“Okay if I talk to you while you work your magic?”
“No worries.”
“I belong to a group of amateur detectives working on the disappearance of Cedric Porter, and Margaret at Scarlett’s said you were the Ronald Nolan from the witness statements.”
He nodded. “Changed it a couple of years back—my name. Not much, but enough. Underwent an awakening and wanted to be called something different. Wasn’t trying to hide or anything.”
“Didn’t think you were.”
“Man,” he said, “that whole thing—that time, what was happening in the city, then for it to hit so close to home. Losing little Cedric like that completely rocked my world, man. I’ll never get over it.”
I nodded.
“It was hard enough, but then to be . . . There were people who suspected me, questioned why I was back there, didn’t buy my story. It was a nightmare. To be honest, it’s a big part of why I changed my name.”
“I hear ya, brother,” I said. “I’ve had a few experiences like that myself. Why don’t you think they believed you?”
“Everybody suspected everybody back then anyway. It was crazy the way the city was at the time.”
“Do you mind telling me what you were doing back there and what you saw?”
“Nah, man, I don’t mind, but that’s the thing—I’ve never been completely honest about why I was back there. That’s the biggest reason I became a suspect.”
“Okay.”
“I was one hundred percent honest about what I saw, just not why I was out there.”
“Why’s that?”
“I couldn’t be. I was with a woman—one I shouldn’t’ve been with, or who shouldn’t’ve been with me.”
“Why can you say now?”
“Things have changed a bit. I still can’t say who it was, but I am at least willing to say that’s what I left out. It was hard as hell, man. Somebody who could corroborate my statement, and I could’ve used ’em.”
“If you still can’t, it leaves you in the same position,” I said. “Just makes it sound like you’re changing your story again.”
“I know, but . . .”
“Are you still seeing the woman?”
He shook his head. “Wasn’t really then. We just got together to fuck. She was in a relationship with someone else.”
“Was? She isn’t any longer?”
He shook his head again.
“So why can’t you say who she is now?”
“Her . . . who she was with is a friend of mine.”
I nodded. “So what did you see?”
“Just what my statement said. Cedric, who I knew from his uncle’s store next door, running toward the woods.”
“Did he have anything?”
“Have anything?”
“A video? A—”
“Nah.”
“Was anyone with him or chasing him?”
“No. Not that I saw. Just saw him. He ran past, then disappeared into the woods. That’s all I saw. I just thought he was running back home. Didn’t think anything of it at the time. ’Course I was gettin’ some of the best head I ever have. Least I was until . . .”
“Until what?”
“Until he ran by.”
“Y’all stopped then?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “I . . . shouldn’t . . . I’ve said too much already.”
“Could you at least ask your . . . partner from back then if she would talk to me. I’d never say anything to anyone. She’d be safe. I’d protect her identity.”
“I just can’t. Sorry. I would actually do that if I could, but I can’t. I wish I could. I really do.”
When I got back to Scarlett’s, Summer, Susan, and Margaret were having an animated and inebriated discussion about God.
Aunt and niece had joined Summer at our table in the back corner, oblivious to the other patrons in the bar and the exasperated expressions being directed at them.
“Here he is,” Margaret said. “Now we have an expert to ask.”
I laughed at that. And not only because there were no experts, but because I was someone who had a spiritual awakening, began seeking, and had only completed one quarter of study at a new and questionable Bible school.
“What is God?” Margaret asked. “I say he’s a watchmaker who made this intricate timepiece and then stepped back and is watching but not participating in what is happening. Susan says . . . What is it you said again?”
“God is our father,” Susan said. “He provides for us, takes care of us, disciplines us. Involved with the world, not aloof or distant or—”
“Hey, Margaret,” an older man sitting on the opposite side of the bar yelled, “can I get a drink over here?”
“Get it yourself. See how hard my damn job is. Don’t mix it too strong neither, Fred, or I’ll know.”
“Suddenly, a fuckin’ self-service bar up in here. I could make my own drinks at home.”
“Summer says God’s a . . .” Margaret began but trailed off and took another slug of her drink.
“God is energy,” Summer said. “In us, around us, in all things. We can ignore him or we can draw from him.”
I nodded.
“Well?” Margaret said.
I raised my glass. “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.”
We all drank to that.
“Seriously,” Susan said. “Weigh in. What is God?”
“God is love . . . or . . . nothing else matters much.”
Chapter Seventeen
I met Mickey Davis the next afternoon at Second Chances.
He was watching Camille Pollard’s shop and her kids.
We sat at a secondhand dining table that had yet to sell, notes and case files spread out on the marred wooden tabletop between us.
The table was in between a small, faded recliner and a country-blue couch with a couple of prominent cigarette burns on it, in what constituted the sparse store’s furniture section.
Opposite us, surrounded by a handful of sad toys and a couple of mismatched shelves of children’s books, Kenny and Wilbur were lying on the floor working on their homework.
