Dominion (11 page)

Clarence stared at the back of his hands on the table.

“I could see it if it was a gang leader or somebody who raped the killer’s sister or murdered his brother. Or maybe a baller or high roller who sold bad cocaine to your best friend, so it’s personal and you want to take him out in a blaze. Here, the only remote connection we can make is that your nephew’s been hanging with some Rollin’ 60s taggers and wannabes.”

“You’re saying they were after Ty?”

“No, I don’t think so. His room’s on the other side of the house, in the back. They wanted him, they’d have shot up his room. But it’s too much. Nobody would do this to get a fourteen-year-old wannabe.”

“How do you know all this about my nephew?”

“It’s my job to know. I interviewed a dozen people in the hood. Asked about your sister, your nephew, anything and everything. It’s like panning for gold. You have to go through a lot of mud and rocks, and you don’t know what’s what till you sift it out.”

Clarence stared blankly.

“Nobody pulls out that kind of weapon for a crime of passion.”

“What kind of weapon exactly?”

“Still working on that. We know from the number of shells, the distribution, and how quickly it happened it was a fully automatic rifle. The weapon caliber is common—not as common as nine millimeter, but .223 is no big clue. The penetration was exceptional; .223 doesn’t sound like an impressive caliber, but it’s very high velocity, and at close range it had a devastating effect.”

“That night, when I saw you at my sister’s?”

“Yeah?”

“You said something about using lasers. What did you mean?”

“It’s pretty new. Been using it less than two years. Called the total station. It sends out a laser beam, a light beam technically, which strikes a mirrored prism on top of a pole. In three to five seconds it measures horizontal distance, vertical height and degree of azimuth based on a compass point. Gets pretty technical.”

I can understand. I’m not stupid.

“A handheld computer, less than a pound, interfaces with the station, and it screens plots with points and lines. Then you take it back to the office and download it to a bigger computer, like our Pentium here. Draws everything to scale. Accuracy is something like three millimeters per mile.”

“What’s the point?”

“Lets you study the crime scene exactly as it was, only a day later, a week or a month. I was just looking at it again this morning.”

“Can I see it?”

“Doesn’t tell you that much, really,” Ollie said. “I don’t know if it would be good for you to see it. I mean, with your sister and all.”

“I want to see it.”

“Don’t know if I can do that,” Ollie said. “Better talk to my lieutenant.”

“She’s my sister.”

“Right. That’s why I’ve been talking with you—and because Jake Woods vouched for you. But it’s my case. Don’t forget it.”

“It’s a free country,” Clarence said. “I can nose around myself.”

“Yeah, you can. But you better not get in the way of my investigation.” Ollie caught the tension in his own voice, though he couldn’t see the red splotches on his neck.

“Tell you what, Abernathy. You let me write your columns for you, and I’ll let you take over my investigation. Deal?”

“I’m headed out to the trail.”

“Okay. Be careful. Got some raisins?”

Clarence grunted and was gone. Geneva lived in fear of him having a serious insulin reaction when he was biking. He’d had a couple, which is why she insisted he keep a sugar source in his bike pack.

Clarence got on his eighteen-speed Cannondale and headed toward the Spring-water Corridor Trail. Crossing the Mount Hood Freeway at Hillyard Road, he saw a McDonald’s bag, then a Taco Bell sauce packet, then a Ben and Jerry’s wrapper.

What’s wrong with you people? Think you’re the only ones living on this planet?

It frosted him to see what people were doing to his beloved Oregon. Dumping garbage by a roadside was once practically a capital offense in this state. You could be pardoned for armed robbery, maybe, but not for littering. Now he’d see high school kids throw their garbage out the window as if what they did just didn’t matter. Once he even pulled some over and bawled them out.

After a quick left and a quick right, he was on the Springwater Corridor Trail, in another world. It was an escape from roads, litter, noise, crime, and congestion. He felt the tension draining already. The only people he met on the trail were fellow respecters of nature and wildlife and solitude. Trees surrounded him. He picked up the speed and kicked it into high gear but could still see minutia all around him. A huge, architecturally perfect spider web, the white froth of the stream as it swallowed big rocks.

