I opened the door. “Hey, Mike.”
"Raleigh." Mike pushed up the safety glasses. "Are you okay?"
"Fine. Why?"
"That looks like a very serious sunburn."
"Oh, yeah, that. I’m okay."
"If you don’t use sunblock, you're going to wind up with ichthyderm."
Oh, the vocabulary of forensics.
"Ichthyderm,” I said. “That would be . . ."
"Translated literally from the Greek, ichthy means fish, and derm means skin. Sunbather’s skin. Smoker’s skin. Skin like you have scales."
Several minutes -- and several Greek translations -- later Mike moved on to scolding me for using First-Aid tape instead of adhesive lifts. I apologized profusely and tried to convey the urgency of this evidence, but he refused to promise anything by Monday. He did however tell me a long version of what was going on in his life, and it was almost as interesting as the two-hour lecture on Optimus Prime.
When I finally got back to the mineralogy lab, my head was pounding with hunger. I was debating moving my dinner date with Eric to lunch. But a hollow metallic clatter, like cheap spoons tossed in a diner’s cutlery bin, stopped me at the door.
Eric was strapping metal braces over his thin legs. At first he didn’t see me. But when he glanced up, his freckled face reflected all the grief that was squeezing my own heart.
"I hate to tell you this," he said, "but we can’t go dancing tonight."
"Eric—when?"
"I got them in April. Next up is my wheelchair. I'll probably be out of the lab by September."
"Why?"
"Oh, come on, Raleigh. Can you see me shuffling into a courtroom like this? The jury will take one look at me and slap 'handicapped' on the evidence too. I’m every defense attorney's dream for a forensics witness."
He bent down, continuing to buckle the braces. I wanted it to stop. I wanted him to stand up and walk. But that was beyond me, beyond my power. And the next words out of my mouth took every ounce of courage.
"Can I pray for you?"
“Go right ahead.” He continued to snap the braces. "At this point I'm in no position to reject prayers. Maybe those holy rollers your mother hangs out can pray for me, too."
"I mean, now."
He looked up. "Here. In the lab?"
I nodded.
"Raleigh." His face flushed. "I really do appreciate your faith. Really. I do. It's gotten you through some tough times, I know that. But I'm a scientist. You know? Big bang. The fossil record. Evolution of the Species -- that's my bible."
"I know."
He held my gaze a long moment. Then he glanced past me, into the examination area beyond the door. Where his esteemed fellow scientists calculated precise figures and devised cause and pinpointed effect. Everything based on fact. And only fact.
When his gray eyes returned to me, they were the color of ash.
He gave a short nod. I turned to close the door.
"Raleigh?"
I looked over my shoulder. "Yes?"
"Lock it," he said.
Chapter 15
By the time I got back to Richmond that night a necklace of blue sapphire clouds had sutured themselves to an amethyst sky. And the downtown streets were tipping the fulcrum from light to dark. The pawnbrokers and ambulance-chasing lawyers had closed up shop for the day, setting alarms before the hookers and drug dealers stepped from the shadows with palpable impatience.
But Milky Lewis wasn’t afraid of the dark. During my early dinner with Eric he called my cellphone, asking me to meet him in the VCU art building.
He was alone in the sculpture studio. When I walked in, the wet plaster coated his dark muscular arms.
"Ruh-ruh-raleigh," he said. "What happened to your fuh-face?"
Every time I heard Milky's stutter, I wondered how childhood could wield so much influence over the rest of our lives. Medical experts might insist that stutters were just some weird glitch, random as birthmarks, but I was convinced Milky's speech impediment came from watching his mother sell her body around the Creighton Court housing project. Her furtive unions produced six younger siblings, all from different fathers, and all of whom were raised by Milky. He toilet-trained them as toddlers, and made sure they stayed in school. But he was also a pragmatic businessman, and when the time came, each of his siblings worked for him as a drug mule. Until one night his little brother was shot dead during a delivery.
That’s how the FBI "persuaded" Milky to flip. We offered to help his siblings. But even as he revealed the names and numbers and locations to our task force, Milky’s dark eyes held a soiled regret. His eyes had changed slightly since he got the art scholarship at VCU. Slightly. But not enough.
"You doing all right?" I asked.
"They put my sc-sc-sculpture out there."
I saw it on my way in. Set in the atrium, with his name on it. “The giraffe?"
He nodded.
"Is that some inside joke about sticking your neck out?"
He smiled. His large hands massaged a lump of chalky plaster, shaping it on a wooden board.
"I found some long puh-plastic tubes. Nuh-nuh-nothing to cut 'em with. So I made a juh-giraffe."
I wanted to warn him. Don't tell the art snobs that last part. They didn’t appreciate practicality. "Is this a good place to talk?" I asked.
"I got to luh-lock the door."
He wiped his hands on a dirty towel and left, and I strolled around the studio. The white plaster sculptures loomed like ghosts. Or maybe pieces of ghosts because I couldn't quite decipher them. Abstract, surreal. Nothing that resembled reality. To people like my sister Helen, reality was a shameful aesthetic. But as I was standing in front of what looked like an arm, my own reality struck.