“I appreciate you meeting me here,” Mickey said. “Camille’s at a job interview. Gonna shut this place down if she gets it.”
The afternoon sun shone through the plate glass windows in front and caused both his paleness and the red in his beard to be more pronounced.
“How long you two been seein’ each other?”
“Only a few months,” he said, avoiding my eye. “First black woman, older woman, and single mother I’ve dated, but so far so good.”
He spoke softly and seemed a little embarrassed.
“How’d you meet?”
“Blind date set up by a mutual friend. Met at Scarlett’s for a drink.”
There was no obvious reason I should distrust the man, but I did. Probably because he was a reporter and the only member of the group profiting from the case, but whatever the reason, I wanted to get his thoughts about and reactions to various aspects and elements of the case without doing much in the way of reciprocating.
“What’d you think about what Ada said last night?” I asked.
He narrowed his smallish eyes and twisted his lips into a frown. “Felt wrong. Didn’t add up, but I can’t say why.”
Waves of hostility emanated from Wilbur and wafted over us. I’d catch him staring at us in unadorned anger, but when I held his gaze, he looked away. Oblivious, Kenny continued coloring intensely.
“Is Cedric’s case going into your book?” I ask.
“Only if we find out what happened to him and tie it to Williams or whoever the Atlanta Child Murderer is.”
Hearing him say it aloud reminded me again that the Atlanta Child Murders were a series of murders surrounded by a much larger set of related and unrelated murders.
Don’t forget that, I reminded myself. Don’t lose sight of the
saplings for the forest.
Then another thought occurred to me. Are the adult victims on the list connected to each other the way the children are? What about the female victims?
“Where’d you go?” Mickey said.
“Huh? Oh, sorry? Just thinking.”
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“Do you think Cedric could be with his dad?”
I shrugged. “Could be.”
“Think we should take a closer look at him?” he asked.
I thought about all the various absentee fathers of all the various victims and how one witness claimed that Yusuf Bell got into a car with his father before he disappeared and was found murdered. I thought about how John Bell, Yusuf’s dad, failed a polygraph.
I nodded. “I certainly do.”
“I think so too. I’ll tell you what else I think . . . I think we need to look at all the other similar missing kid cases from around the same time.”
“Before and since too,” I said. “If they continued after Williams went to prison . . . If they stopped . . .”
“You think all Williams’s victims haven’t been found?” he asked.
“I think it’s likely that all the victims haven’t been found—whether they belong to Williams or someone else, or Williams and someone else.”
“I think it’s Williams,” he said. “And I’ll tell you why. I found four other cases like Cedric’s. I mean so similar they could be the same case. They even look like Cedric. All vanished. Never seen again. Never found a body or any evidence of any kind. It’s a serial. I’d bet my life on it. And . . . it stopped when Wayne Williams was arrested.”
I thought about it. If he was right . . . if Cedric was part of a pattern . . .
“The Atlanta Child Murderer didn’t hide his victims,” I said. “He dumped them. Most were found fairly quickly.”
“I know. So if it’s not Williams, it would be somebody else—a killer who went undetected during that time, a serial killer overshadowed by another serial killer. But if so why’d they stop?”
I thought of Jamie Brooks.
Of all the suspects considered besides Wayne Williams, Jamie Brooks was the strongest—at least for the murder of one of the victims attributed to Williams.
Twelve-year-old Clifford Jones, in town visiting his maternal grandmother and out looking for cans, disappeared on the afternoon of August 20, 1980.
Clifford’s siblings had seen him go into the laundromat in the Hollywood Plaza Shopping Center, where, according to a nineteen-year-old boy, he was raped and killed by the manager James “Jamie” Edward Brooks, and two other men.
The boy told authorities that three men fondled Clifford, that he was crying when they removed his clothes, said, “They mess with the boy’s behind, chest and legs,” and one of them “got him in the butt.” He went on to say that the boy was hollering really loud, saying he wanted to go home, but one of the men had a yellow rope tied around Clifford’s neck, which he eventually strangled him with—a detail that matches the facts. Clifford Jones was one of the few victims on the list known to have been strangled with a rope. The witness then said the men washed the body with soap and a rag, and reclothed it.
Though all the details fit, the witness’s statement was disregarded because police said the nineteen-year-old boy was retarded and would say whatever he thought they wanted him to.
When Brooks was questioned, he told police that the boy came in around 4:30 p.m. asking for a job picking up trash and sweeping, and said he stayed until about 8:30 p.m.
And that was it. He wasn’t questioned further—not about Clifford or any other victims on or off the list.
Jamie Brooks would eventually be sentenced on other charges in March of 1981, the same month when the last child under seventeen would disappear during the height of the murders. He was charged with aggravated assault with intent to rape and aggravated sodomy, and would serve ten months in the Fulton County Jail and be released during the Williams trial.
