Those Bones Are Not My Child (96 page)

Zala waited in vain for the appearance of the new group that had been formed to badger the Task Force into beefing up its personnel and getting down to a real investigation. There were still at least six cases
open on the books. And too, the story of the murdered women was being forced back into the news by adamant community workers—this was the work Inquiry had concentrated on when they realized the trial would disclose nothing. The review did not include Parents for Justice; there was not even a word from the Williams’s attorney Lynn Whatley.

“You should try to take a nap,” Delia urged, holding on to the hall-closet doorknob to get up from the floor. “I can help you set up the reception buffet and help you get the children dressed, but the Webbers are due and I’ve got to get the house reopened and spruced up. They ask about you all the time—did I say that?”

“You’re a good soul, Delia.”

“I’m going to be the flower girl and the pillow girl,” Kenti said, getting up. She tried not to stand between them just in case they quit being so grown and just went on and hugged. Aunty Dee was smoothing the wrinkles out of her skirt and looking at Mama. Mama was looking down at the TV.

“Pillow girl?”

“I’m carrying Aunty Paulette’s ring on a pillow.”

“That’s nice, honey.”

Aunty Dee looked over at the table where Mama’s pocketbook was, then she looked at Mama. “Zee, give it up,” she said, and pulled her into her arms and hugged her. “Try to give it up. It’s crazy.”

Zala looked at the screen. The wrap-up was winding down.

“Case closed,” the TV announcer said in front of the board full of school pictures. The children’s faces hung on long after the news went off.

Between the suntanned legs of kids in college T-shirts and army youths dragging duffel bags, Spence saw the boys halfway down the concourse, scrambling after the ball, zigzagging past briefcases and flight bags, kicking and elbowing each other out of position, then broken-field-running down the carpeted gray expanse. Their sports play didn’t draw the attention of any security guard. “Got yourself a couple of Peles there, brother,” a skycap congratulated Spence and moved on.

With the tip of one sneaker, Kofi was edging the ball up over the top of the other the way Sonny had been teaching him all morning in
the one corner of the yard where the jonquils had pushed through. The ball bumped up to the top of his shoelace and Kofi snapped his foot up and bunted the ball with his knee. He kicked a ground ball past a gift shop where a demonstrator was sending a model airplane out. It flew around in an arc to come back again to his hand.

Sonny, hearing his father’s name being paged, brought the ball to a stop and kept it tight under his foot so Kofi couldn’t move it. He motioned to Kofi, who stopped trying to wrestle the ball and turned. Dad was sprinting to the Delta information desk. He was bent over like he was trying to get a pencil and pad out of his pocket.

That’s how Gaston would run dribbling an inner tube around the garage trying to get Sonny to play. Kofi would drop what he was doing, which was usually fooling around in the trays of metal parts, to go guard the “basket,” the machine the tire was set on its side in. Sonny kind of liked Gaston, or at least he liked hanging out in the garage. There was a lot of long-handled junk and heavy steel tools for giving rubber and metal a good wallop, as Gaston liked to demonstrate, sweat flying and him laughing that weird laugh of his that sounded like someone up to no good in the night around the back of somebody’s house and about to get caught. A goofy laugh of someone who was born to get caught. But that was the interesting thing. Gaston would scratch his head and scuff his boots and play country dumb, but he wasn’t. He knew things.

While the others would talk war talk, Gaston would be watching him. So Sonny was extra careful around Gaston. He knew a lot about things that didn’t go with his act. He knew all about explosives. And he sure had known how not to become a morphine junkie even though he’d been hit bad twice. He didn’t even smoke or drink. And he knew how not to get caught up in war talk. Dad would be cracking his knuckles and pacing back and forth in there sweating from the talk and forgetting himself and next thing Sonny knew, Dad would pop his fingers upside Kofi’s head and yell at him to stay away from the crossbow contraption Gaston had in there. It would take Dad a long time to get himself back together and apologize to Kofi. He wasn’t a hitting father.

Gaston knew things like that Sonny wanted that bow. And when Lafayette asked him if he’d sell it to him, Gaston laughed his laugh and looked Sonny’s way. Or like when Mason asked him about the white guys who’d come around asking if Gaston had souped up any cars lately
for “colored boys” who might be thinking about springing Wayne Williams, Gaston had looked his way when he said they were Legionnaires. It was impossible for Ole Tee-Hee to know, but it was almost like he did know that the word meant something to Sonny.

