that Boggs had just made a sloppy mistake, leaving the name out of the report. Boggs’s story seemed equally believable, but if true, it was bad news indeed. The more Rake looked into the murder, the more cops seemed involved in covering it up.

  “I think,” Rake said, “and I don’t mean any offense to your people here, but I think an unusual amount of care is being taken to bury a crime against some poor colored girl.”

  “A poor colored girl who was working for
a congressman a few weeks ago.”

  “What?”

  Boggs told him that he had learned a few things himself, including the fact that Lily had worked as a maid for none other than Representative Billy Prescott.

  “How did you find that out?”

  “Let me just keep that to myself for now.”

  “Have you filed that in a report?”

  “Of course not. I’m not a detective. I don’t investigate murders. I walk a beat, that’s all.”

  Rake thought this through. Maybe Boggs was doing the same thing he was, trying to solve it on the sly. Rake wondered if Boggs had a better-thought-out endgame than he himself did, or was Boggs, like him, simply hoping that if he solved the crime, the next steps would fall into place.

  “And her father, Otis Ellsworth, was killed two days ago by the cops in Peacedale.”

  Jesus. Boggs knew a hell of a lot more about this than Rake did. Rake tried not to look unmoored as he asked for more.

  “The official story is he tried to steal something from the county store, was arrested, then broke free, so the police shot him,” Boggs said. “The Peacedale cops are also implying he stole a good deal of money recently, though they don’t know where from. It was enough for a poor sharecropper to be able to suddenly buy himself a truck, and that won him some attention.”

  “So the Peacedale cops are involved in this, too?”

  “I thought that at first. Then I thought, if I’m a white Atlanta cop and I committed a crime, the first thing I want to do is peg it on a Negro. So I try to beat Otis Ellsworth into confessing he killed his own daughter.”

  Rake leaned back in his chair. “But then an annoying rookie cop in the observation room mentions Underhill’s name. And they realize that if they do just try to pin it on the wrong Negro, they still have problems, because someone has figured out the Underhill connection.”

  “I didn’t know you were in the room,” Boggs said. He watched Rake for a moment. “But the next step I see is, they call the Peacedale police and mention that they’ve questioned Ellsworth in relation to a crime, and they mention that he has extra money, knowing that will pique their interest. Knowing the way things work in towns like that, they just sit back and let nature take its course.”

  “And that’s why they killed Underhill. He was the link. They knew someone—me, or you, or both of us—had connected him to the crime, so they got rid of him.”

  “So the only connection we have left is Dunlow.”

  They both sat in silence for a moment, replaying the conversation in their heads, trying to review the blank spots in their narrative. The rain came down, but silently, the sheets thin and without thunder.

  “Clearly, I need your help on this,” Rake said. “And you need mine. You can talk to some of the people I can’t get at, or who won’t be up front with me on account of my color. And I can access things in the headquarters you can’t, not to mention get at some of the people you can’t get to.”

  “I want to catch someone who thinks they can get away with killing a colored girl,” Boggs said. “But it sounds like you want to take down a chunk of the police force. That’s not going to happen.”

  “Why not? All Chief Jenkins talks about these days is reform, reform. We can find a big ol’ twisted piece of APD for him to pull out by the roots. Besides, it’s in your best interest for a fellow like Dunlow to get his hands out of your neighborhood. You’ll never be able to do your job, I mean truly do your job the way you want it done, so long as cops like that have their fingers in the pie. That’s what you want, isn’t it, to get them out?”

  “I’m trying to set realistic goals.”

  “If the point of Negro cops is to patrol the Negro neighborhood and keep your people safe, then you need the white cops out.”

  “I’m talking to a white cop.”

  “A white cop who would rather be policing a white neighborhood.”

  Boggs nodded after a pause, as if still determining whether he was talking to an ally or a foe.

  “I didn’t join up so I could keep colored criminals in operation and extort my share,” Rake explained. “If we can make it clear that white cops can’t do that anymore, and that you and your officers have control of the situation, then headquarters will get the message, this experiment will be judged a success, and they’ll hire more of you. You can police your own the way you want to. And I can get myself reassigned, to a partner who isn’t a thug and to a beat that isn’t someone else’s rightful territory.”

  “You want out of ‘Darktown.’ ”

  “Isn’t that what y’all want? To be treated fair, to protect your own?”

  Another pregnant pause. Christ, Rake still couldn’t tell if he was making progress with Boggs or if it had been a horrible mistake to have said so much.

  “Yes.”

