Those Bones Are Not My Child (57 page)

“Yes,” she said aloud, for there it was on the page. Polaroid backings and boys’ underwear were found in the building near Lakewood, the building across from the park where the Terrell boy had been sighted. The altar and Bible, then, were from the building the civilian search team had found. But hadn’t there also been photographic evidence and clothing?

She felt a warm hand on her leg. The woman eating bread was asking her to move a little to the side.

“We can’t hear down here,” someone yelled up from the bottom of the steps.

Whatever Leah had asked and the woman with the ID badge was attempting to answer, Mac interrupted.

“It’s natural,” he said, “that is to say, human,” turning to project his voice down to the fourth landing. “We derive a certain pleasure from making connections. And so we often force causal connections just for the pleasure of the pattern. Or we see parallels that make no sense beyond the superficial level.” So we often mistake coincidence for meaning.”

“What’s the deal? What’s the deal, man?” The youth with the curly mop straddled the banister and attempted to shimmy up it to resume his conversation with the woman eating bread.

“Patterns.” The pear-shaped man in the bomber jacket coughed, then leaned over to answer the impatient youth. “They’re talking about patterns.”

“Well, I could talk about some patterns myself.” The woman set the loaf aside and stopped chewing.

Everybody could relate to that. Had anyone noticed that when the papers write about the mothers cracking on the investigation, they always lay the story alongside one about parental neglect and abuse? Looks funny, don’t it? Anybody from the community say “Klan” or “cult,” they come back with “gentle killer” and “Black man.” Even when the authorities themselves say “porn” they don’t mean porn
ring
, notice that? They want it to be a lone killer, nobody with any group associations. If the community says “porn ring,” then it’s “Street kids are little whores.” Well, how about when the papers cover the mothers traveling around the country? Next day the word is out that they’ve got to take the lie-detector test again.

“But where there’s fire, there’s smoke,” someone said below, in response
to what no one could be sure with so many conversations going. The youth slid down the banister to the person who’d said it, and those on the landing near Zala turned all the way around to listen.

“That’s shit,” the boy said.

Zala caught the phrase “for instance” before the youth cut the speaker off again.

“How you gonna say something like that about the mothers, man? What your mother ever done to you? It’s about ass, man. I’m telling you. You want some white ass? Well, you get one helluva situation on your hand, like in Detroit. Remember Detroit? Well, you stupid anyway, you don’t remember the Algiers Hotel in Detroit.”

“Who the hell is he yelling at?” The man in the bomber jacket was leaning far over the banister, watching the mop of hair disappear down the stairs, people moving aside, not sure whether to read the boy’s intensity as passion, madness, or danger.

Zala could hear him thudding his shoulders against the wall on the floor below where those who’d been sitting were now up stretching their legs, some arguing Klan, others arguing cult.

“Now what is the Klan but a cult,” the seaman said quietly and scratched his neck.

Zala pressed her hand against the memory churning in her stomach and muttered, “Cult, porn, Klan.”

“Now you got it,” the seaman said, without taking his eyes off the City Hall woman in the jabot. From the way he was slitting his eyes and scratching, Zala was sure he was arriving at a definite conclusion about the woman.

“What’s the sister talking about now?” the bread eater wanted to know.

The official behind the rope was talking about profiles in response to a question Leah had raised. The killer profile that the FBI Behavioral Science unit in Langley, Virginia, had produced; the killer and victim profiles that Dr. Lloyd Bacchus, the brother there in Atlanta, a forensic psychiatrist, had composed; the victim profiles the Fulton County Health Commission together with four epidemiologists from the CDC had fashioned. The information relayed down the stairs, her question answered, the woman closed her bread package with the plastic twist and gathered up her bags.

The old man leaned across the seaman. “What did she say?” he asked Zala.

The man in the bomber jacket cleared his throat. “She said the turning point came with the fibers.”

Zala grabbed the banister and was trying to walk up along the railing to get close enough to ask a few questions of her own. Had the laundry attendant been arrested finally? She was helped up by those on the stairs. But she couldn’t get the City Hall woman’s attention.

