No Place Safe (30 page)

There was Williams’s story that a few hours before the splash, he’d visited the Sans Souci Lounge downtown to get back a tape recorder he’d loaned the club manager. The club manager said that visit took place on a different night. There were blood stains found in Williams’s car that matched the blood type of two of the victims who’d died from stab wounds. And most damning were carpet fibers and dog hairs found on Williams’s personal belongings that could be matched with fibers found on multiple victims.

While investigating Williams, Ma and Sid worked to eliminate other possibilities, following hunches and facts. The body found downstream from the splash was Nathaniel Cater, who coincidentally lived in the apartment above Latonya Wilson’s family at the time she was abducted from her bed. Ma had already concluded that her parents had not harmed the girl, but still wondered if they knew anything about the disappearance, if perhaps they or their children had been threatened by the killer into silence. The discovery that Cater lived just upstairs seemed too coincidental now that he was found in the Chattahoochee, leading Ma to speculate on a few theories.

The first was whether Cater had killed Latonya, especially since his build matched the physical description given of the man, or the silhouette of a man, a neighbor had seen carry the girl through the bedroom window. Perhaps someone in Latonya’s family had the same theory, and sought revenge against Cater by making it appear he was the victim of the killer who was dumping bodies into the Chattahoochee. The theory was weak, but she couldn’t shake the coincidence of proximity between the two victims, nor could she build a stronger theory. Her other theory was Cater had an accomplice in the murder, the second man the neighbor had seen at the window, who had killed Cater to eliminate him as a witness.

During a canvas of the Verbena Street neighborhood Latonya and Nathaniel had lived in, Ma and Sid found a young girl who said she’d seen a man in a neighborhood park with his dog a few times. Her description of the man and his dog matched that of Williams and his dog so closely that they had the girl polygraphed and got a positive reading. But this lead was as circumstantial as the fiber evidence.

The FBI said as early as the second week of June that they had enough evidence to arrest Wayne Williams, basing their claim on the fiber evidence, but local authorities—the Atlanta police chief and the district attorney—didn’t agree, and they were the people who needed to make the decision. They were close, but weren’t ready to say they had enough to build a case. Ma, who’d be on the team responsible for the criminal investigation of any case the district attorney would finally elect to prosecute, still wasn’t convinced Wayne Williams was the killer, at least not in all of the murders. A political tussle ensued about whether to arrest Williams: the FBI and the mayor on one side, the district attorney and police chief on the other. Ma thought the FBI, which had been claiming victories throughout the investigation that didn’t pan out, wanted to finally have a real success, and then extricate itself. The mayor wanted to get back to running the City too Busy to Hate. The district attorney and the police chief knew that when it all hit the fan, they’d be the agencies blamed, so they were reluctant to move forward with anything less than a tight case.

Eventually a compromise was made. To try a homicide case, a suspect need only be arrested for a single murder. On June 21, 1981, Wayne Williams was arrested in the Missing and Murdered Children case, charged with murdering Nathaniel Cater, who had been a grown man and not a child at all.

My mother didn’t need me as much after the arrest. There were no more Missing and Murdered Children crime scenes, no nights where she came home and asked me to help her pull off mud-caked boots or fix her a little something to eat that she’d pick over while she talked to me, trying to let go of the day’s bad. Before the arrest, I’d give her the plate I’d kept warming in the oven, and watch the tines of her fork tap at the drying edges of meatloaf, stab at shriveled green peas while I tried to think up something to say. I’d struggle for the soothing and supportive words a grown-up would say, but most times all I could come up with was a question, something innocuous that didn’t demand anything of her. She didn’t seem to mind. But we didn’t have many of those nights anymore.

