The Bridge

by Solomon Jones

  “What about you? Do you miss nights, too?”

  “I been workin’ all my life,” the old man said. “I don’t know how to do nothin’ else but show up. They pay me, and I do my job the best way I can.”

  “So what exactly is the job?” Lynch asked.

  “Well, we supposed to make people that don’t live here sign in when they come to see somebody in the buildin’. A lot o’ times that don’t happen, ’cause people just walk on by. But that’s what we supposed to do.”

  “Did you ever notice the people who visited Judy Brown’s place?”

  “Judy Brown on the seventh floor? Shit, you can’t help seem’ the people that go in and outta there. It’s like the Hit Parade up there. And I ain’t talkin’ about no music.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The hit parade, man. That’s what I call it, anyway. ’Cause every time I come in here, I see people paradin’ up to Judy place to get a hit.”

  Lynch couldn’t help smiling as the old man pressed on.

  “You could look at most of ’em and see they was on that stuff. Most of ’ern ain’t sign in, but the people that did, they usually put phony names on the sheet. Matter fact, here go a old sign-in sheet right here. Take a look. You’ll see what I’m talkin’ about.”

  The man reached underneath the desk in the guard booth, pulled out a few curled sheets of paper on a clipboard, and handed them to Lynch.

  Lynch looked at the names with Judy’s unit number next to them and copied them down in a notebook.

  “Did you or any of the other guards ever call the police and tell them what you thought was going on up there?”

  “You learn to mind your business,” the man said. “You gotta get off work at night, and you don’t want nobody knowin’ you tried to cause problems in here, ’cause it’s a long four blocks to the subway.”

  “I understand,” Lynch said. “You see and you don’t see.”

  “That’s right,” the old man said, bobbing his head vigorously.

  “What about Kenya Brown, the little girl I’m looking for,” Lynch said, pulling out her picture. “Have you ever seen her before?”

  The man looked at the picture. “Yeah, I seen her. It’s hard not to see her. She different from a lot o’ these other little girls you see runnin’ in and outta here. She still got a little bit o’ innocence about her.”

  “Ever talk to her?”

  “She would wave, and I would wave back. But no, I never talked to her. People get funny when you talk to they kids.”

  Lynch thought for a moment, looking around the foyer and trying to imagine where Kenya would have gone first when she came back in on Friday night.

  “I guess, if you saw her coming in and out a lot,” Lynch said as he looked around, “you would have noticed if she liked the elevator more than the stairs.”

  The man nodded. “I did. She took the stairs most o’ the time. Course she knew, just like everybody else, that the elevator was real slow. But there was one other thing I noticed about her.”

  “What’s that?”

  “At night, especially if it was a lot goin’ on in the buildin’, she would wait for the elevator. I think she mighta been scared to take the stairs by herself. Tell you the truth, I can’t blame her.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “A lotta shady folk be hangin’ in that stairway at night, especially on the weekend. One boy like to hang in the stairway and act like he crazy—talkin’ to hisself and what not. I think he on that stuff, too.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  The old man was about to say it, but a group of residents came into the building, watching as he talked to Lynch.

  Figuring it would be better if they didn’t hear him give the name, he wrote it out on a piece of paper, folded it, and handed it to Lynch, who opened it and read it.

  “He usually be up there at Judy apartment,” the guard said. “That’s where he like to hang at when he ain’t in the stairway. But I guess with Judy gone and everything shut down up there, you might find him in that apartment up there on six.”

  “Thanks,” Lynch said, folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. “I appreciate your help.”

  “Don’t thank me,” the old man said. “Just find that girl. She a good little girl. She ain’t never bother nobody.”

  Lynch nodded and walked over to the elevators a few feet away. He pushed the button, then looked at his watch to time its arrival. It took a little over a minute and a half for the doors to open.

  And when he got on, he could feel the very thing he’d been hoping to find. He could feel Kenya’s spirit.

  Wilson heard the news of Judy’s arrest as she left Central Detectives. But instead of going to police headquarters by herself, she dialed Lynch’s cell phone.

