Keeping Secrets

by Penny Mickelbury

  “You. This case. Together. I can’t...”

  “Gianna, please don’t do this.”

  “I understand you have a job to do but I can’t handle what I feel when your job interferes with mine, and I can’t allow you— I can’t allow anyone to get in the way of my job. People’s lives depend on how well I do.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Mimi grabbed Gianna’s arm and pulled her close. “Do you think I would do anything, that I would ask you to do anything, that would jeopardize people’s lives?”

  “You did that story, Mimi.” Gianna pulled away angrily. “You jeopardized my investigation, and I asked you not to do that.”

  “I have a responsibility too, Gianna, and it’s not to the police department.” Mimi was stung by the accusatory tone of Gianna’s voice. “The public has a right to know there’s a serial killer out there, especially that segment of the population that’s vulnerable.”

  “The public has a right to expect protection and I can’t give it if I have to worry that my lover will undermine my efforts.”

  Mimi was stunned into momentary silence. She searched Gianna’s face looking for proof that she really didn’t believe what she’d just said. “Where do you think the line is, Gianna, between the police department’s need to protect its investigation and the public’s need for information to protect itself?” Mimi asked carefully.

  “I didn’t come here to argue semantics with you. I don’t have time for that.” Gianna’s anger had not diminished.

  “It’s not semantics, it’s a real issue. It’s a real problem that the press and the police need to fix and I’d like to think that you and I can—”

  Gianna cut her off with icy anger. “I asked you not to run a story.”

  “I don’t work that way. I never have and I never will.” Now Mimi was angry. They stood facing each other, holding each other with their eyes for a long moment before Gianna spoke, softly but with traces of anger still lingering.

  “If whatever we have between us is to survive this case—”

  Mimi cut her off with razor-sharp swiftness. “Don’t call it ‘whatever,’ Gianna. It has a name, what we have between us. Don’t you know what it is? Or are you afraid to call it by that name?” Mimi was both hurt and angry.

  Gianna looked into her eyes, into her heart, into her soul, probing and seeking and Mimi thought for an instant that some tiny thing flickered in the hazel depths but then it was gone. Gianna said, “I’m going now, Mimi.”

  “Please don’t do this, Gianna. Please don’t.”

  “I don’t know what else to do, Mimi,” said the all the way cop as she opened the door and quickly left without turning around so that Mimi would not see the tears that filled her eyes and overflowed and ran in tiny streams down her face as she ran the last few steps to her car. And as she sped downtown, numbed by the ache inside, almost blinded by the tears, she answered the question posed to her scant moments earlier: Yes, I know what lives between us and yes, I am afraid. She activated lights and siren to clear the southbound 16th Street traffic that was in her way and she rolled down the windows and let the icy wind dry her tears so that when she pulled into the police garage her eyes only looked tired and red as usual from lack of sleep.

  She unlocked the door to the Think Tank and turned on the lights. The enlargements still hung on the walls and reports were stacked neatly on the table for her inspection. Eric had left a note explaining that he’d sent everybody home to bed and he was with Carolyn Green’s husband. He just realized, after seeing the news report, the man was a college friend because Carolyn Green used her own name and not her husband’s. He’d meet her back here at 10:00 pm sharp and maybe they could have a drink before calling it quits for the night. And he’d added a postscript: Did she think it important that Carolyn Green planned to leave her husband for her woman lover? Gianna looked up at the photo of the dead woman, saw Mimi’s face, and turned abruptly to the files. She sorted through them, frustrated and angry that every item she thought, believed, knew was a lead had turned into nothing.

  She scanned the note from Cassandra Ali regretting that no record of gay-related killings on the 21st of the month existed that could tie into these. Kenny Chang’s report said no serial killer had been released from jail or any other institution within the continental United States or Canada in the last six months. Linda Lopez’s report gave the names of a dozen recent parolees known to have killed from a specifically sexual motivation, and noted that a preliminary check showed that none had ties to the Washington area. Someone had affixed a note to the outside of Phil Tancil’s file—a note from the security guard who’d found the body, asking the police to please alter the entry in his official log book to show that Tancil was found on the 22nd and not the 21st.

