A Visible Darkness (7 page)

10

E
ddie felt the cop car turn around. He’d watched it pass, keeping his head down, pushing his cart, willing himself invisible. But after the green and white prowl car had passed by he heard the wheels slow and then crunch the stone, first on one shoulder and then the other. He heard the U-turn and now he thought he could feel the heat of the engine on his back.

The chrome bumper pulled even with him, then the green fender, then the white, smiling face.

“Hey, junk man,” said the young officer in the passenger seat. Eddie said nothing.

“Wassaaaaap?” the officer wailed, his tongue sticking out, his partner grinning.

Eddie had heard the blatting before, followed by laughter. He wondered why only white people did it.

“I do not know,” Eddie answered and stopped his pushing.

The prowl car stopped with him.

“What you got in the cart today, junk man? Anything in there you shouldn’t have?”

Eddie had talked with the police before. Most of the time they left him alone. They never hurt him. The one time he’d been arrested was for burglary when they found a half dozen potted plants in his cart. He’d just picked them up out of someone’s carport. He was planning to sell them but the police stopped him and said they were stolen. They took him in when he said he didn’t know where the plants came from but promised to put them back. He had no money for bail, so he spent sixty days in the county jail.

Eddie didn’t mind jail. The food was good and after a few days they put him on a special floor the guards called the forensic unit. That’s where Eddie met the doctor. They’d had some good talks. The doc had taken care of him.

All the guards were good to him and he did whatever they told him. One day a prisoner had broken a toilet and a work crew came to bust up the porcelain and chip out some of the concrete. They filled a huge trash can and the guards laughed when two of the workers couldn’t drag it away.

“Eddie,” the guard called out. “Come carry this out into the hall for these gentlemen.”

Eddie put down the mop he’d been using and walked over. He bent and gripped the sides of the can and hefted it up onto his chest and walked it to the hall while everyone stared. He’d lifted heavier things. The guards smiled and were even nicer to him.

Another day a prisoner started screaming in his cell, crazy like, threatening to burn up his mattress with a pack of matches. He was strong and wild. The guards told him to throw the matches out but he spit at them through the bars instead. Two of them looked at each other and then the one said:

“Eddie.”

It was the guard that was always asking Eddie for help. “Go in there and get the matches, Eddie.”

The guard sat at his desk and listened to the heavy thumping, the sound of bone against bars and thick muscle against concrete. Eddie came back out with the matches and put them on the desk.

“Thank you, Eddie.”

“Yessir,” he said. Eddie had crushed the bones of a strong man’s hands before.

“You don’t have anything in that cart from Sue and Lou’s Restaurant, do you junk man?” The young white officer was still talking, but neither he nor his partner had gotten out of the car, and Eddie knew if they didn’t get out of the car it was going to be alright.

“Because somebody helped themselves through the back door over there last night,” the officer said.

Eddie knew. He’d been through that alley and saw the busted lock on the door but he had pushed on by. No need to get caught up in all that now.

“I do not know,” Eddie said.

“You do not know, huh?” the young officer repeated. “That might be the truest statement I’ve heard today.”

The officers looked at each other, proud for some reason of their words. “You be cool, junk man,” said the partner as they pulled away.

Eddie watched until the taillights disappeared and then pushed on.

“I know lots of police,” he whispered to himself. “I talks to them all the time.”

Eddie reached deep into his pocket and fished out the watch that he never wore on his wrist. He checked the time. Now he was late.

He turned down Twenty-ninth and quickened his pace. The cart rattled over the rough macadam. At Sunrise Boulevard he scanned the busy street. Rush hour. Working people leaving downtown on the east side heading west to their nice homes out in the suburbs. They kept their eyes on the cars in front of them. They stopped only when the red lights held them. It was like a train moving through an ugly patch of landscape and no one on board cared about the view.

Eddie’s eyes were on the Bromell’s Liquor Store across the street. It had been there since he was a child, sitting back off the main road, a broad parking lot on two sides. Even when they repainted the outside of the building some new yellow or purple color, the walls always seemed dingy, the dirt and grease somehow seeping back through the fresh color like a weeping wound through a bandage. Its present color was an odd orange, like a Mexican cantina, Eddie had heard someone say.

The young ones were hanging in their usual spot next to the pay phones. Yapping. Calling each other nigger and laughing at whoever it was today that had to be picked on. The older men pulled up in their Buicks or the Cadillacs with the sprung bumpers, limped in and came out with bottles in paper bags. The working men arrived in pickups with the shiny toolboxes in the truck beds. Eddie remembered when white boys with a Confederate flag pasted in the rear window were the only ones who drove such trucks. The world had changed.

