Those Bones Are Not My Child (63 page)

“What exactly does your organization propose, in plain speech?”

“We feel that those babies should be separated from those young people who cannot care for even themselves. We propose special boarding schools where they can grow up to become useful citizens without resorting to crime or depending on welfare.”

“Forceful removal of children?”

“Voluntary, purely voluntary. There are many among the Blacks who favor this approach. Ministers, doctors, teachers, and others as well.”

“But … I mean, you don’t really think—”

“He don’t get it, does he?” whispered a viewer.

“I’m not sure I get it either. You’re sure this isn’t a movie?”

Horizontal lines ran across the scene. A light flashed; then, as the camera was directed on the Rolls going past the navy-deck-gray columns toward hazy daylight, the film was overexposed. After a jump shot, quivery white subtitles against a black-and-white poster of a pregnant Black girl looking up from a tub chair, wrist upturned as she tested the temperature of milk in a baby bottle, verified that the footage was shot in Silver Springs, Maryland, September 1980.

“I need a smoke. This is spookier than the mercenary camp stuff.”

“But what kind of ‘assistance’ is that? That’s … that’s …”

“Kidnapping.”

“Hold up, y’all. There’s a reel here somewhere that’s about chat—white people and their need to grab colored children.”

“Just so it ain’t some more of those mercenary training camps. I’ve had my fill.… Vernon, you going with Laf?”

Zala followed Mason out onto the patio, collecting last-minute pledges and statements on the way.

“Any word yet?”

Lafayette was squatting down, turning on the one radio someone had thought to bring along. He shook his head. There was no mention of the latest missing person, Larry Rogers, he reported. They moved aside as others stepped out into the sunshine.

“ ‘Voluntary’?”

“Ain’t that a bitch! An infant’s going to sign up for a boarding school.”

“I’m not sure I get it,” the sister from SAFE said. She looked up at the rooster weathervane swerving on its pole on the roof. One of the fathers looked up too. “I mean, are all these movie movies or what?”

The father turned his eyes from the roof.

“Don’t ask me,” he said.

“In your opinion, Judge Webber, since both the prosecution and the defense would be saddled with messy, incomplete records, can there be a trial? If, as you say, the wiretap evidence—”

Spence turned from the French doors when the judge began laughing. It was a long, wheezy laugh that ended with his cuffs in his eyes. As good an answer as any, Spence supposed, closing the doors behind the movers. “Virtually solved” and “impending arrests,” then, were to discourage “cottage-industry sleuthing,” as one City Hall rep had put it at breakfast in Paschal’s. And, more to the point, to discourage defense squads or “vigilante groups,” as both the mayor and the commissioner denied having said when the Techwood group’s lawyers threatened to sue for slander.

“I guess there’ll be no trial unless citizens bring it about.”

Citizens. The word hung in the air like a life sentence.

Ever since the Patrick Baltazaar “slip-up” and the step-up of disappearances of men, women, and children in March and April, the ratio of energy invested by the authorities in the children’s case was panning
out as four parts PR, mostly praise for a well-behaved citizenry and appeals to frightened conventioneers and businesses; three parts empty announcements, whenever civilian tempers grew hot; two parts threats and accusations, aimed at both civilians and official agencies; and one part investigation. More than ever, Spence was persuaded that the city was playing a waiting game.

“Son of Sam” had held the city of New York in terror for over a year before the police stopped him, his Ford Galaxy sedan pulled over for a traffic violation. The Yorkshire Ripper had been on a five-year rampage of slash attacks and murders before he was stopped, arrested initially for theft. John Wayne Gacy managed to lure, through his Pogo the Clown act and his ability to hire through his contracting business, thirty-three young men and boys over a three-year period before the Illinois police followed odd tire tracks leading from the river to his yard. And now Joseph Paul Franklin of the Defenders of the White Seed—sought in six states in connection with burglaries, robberies, synagogue bombings, and murder spread over two years; wanted in connection with the shooting of Larry Flynt of
Hustler
; wanted for questioning in the sniping of Vernon Jordan of the Urban League; and implicated in the New York Subway Slasher case—was still on the run.

