SEVENTEEN
I am a productâand not an entirely happy oneâof what we used to call the black bourgeoisie, though that term is a little out of fashion these days. Truth is, we bourgeois types are the biggest snobs on the planet. Even though I'm kind of a failed member of my clan, I still have its prejudices to some degree.
People like me look down on the folks who live in housing projects at least as muchâif not moreâthan the average white country-club Republican. All those things that you hear white people saying about the “inner city” folksâshiftless, lazy, low moral standards, and the restâyou'll hear us black bourgeoisie saying, too. We close ranks when the white folks are around, but when the doors are closed and it's just us sisters and brothers, we say it, believe me. We despise those bedraggled black folks sitting on the stoops of those awful rows of sad brick buildings, we despise them terribly. But it's a complicated thing, because we know that in despising them, there's some kind of tinge of anguish or fear, some sense of, there but for the grace of God go I.
But a white person in a down-at-the-heels trailer park or a housing projectâwell, the members of my clan have a special reserve tank of disgust and hatred for them, a nice pure thing that is unmediated by any of the complications of racial solidarity. You can't know the depth of pleasure I feel when I call somebody “white trash.” Maybe it's not right, but it's how I feel.
The white woman sitting on the stoop up in Perry Homes was short and stocky, with a drinker's flush, puffy eyes, a thin slash of mouth, and a rat's nest of hair that hadn't seen soap in a good stretch. She was holding a tall water glass with a fading picture of Minnie Mouse on the side. The woman matched the photo of Evie Marie Prowter's mother in the file, a mug shot taken from a solicitation arrest.
We pulled over to the curb, parked. Seeing the unmarked car, the white woman stood and started walking away.
“Hey, Tanya!” I said. “Where you going, girl?”
“Yo, I ain't did nothing,” she said sullenly. She was white, but she talked black. I suppose being the only white person in a two-mile radius, it came naturally to her, but it sounded laughable to me coming out of those skinny lips.
“We're here to talk about your girl, Tanya,” Lt. Gooch said.
“What that li'l ho Denise done now?”
Lt. Gooch shook his head. “Not, Denise. I'm talking about Evie Marie.”
The woman on the stoop looked up at us for a moment with no particular expression. But her skin had gone another shade paler. “Who the
hell
y'all people is?”
“My name's Detective Deakes,” I said. “Cold Case Unit. We're reopening her case.”
Elise Prowter looked around vacantly, then took a drink from her Minnie Mouse jelly glass. “How come?” she said finally.
“We got new information,” Lt. Gooch said.
She looked at us for a moment. “What new information?”
Gooch shook his head. “I can't tell you about that.”
“Well.” She gazed stoically off into the distance. “What you want, then?”
“Just a couple questions. I wanted to go over what happened when she disappeared. In the statement you gave to the detective at the time, you indicated that your brother Lonnie Driggers had come to visit that afternoon, that he was playing with your daughter.”
“He ain't my brother.”
“I thought he was.”
“Maybe he was. But I don't claim him no more. He killed my baby. I done fell apart after that. Look what he done to me.” She waved her Minnie Mouse glass in a wide arc that took in the whole of the bleak Perry Homes landscape, then looked at me with hard, challenging eyes. Her eyes, I noticed, were the same color as Lt. Gooch's. “I come all the way down to nigger level.”
“You want to catch a slap upside the head, sister?” I said.
Gooch looked at me coldly, but I looked right back. I wasn't having any of that. Finally he turned back to Tanya Prowter. “What you're saying, you think Lonnie Driggers kidnapped your daughter and killed her.”
“He done took her down to that fishing shack of his and kilt her.”
“You have any proof?”
She glared at Lt. Gooch. “Proof? I got all the proof I need right here.” She put her hands over her heart.
Gooch kept looking at her.
“What?” she said. “How come y'all don't believe me? Y'all just like that other sumbitch.”
“Who you talking about?”
“That other
po
-lices.”
“What other policeman?”
“The one that done the investigation. Back when she done got kilt.”
I remembered the name from the file. “Roy Bevis. Lt. Roy Bevis.”
Tanya Prowter shrugged listlessly.
I held my composure this time. “Are you saying that Lt. Bevis didn't think your brother was guilty of the crime?”
