Those Bones Are Not My Child (15 page)

Zala shook her head. What was it about these lady cops, so eager to pin something on husbands and fathers—or was it just Black men in general under suspicion? She found she could not make the officer back off simply by staring her down. Zala dropped her eyes.

“Sexually speaking, Marzala … ahh … This is difficult, but necessary, believe me, okay? Your husband … any offbeat tastes or habits? You know what I mean.”

“Please.” She kept her eyes down.

An ember from Greaves’s cigarette had fallen onto the stack of forms. Zala barely registered it. It was just a place to rest her eyes. “My husband in no way … my husband.” He’s perfect, she wanted to say,
once in fact had said to Paulette getting into her personal business. “Then why aren’t you together, you and your perfect man?” Paulette had asked. Zala blinked. A blistering brown was spreading on the papers.

“I meant only,” Zala said carefully, watching the brown circle widen, “that I wish my husband would get here. He’s not the kind of man who would hurt anybody. Certainly not his children. Or myself,” she added, meaning it both ways. “Or anybody.” The brown circle was now eating down into the pile.

“Of course.” Greaves settled back on the step stool, rolling her buttocks left, then right. She looked over the contents of the folder again. “There’s a pattern to children’s slayings as a rule. A distraught mother at the end of her rope, and the baby won’t stop crying. A burdened father pushed to the edge by the job, or no job, and he’s the family’s disciplinarian. A zealous guardian with a pipeline to Jesus—” She cut short a snuffled laugh. “You’d be amazed how many good Christian folk scourge the youth for Jesus. ‘Suffer the little children’ indeed.” She stared at the butt-end glow for a moment, lost in some private thought. Remembering a sad case, Zala figured, wondering how to move the woman back to the more hopeful discussion begun in the squad room when she’d dispatched several officers.

“Sometimes it’s Mama’s boyfriend,” said Greaves, “irked by what he considers unfair competition with the child for her attention. As a rule, it’s the perpetrator himself—or herself,” Greaves added pointedly—“who calls the ambulance or the police. So as I said, there are rarely more than three or four cases pending in a given year. But here lately …” She shook her head and held her cigarette close to her nose. “Out of hundreds of reports of missing children, certain ones touch a nerve.” She squinted at the filterless cigarette, then drew on it. “A pattern—” she started to say, then, following Zala’s gaze to the smoldering stack, jumped up and stomped out the fire just as a circle of tiny flames licked at the toe of her black brogans.

“Damn!” Greaves swung the door back and forth briskly, fanning the air. “Maybe we’d better sit out there,” she motioned. “My desk seems to have been vacated at last.”

The photos over Greaves’s desk seemed to have collected another layer of dust since morning. Zala sat in the swivel chair, her back to the faces, and followed Greaves’s movements about the squad room. Her feet jammed against the desk leg, Zala braced herself; her mind,
though, reeled—lesions, contusions, autopsy reports: a far cry from the discussion they’d had before heading for the closet. Despite the empty-handed gestures the officers offered the sergeant, Zala clung to hope, for before Greaves had launched into patterns of deaths, she’d remarked on Zala’s good fortune in finding her back from vacation and knowing enough to move fast. Usually it took three to four weeks before the police were satisfied that a missing child was not a temporary runaway. Then, armed with depositions from frantic parents or teachers who’d not been thinking clearly at the time of the original report, they’d pick up the trail, grown cold, colder still now that memories of witnesses were fuzzy. So, though two officers gave Greaves an empty-handed shrug, Zala counted herself lucky. A heavy-heeled male officer approached Greaves at the copy machine; they talked, mouth to ear, the man’s knees slightly bent, the shorter Greaves scribbling notes, tapping the eraser head against her teeth, nodding, scribbling some more. Then, standing alone, she nodded, arriving at some conclusion, her fingertips pressed against her temple, the pencil point recklessly close to an eye. Impatiently, she began pushing buttons on the copier.

Hundreds of reported missing children. A few touched a nerve. Greaves hadn’t called in Sturgis or O’Neal, so didn’t that mean Sonny’s case hadn’t struck that nerve? Zala turned slightly in her chair and examined the children marked M
ISSING
. There were a few empty squares on the bulletin board marked F
OUND
with names and dates on index cards. That was a good sign, hanging as it was over Greaves’s desk. People were reluctant to admit that their children had run away from home. So the session in the hot box had been a goad, that manila folder a scare, all of it a move to impress upon her the need to hold back nothing. Greaves had dropped her form on the desk midway between a file marked P
ENDING
and her purse, packed to go, slightly open; Zala could see the built-in depression where a compact automatic was stashed. Another good sign, somehow, for the form was nowhere near the scary folder of bludgeonings, undetermined death, and suspected foul play. She prayed.

“Marzala.” She’d come up quietly, catching Zala unawares. “Quickly.” She handed Zala two stapled sheets warm from the copier and motioned for her to secret them in her bag.

“I’ve got a few ideas,” Greaves said, leaning close. She made an attempt to moisten her lips; they were dry, cracked, particles of tobacco
blending with shreds of lipstick-stained skin. “The thing for you to do is get over to 350 Peachtree—that’s the special emergency investigative Task Force, Marzala. And get very pushy. Very, very pushy.”

She stood up and led Zala to the door. “And then get the best damn private detective money can buy.”

Gusts of grit blew into the window with waves of heat. Cars honked behind her. She drove down Forsyth in a blur mumbling, “Sonny, oh, Sonny.” Sweat dripped into her eyes—the eerie seductiveness of store-window mannequins lured her up onto the curb by Rich’s Department Store, their mouths parted to give her the word, the secret sealed over, enameled. She begged; they offered glazed stares. Shouts from late shoppers backing up against Rich’s window reminded her she was a driver and not a pedestrian stumbling along on the sidewalk. The car bumped down the curb and she turned widely on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, veering over to the opposite side where construction was going on. She tried to assess what she’d accomplished at the low-slung building out past Peachtree Towers.

