Darktown (39 page)

“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.

Then a long wait in the otherwise empty room. It was likely past midnight when Sharpe and Clayton entered. Clayton was the former football player for the Bulldogs, the tough one who'd driven his fists into Ellsworth. Sharpe was older, gray hair, thin, with a fondness for suits that appeared more expensive than a police detective should be able to afford.

“Quite a night for you, Officer Rakestraw,” Sharpe said. Rake was sitting in a chair opposite a small table. Clayton stood directly across from Rake, while Sharpe stood to the side, very close to Rake, easy striking distance.

Rake just stared at them, waiting for a question. It had not escaped his attention that this room had no observation window.

“Why don't we start from the beginning,” Sharpe said. “Let's start with what Mr. Prescott said to you when you allegedly picked up the phone in your house, when he allegedly called you.”

Rake rubbed at his chin. It was scratchy now and needed a shave.

He asked, “Which one of you shot Underhill?”

“Excuse me?”

“Underhill. That night by the foundry. Only thing I haven't figured out for a certain is why, though it was obviously one of two things. Maybe it was because he went back to you and asked for more money once he realized how important that girl had been. He hadn't known
when he showed up to get her out of town that she was connected to a congressman. She mouthed off to him in the car, he slapped her, then she ran off. Then the junior Prescott finds her, snaps, shoots her, and when Underhill tracks them down he finds he's now dealing with a dead body. He gets rid of it, not doing a particularly good job, and now that he knows just how high-rent a crowd he's helping out, he decides that whatever fee he'd agreed to isn't enough, so he asks for more. And you decide he's too much trouble.

“Or,” he continued, “maybe it was because you realized I was getting too close to him, and you needed to erase the trail. So, which of those two was it? And which one of you pulled the trigger?”

Sharpe smiled. Only now, though. During that long statement, the two detectives' faces had been cold and taut.

“I'm afraid the stress of this evening is getting to you, Officer Rakestraw.”

“It's making you do very unwise things,” Clayton said, making a show of folding his thick arms in front of his chest.

Rake was not cuffed. He scooted his chair back just a tad, so he'd have room to work with in a moment.

“Clayton, you can fold those arms as tight as you want, but if you even think of taking a swing at me like you did that Negro farmer, your partner will be picking up your teeth as keepsakes.”

Sharpe laughed. “You think you're holding a winning hand, don't you? You're about to be booked for
murder.
”

“People who are booked for murder have a habit of talking, a lot. They talk at their trial an amazing amount. They say all kinds of things that some people would prefer not get said.”

Clayton swung. He got Rake in the cheekbone. The fact that Rake had been expecting it hardly meant that it didn't hurt. But it did mean that he rolled to his right quickly, flowing with the punch, his ass sliding off the chair and his right knee landing against the floor. Which gave him plenty of leverage as he stood back up, lifting the table with him, and using it as a battering ram as he flew into Clayton like a drilling lineman running into pads. Clayton tripped backward, the table slamming him into the wall. Rake heard the wind rush out of the detective. Then Rake let go of the table and hit the bastard square in the nose,
twice, a third time, the back of the man's skull hitting the wall each time and Rake's hand getting increasingly wet with blood. Rake was gearing up for another swing when someone or something hit him and he was on the floor, and trying to get up, and seeing all kinds of feet coming at him, some running and some lifting themselves high above so they could plant themselves low.

An indeterminate amount of time later, Rake was sitting in the same room. This time there was no table and his hands were cuffed, one cuff each, to the chair legs behind him.

It had occurred to him, just before he lost consciousness, that the glaring weakness in his plan was that they could just kill him and no longer worry about his ability to talk. He was still alive, at the moment, but his lip was busted and one of his eyes was swollen shut. And regardless of how many of Clayton's teeth he'd punched out, he'd also lost one of his own.

He would have killed for a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin.

He still had no idea how many people on the force had been involved in the effort to remove Lily Ellsworth from life and any living person's memory. If there were as many as he was now beginning to fear—the entire police department except himself ?—then Sharpe was right that Rake had no cards to play. Or maybe it was only a few dirty cops, but those few were still more than powerful enough to swat into nothingness the buzzing annoyance that was Denny Rakestraw.

The door opened and in walked a cop in a spotless uniform. He was tall and thick, an older man but, unlike Dunlow, one who had managed to keep himself in shape. He was holding about six inches of folders and paperwork. He looked down at Rake for a moment, then glanced out the open door and told someone named Kenny to fetch another chair. A chair was handed to him by the unseen Kenny, and the door was closed, and Chief Jenkins sat down opposite one of the most vexing officers in his city.

“Discretion is not one of your strengths, Officer Rakestraw.” Jenkins had blue eyes and a ruddy face that had spent years in the sun. Those eyes still looked youthful but the skin around them was lined with wrinkles that stretched nearly to the gray hair above his ears.

“No, sir.” Talking hurt. He clenched his stomach and forced the words out. “I felt it wasn't in my best interest to be quiet tonight.”

“Why is that?”

“It's the people doing things wrong who want to stay quiet about it. Sir.” He breathed. He didn't think his ribs were broken, but they weren't particularly happy either. “No questions, no whispers, no one bothering them. Being loud is the last thing they want.”

Jenkins regarded him.

“A United States congressman has boarded a plane for Atlanta,” the chief finally said. “By the time he lands, he is going to want to know exactly why his son is dead.” He opened one of the folders and flipped through it. Rake wasn't a good enough upside-down reader to know what Jenkins was looking at, plus his one “good” eye was getting fuzzy.

“It's not a very palatable story, sir. And I've been saving the worst parts for you.”

Jenkins looked up from his paperwork. “How's that?”

Rake had been gambling on the fact that the reform-minded Jenkins, who had moved to arrest the cops who ran the numbers operations a few years back and who had thrown the Kluxers out of the police union, would not side against Rake if he heard the whole story. The fact that the chief himself was in this room made Rake feel all the more strongly that he was right.

So Rake mentioned that he'd had suspicions about his own partner and thus had gone this alone. He told the truth about how he'd questioned Silas Prescott a few nights ago, and how he'd confronted the man tonight. When Jenkins asked how Rake had learned certain things, he did not mention his collaboration with Boggs, afraid to touch that third rail, instead making it sound as if he had picked up tips from Negro informants.

“You did a lot of things wrong, Officer Rakestraw.”

“I realize that, sir.”

“And you're laying quite a mess at my feet.”

“I'm sorry for that, sir. But the way I see it is, there are cops here you wish you didn't have, and there are cops you wish you had more of. I'm the second kind.”

“You don't lack for confidence.”

“Probably just got hit in the head a few too many times.”

“Don't let that become a habit.”

“Sir, there are a lot of things I'm not good at. But I think I'm a good cop. And I was a good soldier. If you think it's best for you and your department for me to go away and keep my mouth shut, I can do that. But if you think it would be best to have me stick around and keep my mouth shut, I figure I can do that, too.”

Jenkins drummed his fingers on the desk. “If there's anything you've been fixing to ask me, you'd best do so now.”

“Sir, if you do decide I'm to remain an officer here, I'd surely appreciate a new partner.”

Jenkins folded his arms across his chest. “Funny you should mention that. We've been trying to reach Officer Dunlow ever since we brought you in here, but he's nowhere to be found. Any clue where he might be?”