Those Bones Are Not My Child (76 page)

She broke off to hold up a torn sheet of paper from a spiral notebook. “Where does this go? Says, ‘February 13, P.B., green Chevy Impala, 20, white, brown shoulder hair, wispy mustache, eyes close set’? That refers to the Baltazaar case.”

“The Coffee Papers,” Mattie answered, holding open the portfolio that contained Zala’s blue notebook and a collection of index cards and other notes. “I want to go through this batch in a minute,” Mattie said, tapping the folio. “To my knowledge Williams doesn’t match the description of any of the suspects.”

“I don’t feel so good,” Zala said, leaning her head on the refrigerator door.

“Girl, you’ve been telling yourself that ever since your pastor asked you to give the Woman’s Day address in church. You could have been up there with Monica Kaufman and Jacqui Maddox, Zala. You too simple. And I wish you’d sit down.”

“You could have read the names on the real list—ours—and asked for a moment of silence.”

“I was scared, Mattie. I’m scared now. I mean the arrest. What do we do?”

Mattie put the cellophane tape down and turned slowly. “You think we made it hot for the authorities, don’t you?”

“Don’t
you
? There’s a connection between that gun-shop warehouse, the Klan, and the murders.”

Mattie looked at Paulette. Paulette blotted her face and neck with a napkin and blew down into her blouse. Mattie fanned herself with the morning edition. Neither of them answered.

“Why don’t we move this operation over to my place,” Paulette said after a long silence. “I’m about to dissolve. If you’re going to let the groceries melt, at least step aside so we can get a little of the breeze.”

It was a record scorcher. In the entertainment section, movie theaters bordered their ads with cartoon icicles. Old Man Winter blew frost across June sales of fans and air conditioners. On the front page, the heat wave stole the secondary headline, warning of an energy crisis and directing families with babies and senior citizens to the emergency relief shelters. A small photo near the bottom of the page showed a man leaning his arm out of a car. The caption identified him as an investigator
of strange phenomena, who claimed to have gotten on film two cases of spontaneous combustion of Georgians.

The lion’s share of page one was devoted to the capture of a local man papers across the country were referring to as “the Atlanta Fiend,” “the Monster Killer,” “the Crazed Beast.” Since the arrest on Monday of Wayne Williams, charged with the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater and implicated in the murder of the other adults and children on the official list, it was no longer necessary to wade through columns and columns of local color—the Shriners convention, the Piedmont Art Festival schedule, the Dogwood Golf Tourney, the Atlanta 500 stock car races, tulips in Hurt Park, the Druid Hills Arts Festival—to find the continuation of page—one taglines:
SUSPECT ON BRIDGE QUESTIONED … WILLIAMS’S ATTORNEY DEMANDS END TO STAKEOUT … SUSPECT’S HOME SEARCHED … FBI CALLS FOR ARREST … VICE PRESIDENT BUSH ASKS GOVERNOR BUSBEE TO ARREST … WILLIAMS ELUDES POLICE … SUSPECT HOLDS PRESS CONFERENCE … WILLIAMS ARRESTED AND CHARGED
.

In the middle section of the paper, international news was squeezed into skinny columns and stories on Williams were run in four fat sections side by side, page after page. One purported to give biographical information, though the data was frequently contradictory and tended to change from day to day. Twenty-three years old, only child of Homer and Faye Williams of Verbena Street, Wayne was described as an electronics prodigy, having built his own radio station, WRAZ, as a youth. An entertainment promoter, he’d been known also as an ambulance chaser and allegedly had a record for having impersonated a police officer. That he’d been a free-lance newsman for radio and TV was scantily mentioned; that he had access to police calls was mentioned frequently.

More damaging was the development of the lead sentence in the second column, which said Williams had frequently distributed leaflets at schools and parks advertising his nonexistent music company called Gemini. With lengthy quotes from psychologists and law-enforcement officials, “Gemini” opened the door to wide speculation on the Jekyll-Hyde character of the “mass murdering child killer”—who thus far was charged with the murder of one adult.

