Cop Town: A Novel

by Karin Slaughter

  Maggie looked down. The transmitter for her radio was by her leg. Everybody on the force carried a radio. PCOs, like Gail, kept them in their purses. Patrol wore them clipped to the back of their belts. They were ungainly, thicker than a paperback, heavy as a can of Crisco, and covered in a plastic shell with knife-sharp edges. You either took it off when you sat down or you sat on the edge of your seat to keep from puncturing your spine.

  Maggie said, “They could’ve been in a dead pocket.” There were pockets all over the city where the radios didn’t work. “They were in Five Points off Whitehall. Reception can be patchy over there.”

  Gail’s eyebrow went up. She worked in the area. She knew the dead spots.

  What she didn’t know was something Maggie had just realized: Jimmy’s transmitter had been missing from his belt this morning. She could see it clearly in her mind’s eye. Keys, nightstick, handcuffs, revolver.

  But no transmitter.

  “Hey, kid?” Gail tapped the table with her lighter. “You in there?”

  Maggie looked at her watch. She thought about her earlier experiment. Five seconds. That was a long time. Even longer if Don was shot twice. Jimmy had maybe seven or eight seconds to respond. Or not, as the case might’ve been.

  Gail knocked on the table again. “Am I talking to myself here?”

  Maggie looked up. “Where’d you work last night?”

  “Not at the Five, if that’s what you’re asking. I was off. This is for today.” Gail indicated her skimpy outfit. “I’m bait for the johns. Zones Two and Three are lending their umbrella cars to round up the pimps. They’re hoping to shut down business.”

  “That should bring out the snitches.”

  “Yeah, but when?” She took one last hit before stubbing out her cigarette. “All it’s gonna do is waste time. Same with the reward money. We already got a million leads from the last two shootings. Bunch of women turning in their husbands and boyfriends, trying to get that five thousand bucks.”

  Maggie had run down enough false leads to know the truth behind her statement. “How is shutting down the streets wasting time? It worked with Edward Spivey.”

  “Did it?”

  Maggie shrugged. Terry had gotten Spivey’s name off a snitch by using the same tactics. There had to be some worth in that.

  “Lemme lay it out for you,” Gail said. “We’re looking for some working gal who saw something in the Five last night, right? We’re hoping maybe she’ll give us a name?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “So, this is how day one goes down: Our boys are gonna throw every pimp they can find into the slammer. Lock up the pimps, then the girls spend all day getting high and sleeping.”

  Maggie nodded again. That was exactly what had happened the last time.

  “Day two rolls around: The pimps bail out, they beat up the girls for being lazy, the girls rush into the street to make up for lost revenue.” She lit a fresh cigarette. “Which brings us to day three: Our boys come in and lock up the whores.” She spun her lighter on the table. “It’s a revolving door, in and out, in and out—day four, day five, however long it takes, they’re gonna keep up this giant pissing contest until finally, somebody turns snitch so that everybody can get back to work.”

  “That’s what we want, though. We need somebody to talk.”

  “Yeah, but does that seem like the smart way to do it?” She leaned across the table. “What did I get up to, five, six days? Meanwhile, whoever killed Don Wesley’s already melting the murder weapon in a vat of acid and getting the hell outta town. Or worse, hiring some fancy lawyer from up north who thinks he’s gonna take a walk.”

  Edward Spivey again. Everything they did today would be cast in the man’s shadow. Maggie asked, “What’s the faster option?”

  “We find out the name of the pimp who’s running girls where the murder went down, then we get the pimp to set up a meet with his girls so we can talk to them. You know how it is. Them whores won’t take a shit ’less their pimp tells ’em to. And most times, he charges some freak to watch it.”

  Maggie almost laughed. “It’s that easy? Just go to the pimp and he’ll let us talk to his girls?”

  “It’s easy if we do it. If the boys do it, then we’re looking at our very own Tet Offensive.” She shrugged, like it was a foregone conclusion. “Chicks are better at de-escalating the situation. You know that.”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said, though this was a lot coming from a woman she’d seen crack open a suspect’s head with her Kel-Lite.