Finally Eddie let the front wheels of the cart down off the curb and pushed his way across four busy lanes of traffic. No one honked. No one jammed on their brakes or cussed out the window. Eddie was invisible.

At the far edge of the parking lot he stood in the shade of a sprawling willow and waited. Without looking up he saw everyone who entered and left, matched them with cars, noted their clothes, paid particular attention to their hands: big or fine boned, stuck down in pockets or dangling at their sides.

When the bronze-colored Chevy Caprice pulled in, Eddie watched the man get out, sweep the area without stopping his eyes at the willow, and then stride into the store. Once he was inside Eddie moved.

The Caprice was an old model but flawless. Not a rust spot or a dent. The paint was unblemished. The chrome sparkling. The whitewalls brilliant and unstained. The license plate was multicolored and decorated with stick figures of playing children and said, “Choose Life.”

Eddie took up a position on the sidewalk in front of the car and leaned against Bromell’s cantina wall. The young ones paid him no mind, an ol’ trash man.

While he waited, Eddie watched another car pull in and park in the back of the lot, near his willow tree. The car looked like a cheap rental. The white man backed into the space, the way a cop might. Eddie kept his head down, peering up through his eyebrows. The ones at the phone nudged each other and under his breath, one hissed “Five-Oh.” Eddie knew it meant they’d spotted a cop on the street. Their voices got softer but they didn’t move. One of the pay phones rang and they let it jangle eight times before it stopped.

Eddie watched the new car. The outline of the man’s head looked huge and Eddie thought he could almost see his eyes. Then he watched the man lift a bottle wrapped in a paper bag to his lips and take a long drink. It wasn’t a cop. Just another drinking man.

Eddie’s own man came out of the store. He was wearing a short- brimmed touring cap. A package was under his arm and as he passed, Eddie watched his hands. The fingers were pale and thin and cupped. Eddie unfolded his own massive palm and the man dropped a tightly rolled package into it and Eddie’s hand snapped shut like a jaw. The man got into his car and only tried to make eye contact after he was behind the wheel. Eddie kept his brow down and pushed away as the Caprice backed out.

No one noticed the exchange or no one cared that a white man had dropped some change into an old black junk man’s hand. Eddie jammed the roll down into his pocket next to the watch and moved north, across Sunrise, up Twenty-third and through an alley. He did not hurry, but he did not break stride until he reached the old warehouse where they used to park the city buses and where the mechanic crews had left the packed dirt black and flaky with spilled oil and engine fluids. Back behind a rusted dumpster, he stopped, swung his head north to south, and satisfied he was alone, dug out the roll and loosened it.

Three hundred-dollar bills and the white notebook paper, the kind with the blue lines and the thin red stripe on one side. Typed in the middle of the page:

Mrs. Abigail Thompson
1027 NW 32nd Ave.

Eddie knew Ms. Thompson from years past. She may have even gone to church with his mother. He also knew the alley behind her house. Eddie knew all the alleys.

11

B
illy poured himself another glass of Merlot. I took another swallow of coffee. Both of us had had enough shrimp fried rice. I was ready for a prowl car tour of the area where Billy’s women had died.

The beach run had been painful. The humidity of surfside Florida teamed up with the soft sand to make my three miles a fine torture. Most of my life my regular runs had been done on Philadelphia streets, several blocks east to Front Street and then north along the Delaware to Bookbinders and back. I was used to cruising on hard concrete, slapping a rhythm, dodging through intersections. If I went down the shore, I’d do miles on the Ocean City beach at low tide when the sand was wet and brown and hard. Here it was slogging, half your energy used digging out of each footstep. My lungs were burning but I’d sprinted the last hundred yards down in ankle- deep water.

The shower afterwards was always a treat. Out at my shack all I had was a rain barrel above my porch that was fed by water flowing from the eaves and fitted with a hose and nozzle.

Billy filled me in on his paper trace while we ate. His women had come to South Florida at different times and they’d bought their insurance policies at different ages but all within a close time period. They probably knew one another because of their era and proximity, but it would have been on a social basis. None was in business with the other. There were no family connections. No shared churches in the recent past.

“Has McCane been any help to you?” I said.

“He has accessed s-some dates and m-medical questionnaires on the policies his company h-held.”

“You talking with him?”

“Only on the phone.”

“I’ll check with him tomorrow. Maybe I should have asked him along tonight.”

We traded sideways glances.

“Maybe not,” I said, and we both relaxed.

I pushed the plate away. I’d already bagged my things, planning to get back to the river afterwards. I’d dressed in jeans and a dark polo shirt and black, soft-soled shoes.

“How is Sherry?”

“Looks good,” I said.

“W-When are you two going to quit d-dancing around each other?”

Billy was trained to be forward and blunt. But he rarely took that step with me.

“She’s still got a ghost in her head.”

