Capitol Punishment (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 3) (7 page)

“I’ll be careful.”

“Make sure Stanley understands that, too,” Barrish admonished his son.

“I will.”

The heat of the moment was subsiding now. Barrish let several breaths loose to unwind further. “I want to see it.”

The words took Toby by surprise. “That’s not a good idea, Pop. You should be as far away from the stuff as possible.”

“I want to see it,” he repeated, his wish obviously not up for further discussion. “Tonight.”

“Okay, Pop. Tonight.”

THREE

Relations

Darren Griggs wondered how one man could hate so much. He had puzzled over the same question more than a year before, when the name of John Barrish sparked images of a pitiful man who was so fearful of those whose skin was of a darker hue than his that he would champion their removal from “white” America. Now, as the head of a family torn apart by the actions of that same man he had pitied, Darren Griggs knew that he could hate even more.

Yet his hate was more profound. It came from a place inside that used to be filled with a contrasting emotion. Now there was a blazing inferno there. His rage was burning, aching for vengeance, consuming its host as it searched for a target of opportunity. It had tempted him to strike out at his own family, but he resisted, burying it deeper. His wife, already destroyed by the vicious murder of her little girl, was little more than a shell of the woman she had been. His son, who had doted on his little sister like any big brother would, was now more of an adversary in their family structure than a member. He thrived on conflict, savoring it, even in the smallest amounts. Arguments with his defenseless mother. Defiance of his father. And, even though Moises was of age, this devastated his father, who had always been the closest of friends with his son. Now the rift could hardly be wider.

And what could Darren do? He himself was teetering on the brink, ready to succumb to destructive urges, which would destroy the last vestige of shaky stability in his family. And that knowledge had guided him to the logical answer to the question. There was something he could do. Something he had to do.

Darren left his car a block and a half from La Brea and began walking east, his right hand curled around the rolled-up flyer. He had memorized the address, which would be just across La Brea and south a half a block or so. He knew so from having driven by a dozen times or more in the past week, hoping each time the courage to stop and go through with it would come to him. This time it had.

As he walked he was the subject of much interest from the residents of the neighborhood. He was an outsider; that was of no doubt. Half of those whose eyes were cast upon him looked out from under the wide brims of coal-black hats, their faces framed by long, regal beards. Children with curls dangling in front of their ears stared the most at the black man walking down their street, not because he was black, but because he was not like the other black men their parents had chased out of the neighborhood. He was dressed nice, not fancy, like Mr. Katz at the shoe store. This black man was clean, and he wasn’t pushing a shopping cart piled with bags and cans and blankets. He wasn’t dirty, and he didn’t have lots of little plastic bags in his hand. He looked almost normal, except that he was black.

Darren glanced left and right as he moved down the block. He saw some of the stares, and felt others. And he knew why he was suddenly the focus of attention. He also didn’t care. There were more important things to worry about, more pressing matters at hand. He had hate to deal with; this was just fear.

The evening rush hour was almost over, and Darren had little trouble crossing La Brea. He trotted through a break in traffic and turned right, his feet moving him toward the building frontage he had memorized from numerous no-stop passes in his car. Just inside the lobby, through twin glass doors that let the bright lights spill out onto the darkening street, Darren saw the signboard. He rubbed a nervous thumb on the roll of paper in his hand and uncurled it.
Race and Hate: A Program on Understanding.
The words on the sign and the flyer in his hand were the same, and the fact that he had it at all was another product of his daughter’s murder. If his son hadn’t started getting into trouble with the law Darren would never have had to come down to an attorney’s office two weeks before, and if that office hadn’t been just a half-mile from where he now stood, and if there hadn’t been a flyer stuck on his car windshield when he came out...

Coincidence or design, Darren didn’t care. It had happened, maybe for a purpose, maybe not, but he was here, standing outside the Hanna Schonman Jewish Community Center in the heart of the Fairfax District of Los Angeles holding on to a piece of paper that told of understanding, and to a thread of hope that it could all be true.

