Geary was the first to come in, then Amanda, then a couple of older-looking men, one black, one white. Both had bushy eyebrows, clean-shaven faces, and the kind of brass and ribbons on their chests that came from a glorious career of riding a desk. They were window dressing, here to make Geary look important. If he were a rap star, they would’ve been called a posse. Because he was a zone commander, they were called support staff.
“Ma’am,” Geary mumbled to Mrs. Levy as he took off his hat. His boys followed suit, tucking their hats under their arms, just like the boss. Geary walked toward Faith, but the old woman stopped him.
“Can I get y’all some tea or perhaps some cookies?”
Geary snapped, “We’re conducting an investigation, not a tea party.”
Mrs. Levy seemed unfazed. “Well, then. Please, make yourself at home.” She winked at Will before turning on her heel and heading back down the hallway.
Geary said, “Stand up, Agent Mitchell.”
Will felt his stomach tense as Faith stood. None of her earlier shakiness was on display, though her shirt was untucked and her hair was still a mess. She said, “I’m ready to make a statement if—”
Amanda interrupted, “Your lawyer and a union rep are waiting at the station.”
Geary scowled. He obviously didn’t care about Faith’s legal representation. “Agent Mitchell, you were told to wait for backup. I don’t know how they do it in the GBI, but the men on my force follow orders.”
Faith glanced at Amanda, but told Geary evenly, “There was blood on the kitchen door. I saw a person inside the house. My mother’s S&W was missing. I feared there was an immediate threat to her life, so I went into the house to secure her safety.” She couldn’t have said it better if Will had supplied a script.
Geary asked, “The man in the kitchen?”
“He was dead when I entered the house.”
“The one in the bedroom?”
“He had my mother’s revolver pointed at another man’s head. I was protecting the life of the hostage.”
“And the man in the yard?”
“The hostage. He took the revolver after I shot the first man. The front door was breached and my attention was diverted. He ran into the backyard with the gun, which he fired at two young girls. I had my shot and I took it to save their lives.”
Geary glanced at his brass window dressing as he decided what to do. The two men seemed unsure themselves, but ready to back up the boss without question. Will felt himself tense, because this was the part where things either went down hard or easy. Perhaps an overriding loyalty to Evelyn Mitchell persuaded the man to take a softer approach. He told Faith, “One of my officers will drive you to the station. Take a moment to collect yourself if you need to.”
He started to put his hat back on, but Amanda stopped him.
“Mike, I feel the need to remind you of something.” She gave him that same sweet smile as before. “The GBI has original jurisdiction over all drug cases in the state.”
“Are you telling me you’ve found evidence that narcotics are a factor in these shootings?”
“I’m not telling you much of anything, am I?”
He glared at her as he put his hat back on. “Don’t think I’m not going to find out why you’ve been wasting my time.”
“That sounds like a wonderful use of your resources.”
Geary stomped toward the door, his minions scrambling after him. Outside, Sara was coming up the front porch steps. She quickly put her hands behind her back, hiding the blood sugar monitor she had borrowed.
“Dr. Linton.” Geary took off his hat again. His men followed suit. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize your name earlier.” Will assumed this was because Sara hadn’t offered it. Obviously, someone else had filled him in. “I knew your husband. He was a good cop. A good man.”
Sara kept her hands behind her back, twisting the plastic monitor. Will recognized the look she gave the men—she didn’t want to talk. For Geary, she managed a dry “Thank you.”
“Please let me know if I can ever be of assistance.”
She nodded. Geary put on his hat, and the gesture was mimicked like a wave at a football game.
Faith spoke as soon as the door was closed. “The Texicano in the yard said something to me before he died.” Her mouth moved as she tried to remember what she’d heard. “ ‘Alma’ or ‘al-may.’ ”
“Almeja?” Amanda asked, giving the word an exotic sound.
Faith nodded. “That’s right. Do you know what it means?”
