“I got a good disguise all picked out for next time,” Sister told me. “Got a fancy blond wig and a sparkly dress and everything.”
“She think she Dolly Parton,” Baby cackled. “Old fool.”
After I let the girls off at home, I floored it over to Memorial Oaks. It was too cold for television or basketball, but the cluster of men drinking from paper sacks was there on the corner, watching me with dead eyes. There were a couple girls, too, young, dressed for street success. Cars cruised to a stop beside them, transactions were made. An open-air drug and sex marketplace. The clientele was varied: blacks, whites, new cars, old cars, some with Atlanta tags, some from the far suburbs. I noticed a red pickup truck from Henry County, forty miles to the south. Even a big late-model Chrysler with an elderly ball cap—wearing white man at the wheel cruised past. The same junk cars were parked at the curb. This time, I put my 9-mm in my jacket pocket and locked the van before I got out.
Monique Bell opened the apartment door before I could knock.
“I’m all ready,” she said, fumbling for her keys.
She looked a little like her niece: light-skinned, with Eurasian eyes, a high forehead, and hair cut close to the scalp. I guessed her to be in her late thirties. She was dressed in a black Atlanta Falcons sweatshirt and blue jeans that were a size too big, a belt cinching them around her waist.
“Deecie wanted you to bring Faheem’s teddy bear,” I said.
She wrinkled her nose. “That stinky old thing?”
“She called it his Boo,” I said. “She thinks he might feel better if he had it with him.”
“All right,” she said reluctantly, turning to go back inside the apartment.
I waited in the doorway while she went in search of Boo. The door across the hall opened just a crack. I felt, rather than saw, a pair of eyes looking me over.
“Tell Deecie I say hey,” a small voice called. “Tell Faheem hey too.”
“I will.”
Monique came bustling out, a matted blue teddy bear stuffed under her arm. “Let’s go,” she said brusquely.
34
Monique Bell didn’t utter a word all the way to the hospital, just sat bolt upright in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, probably so she wouldn’t have to look at me or talk to me.
I tried not to take it personally, but for some reason, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I found myself chattering inanely, about the weather, about what a cute baby Faheem was, even about the farce of trying to clean Ruth Matthews’s already impeccable pink house.
Monique grunted a couple times; otherwise, I would have been tempted to stop and search for a pulse.
For the second time that day I pulled up to the emergency room entrance and dropped off a passenger. “He’s up in the ICU,” I told her. “Maybe they’ll call up there and let Deecie know you’re here.”
By the time I parked and got back down to the emergency room, Monique had apparently gotten over her speechlessness.
A new nurse was working the triage desk, and she was receiving the full force of Monique’s rage.
“I don’t give a GODDAMN about your rules,” Monique bellowed. “I got a sick baby in this hospital, and I wanna know where he’s at.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, her own voice rising to the occasion. She was black and middle-aged and would have made two of Monique Bell.
She stood up and put her face right up beside Monique’s. “I called upstairs and they said your niece is gone. Now that’s the best I can do.” She glared right back at the crimson-faced Monique.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They trying to tell me they don’t know where Deecie gone to,” Monique snapped. “And I know good and well she’s here somewheres, but they won’t let me go up and see about Faheem.”
“It’s against HOSPITAL POLICY,” the nurse said.
I guided Monique to a chair in the waiting area. “She’s right. They only let the parent go with a sick child. And since he’s in the intensive care unit, they only allow one person at a time. Probably Deecie just came downstairs to get a Coke or something. I’m sure she’ll be right back.”
“And then I’ll go on upstairs and see about my nephew,” Monique said, loud enough for the triage nurse to hear.
At four-thirty, I got restless. I volunteered to go to the hospital cafeteria to get a snack for both of us, thinking I might find Deecie there.
She wasn’t in the cafeteria, where I bought Cokes and a package of cheese crackers for Monique. I went out to the main hospital lobby, but Deecie wasn’t there either. Probably, I thought, she’d gone back upstairs to sit with Faheem.
But the triage nurse called the ICU nurse, who said, no, she hadn’t seen Ms. Styles in more than two hours.
Monique Bell was fuming. “That damn girl. Run off and leave a sick baby. Ain’t no better than her mama and all of them, runnin’ around like she do.”
The crankier Monique got, the more concerned I got. Deecie had been beside herself with worry over her baby. I didn’t believe she would go off and leave Faheem alone.
I still had the phone number William had given me when he called early in the morning. I dialed and asked for him.
Five long minutes later, he picked up the phone, breathless. “This is William.”
“William? This is Callahan Garrity. Have you heard from Deecie?”
“When? You mean like, now?”
“I mean anytime recently. She asked me to go pick up her aunt at her apartment, and I just got back here an hour ago, but there’s no sign of Deecie. I’ve looked everywhere, and the nurses who are taking care of Faheem say they haven’t seen her in at least two hours.”
“Two hours? That can’t be right. She wouldn’t go off and leave Faheem.”
I was starting to get a bad vibe about this. “I’m going to go find her,” I said.
“You think something bad happened?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I lied.
“I get off at five,” he said. “Then I’m coming right over to that hospital.”
