Those Bones Are Not My Child (8 page)

“Would you shut up?”

“A hard head will get you a soft behind every time,” she said.

“I wish you’d be quiet. It’s too hot to talk.”

Zala went over it all again to fill in the time. “He left to come pick up the machine before I had a chance to talk to him. But he’ll be here any minute. At least he’ll know how to get to the camping area.” She turned toward Ashby and felt the whole street turn with her. Mowers idled. Hedge clippers paused. Hoses splattered the driveways. A woman near the corner got up from her porch glider and leaned against her screen door, bowing it out. Two stoops up from the Griers’, the elderly husband, seated, held his wife by the elbow while she stood up craning her neck. Then she sat down, leaning against him.

“So long as we don’t get a call, ma’am, we can wait,” the white cop, Officer Eaton, said.

Zala settled back on her heels and examined the curtains in the Griers’ living-room window. They hadn’t moved. But Mr. Grier had come down the basement steps while Kofi had been playing at being a coal miner down there, then a switchman, swinging the lantern behind the stony dirt mound back of the furnace. Mr. Grier seemed annoyed to be asked again if he’d seen Sonny.

“Mighty hot,” said Officer Eaton.

“A scorcher,” said Officer Hall.

“Think your boy might have gone to the pool? That’s where I’d be. It’s some hot,” repeated Eaton.

“Can I get you two some ice water?”

“No thanks, Mrs. Spencer. Let’s just see what your nephew comes up with.”

Zala looked at the knob on the Griers’ door. She hoped Mrs. Grier would let bygones be bygones and come out. She needed support. It was uncomfortable having to deal with police. Especially out in the street.
It was too hot indoors. And too, they’d torn the place up going through Sonny’s things looking for phone numbers.

“Must be some kind of record, this heat wave.”

“Hmm.”

Looking down toward Taliaferro, Zala wondered if everyone was keeping a distance because of the police or because they weren’t sympathetic. By nightfall, she thought, a sour taste in her teeth, some made-up story would be circulating. A version of it would eventually reach her in the barbershop a mile and a half away.

“Well—” pushing himself up onto the curb—“I guess we could check along the strip,” said Eaton, talking across her to his partner. “But let’s see what the nephew comes up with. Now, how recent are these snapshots?” He walked toward his partner, who was still standing with his foot cocked on the meter.

“She said they were taken in June.”

“Sonny’s sixth-grade graduation,” Zala said. “I have a packetful.” She stepped between them. “What strip is that you mentioned?”

“Over there along Stewart Avenue. The electronic game palace, the nudie joints, adult bookstores.” Eaton licked his fingers and thumbed through his notes.

“My son is a twelve-year-old boy,” Zala said icily, and the cop looked up from his little book.

“You’d be surprised, ma’am. And not just Black kids, either,” said Eaton.

She turned on her heels and followed Hall, who shone the flashlight over the roof. Though it was still broad daylight, he flashed it along the gutters and around the lumpy tar edges of the dormers.

Kenti bumped down two steps and twisted around to follow the beam. “You think my brother’s hiding on the roof?”

“Does he do that sometimes, hide from you?” asked Hall.

Kenti looked at him, turned to Kofi, then looked over the man’s shoulder at her mother. Kenti tucked in her lip. When the policeman came into the yard, she pulled in her feet. She looked from the gun on his hip to the Robinson yard. She could see Mean Dog between the back of their yellow Bug and the police car’s front lights. Mean Dog hadn’t barked but one time, like he knew cops had pistols with bullets.

“I thought I heard something up there,” the Black cop said, turning around to look straight at Kofi.

“Squirrels,” Kofi said.

There’d been nights, though, when he’d heard something up there heavier than squirrels. He was thinking about saying so, but he saw his mother looking at him, so he didn’t say anything. The Black cop went around the side of the house just as Eaton came up to the hedge and pointed.

“You need to get your landlord to replace those gutters. Rusted clean through in places. You renting or buying?” Eaton asked her.

Kenti watched how her mother came to a full stop by the jade tree and took a long time to turn her head to look over the hedges at the white man.

“I think my boy is lost in the woods,” she said. Then, “My nephew will show you. He’ll be along soon.” That stopped him. But just for good measure, Kenti stretched her legs out. The cop looked at her bare feet, then went back to the car, his head turned toward the corner of Ashby.