“… dog hairs from Siberian husky or an Alaskan malamute, and of course carpet fibers and clothing fibers …”

“And rope fibers,” a woman in a fur coat said, hooking her arm around the banister knob. “And don’t forget Caucasian hairs. ’Cause my nephew works in the lab. That’s right. Hairs from some white person’s head.”

“What about the laundry attendant?” Zala went up another few steps to speak. “A suspect that was identified back in August worked in a laundry.” She turned to people around her. “Fibers.” They nodded.

“There were eyewitnesses.”

“When was that?”

“Last summer. In August.”

“Was it in the paper?”

“Not much. But I was in the squad room every day back then.”

“Squad room? How come?”

The old man motioned for Zala to say more. When she turned, Leah was looking at her, pushing her glasses flat against her face. She held up one finger in the air and grimaced. Zala had seen that gesture, that expression, knew the tone that went with it, “I’ll handle this,” and the labels—“novices,” “political virgin.”

“Ask her to discuss the Laundromat suspect in connection with the fiber evidence, Leah,” Zala called out.

Leah turned to the woman in the jabot, who leaned forward. But when she resumed talking, it was the spiel again.

“In hard cash $100,000, an additional $46,000 in pledges, an anticipated, hmmm, who knows, from the Sammy Davis-Frank Sinatra benefit …”

“Speak up.” The old man was gesturing for Zala to continue up the steps. He turned to those around him. “That’s the gal who broke up all
the chitchat at Greater Fairhill Baptist.” He motioned several people on the steps below to encourage Zala.

Thinking she was being addressed, the City Hall woman began to speak more loudly. “Two thousand traffic citations have been issued since the road blocks were instituted. I don’t have figures on the overtime hours that represents. Suffice it to say that the investigation is costly. But the city council is considering stiffer penalties for curfew violations. A five hundred dollar fine or a year in jail for the parents.”

She’d gone too far. The old man was still waving Zala on with one arm, and with the other he was trying to quiet the crowd. Zala stayed put. It was pointless. The City Hall woman was not there to take notes. In any case, only data tailored to fit the profiles, patterns, and theories the Task Force was already committed to were considered. Any printout from Aquarius would bear as much resemblance to the actual situation as freshman plot synopses did to Greek tragedies.

The seaman, no longer squinting at the woman behind the rope, grunted. “Think she gets a bonus for baby-sitting the crowds?” He lifted his chin toward the fifth-floor landing, where the woman was still spieling out figures.

A tourist attraction, Zala was thinking. Aquarius was a tourist attraction for home folks. Groups of supplicants came daily to consult the oracle. And the old man from Greater Fairhill was still insisting that she take part in the spectacle.

Someone below was shouting up the stairwell that he wanted his tax dollars accounted for. Black supercops were flown in, mentioned briefly in the papers, then flown out again, citizens none the wiser about what they made of things than a flea in his dog’s collar. Scotland Yard came and went. ABC, NBC, CBS, 20/20, 60
Minutes
, the BBC, German television crews, mystery writers, psychics, detectives who’d made their reputations from the Onion Field Case, the Zodiac Murders, The L.A. Freeway Killings. “We get the tab but don’t get the facts.”

“Tell them what you know,” the old man pleaded with Zala.

“You know something about them fibers she was talking about?” The fur-coated woman with the lab-technician nephew said it loudly, in challenge.

Attention turned to Zala. But what did they want? Why did people keep demanding to hear what they already thought, muttered about, suspected, knew, but kept resisting? She could begin by telling
them how a single phone call inside the precinct house had sprung the Laundromat suspect fingered by five separate eyewitnesses. Or she might begin with the letter B.J. had read on the tape. Maybe the writer was just some crazy white woman who wanted her father locked up, but it did seem relevant.

A victim of father rape, she’d been handed over to the sheriff and other Klan friends of the family to fuck. At twelve, she’d become a regular in home-movie orgies. The minister’s wife, the sheriff’s wife—or was it the mother?—someone put her in a home for wayward girls and then an asylum because she wouldn’t shut up about the death of her brother. He, too, had been raped by the father, then beaten to death, according to the letter writer, who called herself not a victim, but a survivor, though her childhood, fingered and mauled, was still being shown on the screen, her terror still entertainment for rent.