  When she got an automated message saying the phone was inactive, she loaded Daneen into the car, and the two of them tore out of the parking lot with a portable siren blaring in the unmarked car.

  “Did I hear them say somethin’ about Judy?” Daneen said, as they raced through Chinatown on the way back to North Philadelphia.

  “They said Judy’s at the Roundhouse,” Wilson said, referring to Philadelphia police headquarters. “She’s asking for Lynch. I’m going to go get him.”

  “How you gon’ do that when he suspended?” Daneen said impatiently. “Why don’t you just ask her whatever you gotta ask her yourself?”

  “Why should I start questioning Judy again when I still haven’t gotten a straight answer from you, Daneen?” Wilson replied, as the car sped past the male prostitutes who frequented the dark corners of Thirteenth Street near Callowhill.

  “I don’t know what you talkin’ about,” Daneen said.

  “Sure you do. I’m talking about Kenya’s parents. You and her father.”

  “I can’t get into that,” Daneen said through clenched teeth. “Why can’t you just respect that? Why you tryin’ to make me tell you somethin’ that ain’t got nothin’ to do with findin’ my daughter?”

  “Can I tell you something, Daneen? I just left Captain Silas Johnson, commander of Central Detectives, who placed me in the lead of this investigation and told me to do whatever I have to do to find your daughter.

  “He thinks like anyone else would think after taking a look at the file from DHS. He thinks you look like a pretty good suspect, based on the way you used to bounce your daughter around when she was with you.”

  “He can think what he wanna think,” Daneen said flippantly. “I know I ain’t have nothin’ to do with it.”

  “I know that, too,” Wilson said. “But you’re hiding something from me—something that might help me find your daughter. That’s obstruction of justice, and I can lock your ass up for that, Daneen. So you can either tell me what I want to know, or we can hold you in the Roundhouse and feed you cheese sandwiches for a week because somebody accidentally lost your paperwork.”

  They pulled up in front of the Bridge and parked behind Lynch’s car.

  Wilson got out first. “Don’t answer me yet, Daneen. Right now, we’ve gotta find Kevin. Because if Judy says she’ll only talk to him, he needs to be there. But I’ll tell you this much. You will answer me. One way or the other, you’re going to tell me who Kenya’s father is.”

  Renee had spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out what she’d done to anger Darnell. She knew that his temper was volatile—especially when he wanted to get high. But the way he’d blown up when she’d mentioned Kenya wasn’t about a high. It was about grief. And Renee was determined to make that grief go away.

  As she made her way back to the Bridge with the crack she’d hustled turning tricks for the past few hours, she hoped that the peace offering she’d brought with her would be enough to earn his forgiveness.

  When she walked in through the back entrance of the building and saw Darnell coming toward her in the foyer, she had reason to believe that it was.

  “What’s goin’ on, baby?” Darnell sai
d, smiling as if nothing had happened.

  “That’s what I should be askin’ you,” Renee said cautiously.

  He sighed and threw an arm over her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. “I guess this thing with Kenya just startin’ to get to me.”

  “I know it is. But I got somethin’ to make you feel better.”

  She opened her hand and showed him ten capsules of crack. He reached out for them, and she pulled them back, stroking his crotch with her free hand.

  “You gotta earn these,” she said with a grin.

  “Don’t play with me, Renee. I ain’t in the mood for that shit right now.”

  Her grin faded, and her pale skin grew red. And in a rare moment of defiance, she told him what she thought.

  “I know you don’t really want me, Darnell. But you ain’t gotta act like it. I mean, I ain’t Lily, but at least I’m here with you. That’s more than I can say for her.”

  “Lily ain’t got nothin’ to do with this,” Darnell said.

  “No, she got everything to do with it. I think that’s why you treat me the way you do—’cause I ain’t her. That’s why one minute you sayin’ you sorry and the next minute you tryin’ to take it out on me again. Maybe I should just take my little shit someplace else and smoke it. Maybe then you’ll be happy.”

