The Locket: From the Casebook of TJ Sweeney

by Susan Van Kirk

  “Well, my dear, you’re just a young chick. Come next month, I’ll be ninety.” She giggled and slowly shook her head. “Never thought I’d live to be this old. And, you see, it seems like yesterday the war was on, and we were dancing to ‘Five O’clock Jump.’ ”

  “Do you live here alone, except for your great-grandson coming by?”

  “Sure do.” She sat back in her chair and stared TJ directly in the eyes. “You know, my children think I’m crazy to live alone at my age. But I simply remind them that one of these days Frank will come back for me. He’ll take my hand, and off we’ll go together and find that Glenn Miller orchestra playing somewhere in the sky. It’ll be ‘String of Pearls,’ and we’ll dance for eternity. Frank knows to find me here, and that’s that.”

  TJ settled back in her chair feeling decidedly uncomfortable. Really? Even after death? She waited a moment and asked, “And that is exactly what I want to hear about—dancing, and especially at the Roof Garden. Can you tell me what it was like?”

  “I’m a plain, practical woman, Detective Sweeney, but I’d have to say the experience was magical. Looking back, I guess it was the times that were magical. Summer nights, wartime, life and death, separation. We’d survived the Great Depression, and the deprivation was just dreadful. But by the forties, we’d started to come out of it, and then the war began. Here. I pulled a few photographs out to show you after Charlie called. ʼCourse, they’re all black and white.” She set a small stack of photographs in front of TJ. “That’s Frank.”

  TJ stared at a handsome man with riveting eyes and dark, wavy hair wearing a sailor’s uniform. A young Marjorie was on his arm. She had the same smile, but her hair was a luxurious black and hung loosely in curls. TJ could see the outline of the funky 1940s shoulder pads under her white blouse, which topped a dark skirt. She examined the photo more closely. She thought she saw something special about their smiles—but she cleared her throat, and mentally kicked herself for being so sentimental.

  “How long has he been gone, Marjorie?”

  “Died back in 1999. But every morning I have a little talk with him.” She looked at TJ’s face. “Oh, I’m not crazy—he doesn’t answer back. Here, see this photograph. I cut it out of the Endurance Register. It shows all the folks jitterbugging on top of the Gaffney Building. That’s where the Roof Garden was, you know. I went with my sister back in the late thirties, early forties. Everyone was crazy about dancing. We all had to learn the latest dance craze from Chicago. They had put a terrazzo floor on the roof of the four-story office building, and they waxed it real good so if you didn’t have rubber shoes you’d find yourself slipping and sliding.”

  TJ examined the still photo. “The dance floor is quite spacious,” she said. Marjorie pushed her chair back, walked to the counter, and slowly lifted the coffeepot again, topping off both of their cups.

  “I remember the first time I saw it. ʼTwas in the late thirties, and I was, maybe, fifteen, sixteen. They’d built a band shell at one end and strung chairs and davenports around the outer edges of the dance floor. Twinkling lights sparkled all around the edge, too, and it was a dazzling scene. You could look out past the railings and take in all of Endurance. On hot nights the breeze always blew and cooled us off. I believe it cost us twenty, maybe twenty-five cents to go there.” She paused to take a sip of coffee. “My sister and I worked after school at a little mom-and-pop grocery store in our neighborhood to make money so we could go on Saturday night. Most of what we made went to help pay the bills, of course, but we always were given a little so we could go do something fun.”

  Sweeney, a child of the eighties bands, smiled, finding all of this interesting and mildly amusing. “And what kind of bands came, and what dances did you do?”

  “Lots of bands came down from Chicago—Paul Whiteman, Lawrence Welk, and one time, Tommy Dorsey. Other times, local bands got a turn, and they were just as good to dance to. On Tuesday nights, folks went to the dance studio on the second floor and learned the latest dances from Chicago. The jitterbug was my favorite, but we also did fox trots, tangoes, and slow dances like the waltz.” She paused and sighed. “When I met Frank, it was a hot, humid night in July, but a breeze still blew over the rooftop. After we danced most of the evening, he and his cousin walked me and my sister home when the place closed at midnight. We held hands all the way home, and I still remember the feel of his fingers closing around mine, sometimes squeezing my hand gently. I saw him a couple more times before his leave was up, but he told me he’d be back for me. I never doubted him.”