The third column beefed up the case against Williams by quoting people in the target neighborhoods who claimed to have seen him talking to Patrick Rogers, or walking with Aaron Jackson, or having a
drink in a bar near the Greyhound terminal, hangout of the victim Nathaniel Cater. Helen Pue, mother of Timothy Pue, listed in the papers as victim number 18, was said to have identified a photo of Wayne Williams as a man she’d seen talking to her son.

The fourth story described the evidence, choosing not to belabor the point that the colors of the incriminating fibers and the species of the dog hairs had changed drastically since Williams had become a suspect some time in May. Violet-colored fibers from a bedspread removed from Williams’s home were said to match those found in the hair of Nathaniel Cater, whose decomposed body was fished from the Chattahoochee several days after Williams had been stopped on the Jackson Parkway Bridge. A stakeout officer posted beneath the bridge, a rookie, thought he heard something thrown in the water, and a stakeout officer posted closer to the top thought he heard Williams’s station wagon stop before continuing across the bridge. Hairs from Williams’s German shepherd were said to match hairs found on Nathaniel Cater’s body, on the decomposed body of Yusuf Bell, found in ’79 under the flooring of an abandoned schoolhouse; on Aaron Jackson, found partially nude in the Chattahoochee in the fall, and on Charles Stephens, found near a trailer park in the fall. Fibers from the Williams carpet the investigators had cut up and hauled away were said to match those found on Stephens, Jackson, and several others. Blood samples taken from Williams’s car were said to be the same type as that of William Barrett, seventeen, found in May near I-20, and of John Porter, twenty-eight, who had not been on the Task Force list and whose “official status” was still uncertain.

Two photos accompanied the copy. The caption of one described Williams “cocky.” Taken sometime between June 4 and June 11, when Williams, questioned, released, then kept under surveillance, his home a camp-out area for media, police, and the nosy, broke through the police cordon and disappeared for hours, it showed a pudgy young man in glasses. Some said he’d eluded the police to dispose of damaging evidence overlooked in the June 3 search of his home. Others said he’d gone to warn his cohorts. Still others felt he might have headed for Mayor Jackson or Commissioner Brown as he’d once done to make fools of the stakeout. Others said he’d gone to DA Slaton to make a deal, names in exchange for immunity.

The families of still-missing women, men, and children badgered
the authorities at their offices and at their homes, demanding to know if a bargain had been struck and if the authorities were guarding wherever it was kidnapped relatives were being held. But the only
officially
missing person was Darron Glass,
officially
unaccounted for since September 1980, though his foster grandmother said she’d received calls from him, and reports had come in from Alabama to the effect that he’d been spotted at a baseball stadium selling peanuts. On the other hand, a worker in the Fulton County coroner’s office was convinced the Glass boy had been found, misidentified, and buried under another name during a hectic period in the spring when medical records got mixed up.

The other photo of Williams showed him handcuffed and climbing into a police car on June 22. In neither of the photos, nor in any other that appeared, did Williams resemble the suspect drawings on the cork-board down in task force headquarters or the descriptions given by eyewitnesses to abductions, or murders, or dumpings. He did, however, fit the description offered by psychic Lillian Cosby on a Tony Brown TV special aired back in April. For most media, the Tony Brown show was not a reference point, and so was not mentioned.
The Call
, however, and a few out-of-town Black newspapers, did pick it up. And it was the source of many conjectures in the barbershops and other neighborhood news forums in the Atlanta Black community.

In the April telecast, psychic Cosby described an individual who would be arrested as a light-skinned Black man, young, chubby, wearing glasses, receding hairline, sharp-witted. No two people seemed to agree as to whether she named the individual as
the
killer, a killer, or simply someone closely involved. A skeptical radio DJ threw out a challenge at every station break for someone to produce either the psychic or a videotape of the show.