Zala heard herself speaking too loudly, rushing her words, though she did not hear what she was saying. She could feel a wall going up, not unlike her own in summer, when she’d been listening to the STOP mothers and trying to separate herself from their calamity. She tried to slow down. She went over the witnesses—the mortician’s assistant, the Bowen Homes tenants, the father who’d seen the boiler door spirited away and was visited later and urged to be mute lest all hell break loose.

“Take your time, daughter,” the old Fairhill Church man whispered.

She tried to choose her words carefully, to find polite, calm, tax-free words that wouldn’t make them back off from the horror with “Oh, how awful, what’s anybody doing about it?” What did they need said? They knew, and they knew they knew, that the official version was off the wall, shot through with so many contradictions even a fool could figure it out. And when the whole report was neatly done up like a roast, would they cluck, tsk-tsk, give her a hug and a pat and a pill, or would they storm the computer center and take over the investigation?

“My God,” the woman in the lacy jabot said, holding her face in her hands.

“That poor woman,” drifted up from below as Zala made her way down.

“It’s not how little we know that hurts so,” the old man was saying, “but that so much of what we know ain’t so.”

“I know one thing,” the seaman said, “one way or the other, this city’s gonna explode.”

Zala stood by the cyclone fence where three police horses were tethered, waiting for Leah and Mac to come out. Maybe they’d already left by another exit. Everyone else who’d visited the oracle had come out, chewing over this riddle or that. There had been no move to take over the computer room. There would be no protest promenade around Central City Park, no storming of the doors at the car showroom. No action to bring the city to a halt. Resisting what they knew and what knowing obliged them to do, the people were willing to buy official lies a little while longer. Lest all hell break loose.

She continued to wait, the hem of her coat heavy with rain. She eyed a chrysalis slung in the crook of a branch like a bag of garbage, wondered vaguely what was inside the parchmentlike pouch—wasps? hornets? Maybe Austin had served papers on Leah and she was too embarrassed to face her. But maybe there’d been no action at all, Austin’s reassurances a hoax like everything else. Zala thought for a moment that she detected a movement in the chrysalis and wished the larvae well, thinking of Widow Man, not as he was now, cranky and dying, but as he’d been in the very beginning when he took time to tell them things.

He’d called them down from the ladder one day when, washing the windows, they’d discovered a hornet’s nest. Closing up the house with them all inside, he’d sent the twins to fetch the kerosene. He wrapped an old dish towel around the broom and began. Once-upon-a-time not his style, he went directly to the heart of the matter. There was the bee, who flat-out stung you, then went on about its business. Unlike a wasp, that chased you indoors with welts, then buzzed menacingly at the window. Then there was the hornet that would call out its whole army and navy to chase your ass to the ends of the earth, hellbent on your total destruction. Outside, decked out in long sleeves, heavy pants, a mesh helmet cut from an old window screen, and his flaming lance, Widow Man went up the ladder to do battle, leaving them indoors with great respect for those singleminded, non-negotiating, taking-no-prisoners winged maniacs that put their whole life agenda aside to kill you for disturbing their young.

The lights went out in the lobby of City Hall. The guard locked the front doors and went away. The fifth floor dimmed. Whatever else Aquarius had accomplished, its work as distraction was done for the day.

Leaning far forward in his chair, chest pressed against the edge of the table, Claude was rapping on the wood underneath. Ice cubes tinkled in the plastic tumblers.

“What?” Spence didn’t know why he was whispering. The hotel restaurant was half-empty.

“The dark ages, jim.” It was a secret message being tapped through a prison wall.

Spence began making room on the table. He moved the pepper mill, the red candle jar, then the tumblers to one side. Familiar now with his dinner companion’s sudden breaks and startups, Spence figured Claude would be laying the photos out on the table again like cards. Seeing them lined up in rows seemed to help him think.

Claude was finger-spelling against the bread basket. Then he gathered crumbs in piles. His nose bead gleamed in the red candlelight.