“Hocus-pocus,” she said vaguely.
“What's that mean?” I said.
Lt. Gooch held up a hand to me, waving me off impatiently. “Let me ask you this. Let's say it was your brother done it. But let's also s'pose, just for the sake of argument, that there was somebody else who helped him.”
Tanya Prowter took a delicate, prim sip from her tall water glass. As she set it down on the cracked concrete I noticed from the way the “water” clung to the sides of the glass that it wasn't water at all. It was straight vodka, a good solid half pint of it in there. “What you mean, help?”
“Anybody hanging around? Anybody that seemed suspicious? Any adult males in the vicinity who showed an unnatural interest in her?”
Tanya Prowter looked disgusted. “You people.”
Gooch just stood over her. She started to take another sip of her vodka, but the lieutenant's leg flashed out so fast you almost couldn't see it, catching the glass with the toe of his cowboy boot and kicking Minnie Mouse twenty feet in the air. Minnie shattered against the wall.
“You showing disrespect to me,” Gooch said. “You showing disrespect to my partner. Being you being a broken-down welfare drunk, where you claim the right to do that?”
“Shit, man,” Tanya Prowter, waving sadly at the wet stain on the wall. “That's the last I had.”
Gooch stared at her.
After a while she said, “That other cop ast the same thing, if there was somebody hanging around. I tole him there was this dude use to come around. Claimed he was Lonnie's parole officer, be looking for Lonnie, you know what I'm saying. Only later when I ax Lonnie about him, Lonnie tole me he ain't know who he was.”
“And this parole officer. He seemed suspicious to you somehow?”
“He come around three, four times, say he Lonnie's parole officer, say he looking for Lonnie. Then he joke around with me, come in the house, make hisself at home. Then he horse around with Evie Marie.”
“And he did this more than once.”
“That's what I'm saying. He seem nice enough, though.” She hesitated. “He brang me a bottle of Tanqueray once.”
“That sound like something a parole officer would do? Bring somebody a bottle of top-shelf gin?”
She looked away, didn't answer.
“The day Evie Marie disappeared. This here parole officer fellow, did he come to your home?”
Again, there was no answer.
“Was that the day he brought you the Tanqueray? Hm? Did he give you the Tanqueray and then maybe go out in the yard, horse around with your little girl while you was drinking up that bottle?”
“It was Lonnie,” she said listlessly.
“You got drunk and fell asleep, didn't you? While that man was playing with your girl.”
Evie Marie Prowter's mother started shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, a slow insistent motion.
“What did he look like, Ms. Prowter? What did the man look like?”
She shrugged. “Normal looking. Blond hair.”
“A white man,” I said.
“Yeah. White dude.”
“You remember his name?”
“Nah. But I know he parole officer. He done show me his badge.”
“Anything else about him? What kind of car did he drive?”
“How the hell I'ma remember a thing like that?
Ten
years later. Shit.”
Â
Â
When we got back in the car, Lt. Gooch said, “Check the file. You got the sheet on Tanya's brother in there?”
I riffled through, found a police file on Lonnie Driggers. “Yeah.”
“Was he on parole in 1992?”
I studied the sheet. “Nope,” I said finally. “1988, went in for three on possession of burglary tools, some other things. Served nineteen months. Finished his parole in '91. After that he was clean.” I felt the tingling between my shoulder blades again. “Whoever was hanging around with that little girl, he was no parole officer.”
“Mysterious stranger strikes again,” Gooch said.
“What next?”
“Victim One,” Gooch said. “Gerald Bokus, age 7. Disappeared from a battered women's shelter down in Columbus, November 12, 1987.”
Lt. Gooch scooped up the files, dropped them on my lap. “You read. I'll drive.”
EIGHTEEN
Columbus is the biggest town in the southwestern part of the Georgia, which is not saying much. Southwest Georgia is five times the size of the state of Massachusetts and has a population smaller than, say, Birmingham. The only thing of note anywhere near Columbus is Fort Benning, the huge Army base.