Darren Griggs hated himself for hating others, and he wanted it to stop. For his sake, and for his family’s.

With that determination he pushed the glass doors inward and followed the signs to the indicated room. The door was closed. He knew he was late, a product of his trepidation, but the cliché fit in this circumstance. Never just wasn’t an option. Darren took the knob in hand and opened the door, hoping, praying desperately that his mind and heart would follow.

He stepped into the Ben Kaplan Memorial Conference Room and eased the door shut behind him. It was a large, rectangular room with three sections of seats split by two aisles, the classic theater setup. Maybe three hundred seats, he guessed, with less than a third of them filled, but all of those were packed in the front five rows of cushioned seats. At the front of the room was a stage, where the attention of the assembled group was focused. Until, of course, they turned and saw who the latecomer was. Or, more correctly, what he wasn’t.

Darren saw all heads swing his way. He had expected it, in fact, just as the stares on his short walk to this place hadn’t surprised him. After all, as his father had told him when he was just a little black boy in a very white L.A.,
“Son, you is ten shades darker than dark. People will notice that. ‘Specially white folk.”
And Darren was far darker than anyone in the room—except for the lady at the front.

“Sir, come on in.” Dr. Anne Preston smiled, knowing that her pearly whites would be seen from across the hall. It was her most striking feature, at least according to her boyfriend, and she hoped that it would serve as a quiet invitation to the man who had just entered to join the group. “We’re just getting to the good stuff.”

A few chuckles came from the crowd, and Darren forced a smile back to the speaker. Actually, he found, it wasn’t that hard to muster. Somewhat less than half of the eyes in the room followed him all the way to the seat he chose, in the row directly behind the main body of people. He avoided meeting their looks, instead focusing on the lady at the podium.
Dr. Preston
, he remembered from the flyer. A psychiatrist. A woman of color, standing before a sea of white. She would be his beacon in this room. His point of reference to block out the fear he felt from the stares.

Anne waited for the new arrival to be seated before moving on, putting the obvious questions as to why this man would put himself in this place at this time with these people. She figured that those musings would be answered when all was said and done.

“I want to talk a little about perception now,” Anne began. “How our perceptions, which are influenced by that old nature-nurture combination, affect everything we see, do, and most importantly, everything we
feel
.”

She pressed the projection button recessed in the lectern. The lights dimmed just a bit onstage as the slide projector hummed and painted the large white screen above and behind her with two images. One was of a black man, a close-up shot of an expressionless face and head. It was reminiscent of the famed Willie Horton mug shot, less the long hair. To the right of this was another picture, this one of a white man, dressed in blue jeans and a casual shirt, sitting peacefully on a park bench, smiling into the camera. The contrast was obvious. It also had a purpose.

“Jerome Wilkes was a thrice-convicted felon when he met Robert Foster one night two years ago, robbed him, and killed him. He shot him in the back of the head after making him get to his knees. We can only assume that Mr. Foster was begging for his life, but he had no way of knowing that the man who broke into his Atlanta home that night was on parole for another murder. Robbery, rape, murder.” Anne paused for effect. The grimaced faces were her cue to continue. “Jerome Wilkes did it all, and, unfortunately for Mr. Foster, he didn’t like leaving loose ends.”

Darren shifted his gaze between the faces on the screen, but found himself drawn to the man of his color.
Why did he have to do that?
he wondered. His actions were what white people saw when they looked at
any
black man. Killer. Rapist. Thief. Not all black people were like that, but the hate came anyway. Inside, Darren’s head was shaking with wonder.

“When you hear this story, and you see Jerome Wilkes and Mr. Foster, what do you think of?” Anne asked the audience.

“I see what I see all around us,” a man answered from his front-row seat, arms crossed tightly across a pudgy chest. Several seats to his right, the rabbi of the synagogue sponsoring the presentation leaned forward to listen. “All around our neighborhood. Look, no disrespect meant, Miss Preston...”