“Mrs. Robinson’s looking,” Kenti said, watching out of the side of her eye. “She pretending to hold Mean Dog back by the collar when he ain’t even barking.”

“I can see and I can hear,” Kofi said. The fiberglass was making him itchy all over. He prepared for a jump from the stoop. He wanted to see what the Black cop was looking at around the side of the house.

“She said to stay put.”

“I didn’t hear her say nothing.”

“Said it with her eyes. You got eyes, doncha?” Kenti crossed her legs high again and fanned.

“Forget you.” Kofi sucked his teeth but stayed put.

Staying to the narrow walk, Zala followed Officer Hall around to the back of the house, where he suddenly dropped down in a squat. He shaded his eyes and peered in through the basement window.

“You got a cat, Mrs. Spencer?”

“The neighbors’. We share the basement.”

“Laundry room?”

She shrugged. “The washer and dryer broke down one month after we got here.”

He swiveled around, the soles of his shoes gritty on the brick walk. It didn’t seem dark at all until he swept the light under the dogwood, then directed the beam along the back fencing, then back again to the
tree. He did it quickly, as though to catch something sly and elusive. The pool of yellow-green pollen below the dogwood bleached out to pale yellow. The clothesline Sonny had used to pitch a tent suddenly looked bright, almost clean. It was knotted in places. A web a spider had spun, using a knot for an anchor, had ensnared a victim. The husk of a beetle dangled in silvery threads.

“You get on with your next-door neighbors?” Officer Hall straightened up and pulled his uniform free at each armpit.

“We’re fine,” she said, suppressing the scenes that usually started over her gunning the machine late at night.

The flashlight swept across the tub-and-wringer a yard down. An old woman, resting her cheek on her knuckles, her elbow on the edge of the enamel table, was dozing on the back porch. Her stockings were rolled to her shins. She wore men’s slippers. Wet wash hung over her head from a wooden rack. The door that led to her kitchen stood open. A shotgun house; every room was exposed by the APD flashlight.

“Look at that.” Officer Hall shook his head, sending the light down to the house where the blue wading pool lay wrinkled and flat in the yard. The door there was ajar. She could make out the handlebars of a child’s trike on the back porch. Then he focused the light on the house immediately behind Zala’s. The ladder had been left up at full stretch against the side of the house. The screens in the windows were the slot-in kind.

“Lot of break-ins in this neighborhood recently. Getting worse every day. We got a call on the way over here. That’s what took us so long.”

“You get many calls like this? Children missing?” The spit in her mouth was pasty.

“Runaways? A fair amount.”

“No, I mean … The papers say somebody’s kidnapping children and killing them.” She got the same response they’d given her at the curb: nothing.

He seemed determined to wake up the old woman, shining the light right in her face. He stepped a few times to the side, and now Zala too could see straight through the old woman’s house all the way to the plants lined up on her front porch rail. They were sturdy, colorful plants in buckets, pails, and large cans.

Juice cans, Zala was thinking. Grapefruit juice, the lining of her mouth acid. At the Boys’ Club they served the waiting parents grapefruit juice poured from large tin cans into plastic cups that were collapsible.

“I fault the new airport,” Hall was saying. “Building an international airport as huge as Hartsfield is like putting the welcome mat down for organized crime. It’s a whole new ballgame now.” He strolled over to her back steps. “When you get major drug trafficking, you get an increase in petty crimes too.” With the side of his shoe, he gathered scattered cherry pits into a heap.

“You think these murdered children were involved in drugs?”

“I’m saying that drug traffickers’ve got no compunction whatsoever about recruiting youngsters. We can’t arrest a minor for possession, and the courts can’t prosecute. Dealers depend on that.”

“But the children …” Zala couldn’t keep her mind steady. Hall kept looking from the cherry pits littering the back steps to the rope wrapped around the dogwood. A girl, she remembered reading, had been found strangled in a wooded lot not far from Spence’s apartment complex. She’d been tied to a tree with an electrical cord. “Is that what they say about the child murders? That they were working for a drug ring?” It seemed far-fetched. Wasn’t it easier to pay an adult to be quiet than to kill a child?

“My partner looked into the case and he feels it’s a reporter using a sensational story to try to make the grade. There’s actually nothing to make a case. Different MO each time.”

