The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (3 page)

 

After the cops finished questioning us, I stayed to help Sandy make some
CLOSED
signs. Since Waffle House never closes, they don't have any. The front door lock, seldom used, wouldn't work, so we wedged a ladder under the door handle to hold the door closed and left via the back door, the one that had a working lock.

I walked her to her car, a ratty old Escort. I gave her a half-assed hug, which she tolerated.

 

My roommate, a Mexican guy that had answered my local roommate-wanted ad, worked days at the local brake replacement place, so he was still asleep when I arrived back at the house. He yipped and muttered in his sleep, one reason I spent my nights at the House. I turned up the television until I could hear Katie Couric over his snores.

I slept like shit, which I always do when I'm sober. It had been almost three years since my last sound night's sleep.

 

The girl was still on my mind when I woke later that afternoon. I surfed the television for news until my roomie arrived home from work. He went by the nickname Texaco, which fit since he wore ostentatious cowboy boots tooled with pictures of rattlesnakes and longhorn steers.

“Hey,” he said, the extent of our usual conversation, since he didn't speak much English. He carried a plastic gallon jug of milk out the back door onto the landing, where I heard him light a cigarette. He spent hours leaning on the railing, watching dumpsters and alley cats, drinking milk from the jug.

I got nothing off the TV, so I dressed and walked next door to the library to use their computer and Internet access.

According to the web edition of the
Columbus Dispatch
, the girl's name was Nancilee Harper. Local girl, city school, basketball player. An angel, but aren't they all, when they're dead? No parents mentioned. Her grandmother's picture was up on the home page, a pencil-thin black woman with carrot-orange hair and a bombed-out look in her eyes; maybe they caught her on the way home from the clubs. She looked younger than me.

According to the lead story, Nancilee had no enemies. She attended the Baptist church on the east edge of downtown. Good grades. She'd been asleep upstairs when Grandma left that evening for work. Grandma, Phara Johnson, waited tables at Caddy's, a near eastside dive. Grandma returned home at 7
A.M
. to find her front yard full of cops and reporters.

No mention of the white guy, the Escalade, no artist's sketch of a person of interest. I figured he was in the can already or two states away with his pedal to the floor. The license plate we'd written down was no doubt in a dumpster somewhere.

I signed off and drifted to the magazine room. I never knew what to do with myself late afternoon, early evening, the time when families would be regathering after school, work, errands, fighting for the remote, doing homework, arguing about dinner.

My disability check didn't cover entertainment, so the library was my second most frequented haunt. I was sitting by the picture window reading the latest
Popular Science
when Sandy called.

“You see the news?” she said.

“The girl? Nancilee?”

“Yeah.” I knew she was leaning against the door frame in the hallway between her kitchen and dining room, probably twisting her index finger through the phone cord. She never sat down when she talked on the phone. I once asked her why. She told me her father used to sneak up behind her, take up some slack from the cord, and pull it around her neck like a garrote. All in fun, he'd said.

“We should've called.”

“We couldn't have known,” I said. An old man across the table, holding a copy of
Home and Garden
an inch from his face, pulled it down to glare at me.

I ignored him. “She went with that guy like she wasn't worried.”

“I'm going to call on that girl's grandma. It's the least I can do.”

“Don't. You don't have anything to tell her that would be a comfort to her.”

“She'd want to know,” Sandy said, her voice rushed, breathy. “I wanted to know.”

“Talking to the EMTs only made it worse for you.” One EMT had told Sandy he thought I had alcohol on my breath. That one off-the-cuff remark had driven a stake through our marriage. I never realized when I was a kid that every day of your life is a high-wire act. Twenty years you can say the right thing, and then
pow
—one casual comment, one inattentive moment, and you're in freefall. Ask Karl Wallenda.

“Would you go with me?” Sandy said. “In an hour or so?”

I saw Tex walk out of our apartment building toward his Civic. He was dressed to kill, clothes tight and shiny, the silver on his belt buckle sparkling under the streetlights.