Ma no longer needed me to be her surrogate to Bridgette, because most nights she was home to cook dinner or help with school projects. This took some getting used to because I’d grown accustomed to running the house, and though we both missed her, Bridgette had grown used to it, too. She was happy to have more of Ma, but missed dinner in front of the TV (because Ma said she didn’t raise any savages and we had to eat dinner at the table) and staying up late watching old scary movies like
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman
and
The Blob
. When the kids began dying, I was a girl, more responsible than most thirteen-year-olds, but still a girl. After the arrest, there were two women in the house, but I was a lightweight trying to hold steady against a heavyweight. There is room for only one woman in any house, so I deferred, waiting for the moment she would need me again.

On the last Friday of February 1982, I thought she might need me. Jury deliberations in the Wayne Williams trial were expected to begin, and though the odds were against it, people hoped that a verdict might come quickly. Whatever the verdict would be, I thought it would leave Ma spent and that she might need me close by like she did those nights I waited for her to come home from a crime scene.

That’s why I decided not to take the second bus once I reached downtown from school. Bridgette, who had started middle school earlier that fall, now made the bus ride from the Northside with me. Her school bus dropped her off a block from my new school, and from there we caught MARTA home. When we got off the train at Five Points and rode the escalator up into the street, our eyes adjusting to natural light, I said, “Let’s see if Ma’s car is there.”

The courthouse lot sat between Pryor and Peachtree, taking up nearly the whole block. It looked as though someone had razed a building to expose the underground parking lot, a pit filled with cars. It was protected by a chain-link fence, put there to keep pedestrians on Peachtree Street from stumbling and falling twenty feet down onto the roofs of Fords and Chryslers. Ma always parked in the same section, and when I’d ride past on my bus in the afternoons,  I’d look for her car. When I saw it, I’d be relieved that she’d made it to the end of another workday, no bad guy had wrestled her gun away, no visit to a witness’s house had gone bad.

“I don’t see her car,” Bridgette said. “Maybe she isn’t there.”

“Where else would she be on the last day of the trial? Maybe she had to park someplace else because of all these people coming down here to gawk.”

Pryor Street in front of the courthouse was clogged with traffic, the far right lane of the one-way street turned into extra parking for media trucks. Across the street in the vacant lot, which had been the old entrance to Underground Atlanta, were groups with signs that let the world know on which side of the verdict they stood. Officers were stationed at every corner, making sure almost three years’ worth of anger and fear didn’t erupt in front of the building.

I doubted whether we’d make it inside the courthouse. I knew most of the sheriff deputies who worked the front entrance, who had not long ago been reinforced by metal detectors and the right to search purses and briefcases. This meant on the days I carried my knife, I’d have to call Ma from a payphone to ask if she was going home anytime soon and if I could get a ride. Had I ever forgotten, Ma would not only have learned about the knife, but might also end her day bailing me out of jail for carrying a concealed weapon. On that day, I’d left the knife at home and the deputies, who called me Little Yvonne because they said I looked so much like her, let us in.

“Go straight to the fifth floor, you hear?” the deputy said, referring to the floor where the crime investigators’ office was and not the floor where the trial was taking place. We did as we were told.

“Your mother isn’t in her office right now, but you can go on back,” the secretary told us when we reached the fifth floor.

Her office smelled of Chanel N° 5 and mildewed paper. It was tiny, with just enough room for her desk and two chairs, hers and the chair where people sat and gave her the information they hoped would clear someone they loved, or sometimes if the person they loved had done them wrong, the words that might send them away forever. But it was private, not like the car-dealership-turned-Task Force building where I sometimes felt in the way. Since it was just before five o’clock, I thought we might be waiting a while, but Ma surprised me when she stepped into the closet-sized room.

“What are you two doing here?”

I wanted to say that I thought she might need me today, but instead I said, “We thought maybe we could get a ride home.”

“Today of all days? It’s crazy around here, I’m not sure when I’m going home.”

It didn’t look crazy to me, at least not in the crime investigators’ office. The head investigator, the one I couldn’t stand because Ma couldn’t stand him, the one who liked to imply Ma might not be a clean cop because she managed to buy a house and send her kids to private schools without benefit of a husband, appeared at the doorway. He asked if he could have a word with her. She left with him, and Bridgette voiced my own worry.

