Ronald Whitten’s next words died as he came closer and saw who it was Malcolm was talking to. “Oh,” he stammered. “Oh. I…I…”
King stood up with a gregarious smile. “Please don’t chastise the young man on my account,” he said. “I’m afraid I am the cause of his tardiness. I asked to him to sit and talk with me and I guess we both just lost track of the time.”
“No, sir,” said Whitten, still struggling to piece words together. “No, that’s…that’s…fine. It just…I just…”
“Yes,” said King. “Please excuse me, I have to try to get at least a little sleep. I expect that this is going to be a very demanding day.”
Its job done, the gregarious smile faded like morning mist. King looked tired. Indeed, in that moment, Malcolm thought this might be the most thoroughly exhausted man he had ever seen. He stood with Whitten and watched as Martin Luther King walked alone into the sleeping hotel, absently swirling the glass of brown liquid in his hand.
twenty-two
Bob’s cellphone chirped.
When Bob answered, Doug Perry spoke without preamble, “Where the hell are you?”
Bob sighed. “He’s not going to call.”
“You don’t know that.”
Bob braked to a stop at a red light. He said, “It’s been what, three hours now? Plenty of time for him to have seen the video online. Heck, look at the comment board. I saw hits from Limoges, France and Sao Paulo, Brazil. This thing has gone global. You can’t tell me this guy in Chicago, USA doesn’t know it’s there. He’s not going to call. He never had any intention to call.”
“I’ve got a building full of cops who are very pissed at you just now.”
Bob’s laugh was bitter. “That is so far down on my list of pressing concerns that I can’t even see it from here. You tell them if that animal does call—which he won’t—I’ll make sure they know. But I can’t just sit around waiting.”
“Your car is still parked downstairs. You can’t have gone far. We know that.”
“Amy gave me a lift.”
Doug made a disgusted sound. “So what is it you and Amy think you’re going to do that the cops can’t? You’re going to ride around town rousting perps and hassling informants til you get a bead on these guys? Who do you two think you are? Starsky and Hutch? Batman and Robin?”
“Woodward and Bernstein,” said Bob. “We’re reporters, remember? We’re going to see what we can find out.”
“This is a bad idea. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“I told her I wouldn’t let anything happen to her. I promised her. But she’s probably already…probably already…”
He couldn’t say it. Even in his mind, he couldn’t say it. He was conscious of Amy looking over to make sure he was okay. Then he realized the light had turned green without his noticing. Bob accelerated, but a little green sports car cut him off without signaling and he had to brake sharply to avoid clipping it.
“Idiot,” he muttered.
“Beg pardon?”
“Doug, I’ve got to go. I’m driving. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”
He clicked the phone off without waiting for a response. Amy said, “They’re not very happy with you, I take it?”
Bob shrugged. “What are they going to do? Fire me?”
“They never should have done that in the first place,” said Amy.
“That’s also not very high on my list of concerns right now.” He made a left onto the expressway.
“I understand, but I’m just saying.”
“It’s about appearances,” said Bob. “They needed to show that they took decisive action. Zero tolerance and all that.”
“They needed a scapegoat, is what they needed.”
“I’m fine with that,” he said. Bob sensed her eyes on him when he said that. He looked over. “Really, I am. This morning, I’ll grant you, I was about ready to take hostages. But as I keep saying, my priorities have changed since then.”
Amy nodded. “Doug told me the woman they’re holding hostage is someone you knew in college?”
Bob nodded.
“She must be some kind of woman.”
Bob was about to reply when the telephone chirruped again. He glanced at it and it felt as if something had rabbit punched his heart: the caller ID came up, “Unknown.”
He pressed the button to accept the call. “Yeah?”
“Bob?”
It was a man’s voice Bob didn’t recognize. He was distantly aware that Amy was watching him with anticipation and he knew the hope and fear he was struggling not to feel must be plastered all over his face.
“This is Bob,” he said.
“Bob, this is Cecil Raintree. I got to say, buddy, that wasn’t the smartest thing, skipping out on us like that.”
Bob’s hope and fear deflated down to a little pebble of disgust. All at once, he realized that he was clenching the steering wheel so hard his knuckles ached. He loosened his grip, flexed his fingers. “Look, Detective: I appreciate your position, but I don’t think you appreciate mine. That woman he has is a friend.”
“Maybe a little more than a friend, the way I hear,” said Raintree.
Bob counted a silent ten. He tried not to think of that Ford truck driving away from him, Janeka all alone with that jumpy little…monster and his ridiculous pink pistol. “Yeah,” he finally said, admitting it as much to himself as to Raintree. “Yes, she was. Yes, she is.”
“Then think, Bob. You really don’t want to do anything that’s going to get her hurt. How could you live with yourself?”
Bob thought about this. He really did. The fear that he might do some bumbling thing that got Janeka hurt had been ever present since he and Amy had left the building. Who was he to figure he knew better than the police?
“I can’t just sit around there waiting,” he said. He was aware that a pleading note had come into his voice.
