Those Bones Are Not My Child (65 page)

“Teo come up with anything new, Zala?”

“If we could coordinate information from every source in the city and have one weekend set aside for a think tank … then put all the data into Aquarius …”

“Maybe,” Mason said when Zala trailed off. “But so many sources didn’t pan out.” He lowered his voice. “The parents, for instance. They’re not telling all they know. I don’t mean you, I mean … They’re not telling half of what they know, is my feeling.”

“Understandable,” Dave said.

“I know. Even the most innocent thing can make you look real bad when there’s trouble,” Alice Moore said.

“We can line up two for you to see,” one of the Grady nurses offered, beckoning Alice Moore back to the table.

“What’d you have for breakfast, Dave? That’s an innocent enough question. Now watch how weird you sound,” Mason smiled.

Dave pushed his lower lip out trying to remember. “Swiss cheese on raisin bread and a box of frozen strawberries.… And a couple of pieces of chicken from last night’s bucket,” he added.

“Well, I had Jell-O and ice cubes and leftover pizza,” Mason said.

“Ice cubes?” someone asked.

“Makes it jell faster.”

“Uh-hunh.”

“Is that too out?” Mason asked the boys, “We might have thought so when we were kids. Before we started hanging out in each other’s households. But you figure it out after a while, don’t you? You find out that the ways of your household ain’t the ways of the world, just the ways of your household.

“And what’d you have for breakfast?” Mason was asking the shy boy, but the leader spoke up.

“Didn’t have breakfast today. Sometimes … spaghetti. He likes spaghetti with nothing on it.”

“Yeah,” the dancer piped up. “He stands in front of the ’frigerator and eats it out the pot while he talks to his girl on the phone.”

“That’s all right, ain’t it?”

“Guess so.”

“I mean, if you’d said bacon, eggs, toast, and orange juice, I’d’ve tagged you for a maniac. It’s them ‘out’ people who do them normal-type things—meals the same time every day, bed by dark, so forth and so on. Gives their lives the feel of normality.

“But they be out.”

“Exactly.”

“Jell-O and ice cubes, hunh?”

“Not all right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What did you eat if not spaghetti?” the leader asked the shy boy, suspicious.

“Uhhhmm …”

“Whatever,” Mason said, “And it’s all right, right? But what would it sound like if your girlfriend was found murdered and as they’re dragging
you into the station house the reporter asks you, ‘Say, what’d you have for breakfast this morning?’

“ ‘Uhh, a Moon Pie and a bottle of Yoo-Hoo.’ ”

“ ‘Lock him up—lock his ass up with no phone privileges!’ You see what I mean?” Mason turned to Zala, but she had sat down and was staring into the cold grate of the potbelly stove.

“We gave up trying to get anything out of the parents,” Mason said, turning back to Dave. They walked out the side door, the boys trailing behind them.

“Braxton in there—” Dave indicated one of the fathers and moved around toward the front of the carriage house to get away from Mac’s blue tobacco cloud—“he took three days before he reported his boy missing. Never did go to the police. His social worker did that.”

“Where was the mother?”

“Visiting her folks down in Alabama. Matter of fact, they’re the ones who buried Zalas stepfather. They run an undertaking business.”

“Braxton was afraid to go to the police because he has a record?”

“I don’t think so. He works two or three jobs and maybe didn’t claim two so he could get food stamps. Braxton bent over backward to get his wife to take him back,” Dave said, leaning on the words. “He had the social worker in there slugging away on his behalf. ‘Kid needs a role model,’ ‘A broken home is a drag,’ ‘Life ain’t shit without a man in the house.’ ”

“All that good stuff. Social workers never met my old man. But that’s another story,” Mason said, scraping grass off his shoe.

“Braxton couldn’t bring himself to face it, that he blew and the boy was gone. Three days he spent looking for the kid. Would not call the police.”

“Maybe when he and his ole lady separated, she slapped a peace warrant on him.”

“Maybe. But it’s like you said, Mason, it doesn’t have to be anything big to make you clam up.”

The two men wandered over toward the cliffside and watched the movers on the private road below arrange things in the van.

“The police weren’t much of a source either.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know who Zala was thinking about pulling together for a think tank.”

“The police don’t do nothing,” one of Dave’s boys said, coming up behind them. “We had a break-in and you know what they told us?”

