Those Bones Are Not My Child (56 page)

“This has got to be the wettest ever,” the secretary groaned as they both went out.

“Yeah, it’s a mess,” Zala said, catching the woman’s eye and hoping for a more substantive těte-à-těte. But the woman paused in the doorway only long enough to pull up her collar and hug the mail tight before she hurried out into the rain.

On Pryor Street, police vans were unloading their cargo in front of the courthouse. Riders in a tour bus craned their necks to see the handcuffed men being prodded to jump from the vans. Shackled too, the men shuffled up the steps of the courthouse between the white lamp globes; some looked up at the scales of justice and spat before going in. The women climbed down from a smaller van. Unlike the men, they were predominantly white and were not cuffed. Self-consciously, a few reached under their coats, those who had coats, to tug sweaters down over jailhouse flab. A few ran pocket combs through brittle hair.

There were three Black women. One, with greasy, tight curls from a curling iron and not combed out, ran up the stairs quickly and was the first into the building. Zala wondered what these women had done, what they’d been charged with. At the barbershop sometimes, but most often listening through the wall at home, Zala had been hearing about mothers who wound up in jail after going to court about their curfew-defying children and ringing off the metal detector, having forgotten to remove from their purses the can of mace, the scissors, the knife, or the pistol. Few could pay the fine for the curfew violation, much less the fine slapped on for bringing weapons to court. Customers in the shop were definitely talking about Atlanta. But Zala realized, after eavesdropping on the Griers one night and hearing a roomful of people putting together money to get someone on a plane to London, that the Griers were talking about the situation in England since the revival of the “sus” laws. On mere “suspicion,” Black Britons were being collared, especially the youth, most especially those who sported a reggae style, and taken to jail. After the firebombing of a West Indian teenage party in the New Cross district that left thirteen dead, twenty-seven seriously injured, the police got worse, for the community had organized to fight the authorities’ attempt to blame the deaths and the fire on the revelers and not, as the New Cross Massacre Action Committee charged, on the fascist British National Front.

“Same all over,” Zala muttered. She huddled inside her coat and walked around to the side entrance of City Hall.

The downstairs lobby smelled of wet wool and hair relaxer. The tile was sloppy, and the security guards had their hands full with tourists, workers, and customers come to pay bills at the Water Department slipping and sliding. A tour guide was pointing out the architectural features of the windows, the entranceways, the ceiling, the oak banisters and wrought-iron risers, its pattern repeated throughout the five-story walkup. And along the stair wall were numerous cracks where the stairwell had pulled away. But no one pointed that out, or the makeshift attempt to patch the splits with spackling compound.

Zala had been among those who’d heard the rumble of the staircase the day a handful of city jobs was announced and thousands of unemployed showed up. Straight out of a postwar Italian movie she’d seen once at Ashley Mall, the unemployed had stood five deep in the lobby, blocking the doors of the Water Department, and the entranceways, jamming the staircase. Shoeshine boys had fought their way in and up to the second-floor landing where Zala had been heading with her manicure kit to meet her customer.

One of the mayor’s elite corps, he’d held his camel hair coat draped over his shoulders clutched closed with one hand like a matinee idol, as though brilliantine suavity were sufficient to handle the crowd. It had taken muscle—a scarifying lot of muscle, as she recalled—to disperse “the mob,” as the media had termed them, and as Zala heard herself say once, focused only on the fact that they were interfering with her livelihood. Blue-collar, white-collar, men, women, young, old, Black, white, Latino, Asian, domestic, foreign—they’d begun to speak with one voice against the measures used to evict them from the building. Then the crack resounded, and someone screamed seeing the fissure run along the wall. Those above saw those below look up alarmed, plaster dust in their hair.

Though clammy and uncomfortable, now Zala couldn’t help grinning as she moved up the stairs, looking at the patching along the wall. Painted over at least once since then, the wall seemed to be inhabited now by a family of lumpy snakes. But had Mayor Jackson learned a lesson? She stepped aside for three people coming down the stairs with overnight bags. They could have been the last wave of the rush from Ohio, come straight from the depot, luggage and resumés in hand. Not
long ago, while speaking in Ohio, the mayor hadn’t been able to resist boasting about Atlanta, only to have Ohioans pouring into the city to pluck the last nerve of overburdened CETA workers.