“She’s the only one who’s b-been able to p-pull you off the river.”

“Liar,” I said, fishing out my keys.

“Well, I d-don’t count,” Billy said.

I drained the coffee and tipped the cup at him.

“Yes, you do.”

When I got to the sheriff’s office I parked my truck near the front entrance and was starting across the lot when a spotlight snapped on me. When I raised a hand to shade my eyes, the light went off. Richards was backed into a spot and was behind the wheel of a green-and-white. I opened her passenger side and climbed in. She was in uniform. Starched short-sleeved white shirt and deep green trousers with a stripe down the leg. Her hair was pinned up. Her 9mm in a leather holster at her side.

“Regulation,” she said. “Got to wear the whole rig if you’re driving a squad car,” she said in greeting.

“I remember,” I said.

She slid a clipboard over to me with a form on top.

“Absolves the office if you get hurt. Sign the bottom.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong impression of me and my propensity for getting hurt,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” she answered, grinning as she shifted into drive.

We pulled onto the street and headed west. The strip centers were single-story and second-rate. A carpet outlet. A fish market. “Jiggles” nightclub with “Girls, Live Girls.”

We turned north onto a side street and a block and a half off the main thoroughfare we were into residential.

There were no sidewalks but street lamps were set every two blocks. At this time of night cars were parked in most of the driveways, some on the grassless swale. Richards punched off the headlights and swung onto another cross street. Two houses in she twisted the handle on the door-mounted spotlight and snapped it on. The beam caught the black maw of an open doorway and she swept across the windows that were boarded up with plywood.

“Crack houses,” she said. “We try to keep them boarded up. But they rip the stuff down faster than we can get it up. The owner who lives god knows where won’t keep it sealed even if it is the law.”

She flashed back over the doorway and the light picked up some movement inside.

“You arrest them for trespassing or possession and they’re out by Friday.”

She flipped off the spot and pulled the headlights back on and kept going. As a patrolman in Philly I’d done the same thing. It was exactly the same neighborhood only one-story instead of two. Less brick. More trees. Same despair.

“Your husband work this zone?” I asked and immediately wondered why the question came into my mouth.

The dash lights gave her jawline a sharp edge. Her nose held a small but not indelicate hump. A touch of mascara showed at the corner of her eye, which stayed focused ahead.

“Sometimes,” she finally said. “But he preferred the eastern zones. He wasn’t much for the action. He worked a lot with kids in the Police Athletic League.”

And got shot by a kid, I silently finished the sentence for her.

She turned another corner.

We rolled through an intersection and Richards slowed again to a crawl. Every city has a dope hole and this was theirs. Nearly eleven o’clock and there was a busy nonchalance that showed in the slow spin each man did as the green-and-white slid by. Drag from a cigarette. “I ain’t give a shit about no cop,” but the cupped hand helps hide the face. The older ones sitting on empty milk crates, elbows on knees, something too interesting to stare at in the dirt but proud enough to raise their jaws in defiance as the back fender glides by. The young ones who don’t hide. They goof and throw signs with twisted fingers and pull at the loose fabric in their crotch and their eyes say “Ain’t no big thing” and their justification is “All I’m doin’ is bidness.”

We got some extra scrutiny; two new faces on the night shift. But I knew Richards wasn’t showing me this for the dealers. Dope dealers don’t kill old ladies for life insurance money. They also don’t need to rape and murder. There are enough addicts who will give it up for whatever the dealer wants. Richards was looking past them, into the back corners and at the side of houses for the desperate ones.

“We tried to set up surveillance, watch the customers drive in and out, check the plates, run the names through NCIC looking for a hit with a sex crime conviction. Nothing.

“We’ve got some liaison with the community leaders who are trying to clean things up, appealed to their sense of safety, hoping to pick up at least some rumor. Nothing.”

“Too scared?”

“And distrustful,” she replied.

“And scared,” I repeated.

“And probably tired as hell of nothing ever changing.”

She tightened her jaw and we turned again. She seemed to have a destination in mind. A few more blocks and we pulled to a stop next to a dark, undeveloped field of overgrown grasses and brush. The orange glow of the street lamps had little effect on the interior of the empty land.

“Not exactly an urban park,” I said.

“The land was originally bought by the city for some kind of trash transfer station,” she said. “But the commissioner who represents this area fought it. So now they’re waiting for someone to come up with the money to develop it.”

“Been waiting long?”

“Years.”

She flipped on the spotlight and swung it into the darkness. A few tree trunks took shape. A clump of saw palmetto. A squat bunker of gray concrete with a single black window.

“This is where we found the last body,” she said, reaching down to grab a long-handled flashlight and her riot baton. “Take a look?” she said.