Sara opened her mouth to speak, but before she could get a word out, Amanda provided, “It’s Spanish slang for ‘money.’ It means ‘clams.’ Do you think they were looking for cash?”
Faith shook her head and shrugged at the same time. “I don’t know. They never really said. I mean, it makes sense. Los Texicanos means drugs. Drugs mean money. Mom worked in narcotics. Maybe they think she …” Faith glanced at Will. He could practically read her mind. After his investigation, a lot of people thought that Evelyn Mitchell was just the kind of cop who had stacks of cash lying around her house.
Sara took advantage of their silence. “I should go.” She handed Faith the blood sugar monitor. “You need to follow your schedule religiously. Stress is going to make it harder. Call your doctor and talk about your dosage, whatever adjustments you need to make, what signs you need to look for. Are you still seeing Dr. Wallace?” Faith nodded. “I’ll call her service on my way home and tell her what happened, but you need to be on the phone with her as soon as possible. This is a stressful time, but you have to stay on your routine. Understood?”
“Thank you.” Faith had never been easy with gratitude, but her words were more heartfelt than anything Will had ever heard come from her mouth.
Will asked Sara, “Are you going to do a tox screen for Geary?”
She directed her words to Amanda. “Faith works for you, not APD. They need a warrant to draw her blood and I’m guessing you don’t want to go to the trouble.”
Amanda asked, “Hypothetically, what would a tox screen find?”
“That she wasn’t intoxicated or impaired by any of the substances they test for. Do you want me to do a blood draw?”
“No, Dr. Linton. But I appreciate your help.”
She left without another word, or even a glance Will’s way.
Amanda suggested, “Why don’t you go check on the merry widow?”
Will thought she meant Sara, then logic intervened. He walked to the back of the house to find Mrs. Levy, but not before seeing Amanda pull Faith into a tight hug. The gesture was shocking coming from a woman whose maternal instincts were more closely related to those of a dingo.
Will knew that Faith and Amanda shared a past that neither woman ever talked about or even acknowledged. While Evelyn Mitchell was blazing a trail for women in the Atlanta Police Department, Amanda Wagner was doing the same in the GBI. They were contemporaries, about the same age, with the same ball-breaking attitudes. They had also been lifelong friends—Amanda had even dated Evelyn’s brother-in-law, Faith’s uncle—a detail Amanda had failed to mention to Will when she assigned him to investigate the narcotics squad that was headed by her old friend.
He found Mrs. Levy in the back bedroom, which seemed to have been turned into a catchall for whatever struck the old woman’s fancy. There was a scrapbooking station, something Will only recognized because he had worked a shooting in the suburbs where a young mother had been murdered while she was pasting crinkle-cut photographs of a beach vacation onto colored construction paper. There was a pair of roller skates with four wheels. A tennis racket leaned against the corner. Various types of cameras were laid out on the daybed. Some were digital, but most were the old-fashioned kind that used film. He guessed from the red light over the closet door that she developed her own photographs.
Mrs. Levy was sitting in a wooden rocking chair by the window. She had Emma in her lap. Her apron was wrapped around the baby like a blanket. The little ge
ese were reversed across the hem. Emma’s eyes were closed as she sucked fiercely on the bottle in her mouth. The noise reminded Will of the baby in The Simpsons.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” the old woman offered. “Emma seems to be perking up just fine.”
Will sat on the bed, careful not to jostle the cameras. “It’s a good thing that you just happened to have a bottle for her.”
“It is, isn’t it?” She smiled down at the baby. “Poor lamb missed her nap with all this excitement.”
“Do you have a crib for her, too?”
She gave a raspy chuckle. “I assume you’ve already looked in my bedroom.”
He hadn’t been that bold, but Will took this as an opening. “How often do you watch her?”
“Usually just a few times a week.”
“But lately?”
She winked at him. “You’re a smart one.”
He was more lucky than smart. It had struck him as odd that Mrs. Levy just happened to have a baby bottle lying around when Emma needed it. He asked, “What’s Evelyn been up to?”