  “You know damn well that most of the white cops want you all to fail so the mayor can call this off. That’s why Dunlow is trying to tag you and Smith for killing Poe.”

  Boggs stiffened. “First, don’t cuss in my father’s house, please. Second, we did not kill Poe.”

  “I don’t think you did either, but Dunlow believes it, in his bones. Last I heard, he’s having trouble getting Homicide to pursue this the way he wants it done. The majors don’t want this to blow up in the press as some cop-on-cop civil war. But that’s not going to stop Dunlow from spending every waking second trying to nail you for it.”

  “So you’re offering to keep him off our backs?”

  The rain grew louder, the gutters talking to the downspouts.

  “I don’t think the devil himself could do that. But I am uniquely positioned to keep an eye on him. I can find out what kind of fake evidence and nonsense testimony he’s going to wrangle up against you, like he tried on Bayle. I could pass that on to you, so you can find ways to protect yourself.”

  “You got a cigarette?” Boggs asked.

  Rake did. He lit two and handed one to Boggs.

  “So I try to find out who killed Lily Ellsworth,” Boggs recapped, “and I pass what I find on to you, especially if it keeps pointing to Dunlow. And you keep tabs on Dunlow and give me advance warning before he does whatever it is he’s fixing to do.”

  “Yes. But I’ll do more than that. Any records you need at the headquarters, any white folks you want questioned, I’ll do it.”

  Boggs raised an eyebrow. “Congressman Prescott?”

  “Christ, within reason I mean.”

  Boggs shut his eyes for a moment, and Rake realized it was for the blasphemy in a preacher’s house. Goodness, it must be strange to tread so lightly all the time.

  “How about his son?” Boggs asked. “Or his wife. Someone who can tell us what went on in there, if anything.”

  “I’ll think on it. But this only works if we keep this quiet. If Dunlow starts to think I’m spying on him, it all blows up. I’m taking a heck of a risk even telling you this.”

  “You think I’m not?”

  “Just do me one other favor first. Chandler Poe. What happened?”

  Boggs paused, and Rake wondered if he’d misplayed everything by asking this, if he was now making it look like this whole conversation had just been a ruse to goad Boggs into confessing.

  “I have no idea,” Boggs said.

  “What about your partner?”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, you’ll notice I came to talk to you and not him.”

  “He might not be as polite and diplomatic as I can be, but he’s a good cop.”

  “A couple of bootleggers swear Smith beat Poe that night.”

  Boggs stubbed out his cigarette, even though it appeared to have plenty left. “I can assure you, Smith did not do anything that I haven’t seen Dunlow do on occasion. Is that good enough for you?”

  “So you’re saying, no knife?”


  “No knife. And neither of us has been within a mile of the place they found his body.”

  There was a lot of gray area in what Boggs was saying, but it made sense. “Okay. Still, I don’t want Smith involved in this.”

  “He’s my partner. I trust him.”

  “That doesn’t mean that—”

  “You hold up your end of the bargain and I’ll hold up mine. But don’t tell me how.”

  Rake decided to let it go. He reached into his pocket and handed Boggs a slip of paper. “My number. We’d best not communicate when we’re in uniform. You need to reach me, call.”

  Rake stood and wished Boggs good luck. Then he shook hands with a Negro for the second time that day, and in his life.

  25

  MIDDAY. THE SUN was not taking prisoners. Movement and sound were things of the past, even the birds hiding silent in shaded branches.

  Dunlow drove slowly past the house of James Calvin, the Negro who had dared to invade the white community of Hanford Park. Bricks through the man’s windows had not yet convinced him that he’d made a horrible mistake in building that house, but it was early in the summer still, the nights sure to become darker and more miserable.

  He had barely parked his car in his driveway when the eldest of his two sons, Knox, was asking to take the car off his hands. What the hell was it boys felt they needed the car for so much, anyways? When Dunlow had been their age he’d managed fine on foot, on the bus, on the streetcar. He’d seen the city and got himself into a fair amount of trouble, even with his own father and police legend Arthur Dunlow keeping his eye on him. Yet his own sons seemed unable to function if they didn’t have their hand on a gearshift.

  “Why you need my car so badly?”

  “Well, sir, I was hoping I could take Jenny-Beth to see the Crackers this afternoon.” Knox was seventeen and with a year of schooling to go. Buddy, two years his junior, was greasing the chain of his bike about ten feet away, pretending not to be listening. Buddy wasn’t yet legal to drive, but Dunlow knew the boy had taken the wheel for his brother a number of times, and was doubtless hoping to tag along to the game.