In a locked building. At night. With a convicted felon three times my size. My hand reached back under my blazer, touching the holstered Glock. Then I mentally rehearsed the worst-case scenario.
"I muh-miss you, Ruh-raleigh."
I whirled.
Milky stood directly behind me. So close I could smell the plaster minerals warmed by his skin.
I took a step back. "Helen says you're doing great."
He stepped forward and lifted his hand. A six-inch putty knife rolled between his fingers. My mind suddenly flashed to Mike Rodriguez, scraping jeans for evidence.
"Milky, don’t even think about it."
But he didn't seem to hear me. His head was bobbing, catching some deep interior rhythm playing inside his mind.
"Wuh-wuh-why don't you come see me no more?"
I took another step back. The flat of the blade caught the overhead light, blinding me. I lifted my left hand, blocking the light, and reached back with my right. "Okay. We’ll see more of each other."
"Nuh-nuh-nobody listens to me like you."
I tried to back up again but something hit my leg. A wooden platform. Pinning me in. "Milky, remember what I told you?"
He wasn't listening. He was nodding to that bass line inside his head.
My right hand curled around the Glock, lifting it. "Remember? You were surprised by people in the Bureau. How nice they were. Remember?"
He stared at me. The yellow flecks in his brown irises glowed. The gun’s butt was in my palm.
"I told you to give people a chance. Remember?"
The knife went up.
I pulled my gun, pointing at his face.
But as my finger shifted to the trigger, he dropped the blade.
I gripped the gun, feet planted.
He smothered his face with his hands. "Stu-stu-stupid." White plaster had settled into the crevices of his fingers. "Stupid."
"Somebody called you stupid?"
He nodded.
"Milky, they don't know you."
His sobs echoed through the empty studio. But I didn't lower the gun and the ghost statues watched, a grave chorus from a fallen world. The world that revealed its true self earlier today, when Eric Duncan strapped metal braces on his legs with t
he confused expression of a scientist who suddenly couldn't say what tomorrow would bring. And now here were the ringing sobs of a powerful black man who had done things -- horrible things -- to equally horrible people, suddenly brought down by shallow students of “art.” It was a lesson that I needed to learn over and over again. Every one of our so-called strengths eventually turned into an obstacle. Acute intelligence. Brute physical force. Every bit of self-sufficiency. It was all an illusion. At some point, each of us would feel naked and alone and the longer we had relied on our own competencies, the harder it was to surrender. I knew that; I was like that. But whenever I saw it this clearly, that old hymn rang through loud and clear. Broken I came to thee.
There was no other way.
Still holding the Glock, my finger alongside the trigger, I reached out with my left hand, touching the arm Milky had laid across his face. The white plaster looked like a cast on his dark skin. I listed to his ragged breathing as it slowed, until finally he lowered his hands.
He stared at the gun. He was not offended. At all. In fact my experience with people like Milky was what offended them was naïveté.
For several moments, among the plaster ghosts, a hymn of silence seemed to run between us. It was broken by sirens screaming down Broad Street.
He set a heavy haunch on a wooden platform, suddenly drained.
I told him the Bureau was investigating the rooftop deaths at the Fielding factory. "Do you know anything about that?"
"Nasty."
One of his favorite words. Somehow "nasty" never tripped his tongue.
"Guh-guy was weird."
"Hamal Holmes?"
"Huh-him. And the cop."
"You knew them both?"
Milky shrugged, as if to say crime in Richmond was a quaint community of cops and robbers. Sadly, it was. Which was why I called Milky to ask questions.
Tapping the side of his face with a plaster-coated finger, he began describing Hamal Holmes, a man he said was not right in the head. Holmes, he claimed, bought crack from Milky's crew to drop weight for boxing. Later he bought it because he couldn't stop. Because nobody could stop taking that drug. I thought about Ray Frey's story involving the Coretta Scott King and wondered whether the delusions were drug-induced. And whether the drugs had anything to do with why he "disappeared."
When I asked Milky about it, he said Holmes did go away for awhile, then came back a new man. Not addicted anymore. Clean. And he started working with youth, reforming street kids through his boxing gym.
"What about the detective?" I asked.
Milky told a long story about crossing paths with Detective Falcon. The first time Milky was only eight or nine years old. Milky was already selling drugs. "I tuh-told you about that."
I nodded. Milky served less than a year in juvie. And he never talked to authorities, a silence that earned him wide stripes on the street.
"He wasn't nuh-nice like you."
"The detective?"
Milky described an angry man, a vice detective who refused to budge.
"Given the circumstances," I said, "you probably didn't see his good side. Tell me some more about Hamal Holmes."
"Nuh-not right in the head."
"You said. Can you be more specific?"
Nobody knew where Holmes went, he said. But he turned into a crusader for young black men, getting them off drugs, teaching them to fight. "Buh-but that place was still nasty."
The problem with the word “nasty" was that it covered a vast array of criminal activity. "What, exactly, was nasty about the gym, Milky?"
"You ever want suh-something done, you go there."
"Something done. You just said Holmes got off drugs. So something like . . . what?"
He picked up the putty knife, I lifted the Glock again.