She waited for him to ask about the cherry pits. She would keep her answer short. She would say only that they’d sat on the back steps two nights ago, she and Sonny, sharing a bowl of Bing cherries. It had been a peace offering, but she wouldn’t say that. Sulking, he wouldn’t come in to dinner. She’d burnt the salmon croquettes. But at least she’d gotten Dave to leave.

She dragged herself behind Officer Hall. He’d taken an interest in her garden plot. She was mostly interested in going to sleep, but Paulette’s newspapers were scattered all over the sofa.

“The papers say the police chief’s got a special unit to investigate. So there must be something to it,” she pressed him, and followed him over to her garden.

“The commissioner formed a special investigation team, yes,” he said, “because—just between you and me—a group of parents were pressuring city hall.”

His remarks seemed to tire him out, and Zala could think of nothing else to ask. But then he was the professional, he should have been questioning
her
, pressing her to think of some thing, some person, some place she’d overlooked. Maybe there was nothing to be alarmed about. He was a cop; he should know. If there was something to the murder stories, wouldn’t Maynard be on the news, mobilizing the city? Leave it to Paulette to come up with something scary. Zala glanced over at Paulette’s empty driveway. She wished she’d come back and lend some support. Paulette would know how to take charge of the situation.

“You could use some yard lights around back, Mrs. Spencer. Just you and the kids here by yourselves?”

She nodded. And when he shoved his hat back to run his arm across his forehead, she knew he wouldn’t leave it at that. He asked, “No man in the house?” just the way the Griers had, not butting in, but genuinely concerned. “Then who tells you what to do?”: Mr. Grier had sounded sincerely worried about her welfare.

“A dog wouldn’t be bad,” Hall said, scuffing up dirt from her garden. “We’ve got a German shepherd, but a Doberman would be best. Keep a gun for protection?” He spoke quietly and seemed to know she wouldn’t answer, not that it was a big thing. Most people kept guns in their cars, one in their houses, and it wasn’t unusual to feel guns on a person out dancing.

“People have to take precautions,” he went on. “A .33 or a .38, I think.” He turned and looked at her. “Maybe a .32—you’re small-framed.”

He continued sizing her up. And Zala wondered if he’d now indicate what particular sort of man went with the preferred dog, the recommended gun, and her small frame. But he turned his attention back to the plot, tamping the top layer down as though testing how packed the dirt was. He shifted his weight onto his back leg suddenly, keeping his body well away from the tamping foot. He had her believing the earth would split open any minute and yank him down into its mudcaked maw.

“Must be difficult raising three kids on your own. Particularly two
boys. And one’s a teenager too.” He puffed up his cheeks and blew out. “Adolescents can be rough.” He shone the light on the shovel.

“He’s a good kid,” she said, feebly. “He’s just twelve, not a teenager yet. He doesn’t give me a rough time. Not at all.”

“Problem is, you can’t monitor them every second. They can be running with a bad crowd and you wouldn’t know.” He pulled a tomato stake free from the pile stacked and ready to mark rows for the vegetables.

“I screen his friends,” she said, watching him slide his thumb over one end of the stick, testing its point. “He belongs to a singing group. Nice bunch of boys,” she said, repeating what she’d already told them.

“That’s good, because like I said, these narcotics dealers get young kids to do their dirty work. And drugs are big business. They’d kill a kid in a minute to keep the others in line.” He hefted the stick, measuring its weight. “I assume you have a curfew for the boy. Who punishes him when he violates his curfew?”

“Well, I ground him.”

“Uh-hunh.” He sounded doubtful about something. With the stick, he moved her tools around in the toolbox. “Is your husband strict with the children? Does he whip them?”

“No, no.” She felt uneasy, him bent over studying each tool and her not knowing what was going on in his mind. The ball of twine tumbled out of the box. Even to her, it looked suspicious: too thick for the width of the stakes, just right for tying someone up.

“Yeah,” he said tiredly, dragging the word out. “Don’t think these drug pushers don’t use their own children, either.”

“Are you saying that’s what happened? To the missing children, I mean?”

She felt a little easier when he made a shrug with his mouth. But at the same time he kept turning over one of her gardening tools in his hand, the one she’d used to rake the dirt into an even grade so she could plant.