She listened, then nodded and hung up the phone. She pointed at the sign-in sheet. “Gotta sign in here.” She handed me a pen and then reached into her desk drawer. “And wear one of these at all times.” She removed two visitor badges and handed them to me. “Sergeant Schmidt is on the sixth floor.” She gestured toward the elevator. “Welcome to paradise.”
Schmitty’s office was small, but the fact that he had an office at all was a testament to his seniority and savvy. Despite a steady rotation of new police chiefs every three to four years, Schmitty remained. He was promoted off the streets and got that office because he had the unique ability to keep a low profile but always be present when big decisions were made. Schmitty was valued for his advice, but rarely blamed if things went badly.
“Sit.” Schmitty closed the door and pointed to a chair across from his desk. “Is this your girl?”
I nodded, looking at Sammy. “She’s helping me out today.”
Schmitty sat back down behind his desk. “No school?”
“Something like that.” I put my hand on Sammy’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
Schmitty knew that I was being deliberately vague, but he didn’t press for details. It was none of his business.
“Your missing boy is something else,” he said.
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
Schmitty looked at Sammy and then back at me. “Let’s just say that Devon Walker is very well known to the police working that area. Young as he is, he’s already been in and out of juvie about a dozen times.”
“Any idea where he went?”
Schmitty shrugged. “He’s got a warrant out for his arrest. Serious case. He’s also a person of interest in a couple of other ones, aggravated robberies. I think the prosecutors were about ready to bring additional charges, maybe even a certification to adult court, but then he disappeared.”
Schmitty paused, waiting to see whether I had a question, which I didn’t.
“Nothing exactly shocking about him vanishing,” he continued. “Not at all uncommon for kids like him to cross over to East Saint Louis or take the bus over to Kansas City or Gary or up to Chicago. There are usually relatives or gangbanger friends who are willing to let a kid like this crash for a while. Eventually they get kicked out, come back here, and we pick ’em up.”
“So you think he’ll come back?”
“Maybe.” Schmitty glanced at Sammy and then turned back to me. “Or maybe he’s just gone.”
“Like, forever?”
“Also not uncommon,” Schmitty said. “And, frankly, not too many people around here are going to be shedding a lot of tears for Devon Walker if that’s the case.”
“Understood.” I nodded, hoping that would be enough information to satisfy his sister. “Thanks for looking into it.”
“Well”—Schmitty bowed his head—“when the royal family requests a favor, I comply.” He then reached into his desk drawer and removed a file. He set it on top of his desk. “This is an extra copy of Devon Walker’s juvenile record and incident reports. Because he’s a minor and there are ongoing investigations, it’s all confidential. Theoretically his family might be able to get it with a court order, but I’m not so sure about that.” He stood. “I have to go to the bathroom. You can see yourself out.”
“I will.” I stood up and shook Schmitty’s hand. “Thanks again.”
“Not a problem.” Schmitty walked around his desk. He left, leaving me and Sammy alone in his office.
“OK.” I opened my briefcase, then leaned over and picked up Devon Walker’s file. I slid the file into my briefcase and turned to Sammy. “You ready to go get that milk shake?”
Sammy didn’t respond. She didn’t move.
“Come on now.” I motioned to the doors. “Time to go.”
She stood up slowly. “Does that man know you’re taking his file?”
I smiled. “Yes and no.”
CHAPTER SIX
We sat in Daddy’s Booth in the back of Crown Candy. Sammy referred to it as “Daddy’s Booth” because my name was listed on a plaque hanging on the wall above the table. The honor was given to any person who had consumed five large malts in thirty minutes, which was actually the equivalent of drinking about eight regular malts.
The rules required a challenger to drink both the malt in each glass and the remaining mixture in the stainless steel cup that accompanied it. I had accomplished this goal as a teenager. My brother, Lincoln, had bet me his prize Ozzie Smith rookie card that I couldn’t do it, and, well, that was all the incentive I needed.
Sammy and I ordered our chili dogs and milk shakes. Then Sammy removed a thick book from her backpack. I had lost track of all the books that she was reading. She usually had three or four going at once, most having to do with a dragon, a supernatural cat, or a kid wizard.
As she started to read, I pulled Devon Walker’s file out of my briefcase. Part of me didn’t want to know. I would have rather sat back and just enjoyed the hustle and bustle of one of the country’s longest-operating soda fountains. Reading about Devon Walker’s doomed life was only going to make me depressed. Tanisha, however, was coming back to my office that afternoon. I wanted to show her that I had made an effort. Then maybe she’d see that there was nothing more that could be done and leave me alone.
I flipped through the file. It was in reverse chronological order. The most recent contacts with the police were on top, and his earliest contacts with the police and the court system were near the bottom of the file. Interspersed throughout were about a dozen photos.
I skipped the reports initially and just looked at the pictures. Near the top, there was a series of photographs taken by the police’s gang unit. The first two were mug shots. Devon Walker stood in front of a blank wall like it was a driver’s license photo. His expression was blank. His eyes were dead. He didn’t appear afraid, nervous, or angry. He was only sixteen, but getting arrested had become a way of life.
