Two of the boys hung back, but the youngest brother, a six-year-old, went to look. The older boys remembered him laughing as he realized the man was pulling a trick and the laughter stopping as the man grabbed him and pulled him inside. The police showed the brothers plastic models and photographs of cars, and they picked a faded yellow ’81 Ford Falcon. With the help of a sketch artist they described a man with an oval face, thin hair and untrimmed beard. Four days later a woman walking her dog along the riverbank found the little boy’s wrecked and naked body.
The police did nothing, or so it seemed, and so I called Charles. ‘These guys always come back for more,’ he said. ‘They can’t help themselves.’ So we drove and watched and drove some more until one morning we saw a dirty white Chrysler Cordoba. It was trawling through a neighborhood about a mile from where the boy had been picked up. A dirty white Cordoba was close enough to a faded yellow Ford Falcon. We pulled next to it and looked at the driver. He was about sixty, nearly bald, and needed a shave. In his backseat, there was an oversized yellow stuffed animal – the comic-strip cat Garfield. I couldn’t control myself. I cut the steering wheel and ran the Cordoba on to a lawn. It crashed into a cluster of boxwood bushes.
We got out and beat the guy. We broke his ribs. We broke his wrist. We damaged his face.
The only problem was, he wasn’t the right guy. The man who’d raped and killed the child turned up the next month two counties away in a Motel 6 with an eight-year-old boy. When the police arrested him his faded yellow Ford Falcon was parked outside. In the car they found strands of hair from the earlier crime and souvenirs he’d taken with him.
The guy we’d beaten had no police record and no history of sexual abuse. ‘We screwed up bad,’ I’d said to Charles.
‘We didn’t screw up,’ he’d said. He’d seemed content to have beaten someone even if the man wasn’t the right one. ‘The man never explained why he was cruising with a Garfield doll in his backseat,’ he’d said. ‘He had no children of his own and had no reason to be there. Maybe we stopped him before he did something.’
‘Or maybe he just liked Garfield.’
‘So why doesn’t he identify us and press charges?’
‘You’ve gotten too deep inside his head for that,’ I’d said.
‘Me?’ he’d laughed. ‘I thought that was you.’
There was a chirp of surprise behind me in the kitchen. Susan had come in from her real-estate appointment and hadn’t expected to find me there. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Watching the rain. How did the appointment go?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I think they’re interested. Where’s your car?’
‘Thomas has it.’
‘What?’
‘He’ll be sixteen next month,’ I said. ‘He needs the practice.’
‘Why aren’t you with him?’
‘Because I’m here. Tell me about the customers. Where are they from?’
‘Call him,’ she said. ‘Tell him to come home.’
‘I already left a message.’
‘Damnit, BB.’
‘Thomas and I agreed that you’d kill me for this.’
‘Killing’s too good for you.’ She threw her keys on the counter and left the room.
I took another drink of beer, picked up her keys and went out through the front door.
FIFTEEN
I drove Susan’s car downtown and parked at Hemming Plaza. The plaza is named for Charles Hemming who raised a sixty-foot memorial to the Confederate dead with a life-sized bronze sculpture of a soldier facing south from the top. Once in the early 1960s, men with ax handles and baseball bats gathered around the monument before beating a group of teenagers who were staging a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Behind the bronze soldier’s back stands a four-story white-granite building constructed a hundred years ago as a Cohen Brothers Department Store. When the store went out of business the city council bought it and renamed it City Hall.
I rode the elevator to the fourth floor and asked a uniformed police officer at a reception desk where I could find a mayor’s aid named David Fowler. ‘Office of Special Events,’ he said and pointed at double glass doors at the end of the corridor.
On the walls inside the doors hung poster-sized photographs of crowds gathered in a big green tent for a jazz festival, yachts decorated bow to stern with Christmas lights for Venetian Night, fireworks over the St Johns River and floats in a Veterans Day parade. They were nice pictures, but it seemed to me that older, indelible images of the city’s past remained just under the surface of the walls, like old water stains that eventually would bleed through no matter how many times maintenance workers painted them over. In one, the owner of the Monson Motel poured muriatic acid into an all-white swimming pool after black protesters jumped in, just to show that they could. In another, a pulp and paper mill pumped stinking fumes into the air and noxious effluent into the river. In an earlier, fainter image, orange groves covered the land at the south of the city before the first train bridge was built and everyone moved on – an image of when this still was paradise if you were white and survived the cholera, though if you were black no hospital would admit you no matter how sick you were so you died at home or amid the blossoming trees. Or earlier still, when a fire started after a cinder lit drying moss in a fiber factory and burned the whole city down, leaving the bones of houses and businesses, owned by white and black both, protruding from the dark river dirt. Only a nickel-sized yellow stain might remain from the Spanish, French, English and Timucua Indians coming together for hundreds of years to kill each other.
I walked past a series of other doors until I found one with a placard for David Fowler, Head Events Coordinator. He sat at his desk, talking on the phone. He was in his early thirties, tall, thin and white, with curly blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Except for the blond hair and glasses I could imagine someone thinking he looked like me at thirty. Beyond his desk a plate-glass window looked out at the plaza. A horizontal shot through the rain would catch the bronze soldier between the shoulders.