“Do I look rude enough to pry into someone’s business?”
“How can I answer that without insulting you?”
She laughed, but relented easily enough. “Evelyn never said, but I’m assuming she had a gentleman friend.”
“For how long?”
“Three or four months?” She seemed to be asking herself a question. She nodded her answer. “It was just after Emma was born. They started out slowly, maybe once a week or every two, but I’d say in the last ten days it’s been more frequent. I stopped keeping a calendar when I retired, but Ev asked me to watch Emma three mornings in a row last week.”
“It was always in the morning?”
“Usually from around eleven to about two in the afternoon.”
Three hours seemed like a long enough time for an assignation. “Did Faith know about him?”
Mrs. Levy shook her head. “I’m certain Ev didn’t want the kids to find out. They loved their father so much. As did she, mind you, but it’s been ten years, at least. That’s a long time to go without companionship.”
Will guessed she was speaking from experience. “You said your husband’s been dead for twenty years.”
“Yes, but I didn’t like Mr. Levy very much and he didn’t care for me at all.” She used her thumb to stroke Emma’s cheek. “Evelyn loved Bill. They had some bumps along the way, but it’s different when you love them. They’re gone and your life splinters in two. It takes an awful long time to put it back together.”
Will let himself think about Sara for just a second. The truth was that he never stopped thinking about her. She was like the news crawl that ran at the bottom of the television while his life, the main story, played on the screen. “Do you know the gentleman’s name?”
“Oh, no, dear. I never asked. But he drove a very nice Cadillac CTS-V. That’s the sedan, not the coupe. Black on black and the stainless steel grill on the front. A very throaty V8. You could hear it blocks away.”
Will was momentarily too surprised to respond. “Are you a car person?”
“Oh, not at all, but I looked it up on the Internet because I wanted to know how much he paid for it.”
Will waited her out.
“I’m guessing around seventy-five thousand dollars,” the old woman confided. “Mr. Levy and I bought this house for less than half that.”
“Did Evelyn ever tell you his name?”
“She never acknowledged it. Despite what you men want to think, we ladies don’t sit around talking about y’all all the time.”
Will allowed a smile. “What did he look like?”
“Well, bald,” she said, as if this was to be expected. “A bit paunchy around the middle. He wore jeans most of the time. His shirts were often wrinkled and he kept the sleeves rolled up, which I found rather perplexing because Evelyn always liked a sharply dressed man.”
“What age do you think he is?”
“Without the hair, it’s hard to tell. I’d put him around Evelyn’s age.”
“Early sixties.”
“Oh.” She seemed surprised. “I thought Evelyn was in her forties, but I suppose that doesn’t make sense with Faith being in her thirties. And the baby’s not a baby anymore, is he?” She lowered her voice as if she was afraid someone would hear. “I guess it’s coming up on twenty years now, but that’s not the kind of pregnancy you forget. There was that bit of a scandal when she started to show. Such a pity how folks behaved. We’ve all had our bit of fun now and then, but as I told Evelyn at the time, a woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down.”
Will hadn’t considered Faith’s teenage predicament beyond thinking it unusual she had kept the child, but it had probably rocked the neighborhood to have a pregnant fourteen-year-old in their refined midst. It was almost commonplace now, but back then, a girl in Faith’s predicament was generally suddenly called away to tend a never-before-mentioned frail aunt or given what was euphemistically called an appendectomy. A handful of less fortunate ones ended up in the children’s home with kids like Will.
He asked, “So, the man in the expensive car is in his early sixties?” She nodded. “Did you ever see them being affectionate?”
“No, but Evelyn wasn’t the showy type. She would get in the car with him and he would drive off.”
“No kiss on the cheek?”
“Not that I ever saw. Mind you, I never even met him. Evelyn would drop Emma off here, then go back to her house and wait.”
Will let that sink in. “Did he ever go into her house?”
“Not that I could tell. I guess people do things differently now. In my day, a man would knock on your door and escort you to his car. There was none of this pulling up and beeping the horn.”
