Those Bones Are Not My Child (97 page)

In the upstairs room that Peeper had occupied, Zala stood unwrapping a bunch of baby’s breath. She could look right down into her living room, could almost read the sticker on the back of the Sony still sitting on the hallway floor midway between the living room and the kitchen. How awful, no privacy; what was somebody doing about people like Peeper? She chuckled.

The corps of bridesmaids, women who looked totally unfamiliar, though Zala knew she’d met a few of them before at the Webbers’ estate, were lined up in front of the bathroom. Paulette was blotting her lips and smiled on the tissue when Zala came into her room. Six yards of champagne bridal satin, the bodice cut on the bias for graceful cowling across the breasts. Two yards of ecru lace for the peplum that flounced over Paulette’s hips and dipped down in back. Thirty-six dollars’ worth of seeded pearls hand-sewn on the lace. Zala felt bad that her only contribution was the headgear.

“You gorgeous long drink of water, you!”

“Don’t make me laugh, Zala, I’m trying to hold it all together. And whatever you do, girrrrlllll, don’t look my way while I’m taking the vows or you’ll crack me up.”

“I’ll behave if you behave. Sit.”

Paulette held on to the edge of the dresser as Zala fitted an the satin halo she’d made from a length of welting. She pulled it forward and tugged part of the halo down toward Paulette’s left eyebrow. Satisfied that it would stay put, she arranged sprigs of baby’s breath inside the halo at the crown, then, parting Paulette’s hair gently with her finger-tips,
pinned the stems down. With the extra bobby pin she fluffed the hair back in place.

Zala backed up, shoving the sewing basket out of the way, and looked at her friend.

“You may not know it, girl, but you’re going to miss the hell out of me!” Paulette held on to the dresser to stand up.

“I know it, Paulette. I’ve been missing you for months.”

“It’s going to get worse. It’s going to come to you that we’ve been more than across-the-way neighbors, Marzala Rawls Spencer. And you’re going to cry your eyes out. So I want to tell you now, while we have this moment together …”

“Yeah?”

“Just suffer, bitch.”

“Laugh if you want, but you won’t be laughing when I trip your ass down them stairs.”

“Oh, God. I have to walk down the stairs in these shoes, don’t I?” Paulette hiked the hem up and lifted one shoe and groaned. “My father’s going to have to carry me down on his back.”

“Don’t you want to climb out the window first or go through any of them numbers brides go through at the last minute?”

“I think I’d better go pee is what I think. But before I figure out how to do that with this gown on, let me say I’m glad y’all are going to be living here. It’ll give the joint some class.”

Zala stood by the window. Mr. Robinson had built an arched trellis in Paulette’s yard that was grander than their own. All morning, neighbors had been bringing over whatever flowers had come up early to decorate it. Mrs. Grier had forced paperwhite narcissus bulbs in the basement. They were on the altar in the brass pot Gerry had given Zala on their last day in the Georgia Sea Islands. There was to be a two-lined procession from the foyer to the side door, then out to the yard. Zala was glad there was no wind blowing. The dress she’d made for herself was a quickie wrap—no buttons, no zippers, no Velcro or fasteners. She looked up. On the western rim, the sun was glinting around the edges of a cloud bank. No longer like lead, the sky was rinsed blue.

T
he film convinced them they were driving through Aspen. In church basement chairs, the senior and junior choirs overhead in call-and-response singing, eight members of Inquiry were driving through the town of Aspen, Colorado, at 35 mph. They stopped at a light and children in shorts crossed, names stitched on the sides of their swimming-pool satchels. Driving again, they passed a troop in ski clothes reading a menu in a restaurant window. Turning down a leaf-strewn lane on a crisp autumn morning, they paused to watch a man reshingle the scalloped eaves of a Swiss chalet. On the main street again, in heavy night traffic this time, icicles reflecting the light from a movie marquee, their headlights strobed the green door of a tavern. Then down a rain-swept driveway, they followed a collie carrying a sack by its handles. Going into a garage, the dog dropped the bag and a jug of cranberry juice spattered as the garage door slid down.

