No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  Suspect: Yeah.

  Sid: Let me tell you what we think. Yvonne and I have discussed this case. We discussed you, and I want you to know what we think, and I guess this is the proper time to just tell you what we think…We believe that you and [the boy] went someplace. Right now we don’t know where, but believe you me, we are digging like hell. We think y’all went somewhere, possibly stayed overnight, somehow [the boy] was either killed or in effect, died accidentally in your presence, and you disposed of the body. That is what we think. And if that is the case—let me go on—if that is the case, then that would be no murder charge against you. It’ll simply mean that you did violate the law by having concealed death. And I’m not sure the DA’s office will push to prosecute you for that. They might.

  Ma: I would recommend…that they not, if you tell me the truth.

  The interview ended without the hoped-for confession, and not long after, the man was dropped from the list of possible suspects.

  *

  I could hear a car slowing behind me, and the fear from that spring day a year earlier slapped me, fresh as yesterday. But it was only Kevin, and my body was suddenly full of adrenaline produced by fear, relief, and anticipation. He drove slowly alongside me, my still warm heartbreak and the cause of it separated by a yellow dividing line and one lane of blacktop. We hadn’t talked to each other in a long time, but hearing his voice, it seemed to me we had never stopped.

  “Don’t you want to slow down a minute and talk to me?”

  I considered acting nonchalant, but only briefly. I walked over to his idling car and stood on the yellow line, hoping no car came by to run me over just as I was beginning to see a possibility. He looked bigger, like his shoulders had broadened, and there was more hair above his lip. I thought if I looked away for just a second, down the street toward that place where I used to fly on my bike with arms outstretched (was it just two summers ago?), I’d turn back to find he was a full-grown man.

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Not bad, just busy, you know, with football and stuff. I’m not around the neighborhood as much.”

  Was he trying to explain why we hadn’t talked in nearly a year, even though we lived an eighth of a mile apart? We were in front of the girl’s house he left me for, and I hoped she was looking out of her window watching us. That female predilection kicked in, the one that can turn a single hello into a lifetime commitment. It took only a few seconds for me to understand that he was trying to tell me he’d made a mistake. I thought him shrewd for asking me back and demonstrating to the girl that he’d been wrong, all at the same time. We stared at each other hard, not saying a word, not knowing what else to do.

  “Don’t you want to give me a kiss?”

  I did, and didn’t require further prodding. I leaned into his car and gave the most passionate kiss I could muster from such an awkward position, because I thought it held the power to bring him back to me. That kiss had to cover more than a kiss—it had to be me holding him while we watched Soul Train in his basement, us swaying together while “Reunited” played, the rush of finding two remote seats in the back of the movie theater for two hours of messing around, including the trailers and closing credits. I was certain I pulled it off when we broke apart and I walked down my driveway, expecting his call later that evening.

  “I saw you out there kissing Kevin,” Bridgette said when I got into the house, surprising me that there was someone home. “I was watching through the window.”

  “You like to gave me a heart attack. What’re you doing home? Where’s Ma?”

  “I got sick at school. She had to come and pick me up and bring me home, but then she left for work again. I guess I should be glad she at least came to pick me up, and that it wasn’t some black and white pulling up to the school.” I noticed for the first time that Bridgette was not wearing her hair in afro puffs or plaits, no ponytail banded with pink acrylic balls, no barrettes. She had made a not-so-effective attempt at using a curling iron that morning, creating a bob that was half flipped up, half curled under.

  “You don’t look sick.” I touched her forehead with the back of my hand. “You aren’t feverish. Ma wouldn’t have left if she thought you were sick. Maybe she thinks you’re faking.”

  “She knows I’m not faking. The school nurse told her I had a fever, and I puked in the parking lot.” Bridgette tried to act like she was unfazed, but the fact we were talking about it made it plain that she was bothered. “She said you’d be home soon to take care of me.”

  “Well you seem okay now. Why aren’t you in bed if you’re so sick, instead of spying on me?”

  What was that I smelled on her? How long had she been sneaking into my cologne?

