by Attica Locke
“I know.”
She smiled at Michael, enjoying the parts of her life that came alive again with the mention of Joe Sweet. “You sure you ain’t know Joe?” she said.
“Just heard stories,” he said. “Would have liked to, though. That was some love story Booker told about you and Joe back in the day.”
“Joe always said a man can’t be on the road forever.”
The kitchen door swung out from the back room, and Dennis came out with a plate of fish fillets breaded in cornmeal, Lawry’s seasoned salt, plus a spice blend that Geneva had done up on her own and kept to herself. Dennis set down the plate and slid a bottle of hot sauce across the counter in Michael’s direction. For a while, Geneva let him eat in peace. She carried the guitar and its case over to an empty booth and set them on top of the table. It was the same booth above which the guitar now hung. Michael ate heartily, ordering a slice of white bread when he saw the opportunity to sop up the soup of hot sauce, grease, and tomato juice left on his plate. He followed the first beer with another and seemed in a good mood, satisfied with a meal unlike any he’d had since he was a child. He swung around on the vinyl stool and watched Geneva with that guitar.
“I’m sorry this took me so long,” he said.
She waved away the thought, never taking her eyes off the instrument.
“You got a wife, got your own life to live.” She nodded at his wedding ring. At this, Michael stiffened. He looked away from her and spun slowly around on the stool, sipping on the second beer. Geneva felt the change more than she saw it, as if a cloud had swallowed the sun. She left the case in the booth, then returned to her station. She bought some time by clearing Michael’s plate and wiping down the counter. “I got some fried pies.”
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
He glanced at his watch, a spell broken.
“You got kids?” she asked.
“No.”
“How long you been married?”
“Six years.”
“Six years a long time with no little ones at your feet.”
“My wife travels a lot,” he said. He lifted the beer bottle to gesture for another, but then changed his mind. He set the empty in front of him and picked at the label with his thumbnail. “For work.” He felt the need to explain. “She’s incredibly successful, and I don’t begrudge her that. And you don’t see me quitting my job and following her from gig to gig around the world. It’s not fair to ask her to give it up for me, I know that. But tell me, ma’am. Maybe I’ve had it all wrong. I thought men were the ones supposed to be the rolling stones.”
“People do what they want—man, woman, whatever.”
There was an indictment in there somewhere, and Michael got defensive.
“She’s a good woman, and I ain’t been perfect my damn self,” he said. “Truth is, I don’t know if I messed around ’cause she wasn’t home or she wasn’t home because I messed around. I just know we fouled it up some kind of way I don’t even really understand. We loved each other once. I still do.”
Darren, listening, felt an ache inside his own chest. Michael and Randie sounded like him and Lisa with the sexes reversed. Darren was the one who wanted to roam, who didn’t know how to make a home. People do what they want—man, woman, whatever. Did Randie and Darren actually know more about what they really wanted than either of them was willing to admit?
At Geneva’s, Michael left his beer bottle alone and asked if there was a place he could get something real to drink. She’d made him uncomfortable, and he was looking for a way out. She told him the only place around was an icehouse up the road, and he’d do well to leave that place alone. Her words had an ugly bite to them that he didn’t recognize. “You don’t want nothing to do with Wally’s place,” Huxley said as he came from Isaac’s barbershop to refill his cup of coffee. Huxley drifted back to his card game, and Michael edged away from his own emotion, asking Geneva about her life. “You and Joe have kids?”
“Just one boy,” she said. “We tried for another. But none of ’em would hold. So we just loved the family God gave us.”
“Joe died in a robbery?”
Geneva nodded. “First night I’d ever left him alone. Me and my son, Lil’ Joe, his wife, Mary, and my grandbaby had gone up to Dallas to get her a dress for her junior prom, and three men came in after midnight. Stole a week’s worth of sales and shot my husband in cold blood.” She folded up the rag she’d been using to wipe the countertop and stored it nearby. The muscles across her shoulders and back were taut with grief and the anxiety of a trauma recounted.
