The Dying Crapshooter's Blues (14 page)

He wished it could be that easy, because it was starting to turn into a tangle, with Jesse's evasions, Robert Clark's shifty behavior, and the complete lack of any other talk from the street, which was strange. Behind it all was the question of why Logue would want to shoot Little Jesse, a no-account rounder who really didn't bother anyone much. It didn't make sense.

Like all those who hustled for a living, Joe hated being worked, and that was exactly how it felt. It wasn't only Little Jesse's shooting, either; he was slowly being sucked into the burglary in Inman Park by the very woman he had come there to see. If it wasn't for her, he wouldn't be there and in the middle of the mess.

He had stepped off the train from Louisville ready to relax after being sated with the easy theft of a diamond necklace and the attentions of a red-haired woman named Annabelle. They'd known each other in years past, when she went by another name. Though now a respectable married woman, she was still happy to see him. One afternoon, he left her dozing in her four-poster bed and wandered downstairs, out into the garden, and through the ivy to the mansion next door, where he slipped by the house staff to help himself to the best piece he saw. He was back in Annabelle's bedroom in minutes, and the next morning, he boarded a train to Atlanta. If he had known what would be waiting for him, he would have stayed where he was.

Someone moved by him to sit at the end of the bar, a young fellow in a poor suit and old overcoat, his face pinched with melancholy and eyes distressed.

Joe knew the look. “What's her name?” he asked.

The young fellow squinted at him. “What's that?”

“The woman,” Joe said. “What's her name?”

“It's . . . Betty.”

Joe gave an absent nod. “I've come across a few of those,” he said. “Still know one or two.” He got up from his stool. “Well, don't kill yourself over her, friend.”

The young man gazed back at Joe with helpless, liquid eyes, and for a moment Joe wondered if he was going to burst into tears. Then Bill the bartender served up a shot of whiskey and a glass of beer, and he went about dissolving his sorrows that way. Bill left the young heartbreak and stepped over to Joe with a wry smile.

“A double shot will do,” Joe said.

Bill poured the whiskey into a glass that looked none too clean. Joe drank anyway, then whispered something under his breath. The bartender leaned closer.

Of course Bill knew Logue. The cop spent time in all the downtown speaks, cadging free drinks when he didn't have the money to pay. He made the Central Avenue rounds, too. The bartender repeated the story of the night the cop got so falling-down drunk that some of the street rats stripped off his uniform and left him snoring on the floor. His fellow officers came to roust him the next morning. They got the uniform and the weapon back and told everyone to keep quiet about it, but it got around anyway. Nobody could take Logue seriously, but he didn't cause anyone trouble, either. He was just a harmless old shaking wreck of a drunkard who happened to wear a badge.

Not quite harmless, Joe mused, then asked if Logue had been in that evening. Bill said he hadn't seen him in a week, and that he had no idea about later on. Then he rolled his greasy eyes around the room before dropping his voice to ask Joe for the lowdown on the Inman Park caper.

“I know as much about it as you do,” Joe said in an offhand way.

Bill raised bushy eyebrows. “That's not what I heard,” he muttered. “I heard you was in a spot.”

“What else did you hear?” Joe asked.

The bartender shrugged his rounded shoulders and what was left of his neck disappeared into folds of flesh. “Just that the Captain's gonna take somebody down for it. He's got to, is what people are saying.”

Joe decided he'd heard enough. He finished his drink, thanked Bill, dropped some coins on the bar, and went out the door.

Walking back to the Hampton, he figured he'd find Logue in the morning, maybe catch him in the midst of a hangover, and
get him to spill something. He had done all he could for one day. He wasn't a magician and couldn't reach into a hat and pull out the reason why Little Jesse was shot, any more than he could make the Payne mansion jewels appear from thin air with a snap of his fingers. It was all too much, and he was ready for his room, a last drink, and his bed.

As he turned the corner onto Houston Street, he mused briefly on the sad young fellow at Big Bill's, his broken heart on display like a sign carved out in deep indigo. Joe wondered which one of the half-dozen Bettys he knew around town had done the poor boy wrong. They were all able; what woman wasn't? Jesse was right about that.