  “I wasn’t spying. You were right there in the middle of the street kissing on him so the world could see.”

  The way Bridgette presented it, I imagined hookers in wigs and vinyl leaning down into the cars of their johns.

  “What’s it like to kiss a boy like that? Looks nasty to me, but I guess you wouldn’t be all the time doing it if it was nasty.”

  “Now I know you couldn’t see all that from the window.”

  “Not this time, but I’ve seen you and him once, before y’all broke up. So I guess it isn’t as nasty as it looks, then?”

  “You don’t need to know anything about it. Eleven years old and asking me that.” Then I remembered I was only twelve that time between the forsythia bush and the brick wall. “All I know is you’d better not try it.”

  “You sound just like Ma. Now I got two mothers, one I don’t need and one I never see.”

  *

  Kevin’s kiss left me believing we’d be getting back together, but a few days had passed and I’d heard nothing more from him. I consulted on the matter with someone who knew more than I did about boys. Halfway through the second year of school, I’d made almost-friends with a girl outside my usual circle, and regretted that we hadn’t gotten to know each other earlier, maybe the school would have been more bearable. But she didn’t have many friends at the school, and it seemed to me that she treated the place like a job—come in, do your work, get out.

  I always thought her glamorous even though we were in the same grade. She seemed older than the one year in age that separated us, and more worldly. Perfume was already a part of her daily ritual, where for me, on the days that I’d remember to spray some on, it would be an afterthought. I still wore Love’s Baby Soft. She wore real perfume, something I imagined Ma might wear but would say to me, “That’s too old for you” if I ever tried to use some of it. This girl really knew about boys and sex, or she claimed to know. I guess that’s why she shared with me how she and a boy from senior class had done it in the school chapel.

  “No you didn’t,” I whispered, because we were in the chapel at that moment, alone but it was still instinct to whisper, just like when we first entered and did a half-hearted genuflection in the direction of the altar, while making the sign of the cross. That was instinct, too.

  “Yes we did.”

  “You’re gonna burn in hell,” I said, not sure I believed her.

  “Maybe, but I’ll have good memories of how good I felt getting there.” We both laughed at that, forgetting to whisper, me acting like I knew what she was talking about. I wondered what Ma would say if I got an extra piercing in my ears. It made Roxy look bohemian, and more like a college girl than a high school sophomore. I could probably learn all kinds of things about boys from her.

  “So what do you think about my story, my boyfriend’s kiss?”

  “Ex-boyfriend you mean. I only see two possibilities.” She paused, and I waited for whatever she was going to say, certain it would be brilliant. “Either he’s a dog and just wanted a free kiss and had no other intentions, or he wanted to see if maybe he made a mistake in breaking up with you, and he realized he hadn’t. Either way, it’s over.”

  Her words hit me like a slap, the way the truth usually does when you’re not ready to hear it.
I pretended that she’d told me something I already knew.

  “I figured as much. He was a dog.” He was, as well as my first love.

  “Most of them are.” From her blazer pocket she pulled a pack of cigarettes, a matchbook stuck between the package and the film wrapper. I waited for lightning to strike us from the altar when she lit up, but the only fire and brimstone in the air was from the meeting of her match and menthol cigarette. To a girl who claimed to have fucked in the Lord’s house, smoking was probably nothing.

  “Do you do this often?” I asked. “Cut class, I mean.”

  “It’s not cutting class if you have an excuse.”

  “Yeah, but we’re supposed to be in the library helping get ready for the fundraiser this weekend, and you’re sitting here smoking a cigarette and telling me how you got laid in the chapel.” When I said that last line, I thought about how much my language had changed in the two years I’d been at the school. Before the school, my friends and I said “did it,” or the bolder ones simply said “fucked.” We never said “getting laid,” and now I said it effortlessly.