  Gail asked, “You ever break up a fight between two guys?”

  “Sure.” Maggie did it at least five times a week.

  “They don’t stop beating the shit out of each other because they’re scared of you, right?”

  “No.” Sometimes, all it took was the sight of her squad car to break up a fight. “After the first couple of punches, they want somebody to stop them before they really get hurt. I’m just the excuse.”

  “Correctamundo,” Gail said. “So, why go through all this trouble and drag it out with our boys banging up their boys and their boys banging up ours when we gals can just talk like semi-reasonable people?”

  “What gals?”

  “We gals.” She indicated the space between them.

  Maggie tried to think it through. “How do we know they’re not lying?”

  “How do we know the snitches are telling the truth?”

  She had raised a good point. “Have you told this idea to the bosses?”

  “Yeah, Mack and Les and Terry and them all fell to the floor and kissed my feet for being so damn brilliant.”

  Maggie grinned at the joke. “Five Points. A million girls work that area.”

  “We’re not talking Five Points. We’re talking Whitehall. And not just Whitehall, but the section near the C&S Bank where Don got shot. Them whores working that strip are older bitches. Most of ’em are shootin’ coke and horse eight balls. Not much life left. Which makes this time sensitive.”

  Maggie knew “older” meant around her own age. “Okay, so we need the name of the pimp who owns that corner. Do you have any sources who might talk?”

  “Sure I do. But I got some bad blood on the street right now. Might’ve been too hard on a coupla whores got in my way.” Gail tapped her cigarette in the ashtray. “You know me, kid. Never met a bridge I couldn’t burn. I know who’s got the information. Just might need some help pryin’ it out.”

  Maggie felt her toes start to tingle. She was walking along the edge of a very steep cliff. “I’m not a detective.”

  “So what?” Gail stared a challenge into her. This was how Maggie got roped in every time. She wanted Gail’s approval too much. “Lookit, go a couple of steps out. I get the name from a source. Then what? Pimp ain’t gonna talk to me. You know how those bastards are. They wanna talk to some pretty young thing still got her tits where they’re supposed to be.”

  Maggie felt her stomach pitch. Gail had obviously given this some thought. “You think I can just stroll into some pimp’s lair and he’s gonna talk to me?”

  “Listen, sweetheart, forget what I told you when we were back in patrol. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being PCO, it’s that sometimes it’s okay to use the fact that you’re a woman.”

  Maggie wasn’t so sure about that.

  “Not like you gotta do anything after that except sit back and watch.”

  Maggie knew what she was saying. Give Terry the name, then let the guys take care of the problem.

  Gail jammed her cigarette into the stack of pancakes. “Listen, this is a yes-or-no question. You wanna say yes, meet me at the Colonnade Restaurant around two. You say no, and the guy who murdered Don, almost killed your brother, gets away with it again?” Gail shrugged. “That’s on you.”

  5

  A large crowd of cops gathered on the front steps of police headquarters. The squat, ugly building was clad in white marble that had been mined from the Tate quarry in North Georgia, the same pla
ce where they cut blanks for tombstones. Fittingly, the men all seemed to be talking about death. Even from a distance, Maggie kept hearing Don Wesley’s name. Most of them had probably never met him. She could tell from the numbers on their collars that they were from different squads though they all seemed to have the same dark sense of purpose. This was the third instance where a killer had reached into the heart of the police force. The panicked determination that had marked the last two manhunts had evolved into an outright bloodlust.

  Nothing brought cops together faster than a common enemy.

  And Atlanta had a lot of cops. The city was divided into seven police zones, including the airport and Perry Homes, a ghetto so dangerous it required its own separate police force. Each zone had a corresponding precinct. The downtown zone, Zone 1, used the bottom floor of the headquarters building for roll call. In practical terms, the location was ideal, but it was never good to be this close to the brass. Terry and his friends were always complaining about running into the police commissioner in the men’s toilet. She guessed they couldn’t decide which part of him they hated more: that he was new or that he was black.