“Terrible what happened,” Huxley said, and Geneva and Michael realized they were all listening. Isaac stopped his clippers an inch from Tim’s head.
“Isaac saw the whole thing,” Tim said.
Isaac cleared his throat and clicked off the clippers. “I was taking the trash out back when they come through the front door.” Geneva had her head down, and Isaac, unwilling or unable to concern himself with the woman’s feelings, kept talking. He was hopped up on the memory, really selling the danger of the moment and the heroics of his involvement. “I heard one gunshot. Blam! Like thunder, like a shotgun, and by the time I made it from the kitchen, I could just see them making off in they car.” He pointed through the front windows, past Michael’s black BMW to the gas pump and the highway beyond.
Michael turned to follow his gaze.
“It was three white men. Mr. Joe was lying here bleeding,” Isaac said, pointing to a spot just behind the counter and near the cash register, not far from where Michael was sitting. “I was the one called the police.”
Michael looked from the spot on the floor to the windows and then to Isaac. “How did you know the killers were white?”
“Pardon?” Isaac said as he fired up the clippers again and told Tim to lean his head all the way down so he could clean up the back.
“It was night, you said.” Michael looked at Geneva for confirmation. “And you saw them driving off. How, then, did you know they were white?”
It was the same question Darren had asked. He had tripped over the same bump in the story, which Geneva repeated again now, brushing away both Michael’s and Darren’s inquiries by saying the sheriff had come and looked into everything, and what did any of it matter with both her men in the ground now?
Soon as they pulled up into the parking lot at Geneva’s, Darren saw two familiar cars: Randie’s blue rental and Wally’s enormous Ford truck, its chrome bumpers gleaming in the sun, creating a white-hot halo effect that burned his eyes. Darren insisted on helping Geneva from the cab, refusing to heed her protestations. He took gentle hold of her elbow as he walked her toward the cafe’s front door. As they passed the blue Ford Randie had been driving for days, Darren took a tentative peek inside, not sure what he wanted to find but knowing it wasn’t this: her leather duffel packed and waiting on the front seat, the black camera bag resting on top. The time had come. She was leaving. Darren was, too—today, probably. The mystery of what happened to Michael Wright—a man Darren felt he’d come to know and understand, a man who shared his East Texas upbringing—had slipped through his fingers. He’d failed the man in a way he couldn’t quite name, save for the nagging feeling that they’d gotten this one wrong.
Inside Geneva’s, Wally was behind the counter, helping himself to a beer from the refrigerated case. He popped the top with the plastic opener hanging from the cooler door, took a sip, and nodded hello as Geneva and Darren entered, as if they’d just come in out of the sun and into his front parlor, where he was waiting with cold drinks and conversation. He gestured with his beer to the stained cardboard covering the front door, against which the tiny brass bell was dully thudding. “I got a man coming out first thing in the morning to fix that door,” he said to Geneva. It was hardly lunch hour, and Wally was deep in his cups, drunk and pink about the nose, a drinker’s high blossoming across his face.
“That door will be fixed when I say it will,” Geneva said.
&n
bsp; Her manner was matter-of-fact, without shame or scolding. She simply waited for him to come to his better sense and get the hell away from her cash register. She didn’t have to say it but once. Wally walked around to the front of the counter, passing Geneva as she attempted to take her rightful place at the helm of her world, on the kitchen side of the counter, looking out on Highway 59. As they came within a few inches of each other, Wally reached for her arm. There was a laying of claim in the gesture as well as a desperate plea in Wally’s eyes, some unspoken thing he wanted from her. A look passed between them that boiled the air in the room. Darren caught it as well as the warning shot that flashed across Geneva’s face as she yanked her arm from Wally’s grip and pushed past him. Wally stood in place, staring after her a clean minute before moving on, perching himself on one of the red stools, two down from Huxley, who was sitting in his usual spot, a mug of coffee and a newspaper before him. Wendy was in one of the booths by the window, sitting beneath Joe’s Les Paul. She was playing a complicated and made-up game of solitaire that involved checkers pieces as well as two decks of cards. She started to slide her aged body out of the booth to properly greet Geneva, who told her not to bother. She wasn’t touching anyone or anything until she spent a good fifteen minutes standing under hot running water. She had her hand on the door to the kitchen when Wally spoke up again. “Lark ought to sleep good tonight, a cold-blooded killer behind bars.”