How long would it take for one of the Atlanta killers to run a red light or to bungle a bank heist with a missing child in the getaway car? How long would it take after the arrest and questioning for information about Sonny and the others to trickle out? The Charles Manson band had been on trial for 129 days, with information about orgies of murders inching out daily, before we heard about the Benedict Canyon rampage, which they hoped would start a race war. The People’s Temple trials were still going on in California two and a half years later, the whereabouts of many who’d been at the settlement but not among the more than 900 dead to date unknown, the case building up against U.S. and Guyanese authorities still being refuted. The hunted-for suitcases of money and the posted rewards hadn’t resulted in any more information than the Atlanta reward had.

“I don’t envy Maynard Jackson,” Webber said suddenly.

“I don’t either.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say so. You’ve had a change of heart, it would seem.”

“I’d like to think that if I were in his shoes, I’d handle things
more … well, differently,” Spence said. “But I hate to think of how many Black people would have been rounded up, beaten up, railroaded, and worse if Maynard and Lee Brown were not running things. I hate to think of how this state of emergency would be used by … But I’m in my own shoes. Do they know about the feds’ taps? Were they done with Brown and Jackson’s knowledge?”

Beyond the French doors, at the far end of the walk, the big man was restacking cartons onto straps that lay crisscrossed on the ground. How many families, Spence wondered, had recently moved to new quarters and then had a member disappear? Might a mover return to a home to ask if everything was accounted for, then pick out his next victim? Bible Man had told the group that the man with the satyrlike beard had accosted him getting out of a cab. “Secret society up there?” He’d lifted his hairy chin in the direction of the reconverted stable at the top of the hill. Spence had just about brought his mind back under control from the outlandish stories of zombies, human sacrifices, blood rituals, but each time he saw the man, paranoia washed through him.

“I don’t have much time,” Spence said, crossing the room. “And I apologize for tiring you out and keeping you so long, but I’ve got to know—”

“If my doctors had their way,” Webber cut in, “I’d be resting in bed from here on out.”

Released from his usual self-imposed ban on personal references, Webber stretched. His socked feet snuffled against the fireplace screen. The joints of the chair groaned.

Panic gripped Spence. Webber was broadly hinting it was time for a nap.

“After a brief vacation on the Adriatic, I’ll be sojourning to some of the places of my misbegotten youth. If my heart holds out,” Webber added, patting his breast pocket. He whipped out his handkerchief and wiped his face and hands. He was definitely making motions to adjourn. Frantically, Spence surveyed the room. He could not leave without getting the tapes he came for.

“Judge Webber, five minutes more.”

“So much has changed, I imagine,” his voice drowsy and far-off, “since Brazil’s development of the interior …”

Spence was not listening. He was feeling around the fireplace for a loose brick. He went to the bookcases and opened the glass doors underneath. He crossed back in front of the fireplace to the log box built under the window. He moved kindling aside; there was nothing but old newspapers. He looked out the open window. The heavy scent of flowers and damp loam distracted him for a moment. Mattie had taken one look at the gardens and said to Paulette, I’ve never seen this much foxglove outside of a
curandera
’s botanica. It’s larger than the herbarium we have at the lab. Who would cultivate this much tannia and mandrake but a witch?” And off they’d gone spinning tales of the supernatural.

The Inquiry Committee was full of characters, and he was dependent on an old codger lost in reverie about treks in the bush to study lawmaking among the “naif.” As Spence drew back into the room, he remembered the framed wedding picture and went over to the bookshelves.

“… When one is lost,” Webber was saying, not hearing the crackle of glass, “it isn’t the number of days that one will recall, but the immense uncertainty that eats at the heart second by second by second …”

Whether the judge meant to describe the vastness of the Brazilian interior, or the course of the Atlanta investigation, or the various avenues of assistance open to him, Spence used the opportunity to step in close with the glass-spattered piece of paper, kick the hassock aside, and lean down into Judge Webber’s face.

“That is so. Now, let’s discuss the rest of the wiretap report. Names, dates, places. Let’s talk particulars, Judge. Does this report mean the Georgia Bureau compiled a case, then sealed it up? Does this paragraph mean the FBI have sealed their books too? Judge Webber, please.”

“Mr. Spencer,” Judge Webber began, his voice warbly. He stared into the fire, then spoke again. “You’ve said on numerous occasions, and I quote you, ‘Nothing’s in place,’ Do you think for one minute that you and your associates are in position to contain the storm that would erupt if results of various investigations were disclosed to the public?”