When I tapped on the door, Fowler held up a finger, asking me to wait a moment, but I walked in and sat in a chair across the desk from him. He looked annoyed, said, ‘I’ll need to call you back,’ and hung up the phone. He appraised me and seemed to decide that he didn’t know me and didn’t wish to. ‘What can I do for you?’ he said.
‘You can tell me about Jamaica,’ I said.
Panic crossed his face. ‘Close the door.’
I did and sat again.
‘What do you mean Jamaica?’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘That’s a dumb question.’
‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s William Byrd. I was a friend of Belinda Mabry.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I already told you. I want to know what happened.’
‘You’re not the police?’ he said.
‘I’ve little use for them.’
He sat quietly, his eyes fluttering as if he were looking for a way out of his office, and then he reached into the top desk drawer and pulled out a small black pistol.
I smiled. ‘Are you going to shoot me here?’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ He was sweating.
I said, ‘Why don’t you put away the gun and talk to me politely?’
As uncertainly as he’d held the gun on me, he set it on the desk. ‘What do you know about Jamaica?’ he asked.
‘I know that you flew to Kingston with Belinda for Don Melchiori’s party. Tonya Richmond was there. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ashley Littleton was too. I know all three of them are dead.’
He paled and looked sick.
A hospital helicopter flew low over Hemming Plaza, the bass chop-chop of the blades pounding through the rain and penetrating the window and walls.
‘Belinda was fearless,’ Fowler said quietly. ‘If she had an ounce of fear in her I never saw it.’ There was awe in his voice, maybe love.
‘We’d gone out only a couple of times and when Don invited us to Jamaica she said she was game. I knew what Don’s parties were like and I told Belinda I didn’t want to go. But her husband had been dead for more than a year and she was ready. I thought she would go without me so I went too.’
‘Tell me about the party,’ I said.
He gazed at me, hollow-eyed. ‘I knew this would happen.’
‘What went on at the party?’
He looked out the window as if he wished to fly through it. Against the cloud-darkened sky the glass reflected ghost images of his face and mine. He said, ‘A sixteen-year-old girl died. A messed-up kid.’
‘Who was she?’ I asked.
‘The daughter of a man in the Jamaican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Don said he was a regular at the parties but he was out of the country and Don had had his eyes on the girl. Her name was Tralena. She shouldn’t have been at the party but Don invited her.’
‘What happened? How did she die?’
‘They’ll kill me if I tell you,’ he said.
His well-being was the least of my worries. ‘What happened?’
He sighed, his eyes wet. ‘She went so fast, so easily. I don’t know. She had a bag on her face for twenty or thirty seconds and she went limp.’
‘What do you mean “a bag”?’
‘A plastic bag to cut off the air, give her a bigger orgasm. Don was screwing her.’
‘He was screwing a sixteen-year-old with a plastic bag over her head?’
‘We were all so high. It didn’t seem crazy at the time.’
‘Who put it on her? Melchiori?’
‘Huh? No. Belinda and the other women.’
I felt the thick skin of my resolve split. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘It was part of the fun. Tralena didn’t mind. We were all together, you know? Don asked Tralena if she wanted an orgasm that would crack her in two. She said, “I like orgasms,” and we laughed because she said it like a little girl. So Belinda put the bag over Tralena’s head, and Tonya and Ashley held her arms when she tried to take if off. But only for twenty or thirty seconds. Not long enough to suffocate.’
‘But she suffocated,’ I said.
‘Yes, she did.’
‘And then what?’
‘Don finished screwing her.’
‘He finished screwing her after she went limp?’
‘You couldn’t have pried him off her with a crowbar. Afterward we put her in the shower and cleaned her as much as we could. One of the guys at the party had a boat. He carried her offshore, weighed her down and dropped her in the water. But he didn’t do it right. She washed up on the beach two days later. The coroner missed most of what happened but he said she’d been raped and that she’d died before getting dumped in the ocean. On the morning that we left Jamaica it was front-page news.’
‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ I asked.
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ For the first time he looked angry. ‘I was there. I mean, I wasn’t with the girl but I was part of it. Even if I’d wanted to go I couldn’t have. The other guys at the party have the kind of power you don’t screw with. Don brought me only because I was with Belinda and he wanted her. If I’d gone to the police I would’ve ended up in the ocean along with Tralena.’
‘Who were the other men?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘If I give names I’m dead.’
‘How about Tralena’s father? You say he’s in the government. If the papers covered the death of his daughter his name’s got to be public. Who is he?’
‘Godrell Graham. From what Don has said, he’s on the Trade side of the ministry. Supposedly he makes things happen for a little money in his own pocket.’
‘Makes things happen? Drugs?’
‘That’s what I’m guessing,’ he said.
‘Why didn’t you talk to him, tell him what happened to his daughter?’
Again he was sweating. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘More or less. I called and talked to him.’
‘How did he take the news?’
