The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  But I wasn’t heading for my own office. I was heading for the Chief’s office. And that was one place I knew for sure my badge wouldn’t get me into. Which was where my trusty pry bar would have to come in.

  The outer door to the Chief’s office was large and made out of some sort of fancy wood—mahogany, maybe. Solid mahogany, I quickly learned, was not a favorite wood of cabinetmakers just because it was pretty. That stuff was strong. I heaved and yanked and made a lot of unladylike noises before the frame finally gave way.

  I figured I had about thirty seconds before the security detail showed up. There was no camera over the door or anything, but the electronic lock next to the door was hooked up to the building security system.

  My heart was pounding as I raced into the outer office and over to the large desk where the Chief’s secretary sat. My main target was the huge, two-ring Rolodex sitting on the edge of the desk. I dumped it into my duffel bag, glanced at my watch. Fifteen seconds. I rummaged around in the desk, found a message log and some sort of phone log. These went in the duffel bag, too.

  Then I was done. As soon as I got out the door, I realized I was too late. I could hear footsteps pounding on the hallway floor. I headed for the stairs, but somebody was racing up that way, too. For a moment I felt like a cornered rat. Then I thought of something. I opened the door to the ladies’ room, tossed the duffel bag in, and let the door shut.

  A couple of uniformed cops with guns drawn—both of them young black fellows—burst out of the door from the stairwell.

  “Did you get him?” I shouted.

  “Get down! Get down!” they yelled back.

  I held up my badge. “Detective Deakes,” I yelled. “Cold Case Unit.”

  “Oh!” the younger of the two cops drew to a halt, breathing hard. “I seen you on the TV today!” He looked mildly starstruck as he examined my cleavage.

  “Don’t be worrying about me! Get the perp! He just went down the stairs. He just came out of the Chief’s office.” Just as the two cops turned and headed back into the stairwell, another pair of uniforms appeared. Both of them were older, beefier, in worse shape.

  “He went that way,” I yelled, pointing at the young cops as they headed into the stairwell.

  “Who did?” the beefier of the two uniforms said suspiciously. He was a middle-aged black guy, with graying hair and a lieutenant’s bars on his collar.

  “They’re chasing him. The guy who broke into the Chief’s office.”

  The other cop, a white fellow, got on his walkie-talkie and calmly sent out a call to seal off every exit to the building. They seemed to be in no hurry to leave.

  “You better go!” I said.

  The lieutenant ignored me as he took out a notebook. “Who are you?”

  “Detective Deakes.”

  “And you were doing what up here?”

  “Look, the guy’s getting away.”

  The Lieutenant gave me a long look. “No, he ain’t. My job, I’m sealing off this room, find out what happened here.”

  “I was up here looking for the Chief. He’s taken a personal interest in the case I’m working right now.”

  The long look again. “You talking about the Gooch case?”

  I nodded.

  “Man.” He shook his head. “I always knew Gooch was crazy. But I didn’t know he was that crazy.”

  I nodded impatiently. “Look, I’m in kind of a hurry, but here’s what happened. The Chief had told me he was going to be up here until fairly late, then he was heading down to his lake house, spend some time with his wife. I just got back from the lab with some results, figured I’d check and see if he was here. I got off the elevator, and there was this guy coming out of the Chief’s office.”

  “Description?”

  “Male black, light complected, medium build. Had a very nice suit. He was carrying a briefcase. He walked down to the stairwell. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw the door had been kicked in or something.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You know something?” I said. “It looked an awful lot like that guy Captain Goodwin. You know who I’m talking about?” I laughed. “But I’m sure it wouldn’t have been him. Why would he knock down the Chief’s door?”

  “Okay, but what about—”

  “Lieutenant, no offense, I know you’re trying to be thorough. But I got nothing else to tell you. And I’m very much pressed for time.”

  “Detective until I get this—”

  I cut him off again. “No offense, I’m working a murder, you’re fooling around with a little break-in. Chief’s office, sure. But it’s just a break-in.”

