Those Bones Are Not My Child (55 page)

“Giving him plenty of time to get to the witness,” one of the community workers said, meaning the Bacon girl’s friend who’d said all along the death had been no accident.

“Plenty of time to get to somebody,” another man added.

She strained to hear the rest of the talk but was cut off abruptly when the door closed. Neighborhood workers whom Preener had talked with were convinced that keeping an eye on the Bacon suspect, on any of the suspects the police had released, would lead to the killers; the
killers, the workers were convinced, also kept their eyes on the suspects, selecting their victims from children the pimps and other creeps drew into their circle to exploit, children in no position to blow the whistle on the killers. These conjectures, discussed in Simmons’s barbershop and continued on the street, Preener returning to fill them all in, the neighborhood workers based on three facts. One, that there was so much testimony from witnesses linking Black men of unsavory reputation with white men unknown in the area. Two, that many of the descriptions were carefully kept from the media, the public. Three, that the suspects were always released and the witnesses discredited and dismissed—the Bacon suspect a prime example.

For in January, all charges had been dropped, the file and all evidence lost. Any other time, the media might have jumped on that. But the girl had not been on the list. So from the beginning it was a backpage story. And in January even the investigation took second place to the major story of the day, the release of the hostages in Iran. The driver’s trial had gotten less than two inches in the local papers. Days ago in the
L.A. Times
, though, Atlanta-based correspondent Jeff Prugh had made much of the fact that Commissioner Lee Brown could only blink when asked why the Bacon girl had not been made part of the Missing and Murdered investigation, blink because Brown had never heard of her. Not a rookie but an investigator was then called away from command center to locate the Bacon file, found, strangely, in another county’s possession.

The Call
had included the girl on its list, which doubled the official tally, but Lafayette and Mason had shown no interest in the information Zala brought them about the case. The vets could envision no connection between the driver of the car, a Black man, and the prowlers spotted at Bowen Homes, white men. The vets did stake out the Stewart-Lakewood area, not because of Bacon’s connection to the area but because the caller who’d tipped the authorities about the next dump had been described as “the redneck tipster,” and the FBI had traced the call to the Stewart area.

The Stewart-Lakewood area, in particular the shopping mall and the Pickfair Way section, was requiring a tab of its own in Zala’s notebook. Its connection to the case dated back to the summer, when attempted abductions were reported there and the first sexual kidnap hit the paper. The police had corrected Zala’s terminology at the time, explaining
that it wasn’t a kidnap, wasn’t a crime for an adult to offer a minor a ride so long as there was no coercion; nor was it a crime to make an indecent suggestion to a minor so long as no act ensued that could be said to corrupt the morals of said minor or otherwise contribute to the delinquency of the minor, and after all the boy had voluntarily gotten into the car for a ride; further, he’d not been harmed. Zala had backed out of the squad room that day appalled. Since then, through the STOP mail, she’d learned from the numerous child-advocacy groups that child protection laws left children vulnerable.

The Stewart-Lakewood area was further connected to the case in that many on the list, and many not on it, had lived there, like Angela Bacon, and/or disappeared from there. Or, like Luble Geter, peddled wares in the shopping-mall parking lot, or bagged groceries, or, like Charles Stephens, hung out along the strip. Faye Yerby had been found there stabbed to death and tied to a tree. What had made the vets move, what got them out in a caravan to follow Dettlinger’s car as he was showing reporters and TV news people how various victims were linked to the locale, was the connection between the “redneck” caller, the threat made to Lubie Geter by white men, the description two boys gave of would-be assaulters as white men, and the closeness of South Bend Park and the porn-ring leaders who’d been arrested, white men. It seemed that no one was sufficiently concerned about the girls and the women. Was it the fact of a white man, the fact of a boy, or was the man-boy combination the galvanizer?

Rain was seeping in around the frames of the annex window. Rain was drumming the building and it was cold. In the last few days, while logging the contents of Jan Douglass’s cartons stacked far from the radiators, she’d had to keep on her gloves.

