Those Bones Are Not My Child (92 page)

“R
eady?”

Her lunch hour almost up, Zala adjusted the sonic earmuffs and nodded. Schumake could do the shouting. That part of her preparation she had no need to perfect.

“Any damn fool body down range?” Her instructor’s voice ricocheted off the basements walls. No one stirred. Below zero for the second day, the booths on either side of her were empty. “Ready on the right. Ready on the left. Ready on the firing line. Commence firing!”

She emptied a round into the stationary target. It was a pleasurable feel, the weight in her hand, the ping and thud of collision solid in her gut. She snapped open the cylinder of Schumake’s practice pistol, spun it for his amusement, jacked out the spent shells, and reloaded quickly.

“Ready on the firing line,” she said matter-of-factly and immediately began firing again.

Schumake reached around her and set a brand-new revolver on the counter. He pressed the buttons that brought the target rattling toward them. “You’re getting damn good, I’d say—damn good.” He secured his scarf more tightly around his neck, no heat issuing from the pipes along the wall behind them. “Better leave your weapon in the locker if you’re planning to go to court from work.” He tapped her on the shoulder and she secured the sonic earmuffs in place again.

Zala shoved in the clip of the new pistol. Then she loaded her Walther, the .22 caliber, sound-suppressed automatic she’d ordered in a fit of recklessness. In the catalog of 6 Star, which was supposedly closed down and out of business, the gun had been advertised by a comic-book drawing of a man with three right arms: One arm snatched the weapon free from a holster strapped to his right leg; the second arm whipped it upward to aim; the third fired it, not from the shoulder but from the
hip, gung-ho style. “Order Your Merchandise Early,” the cardboard blank in the middle of the catalog said, its drawings appealing to those who reveled in broken teeth, bloody fingernails, and gore. The brass knuckles, bolo knives, and ammunition cases on the order blank brought to mind the man with the same name as a Klan founder. Teodescu and Sue Ellen said he’d been in court on the first day of jury selection. The Walther had arrived on the day of trial when the prosecution and the defense made their opening statements. Not out of business, 6 Star had merely changed its name and address. The return sticker she’d handed over to Lafayette; the PO box was in Glyco, Georgia. Once a week, Lafayette followed Slick from the FBI office on Peachtree to the agent training center in Glyco, Georgia.

Her co-workers in the bank tower went to considerable lengths to obscure certain aspects of reality from themselves. “Which trial?” they would have asked, blank-faced, when she left her post, a footstool in front of the file cabinets, to go to the courthouse. A good Black woman, model mother and model citizen: No one questioned her comings and goings; her crazy-quilt schedule was attributed to familial and civic duties. She could describe to co-workers going down to the lobby exactly how her children would be dressed and whether they’d be standing by the guard waiting for their father to come down from the third floor, or by elevator number 5 waiting for her to come down from the bank tower. Certain set habits, such as meditating by the window rather than gossiping by the coffeemaker, the older accountants advanced as a virtue to the younger typists. They held keyboards and adding machines quiet when she was on the phone checking on her children’s progress at school, occasionally calling a network of friends—from church, it would seem—who looked after shut-ins who lived on Gray Street and kept in touch with former church members who’d moved from Atlanta.

Daily Zala’s sense of isolation deepened. The Inquiry meetings in her home meant little to her now. The comings and goings of Lafayette and the other trackers simply meant more out-of-pocket expenses for Inquiry. Like an automaton she went to work and mindlessly relayed information from Spence to the others and back.

One day she would look out on Peachtree and see the white Toyota pull up across the street, front wheel wobbly. The driver would get out,
tucking a wave of hair behind her ear, to look at the tire. Her friend would come around to see, the two careless of oncoming traffic. Struck down, they’d lie in a pool of blood until Zala, sprinting from the bank lobby, could climb into the ambulance with them. Friend of the family, she’d say—would say whatever it took to get in and get to the tanks, the knobs on the tanks and the masks.

WAYNE WILLIAMS FOR PRESIDENT
was scratched on the side of each newspaper box at the bus stop at Five Points, Zala noticed as she headed back to work. The day before, she’d seen the handbills flying around Center City Park and the meaning hadn’t registered until later, when from the tower window she’d seen two white youths putting them up around the fountain and she’d gone down to dispose of them.