Lt. Gooch had already set up an appointment with the detective who had worked the case. He was a white man, close to retirement, who looked like he'd spent most of his law-enforcement career eating chicken-fried steak at the café across the street from the police station. His short-sleeved mint-green polyester shirt bulged and creased as it strained to contain the rolls and ridges of fat inside it. His brown clip-on tie was held down with a tie tack shaped like one of those fish that people put on the backs of their cars to advertise what good Christians they are. The air conditioning was working overtime against the July heat, but the underarms of his shirt were dark with sweat.
“Nert Clemmiger,” he said, sticking out his hand to Lt. Gooch.
“Nert?” I said.
“Short for Albert,” he said, grinning and shaking my hand. I was tempted to ask for a more point-to-point explanation of how you got from Albert to Nert, but figured that I might save that conversational gambit for a rainy day.
Nert Clemmiger took us back to an interview room and sat us down.
“Atlanta!” he said enthusiastically. “The big city! Yessir!”
Lt. Gooch didn't say a word in response to this, but the expression on his face didn't seem complimentary, so I jumped in, and me and Nert had a fulsome conversation about the weather and the pros and cons of big city law-enforcement careers and the various kinds of pastries that were available within walking distance of the police station here in Columbus and what impact each pastry had had on the various diets that Nert had gone on and how each of the various diets had ultimately and miserably failed and what a fine church Nert had been affiliated with for the past twenty-one years and how there were
several
colored families who attended there and how justâwhat was it? last month? no the month beforeâthe church had brought in a colored gentleman, a preacher from somewhere up in Tennessee, who had preached probably the most informative sermon on the subject of speaking in tongues that Nert had ever heard in his life.
By this point Lt. Gooch was lookingâin his singularly expressionless wayâlike he was about ready to strangle Detective Nert Clemmiger.
“Lt. Gooch?” I said. “With the schedule we're on, you maybe want to fill Detective Clemmiger in on what we're doing here.”
“Nert! Please, call me Nert! By all means.”
“Nert.” Lt. Gooch stroked his jaw. “Delicate thing. We're working a case up in Atlanta. Fellow by the name of Elliot Strickland.” This was the first I'd ever heard of Elliot Strickland. “We got us a, ah, I wouldn't even call him a suspect. Potential suspect. We're evaluating that. No criminal record. But we did learn he was a witness or possibly even a suspect in a murder case down here back in 1987. What was the name of that case, Sergeant Deakes?”
“I've got it right here,” I said, going along with his pretense. I flipped open my notebook. “Bokus. Gerald Bokus.”
Nert thought about it for a minute. “Aw, yeah. What a goshawful heartbreaker. Them child cases are the worst ones, don't y'all agree?” He then proceeded to tell us in some detail about every child murder he'd ever investigated.
“Uh-huh.” Lt. Gooch finally managed to interrupt his monologue. “But here's who we're looking at. Fellow by the name of Doyle Ray Anderson. Says here he was employed as a painter back in 1987. Came around the place where Gerald was living.”
Nert Clemmiger frowned. “Anderson? Don't ring a bell.”
Lt. Gooch pulled the file out of his Samsonite briefcase, opened it to the one-paragraph witness statement signed by Nert Clemmiger himself. Nert studied it for a moment. Finally he looked up. “Mind my asking how y'all got your hands on this here file?”
Lt. Gooch looked at me blankly. “The DA, wasn't it?”
“Ah . . . yes,” I said. “I think that's right. Fulton County DA's office gave it to us.”
“Where'd they get it?”
Lt. Gooch shrugged vaguely. “I ast the gal over there to punch in this boy Anderson, this here's what come up. The case, I mean. Not the file.”
“Yeah, but how'd this get in your computer? This ain't even on
our
computer.”
The lieutenant and I both shrugged vaguely. “Maybe they borrowed it or something,” I said. “DA-to-DA type thing.”
“One thing I can tell you,” Lt. Gooch said. “I don't know a goddamn thing about computers.”
Nert's eyes narrowed, slightly disapproving now that Lt. Gooch was taking the Lord's name in vain. But then he looked down at the file. “Tell you the truth, I don't hardly remember this fellow.” He kept staring. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I remember. The boy's mother said this Anderson fellow had come around, played with the boy a couple times. Something about him she didn't like. So I talked to him.”
“But nothing came of it?”