Monique stood in front of the triage desk, looming over the nurse, who studiously avoided looking up.
“Miss Nurse,” Monique said, snapping her fingers under the woman’s nose. “Hey, Miss Nurse. I’m talking to you.”
“What is it now?” the older woman asked, refusing to look up.
“I want you to call back up to that intensive care place and find out how my baby is, and where my niece has gone to.”
“I’ll see,” Miss Nurse said. She jotted down something on the chart she was working on, then picked up the phone.
“The baby’s in guarded condition,” she said after she’d hung up. “I talked to a nurse who said she saw Ms. Styles around three-thirty. Your niece asked her for change to get something to eat out of the vending machines in the cafeteria. Now, if you can’t be quiet, I’ll have to ask you to leave this area.”
Monique glared at her, and Miss Nurse glared back. I went back down to the cafeteria to see if anybody’d seen Deecie.
“Skinny black girl?” the cashier asked. “She come in here, wantin’ pizza. That was the lunch special. But that was all gone by one o’clock. She said she’d find something else. I told her she oughtta walk over to Jagger’s, and she said maybe she would.”
I went outside the emergency room entrance and looked around. I walked down the drive to Clifton Road, where the hospital entrance was. The Emory University campus sprawled over both sides of the road. Jagger’s was a favorite hangout for Emory students, but it was way across campus, at least a fifteen-minute hike, and I doubted Deecie was that familiar with the neighborhood. And William had said Deecie was broke.
I hugged my arms to try to keep warm, but the chill was coming from the inside as well as the exterior. Each question I asked, every answer I got, added to my conviction. She was gone.
“What you mean—gone?” Monique Bell demanded.
William chewed a fingernail.
�
��I’ve looked around the hospital, I walked around outside, there’s no sign of Deecie,” I said.
William buried his face in his hands. “I kept tellin’ her I’d take care of her. Sayin’ I wouldn’t let nobody hurt her. Somebody done got her.” He looked up at me. “Ain’t that right?”
“Maybe not,” I said, clinging to hope. “The Emory campus is huge. Maybe she got lost and has been wandering around, trying to find her way back.”
“It’s getting dark out there,” Monique said. “That girl never did like the dark. Used to wet the bed if I didn’t leave a light on.”
Monique was really working on my nerves. Slapping her face would have been highly therapeutic right now, but probably ill advised.
“We could call campus security,” I said.
“Cops?” William looked dubious.
“They’re employed by the university,” I said. “Kinda like kiddie cops. They probably don’t have any contact with the real thing.” Even as I said it I knew it wasn’t true, but I couldn’t think of any other way to search for Deecie.
“She dead,” Monique said dully. She opened her pocketbook and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a yellow Zippo, then got up and walked outside.
“We could just tell the campus cops Deecie brought her little boy here to the emergency room, wandered outside, and we think she got lost because she’s unfamiliar with the area,” I said. All of which was true.
“What if they seen her picture on the news?” William asked.
“It’s a chance we’ll have to take,” I said. “Look. Deecie was going to have to deal with the police eventually, especially if she turned over that videotape of the robbery. If she didn’t do anything wrong, she shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
He studied his nails, which were pretty unremarkable. “What if she did do something wrong?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“What if she didn’t say exactly how it really happened that cop got shot?”
I clutched his arm. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Deecie knows more than what she said, that’s all.”
“How much more?”
“Enough to get her kilt.”
I took out the key she’d given me, just before I’d left the hospital earlier in the afternoon. “Deecie said I could have the videotape,” I said, turning it over and over in the palm of my hand. “She said she felt bad about lying to me, and she gave me this.”
He took the key and looked at it, then handed it back. “What’s it to?”
“You don’t know?”
“She said she hid it. Someplace safe. That’s all she told me.”
Luckily for us, Miss Nurse was on her dinner hour. A young, slightly effeminate male nurse whose name tag said he was Carl was working the triage desk. He readily agreed to call campus security and let them know about Deecie.
Ten minutes later, a white sedan marked “Emory Police” glided up to the emergency room door where William and I were waiting.
Officer Cash was middle-aged, with a graying crew-cut and steel-rimmed aviator glasses. He wrote everything we told him on a clipboard, and gave it all some thought.
“You don’t think she might have caught a bus and gone home?”
“Her baby is in the intensive care unit,” I said. “She wouldn’t leave him.”
“Another family member could have picked her up,” he suggested.
“Her only other family is an aunt, who’s here right now,” I said.
“You’ve contacted her friends?”
William plucked the officer’s shirt sleeve. “Look here. I’m her only friend. She didn’t call me. Could we start looking for her? She’s kinda scared of the dark.”
Officer Cash finished writing up his report. “Okay, who wants to ride along with me?”
“I’ll go,” William volunteered.
“I’ll stay here with Monique,” I said. “In case she comes back.”
“If she shows up, call dispatching and let them know,” Cash said. “No sense beating the bushes for somebody who’s already found their way back home.”
35
William’s face told the story before Officer Cash could.
“No sign of the girl,” Cash said. He looked from me to William. “Any reason she might want to disappear? Maybe hide out?”