It wasn’t really a question as she popped open the door. I got out and as I walked around she closed and locked the car, leaving the spotlight on. I followed her into the brush.

“The report came in on a pay phone back up near the dealer’s corner. First time that line has been dialed to the police station. Patrol and a rescue responded. Girl had been dead eight, ten hours.”

I was watching Richards’s feet, following in her tracks, wishing for a flashlight of my own.

“She was ID’ed through fingerprints. We had her on file for some minor possession charges, loitering. She was basically a heroin addict. Her sister kept kicking her out and taking her back in.”

Richards unsnapped the holster of her 9mm as we approached the bunker, stepped around the wall and found the doorway. Inside the squad car’s spotlight painted a square on the wall opposite the window. I stepped in and the stench hit my nose and made my eyes water. It had been a while, but the reek of stale sweat, rotting food and wet mold was not unlike some corners I’d had to stick my head in down in the Philadelphia subway tunnels. Richards’s flashlight beam sprayed across the walls and into all four corners and then settled on the mattress.

“They found her face up, skirt pulled up and top pulled down around her waist, just like the others. This one had fresh bruises on her ankle and one wrist.”

“Toxicology?”

“She was high but the twist in her neck and the bruises around her throat were so obvious they knew before the M.E. got here she’d had her windpipe crushed.”

Around our feet there were half a dozen empty plastic lighters strewn among the trash. Pipers, I thought. When I was a young cop my Philadelphia sergeant had been standing with me at a magistrate’s walk-through at the roundhouse and he grabbed the shackled hand of a guy in line and twisted his thumb up for me to see.

“Bic thumb,” he called the clubbed and thickly callused digit. “From spinning the lighter so many times trying to keep the crack lit.”

I reached out and pushed Richards’s light back to the mattress. Stains and burn marks and ripped fabric where the rats had gnawed holes.

“You guys ever consider taking this thing to the lab for a DNA sampling?”

“Jesus, Max. You want to type every scumball and user in a fifteen-block radius? They’re all in there somewhere,” she said. “A defense attorney would have a field day.”

She had a point.

We got back to the car and she unlocked and switched off the spot, started the engine and kicked the A.C. up.

“That was the third of the most recent ones,” she said, reaching into her back seat and bringing out a bottle of water. Then she reached back again to get a thermos.

“Coffee?”

“You’re a mind reader.”

“Doesn’t take much,” she said and I watched her take a drink and then continue.

“The victim before that was in a stand of bushes near the overpass. One before that was in an abandoned press box at the high school. All the crime scenes were places that the addicts know and use. But nobody’s come forward with credible information, even the confidential informants looking for a few bucks.”

“Maybe even they’re afraid,” I offered, pouring the coffee into the plastic top of the thermos.

She was staring out into the orange glow on the pavement ahead.

“They’re never more afraid than they are hungry.”

We cruised the area for another hour, down a handful of alleys, up behind an old style drive-in theater where movies were flashing away on three different giant screens and along a street that she called the border. Even in the dark you could see that on one side of the street were modest but well kept homes, trimmed grass, planted palms and nice sedans in the drives. It was, Richards said, a neighborhood where middle-class blacks had come together to make a stand and a community. On the other side of the street were the scrub-and-dirt yards, the lot with two broken cars alongside the drive, the open lot with a pile of discarded sofas and trash.

“Don’t ask me how you get from one side to the other,” Richards said. “Smarter people than me have been trying to figure it for a long, long time.”

We drove back to the sheriff’s building and pulled into a spot next to my truck. Light from the poles all around poured in through the windshield.

“So that’s the nickel tour,” she said, turning off the ignition and unsnapping her seatbelt.

“I appreciate the time,” I said.

She leaned back into the corner of her seat and door. The light had an odd way of playing in her eyes. Sometimes they were a light gray, sometimes a deep green. The shadows in the car kept me from seeing them now.

“So.”

“So?” I could feel her grinning at my awkwardness.

“You staying at Billy’s tonight?”

“No. I need to get back out to the river.”

“Ahh. Back to the frogs and gators.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, my time to smile. I let the moment sit for a while. “Billy says we’re dancing, you and I.”

“Billy’s right,” she said.

“So am I dancing too fast, or too slow?”

“You’re being very careful, Max. I like that in a man.”

She sat up straighter in her seat. The onboard computer was between us. She raised her eyebrows to the building façade, as if she needed to remind me where we were.

“See you later, officer,” I said.

I popped the handle on the door and started to put the thermos down in the seat.

“Why don’t you just take that with you for the ride back,” she said. “It’ll keep you company.”

“I’m not sure when I’ll get it back to you.”

“I’m guessing soon enough,” she said and I watched her eyes, trying to find the color.

“OK,” I said, stepping back and closing the door.