Three other things had been part of the psychic’s description. The suspect had an identity kink—that is, he dressed in women’s clothes and wigs from time to time. The officers who stopped Williams on the Jackson Parkway Bridge in the early hours of May 22 saw both men’s and women’s clothing in the white station wagon. And though his story was fishy—he was checking out an address of a potential client at three in the morning—they did not detain him for more than a few minutes. Given the official victim profile, the police were programmed for boys’ clothing. The psychic also reported that the individual was well connected with the authorities. Those who remembered the spring telecast
as they followed the unfolding of the case in summer made much of the fact that Williams had once had an office in the same building as Zone 4 of the APD, had use of a police scanner, and had once, it was said, impersonated an officer. It was common knowledge on the day of his arrest that he’d been photographed with several Atlanta personages who’d written him letters of recommendation—or so he boasted: a plentiful supply of salt was necessary in weighing his statements. Hadn’t the resumé he’d brazenly handed out at the press conference he called in early June, together with the audacious challenge that made June 14 headlines—
EITHER CHARGE ME OR EXONERATE ME: WILLIAMS FILES LAWSUIT AGAINST MAYOR, COMMISSIONER, GA. CRIME LAB DIRECTOR
—proved to be only profiling. But “well connected” encouraged speculation about where Williams had gone the night the police gave chase only to have one police car rear-end another and earn the tag “Keystone Kops” in Williams’s later statements. Scuttlebutt at political potlucks had it that DA Lewis Slaton had resisted pressure to arrest exerted by the FBI and the governor until the White House arranged a meeting at the governor’s mansion. And though the DA’s office had charged Williams with one count of murder, word was Slaton still felt the case against the man was very flimsy.

The psychic had concluded the April telecast with a prediction that the man would be captured in ninety days. Local newscasters ignored her. They preferred to quote the GBI and FBI agents and FBI director William Webster, everyone except the Black woman on the PBS channel, as they gleefully announced, teeth glistening, eyes shining, that it was a Black man after all and not a racist conspiracy. So militants should shut up,
Pravda
could go to hell, BBC should go home, STOP should disband, and Maynard Jackson should calm down. The beast had been captured.

The radio newscasters echoed the “lone wolf” theme, but several of the disc jockeys didn’t go along, which gave music programs’ reports tone and texture.

“Turn it up,” Paulette said. “Let’s hear the latest word on his motive.” When neither Mattie nor Zala moved, she got up and went to the counter. Three tea bags were lying on top of the pot holder. Water had nearly boiled away in the saucepan. She turned up the radio and refilled the pot. “I believe you said something about iced tea a while ago.”

Zala opened the freezer. “You know them, Mattie, try to think. Is
Williams a black belt, a marine? Does he dabble in the occult? Show dirty movies in the basement? Hold satanic meetings in the backyard? We keep waiting and waiting to hear some connection, but all they say is that he did it and he did it alone. Nothing about the evidence we turned in.”

“That might be a good thing,” Paulette said, flopping down on the step stool. “Trespassing, breaking and entering, vandalism, theft. Jeepers,” she said, tugging at her hair, “I feel like Goldilocks. All we missed was the porridge.” She wrapped her long legs around the stool’s and sighed. “Where’s that Shirley McGill is what I’d like to know. Maybe she can identify Williams as part of the drug cult.” Paulette looked up. “Someone at the door?”

“Why didn’t I put the curtain back up, dammit!” Zala peeped over the top of the refrigerator door and looked toward the front of the house. “I can’t take Alice right now. She spooks me.”

“Alice Moore?” Mattie glanced toward the living room, then continued clipping the newspapers. “She’s been showing her husband’s picture to everyone. Do you think she suspected him all along of killing their daughter, or was that triggered, do you suppose, by the domestic-violence panel we saw at Judge Webber’s? She reacted so strongly to that Holmes woman.”

“She’ll go away in a minute,” Zala whispered, staring at the blue plastic ice trays. “We made it hot for the authorities all right, and forced them to move. Williams may not be connected at all. Could be he was just … handy.”

Paulette turned toward the fan and pulled her blouse away from her skin. “That’s dirty, Zala, leaving poor Alice out there baking in the heat.”

“She tells me things I don’t want to hear. Intimate things. I feel helpless to stop her. Her husband used to clean his revolver at the table while she washed the dinner dishes. Then he’d run his hand up her dress.”

“She really think he did it? Sounds to me like Nancy Holmes all over trying to pin everything from the King assassination to the Atlanta murders on her father. Revenge, in other words. I’m surprised the authorities haven’t picked him up, then gone after all the STOP men.”

“They’re satisfied they’ve got their man,” Mattie was saying when there was another knock on the door.

“Why don’t we let her in?” Paulette whispered. But no one moved one way or the other, and the whirring fan blades began to drag.