  “Did you hear from him when he was overseas?”

  She pointed to a stack of letters on the counter next to TJ. “Those were all of his letters to me. I kept every one of ʼem. ’Course, at times he couldn’t write or mail, and I’d get several letters all at once. We set up a code: he’d put the letters of the city and country he was nearest as the first letter of each sentence. Then I’d go through and string the letters together. We sure fooled the censors. It was…romantic, you know? We had this secret we shared, and the rest of the world was left out. And finally the war ended, and he came home. We got married and settled down right here, and my city boy learned how to farm.” She gestured past TJ, who turned to look at the door. “Carried me right over that threshold you came through. We lived in this house all of those years, and often I believe he’s here still, keeping an eye on things.”

  TJ smiled, imagining a young Frank carrying tiny Marjorie in the door and perhaps twirling her around in his arms. She turned over another picture from the slim pile. This one showed people dancing in a crowded area of the floor. “Did African American people ever go to these dances?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Never.” She paused. “Times were different. The guy who took coats was a black man—we said ‘colored’ back then—and sometimes black musicians came with the orchestras.” The elderly lady turned the photo around on the table and examined it. “But the black folks had their own place where they danced, out on Third Avenue. A few of the wilder white kids snuck in out there. They said the bands were better and played lots of jazz and occasionally blues. Back then, black and white were still separated in lots of places and lots of ways. Most people of both colors didn’t want to see any mixing.”

  TJ sat in silence for a moment, considering that idea. She had heard the same words from her grandmother and others, as if that were just the way things were. The rules of behavior were clearly spelled out back then—what was acceptable and what wasn’t, no matter who you were. It was a concept TJ, who was biracial, had never understood. Reluctantly, the detective decided to move on. No use getting into all that with an elderly woman who simply was telling her what happened. “And soldiers?” she asked. “Were very many soldiers at the Roof Garden?”

  “My, yes, any time they were home on leave. That was one of the first places they’d go. The Endurance College guys and the patients from the military hospital came also.”

  “Endurance College guys?”

  “The ROTC cadets would come, and they’d have such good manners. Always in uniform and always spit-and-polished.”

  “You mentioned a military hospital. I didn’t realize an army facility was in the area.”

  “In Woodbury, down the road. It was for wounded military, but many were ambulatory. Those guys would take a special bus over on Saturday night. The bus would let them off at Buchanan and Main Streets, and they’d walk a couple of blocks to the dances. Often we’d see soldiers at the dances, and lots of the local girls danced with them. Only cost a quarter to get in.”

  “I suppose a quarter was expensive in those days. What if you couldn’t afford it?”

  Marjorie smiled and squeezed her hands together in delight. “That was the beauty of the Roof Garden. If you looked over the edge, you could see people dancing in the street and on the sidewalks. The music simply floated down there from the top of the building, and a whole ʼnother dance was going on down below. From above,
you could gaze down on the couples and the glowing streetlights. You see, back then, even if you couldn’t afford the dance, you could still have a little of the starlight.” She paused, and they fell into a companionable silence.

  TJ drank the last of her coffee, and when Marjorie started to rise for another round, the detective signaled that she had had plenty. “One other subject I’m curious about, Marjorie. Did you ever see any trouble? You say a lot of guys weren’t local.”

  “Not that I remember. They hired a couple of security men to keep an eye out for trouble. ’Course, some of the fellas sneaked a half-pint bottle through security in their pockets, but people just looked the other way.”

  “Ever hear of a disappearance, say in the early forties, of a young woman?”

  Marjorie rubbed her chin briefly as if she were pondering that. “Let me think. That was an unusual time, transitory, if you know what I mean. Lots of people in and out. Maybe. Seems I might have heard about something like that. Woman with a young family. I don’t remember much about it.”

