The Policeman's Daughter

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  Salt and Pepper spent hours dissecting the “other voice.” They knew of other cops who hadn’t recognized the voice quick enough. Some were alive and would tell you they had heard it. Some wouldn’t tell. Some were dead. Pepper’s yet beautiful face was testimony to his having listened. They had theories: angels, God, ESP. But the one they put the most faith in was “You know more than you think you do.”

  So after a tough or confusing call, or when they wanted to connect with someone who understood, one or the other would say, just between them, “You know more than you think you do.”

  Now standing at Moury and Thirkeld, Hot Pepper saw her eyes roll up at the sight of the baggy-pants boys with the ludicrous visors. He released the squirming boys, who joined hands and ran together into the hard spray of the hydrants.

  Not long out of their rookie probation period she and Pepper had been in line in a fast food burger place when one of the gangbangers walked in wearing a coonskin hat, about eighteen years old, he had exposed nostrils, a lower lip that hung excessively under a smaller upper lip. She had wondered aloud, “Does he think that hat makes him look better?”

  Pepper had looked at her for just a second and in a neutral, quiet voice said, “He’s without hope. He’s never known better and is angry without knowing why.” Salt, stung by her ignorance of the simple truth of what he said, turned, looking for judgment, only to see that he cared enough to have told her.

  The wheat-and-honey girl came out of the group and stood in front of Salt. “You got black curly hair and you white. I got yellow hair and I’m black.” The girl giggled behind her hand and ran back to her friends. Salt turned, still smiling, to Pepper.

  Pepper, smiling back at her, said, “Yeah, where did you get that black curly hair? From my daddy?”

  “From your mama.” She threw and pulled a punch at his scar while he laughed and ducked. He was quick to laugh but also took to her serious side, backing her always, and to others.

  There had been other times when they talked about chaos and dirty apartments, about the energy it takes to get clothes clean when the washing machine is four blocks away and you have five children to take with you. They traversed the land-mine topics of race and gender and why it took Salt longer to tell Half-Dead from his brother, Cat-Eye. Both admitting the inaccuracies of eyewitness information across races, speculating that folks of different races didn’t fine-tune their observations, didn’t get or didn’t choose to get close enough, didn’t look at others in their faces. They were both learning.

  Standing there watching the kids play in a prism of sunstruck water, she said to him, “I do know more now,” and looking up, “Thanks to you.”

  Pepper looked at his shoes. Then tried to hide a smile as he stepped away a few feet and pulled out his expandable baton. He swung it fiercely in an upward arc so that the metal sections extended, caught, and reflected some of the bright sunlight. He made it, as he often did, like magic, like the light came from his own secret source.

  He was playing with her. “Now kneel down, Blue Knight.”

  And she, playing along, despite the children and now adults forming an impromptu street party, knelt on one knee. He tapped her once on each shoulder with the baton. Since her head was properly bowed, as any good knight’s would be, she couldn’t see what he was doing, although she thought she heard the sound of Velcro separating and then she felt him place something around her head.

  “Rise now, thou Knight of The Homes,” he proclaimed.

  Salt stood up and felt for what he had crowned her with. The children and the Homes residents laughed, and so did she when she removed the visor of Pepper’s police hat, which he had separated from the cloth crown and placed on her head upside down—a moment to carry them through the night, secretly superstitious that the magic would hold. She checked the crowd and saw the visor boys had disappeared.

  7.

  MARCY STREET

  They were just finishing their soup when radio started asking, “Can any unit clear and start for 541 Marcy Street, apartment B-4 on a person down, possibly 48?” Salt held the last gulp of soup in her mouth. Signal 48 was the radio code for a dead person, and apartment B-4 was Shannell’s place. She swallowed, grabbed her shoulder mic, and responded, “3306 to radio, I’m clear and en route.” Pepper yelled to Mai, “Hold the satay,” throwing money for the check and tip on the table.

