“Tomorrow morning,” Nwodo said. “You busy?”
Monday, February 11
9:29 a.m.
For a second time, the silver BMW coupe pulled up outside my building. The hour was a little more humane, the weather a little better. And I was walking without a crutch, a fact Nwodo took note of as I buzzed the seat back and folded myself in.
“You’re new and improved.”
My turn to buy coffee. We stopped en route to 580 north.
She said, “Thanks for coming.”
“Either this or laundry.”
“Man, you are housebroken as shit,” she said. “This fiancée of yours pitch in?”
“Cooks. What can I say? She’s a busy lady.”
“The good doctor.”
“Yup.”
“Whatever you do,” Nwodo said, “don’t mess that up.”
“Roger.”
Northbound again. Instead of continuing toward the bridge, though, she veered onto the 80 fork, through Richmond. Cold sun flashed in the red-and-blue Costco sign, stirring within me an intense need to purchase forty-eight of something.
I said, “You feel like telling me what we’re doing?”
“Right now, you know as much as I do.”
I knew only what she’d told me over the phone.
A week prior, the DA’s office had contacted her.
Isaiah Branch wanted to talk.
He’d asked for her by name.
The meeting was to take place in Antioch, at the home of Isaiah’s parents, Curtis and Tina Branch. I told Nwodo she was nice to travel, rather than have him come to the station.
“I want him in an environment where he feels comfortable,” she said.
“Then why am I here?”
“Not that comfortable.”
“Why you? As opposed to Bischoff or Von Ruden.”
She shrugged.
“Homeboy’s crushing on you,” I said.
“Wouldn’t be the first.”
* * *
—
THE BRANCHES LIVED in a southeastern quadrant of Antioch that consisted wholly of housing developments, a warren of short-run streets ending in culs-de-sac. Bird’s-eye, the neighborhood resembled a thousand sunbathing spoons, or a platoon of very tired sperm.
Here, the price of a mildewy Oakland studio bought a four-bedroom Spanish Colonial, vintage 2003, complete with AC, attached garage, and a postage-stamp yard. The schools were solid and the neighbors worked for Kaiser, too. Arid, beige, and peaceful, it felt about as far removed as you could get from the Lower Bottoms on a Friday night.
In short, the burbs.
We came to a home that looked like every other home, except for the number of cars congregated outside it.
Lexus and Prius in the driveway.
Acura and Mercedes at the curb.
The Acura was the oldest of the bunch, with one window decal for Deer Valley High School and another for SFSU.
“What do his folks do?” I asked.
“Dad’s a hospital admin. Mom works for the city. Something to do with disability access.” Nwodo flicked at the Mercedes. “I’m guessing that’s his lawyer.”
“So that makes four on two.”
“I got ball,” she said, ducking out.
I remembered Isaiah’s mother, Tina, from our brief encounter at Highland Hospital, when she and her husband came bursting into the room to cut short the interview. The woman who answered the door was a calmer version of the same, but aloof and not much happier to see us. When she told us to please come in it was a command rather than an invitation; she gave us her back and walked ahead into the living room.
The house was pleasant and fresh, with an open floor plan and a broad window overlooking gentle hills. The others rose to greet us.
I’d been wrong about our odds.
Five on two.
Isaiah. Tina, in a yellow-and-lavender twinset; Isaiah’s father, Curtis, muscular across the chest through his russet polo. The lawyer, a black man in a slim glen plaid suit and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who introduced himself as Montgomery Prince.
Center, a tiny woman, gray hair ironed crispy, ankle-length wool dress, orthotics.
Curtis said, “My mother, Harriet Branch.”
“Hattie,” the woman said. She put a soft hand in mine. “Nice to meet you, sir.”
“You too, ma’am.”
Montgomery Prince cleared his throat. “Shall we get started?”
Isaiah sat on the sofa, hemmed in on either side by his parents. Hattie took the largest armchair, a proper monarch. The lawyer took the ottoman, and Nwodo and I sat on the pair of dining room chairs that had been press-ganged for the occasion. Stacked atop the coffee table were print-on-demand photo albums, spines dated, one volume for each of the last nine years. The topmost cover showed the nuclear Branch family in better times, smiling, vineyards in the background. There was a daughter, too, younger. At school, presumably.
Mine was the only white face in the room. Hattie smiled at me. I smiled back.
Prince cleared his throat again. “I’d like to go on the record that I have advised my client against speaking with you. Since he insists, I insisted on being present.”
To me, Isaiah didn’t look capable of insisting on much of anything. His posture was at once alarmed and defeated, his shoulders caved in so close they threatened to touch. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, a bulge visible at the upper left arm: the gunshot wound, still bandaged. I supposed he’d had some time to ponder his future.
“As I told the district attorney,” Prince said, “my client has information of potential value to your investigation. I would like to emphasize that this information has nothing whatsoever to do with the alleged incident. The information my client wishes to share pertains to a separate incident, which my client only became aware of after you, Detective, mentioned it to him. His willingness to come forth is therefore nothing less than an act of good faith. He is a young man performing a brave civic duty, and I expect you to treat him and it as such.”
