Those Bones Are Not My Child (90 page)

“Whatever.” Jonesy put his hand on her pocketbook when she tried to pay the driver. The locks were sprung, and the boy reached across her and pushed the door open with his fingertips.

Clumps of trash stopped up the sewer, and the backed-up water stank. She swung her legs over to a bank of dirt she took to be the curb and dug her heels in.

“Wait, I’ll come around.” Jonesy got out on his side.

Though they walked uphill, it felt like going down dark basement steps. She followed the boy into a narrow lane, front doors where she expected backyards to be. A door close to her elbow snapped open suddenly, rattling a chain, then slammed shut with a grunt.

“They’re all right,” Jonesy assured her when she jumped. “Mr. Morris knows them. Watch it.”

On the ground on top of neatly arranged brown wrappers were two fishheads and a tuna can of curdled milk. There was no cat in sight, but a dog barked somewhere to her right and was answered by a dog to her left far in the distance. Up ahead, in defiance of all known geometry—and of the fire codes as well, she was thinking—were two houses jammed together that dead-ended the lane. One house had a light in a round window shaped like a ship’s porthole. She hoped that one was it. There was a laundry pole out front, the kind that worked like an umbrella. A peely oilskin bag hung on one of the spokes, its side seam torn; a clothespin and the leg of a doll poked through. Under the porthole a piece of Masonite covered with shiny butcher paper leaned. The childlike drawings were the kind Kenti used to make—stick people with birdnest hairdos, lollipop flowers, and a green dog with an enormous, pointy tail.

“No bell,” Jonesy said, feeling around the door frame. He rapped with both fists. The house shook. Approaching footsteps felt like an earthquake.

A door was opened. Zala then realized she was looking through fine
mesh at a curtain. Draped in front of them was a vegetable-dyed length of unbleached muslin. Light shone through the splotchy saffrons and purples. A hand pulled back the curtain and a greeting rumbled up out of a woman who turned out to be not heavy at all.

“T. J., whatchu say! Get on in here. Big Dave said you’d be around.” The woman pulled Jonesy in by the neck and kissed him, then opened the door wider and inspected Zala from head to foot as she stepped over the threshold into the pungent smell of kerosene.

“I’m Em,” she said, as a group of men spilled out of a side room and roughed up Jonesy and asked after Big Dave, then returned to a card game inside.

Em handled Zala familiarly, taking her down the hall. Toward the rear of the house people stirred. A boy of sixteen or so stepped into the hall, holding a piece of bread and a knife. He too looked Zala up and down. He was evidently the boy she’d come to see. He stepped back into the room and she could hear the knife clinking against the inside of a jar as she passed and was suddenly yanked forward into a room of smothery heat by a man who shook her arm and swung her around and out of her coat before she could catch her breath.

“Welcome,” he said. “I’m Jersey, Em’s ole man. Any friend of Big Dave’s should make herself right at home. That’s the Lady Bee,” he said, indicating a woman who came sailing out of the kitchen with two tall glasses of water.

Em dropped down on the sofa and pulled Zala down beside her. The Lady Bee put one glass in Zala’s hand and handed the other to Jonesy. “Butter beans on the stove. Cornbread and light bread both,” she announced.

“I’ve eaten,” Zala said, looking at the glass, “but thank you kindly.” She hoped it was water, not vodka or white lightning. Both Em’s and Jersey’s voices sounded whiskey thick, though neither of them looked or otherwise sounded tipsy.

“It’s boiled,” the woman said, and sailed around the room in her peach peignoir. The sleeves were two yards apiece and trimmed in maribou. Smells of supper trailed her as she shut off the TV, rearranged the trophies on top of it, then waved people coming out of the kitchen eating something hot and dripping that they held over napkins to go up the hall. “I always boil it,” she said. “I don’t trust nothing that comes out a city tap.”

Zala sipped and smiled at the trophies and the graduation and wedding pictures on the wall, and the Lady Bee went back to the kitchen. Zala hoped there was a fire extinguisher to go with the sleeves.

Em shook off her slippers and waved Jersey out of the room to get the boy. “Maybe I should tell you about Lorraine, since that’s how it started.” She paused when the boy appeared, brushing crumbs from his shirt. He hung in the doorway. Jonesy unfolded Sonny’s missing flyer and handed it to him. He looked at it, then looked at the floor. Zala hoped Em would not be too long. It was the boy she wanted to talk to.