“I know it’s hard,” said Raintree, “but that’s exactly what you have to do. It’s the best thing if you want to see this lady alive again.”
Bob felt his resolve crumbling beneath him like a sand fort when the tide comes in. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, I do,” said Raintree, sensing his advantage. “Look, Bob: you’re an editor, right? That’s what you do, right? I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to do your job. I wouldn’t know the first thing about it and if I tried to do it for you, we both know I’d only screw it up. Well, this here is my job: catching bad guys. I know how they think and how they behave. So I need you to get out of the way before you screw it up. Let me do my job, okay?”
It was a persuasive argument—and especially so for Bob Carson who, all his adult life, had followed instructions, respected authority, colored within the lines. He pulled the van to the side of the road. Rush hour traffic moved sluggishly past them. Amy stared at him, her eyes full of questions. He ignored them.
“Bob?” Raintree asked. “You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re going to turn around and come back, right?”
“If I do that, can you promise me you will find her?”
“Bob, you’re not being real fair here.”
Bob knew that. He didn’t give a damn. “Can you guarantee that if I come back, you will find Janeka and get her out of this alive?”
“Bob, you know I can’t do that. You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”
“Because we both know she’s probably already…” Again, the word choked him, glued itself inside his throat. But this time, he gritted his teeth and made it come out, some masochistic impulse needing to hear it, needing to hear himself say it. “…probably already dead.” His voice was ashen.
Raintree said, “Bob, listen…”
Bob was done listening. “Don’t call again,” he said. And he clicked off the phone.
Amy was looking at him. “You okay?” she asked.
“No,” said Bob. He nosed the van back into traffic.
He
didn’t speak for a few moments. Amy respected his silence. Bob was grateful for that. Finally, he said, “So, where are we going? You find anything for either of these guys?”
“No telephone listings,” said Amy. She was poring over a laptop computer. “I still can’t believe they used their actual names on the video.”
“They must think it won’t matter very long,” said Bob.
Amy glanced up. “You’re probably right,” she said, “unfortunately. There were some possibles on Facebook, but too many to narrow down quickly. Same for MySpace and Twitter.”
Bob was confused. “Wait,” he said, “what’s a Twitter?”
“It’s a social networking website where—never mind. The point is, I don’t think we’ll find them there. At least not quickly. But I also did a public records search on LexisNexis,” she said, and Bob did recognize the name of the online database used by every journalist everywhere.
“What did you find?” he asked.
“Well, I didn’t have birthdates or social security numbers to confirm, but on the other hand, they both have fairly distinctive names. On the big one, Pym, there’s nothing. As near as I can tell, he’s never even had a parking ticket. But the other one, the one you and I dealt with, he’s a different story. He’s been popped a few times—one or two assaults, but mostly drug possession. Meth. I found a last-known address.”
“Give it to me,” said Bob.
She did. For the next few minutes, they inched toward the address in silence. Bob kept expecting the phone to chirp again. Maybe the next appeal would come from Lydia or Denis. Or maybe they’d find his son and get him to call.
We need you to talk some sense into your old man, kid. He’s gone off the deep end. He’s not acting like the good old Bob Carson we used to know.
But the phone made no sound. Bob gave thanks for this small mercy.
“Are you going to tell me about her?” Amy had apparently had enough of silence.
“Not a whole lot to tell,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”
“That’s why we’re on the run from the cops, hunting down bad guys? For somebody you kind of knew a long time ago?”
“Look, she’s a friend, okay? We went to college together. We dated for a few months.”
“Bob, give me a little credit. I’m a better reporter than that.”
“Oh. Is that what you’re doing here? Reporting?”
“Well, you did promise me an interview, remember?”
Surprised, Bob glanced over and son of a gun if she didn’t have her digital recorder running and notepad at the ready. “Tell me about her,” she said.
“I thought the interview was supposed to be about my getting fired.”
“Tell me about her,” said Amy again.
Bob swallowed. He cleared his throat. He heard himself say, “I loved her.” And all at once he couldn’t see for the tears. He mashed impatiently at his eyes, sniffled up the salty water. “I loved her,” he said again. “And I suppose I still do, much as I’ve tried to deny it to myself all day. I guess I always will.”
“She’s African American, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that part of the reason you all broke up?”
“It was the only reason, as far as I can tell. She dumped me.”
“Why?”
Bob glanced at the impossibly young woman sitting next to him. “You know anything about the civil rights movement?”
Amy waggled her hand. “Birmingham, dogs and hoses, Rosa Parks, and like that,” she said.
Bob sighed. “In the spring of ’68, Martin Luther King came to Memphis to lead a march by striking sanitation workers. The march turned violent. Janeka and I, we were there. We barely made it out in one piece. Me, especially. We were trying to get away from the fighting when some black guy coldcocked me. He had me on the ground and was trying to beat the life out of me til Janeka bashed him in the head with a piece of masonry.”
“Why would the black guy do that?” Amy asked, astonished. “You had been part of the march, right? You were on their side.”
So young.
