Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  The son of Congressman Prescott continued his tale.

  “I confronted her about the money. I told her all the things that had been percolating in my mind over those few days. I was . . . so angry at her.”

  “And you had a .22 on you.”

  “I would have been a fool to tramp through Darktown without it. I don’t even remember taking it out of my pocket. I told her what she’d done to me, the shame she’d brought on me, and then she started screaming. Just completely mad. Saying that . . . she was my father’s daughter. She just . . . seemed deranged. She wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t stop.”

  “Until you stopped her.”

  Prescott didn’t contradict him. Rake continued, “Underhill was circling the neighborhood for her, and he heard the shot, and that’s how he found you. Does your father know?”

  Prescott glared. “I certainly didn’t tell him. I don’t know. Underhill came to my place the next day and told me not to worry, that everything was being taken care of. I did not see fit to ask him how informed of all this my father was. I just . . . tried to forget about it.”

  Rake hadn’t actually told Prescott that he was under arrest, and perhaps it was best not to. The words might jar him from the fugue that had settled over him. He was docile now, doing what he was told, and Rake guided him into the hallway where he could put on some shoes so he wouldn’t have to walk out barefoot.

  “I’d like to write a note for my father first.”

  “You can do that later.”

  “Please. Just . . . It will take only a minute. You can watch me. I’ve nothing left to hide, do I?”

  Beyond the dining room was a small room with a desk and a mostly empty bookshelf. Prescott opened the desk’s top drawer and it was as though Rake had seen this before when the man took from it a .22. Things did slow down this time. Rake reached to the small of his back and was pulling his gun from the holster while Prescott was lifting his own gun, held awkwardly in his fingers, held like someone who had used it often enough to know how it worked but not often enough to grip it properly or even lift it the right way, and now Rake’s gun was at his side and his arm was swinging forward and he was just realizing how stupid he was, realizing that he wasn’t going to get his gun in position in time, when Prescott’s pistol pointed very much the wrong way and he shot himself in the temple.

  Now Rake’s gun was ready but there was nothing to aim at anymore, because Prescott had fallen to the floor. The entire body had folded into itself so fast, as though gravity is twice as strong on the dead.

  Prescott’s legs did not twitch and his eyes did not flutter—the lids were down, as he must have closed them at that awful moment. He was just there, a heap on the ground, blood flowing from his skull. There was more redness and a fleck of what might have been bone on the wall. The bullet hole was a few inches from the blood splatter. Rake paused to note how surprising it was that the bullet and the blood could land in such different places, and he wondered about that for a moment, because he was stunned and it was an easier thing to think about than the huge amount of trouble he was in.

  Boggs was sure he wasn’t imagining the footsteps. He pointed Dunlow’s pistol before him, though he could see only the first few feet of trees before all became darkness.

  “Who’s there?”

  “You put that gun down!” The voice was high-pitched but commanding. It wasn’t coming from very far away.

  “I said who’s there!”

  “I see your pistol but this here’s a rifle and you don’t drop that in three seconds I’ma lay you flat.”

  Boggs tried to focus on the region of darkness from where the voice seemed to be coming. He couldn’t see anything but the intermittent lightning bugs that he half wondered were his own damaged neurons misfiring.

  “I’m a police officer! From the city of Atlanta! If you have a rifle in your hand, you’d best lay it down, now!”

  The unseen man’s three-second warning passed, then twice as much time passed, then far more. Boggs felt dizzy from the blow to his head and weak from not having eaten in he couldn’t remember how long, and he had no idea where he was or when the sun would rise.

  “You ain’t no cop.” The voice was ratcheted down a few notches.

  “How many colored men you think would lie about that, huh?”

  Silence for a few seconds. Boggs still couldn’t see anyone.

  “Listen here,” the voice said. “I’ma walk toward you a bit. I got this here rifle trained on you, so don’t get to thinking nothing stupid. I’ma just get a bit closer so’s we can talk. You so much as flinch and you’re on the ground, got it?”

  “I’m not lowering my weapon, if that’s what you’re asking. But come on over if you like.”

  “Just don’t do nothing we gonna regret.”

  Twigs snapped and leaves crunched beneath the footsteps. A second later, a good many feet to the right of where Boggs had been pointing Dunlow’s pistol, a figure emerged from the woods. The first thing Boggs noticed was the shine of the man’s forehead, from the heat that would not abate even at night and from the terror of realizing he’d just come upon a crime scene. The second thing Boggs noticed was that the man was colored. He was wearing a gray T-shirt over brown canvas work pants.

  The men were still aiming their weapons at each other.

  “Sir, my name is Officer Lucius Boggs. I’m an officer with the Atlanta Police Department. This man tried to kill me.”

  “Looks like you beat him to it.” When the man spoke, Boggs saw places where teeth should have been, as well as a few teeth.

  “Just lucky.”

  “Looks like you just barely lucky.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Tillsboro.” It was twenty miles south of the city. There was a paper mill and the area produced amazing strawberries, according to the grocer Boggs frequented. Lucius had never set foot here before. “You really a cop?”