“Lorraine was no kin to us,” Em said, “but her mother and me used to sing in the choir. You know how that is like, when an old chum is on her ass. So I took the girl in. She’d run off before, arrested too. Wasn’t but thirteen. I don’t know what story she gave them, but when it suits them they put the girls in with the women.”

“Did Lorraine know Angela Bacon and Cynthia Armstrong?” Zala was hoping to push the story along before the boy hanging in the doorway fell asleep. The fumes from the kerosene heater were already making her eyelids droop.

“That girl knew too many people for her own good. Call themselves ministers. Call themselves getting these youngsters out of the life and on the straight and narrow. Bunch of Jesus Joes on the hustle. You know the type. Those girls would come out of that Salvation Army shelter and the pimps and dopers would be lined up from the front steps to the bus stops, them so-called ministers right along with them. Yeah, Lorraine knew about five or six of them young women that got murdered. Met them at a camp where they pay the kids to stick around to make it look legit.” She turned to the boy. “Get me my bag, Michael.

“I’ll show you the pay stubs. I saved them. No two in the same amount. Lorraine was getting checks long after she moved in with us. That camp was summer before the last one, and she came to stay with us about this time last year—November maybe. You’ll see,” she said, taking the bag the boy brought her. “Seemed like an awful lot of money for camp kids.”

“Stipends,” Michael said.

“Stipends my behind. That girl would walk in here sometimes with a roll that could choke a horse. I tried to school her. She was just a kid. You the first person to take an interest other than Big Dave. The police
didn’t even ask to look at her things. But I’ll show you if you want so you’ll see what I mean. Now, here. This is Lorraine. This one too.”

Zala handed back the check stubs in amounts ranging from $150 to $285 and took the snapshots. In one, Lorraine, a dark-skinned girl with large eyes and long dimples, was dressed in a shiny blue low-cut dress that was hiked up to one side with a fabric rose. She wore arm-length lace gloves with the fingers bare. In the other photo she had on a blue skirt and a simple white blouse, the sort of outfit Zala used to wear for Wednesday assembly.

“And this, one of them four-for-a-dollar.”

The brownish pictures in the photo-booth strip showed a sweaty Lorraine with her hair standing on end hugging a man with a heavy ridge over his brows, bushy sideburns, and a dark five o’clock shadow. “Who’s he?”

“One of them jokers she met at that camp. Football camp, I think it was. You’ll notice it doesn’t say a thing on the stubs. That Cynthia child you mentioned was at that camp too. This guy used to come for Lorraine. Wouldn’t never come in. Jersey went out to the car and spoke to him about blowing the horn like she was a ho. You know, come on up and knock on the door with some respect. But he’d blow, and she’d tear out of here and we wouldn’t see her for days. No sense asking for nothing. She’d tell me same as she tell her mother, nothing. One of them fast-talking girls, a whole lotta talk but no information. She tried to get Michael to go along with her.”

Michael sat on the arm of the sofa, still holding the flyer. He had grabbed his arm and twisted it to examine the scabs on his elbows. Zala wondered if he also had scabs on his knees.

“Tell’m, Michael.”

He cleared his throat and picked at a scab. “Meetings,” he said, and looked toward the blank TV screen.

“They’d have prayer meetings, only the real meetings were in the back. These minister types would get the kids to go out on the street with collection cans. But that’s not what they wanted Michael for. Tell’m, Michael.”

“They wanted me to pull some kid’s pants down.”

“How you like that? In a church.”

“Warehouse.”

“Warehouse? Either you were lying to me or you lying to Big Dave’s cousin here. They don’t want to hear no stuff. This lady came all the way over here to find out about her boy. You got to do better than that, Michael,” Em scolded.

“One time, there was a meeting at a warehouse over there near Whitehall.”

“Near McDaniel-Glenn? Did you know Yusuf Bell?” Jonesy asked.

“Only from the papers. Another time, we were over at the Krystal hamburgers on Memorial and this guy—” he leaned over to tap the photo-booth picture—“he came in and walked us around to a church in a store. I didn’t hang around. But something happened that night. Lorraine was scared after that.”