“Is that what he did—beep the horn?”
“No, son, that was just a figure of speech. I suppose Ev must’ve been looking out the window, because she always came out as soon as he pulled up.”
“Do you know where they went?”
“No, but like I said, they were usually gone for a couple’a–three hours, so I assumed they were seeing a movie or having lunch.”
That was a lot of movies. “Did the man show up today?”
“No, and I didn’t see anyone in the street, either. No cars, no nothing. The first I heard there was trouble was when the sirens came. Then I heard the gunshots, of course, one and then about a minute later one more. I know what gunfire sounds like. Mr. Levy was a hunter. Back then, all the policemen were. He used to make me go so I could cook for them.” She rolled her eyes. “What a boring gasbag he was. Rest his soul.”
“Lucky man to have you.”
“Lucky for me he’s not around anymore.” She stood with difficulty from the rocker, keeping the baby steady in her arms. The bottle was empty. She put it on the table and offered Emma to Will. “Take her for a second, will you?”
He put Emma on his shoulder and patted her back. She gave an unusually rewarding burp.
Mrs. Levy narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been around babies before.”
Will wasn’t about to get into his life story. “They’re easy to talk to.”
She rested her hand on his arm before going to the closet. Will had been right. There was a darkroom set up in the small space. He stood in the doorway, careful not to block her light as she thumbed through a stack of five-by-seven photographs. Her hands had a slight tremor, but she seemed steady on her feet.
She explained, “Mr. Levy never set much store by my hobbies, but he was called onto a crime scene one day and they asked if anyone knew a photographer. Twenty-five dollars they paid—just for taking pictures! The old bastard wasn’t going to say no to that. So he called me and told me to bring my camera. When I didn’t faint over the mess—this was a shotgun incident—they said I could do it again.” She nodded toward the bed. “That Brownie Six-16 helped keep this roof over our heads.”
He knew she meant
the box camera. It looked worn but well loved.
“I moved into surveillance work later on. Mr. Levy had drunk himself off the job by then, and of course I’m a woman, so it took some time for them to understand I wasn’t there for flirting and screwing.”
Will felt his face start to redden. “Was this with the Atlanta Police Department?”
“Fifty-eight years!” She seemed as surprised as Will that she’d lasted that long. “I may be a bag of bones now, but there was a time Geary and his ass-kissers would’ve snapped to instead of brushing me off like a speck of lint on their shiny trousers.” She picked through another pile of five-by-sevens. Will saw black-and-white shots of birds and various household pets, all taken from a vantage point that implied they were being spied upon rather than admired. “This little so-and-so’s been digging in my flower bed.” She showed Will a picture of a gray and white cat with dirt on its nose. The lighting was harsh in the black-and-white print. The only thing missing was a board over his chest with his name and inmate number.
“Here.” Finally, she found what she was looking for. “This is him. Evelyn’s gentleman friend.”
Will looked over her hunched shoulder. The photo was grainy, obviously taken from behind the blinds covering the front window. The lens pressed open thin, plastic slats. A tall, older man leaned against a black Cadillac. His palms rested on the hood, forearms twisted out. The car was parked in the street, its front tires turned against the curb. Will parked his car the same way. Atlanta was a city of hills, resting on the piedmont of the Appalachian Mountains. If you drove a car with a manual transmission, you always banked the wheels against the curb to keep the car from rolling.
“What is it?” Faith stood in the doorway. Will passed her the baby, but she seemed more concerned with the photograph. “Did you see something?”
“I was showing him Snippers.” Mrs. Levy had somehow pulled a sleight of hand. The photo of the man was gone and in its place was the flower-garden-digging cat.
Emma shifted in Faith’s arms, obviously picking up on her mother’s troubled mood. Faith kissed her on the cheek with several quick smacks and made faces until the baby smiled. Will knew Faith was putting on a show. Tears filled her eyes. She hugged the infant tightly to her chest.
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