  TJ turned off her recorder and pushed back her chair. “Marjorie, you have sure helped me understand the Roof Garden, the times, and what might have happened to that woman back then.”

  “Did they ever find her?”

  “We may have recently.”

  The elderly lady stopped drinking her coffee, and looked up, concern on her face. “Is she all right?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear.”

  Chapter Five

  TJ had Thursday off, but she figured she’d go to the office at some point later in the day. Looking past her toes, which were propped up on a pillow on her coffee table, she thought about her friend, Grace Kimball, who lived across Sweetbriar Court. She had seen Grace’s car leave early, so TJ figured Grace was driving down to the Endurance Register office, where she worked part-time since she’d retired from the high school last summer. Well, I’ll try to catch her tonight, TJ thought.

  Pushing the mute button automatically, she wandered to the kitchen to refill her coffee. Even though the elections were a year away, she already hated their stupid political commercials slightly more than greedy drug company commercials, and prided herself on never hearing them. Her phone suddenly went off in her kitchen with the doleful hymn, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Her mother’s ringtone.

  “Yeah, Mama.”

  Her mother wanted TJ to come over and help move some furniture—a large china cabinet—and TJ assured her she’d be over in an hour. Tyrone, TJ’s brother, had moved to the Chicago area, so he was too far for Mama’s reach. She had to give advice and worry about him long-distance. Her daughter, on the other hand, was much closer. Opening the refrigerator, TJ wondered what to eat for breakfast. Toaster strudel, an energy bar, some scrambled eggs, cereal. What do I feel like?

  Her phone went off again, this time playing “Saturday Night Fever.”

  “Yeah, Myers,” she said to the desk clerk at the Endurance Police Department. “When did he call?” The detective listened again as Myers gave her the phone number to the coroner’s office in Woodbury, and she dutifully wrote it on a piece of scratch paper. “Got it. I’ll call him back.”

  Why can’t these people wait until it’s a civilized hour to call me? She looked at the clock and realized it was almost nine. Where did the morning go? More coffee. A few more sips and I’ll call him back.

  “Hi, Alex. It’s TJ Sweeney. Man, this is fast. You must be really tight with someone in the lab. What do you have for me?”

  “Rather unusual news, TJ. In fact, I’d say not at all what I expected.”

  TJ sat up in her chair, alert now. “How so?”

  “The DNA came back, and I know I told you we had a twenty-something Caucasian woman who hadn’t been pregnant, right?”

  “Right.”

  She heard Atkins’s voice pick up its usual excitement when he was on to something he hadn’t anticipated. “DNA belies that. The skeleton was definitely the bone structure of a Caucasian female, but DNA does not lie.”

  “Doc, get on with it. What are we looking at here?”

  “The DNA shows that Jane Doe was biracial—both Caucasian and African American.” TJ sat in stunned silence.

  TJ walked over to the kitchen counter and reached for a tissue. Her mind began to race at this news. “You’re telling me that she was biracial, but possibly her skeletal structure was more Caucasian than African American? What does that mean exactly?”

  “It means Jane Doe had a parent of each race, and it is possible she favored the maternal side more, which would be a Caucasian mother.”

  TJ was silent for a moment, thinking about what this might do to the direction of her investigation. “Thanks, Alex. This isn’t what I expected. Anything else you want to spring on me?”

  “No, that’s it, TJ. I’ll fax the DNA information to your department, and they can do a search, but as old as the skeleton is, I don’t know if they’re likely to find a match.”

  “All right. Thanks again. I guess I’ll have to go toward it from another angle.” She tapped the “end” button on her cell and sat for a few moments, not moving. A victim. Perhaps passing for white? Biracial, like me. Almost seventy years ago? How am I going to put a name to you?

  “Remind me again, Mama. Why is it you want to move this monster of a cabinet?” TJ stood in the center of her mother’s living room, gazing darkly at a huge china cabinet that covered most of a wall.

  “Just because. I want to clean behind it and maybe move it over to that other corner, simply for a change, Baby.”