“We signed you out,” someone called to Zala. Three co-workers from the tower took turns shouting that a blizzard was predicted and she could go home. Zala waved thanks and headed in the direction of the courthouse.

At Alabama and Peachtree, AVFW vets were collecting for the Vietnam War Memorial, fifty-five thousand names engraved on a slab of polished black stone to be set in a mound of earth in the country’s capital. At the last Inquiry meeting, Spence and the others had talked about organizing buses from Atlanta for the Veterans Day dedication. The announcement of the upcoming memorial ceremonies had triggered off protests by Vietnamese Americans against the United States for Operation Baby Lift at war’s end. On public radio, a Vietnamese woman compared the situation in Saigon in 1975 to a burning building from which frantic parents had dropped their children to those below for safety. “Who could know,” the woman was saying as Mason attempted to get the Inquiry meeting underway, “that those who caught the children felt they had the right to keep them, fly them away, sell them, or give them away? Like puppies.”

Lafayette had given his report. Slick had been followed to the Bureau Training Center in Glyco, where he seemed to be a consultant or liaison officer between the Immigration agent training school and Arms, Tobacco, and Firearms school. Vernon showed a photo of Slick passing Red of the GBI in front of the Federal Annex post office in
downtown Atlanta. Speculation turned to whether Slick and Red were investigating or covering up the links that seemed to exist between Immigration and the Stoner convention the weekend of the Bowen Homes explosion; between the ATF, the Innis-McGill cult, and the “Klan justice” threat against victim Lubie Geter; between the “clean bill of health” the governor had given the Klan and White House pressure for the governor and the DA to arrest Williams. Speaker voiced a possibility that Spence found too plausible to ignore: Maybe the arms deal that the GBI informant alluded to in the memorandum that had been in Judge Webber’s possession—the one who’d infiltrated a particular Atlanta Klan family to find out about the arms deal and then heard members boast of their involvement in the Missing and Murdered case—maybe the arms deal was bigger than just the Klan. Given the number of mercenaries being signed up all over the southeast region to go down south of the border, maybe it was a government-conducted operation.

Horses tethered to the fence diagonally across from City Hall were stomping the sidewalk and snorting in the cold. Visitors coming out of City Hall, the capitol building, and the courthouse paused before boarding their tour buses, their eyes drawn to the horses. They were Tennessee walking horses, Morgans, and quarter horses—not particularly effective in riding down criminals or controlling unruly crowds, but nonetheless crowd pleasers. With the recent purchase of more horses there was increased opportunity for mounted duty, and according to Dowell morale in the squad room had lifted somewhat. There was still a lot of grousing because of overtime hours amassed because of the case. But the horses were beauties. When six mounties approached, smelling of coffee and cigarette smoke from the City Hall cafeteria, one of the horses pricked its ears forward in recognition, twisted its neck, and clomped noisily on the pavement.

City Hall looked like a postcard. Its landscaping stiff with frost, its window ledges glazed, it was a study in stasis. Crossing over, Zala wondered where Maynard Jackson had moved on to. People said that Benjamin Hooks had a clearer shot at the post Maynard was after as national head of the NAACP. She supposed ex-mayors returned to private practice. In recent days she’d been learning what former state legislators did. In a group she’d come to call the shuttle group, because they
moved triangularly from the courthouse to City Hall to the Capitol Police Office in the basement of the domed building, were several former members of the Georgia legislature, junior and veteran lawyers, and reporters who covered the court beat, the city hall beat, and the capitol beat. Ex-state legislators kept abreast of what was going on in the “triangle,” the three buildings right next to each other. The usual next stepping stone was becoming a local DA.

At the corner, Zala looked down the street toward the capitol. She often found the casual conversation of the shuttle group more informative than the trial itself or the media commentary on it. According to them, Williams had made a big mistake in hiring an out-of-town attorney to head the defense team, someone not sensitive to local customs and biases, not attuned to local speech patterns and style, not privy to hunches and tips on the various grapevines. Sure, there were foot soldiers to run down tips; there were aides who assisted in the mysteries of glance and gesture; and of course there were Mary Welcome, who’d stayed on as assistant attorney, and Chet Dettlinger, who sat at the defense table to second-guess the prosecution’s moves, and Camille Bell of STOP, who’d made herself available. But Alvin Binder, a white man from Jackson, Mississippi, was further handicapped by having had only a few days to prepare for the trial; and, most serious of all, he’d inherited a defense that was running on an empty kitty.

