Those Bones Are Not My Child (23 page)

So by the time the four of them were walking through the corridors of the Hyatt, refreshed for a moment by the stone-cool of the lobby but obviously bushed, Edie and Deidre swaying on either side of him, Geneva ahead but no longer prancing on her lizardy stilts and no longer bothering to quickly recover her poise when her ankle twisted and she reached for the wall, he wasn’t looking forward to depositing them at
the Plaza, the Auburn tour having been declined. He was disappointed, worried, already feeling abandoned, rebuffed, so he hiked his elbows out for them to hook onto as he escorted them to the gift shop as they’d requested. He was reluctant to part company with the women even for the seconds it took to bring the limo around. Then reluctance turned to panic as they approached with their parcels, talking together and not looking at him. Maybe he could invite them to his place for a drink. Helping them in, he was about to ask if he could use their shower. Climbing behind the wheel, he was afraid he’d suggest something gross, unforgivable, sitting there scratching his balls.

“Maybe we can get it together after a shower and nap, hunh, girls?” Neither of the other women was giving the Auburn tour second thought, so Edie leaned back. When he heard the upholstery sigh he feared he would completely deflate. He snatched the slip of paper from his street guide and folded a missing handbill against the wheel. He needed something to hold on to beside the pencil to undistract himself, sensing that in the days ahead, if the fog didn’t lift and the sun burn through, a car would whoosh by him and he’d be assailed by this same perfume and be reduced to sobs and a twelve-day binge on expensive chocolates.

“Sweet, sweet Auburn, they used to say. Girrrrrl, I wish I’d been there in the old days. Mary Lou Williams, Eddie Heywood, the Peacock Lounge …”

Spence fighting the wheel and searching for the equation his uncle Rayfield had presented to him as a child: memory equals hope. It had never worked before, or rather, it had never made much sense; he’d been unclear how to apply it. But he needed something to anchor him, flying through traffic and pain. There was no hope in memory of recent events, that was for sure.

“… dances at the Odd Fellows Hall.” Edie was giving the leather cushions a fit.

Zala and he in a red leather booth, on a date, in New York, the restaurant about to close. Their talk of themselves, movies, school, things in common besides both being late-arriving babies to very mature parents, finally converged on Auburn Avenue back home in Atlanta. Spence imitating his mother appraising the business enterprises, the pastors, the other solid citizens of Auburn who were a credit to the race as compared with the riffraff of Decatur Street. Then Zala imitating
her mother in a black slip, a Lucky Strike dangling, one eye closed against the smoke, dancing from the closet to the bed to upend a hat-box of mementos. Zala moving around in the booth, unself-conscious for the first time, showing how the shoulder strap drooped and the ash collected, and how the wilted brown corsages looked against her mother’s shoulder, how the dance programs had yellowed, how the group pictures of elegant folks at the roof dances at the Odd Fellows Hall had curled.

“Course we went to Friendship Baptist by the university,” Deidre was saying, powdering her shoes. “But we’d visit the churches on Auburn. Wheat Street Baptist—Auburn used to be named Old Wheat Street, you know—Ebenezer, Big Bethel … Ahh, driver, you just went through another red light.”

T
he boy stopped to fold down the neck of the bag he carried, balancing it on one raised knee while he juggled the radio on his opposite shoulder. Zala crossed the newly paved blacktop and almost stepped out of her sandals. She felt the strap on her left shoe give a little. She took cover under a spread of huge sunflowers and tightened the strap. Limp-headed and droopy, the sunflowers didn’t offer much shade, or in fact sufficient cover if the boy turned around. But he didn’t. She gave him a third-of-a-block lead before she resumed tracking. She could hear herself breathing.