  “If I’m going to burn in hell, I may as well get my money’s worth.” She exhaled, creating a bracelet out of smoke, and I was endlessly fascinated.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Ma and I were in the den watching TV. She was running the videotape of the Dan Rather special report about the Task Force investigation even though we’d watched it before. A fifteen-year-old girl from the Southside was being interviewed, being asked if she was afraid. What a stupid question, I thought, of course she was afraid. She said she always carried a knife in her pocketbook, and when she walked home from school, she put the knife up her sleeve, just in case.

  The following day, on my way through downtown, I bought myself a knife with a leather sheath and didn’t tell Ma about it. I carried it in my purse, long after the Task Force was disbanded, through college and into grad school. My college friends named the knife Butch. It made me feel better about walking through Washington, DC, after my classes let out at ten at night and taking the Metro home. Years later when I told Ma about it, she yelled at me as if I was still a child instead of twenty-five, and as if the knife was still in my purse: “If you get a chance to use a knife, that means you’re too close to him and he can turn it on you. It’s a good thing you never got your ass killed.” Always too close. No place ever safe.

  Now Ed Bradley was on the screen, talking about how after nearly two years of killings, kids still weren’t so afraid they wouldn’t get into a stranger’s car. Wanting to see if the student education program was working, the program that was supposed to teach kids how to avoid the killer, some plainclothes cops in unmarked cars went into some of the neighborhoods where the victims had been taken. They drove down the street, yelling to kids, “Want to make ten bucks?” It turned out every kid they approached got into the car.

  Ma didn’t say anything, only shook her head in a way that made me realize she had finally decided it was hopeless. And if she didn’t have any hope, how could I?

  *

  A day hadn’t passed between the time the twenty-seventh victim, a seventeen-year-old boy, was last seen and when he was found dead. His mother last saw him mid-afternoon on May 11, and when he didn’t come home that night, she reported him missing at two in the morning. There was no way for her to know that by then, her son was already gone, that less than an hour before she made her report, her child had been found laying against the curb on a street in Dekalb County by a passing motorist. The boy had been both strangled and stabbed, as if the killer wanted to make some kind of point.

  “Or as if he was angry,” Ma said.

  “But how can you be angry at someone you’d known for hours?”

  “The boy may have known his killer. Either way, the killer probably wasn’t angry at the boy. He’s either angry at what he thought the boy represented, or he’s mad at everything that isn’t the way he thinks it ought to be.”

  I was old enough to know things rarely went the way you expected them to, nothing worked out perfectly. What I wasn’t old enough to understand, and still don’t, was how the same disappointment most of us just deal with can drive some people to an anger so hard that they can kill a child. I didn’t understand why after nearly two years of killing, the murderer still couldn’t see that it wouldn’t make the anger or the disappointment go away. It was scary to think the killer would never be satisfied, would never stop killing, until something stopped him first.

  On Friday morning in the third week of May, Ma woke me early to say she had to get into work right away. One of the bridge stakeouts might have finally turned up a suspect.

  *

  All through school, I couldn’t wait to get home and find out if the killer had been caught. Ma didn’t have any details before she left for work, but I could hear the relief in her voice at just the possibility. I wanted to tell the kids at school that maybe it was over, though it probably wouldn’t have generated much excitement. Nearly two years after the murders began, my classmates still expressed little interest in the killer or the dead kids.

  When Ma got home late that night, Bridgette and I had everything done so she wouldn’t have to do anything but tell me the news: dinner eaten, dishes cleaned, homework done, baths taken.

  “So did you catch him?”

  “Can you let me get in the door first?” Ma said, but there was a lightness behind the question that told me right away they’d at least caught a good break, if not the killer. After she put away her purse and gun, dropped her briefcase on a chair in the dining room, and took a Miller High Life from the refrigerator, she was finally ready to talk.

  “So, there’s some good and some bad.”

  “Good first,” I said, tired of so much bad.

  “Early this morning, a recruit on stakeout under a bridge heard a loud splash in the Chattahoochee, like something big had been dropped in the river from the bridge. He saw the headlights of a car slowly passing overhead. He radioed uniforms on either end of the bridge, they followed the car that was crossing the bridge just after the splash was heard, and a mile down the road, they stopped the driver.” Ma spoke in a flat news reporter voice that told me she’d recounted the story many times since this morning.