“Spell it out.”

“Sit down, Mr. Spencer, and collect yourself.”

Reluctantly, Spence seated himself again. He braced his wrists against the reinforced inseams at his knees and the paper stopped shaking. He could wait. He’d learned how.

Thumbs hooked in his sash, Mason inhaled the energizing aroma of consensus. They were all in accord about the basic things. One, that the official investigation was hamstrung and that the combination hobbling the Task Force was the official list, the official victim profile, and the stubborn resistance to acknowledge the links a map made obvious. Two, that they, the Community Committee of Inquiry, had five solid things to go on: their list of victims, their map, the testimony taped at Bowen Homes, the thirty-eight reports from witnesses, and their list of seventeen suspects. Three, that whatever theory individual members favored—cult, Klan types, drugs, prostitution, porn, or “pederasty” (the term the gay community insisted upon to counter the media’s use of “homosexual” interchangeably with “porn,” “sex for hire,” and “sexual exploitation of children”)—Inquiry should conduct their investigation discreetly; further, that Inquiry’s work should have top priority on everyone’s agenda for five straight weeks. Mason had expected Mac and Speaker to balk at the last two items. And from the way Marzala, Lafayette, and Herman were going through the pledges again, evidently they did too.

Recent plant closings had been taking up all of Mac’s time. When he wasn’t conducting stress-management seminars for community workers or group raps with the laid-off workers, he was hogging Inquiry meetings to tell them about it. Conditions were ripe for wholesale despair, Mac had concluded. Were overripe for a socialist groundswell, Leah had predicted. Or for more right-wing demagoguery, Marzala had sighed. Same ole same ole, Mason had thought.

But Mac had signed the pledge. Speaker too. Below his signature, Mason noted as Herman passed it across the table, Speaker had suggested that members of Inquiry be polled as to their preparedness to go underground, a strong possibility given the wolfish tone of the intelligence memos.

Mason completed his summation, then turned to Detective Dowell, who immediately went to the board to instruct them on triangulation
and to show them how to use the scanners, the radio device for foxing on a moving target’s position.

“You understand that this equipment is for the purpose of visual aids only,” he said solemnly. “And that I will not be accompanying you over the route.”

The sister from SAFE raised her hand. She was pretty sure that Dowell was being facetious. She thought he would wink at any second and clear up her confusion. She looked at the other two cops for a clue.

“Check this out!” Vernon said breathlessly as he ran in, reloading his trusty Instamatic. Everyone in the carriage house swung around toward the door.

“We were on the Stewart-Lakewood strip making our contacts. And up by the Pickfair intersection, where a lot of kidnaps were tried—” He was pointing the camera at the map to direct their attention to the red-alert markings in that area of the route when Lafayette ran in behind him.

“They’ve made it a play street!”

“You got to be kidding! That’s one of the most dangerous—”

“See what I mean?” the SAFE sister said. “And people in the neighborhood don’t even know.”

“Pickfair? Man, you can’t mean Pickfair!”

“You heard me. Parks and Recreation are setting up playground equipment.”

“What’s the matter with those mugs?”

“No coordination of information.” Dowell rolled the chalk in his hand. “Typical. But did you locate Innis?”

“Not yet, but we’re on his trail. We think he’s got a caravan together checking out some of the locations his witness mentioned. We think Sondra O’Neale is with them—the sister from Emory U, the one who’s been riding James Baldwin around gathering info for an article. We
think
,” Vernon stressed, crumpling the Kodak wrapper.

“We need to move quickly,” Lafayette urged.

“What about the films? The projectionist began unbuckling the straps of a Hot Spot case.

“We’ll stick to the agenda,” Zala said. “The first team get ready.”

Dowell chewed on his lower lip. He’d not completed the chalk talk to his satisfaction. Nor were they giving him time to turn his back
while one of the scanners was being removed. For the record, he’d meant to absent himself. But things were happening too fast. Mason was giving last-minute orientation. Gaston was double-checking the tool kits made up for each team. Before the projectionist could fit on a new reel, Team One had followed the vets out the door. Do well ducked out to go over points about the triangulator.