Darktown: A Novel by Thomas Mullen

Author:Thomas Mullen [Mullen, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

19

BOGGS AND SMITH’S unofficial, off-the-books, and mostly amateur investigation into the murder of Lily Ellsworth was producing little in the way of information and much in the way of risk. They needed to limit the number of people they spoke to, to decrease the chances that McInnis or one of the other white cops might figure out what they were doing. Which hindered their efforts greatly. And they hadn’t yet made the trek out to Peacedale to pick up Lily’s letters back home. Though Boggs suspected the missives held a trove of information, he kept putting off the trip. Going out into the country, a land where the white men ruled even yet more ruthlessly than they did in Atlanta, was no minor errand. As he plotted it out in his head—he’d need to borrow a car, and go with Smith, and stash some guns in the car just in case—he realized how accustomed he was to moving about a city where he had a powerful family, important connections. But the country? It would be like that South Carolina army camp once again, and the horrible little hellhole of a town outside it, where the buses never stopped for Negroes and where failure to move off a sidewalk at the right time could be your last mistake.

So they’d done what they could in Atlanta, tracking down landladies and former roommates of the deceased and hoping they weren’t causing enough of a stir to alert whichever white cops (all of them?) so desperately wanted this case unsolved.

The first place Lily had stayed in the city had been a rooming house, seven blocks south of Auburn, a place Boggs occasionally had reason to visit when trying to locate a suspect or witness. It was run by an older black couple, the Paulsons, who had moved to the city as teenagers themselves and now made a point of providing a clean, wholesome place for migrants to live as they got established. Or so they always claimed. From time to time, people rooming there had been arrested for this or that petty crime, but no one at the precinct had reason to think the Paulsons were involved in anything.

When Boggs and Smith visited, Mr. Paulson dimly remembered Lily. She had stayed with them for six weeks, he recalled. She had been polite and well mannered for a country girl, the old bald man had said, and had kept her room immaculate. That’s all he knew. No visitors, and certainly no male guests (that was not allowed), and no reason to have suspected anything harmful might occur to her. He expressed surprise to hear of her death, but it didn’t faze him. Many people came into and out of his three-story rooming house, and he seldom heard from them again. This was life in the city, he said, and he played his role as gatekeeper and hoped the people who moved on found better places, but that’s not always what the Lord has designed. Sometimes those gates opened to dark things.

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