‘He hung up on me. I don’t think he believed me. Who wants to think of his daughter that way?’
I nodded. ‘How did Belinda handle all this?’
‘As if it was nothing. Like I said, she was fearless.’
That both did and didn’t sound like the girl I’d known. Belinda had been fearless but never cold. ‘Who killed her and the others?’ I asked.
Fear and sadness in his eyes, he seemed to pull into himself. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘me too.’
‘What are you going to do with what I’ve told you?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure.’ That wasn’t true. I planned to talk to him again, next time somewhere that no one could hear him if he cried for help. And with Charles by my side. Charles would get him to name names.
Fowler picked up the pistol from the desk and considered it like a new toy or machine whose full range of functions he had yet to learn.
‘Give it to me,’ I said.
‘Why?’ He sounded afraid.
I reached for the gun and he gave it to me. I removed the magazine, put it in my pocket and handed the gun back to him. ‘I don’t want you shooting yourself.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ he said.
I looked at his hollow eyes. ‘If I were you I might.’
When I turned for the door, he said, ‘There’s something wrong with a woman who’s got no fear.’
I don’t like guns. When I was thirteen my father brought home his Ruger .22 from the Best Gas station. He put it in a canvas case and kept it and a box of fifty shells on a shelf in his bedroom closet. My mother had run off to Arizona six years earlier and when I came home from school on autumn afternoons the house was mine alone and I leafed through the pictures that he’d hidden under a stack of road maps in a desk drawer or fingered the shorts, blouses and underpants that my mother had left behind when she’d abandoned us and that my father had inexplicably kept all these years in the bottom of the dresser.
One cloudy November afternoon I moved from the dresser to the closet and I felt the gun through the case. I took it to my father’s bed and unzipped it. The bullets slid cleanly into the magazine the way well-tooled machine parts fit together and the gun felt solid and right in my hands as if we were tooled for each other too.
I took the Ruger into the backyard and sat in a folding chair on the pool deck. The air was cool and a solid layer of gray blanketed the sky. When a light breeze blew through the leaves of the live oak trees, a blue jay made an ugly sound and glided from a branch to the grass beside the quarry pond. I raised the pistol and looked at the bird through the sight. It stood for a full minute without moving as if it were tempting me.
I pulled the trigger and blood burst from the breast of the bird. Feathers scattered across the grass.
A gladness descended upon me, an awareness that I had power in a universe that had always seemed overwhelming. I’d killed a bird and I no longer felt lonely.
Twenty minutes later two sparrows landed on the grass. As I leveled the sight on one of them it flew away. I leveled the sight on the other and pulled the trigger. Too quick. Strangely, the sparrow didn’t fly away at the sound of the gunshot and I leveled the sight again, taking my time, wondering whether the bird would have the patience to let me kill it. I pulled the trigger and the bird blasted apart. When its mate returned, I shot it too. The gray dome of the sky seemed to lower and I felt enormous. A squirrel climbed around the trunk of an oak and I aimed and fired. Bark split from the tree. The squirrel reappeared, I fired again and more bark tore away. The breeze tossed the branches. The water on the quarry pond rippled and darkened.
The afternoon slipped toward evening and I stayed perched on the lounge chair. When my father returned shortly before six o’clock, the remains of four sparrows, a mocking bird and the blue jay lay scattered across the backyard. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ my fat
her asked.
The answer seemed obvious. ‘Shooting birds.’
He hit me in the face with an open fist.
As he watched over me, I picked up the birds from the lawn and put them in a plastic pail. The heart of the mocking bird was still beating when I scooped its body and its separated wing off the grass.
After I retrieved the last sparrow I presented the pail to my father.
‘Inside,’ he said.
In the kitchen he laid a cutting board and a fillet knife on the counter.
‘Do it,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You’ll eat what you kill,’ he said. ‘I’ll teach you how to dress them properly. Start by cutting a line down their bellies.’
‘No.’
‘Goddamn it, you’ll do as I say.’
I made the incisions, dug their tiny organs out of their rib cages with my index finger, plucked their feathers, removed their heads, then filleted their breasts. Tears filled my eyes as I worked but when I slowed, my father said, ‘Goddamn it, finish the job.’
He sautéed the birds in vegetable oil and spooned them on to a plate which he set before me at the kitchen table. I ate the wretched meat. By the time I had finished the last bite I had come to two conclusions. Sparrow is the most revolting bird on God’s green earth, and I didn’t like guns.
Outside of City Hall, the rain was falling in sheets. I ran from the metal and glass awning that fronted the building, across the street and through the plaza. The drunks and homeless had abandoned the benches where they generally spent their days. The pigeons that usually toddled aimlessly were roosting elsewhere.
As I reached Susan’s car, four men poured out of a van parked behind it. I reached for the door and the men surrounded me. Had the sky been clear and had I been ready I might have knocked down two of them before they’d subdued me. I clubbed one of them in the throat with my forearm and another hit me in the back with something that felt like a log. The blow knocked me sideways and I fell against the car. Someone hit me again and then my hands were cuffed behind my back and they were dragging me into the van.
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