Then there were photographs of Devon’s tattoos. There were a few that appeared to be the names of girlfriends, which I’d mention to Tanisha and see whether she knew who or where they were. Most were gang references and symbols of the lifestyle. On his neck was a tattoo of a pair of dice. On his arm there was a gun, above it the words Blood Money.
The gang references were to three small cliques that had been terrorizing the north side of Saint Louis for the past seven years. These were not organized street gangs established to sell crack cocaine or other drugs, like the Bloods and Crips of the 1980s. They were just groups of three to ten kids who robbed, beat, raped, and got high because that’s what gangsters did. It was their destiny. A cop in Northern Ireland once coined the phrase recreational violence. That pretty much summed it up. The cliques filled a void.
Devon was one of the growing number of kids who were bored, uneducated, and disconnected. Violence was something they just did, because there was nothing else to do.
I turned to the next set of photographs, a little deeper in the stack, and the tattoos were gone. Then I found the next set, and then another. Devon was getting younger.
The pictures transported me back in time.
Eventually I got to the end. It was a picture of a six-year-old boy. He still had some of his baby fat. His eyes weren’t dead. They were wide and alive. He smiled for the camera, because that’s what a first grader does when his photograph is being taken. Didn’t matter that this picture was being taken by a cop.
The shock of seeing a picture of a little boy in a police file gave way to curiosity.
I flipped the page in order to figure out why he was arrested. The report was from a school resource officer. A classmate had told the officer that Devon threatened to “cut his lips off” on the playground, and the officer found a hunting knife in Devon’s backpack. Criminal charges were dropped because it was ridiculous to prosecute a child that young with the possession of a dangerous weapon on school property. But, under the school district’s zero tolerance policy, Devon was expell
ed for a time.
I flipped back to the photograph.
Devon Walker didn’t look much different than I did at his age—or much different than any other six-year-old black boy. I tried to imagine how somebody that young would know that stabbing or cutting another person with a knife was even an option. What had he seen others do? What had he heard?
Then I thought of Devon’s little brother, sitting alone in the front yard of their house.
“You OK, Daddy?” Sammy asked.
I looked up from the file. “I’m fine, tiger. Don’t you worry about your pops.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
We walked down two blocks from Crown Candy to my office on the corner of Fourteenth and Warren. I opened the door. The temperature in my office hadn’t changed since the day before. The air conditioner had not magically repaired itself during the night.
Sammy coughed. Her face curled back. “Kinda stuffy.” She waved her hand in front of her face. “Can’t we open a window or something?”
“Wish it was that simple.” I turned on the lights. I looked around the sparsely decorated space and sighed. “Just stay here for a second.” I picked up the stack of mail that had been shoved through the door’s mail slot, then walked through the reception area to my office in the back. “I’ll check my messages, then we can go next door.”
I picked up the office phone and punched in the code to retrieve my voicemail, then set about sorting through the mail. Solicitations and credit card offers went into the garbage. The remainder went into my briefcase for later.
It took a few minutes to listen to all my messages.
There were six. Four were potential clients seeking legal representation. I wrote down their contact information and the crimes that they were accused of committing. I’d call them back once I got Sammy settled down, but I didn’t have much hope. Most people who called my office were only working their way down a long list of criminal defense attorneys that they had found on the Internet or in a phone book. By the time I got back to them, they had usually hired somebody else. If they hadn’t hired somebody else, that meant that they didn’t have any money.
The fifth message was from Cecil Bates, one of the public defender cases that I had handled this morning. He wanted me to call him back immediately to discuss his defense strategy. He had been doing research at the public library, and he wanted to share with me several United States Supreme Court cases that he had found.
Warning flags went up all around me.
I wrote down Cecil’s information and considered how quickly I should return his call. If I called him back too soon, he might come to expect that response every time he contacted me. If I waited too long, he’d sour on me. He’d make my life hell until his case was resolved. These were the kind of real-world problems that never get discussed in law school.
I pressed a button and moved on to the last message. It was my little brother, Lincoln.
“Listen, Justin, you gotta give me a call,” he said. “It’s important that we talk as soon as possible. Things are happening with Dad and you need to be a part of it.”
I shook my head. More political schemes. Then I deleted the message.
Most of the storefronts along Fourteenth where my office was located were empty, but there was some life. Ameren, the local electric utility, and a couple of nonprofit foundations had provided a combination of loans and grants to paint the facades, restore the interiors, and add new streetlights and benches.
The street looked nice for the first time in a quarter century. The beautification effort was intended to be a spark for renewal, but the spark had definitely not turned into a fire.
The lack of economic activity was likely caused by the lack of people. The city had lost 63 percent of its 1950 population. Hundreds of thousands of people gone. It’s hard to make money selling things when there aren’t people around to buy them.