He pushed through the hotel doors and crossed directly to the front desk to get his key. Handing it over, the clerk raised his eyebrows and pointed with his chin to the far side of the lobby. Joe's first thought was
cops,
and he took his sweet time turning around.

She was standing against the opposite wall, in a shadow where the lamplight didn't quite reach. Keeping a nonchalant gait, he crossed the tiny lobby, unable to quell the thumping in his chest at the very sight of her.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

Pearl's smile was white and wicked on her dark face. “I'm getting in out of the cold,” she said.

 

J. R. Logue thought he had a bottle stashed somewhere in his Cain Street room, but when he went looking, he couldn't find it. He figured he must have finished it off and then forgot to go get another to replace it. He did that sometimes.

He stumbled to the door, opened it, and poked his head into the hall. It was quiet, no one talking, and no Victrolas playing. It was too late to go knocking at the other rooms, and Mrs. Cotter had told him never to bother her at night unless the house was burning down. She couldn't abide the behavior that went with
his drinking, and he felt like she was always on the verge of putting him out of the house.

Twenty-four hours earlier, he could have climbed the steep blocks to Peachtree Street to buy a bottle, but the fellow with the still had gotten arrested after starting an altercation that brought a patrolman to his door. There had been witnesses all over the street, and so there was nothing the cop could do but bust it up.

Knowing he wouldn't last the night without a drink, Logue pulled on his high-topped shoes and headed out, trekking down Bartow to Marietta Street like a lumbering bear. He glanced up at the street sign on the corner where it changed to Decatur with a little flutter of anticipation, tasting the raw smoke of bad whiskey and the sweet burn coursing through his veins. Though it was cold out, the alcohol that had long ago saturated his very bones kept him warm.

He stopped at the next corner and looked up to see the sign for Courtland Street. Sudden images rose before his eyes, pictures playing in slow motion and filtered in blue shadow. The colored boy was ahead of him, and he heard himself call out a name. Williams? Was that it? The fellow turned around with that look in his eye, like he knew what was coming. That he had done wrong, and was about to pay. Logue's service revolver had jumped into his hand, and a shot cracked, echoed, and died. He watched Williams crumple to the sidewalk, then put his pistol back in its holster and walked away, feeling the street tilt a little bit. The thought went around in his muddled brain:
I just shot a man.

Even now, he saw those dark accusing eyes and it made him think of hell.
I just shot a man.
He wondered if Williams would be waiting for him when his time came.

He was startled by the sudden wail of a siren and glanced around to see a police wagon pulling out of the lot three blocks down. It gave him a moment's pause, as he realized he had no business wandering around those dark and lonely streets at that
hour. What if someone knew what had happened? What if there had been eyes watching from a shadow? And what if the word was around about what he had done? Lord help him if any of these roughhouse, backstreet niggers had gotten wind of it. White man or not, policeman or not, they could cut him into so many pieces that his own mama wouldn't be able to figure out what went where.

He knew it would be wise for him to turn around and head back home, but he needed his pint, needed the smoky liquor soothing his nerves and blanking his thoughts. At least he had the wits to stay off the main drag, and instead looped a block north on Courtland to come around on Gilmer Street to Maddox, which was actually a crooked alley. There were a couple addresses he knew down this way, places that were good for a bottle at any hour of the night.

It was still and quiet and he stepped uneasily, searching the shadows. He leaned on a telephone post and went digging for the flask he always carried, only to find it empty. Of course it was, or what would he be doing there? He shook it to make sure. It was a special piece, polished brass with a dent where a bullet aimed at his broad ass had been deflected. That fellow who tried to gun him down, or at least give him something to explain, a piece of white trash named . . . named . . . what was his name? Who could remember? He was dead now. And Williams was dead, too. Or maybe not . . .

Now it came back, nagging him. He had fired, watched the man fall, then walked away without checking to make sure the job was done. It was driving him crazy that he hadn't remembered to do that. In a lucid moment Sunday afternoon, he had used Mrs. Cotter's telephone to call down to the precinct and check for a report of a Negro shot on Courtland Street. The desk sergeant said there was nothing of the kind.

