Those Bones Are Not My Child (17 page)

“She’s just trying to help. Under hypnosis a person can remember things. Beats taking a lie-detector test.” She felt her shoulders sag. “This is stupid,” she said. Her heart wasn’t in arguing, defending. The truth of the matter was, Mattie
was
weird. But then everybody and anybody was, if scrutinized closely. She’d learned that at least. “If having the house searched will help, and if taking a lie-detector test will get them on the case, what the hell.”

“Not just taking it, Zala, but
passing
it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She almost keeled over. It had never occurred to her that he might suspect her. How the hell could she defend herself against that? He caught her, but not before she’d banged her wrist against the limo.

“Let’s not jump in each other’s face every time we …” He exhaled loudly and opened the limo door. He threw his jacket across the back of the seat, then closed the door slowly, wondering what to do next.

“You’d let that detective say anything to you,” she snapped. “Just because he didn’t run you in that time.”

His laugh almost choked him. He remembered the race up and down Campbellton Road, searching for two vets in particular he was certain were behind the kidnapping of his firstborn, Kofi and Kenti sliding across the back of the seat at each turn. He’d gotten out waving his pistol, collaring people, till someone directed him to a lot where a child had been found the spring before. He’d found Detective Dowell there, pushing bushes aside with a stick. He looked up as if he knew straightaway what, if not who, Spence was, and very calmly informed him that he was still checking into the murder of Angel Lenair, the twelve-year-old who’d been found tied to a tree with an electric cord, her panties stuffed in her mouth.

Spence had insisted Detective Dowell test him the minute the issue was raised down at headquarters. Had slung his arm across the desk,
eager to have that out of the way so they could put their minds on what common sense and history taught them, where to look for the culprit in cases like this. But Dowell had told him that polygraphs weren’t administered there. “I can make an appointment for you, though, with the state police,” he’d said. “Appointment,” Spence had mumbled. It had seemed sensible at the time, insulting but perhaps a necessary evil to show good faith, to clear the decks before proceeding to the next logical step. It frightened him now to discover how much he’d submit to in order to barter cooperation.

Zala looked through the windshield at the stack of handbills on the front seat. Sonny’s face looked back up at her:
MISSING HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY
? She urged her tongue, plastered to the roof of her mouth, to work.

“So what do you think, Spence?”

“I think I’ve never missed anybody so much in my whole damn life, Zala. I can’t breathe.”

Spence lifted his elbows so Zala could wrap her arms around his waist. Very slowly she rested her head against his chest. He wondered whether an ice pack would help their inflamed ears. His back to the mall, her vision cut off, they had nothing to go on but the sounds of fiesta. But they could picture it: shelves of glassware, ceramic piggy banks, plush teddy bears. A parking lot of pitch-and-toss, pick a card, three for a dollar. The tick-tick of the wheel of fortune spinning against tenpenny-nail sprockets. The ding-ding of circling spaceships. The flirty bell of an ice-cream wagon.

“I’m probably holding Simmons up,” she mumbled, but made no move toward the shop to retrieve her bag or drop her smock in the bathroom hamper. She held on to Spence’s waist even as he turned to look at the fireworks.

Tracer fire. Used to mark locations. A red trajectory sizzling through the night. Spence shook his head free of ghosts and squeezed her. He wondered if anyone checked the personnel files of these fly-by-night carnival groups against police records—kidnappings, child molestation, murder, drugs, pornography, Klan affiliation. She wondered if anyone came around to examine permits, to give the bolts an extra turn, to inspect the gunk on the gears, the tape on the cables. A vendor in a moth-eaten clown suit and high-top sneakers came up from
the lot with a tray of cotton-candy cones and caramel apples. Several passengers getting off the bus followed him along the sidewalk, then down into the lot.

“Well, we’ve got a new batch of flyers anyway,” he said. She nodded against his chest but stopped abruptly. Her ears began to throb.