I agreed to go with Sandy. Not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I was also perversely drawn to pain, and I assumed there would be plenty there.

I looked through my closet for something more formal than blue jeans. I considered my black suit but decided it might suggest I was claiming grief I didn't deserve, as I'd only met the victim that one time. I settled on gray slacks, a dark green checked shirt, and a black sport coat, no tie.

Sandy picked me up twenty minutes later. The temperature had dropped back into the twenties, and the heater in her car was broken, but she wore only a thin overcoat. Her teeth were chattering.

“Where are your gloves?” I asked as I pulled the door shut and belted myself in. I had given her a nice pair of kid leather gloves for Christmas a couple of months before.

She pulled away from the curb right into the path of an old Volvo wagon. I could read the lips of the woman behind the wheel as she screeched to a stop to avoid hitting us.

“They're at work,” Sandy said, oblivious to the close call. Her tone of voice was part of a package I recognized. It went with her head held high, and a way she has of drawing her upper lip down over her teeth, then curling it up, as though trying to dislodge something in her nose without touching it. That package says,
Don't talk, don't touch
. I regretted agreeing to accompany her.

We rode in silence for a few blocks. The address she had was on the other end of town. I waited until we were on the freeway before I said, “This is a mistake.”

Another nose twitch. “You can't spend the rest of your life hiding. She needs us.”

“The last thing she needs is us. She's probably suffering enough as it is.”

That was enough chitchat for our car ride. A short while later, she turned onto Bryden Road. We cruised slowly down the row of huge old houses, now subdivided into apartments, until we spotted the address. Most of the houses were dark upstairs, with a few lights on downstairs. We could see a group of people on Phara's front porch. Or, more accurately, we could see cigarette glows, moving in arcs from waist level to head level, growing in intensity, then descending.

Sandy parallel-parked a few doors down the street, which took a few minutes. We walked up the unshoveled sidewalk, snow squeaking under our shoes. We could hear conversation, laughter, even the clink of a glass from the porch. Sandy took my arm.

The concrete steps up to the front yard were broken, uneven, without a guardrail. I took them one at a time, favoring the hip and knee I'd had replaced. I could feel the eyes on us. The conversation on the porch stopped.

Sandy stopped at the foot of the stairs onto the porch. A small black man separated himself from the circle, crossed to the top of the stairs, and said, “May I help you?” He said it politely, usher polite.

Sandy stood mute, so I said, “We came to express our condolences to the girl's grandmother.”

The man didn't move aside but looked at me. “Do we know you, sir?” He had a subtle accent, not Western Hemisphere.

“No, I don't think so. We were in the restaurant where the girl was kidnapped.” As soon as I said it, I realized how pathetic I sounded. Grasping.

One of the men farther back on the porch, deeper in shadow, made a snort of derision. I could hear muttering. Sandy was studying the stairs, holding on to my arm as if it were a life preserver.

“You saw my daughter? Last night?” The man didn't come down the steps, but he leaned forward at the waist, as if he were looking into a fish tank.

I nodded. “This morning. About three. She came in the diner for some breakfast.”

The muttering grew louder. “And the police have talked to you?”

“Sure. They were there this morning. They catch the guy yet?”

“What guy?” he said, placing his cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“The bald white guy,” Sandy said. “That picked her up.”

Another man emerged from the group. He was black as well, much larger, younger, beefy with the wide head, nose, round cheeks and chin I'd come to associate with Central Africa.

The bigger man said, “What did this guy look like?” He had no accent. He stood well apart from the first man.

I described the bald white guy. As I talked, I could see faintly someone deeper on the porch writing on a spiral pad. The large man turned toward the porch when I was finished, said something I couldn't hear, listened, and nodded.

“Mrs. Johnson's not here. Who shall we say came to call?” He said it perfunctorily, like the kiss-off from a good administrative assistant.