“Told you to get a gun, but they told you that off the record.”

“Naw, Mr. Morris. They said, ‘You’ll let us know if the TV turns up.’ We’ll let
them
know. That’s where the police at.” The boy turned to his buddies for five, but they were talking with Mr. Logan, whose son had run off with a cult, while others had wandered out to get some sun or to have a smoke.

“The medical examiners were a bust too,” Mason continued. “We’re the ones, the public, who want to think all that equipment and training adds up to something. Guesswork. Like everything else. It’s real discouraging. And I won’t even bring up reporters.”

“
Miami Herald
,” Dave said. And everyone on the patio within earshot cracked up.

“
Miami Herald
,” the boy echoed to keep it going.

In response to the press conference Roy Innis had staged on the steps of City Hall on April 21, the Florida newspaper had run a story on Shirley McGill, whom relatives and co-workers were quick to say had a fondness for far-fetched, attention-getting tales. The only problem was that the paper had researched the wrong Shirley McGill. The subject of their story was not the witness Roy Innis had under wraps. She was not the woman whose testimony Commissioner Brown and FBI agent Glover had discounted. The
Herald
’s error and chagrined retraction seemed to have left egg on the face of the whole fifth estate, for no paper followed through and the silence left open as many questions as had been raised about McGill before the faulty write-up.

The Shirley McGill people wanted to know more about was the woman who’d received a phone call in winter from a former boyfriend, a cabbie still living in Atlanta. He told her that he was part of the kidnap ring that would soon be grabbing retarded adults. In spring, when the authorities began adding to the list young men they labeled “retarded” or “childlike,” many readers suspected the labels had more to do with validating the TF profile, which had been used before to exclude missing and murdered adults whose cases seemed related, than with describing the young men. But McGill was prompted to return to Atlanta, where she sought the advice of a media Blood who put her in touch with the splinter group from CORE.

Community workers who’d stuck close to Innis and his group, particularly after a photo of the cabbie boyfriend was recognized by the family of one of the victims and identified as a person seen in the neighborhood on key dates, put out the word that McGill’s actual story had more meat on the bones than the version the local papers told. She’d given highly incriminating testimony that placed her on the scene of a kidnap shack on the outskirts of Atlanta, according to the grapevine. She’d seen a boy threatened with a form of punishment that made “asphyxia,” the term on most of the death certificates, graphic—a plastic bag would be shoved down his throat if he didn’t do as he was told. McGill, the story went, had expressed a willingness to take a polygraph and to be interrogated under hypnosis.

“I don’t know if the media’s been asked to dummy up, but all we get in the dailies is the same ole same ole,” Dave said.

“It’s the rating game,” Mattie said, walking past the men and the youths for a closer look at a patch of purple flowers entangled in the ivy. “They prefer to serve the mothers up like Renaissance Pietàs,” she said, breaking off a sprig to carry back to her friend in white.

It was Preener who noticed Mattie squatting down and snapping her fingers at Mason and Dave, and he went over. Below, to the side of the steps, holding on to the shrubbery, was the beefy brother in the leather cap. The ends of the dingy straps dangling over his shoulder were caught in a bush.

“What’s the score, partner?”

The big man looked up and the sun turned his graying goatee silver. “White boy’s still in the lead,” he answered, drawing his massive arms up to one side. “But then I ain’t been to bat yet.”

Then he swung around from the waist so convincingly, his arms sweeping across the top of the bush with such force, that those watching from the ledge above could feel the wallop. He carefully two-stepped past the shrub, yanking the straps free and sending twigs plummeting down to the sidewalk.

“Who is this old dude?” one of Dave’s boys wondered.

“If him and Mr. Morris got into it, I put my money on Morris,” another said. “He could take that guy.”

“Yeah, he big but he old.”

“I Spy has definitely got a nose problem,” Mason said as he helped
Mattie up. They watched B. J. shoot past them and intercept the moving man under the trellis.

“You wanna be a man?” Dave asked, yanking the boys’ ringleader up on his toes. “You jokers kill me. Is that what it’s about? How much pain you can put on somebody without feeling bad?” He shoved the boy into his buddies.