I prayed nearly every day that it would happen. I wanted to believe that people would rediscover the Northside and move back, but my head told me that was near impossible. Saint Louis was a city built for a million, but it now had a population of just over 300,000. People had moved to the suburbs over sixty years ago, and it was crazy to think that they were going to come back now. They’d settled into pleasant lives far removed from the grit of city life, and every time the city got closer to them, they moved even farther away.
Sammy and I walked a half block down the street to the Northside Roastery. I opened the door, and a little bell rang. Hermes came out from behind a curtain separating the front and back of the shop. “Mr. Glass, I sensed you were coming.” Hermes spoke in a thick Bosnian accent, and he claimed to have some psychic abilities inherited from his mother’s side of the family.
He and his brother, Nikolas, were two of the thousands of refugees who had been relocated to Saint Louis from Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war in the 1990s. “Come over here. What I get for you?” Hermes walked to the counter. “I’ve got some wonderful pastries, very fresh, and my Tower Grove French Roast is near perfection.”
“I’ll have the French Roast, iced.” I looked over at Sammy. “Still full?”
Sammy nodded. “Maybe a juice for later?” She didn’t want to disappoint Hermes by failing to order anything.
Hermes looked from her to me, seeking confirmation.
I nodded. “And a juice.”
Hermes clapped his hands. “Yes. Perfect.” He turned with a flourish, bent down to a small refrigerator under a stainless steel table, and opened the door. “Orange, apple, strawberry-lemonade?”
“Apple.” Sammy looked at me and smiled. Hermes’s enthusiasm was contagious.
I liked it, too, but it was unclear to me how he stayed open. It was rare to see more than one or two other people in his coffee shop. My guess was that most of the money was earned by his brother, Nikolas. He stayed in the back whenever possible, and he wasn’t nearly as friendly.
Hermes had told me once that Nikolas was a computer genius. He purportedly bought, repaired, and resold computers on eBay and Craigslist. That was probably true, but I got the sense that Nikolas also did other things with computers that were far less legitimate.
Sammy and I got a table by the window that looked out at the street. Unlike the one in my office, the coffee shop’s air conditioner was working just fine. A luxury. We sat in the cool, surrounded by the smell of freshly roasted coffee beans.
The smell came from an antique roaster in the corner of the shop. It was a huge cast iron contraption. The body was painted dark blue. A metal arm swept underneath the roasting batch of green coffee beans like the second hand of an old pocket watch. It hummed and cranked. Every few minutes, Hermes wandered over to check the beans. He poked at them with a wooden spoon, ensuring that they were not being burned.
Sammy got out her thick book, and I got out the Devon Walker file.
It took me an hour and a half to carefully work through the entire file. From age ten until the time that he disappeared, Devon was in nearly constant contact with the police and juvenile probation. The older reports described a young kid on the periphery, surrounded by others who were dealing drugs and getting in fights. As the police reports became more current, Devon had moved from the periphery to the center.
He was in the passenger seat of a car when the driver pulled a gun and started firing shots in the air near a bus stop by Saint Louis Avenue and Twenty-Second. He was involved in a fight at an Arby’s on Lindell. And then there was, according to the incident summary, a blurry black-and-white security video of him and three friends stomping on and robbing a man at the MetroLink light rail station on Grand.
Once the man was down, Devon had pulled off the victim’s pants and run. They had left the bloodied victim half-naked on the train platform. The pants were found a few blocks away, but the cell phone and wallet that had been in the pants were gone.
A warrant had been issued for Devon’s arrest, but it was still outstanding. Devon disappeared about the time that the warrant
and a probation violation had been issued.
I pushed the file aside, took a sip of coffee, and then, through the window, I saw Tanisha walking toward my office.
I told Sammy that I’d be right back, then headed out the door after Tanisha.
She was looking in my office window and knocking on the door by the time I caught up to her. “Tanisha,” I said, then pointed at the locked office door when she turned to me. “Sorry about that. It’s too hot in there to get any work done. Want to come down to the coffee shop?”
She was skeptical. “Did you find my brother?”
“No.” I shook my head. “But we can talk about it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Later, I dropped Sammy off at home, where my mother and the Judge promised to feed her and tuck her into bed, then got back in my car to go to work.
As the rest of the city emptied out, heading to South County and Saint Charles, I crossed Forty against traffic and drove back over to the Northside. My task was to find Devon Walker’s girlfriends.
This was it. I’d spent almost the entire day working on her brother’s file. I was going to knock on a few doors, talk to these people, and be done with it.
As much as my heart broke for Tanisha Walker and her family, it couldn’t be personal. I was a lawyer, I reminded myself, and I wouldn’t do anybody any good going broke looking for a nasty kid that nobody besides his little sister wanted found.
The streetlights came on as I pulled up to the first address that Tanisha Walker had given me. I got out of my car and looked for signs of life. It was a typical Northside home on one of the few blocks that were mostly intact. There was no extravagance. It didn’t have arches or turrets. There was no grand Queen Anne–style porch wrapping around the front. Instead, it had a concrete stoop.
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