  TJ studied her mother, a woman who looked remarkable at seventy. A little shorter than TJ, Mama Sweeney was slender, still had some muscle tone in her arms and legs, and a twinkle in her eyes. Like Grace, Mama had raised her children by herself after TJ’s father left. She was a resourceful woman, and she’d taken in laundry, done tailoring and sewing for people, and eventually worked at a department store once TJ and her brother were in school. The AME church was her second home, and it kept her busy and out of TJ’s hair. But occasionally Mama invented something for TJ to do so she could check on how her daughter was getting along.

  “I got these little scooter things. You put them under the feet of the cabinet, and then it moves like silk thread over a spool. Only problem is, you have to lift the cabinet to get this scooter thing under it.”

  “That should be easy enough,” said TJ. Ten minutes later they were done and sat in the kitchen with cups of steaming tea. TJ’s mind was still on the revelation she’d heard from Atkins. The victim was a woman like herself, only the races of the parents were reversed. Of course, “RL” also lived back in the 1940s, and TJ knew the times were different, but maybe not so much.

  TJ’s mind scrolled back to when she was in first grade and she walked to school each day at Gardner Elementary. It was only a few blocks to walk home, and TJ usually made the trek with a couple of friends who lived closer than she did from the school. This meant the last two blocks were a solitary walk, and one day she was skipping along when two fourth-grade boys TJ knew from school jumped out and grabbed her arms. One of them had a pocketknife, and he held it to her neck and said, “What’re you doing here, nigger?” She had burst into tears and cried, “I’m just trying to get home to my mama.” After brandishing the knife threateningly, they let her go, and when TJ made it home she told her mother who they were. Mama must have called their parents, because it didn’t happen again. But that was the first time she’d ever heard that word, and she had to ask her mother what it meant.

  “Theresa Johanna, are you list’ning to me?” Mama suddenly demanded.

  “Oh, sorry, Mama. I was thinking about a case I’m working on.”

  “That’s all you’re ever doing. Girl, you are thirty-nine years old. When are you gonna settle down with some nice man and give me grandbabies?”

  TJ gave her mother a disgusted look. “Didn’t Tyrone already take care of that?”

  “Only a co
uple. But he’s away off in Chicago. I need babies a little closer to home.”

  “Haven’t we been over this before? You want me to find some guy who will do what Daddy did: have kids with me and leave? No, thank you.” TJ managed to spit the words out.

  Her mother was silent for a moment. After the silence, she said quietly, “Theresa Johanna, when are you gonna let that go? That was years ago. We got along.”

  With a guilty sigh, TJ said, “I know, Mama, and I admire you because you did a yeoman’s job raising us. But I wanted to have a daddy, too.” They both were silent. Then TJ said, “I know, spilled milk.”

  “What is this case?”

  TJ walked over to the counter and poured a little more water into her teacup. “Want some more, Mama?” she inquired, trying to make amends as she held up the kettle.

  “No. I want to hear what’s got you all riled up.”

  TJ sat back down. “I know what it was like, Mama, to be biracial and grow up in this little town back in the mid-seventies, but this case is about a woman like me—biracial—but possibly more white than black. This case was long ago, and back then biracial was even less welcome.” She told her mother briefly about the case, leaving out a few of her suspicions.

  Her mama sat very quietly for a few moments. “Theresa, you know things were much worse in the forties for people like you, or even people like me. Your grandmother, my mama, used to tell me such stories. Folks back then didn’t like these biracial—mixed—marriages or couples.”

  “I know, I know. But I sure don’t understand yet what happened to this woman. We don’t even have a name for her. It’s possible whoever killed her is long dead. That was almost seventy years ago.”

  Mama Sweeney gave a resigned sigh, and her eyes looked with sadness on her daughter. “Hmm. Seventy years ago. That would be the early part of the forties. I’ll tell you a story, and you can see how different it was…a story from 1939 or 1940. Your grandmother had a good friend, Freedonia Hitchcock. She worked washing dishes downtown at a soda shop that used to be where the candy store is now down on Main Street. You know where I mean?”