They’d gone through packets and packets of pictures looking for a suitable one, a photo in which Sonny wasn’t squinting, making a face, or looking sloppy and uncared for. Zala hadn’t noticed before that on most, he’d been walking away from them like a boy with something to hide. Spence had never noticed before how few there were of Sonny by himself—mostly they were group shots, the happy family crammed together, posed, no air between them. But how little usable information he’d been able to scratch together for the private detectives.

There’d been one photo that he’d removed from the pile. In it, Sonny, naked from the waist up, was staring into the camera with an expression he couldn’t name, but it made him uneasy. Not defiant, not surly, but challenging in some way, sexual. There’d been a photo she’d never seen before, a Polaroid stuck in his geography book. She’d shoved it into her pocket and not mentioned it to Spence, gotten up in the middle of the night and burned it in a coffee can she’d kept her paintbrushes in. The photo had been a three-quarter back shot taken recently. He was looking over his shoulder, angry and furtive, furtive first, his hands somewhere below the picture frame, in the area of his crotch, then angry at having been caught by the lens. The room was tiled, but it didn’t seem to be a bathroom, more like the stairwell near the boy’s gym. She’d asked Dave, not Spence, to track down the school janitor and question him. In the photo Spence selected for the flyer, Sonny’s graduation picture from elementary school, there was something of that same expression, crooked, up to something. But it came through the copying process as nothing more than a lopsided grin, an innocent preteen boy trying to hide a chipped tooth in the front of his mouth. The whole household needed to get to the dentist, she was thinking. Maybe her earaches were a symptom of an abscessed tooth.

“I’d better make an appointment,” she muttered. She felt his chin sink into her hair, his breath hot against her scalp.

“Appointment?” He jerked his head up when “Dancing in the Street” thundered over the loudspeaker, this time played at the wrong speed, the jumped-up arrangement sounding tinny and garbled.

“Yeah,” she said. The Board of Ed was now asking for dental slips during the first week of school.

“I was going to ask for an appointment,” he said cautiously, “when I thought Dowell was on assignment from Missing Persons. He’s from Homicide and not even officially with the Task Force yet.… Zala? Did you hear what I said? Homicide.”

Her moan ripped through his chest like an electric drill. He rocked her, rocked himself.

A
soup plate for a giant, the kids might have said, taxing their imaginations further to explain why, set on its rim, it didn’t roll across the green. Smooth, white, cool in the shade, the satellite dish measured perhaps six foot three, Spence caught himself thinking, his foot slipping off the rung of the bar stool. It was the concavity of the dish that attracted him initially. It was nestled on the front lawn of a company that hid its identity behind a wall of bougainvillea. The upper story of the building, its Palladian windows outspoken above the bold Doric capitols, announced that the mansion had been built to impress, overwhelm.

“What’s so fascinating about that estate?” Delia pushed her glass toward the bartender and studied her brother’s face. “It isn’t on the market, is it?”

He shook his head no. He was grasping at straws, thinking of what Judge Webber had said about the use of global telecommunications systems by securities exchange commissions, interlocking transnational conglomerates, and law-enforcement agencies. None of which applied, however, in cases of missing children unless industrial espionage was suspected.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sliding down from her stool, “that noblesse oblige is such a smirky term, Nathaniel.” He heard “Nay-thhhan-yule,” the way Sonny would say it, mocking his grandparents. “Because personally, I think it’s the obligation of the well-connected to assist the less fortunate. And the wonderful thing about the Black middle class and the rich here in Atlanta is that they do.” She straightened her skirt and headed for the ladies’ room.

She’d been speaking in a public way. Whether for the benefit of the serviceman who sat at the bar hunched over a newspaper sipping a beer,
or for the young white woman nursing a Tom Collins and slipping her shoe off and on, chafing her stockings, Spence couldn’t say. Certainly not for the bartender. He’d danced down toward the door when a majestic Black woman in African brass jewelry strode in, rubbed circles in the counter all the way up toward the cash register following behind her till she took a seat at the far end of the bar and ordered a Cuba Libre, stressing Appleton rum.

“Honey dripper,” the bartender drawled, winking at Spence.