But the knife wasn't coming for me. With one smooth motion, Milky drew the blade across his own throat. A slow, simulated motion of death.
"Wait--you're telling me they killed people?"
He shrugged.
"You heard this,” I said, trying to get him to clarify. “You heard that Hamal Holmes killed people?"
He shrugged again. "Suh-somebody was taking money for hits. That’s the wuh-word. Everybody knewed it. I said, nasty buh-business."
I told him he was right.
Killing people was definitely nasty business.
Chapter 16
Outside the police department a cruiser’s flashing blue lights brushed over some teenagers getting hustled into the station. Just beyond the entrance another group of teens stood on the sidewalk, hollering obscenities at the cops.
Inside the building, the female receptionist behind bulletproof glass looked harried. I flashed my ID, then walked down the sulfuric yellow hallway to the pebble glass door marked Room 102.
Detective Greene didn't look surprised.
"Your face get that way hanging off the wall?" he asked.
"You heard about that."
"Big news around here." He closed the door behind me.
I took the wooden school chair.
"So what did that get you, beside the scratches -- oh, wait. I forgot. You ask the questions."
"I didn't write those rules."
He sat behind his desk, evaluating me. "You look . . ."
"Bad, I know. I heard it already."
"I was going to say, you look different from my idea of an FBI agent."
"Maybe you had the wrong idea."
“Don’t think so.” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. "This civil rights case is totally bogus. But hanging off a roof by a thin rope, that takes some guts."
"Thanks." I meant it. He didn't seem the type to toss around meaningless compliments. "Did you find Detective Falcon’s notes?"
He shook his head.
“Interesting.” I gazed around the room. "One small room. Two detectives. All that night work together and long hours away from your families." I looked at him. "You had to talk to each other."
"I told you how it worked. Mike did his thing, I did mine."
"You asked what I found up there. I can’t tell you. But I can tell you what I know about Hamal Holmes. He supposedly turned his life around. Bought the boxing gym on Second Street, kept his mother's bills paid, had a wife and some kids and drove a brand-new Lexus. Paid for. So he had money. And it wasn't coming from breaking and entering. And it wasn't coming from boxing."
"Mike didn't throw him off the roof."
"But the question is, why would Hamal Holmes break into an abandoned building? Even if he wanted to steal something, he’d only get old mannequins and trash. The city's worst defense attorney can convince a jury this wasn't a breakin. And from there it's a short rhetorical hop to saying he was innocent. Next thing you know the widow Holmes will drive down here in her new Bentley to spit on the precinct steps."
His brown eyes compressed. "Where’re you going with this?"
"That’s just it. I don’t know. The pieces don’t make sense. Except for something you said about your partner.”
“What did I say?”
“He was dedicated to his work."
"Mike was a good cop. A great cop."
"Right. He didn't just sit around collecting a paycheck."
He hesitated, staring down at his desk. "I told you, I don't know what Mike was doing up there."
"But it would be fair to say he could’ve been working a cold case.”
“Fair how?”
“He was assigned to work crowd control, but he had real work to do. And was anxious to get it done."
"Mike didn't throw that guy off that building."
"Okay, I heard you. But what if he was meeting Holmes, on purpose?"
"What?"
"What if he wanted to talk to Holmes, in private, but something went wrong."
"You want me to speculate again?"
"No, I want you to fill in the gaps. You said Detective Falcon went down to death row. To interview one of the evil twins. Marvin?"
"No, Mar
tin. T."
"Okay, what if this creep Martin, who's about to meet his maker, wants to offer Detective Falcon some real information. You know, do something good before God decides whether to fry or broil his rear end in hell."
Detective Greene stared at me. The dark mustache curled down, as if he was pursing his lips.
"And let's say,” I continued, “that T’s information involves a cold case, but he wants to make a deal. Once a con, always a con, right?”
“Keep talking.”
“T will give Detective Falcon the information if he promises to find out which inmate killed his twin, Marvin. It’s an exchange of information."
Detective Greene drew a long deep breath. “How’d you come up with this theory?”
“Bits and pieces,” I said. “But the biggest chunk was that your partner didn’t make easy deals.” I remember what Milky said, about Falcon not playing games. “I can’t see him going down to death row unless there was a very good incentive.”
The detective reached up, petting the black mustache. But he said nothing.
And I waited. I waited so long that I started counting the second-hand beats coming from the big wall clock. Seven beats later, he opened his mouth.
On the eighth beat, he asked me to take a ride.
And on nine, I was already at the door.
===============
A long time ago a Confederate hospital anchored Chimbarazo Hill. After Reconstruction the land was turned into a city park which remained until this day. But under the street lights the grass looked dry and the spindly elm trees seemed full of thirst. The one remaining building was now the headquarters for the city's battlefield parks, offering a small replica of the Statue of Liberty. Donated by the local Boy Scouts, Lady Liberty held her tablet and torch and looked over the dead grass as if expecting something to change.
Detective Greene parked across from the statue then reached into a file folder on the backseat of his pristine Crown Victoria. Opening the manila folder on his lap, he silently read the pages. There weren’t many.
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