  I walked away as he sputtered, slipped into the bathroom, grabbed my duffel bag. There were a couple of uniformed officers guarding the door downstairs, but I waved my badge and they didn’t give me a second look.

  As soon as I reached the parking garage, I started running again.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I called Mark Terry on the cell phone as I drove back to my apartment. “Progress?” I said.

  “The more time I spend on the phone, the slower it gets.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’ve got almost all the samples prepared,” he said. “But I’m still calibrating the equipment. It’ll take a while.”

  “Keep up the good work.”

  I hung up just as I was pulling into my space in the building’s lot.

  In my living room, I dumped the duffel on the ground. What I needed was a phone number for the Chief’s lake house. Once I had that, I could run it through my CD-ROM crisscross directory and find the address.

  First I checked the Rolodex, looking for the Chief’s phone number. His secretary had listed a home number and a cell number for the Chief, but there was no third number to indicate a lake house. Next I checked the phone log, a fat book of yellow carbons, looking for messages from his wife. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure what his wife’s name was.

  I had hunted through maybe forty pages and the name Sherri had showed up five or six times. Was that his wife? I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t a phone number listed on any of the messages. By 1:30, I had searched through almost the entire log. I was beginning to feel like the whole thing was futile. I threw the book on the table, went in the bedroom, turned on my computer, logged on to my Internet service, stared at the screen. What good did it do fiddling with the computer if I had nothing to put into it? Garbage in, garbage out, as the old saying goes.

  I went back and leafed through the phone log. And, finally, one page before the end of the log, I found what I needed. The message was from Sherri, but underneath the name the chief’s secretary had printed in her neat handwriting, “Call her in Milledgeville.” No number listed.

  That had to be it, though. If there was no number listed, that meant it was a place that was familiar to the Chief. Which meant—I hoped—his lake house.

  I called information from my cell phone, asked for the phone number for Eustace Diggs, Jr. in Milledgeville, Georgia. I was disappointed when the operator said, “I’m sorry, I have no listing showing for that name.”

  I thought for a moment. “What about Sherri Diggs?”

  “One moment.”

  And then the number came on.

  I jumped on the computer, ran the phone number through the crisscross directory site I had access to, and found the listing. Box 216, Rural Route 11, Milledgeville, Georgia.

  I called the crime lab. “How’s it coming?”

  “The equipment’s on line. I just started cranking out the samples. I’m guessing the results will start coming in around daybreak.”

  “That’s four hours!” I said.

  “I told you it would take all night.”

  “Look, I’ve found the address of his lake house,” I said. “Maybe I should head on over there.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Down in Baldwin County near Milledgeville. Looking at the map, I guess it’s on Lake Sinclair.”

  “That’s a hike. W
hat if it turns out it’s not him? You wouldn’t want to be stuck down there and find out it’s somebody else.”

  I sighed. I just wanted to act, to do something. “Yeah. I’m going crazy over here, though.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  I hung up, logged onto my computer, and used Mapquest to find the location of Chief Diggs’s property in Milledgeville. After that I couldn’t think of anything to do, so I idly fired up my e-mail program. It was mostly a bunch of spam, idiots trying to sell me penny stocks and Viagra. Then one of the e-mails in the list caught my eye. It had a red exclamation next to the sender’s name, a sign that it had been flagged as high priority. But I’d have looked at it in a heartbeat anyway. The sender name line said it all.

  Captain Hunger.

  I quickly clicked on the message.

  The message said: “I know a lot of things now, Mechelle. Not just who you are. I know who HE is. If you keep pursuing this, HE goes in the box next.”

  It was signed, “Your old buddy, Captain Hunger.”

  I scrolled to the bottom of the message. There on the page was a photo of the Drobysch’s house in Alpharetta. Underneath that, an image of my son. The Drobysches’ son.

  Kevin.