  “So you caught him?”

  “We have someone we’re questioning.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not going to say. The media hasn’t caught on yet, and we need to take advantage of that as long as possible.”

  Did she think I’d tell? My feelings were slightly hurt, but for Ma to be so tight-lipped, I knew it was a good lead.

  “So what’s the bad part?” I asked.

  She finished off the pony-sized bottle of beer and asked me to get her another. I always wondered why she bought the little bottles when she’d always drink two of them, which equaled more than one regular bottle. I went and got the beer, uncapped it, and brought it into the den where she picked up as though I’d never left.

  “For one thing, I know the suspect from my patrol days, and my first instinct is that he couldn’t have done these murders. But that was a long time ago, people change. The biggest problem is that no one actually saw the man, or anyone, on the bridge. His was the last car to go over the bridge immediately following the splash. No one saw anything dropped into the river. And we couldn’t find anything that had been dropped in the river.”

  “But I thought there was a stakeout? Seems like somebody should have seen something.”

  “Seems like. That’s why we shouldn’t have had recruits on the stakeout. There was a uniform and an FBI agent at the end of the bridge, but they sent a recruit underneath. The position nobody else wanted, so they gave it to a recruit who had about three minutes’ worth of experience doing surveillance.”

  “He’s in jail now, right?” That was all I really wanted to know. Could I go to sleep tonight without worry, stand at the bus stop in the morning without fear?

  “No. Officers and FB
I agents tailed him for a while, pulled him over, questioned him, searched his car. Then they let him go.”

  “Let him go?”

  “The FBI took the lead, and said there wasn’t enough to hold him. I wasn’t there, so I have to believe that. Right now, all we have is a man driving across the Chattahoochee on the Jackson Parkway bridge and the sound of a splash.”

  Two days later, the Task Force had more than the sound of a splash. They had the body of the twenty-eighth victim, found in the Chattahoochee just a half mile downstream from where the splash had been heard.

  *

  The Monday following the splash was the first time I could recall making the early morning walk through downtown and not being afraid. The first time I’d walked through Central City Park in the dawn, promising God I’d never do it again if he let me make it to the other side, was a month after the first two bodies had been found and my first day of school in the suburbs. Now I was starting the final week of my sophomore year, and it was the first time I didn’t imagine a child killer lurking somewhere, watching me. Instead of walking around the park, I walked straight through it. Instead of going directly to the bus stop, I used the ten minutes between buses to buy a hot-from-the-oil doughnut from the Federal Bakery. I’d planned on waiting to eat it on the bus, hidden behind my science notebook, but couldn’t hold out and feasted as I walked down Forsyth toward my bus and Luckie Street, which I called Rat Street. In the morning hours before the sun came up, the rats that roamed around Luckie and Poplar were fearless and thought nothing of running right past the feet of people scurrying to make the bus. That morning, I barely paid the rats any mind.

  Ma said they weren’t sure the man from the bridge was the killer, but they were questioning him, and the FBI was getting warrants to put surveillance on him. I was satisfied. They had someone, and the cops were watching his every move. He wasn’t waiting for me around the next corner. Once I was past the initial relief that there was a suspect, I wondered who he was. Ma said it was someone she knew from her patrol days. I tried to remember those days, but I was too young to have retained much memory of them. She worked in Zone Four, that much I remembered, somewhere off Campbellton Road. Angel Lenair was found off Campbellton Road. Greenbriar Skating Rink was there, too. It was the street I’d had a hard time imagining a Klansman cruising for prey. But maybe it wasn’t a Klansman, just an angry white man who felt we’d wronged him, all of us, and he wanted to set things straight. There weren’t many white people living around there that I knew of, even six years ago, so I wondered how Ma knew the man. It didn’t matter that recent leads had pointed to a possible black suspect, I didn’t believe them. There was no way a black person could do this to his own. Even an FBI profiler said as much.