  On the way Salt imagined talking to Shannell: You can’t have. You didn’t. You better not have killed Big D. Just last month Shannell was in her patrol car, eyes crack bright, knowing that even though she’d stabbed Big D, he loved her. She could still hear Shannell’s pronouncement: He luuuvv my cooda potpie.

  But it didn’t save you, now did it? Salt thought. She lifted her foot from the gas, the familiar sadness causing a moment of breathless sluggishness.

  A crowd was gathering as she turned onto the short street. The Marcy Street apartment was where Shannell stayed with Big D most of the time, and it was as bad a shit hole as it gets. It didn’t matter that this call was inevitable. Salt felt flattened by it. She watched for the players and snitches and to see who walked away as the patrol car pulled into view. Witnesses would be quick to disappear when the questions started. Salt parked along the curb perpendicular to the dingy redbrick apartment building.

  Pepper made his entrance, tires squealing to a halt behind her car.

  The Hope Apartments were a short row of three four-unit buildings in a development that would have fulfilled only the smallest of hopes. One of the peripheral blights around The Homes, they had been built about ten years before but, in her ten years in the zone, these apartments had never looked anything but worn out.

  Before she could get out of the car, Sister Connelly, who was the tallest woman Salt had ever known, appeared at her car door. She owned the little old house across the street and could tell you who was kin to who as far back as Jesus. “Lawd, that child done found Shannell dead,” said Sister, patting the crown of braids on the top of her head with thin, knobby hands, polished with age to a shiny brown. She was a revered elder at the nearby church and had earned the title “Sister.”

  Salt faced forward and focused on a tiny crack in her car’s front window. “Damn,” she said, shaking her head. Without looking up she asked Sister Connelly, “Who found her? How do you know she’s dead?” She forced her voice to be professional. The weight of another grief made Salt feel her body was too heavy to get out of the car.

  “Her girl come over to my house. I called 911 and then went up to that apartment and I saw her. She been dead ’cause they flies on her.”

  “Where’s the girl?” Salt asked, getting out of the car, trying to focus on anything other than the body she’d have to see.

  Sister Connelly pointed up at the apartment. “She the one standin’ at the door. She followed me when I went up and I couldn’t get her to come away.”

  A girl of about eleven or twelve, wearing all pink, was barring the doorway of the apartment. Also there were at least a dozen people on the stairs, compromising the crime scene. Pepper was already out, wading in, calling for the people to come down from the stairs. The crowd was murmuring, “Salt and Pepper, that Salt and Pepper,” as she and Pepper fell into a familiar rhythm.

  On her way Salt noticed that all of the apartment’s windowpanes had been painted red on the inside, the paint chipped where there were cracks. She imagined Shannell with a dripping brush of red, jittery and covered in paint. The screen door was broken, just like the last time she had been there, the wire mesh of the screen missing, boards left hanging from one hinge.

  Sounds came from inside, like someone breaking Sheetrock. Lil D stomped out, kicking and slamming his fists into the walls as he came. He knocked into Salt as he rammed the door, causing her to hit her newly healing head on one of the dangling boards, yelling, “I’ll kill him my own goddamn self!” Salt put out her arm to stop him. He jerked
away. “Don’t touch me! Fuck the poleese!”

  “Hold on, Lil D.”

  “She in there dead, man.” His face contorted with anger and grief. He was trying to put on a fierce look, but the tight muscles around his eyes couldn’t hold back the tears.

  “Show me where she is. Did you find her?” Salt sounded harder than she felt.

  “You poleese don’t give a damn. And you ain’t gone fine Big D ’cause he don’t want to be found. But I’ll find him and then you can arrest me.” He punched the air as he stomped down the stairs past Salt. “You just lock her up and she gets out and they back in the same old shit.”

  “How do you know Big D killed her? Were you here when it happened?” Salt called out to him, then dropped her shoulders in exasperation.

  “I jus’ know. Who else? They always fightin’ all the time.” He was halfway down the steps, knocking into people as he went.

