Out of the Blues

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  She sighed and lowered her chin to her chest. “Breathe.” She had watched her father’s breath leave, had not thought anything about giving him her breath. “Breathe.” Where did it go? she’d wondered in that moment when his breath was gone. That precise moment of her ten-year-old life when she realized her father was dead and she should have tried to give him her breath. “If I could find your breath—”

  Breathe on me, breath of God

  Fill me with life.

  She imagined hearing the choir sing. “What could I have done to get you to stay in this life? I didn’t think to give you my breath. If I had done enough, been enough, could you have stayed? I did not give you breath.” The thoughts came in the same old pattern.

  Wonder stared up from below, happily swishing his tail. “Breathe on me, breath of dog.” Ranger. Dan. Breath of dog.

  —

  THE ROTTIES and the warm aroma of just-baked biscuits met her when she let herself in Wills’ place. “Honey, I’m home,” Salt called, walking down the hall while scratching the dogs’ ears, their nails tapping and sliding on the polished wood floor. The fragrance became increasingly delicious as she neared the kitchen and her appetite was further enhanced by the sound of perking burbles from the coffee brewing on the counter.

  She’d called Wills after coming down from the tree. He suggested breakfast before they went in to work.

  He stood next to the stove pushing soy patties around a small pan. “I could get used to hearing that,” he said, smiling at her. He was wearing his standard work clothes—a short-sleeved dress shirt and khaki pants, covered with a white half apron tied under his chest. A day-of-the-dead skull tie was slung over his leather carryall on a chair by the wall.

  “Oh, yeah. Wait till I’ve told you my latest adventure. I need some advice, dude. I’m actually asking for help.” Her phone rang. “Hi, Chuck. Hold on.” She motioned to Wills. “I actually need to take this one.” She put the phone back to her ear. “Yep. Honda Accord. Yep. You got it. Passenger front window. Anytime today. It’ll be in the parking lot. Blue. Yep. BIF2988. Thanks, Chuck.” She turned the phone off, tucked it in her bag, and looked up at Wills waiting. “Sorry, but Chuck’s fixing my window today.”

  “Your window?” Wills piled the biscuits in a red ceramic bowl lined with a green kitchen cloth.

  “Wills, I’m telling you right away. I’m going to tell you all of it. I want to be better with you, to not be so, so . . .”

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “I’m starved,” she said as she sat down and began giving him the details about the surveillance. “Don’t dog me out. I’m doing this. Okay? I didn’t have any clear idea what I was looking for or who I might see, but I set up across from Magic Girls.”

  “Magic Girls—thug central.” He turned with his hands on his hips.

  “Wills. Mostly I wanted to get a sense of Spangler, who he hangs with, bodyguards, posse pals, associates, the usual suspects, who I might need to go around to interview him.”

  “Did you stop to think that since he’s connected to my case that you might talk this over with me?” He stirred eggs with his back to her.

  “You’ve got your hands full and we’re not officially assigned partners. What would you have said if I told you I would be doing the surveillance? I can’t check in with you asking about every move I make. If I’ve got an opportunity, I need to be able to take it. Same as if I were a guy. So I set up in the vacant building across from the club.”

  “God, God, God. This is going to be the death of me. And to think I was the one encouraging you to go for detective.”

  “Wills, you are going to have to trust that I can handle myself. And I am going to promise to try to ask for help when I need it. Like now.”

  “Salt, even a guy would make a phone call, pull out with radio.”

  “But wouldn’t you just have worried if I called first and then had my phone off? And okay, so maybe I’m sensitive about being treated different, but it’s sometimes hard to know when someone’s safety concerns are a disguise for paternalism and thinking that a woman’s not up to the job.”

  She told him the rest—about Spangler and Madison, and Madison’s assault. Then finding the window busted.

  They sat with mugs of rich Cuban coffee, real butter, watermelon-rind preserves, free-range organic eggs, and soy sausage. “Have you noticed I’m not even ranting about your run-in with Madison?” said Wills.

