Instinctively his eyes went to the telephone and for a passing second it occurred to him to call the police once more. He started to get up but then a second later slumped back helplessly. He knew what the answer would be. It would be what it had been each time he had called these last few weeks. They would know nothing. They could do nothing.
And then, as his eyes slowly closed and his heavy face seemed to relax into a mask of utter futility, the sharp, imperative jangle of the telephone disturbed the dead air of the room. Within brief minutes Perry Williams was to find the answer to his enigma. He was to find the peace of knowledge. But it was to be a peace distilled of tragedy and blood and violence.
High winds and sheets of rain beat with an unrelenting violence across the breadth of the city. Great sign boards keeled beneath the wild fury of the storm, wires were down and the facilities of Atlanta’s sewage system were incapable of coping with the tons of water which flooded the gutters until the streets ran in mad torrents.
It was the middle of March and the entire South was being lashed with the pre-spring gales. Hardest hit was Georgia. Down Atlanta’s Stewart Avenue flowed a veritable river of mud, water and debris. And into the cement basement of the old-fashioned frame dwelling at number 1117, water seeped in a turgid, never-ending flow until it reached, a height of more than six feet.
Odds and ends of old, discarded furniture floated in silent, drunken fashion. Mud and silt and the accumulation of years intermingled to give off a dead, musty odor.
And then on March 18th the winds suddenly died and the heavens cleared beneath the crashing orange of a rediscovered sun. The storm was ended and once again the city settled down to clear away the aftermath of the rains and fury of the weather.
In the house at 1117 Stewart Avenue, Tom Griffin, 26, and for these last six years unselfishly carrying the burdens of the eldest son, turned to his widowed mother and smiled down at her frail figure as she sat rocking gently back and forth in the kitchen chair.
“Ma,” he said, “it’s a mess downstairs. If we weren’t so busy, me and the kid would get down there and clean up. But I guess we better hire a couple of men to do it.”
Minnie Lee Griffin looked up at her son and shook her head. A slight figure, tired and with slender, drooping shoulders, her face was thin and weary with the years of struggle. The almost black eyes made deep shadows in her face and there was an odd, downward twist to her small, worried mouth.
“Don’t worry about it, lad,” she said. “You boys just keep on working and let me take care of the house. This is my job and I can still manage it all right.”
Tom nodded and smiled back at her. But, he decided that he would still make the arrangements. His mother, only 46, had of late shown signs of premature age. Always frail, she had worked hard for her children since her husband’s death. She had kept house and cooked for them and had even taken in boarders. She had worked too hard and worried too much. Her withered hands, gray hair and the lines around her eyes were visual proof of it. He knew that she would likely enough forget all about the cellar.
Later that afternoon he hired two Negroes to come in the following day and drain out the basement and clean it up.
Minnie Griffin left early the next morning to go downtown and get in some shopping. She and a neighbor decided to go together and make a day of it. Tom and his younger brother, J. W. Griffin, 16, left the house a few minutes afterward for work. Meantime, the hired men had arrived and Tom had sent them into the basement to start cleaning it out.
The big fellow, his shoulder muscles bulging beneath the thin cotton fabric of his shirt, stood at the top of the wooden steps and shook his head. He turned to the little man at his side.
“Boy,” he said, “is that some dam’ mess. Look like this here basement been the meeting place of a hurricane. She’s going take some back labor to straighten out.”
His eyes made out the outlines of the broken debris, the mud and silted floor and the stained cement sides of the cellar. Already the water itself had receded until there were but isolated puddles in a desert of filth and muck and trash.
“She’s dirty, all right,” his companion said. “Goin’ be plenty of work here,” he added as he started down the stairs.
First they righted the overturned work bench and then stacked broken furniture in one corner. Everything was mud-encrusted and they made little effort in the beginning to do more than move things to one side so that they might be able to clean out the silt in tin buckets. They worked hard and it was long past noon before they made much headway.
“The junk that folks can hang onto,” the little man said. “Now why do you suppose they want that ol’ sewing machine?”
“Why they want anything down here is more’n I know.”
They worked on and by mid-afternoon their labor had reduced the shambles to some degree of ordered arrangement.
“Take this here trunk,” the little man began, pointing at an ancient metal automobile luggage carrier which looked as though it had been removed from some sedan of the early 1920s. “Now what you suppose they keeping this for?”
“Probably filled with somethin’ or other,” his big companion said. “Let’s put it in the corner.”
They leaned down and started to lift it. The little man grunted and then dropped his end.
“Dam’,” he growled. “If this ain’t the heaviest dam’...”
“She sure is. Now what you s’pose is in this thing to make it weigh like this?”
The small man wiped the perspiration from his brow. He sat down on the trunk for a minute and then looked up.
“One way to find out,” he said. “Han’ me that bar an’ I’ll pry her open.”
Less than one minute later they burst through the cellar door at the top of the stairway and went running across the kitchen. When they reached the open air both began screaming.
It didn’t take long. It seemed as though there were hundreds of people there in less than five minutes. Somewhere, in a house down the street, a woman, seeing the rush of people and having heard those awful yells, had the sense to call the police. She thought it might be some sort of riot.
The men were hardly coherent, but the first ones to arrive realized through the terrified shrieks that down there in the basement they had come across a dead body. Oddly enough, no one went into the house — they just stood and waited for the law to arrive.
The first cop on the scene went downstairs and came back in a hurry. He closed the door behind him and then sent a brother officer to the telephone. Within minutes, Detective Superintendent J. A. McKibben, accompanied by Homicide Detectives D. L. Taylor and J. M. Austin, were pushing their way into the house and down the rickety basement steps.
The dim light of the naked electric bulb hanging from a slender cord in the center of the basement was supplemented by the powerful police flashlights as they bent over the trunk. The little Negro had thrown the lid back and had pulled the gray worsted woman’s coat from the ghastly burden which had made the trunk so heavy. Brown hair matted and stained a mottled red covered her disintegrated face. A frayed rope had been tied about it to pull the slender body into a gruesome huddle as it lay there in the trunk. The nauseating odor which rose from the decayed corpse sent the officers reeling back.
As hundreds converged outside the house of death, and reinforced police fought to keep back the ever-increasing crowd, a trackless trolley car slowly made its way down Stewart Street and passed the house. The windows on the left side were crowded with the morbidly curious, attracted by the mob and the sight of a dozen squad cars and an ambulance. A heavy, package-burdened female turned to the slender, elderly woman at her side.