  I have been trying hard. When he was born, I talked to the Drobysches and I told them, “This is your son.” That’s what I told them and I meant it. Theirs to raise, theirs to cherish, theirs to care for.

  But there’s some weird residual hitch deep in the blood that attached me to that child. I know, I know, maybe I should have worked harder to cut the knot. It’s not healthy the way I’d been obsessing about him. And I knew it would fade and diminish over time. Everybody’s brain has a process it goes through when something tragic happens. And giving your child to someone else to raise, make no mistake, that’s a tragic loss, no matter how positive a face you put on it. What made me a crankhead, and what made me a good cop, too, for that matter, was the same obsessive quality that made it so hard for me to let go of Kevin.

  But there, staring me in the face, was a final signal of something, a signal that a choice had to be made. Protect Kevin. Protect Jenny Dial. Which would it be? Because I had a hunch there was no way to do both.

  I stared at the screen for a while, but to no particular end. The choice had been made the second I saw the picture.

  Alpharetta is normally about a thirty-minute drive from Decatur. I made it in twenty. Given that Atlanta is the fastest-driving city on the planet (this is a fact, you can look it up), that meant I was seriously moving. My poor old Chevy was laboring something awful, but we made it, screeching through the turns in Rosemont Orchards II like some gold-plated NASCAR redneck down at Talladega.

  I screeched to a halt in the driveway of the Drobysches’ big house, hopped out of the car, the motor still running, ran up, and banged on the door.

  I saw a light come on upstairs. I kept banging. An upstairs window light came on, and a man’s voice came out, nervous but firm. “Mechelle! Is that you? I’m calling the police right now.”

  “David, I have to talk to you!”

  “I’m calling nine one one.”

  “Go ahead. That’s fine. But first go check on Kevin. Make sure he’s okay!” I was screaming my head off. Lights were coming on in other houses. This neck of the woods they weren’t used to people pitching fits in somebody’s lawn at two in the morning.

  “I’m sure Kevin’s fine,” David Drobysch yelled to me.

  “Please! Go check, goddammit! Somebody’s threatened his life.”

  The window slammed shut.

  “Daviiiiiid!” It was sad, really. I was screaming like some poor street fool, high on something, paranoid and crazy. Even in my panic I had enough distance to see it from their perspective. Some crazy drug addict was down on their lawn, screaming and cussing. “David, Nancy you have to take him away somewhere! Go somewhere safe! Please David. Please, Nancy. Take him somewhere safe!”

  I heard the distant, thready siren drifting through the sticky night air. I knew then that I had failed. I’d failed to convince the Drobysches. I’d failed to protect Jenny Dial. And now I’d failed my own son. Come Sunday they’d take away my badge, probably prosecute me for pointing my gun at Captain Goodwin. And then that would mean the end of my career as a cop.

  Looking back, I had another thirty seconds, maybe a minute to convince the Drobysches that I was not crazy. Maybe, possibly, I could have explained to them what was going on, at least convince them that it was worth their while to go visit Mom and Dad back up in Syracuse or wherever they had come from. Maybe I couldn’t save Jenny Dial, but maybe I could have convinced them to save little Kevin, my son. Their son. But I didn’t have the courage. Or, for that matter, the time.

  I heard the siren, and I knew I still had time to get out of there, still had time to sneak out of the neighborhood before the local yokels showed up to arrest me for being loud and black in a white suburban neighborhood.

  I got back in the car and I drove.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I stopped at a StarMart on the way home, picked up a couple forties of malt liquor. Why malt liquor? I’ll put it straight out: I bought malt liquor because it’s the niggeriest drink on the planet. It’s the drink of abjectness, of prostration, of laying on your back with your knees in the air and taking it, the cheap high, the shortest, ugliest route to the dark place that I’d spent my whole life flirting with.