In a vacant lot back of the MARTA station, children, stooped as if working a snatch-row, collected aluminum cans, dumping them into a plastic bag big enough to hold all four of them in a sack race. There was no play to their actions, though—no hook shots, no dunks, and no peekaboo either from the two younger ones dragging the bag through the mustard-colored brush. They worked as though the family budget depended on their seriousness. She was thinking of the Jones boy, who’d been visiting from Cleveland. He’d disappeared while gathering cans with his Atlanta cousins, the papers said. But Dave had said, and she’d heard it corroborated at the Task Force headquarters, that there were several people who, separately and independently, had seen the boy hours after his cousins reported him missing: one who’d witnessed the boy being molested, one who’d witnessed the boy being strangled, two who’d seen the murderer the next day carrying a body wrapped in plastic, and two who’d seen the murderer step into a phone booth to tip the police off as to its whereabouts. According to B. J. Greaves, after a brief interrogation the man had been released, whether in the hope he’d lead the police to the rest of the murder ring, B. J. couldn’t say.

Zala slapped at the army of gnats swarming around her ankles. She
moved past the lot where the children were scuffing up clouds of red dust and kept her eyes on the boy. She was seeing him through waves of heat thrown up from the ground like a curtain of Lurex fringe. He was moving quickly now. For the first time since leaving the store and running down Forsyth to catch the train, the boy was walking as if time meant something.

Originally downtown to intercept Delia’s daughter Gloria, Zala had switched tracks the minute she recognized the boy going into the clothing store. She’d almost approached him, so glad to see him. But something told her to follow instead.

She wouldn’t give two cents for the private detectives Spence had selected from the yellow pages, detectives who wouldn’t budge from their air-conditioned offices, wasting Spence’s time telling him what was possible, difficult, just too damn expensive in a city the size of Atlanta. She tried to calculate the worth of the Task Force personnel, grown now from five to thirteen. “You’re not qualified to judge,” Delia had told her. To hell with Delia.

The boy had paused by an ice-cream truck, the kind she’d once earned a living with in summers. A wooden bar with six bells, operated by a string on the inside, overhung the windshield, exactly like in the one she’d once driven. She knew by the slapdash arrangement of decals showing Fudgsicles, Creamsicles, rainbow pops, and assorted sundaes that they hid splotches in the white that needed epoxy. The freezer was set in on the side of the truck. She saw herself in white T-shirt and slacks reaching into the box, reaching into the hot-ice vapors up to her shoulder, up to her ear, her cheek flat against the freezer door while the boy changed his order. Three times was the general rule. She used to amuse herself conducting surveys like that. That seemed three lives ago, in another city.

She snapped to. The boy was moving. She followed, congratulating herself. She’d been right—he was heading for the Ollie Street Y To hell with private detectives.

For all of Spence’s misgivings about the ex-APD cops volunteering their services to STOP—and he had a point; they were part of the old Chief Inman crowd, so who knew what their motives were?—they at least knew the lay of the land compared to miscellaneous sleuths in the phone book, or at least the three did who’d entered the case when Mrs. Willa Mae Mathis accepted their help. Perry, who’d left the force in ’79
for an unsuccessful bid for the Rockland County sheriff post, had been with Homicide when the first two children were found laid out within 150 feet of each other, both mysteriously dressed in black. Edwards, who’d been working in Criminal Investigations when O’Neal and Sturgis were writing the early warning memos down at MPYD, said he’d quit the force after nineteen years out of disgust; manpower was limited enough without squandering resources on community-relations nonsense. The Task Force’s insistence that there was no discernible pattern to the missing and murdered children’s cases, plus the fact that the TF refused to make use of Edwards’s private agency, were proof positive of that units piss-poor approach. Barber Simmons had reminded her days ago that Edwards had been part of the clique that had blown the whistle on Reginald Eaves. She didn’t know if that was true of Perry, and if it was true of the third VI, Dettlinger, she didn’t much care. Dettlinger had said all along that instead of flapping their gums about the murderers’ motives they ought to concentrate on finding the link between the children. A few days ago he’d found it. So simple, so reasonable; it had been right in front of their eyes. But the Task Force hadn’t hit on it. She was reluctant to say that the TF wasn’t hitting on much, for there was something to what Delia had said, she just didn’t know enough about police procedures. But Dettlinger, plotting two or three points for each of the children—where they’d lived, where they’d last been seen, where those murdered had been found—had zoomed in on a geographical link that, charted on a map, outlined the killers’ route. Bingo. Down at the low-slung car showroom they were not impressed. Nor were they impressed by eyewitness accounts. They were still calling the death of Angela Bacon three days ago a hit-and-run accident, so not for their list, despite the on-the-spot testimony of the girl’s companion, who called it deliberate, intentional, cold-blooded murder.