Upstairs was the delegation come to the community-relations bureau once again to demand that Black militants capitalizing on the crisis be censured before race relations thoroughly deteriorated. Already, they claimed, there’d been too much reckless talk about the anonymous phone caller and too much dangerous speculation about the authorities’ refusal to play the phone recording on the air. Teo’s wife had walked in with them and flashed Zala a signal. And Zala was still resenting having to close up the cartons and leave not knowing whether Sue Ellen had infiltrated the group or joined them.

When Zala had first arrived from Austin’s, Spence having failed to
show, there’d been a group in the office discussing a conference they were planning on poverty. An integrated group of civil-rights workers, progressives from the Highlander Center and the local Southern Regional Council, and clergy who identified with the
Catholic Worker
tradition, they gave her hope that maybe the whole world wasn’t crazy damn mad. Zala had gotten to work on the news clippings, listening to their discussion and feeling at peace, though the material was anything but peaceful and the conversation about the impact of poverty on young people anything but restful. But there was hope. Just that morning the Burpee seed catalog had come in the mail, and setting out the garbage, she saw earthworms wriggling in the dirt along the brick walk. Morning had smelled loamy and warm for a while. Spring was coming. All day she’d tried to get hold of something Mama Lovey used to say to drown out the ugliness around her: the something something, but ohhhh, the faith of the gardener. The buoyant phrase waltzed in Zala’s head, lightening the anger of another day’s pay lost because Spence didn’t show.

In January, caught in the crush of frantic relatives come to the Quonset hut that served as the pathologist’s headquarters, she’d had nothing like “the faith of the gardener” to bear her up. Though the news had said two young Black males, white families were there too, and people looking for missing adult relatives. Lord knows, there’d been errors aplenty before, people kept telling each other. And the latest bad-mouthing to reach the papers—coroners, from behind their degrees, taking pot shots at medical examiners, the “unqualified” examiners calling their colleagues pompous quacks; both vowing but not in concert, to bring suit against the various investigative teams for creating chaos with physical evidence—did little to sustain any faith in white-coat expertise or blue. Those who’d arrived early enough, often enough, to get to know the janitor relayed the news that the team behind closed doors were using only those medical charts of persons on the Task Force list. When it was learned that the team felt confident to identify, by process of elimination, the bones the investigators had scrambled, all hell broke loose, and the relatives were quickly removed from the area.

Zala and two other determined parents had shouldered the terrible chore of trying to get the experts to consider their children while handling the bones on the steel tray. Others whose relatives were not on the
list stayed put on the sidewalk trying to convince themselves that the janitor couldn’t know, that they’d done all they could to make the medical charts of the missing available so when the news broke, they could go home and wait in anguish till the next said bodies were found. Zala had been pounding on the Task Force doors when the names of Earl Lee Terrell and Christopher Richardson were announced on TV, the news having bypassed the waiting families and official couriers too. No one had knocked on Sirlena Cobb’s door beforehand. She heard about the death of her son, Christopher, on TV a split second before a mob of reporters invaded her house shoving microphones against her teeth and cameras in her face.

With no faith of any kind, Zala had stayed in bed for days till Simmons came by himself to coax her back to the shop. Then two other boys were reported missing. The following day Terry Pue was found where the redneck who’d boasted over the phone that he was the killer predicted a body would be. She did not get up again on her own steam till one of the STOP volunteers called to say Lee Gooch had been found alive.

Zala then had set about cleaning the house, making gingerbread, and putting the finishing touches on Austin’s tapestries. Delia came by with new gadgets to try, leaving the sewing machine without Zala having to ask. The Gooch story had changed the climate in the shop, the STOP office, the whole neighborhood, people stopping in at the grocery for a single can of tomato sauce just to tell the story of how Dettlinger had walked into the Gooch home, spotted mail addressed to the missing boy from motor-vehicle bureaus in Florida, made a few calls, and bingo, located the boy in a Tallahassee jail for failing to respond to traffic violations.