“You think she’s in trouble because we’re here?”

“Grown people don’t get in trouble. This isn’t school.”

“Grown people can get fired, though.”

“She won’t be fired because we’re here,” I said, my tone relaying how little Bridgette knew about grown folks’ business, though I was thinking the same thing.

Ma returned in a minute. “Come on, it looks like my day is done after all.”

On the walk to her car, which turned out to be in the parking lot but far from her usual space, I tried to understand what had happened. Surely Bridgette hadn’t been right, but neither of us said anything because Ma hadn’t said anything. During the drive home she was quiet, so I stared out the window as if the scenery was new to me, as if the Fulton County stadium had appeared overnight and the people pushing all they owned in rusted grocery carts down Capitol Avenue was something I’d never seen. Bridgette sat in the backseat and pulled out the leftovers of her lunch, a banana and half a peanut butter sandwich.

“Put that away, the smell is making me sick.” Those were the only words Ma said the whole ride home. I wanted to look back at Bridgette to sympathize, but anything could set Ma off when she was angry. I knew whatever she was thinking about, maybe what her supervisor had said, was making her angrier by the minute. So when we got home, Bridgette offered to make the salad, and I told her I’d start cutting up a chicken. Ma just went straight to her room and turned on the evening news. When the chicken had been browned and the onions caramelized, all of it poured into a casserole, smothered with a can of cream of mushroom soup and put into the oven, when Bridgette had sliced the last tomato into the salad, we went into her room and sat on the bed.

“Ma, did we get you fired today?” Bridgette asked, and I thought she was braver than I.

“Why do you think you got me fired?”

“Because we came to your office when all the Wayne Williams stuff was happening, then that man came to talk to you, and you’ve been mad ever since.”

“I’m not mad at you. And he didn’t fire me. He can’t fire me, only the district attorney can do that. But he did let me know that the DA wouldn’t be needing me in the courtroom, and that there was no sense in me hanging around waiting to be asked. And he was right, there was no sense in that at all.”

On the TV screen, the cameras panned the Fulton County courthouse, the prosecution team walking down the steps while reporters stuck microphones in their faces. My mother’s face was not among them because she had been dismissed and was sitting on her bed with us. That’s when it occurred to me that hers had never been among the faces during any of the news film during the eighteen days the trial had dragged on.

“Ma, why aren’t you ever on the news walking down the courthouse steps?” I asked.

“Because I wasn’t part of the courtroom team.”

“But I mean before today.”

“I’ve never been part of it. I was good enough to represent the DA on the Task Force, good enough to help build the trial investigation. But I didn’t make the cut when it came to the courtroom team for the biggest trial we’ve ever had.”

When she said that, Ma looked the way she did on too many days before the arrest—broken down and defeated, her hope drained into the soft riverbank soil of a crime scene. All my anger of the last two years was fresh again in that moment. I remembered the nights and weekends without my mother, the last few years of my childhood I gave up so Bridgette wouldn’t have to give up as much of hers. The phone calls from Ma when she couldn’t hide the panic in her voice because she’d already called ten times and I hadn’t answered because I’d missed my regular bus and had gotten home late. My fear for all of us when my strong-as-blue-steel mother told me she saw the ghosts of children.

The newscaster came on and said that the jury had not reached a verdict, so there would be another day of deliberations. Another day of waiting.

*

The next day was Saturday, and Bridgette and I stepped delicately around Ma because even though she wasn’t angry with us, she was still angry. I wanted to stay close by because I still thought she might need me, so I called work and said I was sick. By evening, her anger had softened into a kind of sadness, so we sprawled on her bed again as though it was any other night, bits of pecan shell lost in the stitching of her thick comforter, camouflaged by its brown and tan print. Copper snored loudly at the foot of the bed, and I could feel the vibration of it.