  Gianna frowned, opened the file, and removed the guard’s log book. She paged through it, impressed with his detailed neatness. She turned to the last page for which there was an entry and read his carefully printed notation: Mon. Oct. 21, 91, 12:30am. Gianna scrutinized those cryptic symbols, amazed at the fact of their simple truth: When Ed Coleman had clocked in for his shift it was, indeed, Monday, the 21st of October. But when he found Phil Tancil’s body, it was, in fact, Tuesday, the 22nd. The same was true for all five victims. Even if the official time of death was on the 21st— as was true for Tony delValle and Phil Tancil—all official reports and documents were dated the 22nd or later.

  Her fingers fumbled at the computer keys, entering the wrong codes twice before she accessed the National Computer Information Center, and she cursed out loud when the program came up empty. She then called up the program that would print out any newspaper story on any murder on any 22nd day of the month, and for a week thereafter. Five, six, seven stories about murders on or about the 22nd of the month: two each in New York City and Los Angeles, one in Boston, one in Philadelphia, before, finally, a twenty-year old front page story in three Washington papers. Two were dated October 25, 1971, the third a day later, and all were about the murder of the Reverend Alexander Brathwaite. “This is it,” said aloud when she read the headline of the first article: Prominent Minister Slain in Church Parking Lot.

  The Reverend Alexander Brathwaite, pastor of a prosperous Presbyterian congregation in the prosperous D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland, had joined a metropolitan ecumenical group and agreed to volunteer one day a week in a Washington, D.C. prison ministry. It was 1970 and the fervor of the Civil Rights Movement still burned brightly. The young Rev. Brathwaite believed passionately in the teachings of another young minister who had been murdered just two years earlier for the passion of his beliefs. In fact, say his friends, Alex Brathwaite fancied himself a white Martin Luther King, and was proud of the rapport he had so easily developed with the largely non-white prisoners he believed himself destined to save. The excitement of Washington and an activist ministry soon left Alex Brathwaite bored with his tame-by-comparison suburban church, so when several of the other activist young ministers hit upon the notion of establishing a non-denominational congregation open to all regardless of race, gender, or sexual preference, Alex jumped at the chance to become part of this mission.

  Gianna jumped when she read the name of her friend, Art Crawford, as one of the young ministers involved in that radical-for-its-time project. She resisted the urge to call him and forced herself to continue to read how Brathwaite accepted the job as head of the inner-city ministry, spending almost all his time in Washington and leaving his wife, Jessica, and their two young children at home in the suburbs to fend for themselves while he immersed himself in a new world: a world of Spanish-speaking people, of Black people, of socially and politically and culturally and economically different people, people with whom his young wife was unfamiliar and uncomfortable; people who did not interest or amuse or challenge her as they did her husband. The article quoted the wife as calling the people of her husband’s ministry “Godless and godforsaken sinners.”

  Gianna rubbed her eyes and tried
to rub some of the tension from her neck. She could feel where the story would lead. She forced herself to take the time to read the lengthy article in its entirety instead of skipping to the end. Jessica Brathwaite, angered at her husband’s lengthy absences from home, would suddenly and irately appear at either the Ministry headquarters in a dilapidated section of Southwest Washington, or at one of the Ministry’s three community centers in equally dingy parts of Northwest D.C., looking for Alex, demanding that he come home to her and their children. A stoic Rev. Brathwaite would apologize to those present and leave with his wife, only to reappear the next day with the pronouncement that “Jessie would soon get the hang of a community ministry.” But Jessie never did and on the evening of July 21st, 1971, she came looking for Alex again. This time she brought a gun with her. She found him in his car in the parking lot of the Church Street Center and, according to the peculiar brand of gentility dictated by times, “...she shot him in a brutal manner and arranged his body in a prayerful pose.”