Grandaddy Wesley used to tell stories about Legionnaires, not so much to Sonny and the others, but there’d be company, old people who sat around drinking out of mayonnaise jars and talking over old race stuff. Legionnaires with bats and clubs used to storm the railroad yards where Grandaddy worked in the old days. They’d beat up on the hoboes, then they’d go down to the river and bust up the bums who lived there cooking food in tin cans over fires. Black people, cripples, carnival people, drunks, and anybody else they could call scum and get away with it, they’d bash them and fuck up their living places, whatever they were. And the sheriff would stand around chewing tobacco and looking up at the sky the way Kofi did sometimes making up shit like he knew all about constellations and the space program. But ole Gaston, he didn’t sidle up and ask Sonny things outright like the others did trying to get him to talk. Gaston laughed his laugh and did his little two-step and watched.

And Sonny found out, standing there watching his father run from the white phone at the information desk to the little alley where the regular pay phones were, that he didn’t mind that Gaston ran the country number on him. He kind of liked the guy. Mostly, he decided as Kofi started pulling on the ball, because of the explosives. He wouldn’t mind getting his hands on a couple of sticks of dynamite. And he kind of had the feeling Gaston knew this and might actually help him without telling Dad.

“I bet I know what’s up.” Kofi waited for the two stewardesses to understand that he wasn’t moving and they’d have to split and go around. “It’s Ma. Betchu Michael remembered something and Ma wants you home right away.”

Kofi trotted after his brother, in no hurry to catch up. He wanted to see if Sonny would walk into the phone area and ask, or if he’d hang on the edge and spy.

Whenever Miss Em brought Michael by, the two big boys would walk around each other like gangsters or cowboys, sizing each other up. It was stupid. But then Miss Em was a little stupid too. She said mothers with growing sons needed to show boys the places white people
liked to put Black boys before they got to be men and couldn’t be controlled. Sonny was by the hall closet eavesdropping. Michael was in the kitchen helping himself to the last of the baloney. And Mama was saying that that wasn’t her idea of an educational outing. She’d been taking a first-aid law course at the Office of Equal Opportunity center, where she and maybe Dad were going to be working soon. Sons and daughters needed to be taught about their rights, was her comeback. And then Miss Em said, “Well, they need to learn something, ’cause boys think the whole purpose of having knees is to use up a can of Band-Aids.” Kofi didn’t see the point of that joke.

“Who is it?” Kofi stood near the ice-cream machine.

“Paulette.”

But before he could ask any more, his Dad took off with Sonny right after him, and Kofi had to run like hell to hear what Sonny was saying.

“They’re already at the house?”

“They haven’t left Houston airport,” Sonny said over his shoulder. “There’s a big crowd in the airport, she said, waiting for the new Houston police commissioner to touch down.”

“So what? I thought they were getting married up here.”

“You see who I see?”

Winded, Kofi came to a halt in front of the gate for the flight to Houston. “We’re not going to Houston, are we?”

“Use your eyes,” Sonny said.

Passengers were ready to board. A couple was helping an old man out of a wheelchair. An attendant was holding the line back until a woman carrying a baby and tugging on the straps of a little kid carrying a panda went through the door. The line was long. On line were Commissioner Lee Brown and his wife, Yvonne. He looked at Dad a long time with his eyebrows up and then he nodded. Before Dad could jump over a garment bag a man had unzipped on the floor to put something in, Brown and his wife had gone through the door.

“What’s the deal?” But once again they were running, back to the phones again, Dad looking like O. J. Simpson, hopping over tall ashtrays and stuff.

“The mayor of Houston was going to announce her choice for the Houston police chief job this afternoon,” Sonny explained, running sideways. “The reporters got wind that the new guy was coming in on flight 1154, so they’re waiting for him.”

“Brown?”

“Brown. Ole No-Rap Brown has slipped out of town without anybody knowing. And all this time, people were all over Napper because he got a job offer from California and if they let him go, that’s the end of any chance to make the Task Force get down to business. But Brown split.”

“Why is that so funny?”

