Those Bones Are Not My Child (95 page)

“You don’t believe they were real roof men?” Kenti turned the TV off.

Zala pressed her lips together and listened. There was silence from the bathroom. From the closet, Kofi came and held out his hand. Globs of white were on the tips of his fingers.

“Go back to the part where the roofers were outside and Gittens was inside. Where were you?”

Kofi worked his mouth. His bottom lip disappeared under his top teeth while he thought. He wiped his hands on the back of his pants. “Me and Kenti were in the kitchen mostly, and Sonny was helping the landlord. You know, holding the stool steady.”

Kenti came and stood by the arm of Zala’s chair. “We were in the kitchen, Mama, ’cause he said we should stay out from underfoot on account of the roofers charge by the minute.”

“Uh-huh. Sonny and Gittens were in the hallway. Were they talking, laughing, or what?”

“I didn’t hear anything. Except the landlord poking around in the crawl space. You know, Ma, like the time we were up in there. That’s all I heard.”

“They were whispering then?”

“Mama, you scaring me.”

“I’m sorry. Then what happened?”

“Nothing much. The roof guys mixed up the plaster and fooled around in the closet.”

“Fooled around.”

Kofi laughed. “You’re making me say things I don’t mean, Ma. I mean they fixed it. One of the guys had a trowel. Then the roofers told
the landlord what the problem was and that they could come back and do a good job after the snowstorm. Then they all left.”

“They all left together? The landlord didn’t hang around for a few minutes?”

“We were in the kitchen, Ma.”

“How long were Sonny and he in the hall without you two or the roofers?”

“You mean alone?” Kenti whispered.

Kofi grabbed up three bags of groceries and lugged them to the kitchen. “Ask Sonny. He let’m in, he was in the hall with’m. I’m hungry.”

“Kenti, how long was it after Daddy left that the landlord came?”

“Mm … um … uhn … But I know you better get out that coat. You wetting up the chair.”

“Beg pardon?”

Kenti lifted two bags but set them down quickly and looked in instead, taking out what she wanted. “You gonna fix dinner now?” She pulled out two boxes. “I see you got macaroni and cheese. I can fix it, I think.”

“Just put the groceries up.”

“If you come and watch, I can do it.”

“Put ’em up, Kenti.”

“Put ’em up? Put ’em up on the ceiling?”

“Put the groceries away, please.” Zala got up and looked at the bathroom door. She went instead to the front window.

“I’m going to cook, Ma.”

Zala waved her on into the kitchen, then looked out to the street trying to piece it together. The landlord had been hanging around, circling the block perhaps. And when he saw Spence leave, the coast was clear, he made contact. Lafayette had come, no doubt, for whatever reason had kept Inquiry from court. Zala then thought of a more likely scenario. Lafayette, at Spence’s request, had been tracking Gittens. When he spotted Gittens’s car in the area, he and Spence, as previously planned, cleared the way. Gittens then made his move and confirmed their suspicions. Zala looked across the street. Surely they would not have gone far, and they’d see she was home. There was no sign of anyone hiding behind the low hedges in Paulette’s yard. There was no bush
big enough to speak of in the Robinsons’ yard. Perhaps the two had gone after Gittens. They would call now.

When Zala turned toward the phone, she found Kenti still standing by the chair, a box of cereal under one arm, a box of Kraft macaroni dinner under the other.

“You could’ve brought the groceries home in dry boxes, Mama. Then we could a used’m to start packing.”

“You better shut up and get in here!” Kofi hollered. “If you know what I know!”

Zala took a good look at her daughter. How grown she seemed, standing by the chair, her legs astride, the boxes under her arms, her gaze unwavering. She didn’t budge when Kofi called again. She didn’t hunch her shoulders up and lean against the chair under her mother’s stare.

“I’m sorry, Kenti, I didn’t mean to snap at you before.”

“You did mean it, ’cause you did it and you didn’t have to, you grown.”

Zala bent down and unbuckled her boots. “Please help Kofi put the groceries away, and I’m really sorry.”

“You coming?”

“In a minute.”

“I’m going to put the big pot on to boil the water, then I’ll need watching to see how to do this. I want to do this.”

“All right.”

“If you waiting for him to come out of that bathroom, the food’ll be all burned up.”

“Be there in a minute.”

Zala thought she would need more than a minute to think it through. But she couldn’t get past the part where Spence had used the children as decoys. So it had to be the other way around.

“I want you out of that bathroom, Sonny. Right now.”