I found this speech puzzling. Isaiah Branch had yet to be charged. Any halfway decent lawyer would realize that he couldn’t prevent Isaiah from saying something incriminating. Nor could he prevent us from taking that to the cops working the shooting.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Nwodo said to Isaiah.
“Yes, he is,” Hattie said.
“Mom,” Curtis said.
“If I may,” Prince said. “I would like to emphasize as well that if at any point I sense a failure on your part to keep that distinction in the forefront of your mind, I will instruct my client to end the conversation immediately.”
I grasped now the lawyer’s aim: to scare the shit out of Isaiah, thereby getting him to change his mind about talking to us.
It was a lost cause, though. The prime mover made herself known.
Hattie said, “Tell them what you told me, honey.”
“Mom,” Curtis said, “please.”
“It’s all right,” Isaiah said. He blew out a breath. “Okay. Earlier that night, I was over at the, the house.”
“Sorry,” Nwodo said. “Which night are we talking about? The night of the shooting?”
“Yeah.”
“He was visiting me,” Hattie said.
“Mother,” Tina Branch said, “let him talk.”
“I’m trying to help them understand,” Hattie said.
“You live on Almond Street,” Nwodo said to her.
“Forty years.”
“They were blasting music,” Isaiah said. “I went over to ask them to turn it down.”
“The neighbor across the street,” Nwodo said.
“Yeah.”
�
�You remember what time this was?”
“Seven thirty,” Isaiah said. “Seven forty-five.”
Montgomery Prince appeared poised to jump in. Isaiah was admitting to having prior contact with the party people.
“You ask them nicely to turn down the music,” Nwodo said. A little editorializing on her part: We’re not out to get you. “Okay. What then?”
Isaiah said, “I saw a guy.”
“A guy.”
“A homeless guy.”
“How do you know he was homeless?” I asked.
“How do you know when someone’s homeless?”
“Don’t sass,” Hattie said.
Curtis Branch sighed.
“Can we, please, move it along,” Montgomery Prince said.
“I’ve seen him myself,” Hattie said.
Nwodo turned to her. “You did?”
“Not on that particular night. But a number of these fellows hang around the neighborhood. Before the lady artist moved in they used the house to do their drugs.”
“ ‘Artist,’ ” Isaiah muttered.
“It’s terrible, what happens to these poor folks, when they get hooked. My husband, God rest him—”
“If you don’t mind, Ms. Branch,” the lawyer said, “let’s stick to what’s directly pertinent.”
Curtis shot the lawyer an irritated look—Don’t insult my mom—but said nothing.
“I ran into him when I was leaving,” Isaiah said. “I was on my way out, and I got lost. It’s kind of a mess back there.”
He paused to glance at Nwodo, who gave him an encouraging nod. “I saw it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So, they have this—in the back, there’s this area, with a shed.”
“That’s where you saw him? By the shed?”
“Yeah.”
“What was he doing?”
Isaiah said, “Digging.”
The nape of my neck prickled.
Nwodo said, “Digging what?”
“I don’t know. That’s what it looked like,” Isaiah said. “I’m walking past and he jumped up out of nowhere. I didn’t see him at first. It was dark, and he just…appeared. Like, from the dirt. We’re looking at each other, and…” He trailed off, caught up in remembered fear. “He had a knife.”
“Did he threaten you?” I asked.
“Of course he felt threatened,” Tina said. She grabbed Isaiah’s hand. “Anyone would.”
“All right,” Nwodo said. “He has a knife. What does he do?”
“He came up to me,” Isaiah said. “Like, this close. He goes, ‘Not you.’ ”
“ ‘Not you.’ ”
“That’s what he said.” He freed himself from his mother’s grip. “You asked me about that girl. In the hospital. I was thinking about it later and it reminded me. Because of—I mean, I’m not trying to tell you this because he was homeless. All right? I’m not saying that.”
“Nobody thinks you think that,” Curtis Branch said.
“No, but, see,” Isaiah said, “if people need help, we as a society should give them help, right? Not demonize them. It all feeds into the structures of power.”
He sounded like a school essay.
Prince said, “Let’s wrap this up, please.”
“The girl,” Nwodo said. “Did you see her?”
Isaiah shook his head.
“Can you describe the homeless man?”
“White, with a beard, messed-up. Messy.”
“Would you be willing to work with a sketch artist?”
Isaiah started to nod, but Montgomery Prince said, “I consider that request premature until I’ve heard back from the district attorney’s office regarding his intentions toward my client. For the moment we sincerely hope this has been of help to you, and that you can appreciate the fact that Mr. Branch was willing to come forward.”
“We do,” Nwodo said, standing. “Thank you, everyone.”
Prince rose, followed by Curtis and Tina, and then Isaiah. Hattie remained sitting. Curtis put his hand out to help her up. She ignored him and got up on her own.
We said our goodbyes, and a minute later Nwodo and I were back in the car.