  “Yes. You can call the Atlanta police and ask them if you want. Is this your property?”

  “No. Mine about three hundred yards behind me. I heard shots an’ came looking.”

  “Do you know this man? Any idea who he is?”

  “No.”

  Boggs believed him. He’d wondered whether Dunlow had used this spot before, whether it was a favored destination for disposing of bodies. Perhaps Lily Ellsworth had been bound for here once, until Boggs and Smith’s traffic stop of Underhill had thrown that evening’s plan into disarray.

  Boggs asked, “This kind of thing happen around here a lot?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.” The man was perhaps ten years older than Boggs, perhaps twenty.

  “Now, you stop aiming that gun at me, I’ll do the same.”

  “All right.” The man pointed his gun at the sky. He’d been in a defensive crouch, but he stood taller and stepped closer. He stared down at Dunlow.

  “Goddamn. Where’s your knife?”

  Boggs explained what he’d used as a weapon.

  “You don’t know this fella?” the man asked.

  “Never seen him before.”

  “Where’s your badge?”

  “It isn’t on me. I’m not on duty. I was just walking through the city and this man nearly ran me over, knocked me out, and stuffed me in his trunk.”

  “You arrest one of his buddies or somethin’?”

  Boggs didn’t answer, busily trying to construct a story in his head.

  “I got a phone, you want to call your boys in.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “What I just did was self-defense, but that won’t matter. Even though I’m a cop, it won’t matter.”

  They watched each other for a moment, then both stared at Dunlow, their mutual problem. Boggs felt ashamed of how he could smell his own vomit and was sure the man could, too.


  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Roland. Roland Dooley.”

  “I need you to do me a favor, Mr. Dooley. I’d like to use your phone to call my partner. Then he and I are going to bury this man right here, and get rid of his vehicle somewhere. We’re never going to talk about this. And I’m going to have to ask you to never talk about it, either.”

  “That’s two favors. The second one’s mighty big.”

  “It is mighty big, sir.” An owl echoed its own call in the dark. “Or you could tell it like you saw it, and I’ll be arrested. I’ll plead my case honestly, and even though this is just some bigot who decided it would be fun to kill a Negro, I’ll at the very least lose my badge, and Atlanta will lose its Negro cops. That’s the best-case scenario.”

  Dooley took another step until he was right next to Dunlow’s feet. The earth near Dunlow’s head and chest was shiny with blood. Then Dooley looked up at Boggs.

  “We ain’t got no Negro cops in Tillsboro.”

  It took more than an hour for Smith to find them. Boggs had called him from Dooley’s phone, explaining as little as possible, then letting Dooley give Smith directions to wherever they were.

  Boggs stood sentry at the body while Dooley waited in his home. When Boggs heard the faint sound of a motor, then silence, then two quick honks, he knew they were coming.

  “Good God,” Smith said as he got out of the reverend’s car and surveyed the corpse. Some white people look so pale it doesn’t seem possible they could be even yet paler until it happens.

  “He was drunk. Drunk when he ran me down and a whole lot drunker when he tried to put me in that hole.”

  “It ain’t near deep enough,” Smith observed. So he got started. It was past one in the morning, so they had a few hours of darkness left. The owls and nighthawks seemed louder now to Boggs, as if this was the time of night they’d been saving themselves for.

  Dooley told them he would honk his old pickup’s horn again if he saw anyone venture down the road, then he returned home to wait for them.

  “You trust him?” Smith asked Boggs while he deepened the hole.

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  Smith got out of the hole and handed the shovel to Boggs. “Your turn.” He wasn’t that tired yet, but he didn’t like the vacant look in Boggs’s eye. The man was no doubt exhausted, but Smith wanted him to move again, put himself to some purpose, even if he could only manage a few spades’ worth.

  “What did you tell my parents to get the car from them?”

  “I didn’t have a good story yet. Just told them you needed my help and you’d explain. Reverend looked like he was saying a prayer to Jesus in his head when he handed me the keys.”

  When the grave had been dug to Smith’s satisfaction, they frisked Dunlow and found nothing but his wallet and keys. They chose to leave the wallet in his pocket, though not before looking in vain for some evidence into the Ellsworth crimes. They kept the keys. Then they each took one of Dunlow’s feet and dragged him into the hole.

  Dooley had offered to lend them an extra shovel, but they’d declined, lest he wind up with evidence in his toolshed. So the two officers shared the job of shoveling the fresh dirt on top of Dunlow.

  “We’re assuming he was acting alone,” Smith said at one point. “Anybody else know what he was up to, and he goes missing . . .”

  “I realize that. If you have a better idea, I’m listening.”

  Smith offered none. “Give me the shovel.”

  They hadn’t covered up the grave very convincingly, Boggs could see, but here in summer all it would take was one good rain and the grave wouldn’t look different from any other spot. In a month or two, nearby vines would be crawling their way across the surface, and in another year shrubs whose seeds were shat out by birds would be growing there.

  The Lord would have expected some words to be said for Dunlow’s immortal soul, Boggs realized. And Reverend Boggs certainly would have offered a benediction, even to a man who’d tried to kill his son. Then perhaps my father truly is a better man than me, Boggs silently said to the Lord, because I have nothing to say.

