Crown of Thorns (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Timothy and I grew up in the same neighborhood. My name is Nicholas Barrett.”

  “That, sir, is an answer, but not to my question.”

  “Nor have you helped me find Timothy Larrabee.”

  “I’ll let him know you were looking for him.”

  “I’m at the Doubletree in Charleston.”

  “I’ll inform him of that. Please do not use this church and our service of God as a method of convenience again. While we are open to new members, our degree of commitment to Jesus excludes many, if not most, from taking up his cross the way he demands of his followers.”

  He turned from me. Deliberately. And that was it. Elder Jeremiah folded his big arms and stared directly into my eyes, challenging me to do anything else but move away.

  I moved away, out of the church and into the sunshine. I opened the door to get into my Jeep and saw the note on the front seat.

  And a baby boy in a blanket on the floor on the passenger side.

  Chapter 9

  Without warning, from behind me two hands gripped the tops of my shoulders.

  “Don’t turn,” a voice said, close into my ear. “Tell me who this is.”

  I was standing in front of the candy machine in the waiting room of the emergency room at St. George’s Hospital, and until the hands had grabbed my shoulders, I’d been trying to decide between a chocolate or granola bar. Half an hour earlier, I had brought the baby from my Jeep to the admitting desk. A nurse had taken the boy away. Once I heard more about the baby boy,

  I intended to go up to the children’s ward to see if Angel was there with Maddie.

  “Think back,” the voice continued. “Think a long ways back.”

  I tried to spin. Those powerful hands kept me in place.

  “After all these years, you still haven’t learned to listen, have you?” the voice said.

  “And after all these years, you still haven’t learned any manners. Good thing you could throw a football well enough to get us into the state finals.”

  “I’m impressed, Nick.” The hands dropped. “It’s been a long time since you caught enough of those balls to get us there.”

  I turned to face Jubil Smith.

  He was a picture ready for a Gap ad aimed at the Volvo market—khaki shirt, khaki pants, crisply ironed. He wore the blackest sunglasses I had ever seen. Round, John Lennon glasses. Black as the lenses were, they were almost lost against the luster of the man’s dark skin. Tight-cropped hair with tinges of gray. Equally tight goatee, with gray forming an oval within the oval of hair around his chin. Flat-bellied. Big shouldered. I guessed Jubil still went to the gym plenty, as he’d done in high school.

  Jubil’s hand was extended. I shook it in greeting.

  He took off his dark glasses. “One day I get a call telling me you’re coming back to Charleston a married man and you want to celebrate,” he said. “This was back before a person couldn’t punch in the numbers but actually spun a dial on the telephone to make a call. So I wait the next day, to hear from you. Nothing. Same thing, the day after. And the day after. Finally ended up throwing out that bottle of champagne. I must have misunderstood. Didn’t think you meant you’d be coming back to Charleston by the time cell phones would be invented. And still you don’t call. I had to read the papers to learn what

  I could.”

  “Never dreamed you’d still be in Charleston,” I said. “Thought you spent a couple years in the big time.”

  He smiled. “Not long enough to retire rich. Back then the NFL didn’t pay like it does now. Especially to backup quarterbacks. It’s only been the last couple years they decided a black man was intelligent enough to belong in the pocket as a starter.”

  There was enough truth in what he said and what it implied that I didn’t comment. Then I thought of where we were standing. The emergency room.

  “You alright?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  I gestured around us. “Thinking maybe you brought someone here. Hoping it’s not too serious.”

  He nodded in understanding. “No, wasn’t anything medical that brought me down here.”

  “That’s good to hear.” I left the obvious question unasked.

  He answered it immediately. “It was curiosity. Your name came up at the station, and I thought I’d come down myself instead of sending some rookie. I’ve got to ask you about the baby you brought in.”

  Station. I mentally blinked until it made sense. Medical station.

  “Doctor is a long way from pro football,” I said. “Congratulations. I’m glad to hear the little boy will be in good hands.”

  “I’m not a doctor, Nick. I’m a cop.”

  **

  Angel didn’t return to the hospital until after my conversation with Jubil. She was at her secret place. Much later, when she came to trust me, I would learn about it and picture it with a smile.

  She arrived at the secret place later than she had promised Camellia that afternoon, burdened by four white plastic grocery bags that sagged from the weight of canned food. It was a boarded-up shed beneath a freeway bridge that crossed over railroad tracks and a street lined with sagging commercial buildings. Two blocks from the row of houses where Angel lived, the shed, an old outbuilding once used to hold coal, leaned against the rear of a liquor store which was wedged between the street and the tracks. Barely larger than a doghouse, the shed was almost completely hidden from the tracks by willows and assorted weeds that grew to the height of Angel’s head.

  The interior was cluttered by discarded store shelves, but mostly clean of coal dust because of the rain that had been leaking through the shed roof over the years. Angel had moved in wooden crates to serve as chairs and shared her secret place with only one person: her best friend Camellia, two years older at fourteen, who lived down the street from Angel. While neither could explain why, they had come to depend on daily meetings at the secret place. In their world it was their only refuge; nowhere else could they step out of their shells of toughness and try their hidden voices with no self-consciousness or fear.