“We closed, Wally,” Geneva said, shutting down further conversation.
And when Wally looked around him at the food on display, folks eating, bustling commerce in nearly every corner, she added flatly, “I just decided.”
He smiled, as if this woman never failed to entertain him.
He took another swig of beer as a tonic against whatever weakness had befallen him earlier, had laid bare a longing, something he needed from Geneva. He fiddled with the diamond on his wedding ring, swinging out his legs so he could cross them beneath the countertop, a pair of horned gators shooting from the legs of his black Wranglers. “I hope it ain’t no hard feelings between us.”
Geneva paused at the doorway to the kitchen, a wary look on her face.
Wally shrugged, as if it wasn’t much of nothing. “I owed the sheriff the truth about what I saw, Missy coming up to your place the night she was killed.”
Darren stepped forward. “You told Van Horn?”
“I might have mentioned something in the early stages of this thing, when it was wide open as to who done it, and Parker was just asking questions.”
Huxley came off his stool fast, as if treachery were catching. He put a few feet between him and Wally, taking the seat opposite Wendy in her booth.
Darren took up the space he’d vacated, looking directly at Wally.
He shook his head slightly, as if trying to loosen a thought, the pebble of doubt about these murders that remained lodged in a dark corner of his mind.
“No,” he said. “It was the autopsy—”
“That confirmed it, yes,” Wally said. “The food and all that.”
He looked across the counter at Geneva, a prickly indignation set up as a shield against what she might do to him for talking. “But look, Van Horn knows I’ve been living across the highway from this place for near fifty years, that I can see every goddamn thing going on in here right from my front window.”
“Said I was closed,” Geneva said. Then, in a huff of anger, she slammed through the swinging door, hollering, “Where is Faith?” The door swung back, carrying the echo of her words on a gust of warm air scented by bay leaves and garlic. Wally seemed pleased by the exchange. That she had not hauled off and hit him or banned him from the premises put a smile on his face. He sucked down the last of the beer, belching before turning his attention to Darren.
“But hell if it didn’t all work out,” he said to him. “You put up Keith on two killings, and now you can leave this little town just like you found it.”
He stood to his full six feet two inches, a decent haircut shy of Darren. He rapped his knuckles on the Formica countertop, then turned and walked out.
Darren watched him go.
He swung around on the stool and followed his every move, watching as he climbed into the Ford’s cab, as he backed up the oversize truck and steered it back onto 59, crossing the highway to drive the short distance that separated Geneva’s cafe from his front door. What had Wally said? That he’d been living across the highway from Geneva’s for fifty years, that he could see everything that went on in here right from his front window. Darren looked at Geneva’s regulars, Huxley and Wendy. “They ever find who did it?” he said.
“You talking about Keith?” Wendy asked, her brow knotted in confusion.
“No. The men who killed Joe Sweet.”
Huxley met Wendy’s eye, and the two pointedly remained silent a moment; an unspoken sense of propriety required it. Wendy broke the silence first, not with words but with a soft whistle, a blue note that hung in the air, a call that demanded a response. “What?” Darren said, looking between the two of them.
Wendy shook her head. “Naw. They ain’t ever caught nobody.”
“See, that’s what always ain’t sat right,” Huxley said, a breathlessness creeping on him as the words came, an eagerness to speak of something taboo.
“The whole thing ain’t sat right,” Wendy said. “But we got but one sheriff, and he closed the book on that one ’fore Geneva got Joe in the ground.”
“The story doesn’t make sense,” Darren said.
“No, it don’t,” Huxley followed.
Darren glanced toward the barber’s chair, which sat empty, as did the stall where Isaac cut hair. He realized again he hadn’t seen the man since the night of the shooting, when Geneva’s door was shot to hell. “You think Isaac was lying?”