* * *
—
NEITHER OF US spoke until she’d gotten on the freeway. I figured she was lamenting the wasted time. She glanced over her shoulder to merge toward the fast lane.
She said, “I want to have another look at the shed.”
We were seven-plus weeks out. That she thought it worth the trouble said she wasn’t having success elsewhere. The request for a composite had that same tinge of desperation. Eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate; most police sketch artists have rudimentary skills.
“You can come,” she said. “Unless you have to wash the windows.”
CHAPTER 23
Tuesday, February 12
11:24 a.m.
We met on the corner of Almond and 11th, outside the giant Victorian. Oily rain spat down. Nwodo stood beneath a red umbrella, talking on her phone.
I hadn’t been back since the shooting. Seeing the mansion now was like visiting a friend who’d succumbed to a sudden, horrific illness. It swooned beneath leaden skies, bedraggled and wan. Crime scene tape hung in sullen yellow shreds, fluttering across flower beds reduced to mud sumps and snaking over a lawn pounded to stubble. The fence gate had been fitted with a beefy padlock and an opaque green tarp added behind the chain-link to thwart gawkers.
None of that compared with the real damage: a rash of graffiti, consuming the façade. There were anarchist A’s, and racial epithets, a vile base coat of hate topped by squiggles and tags. The original Painted Lady color scheme, pastel purple and yellow, was all but obliterated. You had to give the vandals top marks for tenacity. They’d scaled the porch overhang to get at the upper floors. Cardboard filled a broken second-story window.
Nwodo finished her call. “Morning.” She joined me in peering up at the house’s blighted exterior. “I know, right?”
“When did this happen?”
“I think it’s a work in progress,” she said.
I said, “Did you know that the Summerhof Mansion was built in eighteen-ninety-something, for a guy whose name I can’t remember?”
“Summerhof?”
“He had like a dozen kids.”
“Huh. It doesn’t look so big anymore.”
I eyed the padlocked entry. “Jump the fence?”
“Bold thinking from the man with a bad knee,” she said. “No need.”
She pointed up the block, where a gold-tone Cadillac Coupe de Ville was puttering toward us. At the wheel sat a woman in her early forties. She parked in the driveway and got out, and I gave myself a pass for failing to recognize her at first.
Like her home, Rhiannon Cooke appeared much the worse for wear. She’d dyed her hair a uniform black. Dressed in baggy sweatpants and a RISD hoodie, she slouched toward us, casting nervous glances behind.
“Appreciate your taking the time, ma’am,” Nwodo said.
“Yeah, no problem,” Cooke said, sounding like it was a problem.
“Shame about the house,” I said.
That was all the prompt she needed.
“Do you have any idea what I’ve been going through? It’s insane. I get death threats. I can’t stay in my own home. You can’t imagine what this place used to look like. It was a crack den. It’s this massive white elephant nobody will take responsibility for and then I come along and put my heart and soul into improving it, for the good of the community. My own two hands and now this. It’s not enough to throw a tantrum and let everybody know how mad you are. You have to ruin something. You have to burn it to the ground, on principle. Explain that to me. You want to hate me, fine. But
that—is a building. A beautiful building, and, by the way, historical. You live here. You’re going to walk past it every day and see it. Why would you do that? It’s disgraceful.”
Nwodo said, “Tough situation.”
“I haven’t slept more than four hours in God knows how long. I have to keep moving, every time someone takes me in, they start getting death threats, too. There’s a dedicated subreddit called FuckRhiannonCooke. I took down my Twitter, my Facebook page. Twice”—she pointed to her car—“my tires have been slashed.”
“Have you reported it?” Nwodo asked.
“Of course I’ve reported it. Half the time no one bothers to come and the other half they write it down and there’s literally zero follow-up. No offense, but what kind of donkey show are you people running? I have to drive down here and open a gate? You’ve had since January. What you think you’re going to find is beyond me.”
We waited for her to run out of steam.
Nwodo said, “If you wouldn’t mind.”
Rhiannon Cooke raked her stiff black hair. “Whatever.”
She undid the padlock, then went and stood beneath the denuded willow, arms crossed, glaring at us from afar.
“Should’ve jumped the fence,” I said to Nwodo.
* * *
—
TWO MONTHS OF weather had worsened the disarray in the yard, paper pulped, vessels overflowing. The rain had petered out, but drops continued to fall from eaves.
No sign of the goat. Maybe Officer Grelling had nabbed him.
The passage to the rear of the property felt briefer than I remembered—compressed, the way a return journey often is. We arrived at the triangular nowhere zone to find the scenery intact, the actors long gone.
Bicycles. Pallets. Crates. Cans.
Shed.
Nwodo opened the doors, causing the hand tools hung inside to rattle on their hooks. From her pocket she removed a tube of ChapStick. She placed it on the ground where the doors met, then shut them and set the hasp, leaving the end of the tube sticking out, a proxy for the dead girl’s thumb.
She counted off ten paces and faced the shed.
A Measure of Darkness Page 20