“Not from us,” I said.
Cash looked at his wristwatch. It was past seven. “I’ll ask the evening watch to keep an eye out for her,” he said. “Who should we call if we should happen to see her?”
I gave him my cell phone number and thanked him. He got in his patrol car and drove away.
“Something bad’s happened,” William said.
But I wasn’t ready to accept that. Not yet. Not when I was so close to the truth.
“She didn’t have a girlfriend or somebody at the complex she might have called to ask for a ride or something?”
William shook his head no. “See, she worked nights mostly, and slept during the day when everybody else was out. Deecie was funny, she called them other women ghetto bitches. Except for that old lady used to keep Faheem sometimes.”
The woman I’d met the first time I went looking for Deecie. “Mrs. Rudolph?”
“Yeah. She and Deecie got along good. But Mrs. Rudolph, she don’t drive.”
“It’s worth checking out,” I said.
“Maybe.” He wasn’t convinced.
We went back inside the waiting room, where Monique Bell was slumped in a chair, her head thrown back, mouth wide open, snoring to beat the band.
“Monique?”
She opened her eyes, blinked. “Where that girl go to?”
“They didn’t find her,” I said. “Do you think she might have called any of your neighbors?”
“Deecie? She thought she was better than all them niggers. No, she didn’t give none of them the time of day.”
“Not even Mrs. Rudolph?”
“Well, she liked her, ‘cause the old lady thought Faheem hung the moon. But why would she call her, with me and William right here?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Monique stood up and stretched. “I don’t know neither. And I ain’t studying staying in this here waiting room no more. I got to be at work. You giving me a ride or what?”
Since she put it so charmingly, how could I refuse?
“I’m staying here,” William declared, planting himself in the chair Monique had surrendered. “In case Deecie comes back.”
“She ain’t coming back here no more,” Monique said. “That boy nurse over there, he called up to the room they keeping the baby at. They say he in guarded condition. Whatever that means.”
Monique worked as a waitress at the Holiday Inn in Midtown. She gave me the address, then promptly dozed off again.
When we got to the motel, I had to shake Monique to wake her up. She sat up, looked around, and reached for the door, without saying a word.
I had to take one last shot at finding Deecie, or at least finding that videotape.
“Monique?”
She yawned broadly. “What?”
I held up the key. “Deecie gave me this today. Right before I left to pick you up. She said she’d hidden something, something she wanted to give me. But she didn’t say where it was. Do you have any idea what this key might go to?”
She gave it only a cursory glance. “Look like any old kind of key. Deecie, she real closemouthed about her business. Like her mama, that way. Think she better than everybody else. She better, all right. Deecie’s mama, she dead, got cut by the man she stayed with. Now Deecie, she probably dead too. Leave me with a sick young’un to raise. I ain’t studyin’ no key. And I ain’t messin’ in that girl’s business. Cops come around, I’ll tell ‘em same as I told you. I ain’t studyin’ what kind of trouble Deecie Styles got into.”
Monique got out of the van and slammed the door shut. After I left the motel, I decided to take another run past Memorial Oaks.
; It was dark out, and the place looked more menacing than ever. I parked at the curb with my motor running and tried calling Austine Rudolph from my cell phone. No answer.
I briefly considered a door-to-door canvass, to see if anybody had heard from Deecie, or seen her. As I weighed the options in my mind, people were drifting in and out of the buildings, standing under an unlit streetlight. The two whores from earlier in the day were back, joined by two more girls who didn’t even look old enough to drive, let alone turn tricks. The men stood around, drinking from paper sack-wrapped bottles, smoking what looked like hand-rolled reefers.
When I saw my old friend Tweety Bird saunter down the sidewalk toward the van, I decided it was time to move on, before my windshield took any more abuse.
When I got home, Edna looked up from the hand of solitaire she’d dealt out on the kitchen table.
“Your sister wants to know where her uniform and Grady I.D. badge are.”
“I’ll get them to her,” I said, sitting down at the table beside her.
“Mac called,” she added. “Twice. I told him you’d call him back. Tonight.”
“Maybe. Anybody else call?”
“Am I supposed to be your answering service?”
“It’s been a long day, Ma,” I said. “Deecie Styles has disappeared.”
“You think she’s dead?”
My mother has a way of cutting to the heart of a matter.
“I don’t know. We looked around campus. Her aunt claims she doesn’t know anything about what Deecie was mixed up in. But William, that’s the boyfriend, admitted that Deecie lied about what happened in the liquor store the night Bucky got shot. And Deecie as much as told me the same thing, before she disappeared. She even gave me a key, where she said I could find the videotape of the robbery. But I didn’t get a chance to ask her what the key was to.”
I took the key out of my pocket and placed it on the table.
“Too big for a safe deposit box or a padlock,” Edna commented. “Could be a house key.”
“Could be a lot of things,” I said. “But Deecie didn’t have access to a car after she disappeared. I think she must have hidden the videotape somewhere around that apartment complex her aunt lives in. Either that, or near the warehouse they were hiding in over on Shallowford Road.”
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