On the third floor, waiting on either side of tall doors with frosted panes, were a group of Japanese men and a group of Indian women. The men stood in a semicircle, their overcoats over their arms. Some of the women were squeezing rain from the saris showing below their coats. One woman with a cherry-red spot in the middle of her forehead was looking over the shoulder of a younger woman slowly turning the pages of her passport. They looked up at Zala, then up the staircase, then back at her, their faces creased with sorrow. The doors opened and someone beckoned the women in. Zala acknowledged the men’s nods as she rounded the bend to mount the stairs to the fourth floor.

Back in the days when Delia was running her life, Zala had escorted a group of Japanese men to a business luncheon as part of her job with a tour company. The Southern gents had gotten a head start with Southern Comfort, and she’d barely had time to lead the Japanese businessmen to their seats before the foolishness started: “Hah so, Mr. Yammy Wobby, hear y’all are putting up them Benny Hanny chop shops with your own lumber and your own workers.” The Japanese men got up and walked out, sending her back in with their cards so that in the future the hiy’alls could be followed by proper names. A nervous, high-pitched, red-faced man was taking two Georgia men to task: didn’t they realize how much money them Japs were bringing into Atlanta?

A City Hall employee, steadying a stack of phone books with his chin, came down the stairs in a careful one-step. He smiled, all tuned up to talk, but when he glanced up the stairwell he continued down past Zala.

A quiver of excitement quickened her step. Before she came into earshot of the murmured conversations, she could feel a high-tension current spiraling down the stairs in her direction. Something—an announcement? was about to break. She could feel her own excitement spring out from her fingers and travel up the banister, registering with those above: newcomer coming. Voices lowered. Heads swung her way as she came into view of those on the stairs. In rain-spotted hats, water beading their scarves, people were leaning against the wall and the railing, others were seated on the steps hugging damp shopping bags. Midway, the staircase angled for a turning, and there on the wide step was a
small man with a face like an old leather glove. She felt her breath catch. He motioned her up, instructing those around to make room.

She took a zigzag course up the stairs. She sensed that some were there because, if bad news was coming, they wanted an inkling beforehand, not to hear it as Sirlena Cobb had. Some were there because they had information they didn’t trust sending over the transom, and were tired of waiting for the police to come. Others had come simply to lend support. It was as good a place to be as any, she thought, climbing. For a directive had been circulated: no one got in to see the Task Force anymore without first going through the commissioner’s press secretary. There were gatekeepers in the squad rooms as well, though wily reporters circumvented the gag order by transporting officers to restaurants in outlying counties.

Commissioner Brown wasn’t the only one cracking down. Employers said the case polarized workers, so collections were prohibited. Posters and clippings were taken down from bulletin boards. Memos went around to the effect that discussion interfered with productivity. Supermarket managers instructed their security guards to keep a close eye on customers wearing green ribbons, possibly troublemakers come into the store to provoke. Everybody was jumpy. Demonstrations kept being called. The gathering on the stairs looked like a sit-in. Zala stepped over a sodden brown bag of groceries. Many were angling their heads up to look at the rope barring entrance to the corridor where Aquarius was installed. But it wasn’t a sit-in, she knew, working her way up to the old man who kept beckoning.

Ex-sergeant B.J. Greaves had been on the radio several times in recent weeks calling for a community show of support for Detective O’Neal and Sergeant Sturgis, demoted when officials had been caught with their pants down on the Lubie Geter case. “Why should those two women take the fall just so those men can pull their nuts out of the fire?” B.J. had put her job and her pension on the line by reading from her daybook particular entries that proved that her sister officers had moved quickly and efficiently and done were what they were supposed to do, but their supervisor hadn’t, hadn’t been at his desk all day. Served with disciplinary action for unprofessional behavior, B.J. went back on the air to report that the women officers were being scapegoated and had had to hire a lawyer to get a hearing that should have been proforma.
She read off the awards and commendations the Black women officers had received over the years.