  “No, you’re not. Why?”

  “I’m also going to try to do this better. I’m not going to go flay the skin from his body inch by inch. I’m not going to go remove his eyes from his head or his teeth with a tire iron. I’m not even going to say a fucking word to him. In fact, I’m going to seriously avoid him or any place he might be.” Wills put his mug down on the table and started clearing the dishes.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “No. You’re right, honey. As things stand it would be just your word against his. But I know how to get more. This needs, we need, help and I have friends. You have friends. We can do this.” He refilled her cup.

  “What about his connection with Midas Prince and now Spangler? What about all the cops who work EJs for him? I don’t know who we can trust. Do you?”

  “The EJ thing is a problem. Right now I don’t know who all works for him either.” Wills sat back down with his own fresh cup of coffee.

  “I’ve had EJ discussions with Pepper several times. I think he’s even worked some jobs for Madison,” she said. “Ann called me and she and I are going to go to lunch tomorrow. I think she’s worried. She and Pepper are having a hard time with the new assignment.”

  “Understandable. Narcotics is the most dangerous job in the PD for lots of reasons. And it can change people if they start to identify with the dark side.”

  “I’m assuming you mean that metaphorically?” Salt widened her eyes.

  “God, you Southerners are so sensitive—Atlantans especially.” He shook his head. “Everything has a subtext about race. It’s tiresome.”

  “Sister says the city has a black dog hanging around.”

  “Black dog?”

  “A hellhound.” She looked down into her cup. “Wills, one of the reasons I wanted to see you is because I was thinking about my dad this morning and I realized that I might be, I don’t know, for lack of a better word, haunted by his death, by having found him after he shot himself. This case of the blues, Michael Anderson’s death, my father’s blues collection, Dan Pyne bleeding out while I tried to give him CPR—it’s all brought up some things I’d forgotten.”

  He laughed. “Shazam! Well, aren’t you the smart shrink. You think? A little girl finds her father bleeding to death from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head and he dies in her arms. Yeah, that might put a crinkle in your gray matter.”

  “The dog in my dream . . .”

  He looked at her from under raised brows.

  “Don’t give me that look. Besides, no one, no cop, is a blank slate. We all have scars, even you.” She reached across the table for his hand.

  Wills got up, came around behind her, and encircled her in his arms. “Remember when we first came together, I told you I wanted you, in part, because of your history. I do have broken places myself, and you wouldn’t be you without the history.”

  “This stuff blindsides me sometimes. It comes up and I want to remember and I don’t.”

  “Well, Detective, we’ve got a lifetime to figure it out.”

  SISTER’S HOME

  I knew I’d be seein’ you soon.” The hinges of the screen door made a salutatory rasp as Sister Connelly, wearing one of her immaculate, albeit worn, old-fashioned housedresses and flat sandals, opened it wider. With her halo braid, tight and neat, adding inches to her already impressive height, she narrowly missed the doorframe as she motioned to Salt. “I’ve got a fresh pitcher of tea. Come on back t
o the kitchen.”

  Passing the small parlor as they went down the hall, Salt said, “This is a treat. I feel like I’ve graduated—getting invited to your kitchen.”

  “Might as well, you keep comin’ ’round anyway.”

  “I come because you know The Homes. You’ve been living here forever and you know almost everybody and who’s kin to who.”

  Sister’s house was a small hundred-year-old cottage near The Homes and across the street from the apartment that had been the scene of the murder a year ago.

  “Sit.” Sister motioned her to one of two red vinyl chairs at an aluminum-rimmed Formica table in the middle of the tiny kitchen. She took a large pitcher out of the refrigerator, removed its plastic cover, poured two glasses, and added ice from the freezer. A bouquet of collard greens lay on the counter by the sink. Salt began to get the same feeling she’d had before at Sister’s, of shape-changing, of growing larger, like Alice in Wonderland, the already small kitchen growing smaller. Sister was so tall the two of them filled the room.