  Complicated thing, explaining what it is to be a nigger. It’s about being black, I suppose, but that’s not mainly what it’s about. Mainly being a nigger is about seeing yourself through the eyes of other people, folks who look at you and see nothing, see a dark, empty, worthless, stinking hole. Nobody can nigger you but you. And right then it was time. Time for me to nigger it up, baby.

  I cracked open the Olde English 800, drove back to Decatur nice and slow, taking my time. That’s the whole thing about niggering it up; once you’ve fully niggerfied, niggerized, and niggerated yourself, there’s no point to getting anywhere. When you’re nothing, there’s no future, no past, no consequences, no right, no wrong, no pretty, no ugly. Just here. This ride, this beer, this hot, sticky, sad, hopeless, aimless night. And underneath it all, of course, is the sick sensation of worthlessness, almost a taste in your mouth, like a bitter old penny sitting on your tongue.

  About the time I hit Clairmont, I got on the phone and called the GBI crime lab.

  “Yo, baby,” I said.

  “Mechelle?” Mark Terry said.

  “Whasssup.”

  “What’s going on? You sound funny.”

  “Nah, baby, nah. I feel good. I feel calm and shit.”

  There was a long pause. “Did something happen?”

  “You could say. Sure. Something happened.”

  “Like what, Mechelle?”

  “Like it ain’t the Chief.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Yo, baby, I just know. How come you be dissing me?” I was laying on the street speak, toying with the feel of it in my mouth.

  “And why are you talking like somebody who lives over in the Carver Homes?”

  “Yo, dawg. Listen up. Here it is. You might as well quit running them tests. It ain’t gonna come up the Chief anyway.”

  “You’re sure of this.”

  “Damn straight I’m sure.”

  Terry didn’t say anything for a long time. I guess he was waiting for an explanation, but I didn’t much feel like going into it. Finally he said, “Well, fair enough.”

  “All right then. Pack up the camel, go home, get some rest. Forget this whole bidness.”

  “Mechelle. Listen. Be serious here. Do you really mean this?”

  “Stop them tests. Throw it all in the shitter. We done, baby.”

  I closed my cell phone, turned the radio on to some hip-hop station, started grooving around in my seat, dancing against the cheap vinyl. It felt kind of good in a trashy, stupid kind of way. It was this song called “Back That
Thang Up” by this boy, Juvenile, that came out a few years back. I’d seen the video a few times. It mostly showed girls with big butts, pumping away, showing their booties to the camera.

  I stopped in at this twenty-four-hour record shop, bought a copy of the CD. When I got home I put the song on infinite repeat, cranked it up, danced around the room for a while. Juvenile would go, “You a big fine woman, why’ncha back that thang up,” and I’d back up, bumping and grinding against the wall, pulling on the Olde English 800. After a while the brother next door started banging on the wall, telling me to shut up. I yelled some nastiness at him.

  Alcohol is not really my drug. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t the real thing—it wasn’t meth, ice, crank, whatever—that I still had this thin little thread of hope dangling down into the darkness that had opened up underneath me. My heart wasn’t really in the drinking. It took too much energy to drink.

  After a while I lost track of things. I hadn’t slept in so long that it didn’t take much of the Olde English 800 to ease me out of consciousness. I just remember the sound of the phone ringing over and over and over, but not being moved to get off the couch and answer it. I remember some yelling, somebody banging on the wall. And mostly I remember that song, playing again and again and again and again. “You a big fine woman, whyncha back that thang up.”

  And then eventually it was all darkness and prostration.

  FORTY-NINE

  Jenny Dial smelled something strange. It was strange because it wasn’t like anything she’d smelled in a long time. It was a memory, not a real thing.

  She could see in her mind what the thing was: a potato. A potato and something else, a little lump of meat like what you found in the stew Mommy used to make when Grampa Jimmy would come over. Grampa Jimmy loved stew. He would eat it and make faces and funny noises that showed how much he liked it, and Mommy would giggle and her face would turn red. Every time he came over it would be like that, like it was a whole new thing every time.