He opened the door as Kofi let out a groan in the kitchen. “I wish you would calm down,” Sonny said, going to the kitchen, turning his head only slightly in her direction. “Things are all quiet and peaceful, then here you come.” He pulled a chair out from the table and whirled it behind him on one leg, barring her way. “I’ll do the hamburgers, Kofi. You don’t half cook’m through,” he said, done with her.

“Sonny, I want to hear what you know about all this roof business,” she said from the hall.

Sonny walked back from the stove to the table so she could see him fully. It wasn’t the same as he’d done months before: lookatme, lookatme, the haircut, the capped tooth, the hat his father had bought him. He had his hands on his hips, and his mouth was hiked up to one side.

“Would you leave it. You want to make a big thing out of nothing, save it for Dr. Perry. She’ll go for it. Me, I just want to eat and finish my homework.”

“Who the hell are you talking to?”

He sucked his teeth and went back to the stove. “Get the rest of the groceries,” he said, tapping Kofi on the shoulder.

“Who you think you talking to now? I ain’t your slave.”

“Everybody be quiet.” Kenti banged the box of cereal down on the table. “Everybody in this house is talking all the time and don’t even hug or say hello. So why don’t everybody just be quiet.”

Kenti looked around at her mother, whose eyes were still blazing. Then she turned her back and tore the top off the blue-and-white box.

“W
e got grits. We got hot skillet biscuits. We got Southern fried chicken, quiche, nachos, lox, sushi, pizza, egg rolls, and paella. We got Six Flags Over Georgia, Stone Mountain, the zoo, and the lovely Chattahoochee. Got the Falcons, the Braves, and
E.T. the Extra-Terrestial
on a first-run basis. Got carpeted subways, decorated tile in the stations, a stadium, a symphony, the ballet, and an art museum. Got the Merchandise Mart, the World Trade Congress Center, the world’s tallest hotel, and an airport so big it’s liable to run its own candidate for Congress.…”

Spence followed the tour bus weaving leisurely up the newly widened street respecting none of the freshly painted lines and dashes in the blacktop. Placards on the back and sides of the bus promoted Broadway shows on the Southern circuit. On the Saturday night of February 20, a festive
King and I
crowd had been caught in the glare of TV lights there to catch the jurors’ return to civilian life: after nine weeks of listening and twelve and a half hours of deliberation, they had brought in two verdicts of guilty.

“Aunty Paulette’s plane gets in at 10:10, Dad.”

Spence looked in the rearview at his sons, confused for a minute. They should have been in school. The soccer ball to his chest, elbows stuck out, Sonny was swiveling the globe against his shirt front, looking at nothing. Kofi was waving to passengers on the tour bus, those who weren’t looking over the roof of their car, Aunty Delia’s car, to an apartment building going up on the next street. The formal facade stopped abruptly at the third floor.

“Always building,” Spence murmured. “But it’s always a thing.”

“We got steel-and-glass towers. Got Georgia red-clay straw bricks, and the famed Georgia pine. We got long, long-burning fuses, short
memories, and coolant systems that are state of the art. Got false fronts in place and flax at our backs. Got covens and klaverns and twitchy commandos. Got funeral wreaths fading on doors in our neighborhoods. Black armbands and green ribbons discoloring in the back of dresser drawers. Got Twinkies set on saucers and chocolate milk for curfew-free children bounding in from play at 3:30 or 9:00 or even 10:45. We got names, dates, events boxed, locked, and buried. Got walls well erected against question and challenge. And roofs bolted fast against all types of storms.…”

“Crowbar,” Spence muttered, passing the bus and entering onto the highway for the last clip of the trip to pick up the wedding party.

“Crowbar?” Sonny leaned forward for a minute, then felt he knew what his father was grinding his teeth about. He never let up. There was a case in the paper lately about murdered women. Lafayette and them were trying to get the police to see that the women were part of the whole Missing and Murdered thing. They’d been running around doing that since the big snow. They hardly came to the house anymore, for meetings. Only a few now; mostly they hung out at the garage on Memorial or stood around talking in the side lot junky with car parts. They kept saying they had to move fast ’cause the Task Force kept getting smaller and Williams’s new attorney was getting nowhere arguing for a new trial.

“Hope yet,” Spence said, talking to himself, both sons with their faces turned to side windows ignoring him now.

