No Place Safe (17 page)

Luckily, Ma had more sense. She dropped to the ground like this was something she saw happen every day and tried to get the man to lie on his side.

“We have to keep him from choking,” she told Bridgette and me while she looked through her purse like the answer to the man’s problems was hidden in there. I half expected her to pull out a syringe full of something, or a bottle of pills. I was disappointed when all she came up with was a scarf.

“It looks like he hit his head when he fell, there’s blood. And he’s starting to seize again. Run into the school and call an ambulance.”

I didn’t move, just stood there watching her lift the man’s head and put the folded-up scarf under it. She repeated her instructions, this time using a few cuss words so I’d see the urgency in the request, and I took off running.

When I returned, my task completed and some of the polling workers following me, Ma was still on the ground trying get the man on his side again when he started having another attack. That’s when the ambulance arrived. We got out of the way and let the paramedics take over, and I watched Ma talking to one of them, explaining how the man’s seizures came in succession. The rest of the evening I wondered, as I told my friends what happened, how many of them would be able to say they helped their mother save a man between school and dinner. I was certain not one of them could.

After the dance that had gone bust, I decided to treat school like a job—put in my eight hours and get out. There were no extracurricular activities that might keep me on campus a minute longer than required. My friends would be better described as acquaintances. The only way I’d survive those eight hours was to keep my two lives separate, be two different people like Ma. Unlike her, I enjoyed only one of my personas, and one didn’t complement the other. At home and with my real friends, I was me—comfortable, still street enough to be respected despite the plaid skirt and crested blazer I wore. Black. At school, I found a new group of friends who worked hard at not fitting in. They were white, but not quite rich. A few of them had part-time jobs. They talked about anti-establishmentarianism, and on the weekends sprayed their hair purple, wore black nail polish, and stuck safety pins through their cheeks. I liked how much they didn’t want to belong, and they took me in.

I got a room full of blank looks. Surely I wasn’t going to have to explain the concept of lawyers to them. “What do lawyers have to do with stopping the misuse of magic?” Mr. Hartwell asked.

We went to the
Rocky Horror Picture Show,
where I learned the lyrics to “The Time Warp” and the matching dance steps, and the right moment to throw toast at the screen. These friends introduced me to yet another new music by groups called the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Like all the other music, it had no beat I could move to, but it sounded angry and I was angry—at rich kids who didn’t have to work to afford tuition, and at white kids who didn’t have to understand me though I had to try to understand them. At a child killer who took my mother away from me for an hour, a night, a weekend at a time until there was little of her left for me. And at the weakness that kept me in a school I hated.

When I was with my new friends on the weekends, I painted my nails black (but only the pinkies), I turned safety pins into accessories (but only in already pierced ears), and I sprayed my hair purple (only the bangs). Nothing too radical because it all had to be changed back to my regular self before I reached downtown, where such a look would surely result in a beat-down on the bus ride home. The black polish was peeled off on the bus from the suburbs into town, the safety pins replaced by earrings, the purple hair spray brushed out of my bangs.

I spent more time trying to fit in somewhere—at home, where my friends and I straddled the line between being street and being middle class; at work, where my friends lived in a world that included housing projects and raising children though they were only children themselves; and at school. A little more each day, it seemed to me that I fit nowhere at all.

*

Between classes, I made my usual stop in the girl’s room to slick on lipgloss and fix my hair. I couldn’t find my hair pick in my purse. When I realized I must have left it in the gym locker room, I headed that direction but was stopped short by what was happening in the second-floor hallway. My hair pick, the plastic kind with a handle shaped into a black power fist but by 1980 more a grooming tool than a cultural statement, was being passed around by a group in the hall.

The group was made of boys and girls, all white. They were putting on impromptu skits with my comb as a stage prop, taking turns pretending to be some TV version of a black person, the only black folks they knew save me and the other seven black kids in the school.

 “Dy-no-mite!”

“Well we’re movin’ on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky…”

“Whatchu talking ’bout, Willis?”

When they saw me, they didn’t stop the comedy show even though they must have known that the odds the pick was mine was one out of eight. I was embarrassed that it was my pick, and even more embarrassed that I did nothing about it, and instead just walked on by like I didn’t notice them. Throughout the day as I went from class to class, I saw the pick in different hands, white hands where the black power fist looked so foreign, but still I said nothing.

At the end of school, after I’d killed my usual twenty minutes in the library instead of the cold street corner waiting for the bus, I saw that they’d finally grown tired of the game. I saw my pick laying on top of soda cans and potato chip bags in a trash can on the bridge connecting the library to the main building. I felt a sudden surge of rage toward the kids for being ignorant, but mostly at myself for doing nothing about the modern-day minstrel show they’d put on. As I walked to the bus stop, I made a mental note to stop by McCrory’s on the way home to buy another pick.

*

Ma still had her doubts about what the FBI would bring to the investigation, but she had to admit she was relieved to have them join, not so much because the Task Force cops couldn’t do the job, but because there weren’t enough of them, or enough money. She was spending crazy hours at the Task Force building, and often I’d be down there spending some of them with her. My bus home stopped running before seven o’clock, and on days when I had to stay after school to study in the library, or when traffic was really bad from school into downtown because of an accident on I-85, I’d miss the last bus home. I didn’t have a choice but to hang out at the Task Force building until Ma was ready to go home. Sometimes this wouldn’t be until after eight o’clock.