“Aw, Isaac don’t know shit from shinola,” Huxley said. “He only said three white men after the sheriff did.”
“Whatever Isaac really saw that night must have spooked him good,” Wendy said. “It’s like the whole thing got buried along with Joe.”
“Ain’t nobody dare bring it up…until that black fellow come in here.”
“Michael?” Darren said.
He felt a thrum in his chest, a vibration picking up speed, like a train coming, a locomotive of a feeling that he was getting close to something.
Huxley nodded.
Wendy said, “Geneva never wanted to talk about it.”
“Still don’t,” they heard as the kitchen door swung open.
Geneva entered, still in the clothes she’d worn to jail. “That gal was out back looking for you,” she said flatly. “Guess y’all be going soon.” She said it as if she had all the time in the world to stand right there and watch him go.
“What did Van Horn tell you happened to Joe?” Darren said.
“What you bringing that up for?”
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it? With Isaac’s story.”
“We been living with this for six years now,” she said. “It was a robbery.”
The same thing they’d told Randie about her husband when she arrived in Shelby County.
“And you don’t think it’s odd,” Darren said, “that it happened on the one night you left Joe in the cafe alone?”
“Don’t know what that matters, unless you trying to say this is somehow my fault,” Geneva said. “And if you think I ain’t already been carrying that around for years, then you’re not only mean as the devil but stupid, too.”
“I’m saying that it’s almost like somebody knew when to strike, somebody who’s got a view of everything that goes on in here, right from his living-room window.”
It flashed across Geneva’s face, the realization of what he was implying, and she wasn’t having it. “Leave it be, hear?” She’d grown increasingly angry, but Darren felt the pinch of something else beneath it, a hard and festering fear.
“What are you so scared of?”
“I’m not scared,” Geneva said, and ma
ybe she wasn’t, at least not in the way he’d understood. Maybe the whiff of unease she gave off was more akin to acute caution, a fear of bumping up against the barbed fencing that time had put around her heart, keeping hope penned in. “I’ve just been living in this state a lot longer than you have, and I know how the law works for people like me.”
She’d given up on the truth, just as Randie had.
It both saddened and infuriated him that he wore a badge that meant nothing to either woman, that justice and despondency were so inextricably intertwined that the former was often not worth the trouble of the latter.
“Show him the card the man gave you,” Huxley said suddenly.
Geneva waved away the thought.
Huxley looked at Geneva, knew he was pushing nearer to where the ice ran thin, but he kept going anyway. “The lawyer fellow, Michael. He left Geneva a card, a place that looks into old cases, some folks he knew out of Chicago.”
Darren said, “You still have it?”
Geneva shrugged, but Huxley came around the counter himself and plucked out a business card that had been tucked under a bottom corner of the cash register. He handed it to Darren, who studied the embossed letters: LENNON & PELKIN INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES. He looked at Geneva, who let out a heavy sigh.
24.
IT WAS a private investigation firm run by two ex-cops who had over the years been hired numerous times by a local offshoot of the Innocence Project, run by a former University of Chicago law professor. A few phone calls and a thorough Google search by Darren explained why Michael Wright thought to suggest their help. While looking into the cases of men and women, mostly black and Latino, who had been wrongfully accused and often incarcerated for decades, the two investigators discovered a pattern: for every story about a black mother, sister, or wife crying over a man who was locked up for something he didn’t do, there was a black mother, sister, wife, husband, father, or brother crying over the murder of a loved one for which no one was locked up. For black folks, injustice came from both sides of the law, a double-edged sword of heartache and pain. Lennon and Pelkin had carved out a whole division of their agency to work on unsolved murders in which race played a part—as in the race of the victim had put lead in the shoes of local law enforcement, slowing their pace and ultimately dulling their curiosity to the point of inertia. The New York Times had written a profile of the agency and its founders and the few unsolved murders they’d resurrected and solved. Michael had been offering Geneva a way to find Joe Sweet’s killer.