Of course not, but I stopped being “Miss” a long time ago. And earlier when you agreed with me, I recall being referred to as “Doctor Preston.”
It was Anne’s job to read into what was said, and what wasn’t, and she was damned good at it, much to her boyfriend’s displeasure at times. Here, though, it would let her make a breakthrough...maybe.

“...but all we see are blacks committing these crimes. You see this all the time. You hear of it every day. They walk down our block and sell their crack.”

“Not anymore,” another man interjected. His face was a mask of hate. “Not on my block.”

“Fine, we clean up our own neighborhoods,” the first man continued, “but what about the rest of the city? Or the country. Look,” he said with added passion, pointing to the screen. “That’s in Atlanta. The blacks there are no different than here. No different than anywhere.”

“They can’t fit in,” a woman offered. “They don’t try.”

The first man’s head nodded emphatically, looking at Anne.

“That’s right. And so what do they do? They rob and kill white people because
we
tried to fit in,
we
worked hard, and
we
have things they want! Miss Preston, you show us these pictures and tell us this story and expect it to change our mind? It only reinforces it.”

Anne wanted to smile. She always wanted to smile at this point, more than her natural tendency to do so, but didn’t. “What reinforces it?”

“This!” the man half-yelled, standing and tossing his hand toward the screen. “You tell us a story about another black murderer taking a white man’s life because he wanted his things! That is what we live with every day!”

Darren swallowed hard. He hadn’t expected to hear the hate. Maybe feel it, but not hear it. Was this a mistake? Was coming here hoping for something to drive the hate out of his soul too much to ask? His eyes again looked to the screen.
Why? Why did you have to fulfill their prophecy?

“You mean Jerome Wilkes?” Anne asked.

“Yes!” the man yelled fully now, pointing a spear-like finger at the black face over Anne’s right shoulder.

Anne glanced over her right shoulder, then over her left, holding her look there as she brought a hand up and casually pointed at the smiling white face staring down upon the audience. “This is Jerome Wilkes.”

It couldn’t be called a gasp, but there was a collective sound from the audience, including Darren.

“What made you think I meant this gentleman was the murderer?” Anne asked, pointing now at the black face above and to her right.

There was no answer. The man who had been standing looked to some of those near him, glancing briefly at the lone black face in the audience, and slowly sat back down.

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is Robert Foster. The picture you see is from his identification card. You see, Mr. Foster was an Atlanta firefighter when he was murdered by this man.” The direction shifted back to the man who, until a minute before, had been the victim in the eyes of the people in the room. “Jerome Wilkes is now awaiting execution for that crime.”

Silence. The hum of the slide projector’s cooling fan might as well have been thunder. The only member of the audience unaware of it was Darren, whose face was now downcast, his mind assaulting itself with torturous accusations.
Racist! To your own people!
The whites don’t need to hate us—you’re doing it for them! Black means bad! It means guilty! You’re no better than the animals that killed Tanya!
He had come seeking understanding, and was now filled with confusion. The hate he had developed for those other than his own, a hate he wanted to destroy, was now targeted inward. He sat there, hearing nothing more, dreaming of ways to end this pain. To end it for good.

“This was a trick,” a faceless voice from the audience said.

“You’re right,” Anne responded. “Your perceptions tricked you into believing what you expected, rather than the reality. You see, preconceptions—even if somewhat validated by past experience—circumvent one of our most important abilities: the ability to look critically at something. When I put those two pictures up there you immediately focused on the black face when I mentioned that a crime had been committed.” She heard no dispute from the audience; not even a
Why is his head hung like that?
“Many people have come to the point where they see black as the color of danger. Yet here we have an example of something quite different.”

This was a mistake
. Darren wanted to just curl up in a ball and fade away. To just be gone. Gone like Tanya. His living family didn’t even matter at the moment, and he had come here in the hope of resurrecting the old Darren Griggs, the real Darren Griggs, in order to save them. Now that wasn’t even a possibility as he saw it. He was on a slippery slope sliding slowly toward a steep drop-off. Slowly but gaining speed.