The Dying Crapshooter's Blues by David Fulmer Page A

and didn’t come home until late.
    With so much free time and unfulfilled ardor, May Ida went back to entertaining men, though she now had to be more creative about it, lest her husband find out. No more bricklayers who could work like plow horses, dull but steady, lasting for hours. She could now engage only sly and nimble men, the kind who could thrill her in the time it took to hard-boil an egg and then get away clean.
    The Captain became her unwitting accomplice. He was always grousing over the breakfast or dinner table about this rounder or that one, calling them by their full names or monikers and describing their wiles in much detail. As she sat listening to him relate the antics of these felons, May Ida felt flashes of heat in her lap. The Captain did nothing to quench the fire; he was mostly a feeble man in that respect, the complete opposite of the virile front he presented around police headquarters.
    In any case, May Ida knew what she wanted, and went about sending her Negro maid to the rough sections of the city to find the sharps and invite them around. The backyard of the house was shielded by a fence that was a riot of morning glories and honeysuckle vines and let out into a narrow alley from West Pine Street, so her paramours could come and go as if invisible, which was one of their talents, anyway. Once the sun was up and the flowers had opened, it was safe.
    The whispers started right away, and soon crazy stories about May Ida abounded. The rounders chuckled over retellings of her fountains of protest as she parroted lines from dime novels of the romantic sort and from the cards that appeared between scenes in the moving pictures.
    â€œOh, sir, I won’t do any such thing!” she’d cry. “How dare you! You are so impudent! I should have you thrashed!” All the
while the lover of the moment would be removing various articles of clothing to expose her pink, moist, trembling flesh.
    â€œOh, stop!” she would wail, as some rake descended on her like a fly diving into a honeypot. “Don’t you dare! Wait until my husband learns what you did!”
    In fact, her husband never learned what she did. If it seemed odd that a police officer of the Captain’s expertise could not discern his own wife’s deceits, it was also true that for all his cruel proficiencies, Grayton Jackson was a fool. He was so arrogant that he never bothered to learn about his betrothed’s history before the nuptials, and it never occurred to him that his wife would dare open her rosy thighs for any man she could entice, no matter how rabid her appetites. And he was
busy,
his attention diverted by the mechanics of collecting graft, the abuse of hapless “suspects,” and finding new ways to lay his lips ever more gently upon the buttocks of his superiors.
    Having suffered a drought, May Ida was eager to get caught up. The path from the back door through the morning glories and into the alleyway was worn bare by leather soles. Never the prude, she cast her eye on more than a few of her female friends and, in one case, had cast more than an eye on one of the young colored maids.
    It didn’t take long for Joe Rose to hear the rumors about May Ida, and it was just a matter of time before she heard about him, a rounder who flew south like a snowbird in the wintertime and was reputed to have a wicked way with women. She sent the maid with an invitation.
    Though Joe recognized a risky proposition, his curiosity got the best of him. He had heard the stories and had to see if any of it was true.
    But he was smarter than the others and refused to go to her house. It was too risky. Instead, he invited her to meet him at the Dixie Hotel. So if there was trouble, she would be the one explaining what she was doing in a man’s room in the middle of a January afternoon. Not that Joe would just stroll away whistling. Even if he did escape, he’d never be able to show his face in Atlanta