Never mind that it hadn’t happened as simply as that, that the actual story had a cast of characters, that grueling time had been collapsed to a narrative second, that the boy had been released whereabouts unknown, that when he was apprehended again on another joyride charge he explained why he’d fled Atlanta—he knew one of the kidnappers and his life was in danger. The bingo version was the preferred version. When local reporters attempting to follow up on the out-of-town coverage were told by Atlanta authorities that there was no substance to the Gooch story of knowledge and threat, the bingo version became the only version. Zala did nothing in the daytime to correct the story with
the facts she knew; but at night, hunched over her notebook, she notated in scrupulous, meticulous detail every scrap of information she could get from B.J., Detective Dowell, the vets, Simmons’s customers, and the brothers in the neighborhood who knew people on the APD. Kept faith with the record, because it mattered. Because she was no longer a good little schoolgirl raising her hand to recite the Plymouth Rock Covenant. Then on February 5, she’d lost all voice, all faith, and fled to bed once again.

She’d been standing on the landing at the STOP office with Monika, who was spraying rose scent on the stairwell, when the news came over the radio. Lubie Geter had been found strangled. Weeks before, while most of the mothers were on speaking tours, Sandra had taken down testimony from three separate witnesses who’d come to report an incident in which two boys had run their go-cart into a car full of white guys, one of whom had threatened the boys with “Klan justice.” One of the boys had been Earl Lee Terrell, the other Lubie Geter. The STOP office was abuzz—had the witnesses gone to the Task Force? Had the information taken down been transferred? Had any media picked up on “Klan justice” since The Call ran the story? Was this carload of white men the same guys the vets and community workers were patrolling? That night, Zala was dictating copy to Speaker when the next news broke. Patrick Baltazaar was missing. Running from an attacker, he’d ducked into a phone booth and called the Task Force, but no one came. The radio commentator, paraphrasing someone from Commissioner Brown’s office, said the boy had failed to call the right number—the third number on the poster, or was it the sixth?

Later, crawled up in a corner of the sofa bed, Zala had been going over those portions of the B.J. tapes she’d transcribed months earlier for Leah. A white woman had written to Missing Persons, among other divisions, to say that her father and his Klan buddies were killing the Atlanta children just as they’d killed numerous Black children in their hometown in North Carolina while she was growing up there. Other things going on in her household had made growing up horrendous and Zala’s typing sloppy, a rattler lashing around in her stomach as she’d listened, the earphones clapped to her head. So when two office volunteers from STOP knocked on the door, she was too frightened to answer. It
was not until the next day, when Speaker insisted she go down to the City Hall Annex and log material, that she learned that someone had walked into STOP to say he could identify the whites who’d threatened Geter and Terrell. Further, he could identify a professional informer who was palling around with them who might, might not, be passing information to the APD, the Task Force, the GBI, the FBI, one of the various county bureaus, or keeping the information to himself in order to cop the reward.

“Even if that information goes over the transom or is phoned into the hot line,” Speaker had said, “there’s no guarantee it won’t be handled the same way the phone call was handled. Too hot to share with the people,” he’d muttered, shaking his head. “Leadership that has no faith in the people is dangerous.”

And so Zala had been at the annex every hour she could spare, determined to put in order material on two groups in particular: Coverts—Kluxers, survivalists, Birchers, Minutemen, the Posse Comitatus, La Rouchites, Defenders of the White Seed, states’ righters, and other ultra-right extremists; and Overts—fundamentalists, right-to-lifers, evangelicals, born-agains, creationist leagues, and other right wing pulpiteers. Material in the cartons showed that, emboldened by the Reagan administration’s green light and the President’s frequent references to Armageddon in our time, the overts and the coverts had begun to persuade farmers, unions, church and business groups to march to the right.

Zala turned, hearing footfalls on the stairs, and was glad it was not Leah Eubanks coming down and maybe reading her mind, for she would call her an historical idiot. Hadn’t Christianity, slavery, and capitalism developed side by side, hand in hand? Zala could hear the condescension in Leah’s voice, and was glad she’d cut ties with the woman. It wasn’t Sue Ellen either; Zala could hear her in the upper hallway arguing with one of the community workers. It was one of the secretaries taking out the late-afternoon mail wrapped in a plastic picnic tablecloth. Time for Zala to leave too. The woman was looking up over her shoulder through the staircase balusters, not, Zala noticed, at the debaters near the radiator, but further down the hall. That locked brown door. Mason and Lafayette, and others too, were sure the FBI was using the room for surveillance of City Hall visitors.