He listened to the soothing sound of the gravel, like pouring milk on a huge bowl of Rice Krispies. He heard birds sing and crickets chirp and a bossy squirrel chatter at him. He thought of what people back in the Chicago projects, people even in Portland, would give to have daily access to a place such as this. It was a better world. Something inside told him he was made for a better world, and if this wasn’t it, at least it contained hints of what he longed for.

He passed by the old brick factory just before crossing under Hogan Road. There was another squirrel. Two rabbits. A few days ago he’d seen a raccoon and a skunk. Two weeks ago, three coyotes.

The trail had been developed by removing old train tracks that connected Portland to Gresham. There were seemingly endless miles of trail hidden behind trees and invisible from streets. It afforded a chance for Clarence to work his body while resting his mind, a welcome change from the usual pattern.

He noted the waxy green of the leaves, the bulging black of the overripe blackberries, the penetrating purple of the faux paws. Colors thrived here, outside the destructive reach of human hands. What a stark contrast to the encroaching concrete jungle of the city, which like the Sahara seemed to claim more turf every day.

A low powerful growl erupted into a series of excited barks.

Ah, Hugo.

He looked at the Rottweiler he’d christened Hugo, who had the good fortune of living near the trail and challenging every rider who flew by. Clarence had gotten into the habit of bringing leftovers to make the dog’s day.

“See you in thirty minutes, Hugo.”

Twice he’d taken Dani out here this summer, and she’d loved it. “If you move out to Gresham, we’ll find you a nice place near this trail,” Clarence had promised her. Why hadn’t she listened to him? Why hadn’t she moved out here where it was safe? Why had she been so stubborn?

He pedaled toward Main Street Park. He looked carefully into the shadows on his left, down at the pond, looking for familiar faces. There they were. A mother doe and her fawn, drinking from the pond. He’d told Dani about these two, and she’d wanted to see them. He said he’d bring her out here again. It hadn’t ever worked out.

He rode by the baseball diamond at the back of the park, today empty, but where white kids played summer baseball. White kids? Why had he said that in his mind? It was open to all kids in the community, blacks as well as whites. But he’d never seen a black kid out there. Nobody’s fault. There were just so few black kids around. He winced at the fresh gang graffiti above a garbage can. Just a few years earlier there had been no gang presence in Gresham.

He came to the cemetery and zipped the windbreaker high up his neck. It was mid-September and the heat of just ten days ago was a fading memory. Why did everything feel like winter now? Many of the leaves seemed past their prime, dried out prematurely, giving up on life and ready to be blown away into oblivion.

After a few minutes of sprinting hard on the bike, he turned around and parted from the trail at Eastman, riding up across Powell. He headed to Coffee’s On, by GI Joe’s, to reward himself.

He locked up his bike to a bench. “Double caramel mocha.” Clarence popped the chocolate bean in his mouth and set the coffee on a table to cool a little, went back and used the restroom, then sat long enough to drink the mocha and scan the
Trib.
Then he was off again, cutting back across Powell and tying into the trail.

As he headed back home, he saw the old house, hidden back from the trail, billowing forth the fall’s first burn from the chimney. He’d seen the smoke from a distance, first black, then gray, then white, dissipating quickly into nothingness. Behind the ancient wrought-iron fence lurked Hugo the Rottweiler, who started to bark but, on recognizing his friend, suddenly stopped.

Clarence pulled over and unzipped his bike bag, opened up some aluminum foil, leaned over the Cyclone fence, and handed Hugo a gristled piece of steak, saved from last night’s dinner.

“If he could see us now, Spike would think I’d betrayed him,” Clarence confided in Hugo. “Of course, he had his share last night, but still, there’s no talking to Spike when he’s jealous. Hell knows no fury like a bulldog scorned.”

He talked on and on the silly way people do to dogs and babies, knowing they will love them no matter how stupid they sound.

Hugo licked his hand through the chain-link fence. Clarence felt certain the dog saw every person the same. It didn’t matter to Hugo that he was black. It neither irritated him nor impressed him. He liked that.

Clarence rode to the lonely park bench just past Hugo’s. It had become part of his ritual to pull over, kick back, and stretch out on the bench before digging in again and climbing the big hill that would take him back toward the freeway and home. After five minutes of lying there, soaking in the world of dreams and promise around him, he got back on his bike and braced himself again for the real world.