“Because I’m white,” said Bob. “It was a bad day and a bad place to be white. Anyway, they took King out as soon as the trouble started. He didn’t want to go, but they made him. I was angry with him for that. I was angry about a lot of things that day, to tell you the truth—not the least of which was that some guy had beat the heck out of me just because I happened to be handy and white. But I think one of the things I was angriest about is that she didn’t seem angry enough. Or maybe we were just angry about different things, I don’t know. We argued about it.”
“So what happened?”
“She left. That very day, she told me she was transferring to a black school—an HBCU, we’d call it now. She said she needed to ‘be with her own people.’ I was sitting in an ambulance, beat all to pieces from trying to help her people. So, it hurt. Hurt then, hurts now.”
He fell silent, suddenly out of words. An endless line of brake lights stretched before them. The shadows had lengthened, the sun deep into its long fall toward twilight.
“You held that against her,” said Amy.
“Do you blame me?”
Amy gave this some thought. “No,” she said, after a moment. “But you ever think about why she did it? You ever wonder what it must be like to be them? Black, I mean?”
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Bob.
Amy hunched her shoulder. “Maybe it’s just the concussion talking,” she said, “but I’ve been thinking about this ever since I ran into Malcolm this morning. Sometimes, it seems to me there’s this whole other world, this whole other America they live in that you and I know nothing about. And maybe sometimes that’s the reason they do things or behave in ways that, to you and me, don’t seem to make much sense.”
“You’re romanticizing.”
“Maybe I am,” she conceded. “Maybe I’m just another white liberal with an advanced case of good intentions and guilt. All I know is that when I read Malcolm’s column this morning, it really took me by surprise.”
“You were surprised how angry he sounded?”
Her eyes, which had been fixed on the laptop, came up. “No,” she said. “I was surprised how sad and hurt he sounded. He sounded like someone who’d given up.”
“Given up on what?”
“On us, I guess. White folks.”
“That’s absurd,” said Bob. “I never did anything to Malcolm, did you?”
“No,” said Amy, “but maybe it’s not about you and me. Maybe what he’s given up on is the idea that he can ever make white people in general understand.”
Bob was getting impatient. “Understand what?” he asked.
“How it feels when you’re not white.”
She looked at him. He looked at her. He returned his eyes to the road and took the next exit.
Dwayne McLarty lived in a house of ramshackle neglect on a street two blocks from the railroad tracks. The buildings were jammed so close together you almost had to turn sideways to walk between. Bob parked the van and for a moment, they just sat there looking at the place. Then he said, “Come on,” and they got out and went up the walk together.
Amy thumbed the doorbell. There was no answering chime from inside the house. “Broken,” said Bob. Amy reached through the accordion security gate and knocked at the door. They waited. There was no answer. She knocked again.
“Are you more police?”
A woman, trailing a little girl on a Big Wheel, was calling to them from the sidewalk. “Beg pardon?” asked Bob.
“I asked if you were more police.”
“No,” said Bob. He stepped down from the porch. “We’re reporters. I’m Bob, this is Amy. You said, ‘more’ police. They’ve already been here?”
She nodded. “Yeah. They were looking for Dwayne. Apparently, he’s posted some crazy video on the Internet.”
“Yes,” said Bob. “I know. So he does live here?”
&n
bsp; “No,” said the woman. “Like I told the detectives earlier: he moved out maybe three months ago. Some big fight with his brother, the way I hear. There was always some kind of commotion when he was around. Good riddance, I say.”
“He wasn’t your favorite person?” Amy had come up behind Bob. She had her notepad and digital recorder out.
The woman glanced down at her daughter, who was singing a nonsense song and driving a loop around her mother’s legs. “No,” she told them, “he was an…” And she mouthed the word “asshole.”
“Do you have any idea where we might find him?” asked Amy.
She shook her head. “He was here earlier today,” she said. “Noontime, or thereabouts. Snapped at Bethany here just for looking at him when she rode by. I ask you: what kind of man snaps at a child for riding on a sidewalk?”
“A nasty one,” said Bob.
“Exactly,” she said.
“What about his family? You mentioned a brother?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “His brother Daryl and their mother Edith live here. I guess they’re out. Maybe a doctor’s appointment or something. That’s pretty much the only time she leaves the house the last year or so. She’s got emphysema, you know.”
“That’s terrible,” said Amy.
“Yeah,” said the woman. “She’s had a pretty hard time of it.”
Amy gave the woman her card and got the correct spelling of her name, Lucinda Vasquez. She finessed the inevitable question about when the story would appear in the paper, thanked the woman for her time, and then stood with Bob watching the woman walk off, following the little girl on the Big Wheel and patiently explaining to her that, no, she could not have ice cream for dinner.
“So,” said Amy, “we just drilled ourselves a dry hole. What do we do next? I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to have to toddle back to the building with our tails between our legs.”
Bob was tugging on his bottom lip. He didn’t answer.
Amy said, “Maybe we could just wait out here and see if they show up. If the mother’s got emphysema like the lady said, she probably won’t be gone too long. Probably can’t be.”
Bob looked at her. “Or, we can break in.”
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