  “Lil D, help me here. Maybe your daddy didn’t do it. Did anybody see him kill her? Who was here?” She shouted to Pepper, “I’ve got to go see where she is. Hold on to Lil D.” Lil D continued punching the air, trying to make his five-feet-five thin frame tough. Pepper grabbed him and opened the back door of his cruiser.

  Salt tried to ignore the ache that was starting in her scalp.

  “Shush.”

  She turned to the girl in pink, whose finger was in front of her lips, the sound coming from her puckered mouth, the rest of her face stiff. Salt couldn’t tell to whom the admonition was directed. The girl’s eyes were focused past Salt on nothing Salt could see.

  “That my sister,” Lil D yelled from below, looking up as Pepper closed the car door.

  Salt turned back just as the girl was blinking, as if her vision were returning, surprised to find herself here.

  She reached out for the girl’s arm, asking, “Are you—?”

  The girl interrupted; answering the questions Salt had asked Lil D: “Wasn’t nobody here. I found her.”

  The girl seemed familiar. Salt then realized that the girl looked like Shannell.

  “Where is she?”

  “She in the closet, in the bedroom.”

  “Do you have a key?” Salt asked as the girl turned away. Pink barrettes held two thick, neat braids tight against her head. Her blouse, pants, and sneakers were all the same color pink, cheap clothes but clean, starched, with ironing marks visible on the cloth.

  “No key. They don’t ever lock the door. Ain’t nothing worth stealing anyway. I went in and called her. When she didn’t answer I thought she might still be asleep, ’cause she sometimes doesn’t get up till late.”

  “Wait for me at the bottom of the stairs.” Salt touched the girl’s shoulder.

  The apartment was grim. The entrance was through a roach-infested kitchen, the stench oppressive, something meat-like rotting in the filthy sink. Salt hurried through the living room, to the right, and down the short, narrow hall. The bedroom door on the left was open. She stood looking into the room, her eyes adjusting from the daylight to the dark inside. The room was a dim blur. Crumpled dirty blankets in the middle of the floor took shape, a soiled bare mattress under the thin rectangular windows on the wall opposite.

  “Then I went in there”—the girl appeared at the door, pointing without looking to the inside of the bedroom—“and saw her in the closet.” Her eyes were scanning memory, not the present.

  “There’s no need for you to go farther.” Salt stepped alone into the bedroom, leaving the girl in the hall. Wet molding clothes were in piles in every corner of the bedroom and the blanket mound was empty. The closet door was open, Shannell’s familiar patchy scalp visible on her bowed head. Slumped on the floor and there was no doubt she was dead: thick, dark, crusted blood covered her chest and pooled, congealed, in her lap. Flies had begun the work of taking Shannell back to nature. At least eight hours, Salt thought. Where was I? She swallowed, her throat tight as if she needed an alibi.

  Something flew in front of her face. She lifted her hand to ward it off. But when she turned the flutter was still there in her vision. The girl stood in the hallway, steadily pulling on each of her fingers, not cracking knuckles, but with a stripping motion. “It’s Mother’s Day. Shannell is my mama. I live with my grandmother over in Lakewood. So I took the bus to see her. I came in.” Her voice got so soft.

  “I went out and called Lil D from the corner. Then I went over to Sister Connelly’s. Lil D’s gonna kill Big D if he can.”

  “Let’s go back outside,” said Salt, stepping out of the room.

  The girl just kept pulling at her hands, like she had to finish both of them, one finger at a time. Salt reached out. “We can go now.” Shannell’s daughter nodded, still looking but not seeing down the hall. The girl couldn’t be more than twelve, slender, with skin that shone in the dim apartment. She possessed the frightening calm of some children who have seen too much. Salt touched her back to escort her down the hall. As they moved through the apartment the girl seemed to be talking to someone, not Salt. “She wasn’t careful.”

  “What?” Salt said to the girl’s back.

  “Shush,” sounded the girl again.