Daily, Zala felt increasingly confused, despondent, and not up to the task of trying to second-guess professionals. Were they lying, were they stupid, or were they just playing things close to the chest? Every day the thing grew more snarled by misquotes, blank faces, charges of race, saving face, and recklessness. Had the children been killed because they were Black, or should she say because the murderers were white? Had the authorities marginalized Dettlinger because he was white, because the high command was Black? Had the memo writers’ warnings been trivialized because they were females, their supervisors male? And
was B. J. correct, that female victims would be continually overlooked because girls did not count to male personnel down at the showroom? It was generally said, by those who said anything at all, that had the families of Angel Lanier and LaTonya Wilson not been members of STOP at the time of the sit-ins and the meeting at Wheat Street Baptist, there’d be no girls on the list at all. It was beyond her. What did it take, if not the security of children, for every damn body to sit down and pool information?

Tied up in knots, she’d sought out her pastor. He’d listened gravely, then given her a selection of readings to study. She knew without looking which psalms he had cited, which figures, like God-wants-something-special-of-you Jonah and model-of-steadfast-faith Job, he’d recommended. She’d not anticipated, though, the stories of sacrifice—Abraham and Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael, Jephthah, and Lot. She’d always been befuddled by the sermons that hinged on these stories that to her were nothing more than atrocity tales of child abuse. Get out of Dodge, kid, your father’s a psychopath. And what was the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar-Ishmael story but plantation melodrama, with Sarah as the evil Miss Ann?

She had worked herself up into a heat with the biblical tales and the squad-room tales while Mac, who couldn’t even be counted on for food stamps, told her and Spence, sucking his pipe, that perhaps (puff puff) they preferred (puff puff) being up to their necks in convoluted theories (puff puff) because they lacked the courage (puff puff) to face the ordinary fact (puff puff) that their child had simply run out on them. “Don’t vary routine,” he’d said in his phony fatherly way, ushering them out of the door. “He’ll turn up.” Like a last piece of a jigsaw puzzle found in the dustpan next time she swept, or like something a dog unearthed in the yard.

The boy was crossing the street, turning up the volume on the radio. She recognized the song from the Peabo Bryson album
Crosswinds
, a song she and Spence had danced to over and over in their try-again days. “I’m so into you / Don’t know what I’m gonna do-ooo-oo-ooo.” Singing along with the blaring radio, a woman stepped around a bed of dahlias to shape up the front of her hedges. Zala nodded a brisk hello and moved toward the corner, walking parallel with the boy on the sidewalk opposite. He paused at the side door of the Y, then moved toward the front of the building. She waited in the shade of the hedges, bending down to
remove pebbles, mud, and bits of glass from her sandals. Where does a boy that age, she wondered, get money for expensive equipment like that? Now she was thinking like the police, like the reporters, like Mac: Was your son involved in a gang? If not a peer-run group of hoodlums, then perhaps a ring run by an adult? Has he ever brought home items such as radios, jewelry, cash—things he couldn’t account for? So casually they spoke of break-ins, car thefts, the boosting of clothes, the snatching of purses, the peddling of hot goods, drugs, defective merchandise, as though everybody in the community was in on it.

An old man and a panting bulldog crossed over from Washington Park and almost collided with the boy, who played it off like a star recognized in public by a fan too awestruck to ask for an autograph. Out of danger, the old man and the bulldog drooped their heads again and went down the street. The boy was dancing, moving with the assurance that the ground underfoot would always be reliable. Zala watched the old man for a moment, how he studied the street; a sudden trip-up could mean the end of a porous bone too played-out to mend. She pictured herself of late treading the ground with the suspicion that any minute it might crack open and suck her under.

A blue car swinging way to the left to make a right turn in front of the Y interrupted her musings. Using it as cover, she ducked across the street toward the side door. She inched up toward the corner like a sneak thief to take a peek at the boy. He had one leg cocked on the third step and was swaying his hips to the music. The blue car cruised by and beeped a short beep. Then, apparently realizing he’d made a mistake, the driver took off.