  She fell silent and waited for a slap, or one of the other abuses she’d come to expect from him.

  Darnell just stared at her. He wasn’t used to her standing up for herself, and he didn’t know quite how to respond.

  When finally he spoke to her, it was with a vulnerability she didn’t know he possessed.

  “It ain’t you,” he said. “It ain’t Lily, either. It’s Kenya. I guess I ain’t know I cared about her that much, ’til it hit me a little while ago. I was smokin’ a blunt with Monk, and he started talkin’ about how Kenya look like a pretty little woman. I’m listenin’ to him, and I’m thinkin’ this the man that did somethin’ to my niece.

  “I started to kick his ass right then. But somethin’ told me not to. I guess it was a good thing, ’cause a few minutes after that, he said he saw Kenya on the elevator with this dude Friday night. I made him take me out to try to find him. We walked around the block a few times, even looked around the buildin’, but we ain’t see nobody.”

  “Who was the guy Monk seen her with?” Renee asked.

  “He said he ain’t know who it was. But I think Monk just old. He probably thought he seen Kenya and ain’t seen nothin’.”

  “So where Monk at now?” Renee said.

  “I guess he went back upstairs to his apartment. I don’t know. All I know is I can’t look no more. Seem like that’s all I been doin’ these past couple days is lookin’.”

  Renee looked at him with something approaching sympathy. Then she reached up and rested her pale hand against his dark brown skin. “Let’s get outta here for a minute. It’s a house down Poplar Street we can go to. You ain’t gotta think about Kenya for a little while.”

  Darnell stared down at Renee, almost gratefully. But when she took his hand and led him out the back entrance of the building, Darnell knew, for the first time in years, that crack wasn’t going to solve anything.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lynch got off the elevator and walked down the deserted hallway to 6D—the apartment number the guard had written down for him. When he knocked, the unlocked door creaked open.

  A cold puff of air whisked out of the apartment and clung to him as the pungent scent of smoke filled his nostrils.

  He walked in coughing, noting that the plastic floor tiles were burned black. Some of the walls were charred, revealing gray cinder blocks behind the damaged Sheetrock. Water damage had left plaster and paint peeling from the others.

  Lynch was so caught up in the sight of it all that the slamming sound startled him.

  Reaching for the gun that he kept under his jacket, Lynch wheeled on the man who’d shut the door.

  Bayot didn’t move. He simply stood against the wall, staring at Lynch with more curiosity than fear.

  “Who are you?” Lynch said.

  A wide smile creased Bayot’s face.

  “Had a fire in here a while back,” he said, ignoring Lynch’s question. “Floor a little burnt up.”

  Lynch chambered a round in the gun. The sound of the metallic click filled the space between them.

  “I said, who are you?” Lynch repeated forcefully.

  Bayot’s smile disappeared quickly and he stared down at the floor.

  “Who are you, who are you?” he chanted, as his face transformed into that of an angry little boy.

  Lynch started to respond. But then the man looked up, and Lynch caught a glimpse of his eyes.

  The person trapped behind them was not the burly, forty-year-old man whose gray-flecked, unkempt beard grew out from leathery, almond-colored skin. The person behind those eyes was a child.

  “Bayot,” Lynch said, easing the gun back into its holster as he spoke in soothing tones. “That is your name, isn’t it—Bayot?”

  His eyes grew wide and his head moved in circles as he tried to form a word.

  “My name is Bay-ard Jack-son,” he said with much effort. “They call me Bayot.”

  “Okay, Mr. Jackson—”

  “Bayot.”

  “Okay, Bayot. I’m sorry I had to come in without your permission. But I needed to ask you about something. Is that okay?”

  The soft words seemed to relax Bayot.

  Lynch reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the picture of Kenya. “Do you know her?”

  Bayot looked timid, almost afraid.

  “It’s okay,” Lynch said. “You can tell me. I’m looking for her, and I thought you might have seen her, that’s all.”