  “I meant to tell you at the cemetery, I went to see Stone.” Salt took a slow sip of the tea, remembering how sweet Sister made it.

  “How’s he doin’?”

  “Terrible.” The tea slid down Salt’s throat like syrup. She didn’t usually drink her tea sweetened, but Sister’s was old-fashioned sweet, the sugar added when the tea was hot.

  “He was never going to make it,” Sister said. “Just too messed-up from the git.”

  “What do you hear about Lil D?”

  “Latonya don’t put much in the street, so he probably takin’ care of her and that baby.” Sister nodded her head to Salt, as if she were affirming something.

  “Dantavious.” Salt said the baby’s name. Sister’s back door was half pane glass. A wood-line barrier behind the house separated her quiet residential street from the parallel, more heavily traveled city street on the other side. But the trees grew up close, leaving her just a small backyard. Birds flitted back and forth across the view from the door’s glass panels. An open worn Bible lay on the table at Sister’s elbow. A black cat clock on the wall ticked with a switching tail.

  “Is it Lil D or the new job brought you ’round again?” Sister asked.

  “In a way both, I guess. I found a recording that belonged to my dad of Mike Anderson with Pretty Pearl. I think I told you I’d been assigned to look into some new information about his death.”

  “So that’s it—your daddy.”

  Salt stood up, went to the back door, and looked out. “Can we go sit on your front porch? It’s too pretty to be inside.”

  “I got your glass. Come on.” Sister was halfway down the hall by the time Salt turned around.

  The old woman sat down on a hard-back wood chair and waved Salt to the two-seater swing. “I’d like to just sit on the steps here if you don’t mind—better view of your yard,” said Salt.

  There were flowers blooming everywhere in the crowded yard and along the wood fence. And everywhere there were starter containers: coffee cans, plastic tubs, anything that could be used to hold seedling plants. A climbing rose had grown up and into the trim on one of the corner supports. Flowering vines had begun sprouting on the fence posts. It all blended in an impressionist blur around the paint-peeling, weathered-wood house, patched in places with faded-tin advertising signs. “Atlanta’s prettiest, best time of year,” Salt said.

  “Your father loved this city, too—one of the reasons he was a good policeman. He’d come by sometimes, even if he didn’t have no real reason or police business.”

  “I just have these little pieces of him that I remember, since I was only ten when he died. But sometimes something will happen, like last year when I was shot, and I am able to grab at another piece.” Salt put her nose to the fragrant jasmine that twined around the post beside her.

  Sister had been rubbing the smooth, shiny skin that stretched over her big knuckles, then she looked up sideways, narrowing her eyes at Salt. “You think maybe you took this job so’s you can make a whole out of them pieces? You chasin’ a ghost?”

  “That’s funny—chasing ghosts. It’s what homicide detectives do, in a way. It’s my job. You have the best memory of anyone I’ve ever known and you knew my dad.”

  “Lord, chile. You can’t expect me to remember much from maybe ten conversations that he and I had twenty or more years ago.”

  “No, but you might have noticed something, remember some impression.”

  “What kind of impression? What are you looking for?”

  Salt felt a constriction in her throat, a hardening under her breastbone. She held her fist there. “Do I remind you of him?” She closed her eyes when her view of Sister’s yard blurred.

  “You mean are you like him?”

  Salt nodded.

  “You worried you are or are not like him?” Sister leaned toward Salt with her elbows on her knees and hands folded together. “Do you want to be like him or are you worried you messed-up from the git?”

  “Both probably. Did he ever say anything, like he saw or heard things?”

  “Not that I remember. Mostly my recollection of him, and I’ll tell you straight, when I think back on him, it’s how he saw connections, how things come together, crossroads, where the black dog sits. There’s the song goes, ‘None of us are free ’long as one of us is chained, none of us are free.’ He understood how we all tied together. As much as anybody I ever knew. I used to think it was because he was a policeman. But it’s come to me, since I met you, that it was just his way. He paid attention and got the connections.”