Perhaps most interesting of all as it relates to the list and the case against Wayne Williams is that Clifford Jones’s murder was attributed to Williams following the trial—based on matching fiber evidence. Why, if the green trilobal fibers used to connect Williams to the victims and convict him for their murders are so unique, were they found on a victim that he almost certainly didn’t kill?
“Maybe like Jamie Brooks he went to prison on different charges. Maybe he moved. Or died.”
He started to say something, but Camille walked in.
She was a mid-thirties African-American woman with light skin and very tired eyes. Her hair had been straightened, and it, her makeup, and clothes were stylish—or would have been a few years back.
She collapsed in one of the two free chairs around the dining table and sighed heavily.
Kenny ran over and hugged her, but Wilbur didn’t even look up.
After hearing about Kenny’s day and speaking to Wilbur and getting a grunt in return, Kenny rejoined Wilbur and she returned her attention to us.
“Camille, this is John Jordan, the guy I was telling you about. John, this is Camille.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“How’d it go?” Mickey asked.
She shook her head, the long side of her asymmetrical bob waving back and forth. “Too old. Too qualified. Too late. Too bad.”
“You’ll find something,” he said. “Just a matter of time.”
“What’re y’all doing?”
He told her.
“Do you remember Cedric?” I asked.
The question seemed to bother her, and she glanced over her shoulder at her boys. “Don’t like talkin’ about it. So close to . . . He played with Wilbur. Good, sweet kid. The kind that people looked out for ’cause his mama didn’t. But I don’t even like talkin’ about it. Scares me to think . . .”
She turned and looked at Kenny and Wilbur again.
“Did you ever see his dad around?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I really don’t want to talk about it. And I’d rather y’all not work on that stuff around me and my boys.”
“Okay, baby,” Mickey said. “I understand. I won’t do it again.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at me. “I’m not trying to be . . . It’s just upsetting. I just can’t . . .”
I nodded. “I get it. It’s not a problem.”
“You should talk to Miss Annie Mae Dozier. We all looked after him, but she near raised him. She moved shortly after he disappeared. Broke her heart. But I don’t think she went far. I’ve got her new address ’round here somewhere. Always send her a Christmas card.”
Chapter Eighteen
“You killed a cop,” Bobby Battle said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “He killed himself.”
He was referring to Larry Moore, Ida’s son-in-law, Jordan’s husband, and one of his brothers in blue who killed himself a month back. It happened at Ida’s house. I was there at the time.
“Ida was there,” I added. “Her statement corroborated mine.”
“Corroborated,” he said. “That’s just how criminals talk. She’s covering for you.”
“DA doesn’t see it that way.”
“Well, that’s the way me and every other cop in this town see it. And don’t even get me started on a dead kid being found in your room.”
We were at a truck stop off I-85 north of Atlanta, because he didn’t want to be seen with me.
As usual, he was dressed like a slick TV detective, but his white cotton Miami Vice suit and purple silk T-shirt looked out of place in Atlanta in November.
He held up a file folder.
“I’m doin’ this as a favor for Frank. ’Cause I owe him. But I’m also doin’ it because of what this is for a guy like you.”
I didn’t say anything and he looked disappointed.
“This is rope for a guy like you,” he said, flapping the folder in the wind. “I give you enough of it and yo
u’ll hang yourself.”
All around us, semi-trailers and tractors pulled in, parked, refueled, pulled out. The side lot where we were was full of them.
We were standing between our two cars even though it was a cold, damp day. It was loud and hard to hear, and I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.
He handed me the folder.
“Copies of the four missing kids cases Frank asked for—and one he didn’t because it matches.”
“Thanks,” I said, opening the folder and glancing through its contents.
It was thin—a few missing persons reports, a few notes from the cops involved. Not much else.
“And before you say anything, that’s all there was. I copied everything.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Frank is welcome.”
I nodded.
“I know you didn’t ask what I think, but—”
“I was just about to,” I said.
“Their dads took them, not so as we could prove, but that’s what happened. And I’ll tell you why the fine detectives who investigated these cases didn’t do anything other than what they did.”
I waited but he didn’t say anything. Guessing he was waiting for me to ask, I said, “Why’s that?”
“Because of how shitty their mothers were. Gotta figure kids would be no worse off with their sperm donors. Hell, may even be better off.”
“Do you know if any of the missing boys ever called their moms to let them know they were okay?”
He shook his head. “Never heard anything like that.”
“You mind if I ask the detectives who worked the cases?”
“Hell yes, I mind. Don’t even think about talking to anyone else. Not that they’d talk to you, but . . . I better not hear of you talkin’ to another cop.”
“You won’t.”
“Make sure you don’t. I’ll ask around about it, let you know if I hear of anything like that—so don’t you. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. I appreciate this. I’m not gonna do anything you don’t want me to.”
“We both know that ain’t true. I don’t want you doin’ any of this.”
Chapter Nineteen
BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries) Page 7