Her visit to the Task Force had been brief. 350 Peachtree looked like a car showroom, hastily converted into a squad room, but still a car showroom. She had asked to speak to someone on the special Emergency Task Force investigating the missing and murdered children. A man in blue sent her toward a partition marked
SALES MANAGER
. It was a while before she found her way back again to the sign
EMERGENCY TASK FORCE
, on the double doors with the transom overhead that led back to the sales manager’s office. One after another referred her to Missing Persons, to Juvenile Court, to her neighborhood service center, to family counseling. One officer explained that they were reviewing only old cases at the moment, not taking information on new ones not yet referred by Homicide. She was a customer come too soon to the new store, stock not yet in, sales personnel being interviewed, Sonny an item not unpacked yet, the price sticker not licked and stuck on.

Then she had yelled, “I want to see someone in charge!”—the words echoing deep within the showroom, richocheting off the walls, the hoarseness deep within her chest, grating, friction threatening to send up sparks. Greaves had said to get pushy. For nearly a year mothers had been put off and trivialized in in-house memos as female hysterics. The
parents, organized and adamant with the newspapers, TV and radio stations, had collared city council members, who’d put a bug in the mayor’s ear. They were a group. She needed to be in a group. “Come back tomorrow.”

At 6:25, alone, Zala had gone back and knocked again on the double doors of the locked showroom, hearing footsteps go past. She banged her knuckles bloody. Then on the street she had smeared blood on the pay phone calling Delia, who said she couldn’t come down to help because her daughter Gloria had taken her car to pick up Zala’s children, but if Zala could make it down to Spring Street, Delia would drive her home, then bring the kids over later. Delia had hung up abruptly. It was late. She had work on her desk. She wasn’t paid overtime.

“Bitch—you bitch!” Zala had screamed, kicking the glass doors. “Bitch.”

A driller was sinking his bit deep into the shoulder of the humped street of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
I should have gotten on the case the minute Kofi said “Went.”
She damned herself. She’d gotten the cue and not done as she should. Her son’s trail was growing cold.

Shocks gone, nerves shot, she bounced over the resounding metal plates covering the pits in the torn-up street and sped up the ramp toward Spring, scraping a fender against the base of
Resurgens
, the dingy gray statue dividing the drive. She swung wildly in the direction of the Russell Building, oncoming cars honking and veering. She hit the brakes the minute she spied Delia moving rapidly down the wide, flat stone steps.

Zala got out and negotiated to the passenger side of the car, holding fast to the dusty fender, its sap-smeary dents a series of hand-holds. The streetlights came suddenly on, and something loud and urgent was blowing against her back. Delia’s voice.

“Gloria called. Said Nathaniel picked up the kids and tore out of the place like a madman. He’s got a pistol, Zala. What’s he going to do with a pistol?”

A pistol? A pistol seemed fine. She slumped against the car door, yanking at the handle, not sure how to get the mechanism to work, but sure that she had to get back in and strapped down tight lest she come apart.

“Oh, my God.” Delia jumped her from behind. “Please let me help you.”

Zala spun around, her head falling back against the metal. Then Delia had her about the shoulders, tugging her, trying to get her to do something, she wasn’t sure what. Delia’s face was so close Zala could see the pores under the foundation, could lean away and take in the family trademark, that particular arrangement of features: the prominent jaw, the eyes that leapt forward from under the brows, the bold nose. Not at all like her own looks—soft, receding, the eyes deep-set and secretive, the features in retreat. She should have been able to say to anyone, “My boy looks just like this,” and thrust her face forward. But he’d rejected her looks, accepted only her ginger-brown complexion; everything else was his father.

“I resent it,” she said, and wondered if that hadn’t always been true.

“Don’t fight me, Zala. Please. I’m trying to help.”

There seemed to be no way to twist free of the arms, those arms that weren’t powerful enough to really hold her together, only thick enough to annoy, interfere. She had to get into the car, through the window if necessary. But strong arms held her about the middle, constricting. It felt like the elastic band she’d worn to school that time when she’d begun to bulge with Sonny.

“Oh, Zala. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.”

Bitch, she wanted to say. The last thing she saw were the street globes, their haloes blending with the sheen of the pale blue sky.

F
or a split second the whole of the Cascade-Gordon intersection lit up like night baseball; eerily silent white flares were followed by a salvo of firecracker rockets. She waited in the barbershop doorway as he approached from the curb, moving as though each step would detonate a claymore mine.

“Leftover fireworks from the fourth?” Spence turned in the direction of the shopping plaza, his mouth bone dry.

She waited, one arm twisted up behind her at an odd angle. When he turned around again, she swept his face for news that would restore her life.

A few bars of an old sixties tune blared up from the lot across the street. “Dancing in the Street,” Martha and the Vandellas. Burnt sugar was in the air. Noisy laughter accompanied the clangy hammering of the ragtag outfit setting up a carnival in the mall’s parking lot. She could make out the tops of raw lumber stalls and booths; Kewpie dolls in pink feathers swung from crossbeams. Abruptly the tune, banned from the airwaves during the street rebellions of her childhood, stopped.

“Well?” She pulled the door shut behind her. Her arm ached. “You went down there? You saw him? There’s a plan?” He seemed afraid to move, so she walked toward him.

“Dave been around? I want to see him.”

“Is that what ya’ll talked about down at Task Force headquarters? That detective, he suspects Dave?”

“I asked you a question.” He backed up toward the limo motioning for her to follow. “He wanted to know if we’d be willing to take a lie-detector test.”