She’d heard them refer to Williams as a dupe, a setup, a dummy. The shuttle group’s speculation about the kidnap-murder ring echoed Miss Em’s description of the church group Lorraine had fallen in with: The real operators connived behind closed doors. And so—like Oswald, Ray, and Sirhan, they argued, moving from point to point on the triangle—the defendant would sit tight and reveal little simply because he’d been set up.

Zala crossed again and headed for the courthouse. No one in the side street and no one on the roofs, either. During the first two days of the trial, sharpshooters in goggles and high leather boots had lined up along the roofs’ edge, weapons pointing down at the crowds milling around the courthouse. Officers in flak jackets and riot helmets had been on the front steps and against the walls of the inside staircase looking shoot-to-kill grim. Police dogs were led through the corridors, up the stairs, taken to the elevators to sniff for bombs. In bulletproof vests,
sheriffs and platoons of deputies kept the traffic moving through the halls and through the surveillance. The tocsin sounded every few minutes at the airport-style setup, people forgetting to remove jewelry, key rings, and coin from their pockets, electric razors and cans of toiletries from their travel bags.

On the second day of the trial, a marshal had pulled Speaker out of the line bunched up in front of the surveillance archway. He gave Speaker the once-over with a hand-held metal detector. “Expecting an invasion?” Speaker had been the soul of cooperation, removing his knit cap, shaking out his locks, turning around good-naturedly as the marshal searched him. “His cohorts might try to spring him,” the marshal then said. Bible Man had been holding the larger tape recorder and Leah the miniature one. “No comment,” the marshal had said, spotting the mike. “We’re not with the media,” Leah coaxed. “No comment anyway.” But when he’d done with Speaker and moved down the line, Bible Man followed him, just as Preener and some neighbors from his former safety patrol followed the shuttle lawyers around. Inquiry was determined to find some channel through which they could get the 6 Star packets impounded by the court.

The amount of security those first days had everyone wondering: Was there a surprise witness waiting in the wings? No defense witness would cause such heavy guard, people were certain. The name “McGill” was on the lips of some who reminded others of developments last spring. While transcripts of the trial were being peddled at a dollar a page, people compared hunches. Logan had written Inquiry from New York that McGill, McGill’s son, and a former “personal friend” of McGill’s had identified Williams. Under hypnosis and subjected to both the psychological stress evaluation and the polygraph, the three had placed Williams on the periphery of the drug-running, child-murdering cult. That he knew not a great deal but far more than he’d revealed thus far, had been Logan’s summation in the fall when the Innis caravan, led by McGill, found a huge, partially burned cross and animal corpses on a burial ground just outside the city. Logan’s summation jibed with the shuttle group’s theory and much of the hunching in the fourth-floor corridor. But those who snooped around the offices of the defense team said there was little material on this angle in the Brady file, the volumes of reports gathered by the prosecution that was then, by law, made available to the defense.

Inquiry members were pretty sure who the witness would not be, but should be. For Spence it was the youngblood who’d testified at the St. Louis–Hardy–Wilcoxin sodomy trial. The three white men convicted of sexually molesting minors were said to have been involved with two or three victims on the Task Force list. The media, however, did not pick up the link, nor had the authorities. And according to B. J., the snoopers had found less than a line of it in the Brady file. Since the child porn angle had been Dettlinger’s theory all along, and he and
L.A. Times
reporter Jeff Prugh had amassed a great deal of material through independent sleuthing, B. J. was hopeful that a young teenager known to the two would be called by the defense to give the jury another suspect to consider. A boy from Miss Em and Michael’s neighborhood had been out one night filling a prescription for an ailing relative and had witnessed the murder of a youngster. He’d shared this information with a neighborhood worker and was, shortly after, picked up and charged with beating and raping a schoolmate he swore he barely spoke to; he swore he’d been framed.