Lafayette scraped the bottom of his shoe on the rung of Zala’s chair and they sped up a mountain bluff, plowing through flowers of ice like a kayak. Snow was banked to their elbows on both sides. They shivered and huddled together. McClintock turned the wheel of his notebook and they climbed a peak to the left and felt suddenly airborne. From their new vantage point, they looked down on the movie house, the restaurant, the Swiss chalet, the tavern door, and the collie’s garage. Buffeting her stomach in the updraft, Zala held on to the back of Dowell’s chair. Water bubbling practically under his feet, he kept his eyes on the ski lodge whose rear deck held the huge hot tub. The ski lodge was built like a ship.

Preston, the Florida narc, had called from a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, where the ornate fittings of the S.S.
United States
were scheduled to be auctioned off. He’d driven over from Quantico, where he’d
been taking in an FBI seminar and, snout ever to the ground sniffing out money, picked up on a few things. He’d confirmed from that end that agents for the U.S. Customs Service had infiltrated a group involved in an illegal arms deal and had traced the dealers to the same Klan family in Atlanta that a GBI informant had. Preston had proposed on the phone that Dowell throw in with him and try for the reward. Not the reward from the children’s case; the feds would obviously separate the child murders–international arms deal tie-in. Local murders complicated things. By now they would have suppressed or destroyed any evidence that linked the two. The reward Preston was talking about had to do with the weapons. It was customary to award a percentage of seized property—in this case maybe as much as would fill the whole of the 6 Star warehouse—to agents responsible for making the collar.

Dowell had seen through it. “Hush money, you mean.” What else did a Florida narc and an APD homicide detective have to offer those assigned to the armament case but their silence? Preston had laughed and called him chicken shit. And when Dowell laid out the possibility—a possibility that grew more and more probable each time Lafayette came back from Glyco—that the arms deal might be a government caper, Preston had laughed even louder, dropping more coins in the phone. “The bigger the better,” he’d said. Judging by the speed with which the regular agents were squeezing out free-lance and contract part-timers, the arms deal might well be a CIA covert operation the other bureaus had happened across. In which case, Preston argued, there’d be beau-coup hush money to pass around. Wasn’t it time some colored guys broke into that private country club anyway? Preston was playing with fire. Dowell no longer accepted his phone calls.

“Too bad we’re not driving through Atlanta,” Lafayette murmured as they observed the highway patrol in Aspen. The sensation of being in a car in Colorado was so strong, Lafayette felt around to his left for the armrest of the car door.

A videodisc, Dolph Newcomb, a.k.a. Claude Russell, had informed them, can store as many as 54,000 stills, which can then be called up on the screen in one-twentieth of a second. Single images, footage, graphics, any visual can be segued to allow the viewer to reconceptualize or recontextualize a particular site, detail, or relationship. Any feature of the targeted terrain can be seen from multiple perspectives, they’d discovered driving through Aspen, with Dolph working the dials so they
could experience what the area felt like at any time of day, night, or season and under varying weather conditions. They were now going over the same terrain, the children in their shorts with snow on the ground, the collie dropping the juice at twilight.

With the aid of a videodisc, an entire city could be learned. A particular district or neighborhood could be mastered without leaving one’s chair. Half the stills could be gathered from guidebooks. A team with cameras could leisurely walk through a district taking snapshots.

“Such as the killer’s route,” Dolph said, “or the segments of the route where murders occurred after Williams’s arrest.”

“Or the Gray Street area,” the young reporter said next. “Where the house we had under surveillance mysteriously burned down.”

“Or the neighborhood where we keep losing the boy,” Vernon said, looking across Zala to Spence.

“You can be there in ways you wouldn’t dare be there for real,” the visitor from Hot Spot continued. He pressed the fast-forward button to show them something else. “Believe me,” he said to hold them, “it’s a matter of time before our neighborhoods become the target of this new branch of surveillance research.”

They were walking through a campus now, clusters of windburned faces reading the notices on a columnular bulletin board ten yards from the student union. Lafayette put his feet flat on the cement floor. Mc-Clintock sat up straight as they went up the steps. Vernon’s hands left the camera in his lap as they pushed through the revolving doors.

“If we had more equipment, I could turn this room into Aspen. With holograms, you’d be so convinced, you’d step right up to that counter and order.” Dolph turned in Spence’s direction. “Remember the raid at Entebbe, Nat? That’s when the Defense Department got into this research. They’re funding a group up at MIT. Need I say more.”