There was hope. Like Lux the Leather Illuminator down at Simmons’s had said, “All closed eyes ain’t sleep and all goodbyes ain’t gone.” There were still pockets of interest and people who wouldn’t let the case go. James Baldwin had been coming to town off and on; a book was rumored. Sondra O’Neale, the Emory University professor, hadn’t abandoned her research, either. From time to time, TV and movie types were in the city poking around for an angle. Camille Bell was moving to Tallahassee to write up the case from the point of view of the STOP committee. The vets had taken over
The Call
now that Speaker was working full-time with the Central American Committee. The Revolutionary Communist Party kept running pieces on the case in the
Revolutionary Worker
. Whenever Abby Mann sent down a point man for his proposed TV docudrama, the Atlanta officials and civil rights leaders would go off the deep end. Dettlinger and Prugh were putting their

heads together on a book. So long as there were people who kept the thing going, Spence could stay on the case without feeling he was alone, or hallucinating.

Spence stole a glance in the rearview at Sonny. If he let out the rope and gave Sonny some slack, the boy would eventually lead him to where he wanted to go. Zala kept harping on the landlord, browbeating the boy. But there was more than one way to skin a cat.

“We’re going to make it,” Kofi said, looking at the clock on the airport tower.

Mother and daughter sat on the floor by the TV, the younger unbraiding the older one’s hair. The house around them stood back, separate and chilled, aloof from the cartons and barrels, apart from the furniture pushed together and numbered with squares of red stickers. When the news came on, the three females gathered as round a camp-fire. Through naked windows the sky showed gray like lead.

Brass handles of a casket gleamed. Schoolmate pallbearers in white gloves carried their chum down the steps. Grieving mothers seen through the gauze of black veils. School pictures, the long-ago smiles fading as the image dissolved and the courthouse appeared. The flag, the paneling, the gavel in its wooden saucer. Then “clearance,” the leitmotif of officials. Ten, then twelve, then fourteen, cases “cleared by arrest”—why try him again, trials being costly?

Homer Williams: “I don’t see how anybody anywhere could find my son guilty.” Camille Bell in her trademark glasses: “The jury was given no one else to look at; the real killers have not been found.” An unidentified Blood in a leather-trimmed beret: “He’s a political prisoner.” Then Andy Young, confident that the jury knew what it was doing, rubber-stamped the entire enterprise.

An expert from the FBI Behavioral Science Unit came on the screen to say that Williams’s behavior jibed with three of the nine classic features of the serial murderer’s profile. One, serial murderers were invariably police buffs. Williams was a scanner freak and owned a car purchased at a state patrol auction. Zala blinked. It had been said so many times, on the block at least, that the white Chevy wagon had been bought from an uncle in Columbus, Georgia, she wondered what car the expert was talking about. And would he mention that ambulance
and fire engine chasing was Williams’s work as a free-lance news photographer? She dropped her head to the left as Kenti brushed her hair. Delia reached over and massaged her shoulder. Zala closed her eyes.

Two, serial murderers usually went out of their way to make postmortem contact. According to the authorities, Williams had attended one of the funerals and before that had applied for a job as a morgue photographer. Zala opened her eyes again and tilted her head to the right as Kenti brushed. How many features did Leah fit, or Vernon, or Dowell? She was sure Williams had applied for the job in 1979, not postmortem.

Three, serial murderers invariably collected souvenirs. The stakeout officers who’d stopped Williams on the bridge had reported seeing clothing in the car that could not have been Williams’s, and the family had boxed up numerous items between the bridge incident and the first lengthy questioning on June 3. But, Zala frowned, Dettlinger maintained that the bag of clothes from the Chevy was still on the back porch of the Williams home, and no one had had any interest in it.

The review continued. Zala tried to stay awake to see if they would interview or even mention Mildred Glover and Annie Rogers, mother of Patrick Rogers. They’d begun to organize a second committee, Parents for Justice, during the period when agency after agency had been going after STOP. But there was only the now-famous shot of the convicted man in an isolated cell, the camera looking down on him through the bars, the shadow of the bars slanting across the no-longer-pudgy Wayne Williams. Then a series of on-the-street remarks from children playing in the parks, women hanging clothes on the line, men hosing down cars. In one crowd scene, Zala recognized some of the men and women who’d come down from Harlem for the September 9 rally. They’d questioned her closely about the zoning method. “What, no precincts!” They couldn’t get over it. “You mean it’s all centralized in one or two buildings per county? That’s insane!” they had screamed, collaring others who’d come from Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, and Philly to compare notes. “Police work is all about squealing. Who the hell is going to hop on a bus and travel ten miles to go up into some big-ass building to talk to a cop they’ve never laid eyes on?”