“That woman, I don't mean to speak ill of her. But she was a no-count type of individual. I felt pretty sure she was covering for the boyfriend. There was a history of physical abuse, whatnot. Nothing serious, but the boyfriend had been took down to the station a few times. You book him in, give him a little talking-to, then she comes and drops the charges, calls you all kind of nasty names for arresting her man. You know how that is.” He shook his head sadly. “But I never could make a case against him. Never had the evidence.”
“You say a
history of abuse
?” I said. “You're not talking sexual abuse, are you?”
“Nah, nah, nothing like that. He slapped her around, is all.”
“So this guy Doyle Ray Anderson . . .” I said.
Nert glanced at the witness report again. “Looks like he had him an alibi.”
“Anything strike you about him? Anything in particular?”
“Not really. My recollection he was a friendly type fellow. Likable. Real dry wit, if you know what I mean. Liked to joke around a little.”
“You track down his employment, alibi, that type thing?” the lieutenant asked.
“I honestly couldn't tell you.” Nert looked at the report again. “He worked for a painting contractor.”
“How did you know that?”
“Says right here: âSubject drove white Ford van with Allgood Painting painted on the side.' ”
“And that was good enough for you?” the lieutenant said.
“Like I say, I got on pretty good with him. He didn't seem . . .” Nert squinted thoughtfully. “Yeah, now I think about it, he went out of his way to help. Had some law-enforcement experience, as I recall, and so he was good with dates, times, things like that. Made it easy on you.”
“You're saying he was a cop? Before going into house painting?”
Nert shrugged. “Something along those lines.”
“That's kind of coming down in the world, isn't it?” I said. “Cop to house painter?”
Nert looked at me curiously. “I don't know how much y'all get paid up in Atlanta. I guess y'all got the union and everything. But most small-town copsânot here in Columbus maybe, but out in them tiny little burgs?âpainting houses is a whale of a lot more lucrative than law-enforcement work. I got a buddy, he's chief of police over in Rayburn, the city council wants him to hire another policeman, they give him a budget of $14,400. You believe that? Fourteen-four! This economy, you can't hire a retard with a criminal record for fourteen-four. But that's how it is. These dadgum politicians, boy, they want police protection, but they don't have the stuffing to ask the voters for the funding to pay for it. Why I knew this fellow over in Alabama whoâ”
Lt. Gooch spoke up for the first time in several minutes, cutting off what had the makings of another fifteen-minute monologue. “So why'd you think he had been a cop, Nert? This Doyle Ray Anderson.”
“Honestly? I can't remember. Guess he just seemed familiar with procedure, terminology. Like I say, it was just an impression.” Nert grinned. “But you run into them types from time to time, people that watch all the shows on TV.
Cops
,
America's Most Wanted
,
CSI
, read all them books about crime, whatnot? It's just a hobby. Sometimes those folks know about as much as your average street cop, procedure-wise, information-wise, whatnot. He could of been one of them.”
“You never asked, though.”
Nert apparently didn't like the lieutenant's tone. “Hoss, I done told you. It was twelve years ago.”
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As we drove away, I said, “Who's Elliot Strickland?”
There was a long pause. “What?”
“Elliot Strickland. You told Nert back there that we were working the Elliot Strickland case.”
“I made that up.”
“Uh-huh.” It hadn't taken us long to get outside of Columbus and into the country. “It's just it had the sound of a real name.”
“He's my father-in-law.”
“I didn't know you were married.”
“I'm not.”
I waited for a while in the distant hope that this cloudburst of self-revelation might rain a little more. But it didn't.
“So,” I said finally. “There's no Elliot Strickland case that you haven't bothered to tell me about?”
“Nope.”
“What did we learn back there?”
“Why I left the little dipshit town I'se born in and never went back.” The tires hummed beneath us. We were driving through a long, monotonous stretch of dark pine forest unrelieved by houses or fields or much of anything. After a few miles, Lt. Gooch added. “Jesus God, I thought that fat little sumbitch'd
never
shut up.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to loosen him up.”
This brought no response.
“Was it okay? That I asked most of the questions? I don't mean to be, you know, horning in on your territory or whatever. I just thought I'd developed some rappport.”
Lt. Gooch squinted at the road. “You did fine.”
“Careful now,” I said. “You're gonna spoil me in a minute.”
Lt. Gooch rolled down the window, spit some tobacco juice into the hot wind.