  After months of open hostilities, Mayor Maynard Jackson had finally managed to push out the old chief of police. Commissioner Reginald Eaves had taken over around the time of the Edward Spivey trial, which made a bad situation unbelievably worse. Eaves didn’t seem to care. He was on a mission to break the white power structure that had controlled the Atlanta Police Department since its inception.

  Suddenly, Terry Lawson had a problem with cronyism.

  Maggie could understand her uncle’s anger, even if she didn’t share it. The good-ol’-boy system was great so long as you were one of the boys. When Terry’s group first joined the force, black cops weren’t even allowed in the station houses. They had to hang around the Butler Street YMCA until they were called out. They were not allowed to wear their uniforms unless they were on the job. Most of them didn’t have squad cars. They were only allowed to arrest other blacks and could not take statements from or interview white people.

  All of that had changed, of course, but men like Terry embraced change only when it suited their needs.

  The first thing Commissioner Eaves did was clean house. In the span of a month, six assistant chiefs and over a hundred supervisory personnel were demoted to the lower ranks. Eaves handpicked the men who replaced them. A lot of new bosses want their own people, but because the old structure was entirely white and the new one was entirely black, people had problems.

  Lawsuits followed, but none of them had yet been settled.

  Next, Eaves implemented a new testing system to formalize promotions. Before it was all about who you knew, but Eaves wanted to make it about what you knew. It was a good idea, but when no black officers could pass the test, Eaves appointed a board of examiners to give oral tests. No white officers were able to pass the oral test.

  Lawsuits followed. No one knew what the outcome would be.

  Other than the color of his skin, the biggest complaint that Maggie heard about Eaves was the color of his blood: he didn’t bleed blue. The mayor had met him when the two were in law school. Eaves had never been a real cop. He’d never worked the streets. Outside of headquarters, no one saw the commissioner unless they were watching the news or spotted his fancy Cadillac rolling down to the Commerce Club for lunch.

  Primarily, he communicated through daily bulletins that were read during roll call. Which created another reason to hate the new boss: Eaves was obsessed with paperwork. He implemented new rules about appearance, how to address the public, when to use force, and, most importantly, how to fill out the forms required by the federal government in order to keep the grant money rolling in.

  This part was especially important for the female officers. The only reason they were in uniform was because the federal government had bribed the city with grants to hire them. The women weren’t exactly told to lie about their duties, but the grants dictated certain guidelines that the Atlanta Police Department was not going to follow—mixed assignments being primary among them.

  No white woman would ride with a black man. The white men really wanted to ride with the black women, but the black women weren’t stupid enough to get in a car with them. And there was no way in hell a black man and a white man would ride together.

  Maybe there was a reason Atlanta was statistically one of the most violent, criminal cities in America. As far as Maggie could tell, the only thing the black and white male officers could agree on was that none of them thought women should be allowed in uniform.

  Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

  Maggie climbed the twenty-one steps to the headquarters building. The brass doors were a tarnished green. The thin sliver of glass was oily from smoke and sweat. She took one last whiff of fresh air before entering the lobby. As it was outside, the place was packed with men. There was no joking or jive talking. The weight of Don Wesley’s murder blanketed the room as palpably as the cigarette smoke that fogged the air.

  Even in their grief, they were true to form. None of them moved out of Maggie’s way as she pushed through the packed squad room. A shoulder bumped hers. A hand brushed across her ass. She kept her expression neutral, her eyes straight ahead, as she headed to the back of the room.

  “Hey, doll.” Chuck Hammond was short for a man. He came up to around Maggie’s breasts, which seemed to suit him just fine. “Jimmy okay?”

  Maggie kept walking. “He’ll be here soon. You can see for yourself.”

  “Listen, if you need to talk about—”

  Rick Anderson saved her. “Hey, Maggie, you got a minute?”