“Think men go around offing each other for your amusement? You? How about you? What are you mugs going to be doing when the schools close and the kids got nowhere to go and no one to watch out for them? Hanging tough on the corner lying about how much pussy you’ve had and how many heads you’ve whipped?”

“Lighten up, partner,” Preener said.

“C’mon, Mr. Morris,” one of the boys said, shading his eyes from the sun. “We here.”

“I know you’re here.” Abruptly, Dave walked back to the carriage house.

“They gave him a rough time in the can,” the ringleader said, looking at Preener, Mason, and Mattie in turn. “But he’s all right.”

B. J. was coming across the flagstone from the trellis, giving the okay sign.

“We’re going to start!” Zala called out, and those on the patio turned to go in.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Spence?” Mason asked.

“No.” She handed him the sheet of muslin to drape in the doorway.

“Don’t worry, we’re bonded,” the big man said when the housekeeper handed over the last of the large silver pieces, an elaborate candelabra.

“It’s not like it was my stuff, Mr. Bingham.”

“Then we have your permission, Miss Lady, to return in the night and break into the basement?”

“If it suits you. All the same to me. I’m done here come seven o’clock.”

“Silver don’t excite you. You an undercover heiress. Is that it?”

“Ask yo’ mama.”

“She just like you,” he laughed, “full of vim and vinegar.”

“Then go see yo’ daddy.”

“A great lover, my daddy. Just like his son.”

Ed Bingham laughed as the housekeeper sashayed out of the room. She probably had a peephole in the kitchen, he thought. He helped the men shove the barrels onto the hand truck, then taped up the cartons marked for the van.

Another crew had arrived and were doing the upstairs windows. A buffing machine, cans of denatured alcohol, and boxes of steel wool were set by the sideboard, a reminder that Bingham’s crew should have been through and out of the way. He wondered how long it would be before the carriage-house group finished their business. They were the ones holding things up.

Watching his packers wrap up the silver dinner service put him in mind all the more of the household he’d grown up in, where the most-often-used phrase was “Go see Father.” Whatever the problem—personal, religious, in the home, on the job, with the police, matters of the pocket or of the heart—“Go see Father.”

His grandparents had joined Father Divine’s Peace Mission in Sayville, Long Island, when the original Mother Divine was still alive helping folks pool resources to pull each other through the Depression. His parents had practically been raised in the Broad Street headquarters in Philadelphia. And under the tutelage of Professor Pearly Gates, Bingham had gotten his high-school studies together in the family hall of the Divine Lorraine Hotel.

He strapped the load onto his back and went out, wondering who there might be in that city for those burdened people in the carriage house to go see.

A courtly man named Fess who’d once worked for the Pullman Company had taken him to rallies, marches, and meetings, explaining their meaning and relating them to earlier moves. Protests against lynchings. Secret gatherings with A. Philip Randolph to form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rallies in support of the Scottsboro Boys.

His uncle Connie used to take him everywhere else, on trips to National Negro Baseball League games, to give him something better to think about doing with his large frame and powerful arms than getting on his knees to pray. Connie had nothing against making use of the Peace Mission enterprises. He took Big Boy for haircuts at the Peace barbershops—a quarter if you had it, “Peace” and “Thank you” if you
didn’t, or were too stingy, which Connie was about everything but baseball. The time they went to St. Louis just to see Quincy Troupe on the diamond, they’d made use of the Peace boardinghouses, hotels, and restaurants. The Salisbury steak dinner was two bits—less than that in the restaurants where everyone ate family-style at long tables.

The banquets, on the other hand, were free, announced by messenger “whenever the spirit moves Father,” as his daddy would say. Ducking under the trellis, Bingham remembered the floral arrangements on the sparkling white tablecloths, the stiff cloth napkins, the gleaming glasses and silverware. Throngs of people with heads bowed as Father Divine gave the blessing. When Big Boy had put down the bat and put on a bow tie to work on Colonel Black’s plantation, Chock Full O’ Nuts, he’d once been invited to the estate for a picnic, along with relatives who’d come north on the Dixie Maid “express” and wound up behind the Chock Full counters after years of standing on the corner designated by the Dixie Maid agency for white folks to look them over and maybe give them a job, for which the agency got cash and they got old clothes. The colonel’s spread, for all his fanfare, couldn’t hold a candle to Father’s banquets.