  Bayot stuck a finger in his mouth and smiled. “That’s Kenya,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Lynch said. “Kenya Brown. Can you help me find her?”

  Bayot covered his face with both hands and smiled mischievously. “She pretty,” he said, giggling. “Pretty little girl.”

  Lynch felt a knot forming in his gut.

  “Are you friends with her?” he asked cautiously.

  Bayot’s smile faded as sadness turned down the corners of his mouth.

  “She don’t wanna be my friend,” he said. “She scared o’ me.”

  The sadness turned to dejection.

  “She too little to play with me anyway. Plus Mommy said don’t play with little girls, so I don’t.”

  “Who’s your mommy?” Lynch asked.

  “Mommy don’t live here no more,” he said matter-of-factly. “She died.”

  “So you’ve been living here by yourself since then?”

  “I don’t live here. I live in a group home on Eighth Street. They keep takin’ my SSI check, talkin’ ’bout it’s for my rent and for my food. So I be leavin’ sometime, and when I do, I get my check and I go upstairs with Judy and them, or I come down here so nobody won’t bother me.”

  “Were you there on Friday? At Judy’s, I mean.”

  Guilt swept over Bayot’s face, and he was silent.

  “What’s wrong?” Lynch asked.

  “You gon’ tell on me.”

  Lynch watched him for a moment, trying to figure out what he meant. He decided to gamble.

  “I already know you smoke the crack Judy sells,” Lynch said. “You know you could get locked up for that, right?”

  Bayot averted his eyes and nodded slowly.

  “I don’t want to see that happen,” Lynch said. “And if you help me find Kenya, it won’t. But if you don’t help me, I’m going to have to tell. And then they’re going to put you in jail for smoking crack. You don’t want that, do you?”

  Bayot’s eyes filled with tears as he shook his head vigorously from side to side.

  “Good. Now I’m going to ask you again. Did you see Kenya on Friday?”

  Bayot shrank back against the wall and began to cry. Then
he sat down on the smoke-damaged tiles, trembling.

  “Did you see her on the staircase?” Lynch prodded. “Somebody told me that you like to play on the staircase.”

  “You gon’ tell,” Bayot said, rocking back and forth with his arms around his knees.

  Lynch hesitated, then came over and sat down next to him. “I promise I won’t tell,” he said, looking the man in the eye.

  Bayot studied Lynch’s face. Then he let out a long sigh and stared straight ahead as the memories poured out.

  “I just wanted her to play with me,” he said nervously. “I ain’t want to do nothin’ to her. I just wanted somebody to play with. But Mommy said I’m too old to play with little girls. So I just followed her.”

  Bayot looked down at the floor, then over at Lynch, who sat silently waiting for the rest.

  “I ain’t want her to be scared o’ me,” Bayot said. “I ain’t want her to think I was crazy, neither. ’Cause I ain’t crazy. I just don’t learn like other people do. Sometime it take me a while to figure stuff out, know what I mean?”

  Lynch nodded.

  “I figured Kenya out a long time ago, though. I knew she was nice, ’cause everybody wanted to be her friend. I guess that’s why I wanted to be her friend, too. That’s why, when I seen her comin’ out Lily place the first time on Friday, I was gon’ ask her to play with me.”

  “Do you remember what time it was when you saw her?” Lynch asked.

  “It was nine o’clock, ’cause when I seen her, somebody had a radio playin’ real loud, and they had said the time on the radio.”

  Bayot stopped and looked at Lynch for approval. He nodded. That pleased Bayot, so he continued.

  “When I saw Kenya come out and start walkin’ upstairs, I started comin’ up the steps behind her. She looked back and I ducked down, ’cause I thought she wanted to play hide-and-go-seek. But then she started walkin’ up the steps again. So I followed her again. She stopped and looked back like she was tryin’ to find me. When she ain’t see me, she started lookin’ kinda scared, and she ran up to Judy apartment and went in.”

  “When I asked you if you were in Judy’s apartment, you said I was going to tell. Did that mean you were in there?”