  “Sure.” Maggie felt Chuck’s hand on her arm, but she kept moving. She followed Rick as he cut a path toward the back. Everybody liked Rick. He was funny and good-natured and always laughed at everybody’s jokes.

  He looked over his shoulder to make sure she was still there. “You holding up okay?”

  “Sure,” she repeated. “Jimmy’s great.”

  “I wasn’t asking about Jimmy.”

  Unreasonably, Maggie felt the urge to cry. She couldn’t remember the last time anybody had asked her how she was doing. “I’m good. Thanks.”

  “Madam.” He bowed slightly, indicating the door marked ladies. They both ignored the crude drawing of an ejaculating penis taped under the sign.

  “Thank you.”

  Maggie cracked the door just enough to slide through in case anyone was indecent.

  Good thing, because Charlaine Compton had her pants off. She was dabbing clear fingernail polish on the ladder working its way up the back of her pantyhose. She saw Maggie and said, “I just bought these.”

  “I have an extra pair.” Maggie had to turn sideways to get past Charlaine. The women’s locker room was an afterthought, a narrow bowling alley of a space meant to store cleaning supplies. There were no toilets or sinks. If they needed to use the facilities, they had to go up a flight of stairs and use the public restrooms.

  Maggie spun the combination on her lock. “Chuck cornered me.”

  “Did he touch you?”

  Maggie shuddered. “Rick Anderson saved me before he could.”

  “Rick’s one of the nice ones.” Charlaine studied her. “Jimmy okay?”

  “He’s mad. He wants to catch the guy.” She handed Charlaine the white plastic egg from her locker. “Don was a good cop. He deserved better than that.”

  “True on all points.” Charlaine rolled the pantyhose so she could put them on. “You shoulda heard my mother on the phone this morning. ‘Why’re you doin’ that job when you could get killed? What’s wrong with you?’ ”

  Maggie was familiar with the questions. She floated out an idea. “Maybe they’ll let us work some of the leads.”

  “Maybe Princess Grace will come scrub my toilet.”

  Maggie thought about Gail’s suggestion that they work the case together. More like a challenge. Gail knew how to push Maggie’s buttons. As awful a
s it sounded, thinking about helping solve Don’s murder was an exciting prospect. But then there was the other component, which was that Maggie would have to turn the name over to Terry. She wouldn’t just be giving Terry a name. She would be signing a man’s death warrant.

  Then again, she could always feed the information to Rick Anderson and his partner, Jake Coffee. They weren’t Terry’s kind of cops. They actually followed the law. Which brought up another problem. If Terry found out that Maggie had gone behind his back, she wouldn’t be anybody’s kind of cop. Terry was losing his power on the force, but he still had enough pull to keep her behind a desk or, worse, make her work night shift at the jail until she either got stabbed or quit.

  “Good morning, ladies!” Wanda Clack squeezed through the half-open door. She had a big smile on her face that dropped the minute the door shut. “Another cock drawing?” she asked. “Honestly. Don’t these boys have mothers?”

  Charlaine asked, “How was your date this weekend?”

  “I told him I’m a cop and he stuck me with the check.” Wanda rolled her eyes. “Maybe I should tell the next one I’m a stewardess.”

  “He’ll think you’re fast.”

  “That’s exactly what I want him to think. I haven’t been laid in two months.”

  The door opened wide.

  “Hey!” Charlaine screamed, clutching her pants around her waist.

  “Jesus, lady!” Wanda pushed the door closed on the ensuing whistles and catcalls. “What the hell?”

  They all stared at the blonde who’d stumbled into the room. She looked panicked. Her chest was heaving. At least Maggie thought her chest was heaving. Her uniform was big enough to pass for an Indian sari. You could always spot the new recruits by their clothes. They didn’t get their uniforms until they graduated from the academy, because most of them washed out before graduation. The guys in the supply room gave the women uniforms that were too large, while the black men got uniforms that were obscenely small.

  “Listen up, blondie.” Charlaine buttoned her pants. “You never open the door all the way. Ever.”