The Scribe (8 page)

Canby cleared his throat. “Are we waiting on Vernon and Colonel Billingsley?”

Bishop Drew took a sip of claret before he spoke. “I expect Chief Thompson will arrive soon. Colonel Billingsley has been detained by some of his northern investors. He sent me in his place.”

“I didn't realize the two of you were associates.”

“Oh, yes. He is one of my most prominent parishioners.” He cut his eyes to Wellingrath. “We have yet to gather Mister Wellingrath into the fold.”

Wellingrath snorted but made no comment, as if he hadn't heard. He motioned the waiter for another whiskey and Canby nodded for one himself.

“Let's get to it,” Wellingrath said, fixing his smallish eyes on Canby. “Mister Canby, I won't bullshit you. I'm a cracker, purebred, out of Columbia County. We lived so far out in the country we had to go into town to hunt. I came to Atlanta right after the war, when I was through with my service, and I've never looked back.”

“Mister Wellingrath is in the real estate business,” the bishop said carefully.

“Damned right. This town is a gold mine, just waiting for
the big rush. The
big
rush, you see? And it'll come, you mark my words. What we've seen so far is nothing. Someday there'll be settled development all the way out to Buckhead.”

Canby could not repress a smile. He thought of old Henry Irby's store—with its stuffed whitetail head out front giving the rough crossroads the name—and could not imagine anything more at the meeting of the Pace's Ferry and Roswell roads than the run-down clapboard pub. “And after that, Vinings?” he said. “It's hard to imagine many living a half day's ride from downtown.”

“Don't smirk at me, boy. I've got over a half million in real estate to my name. Got a credit line with the Gate City National Bank for twice that”—Wellingrath glanced at the bishop, who looked intensely uncomfortable—“and you don't know shit from apple butter.”

Wellingrath took the glass of whiskey from the waiter's hand before he could set it on the table. Sweat had begun to bead on his pink neck. Canby stared at his own glass for a moment, figuring that Wellingrath had gotten his start in the bad years, probably buying up land at sheriff's auctions or from war widows themselves, direct. Pennies on the dollar.

“And I'll tell you another thing before I shut up and let Drew take over. I told Billingsley to watch out for you,” Wellingrath said, his drawl picking up speed. “Anyone who got into bed with the Union can't be much. Nigger-lovers, coon-humpers, scalawags, and damn Yankees, that's all the Union army was, I told him, down to the last man. But did he listen?”

Wellingrath glared at Canby as if to imply his presence was answer enough to the question.

“Strange bedfellows we are,” Canby said, taking a careful sip from his drink. He and the bishop both seemed to be struggling for something to say next when Vernon slipped into the lone vacant chair at the table. The chief's eyes were on Wellingrath.

“A.N., you remind me of an overloaded boiler. One of these days you're going to blow your own gasket. Meantime, I'd appreciate it if you'd not insult my man.” Vernon leaned on his elbows across the table. “If common decency isn't enough, just let the thought of your losses shut you up.”

“All right,” Wellingrath said, his features softening. “The money.”

“Good, then,” Vernon said. He leaned back and smiled at Wellingrath, at Canby. “Tell them what we have on the case.”

Do the job
, Canby thought.
Do the job and get the hell out of here
. So he began to talk.

Canby talked and did not let up until the sorbets arrived, taking them through each crime scene, through the state of the bodies, the linkages and discrepancies he could see between each murder. Before he'd even mentioned the dead whore's room, the bishop had pushed his plate of mussels away.

“He's trying to make a point, gentlemen,” Canby concluded. “He has a grudge, some sort of injury he perceives that's been done to him.

“But I have to admit that these letters are a mystery.” Canby felt a drive to keep his face on Bishop Drew's, away from Vernon's, as he spoke. “They ended in a
U
, which I've not been able to make much sense of.”

“
Maul?
” the bishop asked.

“Could be,” Canby said, feeling a stab of guilt at the lie he'd just told Vernon, the first he could remember between them. “Thus far it does not come together.”

Vernon turned to the bishop. “Most of your murders are simple as can be, Bishop. Your motive's usually right in front of you. You've just got to figure out the history between the victim and the murderer—and it's almost always money, sex, or anger—and you're done. The history falls into place.

“The bad cases are the ones that don't show any history,” Vernon said, and Canby found himself nodding along with him, warming to the familiar process in spite of himself—here and now, at least, where there was no blood or pain on display. He watched Vernon as he drew a cigar from his jacket pocket and clipped its end. “Remember, for example, the DeFoor murders?”

The bishop nodded. Wellingrath ordered another drink.

“That was a bad case,” Vernon continued. He looked at Canby. “You were up in your mountain hideaway when this happened. Heads nearly hacked off in their beds.”

The bishop held up a hand as if in anathema.

“Beg your pardon, sir. But that part of it was, from a detective's point of view, a help. We found the ax in the fireplace and their grandson confirmed it was theirs, had been taken from their own shed. What was troublesome, though, was the eighteen silver dollars left on top of their bureau, which had one drawer broken open. No robbery motive there, you see.

“We did find a broken window in the shed where the ax was, with a watermelon rind on the floor and, ah, human excrement with watermelon seeds in it. Old Man DeFoor's boots we found in a clearing by the river, like they'd been thrown aside.
As if the murderer had tried wearing them but they didn't fit. There was more, ah, evidence of watermelon next to them.”

Canby took a breath while they waited for Vernon to deliver the verdict.

“So there was only one conclusion. A stray Negro had broken into the shed. Why he killed them, we can only guess that he was crazed—too crazed to notice the silver, and on the run from someplace bootless. Intending to walk a long distance, or already had come far enough that he needed new boots.”