“She was plenty scared,” Em said. “Kept saying things were coming apart and she was going to stay with her father, which was news to me ’cause I’ve been knowing her mama for more than twenty-five years and the man I thought was her father died in Vietnam. Next thing I know, the police are knocking on the door to tell me they found her body. Didn’t even ask to look at her things. Come on, take a look. You’ll see. A couple of hundred dollars’ worth of makeup, underwear that would make your teeth fall out. I’m talking about bras with no cups and drawers with no crotch. You come too, T. J.—be a real education for you.”

Em pushed Michael ahead of her up the hall, talking all the while about drugs, orgies, and blue movies. It wasn’t until they came to a door that had to be shoved open, so many clothes hanging on the back of it, that Michael spoke up again.

“After that, they started following me. They’d come to the house asking for Lorraine but really trying to see if I was in. When I’d go out, they’d follow me.”

“That’s when you should’ve called Big Dave. But oh no,” Em said, flinging a crinoline lamp shade onto the bed covered with rough dry clothes. She changed the bulb in the lamp but the room remained dim. “Come on, sit down,” she urged, clearing a few spaces. She pulled a red leather model’s hatbox from under the bed and zipped it open. The makeup and the underwear she mentioned were on top. Photographs, an angora sweater, a leopard-skin boa, and jewelry were crammed inside.

Zala sat down and went through the photos, realizing that the faces of the murdered men, women, and children had faded from her mind
since the summer. The girls in the pictures were mostly teenagers and the boys seemed Kofi’s age. The grown-ups were all men. The man with the thick ridge over his eyes who looked like a boxer turned up in several snapshots, usually standing over one of the girls and gesturing with his finger. She worked through layers of photos, flipped through an address book, found two torn movie stubs from the Coronet in a white clutch bag, and worked down to a pack of looseleaf whose cellophane had been slit at the top. Between the sheets were two folded pieces of paper. When she shook them out, Michael came around and sat on the night table near her. She tried to handle the papers with care. It was clear the girl had meant something to him and that he thought these papers important.

“She wrote poems,” Michael said just as one of the creases tore.

Feeling the pain of causing pain, Zala took more time reading over the tried-lied, love-God above, reality-eternity verse than she wanted to. On the other piece of paper, which looked as if it had once been in the rain and dried on the heater, crisp brown lines indicating the coils were several names followed by numbers: “A. Wiley 246,” “P. Putnam 336,” “S. Burr 516.” In different ink and block-printed was Dave’s name and phone number, and at the bottom the single word “Bell.”

Michael was leaning over her, but she couldn’t remember the names of the men in the Bacon and Armstrong cases. And if “Bell” referred to deputy Chief Eldrin Bell, she wasn’t sure what that meant. Perhaps it referred to Camille Bell. Maybe the girl had meant to visit STOP and tell them something.

“What do you think about them numbers?” Michael asked her.

Jonesy crawled across the bed and looked over Zala’s shoulder. “Hotel rooms, could be.” Michael’s face went flat. “Might be taxi ID numbers,” Zala offered, “or swimming pool lockers.”

Em began gathering the things together, her face wet, and Michael looked far away.

“Is that why you left Atlanta?” Zala asked him. “You were afraid they would try to silence you because you could identify them?”

“You need to speak up, Michael. They wouldn’t be here if Big Dave hadn’t sent them. And he’s done more for you than anybody. But instead of sticking close to Jersey and Fred,” she said to Zala as she zipped the case closed, “he thought he saw a chance to make some change, so he
started calling up the papers and the television people saying he knew something and could get the reward. Like he hadn’t noticed how kids around here who talked to the police or reporters wound up in Juvenile for beating up an old lady they never saw before. You know how things go. Soon’s you talk to somebody, your ass is grass. Didn’t I tell him, try to school him, but he fronted me off. Kids.”

“What happened, Michael?”

“This guy called, told me to meet him at the train station out there by Channel 11. I thought it was one of the reporters calling me back, so I went.”

“White guy?”

Michael looked over toward Jonesy and nodded. “He gave me thirty dollars and a ticket. Said to keep my mouth shut and he’d check out my story. Said it would take a few days, then I should call him, and if they hadn’t arrested anybody, then he’d tell me where I could get a job till they made the arrest and I could come back for the reward.”

“Blow over in a few days,” Em snorted. “Four months later they grabbed Williams, and now they’ve tied ten or twelve of them children to his tail. Half them cases could have been solved last year if they’d wanted to. So you know the trial’s going to be one hell of a joke. And my son here, he don’t even call home. A white man tells him to get on the train, he gets on the train. I’m telling you.”