I gave him our names. He nodded, as did the smaller man. Neither seemed prone to continue our conversation or move aside to invite us in, so we nodded in return and headed back to the street. My heart was beating so loudly I could almost not make out the laughter as one voice said, “You tell 'em Phara's back at the club?”

“Well, that was a clusterfuck,” I said as Sandy started the car. I was plenty warm now, although the heater still didn't work. I hadn't been exactly scared, but I was certainly on edge.

“How can they laugh with that poor girl dead?” Sandy said, nose twitching again. “With her father standing there? Have they no respect? And that grandmother? What a bitch.”

“What I don't get is why they didn't know about the bald guy.”

“Maybe the cops are afraid they'd go after him themselves.”

“Maybe they should.”

Sandy dropped me off at home after a silent ride across town. We didn't even say goodbye, just nodded, knowing we'd see one another again in a few hours at the Waffle House.

Tex had not returned yet so I had the apartment to myself. I filled the tub with hot water and soaked for a while, until my back and hip stopped aching. I usually shower, because the tub brings back memories of bathing my daughter, Iris, when she was two or so. I'd keep an old pair of swimming trunks on the rack on the back of the bathroom door to wear, because she loved to soak me with hand splashes of water, and I enjoyed it too much to convince her to stop.

 

I found the same old crowd seated in their same old places when I arrived at the Waffle House about 3 the next morning. Sandy was on break, her feet on the manager's desk and Art Bell on the radio. Otilio waved to me and slid a coffee cup down the counter, following with the coffeepot to fill it.

“How you doon?” he said, accent heavy. I knew he didn't expect, even want, a reply. He understood English fine but didn't have any confidence in his ability to speak it.

I shrugged and unfolded the
New York Times
, my daily indulgence, a buck from the box outside the door. I could, and usually did, spend hours working my way through each day's issue, even before I began the crossword.

I didn't get far this morning, though. About 3:30
A.M
., just as Sandy came back on duty, a TV truck pulled up outside. An attractive young black woman, buried inside a thick down parka, got out. The parka fell lower on her thigh than her skirt did.

She came inside. The truck kept running, and I could see the silhouette of the driver, his head against the headrest. I recognized the woman as a reporter on the morning news, which I usually watched before going to bed. She did the weather reports, too.

She flagged down Sandy as she was carrying the coffeepot on a circuit of the counter. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Sandy put the pot back on the warmer and took a step back. “What you want?” She was beginning to do the nose thing again.

“I understand Nancilee Harper was in here last night before she was killed?”

I waited for the reporter's notebook to appear, but the woman kept her hands in her parka pockets. Sandy looked at the floor, shook her head, and walked into the back room.

The reporter glanced around the room, appraising the rest of us, before approaching Notebook Guy. I heard her repeat the question to him. Sandy peeked through the door just as the guy replied with a word salad, the way he does when he's been palming his medications. I winked at Sandy.

Unfortunately, the reporter persisted by moving down one table to the old couple. Vern and Viv knew who I was. They knew about Iris. The reporter sat down at his invitation, and the three of them talked for a long time.

Sandy finally had no choice but to come out of the office when a four-top of security guards came in. When I saw the old guy and the reporter looking at me, then at Sandy, I threw a few dollars on the counter and left. Sandy watched me go as she dealt a tray full of waffles to the guards.

Against my better judgment, I watched the early news later that morning. They led with the girl's report. She did a standup with Vern and Viv in front of the restaurant.

“This is Tayndra Stephens. Behind me is the Waffle House restaurant on Staley Road, where twenty-four hours ago young Nancilee Harper was abducted, in front of eight witnesses who did nothing to stop her kidnapper. An hour later, she was dead.”

She skewered, skinned, and hung the old couple, who seemed oblivious to the callous impression they were making on the audience. All the time they talked, Sandy was visible in the background, moving back and forth in the same forty feet of behind-the-counter space that now circumscribed her life. The reporter made sure to work my name into the report.