  Smith tossed a few fallen branches across the spot. Then he spat on the ground. He was worried about his partner and worried what would happen with Dunlow’s friends and worried that neither he nor Boggs would survive this, but at that moment his biggest regret was that Dunlow had not suffered more.

  In Dooley’s front yard, they paid him a few dollars for a can of gasoline.

  He told them he worked at the paper mill. His wife and son were asleep, he claimed, though Boggs wouldn’t have been surprised if his lady was sitting up in their bedroom at that moment, clutching her Bible and listening to everything. Dooley said that few people lived within a half mile of this spot; he had chosen it for the solitude it offered, though he sometimes heard rumors that the state wanted to turn some of the woods into parkland and kick him out.

  They shook his hand. Boggs looked him in the eye and tried to impress upon him once again the gravity of this event, but probably all his blank eyes could convey at that moment was shock and the emptiness of death.

  “If there’s anything you ever need, Mr. Dooley, you call us.”

  With Boggs driving Dunlow’s car and Smith the reverend’s, they drove six miles north, closer to Atlanta but still safely far from where cops might search for Dunlow anytime soon. They were in woods again, and Smith knew these roads from days spent fishing. Eventually they drove down a dead-end road that went downhill sharply and ended in a wide clearing.

  There had once been an antebellum mill building there, Smith explained, but it had caught fire a few years ago and all that was left was a bare skeleton of bricks whose outline looked spectral in the dark. Smith parked the car in the center of the clearing. Someone would find the car eventually, but it might be days, and they might not even be the type to bother telling the authorities of their discovery. Smith used a screwdriver he’d hidden in his pocket to remove Dunlow’s tags, which he would toss into a drainage intake once they were closer to Atlanta.

  They wiped the car down again, checking the trunk and floor for anything incriminating and removing some paperwork that would have traced it to Dunlow. Then Smith poured the gasoline, backed away, and threw a match. It caught slowly but then spread fast. They watched for a moment, checking to make sure nothing else caught fire, though if anything had, they wouldn’t have been able to stop it.

  It seemed they had spent most of the last twenty-four hours in this car.

  Smith said, “Well, you got your kill now.”

  “What?”

  “You not getting to fight in the army. You taken care of that now.”

  He’d never said anything to Smith about any feelings of inferiority about his army experience. At least, he thought he hadn’t. Had he been so obvious nonetheless?

  “I didn’t want this.”

  “Didn’t say you did.”

  Boggs stared through the windshield and tried to remember what it had been like to wonder what it would be like to kill someone.

  “If there’s anything you want to say about the experience,” Smith said, “now is the time. Because once we get out of this car, neither of us is ever talking about this again.”

  Boggs answered with silence that lasted thirty minutes, and then the lights of the looming office towers welcomed them back to Atlanta.

  36

  TWELVE HOURS AFTER Silas Prescott had exited this mortal world, Rake was sitting in the same interrogation room he had entered when he’d first arrived at police headquarters.

  Shortly after Prescott shot himself, Rake had picked up the phone and dialed his home line. When he heard Cassie, half asleep, pick up the phone, he hung up. He’d then spent ten minutes cleaning the bathroom to kill the vomit smell, using only soap and water rather than stronger chemicals that might
have tipped off other cops to the tampering of a crime scene. After waiting the ten longest minutes of his life, he’d called police headquarters.

  His admittedly far-fetched story, when the squad cars and ambulance pulled up, was that Prescott had surprisingly called Rake at his house to say he urgently needed to speak to him. So Rake had dutifully come over, had then witnessed a shocking confession, and, before Rake could even mentally process it, Prescott had shot himself.

  “Why in the hell did Prescott call you? ” Rake’s commanding officer, Sergeant Yale, had demanded. Rake had insisted he had no idea whatsoever.

  Shortly after the first group of cops had shown up to take photos and gather evidence, two men whom Rake had been expecting showed up: Detectives Clayton and Sharpe, who had enthusiastically and brutally questioned Otis Ellsworth.

  An hour later, Yale drove Rake back to the station.

  “If there is anything else you want me to know, you had damn well better tell me now, because once we get back to that station you and me aren’t talking a lick. There’ll be a long line of folks ready to sink their teeth into you.”

  During the course of his half year working under Yale, Rake still had little idea of how far he could trust the man.

  “Nothing that comes to mind, sir.”

  Rake’s fingers had been shaking when he’d cleaned up the bathroom, but during the final wait before making the call his nerves had settled. He wasn’t sure whether he was delusional to feel so confident. Perhaps he was suffering from some strange adrenalized spike of self-­congratulation, but he wasn’t going to whine and beg in front of the sergeant when he still had a few cards left to play.

  In the interrogation room, he repeated his story to Yale’s commanding officer, on the record. Twice. A third time. Why did Prescott call you? Had you ever spoken to him before? How did he even have your number or know who you are? He was asked to repeat exactly what Prescott had confessed, over and over, backward and forward, with adjectives and without.