Sonny never did say. He threw the ball from hand to hand double-daring Kofi to try for it. After a while the laugh was one of his sarcastic laughs like everybody was a stupid jerk but him.

The wedding guests were on the first floor. In the hall at the foot of the stairs, people took turns making calls on the phone and answering the door. Those in the living room made polite talk with the Foremans and the groom’s relatives, one eye on the TV and one ear cocked toward the radio. What the hell could Andy Young say at this late date? The news broke in Houston at 10:54 a.m. when Brown’s plane landed. By the time he and Yvonne left the airport at 11:15, the shit had hit the fan. Rank-and-file HPD were up in arms—not because Brown was Black, they said, but because Mayor Kathy Whitmore should have selected a local candidate for the post. The Houston City Council balked—not because Brown was Black, they explained, but because the executive search had been conducted in secrecy. They’d never heard of the guy till reporters called in from the airport. Who the hell was he anyway? The roving reporter queried Houston citizens, who echoed the beef. Who was this colored guy with a Ph.D.? Not that race was any problem, but the mayor had overlooked a lot of local talent to import this colored fellow, and that wasn’t right.

The wedding guests buzzed through the first-floor rooms checking dates with each other. Brown and Whitmore had held a secret meeting in an undisclosed town outside of Houston about three and a half weeks ago, it had been learned. Damned if that wasn’t when Brown had reduced the Task Force personnel to a skeleton staff.

The musicians came in and their entrance broke up the talk. For a while people questioned each other about the groom, the honeymoon plans, and said lovely things to the Foremans about their daughter.

Ten minutes before Mayor Young’s press conference was due, Brown
was the subject again. He was the focus too of special news reports from Houston. The first Black Ph.D. in criminology from the University of California at Berkeley, he was also the first nominee for the post from outside of the Houston PD since 1941. The newsmen said, sounding more personal than professional, that many citizens were busy enough trying to get used to a woman mayor when out of the blue an out-of-town Black was slipped in under the very noses of the city’s movers and shakers.

The wedding guests brought finger sandwiches by the plateload to the sofa and finally moved a small table with stuffed celery and fruit salad closer to the television. The Atlanta murders were offered as the most current episode in Brown’s past. Since he’d been on the West Coast before he’d come to Atlanta, California’s Zodiac Killer of women and girls was trotted out, followed by the case of Juan Corona, who’d killed twenty or more migrants. To cover Brown’s Seattle years, the story picked up the torture-rape-bludgeon murders of Ted Bundy, who’d been on a killing spree through Oregon, Utah, and elsewhere in the late seventies. Local Houston cases were introduced, going back to the mid-seventies with the case of Dean Corll himself murdered by an accomplice after being accused of the murders of twenty-seven young boys.

Mr. Robinson snuffed out a cigarette in a paper plate. “What the hell are they trying to do, pin all those murders on Brown or something?”

Wiping their fingers free of cream cheese and chasing slippery melon balls across the buffed floors, various wedding guests made bets that in the next set of man-in-the-street interviews someone was going to say that while race probably had nothing to do with it, it did seem that serious murder cases followed Carpetbagger Brown around and even preceded him.

“Here we go.” One of Paulette’s boarders, who’d stayed an extra day to assist in the reception, sailed through the rooms to the foyer to notify everyone that Andy Young was about to appear.

By the time Mayor Young came on the screen, everyone in the room had heard via the phone that his staff had to locate the resignation letter and pull a statement together. There were no side bets on whether Andy would say he’d been shocked by the exit, not to mention pissed off to be jumped by the media when he was unprepared. Spence, leaning forward in his chair, had called both STOP and Parents for Justice
so that if one of any reporters still on the case planned to catch them on camera with their mouths open and their eyes rolling up like morons, they’d be forewarned. He assumed Mason had called someone on the City Hall staff. Spence wondered if Brown’s exit was related to the latest mailings of updated 6 Star packets.

“Aww, whattaya expect him to say? Of course he was in consultation with Lee Brown.” Mr. Robinson was more interested in the ham, turkey, and roast beef that were scenting up the living room each time the woman who used to live there, dressed to the nines but wearing men’s shoes broke down in the back, sailed through the door from the kitchen, teasing them with dishes of meatballs with toothpicks stuck through them.