It felt strange being at the
Trib
on Saturday, but he and Jake both wanted to get an extra jump on this week’s columns, to free up time during the week. Jake had plans with Janet and Carly. Clarence had plans of his own.

He finished off his sports column—not a home run, but a triple anyway, or at least an off-the-wall double. He’d had only a few strikeouts over the years, but he remembered each of them vividly.

Clarence waited for Jake. He looked around the
Trib
, manned by a skeleton crew. He’d worked so hard for so many years to make a mark on this place. He thought about Daddy. When Clarence was a boy, Obadiah had told him, “Son, you has to work twice as hard as white folk to get half as far. I know it don’t seem fair and I reckon it ain’t, but that’s the way it is. I know you can do it. I’ll be in your corner whenever you needs me.”

“Ain’t no shame to be ignorant, boy,” his daddy’d told him. “Only shame is to stay ignorant when you don’t has to be.”

Obadiah had been raised behind the plow of his sharecropper daddy, fighting weeds and drought and the boll weevil. In the years after Negro League baseball, he’d worked a dozen jobs, some two at a time, everything from short-order cook to custodian at a small black college. Administrators had let him sit in on classes after he finished his job. He loved it. He’d discovered the school library, a temple for the mind. He loved books, checked out hundreds of them while working there.

“ol’ books, they got the most wondrous smell, they do. Most wondrous.” His eyes would sparkle, and at dinner he’d read aloud some precious fact or insight.

“Don’t let your dinner get cold, Obadiah,” Mama would say, but good as her cooking was, and it was the best, Obadiah Abernathy was always more excited to learn than to eat.

There was only one book, though, opened at every dinner.
The
book. God’s book. Obadiah would read from it, voice trembling. “These are the words of the Almighty, chillens. You don’t mess with God, you hear me now? You break his commandments, and they’ll break you.”

He wished Daddy had been given more of a chance. With his thirst for knowledge he could have been a scholar, a doctor, a teacher. He could have been anything. But when you worked fourteen hours a day to provide for your family, there wasn’t much time for the scholarly life.

Clarence remembered Daddy lining up the kids like crows on a fence: Harley, Ellis, Darrin, Marny Clarence, and Dani. More than once the lecture began, “Always pick you out a rabbit, chillens. Pick out somebody ahead of you in their schoolin’. Then try to catch ’em, and when you catch ’em, pass ’em. Better yourselves, chillens. That’s what you gotta do. Always better yourselves, you hear me?”

I heard you, Daddy.

Clarence picked up the phone and dialed. “Hi, baby. Yeah, everything’s okay. Can I speak to Daddy?” He waited.

“Well, hello, Dolly.” His father surprised him with a beautiful imitation of Louis Armstrong’s low gravely voice.

“Well, hello, Daddy.” Clarence laughed. “Just lookin’ in on you. Check your blood pressure today? Everything okay?”

“Shor nuff, Son. Why you askin’?”

“Just checking on you, that’s all. You still feel up to coming out to the park for the rally?”

“Sure do. I ain’t mulch on the flowers yet, you know.”

“I know, Daddy. I’ll see you at the rally then.”

“See you there, Son.”

Clarence hung up the phone, wiping his eyes. He went to Jake’s desk and they headed from the
Trib
to what had been billed by Norcoast’s office the “North Portland Fight Crime Rally.” Geneva would be bringing Obadiah and meeting them there.

Clarence braced himself as they turned north on Martin Luther King Boulevard. He never drove on this street without remembering the bitter opposition to changing the old Union Avenue to MLK. It bothered him that some of the people who fought against it were conservatives. One of the contradictions of his life was that among the people whose beliefs and morals were most like his and who hated political correctness and big government and encroaching liberties as he did were some who didn’t seem to ever want to concede anything good to those of his skin color.

“You remember when Martin Luther King was killed?” he asked Jake.

“Yeah, I do. I was fresh out of the army.”

“You remember exactly where you were?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“I was in eighth grade, still livin’ in Chicago at the Henry Horner projects, just before we moved to Cabrini Green. I heard about it out on the street, playing stick-ball after school. Spider Edwards came runnin’ up wide eyed and stuttering, ‘They killed Martin.’ I ran home to Mama. She was frantic—never remember her like that. Daddy came home from work early. He cried and cried. To us in the projects it was the end of the world.”