“Who was convicted?” Canby asked.

“No one,” the bishop said quietly.

“We rounded up every Negro in north Fulton County,” Vernon said, shaking his head. “Couldn't make it stick to any one them. Alibis—work or family—for near every one them. And the one or two who couldn't account for their whereabouts—the boots fit them.”

Canby took a deep breath. “So the motive was what?”

“Crazed Negro, like I said.”

“Did you question the grandson again?”

“We didn't see a need to. Those watermelon seeds told us what we needed to know.”

“Vernon, when did you last eat watermelon?”

Vernon's face colored as he considered the question. After a long moment, he said, “But you would not find me shitting in a shed, Thomas.”

“Because you have no need to. I wonder where the eighteen dollars ended up. Would they have been inherited by the grandson? The one with no crazed motive, I mean.”

But Vernon's apparent discomfort in front of the other men made Canby want to move on.

“This case,” Canby said, “is crazed, but crazed in a pattern. The common factor among the victims is their race and their prosperity.”

Wellingrath gave the first indication he'd been listening by snorting. “You call a whore prosperous?”

“She was new, but she was popular. The doorman at O'Donnell's told me she'd been clearing fifty dollars a night. That's not money enough to join the Ring, but it's better wages than nearly every white man in the city earns. She'd have
been
prosperous, at any rate.

“So, if I am correct, race and prosperity trigger the motive. Our thoughts lead us instinctively to a black man as perpetrator. Perhaps jealousy in the case of Lewis, or a debt owed to Dempsey. But that could never give us a link to O'Donnell's. A black man could have killed the first two, but not all three.”

The bishop's eyes flashed behind his spectacles. “You can't mean—”

“The killer may well be a white man,” Canby said. He looked at Wellingrath. “A cracker, perhaps, somebody with a good deal of race hatred in him. Probably your lower-class sort of man, someone who could just get himself into the Kimball House but would not stand out in Jenningstown, walking through. Or maybe a foreman, a middleman for someone wealthier who has business in the Negro districts.”

“But who also has enough money to pay the fare for your up-and-coming whore,” Wellingrath said.

“You're right there. I have not yet figured that through.”

“What about the letters?” Vernon asked, pulling on his cigar.

As he spoke, Canby found the sound of his own voice unconvincing. “The carving on this last one seemed to have been done in more haste than the others. Perhaps he was interrupted in his work. He may have intended to complete the letter as a
D
.”

It made things worse that Vernon seemed not even to suspect the lie, so he pressed on.

“
Madness
, perhaps? He could carry it in a number of directions,” Canby said, thinking instead of
malice
,
malignant
,
malevolent
. “Or maybe just
mad
. Maybe he's done. I have an idea of how to find out,” he was saying as a rising tide of voices in the street drowned out his voice.

A man leaped into the vestibule, the frosted-glass door held open behind him with one hand, his hat in the other. His face was radiant.

“Sherman's coming, boys!” he cried, then grinned. “Again! Got it on the word of Henry Grady hisself. Be in the paper tomorrow! Just you watch that stock go now!”

Then he was gone, the door swinging shut on the space where he'd stood a second before.

The Bonanza was instantly in a fury of motion. Men leaped from their seats and grabbed for hats and coats, tossed bills on the tabletops. The bishop, too, was rising, and Wellingrath had begun to struggle upward from his chair.

“Gentlemen, I should be getting back to the cathedral,” Bishop Drew said.

“Take care you don't stop by the exposition office on your
way,” Vernon said, and winked. “There's a stampede in progress.” To Canby, he said, “Wonder how much stock Grady bought up before he let the news out?”

“As much as the son of a bitch could afford, I'll bet.”

“Watch yourself,” Wellingrath said to Canby, then he was gone.

“He will,” Vernon answered through a cloud of smoke. His eyes were on the front door. Canby followed them to see Lee Smith himself there, in the vestibule, apparently having come out from his office to try to stop the throngs of men before they ran out on their unpaid tabs. Someone pushed him aside and he remained pinned against a fresco until the last few had gotten through.

Canby looked out the flung-open door and saw that a hard rain had begun to fall. Men rushed out into it unheeding, hustling for the I.C.E. office before the news of Sherman got widespread enough to raise the value of the exposition's stock to its saturation point. Some going to buy, some to sell, he figured. They seemed to be both coming and going. As he watched and as Lee Smith shook his head and brushed at his rumpled clothes, a pair of men counting their money collided in the street and fell to the mud, one grasping at coins half sunk in the muck of Decatur Street and the other rising, wiping a grimy bill on his jacket sleeve.

Vernon rattled the ice in his drink and turned away from the door. “Atlanta,” he said with a sigh to the now-empty saloon. “Madness, you say?”

He tossed back the dregs of his drink and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Standard fare.”

October 8

N
EARLY A WEEK OF SULLEN RAIN, UNRELENTING
, cold. Canby and Underwood had been at this work of watching four nights now, paired silent as creepers for most of it, in the shadows of Negro Atlanta's most prosperous quarters—haunting its saloons and dry goods stores, cobblers, outfitters, smitheries, milliners. In that span of time Canby had been vouchsafed by Underwood throughout what the men on the force probably still called Darktown, past quizzical stares and terse exchanges and into back rooms and alleys—had in fact dined several times with the younger man, watching in bemused silence as Underwood bent his head in prayer before each meal of collards or fatback pork.

For most of the time Canby had been the only white man in sight. And the killings had, for the moment at least, ceased.