Bridgette sometimes slept across town at her friend Nadine’s house in Northeast where she was going to school, because Ma couldn’t always pick her up early enough. Unlike Bridgette, Nadine wasn’t on the M-to-M transfer and actually lived in the same district as the school. Her mother told Ma not to worry about Bridgette staying over so often, it was more important that she was safe. She said she was glad to know her own daughter had someone to walk home with after the school bus dropped her down the street from their apartment complex.

Usually I didn’t mind spending time at the Task Force, and luckily for Ma, her bosses didn’t mind either. They understood that there was just her. They knew that while she was working sixteen hours a day, one of her children was waiting for a bus home at the same bus stop one of the victims did. Her other child used to go to school two blocks from where one victim was last seen. A child had been found dead just a few hundred yards from where her children and their friends lived and played every day. While she was talking to a victim’s mother about what route he took home, she was wondering if her own child had made it home okay. So her bosses knew they’d better understand when her daughter showed up at her desk, doing homework in the seat reserved for possible witnesses, tipsters, and people who had official business with the Task Force.

The cops didn’t seem to mind me being there. I either went unnoticed or provided a brief diversion. I liked to think I helped them in a small way by being there, especially those who didn’t have children. Maybe it was a good thing for them to be around a kid who they could get to know in person and not through crime-scene photos and interviews with grieving parents. Sometimes they made food runs and would ask me for my order because Ma was out on a call or in some office taking a report. A detective might look over my shoulder at my homework and ask what I was studying, but then be off toward his desk and a mountain of work before I could look up and answer.

Sometimes when I was hanging around the Task Force, the detectives included me in their work, making me feel as though I was helping them find the killer. While I sat at Ma’s desk practicing my French verb conjugations, she or some other cop would ask me whether a kid would do this, might a kid try that.

“If you really needed some extra cash and a regular rider on your bus day offers you twenty dollars to help him with a small job, would you get off at his stop instead of your own?”

No, I’d figure it was a con. Besides, Ma would kill me if I did that.

 “Let’s say you’re walking along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive near Ashby Street, and it’s raining hard and you forgot your umbrella, and a white man pulls alongside you and asks if you need a ride. What would you do?”

How many white men do you see hanging around MLK and Ashby? I’d know right off it was a scam.

“What if he said he was a cop and he thought someone was after you?”

I’d look for the Motorola antennae on his car. I’d check the make—is it a Crown Vic, or some other model police departments like to use? I’d wonder why he didn’t show his badge right off the bat. I’d run. You should ask another kid that question, one who wouldn’t know the difference.

I stared at the
Special Bulletins on Missing Children
tacked on corkboards, memorizing the faces because I thought trying not to forget them was the least I could do. Maybe I thought I’d see one of those faces one day, the ones still missing, staring from the back window of a car as it pulled away, begging me to do something.

Other times, being at the Task Force made me feel like any other kid in the city, afraid and no more protected than they were. As a break from Algebra II formulas, I’d walk around the building, looking at the maps that someone with a steady hand had drawn symbols on showing where each child lived, went missing from, and was found dead. No matter where I started searching, my eyes would eventually stop at the red circle on my street. Red circle for
found dead.
In map space, it always appeared the circle had been drawn square on top of my house.

*

In the second week of November, the seventeenth child went missing. Taken just a month before his sixteenth birthday, Patrick Rogers, who loved Bruce Lee movies and planned on being a singer when he grew up, was the oldest child to make the official list so far. Patrick was last seen on Thomasville Road in Southeast, just two miles from my house. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in the week since the boy was found on my street, wondering how he died and whether I’d ever passed him in a grocery store aisle at the Big Star, or saw him playing Space Invaders in the video arcade on Jonesboro Road. When I did get to sleep, the boy was still able to sneak inside my dreams and eventually frighten me awake. Knowing the killer was still nearby didn’t help.

Another child going missing right after the mayor kicked up the fuss with the FBI just increased the pressure on all the agencies working the case, local and federal, and it also instigated fighting among the agencies.

“The FBI acts like they’re gonna save the day,” Ma said, her anger so easy to raise

up now. “So far, all they’ve done is dredged up old theories about drugs and gangs.”

Drugs and gangs was just the twentieth-century version of a centuries-old belief in this country, at least in the South—that any evil that befalls black folks, we must have brought it on ourselves, including slavery. Didn’t work hard enough, didn’t get enough education, waited for someone to help us instead of helping ourselves. All our problems were self-inflicted, no matter that slavery was a hundred years fresh, full access to voting and desegregated schools just fifteen years young. The part I didn’t understand was that the lead agent in the FBI’s Atlanta office, a black man, was also blaming drugs and gangs. Maybe he’d been in the FBI too long. Or as one of the victim’s mothers kept saying, the FBI had no business working the case in the first place because they didn’t know Atlanta, didn’t understand its people or its ways.

The FBI didn’t help Ma’s second case by saying publicly that it was imminently solvable, basing this statement on what had turned up so far in the investigation—the possibility someone in Latonya’s family knew what happened to her.

“Of course we’re looking at the family. You always start with family. I don’t appreciate them working off the same knowledge and theories that I am, and saying they’re about ready to solve the case if only they had more FBI agents to put on it.”

The first thing that struck Ma about her second case was that the modus operandi was so completely different. With one exception, the other sixteen victims to date had been boys. All the other victims were taken off the street at least a few blocks from home, except for the only other girl, who was last seen near her home. Latonya’s parents said the girl had been taken from her bed while her family slept, that the abductor had climbed through her brothers’ bedroom window, which was found open the following morning. But once inside, the killer would have had to walk past the sleeping boys, into the hall, and past the sleeping parents, past a third brother sleeping on the living room sofa, lifted the girl from the bed she shared with her sister, then gone out the back door, undetected.