He made calls to Grady Hospital and some of the colored funeral homes. No one had any information about such a subject.
He considered that the people he spoke to were lying to him, which was what they did by habit when they dealt with a white policeman.

If Williams wasn't dead, it would mean all kinds of trouble, and it wasn't even his fault! What had he been doing there in the first place? His brain was muddled about that.

He put the flask away and had just started off again when he heard voices, and turned around to see three colored boys amble by the mouth of the alley behind him, staggering into one other as they engaged in a bleary argument. He thought to chase after them and brace them good, see if they'd give up any talk about the Williams fellow. Maybe that was a way for him to—

“Logue!”

He jumped and came back around. A man had come up on him from the other end of the crooked alley without a sound to stand not ten paces away. Though Logue didn't quite recognize him, he straightened, hearing rough authority in the voice.

“Yes, sir?” His voice was shaky.

“You're a drunk, Logue,” the man said.

The cop didn't know if he was expected to agree, argue, or stay silent. He was still mulling his choices when a revolver came up. “And you're a terrible damn shot.”

The pistol coughed loudly in that narrow space, and Logue staggered, his hands flapping at the hole in the middle of his chest. He tipped over, the back of his head slamming onto dirty bricks, and found himself looking up into a cold face. The world shifted at a rough angle. Grunting in pain, he tried to get to his feet.

“You start something, you finish it,” the fellow muttered, and then without a second's pause, shot him in the precise center of his forehead. There was a splatter of blood and matter and a little puff of hot smoke where the bullet exited from the back of his skull. The man put the pistol back in his pocket, straightened, and walked away, heading off through the cold shadows toward the lights of Bell Street.

Two brothers who worked as porters on the Georgia Southern were walking to the station in the chilly six o'clock darkness when the older of the pair happened to glance into the narrow gap at Maddox Street to see the body lying sprawled on the cold bricks. He touched his brother's arm. They stopped, stared, and then edged into the alleyway.

The heavyset white man was dead as could be, with one black hole high on his chest and another almost between his eyes. Dried blood had webbed a pattern on his face and down his shirt. He wore no overcoat and his trouser pockets had been turned inside out.

The brothers gaped for another few seconds, wordless in the wake of whatever violence had befallen the poor soul, then hurried off to call the police station and report what they had found. Anonymously, of course.

 

Even before the break of day, there was a cheerful clamor on the first floor of the Dixie Hotel that rippled from the lobby into the parlor. As soon as the dining room doors opened, almost every seat was taken, so that the regular guests stood grumbling in a line at the door. Some of them gave up and walked out into the
brisk morning. Those who didn't care what they ate crossed the street to the Checker Diner. Others took the desk clerk's advice and headed four blocks west to Lulu's on Houston Street, with Beck's Café on James as a second choice.

Out in the lobby, the crowd of four dozen men and twenty-odd women swirled about like eddies in a rolling stream, raising a giddy row. In turn, a guitar or banjo would appear from a case or come unslung from a shoulder and a ripple of steel strings would rise up, followed by a voice that rasped, crooned, or warbled. Meanwhile, the parlor piano, an old upright that was slightly out of tune, got worried to death as one player after another sat down to try out a tune. Strange, plaintive harmonies rose from tables in the dining room. The competing sounds echoed about the ground floor in the manner of a jungle flush with exotic birds. Though a less charitable soul might have described it as more akin to a barnyard. Meanwhile, the regular guests hurried in and out, looking askance, as if they thought an invasion was in progress.

The news had spread faster than anyone might have guessed, with telephone calls and telegrams flying like startled quail to all parts of Georgia and into South Carolina, Tennessee, and east Alabama. In the twenty-four hours before George Purcell and Jake Stein finally stepped to the front desk in the lobby of the Dixie Hotel, certain men and women in far-flung hollows and pastures laid their work aside or whoa'd their mules. Others toiling away in small towns were taken with sudden bouts of dyspepsia and fever and had to leave their jobs immediately. Still others, laboring in dirty mills, simply vanished when no one was looking.