  Above the shed, the overpass rumbled with late-afternoon rush of traffic. Semi-truck trailers banged and clanked as they crossed; tires of lighter vehicles slapped the lines of tar on the concrete. Angel set down her bags and gave the triple-knock-pause-triple-knock code.

  “Hey, girl,” Camellia called out in response. “Where you been?”

  “Just you open up,” Angel said. “I had to walk back from the hospital ’cause I didn’t want to spend none on a taxi. Then I stopped to buy you some stuff.”

  Camellia pushed aside a loose vertical plank. Crouched in the opening and looking up, she gave Angel a broad grin. Rays of sunlight, coming low from beneath the overpass, shone off the ebony of her face. “Hey! What’d you get?”

  “What’s it look like?” Angel said. The heavy plastic bags snagged against weeds as she lifted them toward Camellia. “I’m going back to the hospital, so I want you to take them home. Maybe put half in my kitchen and take the rest for you.”

  Angel followed the groceries inside. She sat on a crate and brushed dirt off her shoulders, leaning forward to keep her head from hitting the interior of the roof. Cracks of light fell between the old planks above her, striping her face with shadows.

  Camellia lifted cans and squinted to read the labels in the uncertain light of the shed. “Peaches! Pineapple! And look, sugar ham! This must’ve cost forty dollars.”

  “Forty-five. And before you say you can’t take some, just you remember that you gave me that electric stun gun you stole off Leroy. And I still got fifty-five. Had to save the rest so when Maddie is feeling good, I can take her back home by taxi.”

  “The rest? You rob a bank?”

  Angel shook her head. “You remember yesterday me taking Maddie to the hospital?”

  “I do.”

  “This man named Nick, after I busted up one of the security guards, he said he’d help and he did. When no one was looking, he gave me a
hundred dollars.”

  “Whoa, girl. You busted up a security guard?”

  Angel recounted the events. She did it deadpan, which she knew was the way to make Camellia laugh hardest. Camellia listened with her hand covering her mouth, muffling her giggles.

  “He gave me his leg,” Angel added. “But I gave it back.”

  “Child,” Camellia said in the best imitation of her mother’s voice, “you been smoking some of Herman’s weed?”

  Herman was Camellia’s mother’s boyfriend, and the biggest reason Camellia needed the secret place to get out of the house.

  Angel frowned. “You know we promised each other not to do stuff like that.”

  “A man’s leg? Girl, he can’t just take off his leg.”

  Angel again explained, and this time Camellia covered her mouth in mock disbelief, her eyes wide and white in the dimness of the shed.

  “You had some kind of day yesterday,” Camellia said. “Them doctors gonna be able to fix Maddie?”

  “A day, maybe two, and I can take her home.” Angel looked earnestly at her older friend. “You remember, though, what you promised.”

  “Be your best friend forever.”

  “The other thing.”

  Camellia frowned. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”

  “This man Nick,” Angel said, “I got him chasing that white-haired man. Stuff’s gonna happen now. If any of it falls back on me . . .”

  “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Angel. If it does, get the cops.”

  “Be too late then. And say it wasn’t—I can’t let them find out about Grammie Zora and what she done. You know I can’t. Just promise if something happens to me, you’ll look after Maddie. Don’t let anyone take her away.”

  “Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”

  “You weren’t there the night Grammie Zora had to leave.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Can’t tell you, except that—”

  “Grammie Zora’s gone and won’t be back for a while. How many more times you gonna tell me that?”

  “As many as it takes. But you’d better believe you don’t want to know about it.”

  “Nothing’s gonna happen to you.” Camellia sounded less certain.

  “Just tell me if anything goes wrong and I’m gone, you’ll make sure to look after Maddie. Promise?”

  **

  “From what I understand, you told the admitting nurse nothing more than the boy is sick and you are trying to help out the family. Not where you found the boy. Not where the boy lives. Not the boy’s family name.”

  We sat near the window of the hospital cafeteria, Jubil and I, at a table for four. He was leaning back in his chair, face tilted to the sun, hands cupped around a mug of coffee. Relaxed.

  “Chitchat on old times finished?” I said to Jubil. “It was just getting interesting, how you’ve worked your way up the force. Where’s your notebook?”

  “Note to self,” Jubil said, keeping an even smile, “witness suddenly hostile and defensive.”

  “Add impressed,” I said. “You went from social to interrogation without missing a beat. To me, the implication is that I’ve got something to hide and you’d like me to say something important without realizing we’re suddenly on the record.”

  “Do you? Have something to hide?”

  “Again, that implication. I brought the boy in on behalf of the boy’s mother.”

  “But you didn’t give them the mother’s name,” Jubil said. “Didn’t you expect warning bells to go off?”

  “Since I’m now talking to a cop, not a friend, let me tell you that—”

  “Detective first class,” Jubil interrupted. “Not just a cop. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a muckety-muck. Uniform is not required.”

  “Since I’m now talking to a detective first class, let me tell you that—”

  “Relax, Nick. My questions are standard procedure. Someone brings a baby to the hospital under these conditions, we get

  a call immediately. Like I said, I decided to handle it myself because I know you.”