  The building across the street, where last year a twelve-year-old girl with tight braids had led Salt to her mother’s body, was now stripped and gutted. “At first I thought maybe you were here about that killin’ that’s so much in the news these days. The rich lawyer’s wife and her girls that were shot.”

  “Solquist?”

  “Yeah, folks ’round here been talkin’ about the detectives, all kinds of police, looking for DeWare. What kind of connection he have with killin’ rich white people on the north side?”

  “Good question,” Salt said. Only the brick façade of last year’s murder scene remained.

  “You thinking about Stone again, and last year?” Sister asked.

  “Should I?”

  “Who else?” Sister said.

  BREATH OF DOG

  There were two dead and five wounded at The Manor (otherwise known to cops as the Razor Wire Arms) on Fort Street just off Auburn Avenue. The Homicide office was in official post-murder chaos: uniform cops escorting all manner of citizenry, witnesses tromping back and forth between cubicle rows, their kids playing games on the vending machines in the break room, detectives reporting in with each other and with supervisors, and supervisors fielding phone calls from command staff and the press. “Where the fuck are my lead detectives? I can’t raise them on radio. One of you squirts call them on their bat phones, please,” Huff yelled across the room. Then when he saw the chaplain standing beside Salt’s desk, “Sorry, Chap.”

  “They’re still out there, Sarge,” Wills shouted.

  “Do not the fuck call me Sarge, and where ‘there’? Why?”

  “Still at The Manor, interviewing the lords and ladies.”

  “This isn’t a good time, Chaplain,” Salt said.

  “Is there ever a good time in Homicide?” The rotund cleric took in the room. There were even fewer white tufts on his pink head than this time last year when he’d first tried to counsel Salt after she’d been shot.

  Thing One escorted a slouching woman wearing a large red T-shirt that said simply “Jesus” to Salt’s cubicle. The woman was wearing only the T-shirt apparently, no pants were evident beneath the hem, and she had no shoes. “You can’t smoke in here.” Thing One removed the unlit cigarette from her lips. “She’s a witness. Sarge
wants you to do the interview, take her statement.” He pulled a rolling chair from the nearby desk, pushed the woman into it. “Sit,” he said, and walked away.

  “Young lady, you need some more clothes on,” the chaplain said, starting to take Salt’s coat from the hook.

  “Not that.” Salt stood abruptly, startling the already disconcerted cleric.

  “I like that jacket you wearing better anyway,” the woman said to him.

  He looked down at his coat, then enthusiastically came out of it and handed it to the woman, who used it to cover her bare thighs.

  “Salt, I brought you some books that I thought you might be interested in.” The chaplain dipped down, lifted two books from the market bag at his feet, and put them on the desk.

  “I’ve read that one.” The lady from The Manor tapped the cover of Herding Dogs of America.

  “I saw it at a yard sale,” the chaplain said.

  “I love yard sales,” said the woman, picking up the dog book.

  Huff and Wills were walking together down the aisle and passed the chaplain, the books, and the lady at Salt’s desk. Huff stopped beside them. “Is it just me? It is. I blame myself,” he said to Wills and picked up the other book the chaplain had brought. “What to Say After You’ve Said I’m Sorry,” he read, wiping mock tears from his eyes and sniffing loudly.

  “Oprah had that one on her show,” said the lady. She swung one bare leg from under the Chaplain’s jacket.

  “Really?” said Sarge, dropping the book on the table, turning his back and striding off.

  “How ’bout if I get coffee in the break room. I don’t mind waiting.” The chaplain picked up the bag.

  Wills lingered. “Problem?” He nodded in the chaplain’s direction.

  “No, he’s kinda, well, he thinks of me as a project—from last year—you know.” She tapped the tip of the scar with her trigger finger.