  “...in a prayerful pose.” The words reverberated in her head. The date, the car, the brutal manner of the murder, the prayerful pose. Here, surely, was the killer and yet...Gianna read how the police found Jessica at her suburban Maryland home early the next morning, sitting in a rocking chair and reading the Bible to her children, her clothes still splattered with her husband’s blood. Jessica Brathwaite was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity and was confined to the Criminally Insane Ward of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the same ward, Gianna thought numbly, that had been home over the years to such diverse psychopaths as Ezra Pound and John Hinckley.

  Snatching up the phone, she hurriedly dialed the Records Section and ordered the Alex Brathwaite murder file; then, just as quickly, she rang Art Crawford, the pastor of Metropolitan Community Church, Washington’s non-denominational gay church and, she knew, a dedicated workaholic. He answered his office phone on the second ring, surprised and delighted to hear from her.

  “Alex Brathwaite?” he yelped when Gianna told him what she wanted. “Of course I remember him. He was one of my closest friends. We were at Seminary together. What could you possibly want to know about Alex?”

  “Everything, Art. Everything you know, everything you can remember.” She heard him sigh. She was asking for a lot: for twenty-year old memories that had certainly dimmed with time; for information that could be intensely personal about someone who was once a friend; for a minister to reveal what would in her line of work be considered privileged information.

  She waited respectfully in the silence that allowed the Rev. Arthur Crawford to make up his mind about what—if anything—he would reveal. Finally she heard him clear his throat and he began to talk about Alex, the son of fundamentalist missionaries whose zeal to save the souls of the unenlightened led them all over the world, their only child in tow. And of course that child could only follow in their zealous footsteps. “The poor guy didn’t have a chance,” Art said sadly. “He could not have been anything other than a minister. That he found the nerve to stand up to them and refuse to be a missionary I know was the hardest thing he ever did in his life.”

  “He didn’t want to be a minister?” Gianna asked.

  “He didn’t know what he wanted, Gianna. I’m telling you the guy never had a chance to think about it. His parents rammed it down his throat and that’s wrong, no matter how right the reason. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I’d guess that being a preacher is a lot like being a cop: You either get the calling or you don’t, and if you try to do the job without the calling, you’ll be miserable.”

  An all the way cop, an all the way preacher. Gianna felt every bit of the passion of Art’s words and she had to force her mind and her emotions to stay with the issue at hand. “The old newspaper article I just read made him sound like a good minister,” she offered.

  “He was wonderful,” Art said simply. “Compassionate, generous, dedicated, tireless, fearless— all the right things. But he was innately all those things anyway. That’s the kind of human being he was. You know, I always thought he took on the Community Ministry job just to spite his parents.”

  “How? I’d think they’d love the idea. Kind of like doing their missionary work but in an urban setting,” Gianna said.

  “Alex saw it exactly the opposite. I remember he made them furious as they were about to leave on a trip to some African country. He explained that centuries before the Europeans, the Africans had language and art and culture and a civilization and religion, but it was due solely to the interference of whites that they’d lost those things. ‘The only thing you can possibly save them from,’ Alex had told them, ‘is yourselves.’” Art chuckled softly to himself at the memory and was silent. Gianna allowed it for as long as she could, then asked the question that had lurked between the lines of the twenty-year old newspaper story.

  “When did he know he was gay, Art? Was that something you shared with him?”

  “Lord no!” Art exclaimed with a bark of laughter. “Not only didn’t we share it, we didn’t even talk about it. I honestly don’t think Alex had a clue about his homosexuality until we began the community ministry and he encountered homosexuals for the first time. I can still see the look on his face when I told him I was gay. At first he truly didn’t understand. But then, when he did, he was the most kind and gentle and loving and supporting of all the ministers. The rest of them wanted to toss me out the door, good Christians that they were. Alex was the one who stood up for me, who reminded our brethren of our mission. It was Alex, true missionary that he was, who always was able to love every person no matter what. It was Alex who was good. Always good.”