“Talk money.” Spence leaned forward to catch Zala’s eye. On an anniversary card from the Webbers, the judge’s wife had pledged financial assistance toward Sonny’s rehabilitation. “What would it take to make a videodisc of a six-block area, for example?”

While Dolph was scribbling on the lid of the suitcase holding the tapes, Mason leaned in toward the rest of them.

“Speaking of money, I’d sure like to know where Atlanta’s federal dollars went.”

“The long hot summer was the threat,” Lafayette said for the benefit
of the Blood from California. “That’s how the local authorities got the money. There were more community groups organizing than the authorities could contain. Word was spreading and it was spreading fast. It wasn’t enough to call people outside agitators and vigilantes anymore. The official fiction was unraveling. People were waking up.”

“Can’t prove it by me,” Dolph said, shaking his head.

“Mellow?” Spence chortled.

“Brain dead, jim, brain dead. I think they’ve mickeyed the city’s drinking water.

Mac sighed and set his notebook on the floor, as much to prove to himself that it was the church basement floor and not the cedar planks of the college dorm hallway as to get up and fix a cup of coffee.

“I wish the rest of us were here,” he said as the young reporter jumped up from his chair.

The Inquiry group had dwindled to ten. Leah and Gaston, still hanging in, were out scouting a neighborhood for the Spencers. On the table by the coffeemaker were three dog-eared copies of
The Turner Diaries
that Speaker had sent. The 1978 novel, which blueprinted the ultra-right takeover of America, was his way of saying not to count him out. But he’d not been part of the group for months. He’d gone to New York when it was thought that Maurice Bishop, prime minister of Grenada and leader of the New Jewel Movement, would take the case of the independently developing Caribbean nation to the UN. The one viable economy in the Caribbean that wasn’t a client state, socialist Grenada had been the target of destabilization schemes since the New Jewel Party had come to power. When last heard from, Speaker was in D.C. President Reagan had rebuffed Prime Minister Bishop, refusing to meet with him and sending a marine officer from the National Security Council in his stead.

Mac turned to ask if anyone else wanted coffee. Mattie, whom he hadn’t seen since the break-in at the warehouse, had driven him through a snowstorm to see Alice Moore at the state asylum. Despondent, Alice had called a suicide hot line. At the volunteer’s recommendation, she’d called the police, who had arrived and handcuffed her, informing her that threatening to take her own life was a crime. She’d spent thirty-six hours in an isolation cell, without food, water, or clothes, then been shipped to Milledgeville, where it took her three days to walk off the near-overdose of medication. Drugged or not, she
was daily propped up in front of a chart in the hall, “The Aid to Daily Living,” until she agreed to abide by the 5:30 a.m.–to–8:30 p.m. outline. Fortunately, a nurse’s aide one day walked her two feet down the hall to another chart, fly-specked, that read “Patient’s Rights.”

By the time they got to Milledgeville, Alice Moore had her hospital insurance papers in her seersucker robe pocket. She’d decided to stick it out for the money. Mac was never clear as to whether Alice was suing her husband for divorce and alimony or was planning to charge him with the murder of their child. She’d not been particularly coherent.

Mac brought over a cup of black coffee for Dowell, who remarked how he missed a good cigar. Mac missed B. J. Greaves; flinty though she’d always been, she was straight-arrow and worked hard. B. J. was in Wisconsin with Dave Morris, training staff for a runaway shelter. She called from time to time, mainly to remind them, as she put it, that Klan-arms-drugs was but one of the patterns, while the one playing the largest role in the murders was child porn.

“One last thing I want to show you,” Dolph said, looking at his watch. “This will give you an idea of how to scout an area and collect material.” Vernon watched closely. Overhead, the choirs were singing in eight-part harmony “Take It to the Lord in Prayer.” Zala pulled back from the streets of Aspen and bowed her head over the straw pocket-book in her lap.

Spence glanced at the door of the basement room, usually used for Wednesday-night fellowship. Someone was outside the door. Was it Sonny eavesdropping? Spence turned back to the monitor. Streets and yards were emerging on the screen as more familiar ones had in the developing pan that morning, Vernon swishing the heavy paper back and forth with the tongs, four pairs of eyes glued to a figure emerging as in a seance: Sonny ducking under a tree and disappearing into a black hole that looked like a doorway in ’Nam about to receive a fragged lob.