  She had gotten the girl back outside and down to Pepper. The paramedics had arrived, and Salt and one of them, her friend Sherry, went back into the crime scene so Shannell could be officially pronounced. Back in the bedroom, Sherry approached the closet and snapped on a latex glove. She batted a fly away from her face. “God, God, God,” she said, almost like a prayer as she knelt and put two fingers to Shannell’s throat. For half a second she looked at her watch. “Time of official pronouncement, 7:22 p.m.” Salt wrote it down in her notebook. Sherry turned and took off the glove.

  “How long?” Salt asked.

  “Rigor has set in. Ten hours or more,” Sherry answered. “Looks like a bullet wound to me.”

  Back out on the landing, Salt stood blocking anyone from going back in. Below, Pepper was guarding Lil D, locked in the patrol car with his face turned away from the outside. Pepper bent his head toward Shannell’s daughter, talking to her.

  “Radio, raise a Homicide unit,” Salt said into her shoulder mic. Seconds later a unit came on: “4125. Was someone trying to contact Homicide?”

  “3306 to 4125, we’re at 541 Marcy Street on a 48, probable GSW,” she responded.

  “En route.” Detectives were on the way.

  Sister Connelly had gone back across the street to her yard and was looking up at Salt. The tall woman just kept staring, so intently that Salt turned to check the apartment door behind her to see if there was some sign or problem that Sister Connelly could see from her viewpoint that she was missing. There was nothing different, the screen door boards still held to the frame by that single hinge. She carefully pushed them well clear of the entrance.

  In the crowd of thirty or more people to the left, exactly straight across the small street, the gang lieutenant and enforcer Stone stood, leaning against another apartment porch support. Wherever there was trouble he seemed to catch wind of it. He was eating from a bag of chips and looking at the action, his red-brown face impassive, like he was watching a movie. He and Sister Connelly were about the same height and build, with about a sixty-year age difference. Stone glanced up, looked over to check out the crowd, then again at Salt, making eye contact. He sprinkled the rest of the chips around the porch, threw the bag in the yard, and loped toward the street, looking over his shoulder like a stray dog that’s marked its territory.

  In the patrol car Lil D knocked on the window. Pepper opened the door, listening while Lil D, face wet and taut, gestured broadly. Pepper motioned for him to move back and closed the door again. Salt thought again of Shannell, her last time in custody, in the patrol car backseat.

  An unmarked detective car pulled up. Wills and Gardner got out, checked with Pepper, then looked up. They had been on other homicides Salt had worked.
Both were white guys. Gardner was older and never had much to say, and even though he had classic male-pattern baldness, he was the only Homicide detective she knew who didn’t wear the signature fedora. He and Wills, both always slightly rumpled, were enough alike in their bad sartorial choices to have been shopping from the same thrift store. But where Gardner was thin and lanky, Wills was built like a high school football coach, hard-boned and muscular without the definition, and always seemed to be looking in your eyes. Gardner began taking notes while talking with Pepper. Wills started up the stairs toward Salt.

  “We’ve got to quit meeting like this,” he said when he reached the landing, smiling at her.

  Salt, caught without a comeback, glanced at her notes. “Her name is Shannell McCloud, pronouncement time, 7:22 p.m. Call came in at 6:45, we arrived at 6:55.”

  “How’s your head?” he asked.

  She touched her scalp and felt a piece of scab that was hooked in her hair. “Okay, till I knocked it against that board there.” She gestured toward the screen door. “I’ll show you in.”

  He followed her. Salt left him at the bedroom and went back out to protect the entrance, back to where she’d first seen the girl standing. Gardner came up and went in to join Wills. The crime scene van got there and the scene technicians brought their equipment up, banging their black cases against the wobbly stairs. The funeral home employees, contracted by the city to transport bodies to the morgue, waited down the block in a black hearse. The crowd waited for the high point when the body, locked in a medical examiner’s bag, was carried out, covered with a fake velvet cloth. The girl was below, stiffly leaning against Pepper’s car. Sister Connelly came over to Pepper, then turned and pulled Shannell’s daughter with her toward her house.