  Gianna conjured up another image from the ancient newspaper story, that of a young wife left home alone in a strange city with two young children and thought, No, not always good. To Art she said, “Do you know why Jessica shot him in the car?”

  “Well, sure, Gianna. He was with another guy.”

  “Yeah, I know that much.” According the news story, Herb Addison told police that he ran when the woman pointed the gun.

  “So, isn’t it obvious?” Art asked.

  “Spell it out for me, please,” Gianna said tightly.

  “They were, well, having sex. Alex was getting a blow job when Jessica appeared. She’d seen his car in the lot and walked over to it. It was late, almost midnight, and when she saw what was happening she took out this gun and the other guy opened the door and ran like hell but Alex sat there trying to talk to Jessie, trying to explain...” Art trailed off, as if the realization had suddenly hit that there could be no way to explain that scenario to the most understanding of wives—and most certainly not to Jessica Brathwaite.

  “Why these questions about Alex and Jessie?”

  Gianna hesitated. Art deserved an answer, but she didn’t want to reveal too much of what she was thinking. “I’m just trying to piece together some background material for an investigation—”

  “Dear God,” he breathed. “Oh Dear God, Gianna. I had heard she was out but I never dreamed...it can’t be possible, can it?”

  Gianna literally heard her heart thud inside her chest. “You think Jessica has been released from St. Elizabeth’s? When, Art? When?” Gianna clenched her fists. Jessica Brathwaite’s name didn’t show up any release list.

  “I don’t remember. A year ago maybe? I’m not really sure.” Art’s response validated Gianna’s suspicion but the central question remained: After almost twenty years of confinement, how could Jessica know Phil Tancil and Liz Grayson and Carolyn Green and the others? And even if she knew them, how could she know they were gay?

  Gianna thanked Art and grinned as they performed their years old ritual: He asks whether he’ll see her Sunday; she responds that the time for miracles has passed; he reminds her that miracles occur every day, and she says then maybe Sunday’s a good day for one. They both know that church isn’t part of her program; but they both also know that in their respective lines of work, belief in miracles is someti
mes the only way to get through a day.

  Afterward, Gianna sat for a long moment, digesting all she’d just learned and seething at the incompetence that denied her the knowledge that Jessica Brathwaite had been released from St. E’s. She opened the report on recently released criminals and scanned the list. Jessica Hendrix! Released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital on January 1, 1990, having spent 19 years and been declared no longer a danger to herself or others. And she winced when she read the notation in handwriting that she didn’t recognize: possible religious motivation...no indication of sex motivation. Forensics expert Asa Landing’s warning replayed itself in her head: “These crimes are not about sex, pure and simple.”

  She scanned the report, found what she sought: Jessica had been released to the care of the Presbyterian Home for Women in Wisconsin. A pleasant conversation with an administrator there proved both helpful and frustrating. Yes, the woman said, Jessica had been there. She’d also left after three weeks and no one had heard from her since.

  “Could she be with her children?” Gianna asked.

  “Oh, no, Lieutenant,” said the gentle voice from the Presbyterian Women’s Home. “His parents took the children after the...after the incident. They were missionaries, you know, and lived abroad. And her family...well, there was some embarrassment about the whole matter, as you might imagine.”

  Yes, Gianna could imagine. It was also becoming easier by the minute to imagine where Jessica had been since leaving Wisconsin. “Money,” Gianna said suddenly. “Where could she go without money?”

  “Oh, that was no problem,” said the gentle voice. “Her family was quite generous in that regard.”

  Yes, Gianna thought, embarrassment often breeds generosity. She checked her watch again: Not quite nine. An hour before Eric would return. She toyed with the notion of calling him and trying to find out from Carolyn Green’s husband whether his wife had known Jessica; she was much too restless to sit waiting for him to return. She read over her notes from the newspaper article and her eyes focused on the Church Street address where Steve Gordon was killed. Wonder what’s there now, she mused, even as she was writing a note for Eric to tell him what she’d learned and where she’d gone.