Spence was twisting his wedding band around on his finger and looking at the silhouette figure on the ladies’ room door. He’d been sure that the purpose of Delia’s summoning him to the real-estate office was to give big-sisterly advice about Carole, the crack saleswoman Bryant and Delia were grooming for partnership. But she’d said nothing to hint she knew of their relationship, had simply ushered him into Bryant’s office and introduced him to an old friend of hers, a judge, then backed out of the room. It took Spence a while to adjust to the context, the unexpected offer of help; if not help exactly—for stocks, bonds, international banking security systems, and keyboard bandits seemed to be Judge Webber’s special interest—then an ear. When Spence laid out what had been done and not done in connection with his missing son, stressing his dissatisfaction with the seeming inaction on the authorities’ part, the white-haired man with the receding hairline had swiveled his watery eyes from Spence to the Venetian blinds and squinted till Spence played with the cord. In his overstuffed chair—a pope, a king, an Old Testament judge—Webber had proved as ill prepared for the meeting as Spence. He did ask, though, if Spence suspected chicanery in high places, involvement at the level of elected officials or government appointees. Spence had had to take a seat behind that. It was possible, he answered cautiously, to head off a lecture about libel laws. Perhaps, the judge went on to say, Spence suspected collusion between a band of child killers and some section of the government because that seemed to answer the question of why it had taken such effort on the parts of parents and lower-echelon professionals to galvanize the officials to act. That too was possible, Spence conceded, though it was no secret that Klan members and sympathizers were on the force. And that, coupled with the fact that mass murders were bad for business, might encourage a true believer at the level of file clerk to throw a monkey wrench into the case. The judge then gave a rhetoric lesson, insisting
that “serial,” not “mass,” was more apropos, assuming the number of murdered children translated as something more than “natural attrition.”

“Are we talking about human beings or rocks?” Spence had challenged. The two of them had sat in silence, the freckles on the judge’s pate darkening, the muscles in Spence’s face tightening. And in the silence, Spence heard Carole in the outer office asking for him. He hadn’t seen her since the desperate ride of the day before. He made a move to get up, thank the man cordially, and split. But the judge relaxed at that point and held forth on a number of subjects, in particular the noncomprehensive body of legislation and the whimsical procedures governing the distressful situation of lost, kidnapped, and runaway children. It was no news to Spence that the way things were set up, the authorities were better equipped at locating a stolen truck than finding a stolen child. The old man had promised to have his office send Spence a national directory of organizations that had a better rate of success with recovering lost children than the authorities.

Spence sipped irritably at his bourbon-and-water. The bartender and the serviceman were looking at him slantways and seemed to be sharing a joke at his expense. He scowled. The bartender moved off to ask the Cuba Libre sister if she was a designer of jewelry. The serviceman spread the newspaper wide, then backed it to a story he’d been reading.

“It was your getup that caught my eye,” he said, glancing apologetically at Spence’s uniform. The China-blue jacket hung oddly opened, the weight of the five brass buttons and the pistol in the pocket pulling the shoulder seam down well past Spence’s collarbone. He’d flipped the patent-leather visor up and pushed the cap far back on his head. Tapered pants and boots too: he supposed he did look ridiculous, especially with the raw band of skin over his top lip.

“There’s this guy out of Oxford, Mississippi,” the serviceman explained, tapping the newsprint. “Got dressed up like a chauffeur and picked up his two boys from private school and disappeared with them. One of them divorce cases where the guy pays through the nose and can’t see his own kids.” He looked at the two women at the bar for their views on the matter. The young white woman kicked off her shoes and wrapped her stocking feet around her stool’s lower rung. The Black woman jangled a bracelet, then fished the wedge of lime from her drink.

“Last week the owner of a trailer park outside of Lawrence, Kansas, she spots the three of them and drops a dime.” He paused to find his place in the article. “Seems the wife sicced the bloodhounds on the guy for taking off with his own kids. Probably had a price on his head or something and the trailer lady saw the Wanted poster. Doesn’t say.”

“More likely a missing-child bulletin was circulated with photos,” Spence said.

“Makes sense. So the posse arrives and corners the guy in the trailer.…” The serviceman wet a finger and thumbed through the paper for the rest of the story.