As far as Zala knew, there’d been no community show of support for the two policewomen. Nor had the demonstrations called to pressure the authorities to play the “redneck” recording on the air materialized. “How ugly could it be?” Barber Simmons had asked when his customer quoted officialdom: “The phone caller’s racial epithets were too inflammatory to air.”

“What’s he saying?” A woman with groceries yanked Zala’s hem as she attempted to reach the turn in the landing.

Zala identified the aroma drifting down the stairs as Irish Mist pipe tobacco. But she couldn’t pick out McClintock among all those crumpled coats and rain-darkened collars. She could hear part of his litany on the “information fallacy”—“We are informed about everything, it would seem, so we understand nothing in fact.” He was sharply cut off by a City Hall employee leaning over the rope and scowling. Zala heard the knocking of a pipe against the wall, saw several people on the stairs step back quickly looking down, then heard another brusque remark from the woman leaning over the barrier rope. She wore her hair in a bouncy mushroom cut, had on a pinstripe suit with the City Hall badge on the lapel, a lacy jabot at the throat. Directly in front of her was Leah, holding her miniaturized recorder near the lace. Next to Leah was Mac.

A tall, rugged-looking brother in a pea jacket and seaman’s cap had folded his arms across his chest and planted himself just so on the wide step. Zala accepted the invitation and leaned against him. On his other side the old man with the leathery face motioned that he wanted to speak to her at the first opportunity.

“She back to that again?” The woman with groceries, three steps below the turn in the landing, broke open a loaf of bread.

Zala did not bother straining to hear what the City Hall woman in the jabot was saying. She knew the tone, so knew the spiel: Aquarius, the supercomputer, on loan from TBS in Dallas, is comparable in CPUs to ten IBM 370s; Mr. Samit Ray, our computer director, reports that we can now extrapolate seventeen thousand bits of data per minute; thirteen thousand separate pieces of information have come in from psychics alone, and those can now be tabulated and cross-referenced with Aquarius in one-tenth or better the time it would take with more conventional
equipment; fifteen hundred calls can now be placed by computer in a twelve-hour period; electronic searches of similar cases can be sorted, cross-indexed, filed, stored, retrieved for patterns that blah blah blah.

“Instead of just playing the damn phone call,” the seaman said, picking at his razor bumps.

A familiar face in a peely bomber jacket braced himself against the banister, looked around at the seaman and nodded, then leaned past Zala to join the discussion the woman with groceries was having with a high-strung youth with wild hair—something about dead bodies in a hotel. Each time Zala moved to position herself to hear, the old man reached across the seaman to pluck her sleeve to stay put. The wildhaired youth moved further down the stairs to take issue with something someone below had said about the STOP committee.

“Sshhhhush.” A pregnant woman on the fourth-floor landing pointed up through the railing in the direction of Leah’s back. “She’s been asking good questions.”

Zala leaned forward to listen. There were certainly plenty of good questions to ask. And Leah asked them. Now that Medical Examiner Stivers had dropped his suit against the FBI, the GBI, and the APD for not protecting the site until his office got there, was someone going to investigate why the authorities had been in such a hurry they’d thrown the bones of two bodies in one bag and left eleven teeth and a sternum behind? Had the site been meticulously searched since then, if not for footprints and tire tracks, obliterated once the professionals tromped through the scene, then maybe for a button, or a watch spring, or a spent bullet that might have rolled away from the skeletons? And what was being done in response to the charge by the civilian search team that evidence they had unearthed and turned over to the police was not heard about since? What about the things, for example, the team had discovered in the abandoned building last month, drawn to the place by the overwhelming stench of decay? According to people in the neighborhood who continued to go out by the hundreds on searches, there’d been weapons in the building, boys’ underwear, Polaroid debris, an altar, and a Bible nailed open to the wall with a knife.

Zala thumbed through her notebook. Had she gotten the contents of the “cult” building in January mixed up with the contents of the “porn” building in summer?