  “Makes it easier to tell if the witness is hiding anything when you think you know him?”

  “Next time I’ll buy you decaf. The Nick I remember wasn’t this high-strung.”

  I leaned back myself and sighed. “Sorry. Driving to the hospital with the baby beside me, I guessed the police would get involved. I had myself all worked up to spend time in jail to protect the mother. And frankly, if I’m headed there, I wish it was some rookie I didn’t know taking me in instead of you.”

  Now Jubil leaned forward.

  “There was a note on the seat,” I said. “From the mother. It requested that I do whatever I could to ensure the baby reached a doctor. That’s all I’m going to tell you. Not where I was when the baby was placed in my Jeep. Not what else the note said.”

  “Because . . .”

  “I think I was the mother’s only hope. Police get involved in this, she may never see her baby again.”

  “Because . . .”

  “I tell you anything else, it will be too much.”

  The note had been written on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt with a single purchase. Take my Billy Lee to St. George’s Hospital please. These people here won’t let me. If you could bring him back when he’s better, I’ll pay you what I can. I love my baby boy. The mother had signed her name, Retha. She’d circled her phone number beneath. PS You gotta call before you bring him back. I can’t even let my husband know the boy is gone. I think I can fool him for a couple days.

  Taking the baby to a private doctor’s office had not seemed like an option. Not on a Sunday afternoon when private practices were closed. Not when the baby boy was so listless I wondered if he might die soon. So it was back to the emergency room. Twice in two days.

  “Nick, this is serious business. Anyone else but me is going to look at the facts and accuse you of kidnapping. They’re going to say you got scared the boy was so sick he might die.”

  “If that were true, I’d have brought in a doctor long before he got this sick.”

  “Not if you’d stolen the baby. And you know that’s one of the first things any cop would suspect. We live in a sad world, Nick. Kids disappear all the time and some bad stuff happens to them.” He rubbed his face. “Help me out here, Nick. I already know you’re footing the bill for another sick kid. Coincidence is one thing, but . . .”

  “It’s not coincidence.”

  “No?”

  I allowed myself a smile, thinking that if I learned anything about Timothy Larrabee that needed police intervention, the first person to hear about it would be Jubil. For now though, this was my game, and I wanted to keep it that way. It was, I suppose, a way of protecting Angel. “Not coincidence. The first sick kid led to the next. I’ll tell you more when I can. So I’m going to ask you the same question.”

  “Same question?”

  “Help me out here, Jubil.”

  “Me help you.”

  “Let me take the boy back to his mother when he’s better.”

  “If he doesn’t get better? And what kind of family are you taking him home to? From the sounds of it, maybe the kid is better off with social services.”

  “The boy deserves to grow up with his mother.”

  Jubil stared at me. I believed I could read his mind. He was thinking about my motivation. We’d been close in high school. He knew part of my past, the years I’d spent with no real family. He knew I understood too well the bewilderment and pain an abandoned child would face as he grew old enough to comprehend what had happened. If police involvement separated Billy Lee from his mother . . .

  “I can’t do it, Nick,” he finally said. “The call came in to the station. I went out. A report’s due.”

  I knew from where I’d found the baby that Retha belonged to Shepherd Isaiah’s church. But I doubted it was a church. In a church husbands did not allow their wives to be beaten publicly. In a church mothers were not prevent
ed from getting their babies medical attention. That was closer to the realm of cults. There were a lot of implications behind the note on the back of the Wal-Mart receipt. If I could get Retha out of her situation, I would. And bringing in the police—at least immediately—didn’t seem like the best solution for her and the baby.

  “Help me out, Jubil,” I repeated.

  “You’re thinking of your own mother, aren’t you? Wishing that someone had stepped in to rescue her like you’re trying to rescue this boy’s mother.”

  “Psychobabble.” Although it wasn’t. I’d sent her away in a moment of anger when I was a boy. And she’d never come back. It had taken me until recently to learn why. But that didn’t change the deep-down scars I’d carried for decades. “Help me out, Jubil. Delay your report a day or two. I’ll see if I can get the mother to come in and explain everything.”

  “I wish it was anyone else asking but the person who stepped out of his car with a tire iron the night we won a football game by forty points.”

  Four linebackers had backed him up to the wall of the high school after that game, bitter at a lop-sided loss inflicted by Jubil, four linebackers whose fathers believed staunchly in the value of the Confederate flag and saw no value in a throwing arm—no matter how powerful or accurate—if that throwing arm was black. None of those four saw my approach, nor had I intended

  to give warning, not with a tire iron in my hand and rage in my heart, for the words I heard them utter to Jubil were words no boy or man should have to endure. The first I hit across the thigh, and he dropped with a shriek. The second fell when Jubil took advantage of the distraction and kicked him in the stomach. And the other two decided we were serious enough to choose discretion over valor and ran, leaving their fallen companions to crawl away from our anger.

  “I only asked for help,” I said. “I didn’t say you owed me.”

  “Like I’d forget,” he answered. He rubbed his face, pausing to massage his goatee. “You got a couple of days. Wednesday afternoon. Then I file a report and bring in the social services people.”