The Body Box (5 page)

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Authors: Lynn Abercrombie

Tags: #Fiction, #Thriller

BOOK: The Body Box
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“You looked at mug shots for Sergeant Fairoaks?”
“Wasn't no point,” she said dully. “I didn't see him clear.”
I asked a few more questions, but there was just nothing there. Finally I stood to go.
“Here,” she said, handing me a stack of photocopied sheets. “I printed up five thousand of these. Hang them on some light poles, drop off a few at your favorite restaurant, I don't know, maybe something will come of it.”
“Sure,” I said.
But I knew nothing.
I got back in my car, set the posters on the seat next to me, stared at the little girl. I could feel something yanking at my insides. And there was nothing I could do about it.
I shouldn't have even come here.
NINE
As I got back in the car, my cell phone rang. “Detective, this is Captain Goodwin. The Chief wants you in his office. Immediately.”
“I'm out picking up a perp, sir. I probably ought to stop off and—”
“Is there something ambiguous about the word
immediately
, Detective?”
“No sir,” I said to the dead line.
 
 
As I mentioned before, the chief of police, Eustace V. Diggs, Jr., is an extremely ordinary looking, extremely light-skinned black man. He makes up for his ordinariness by wearing a suit with more gold braid than your average admiral. He always seems to be smiling. He's been a lifer with the department, coming up mostly through the staff side—personnel, public relations, training, admin, that sort of thing. He had never been a detective, and hadn't walked a beat since the early eighties. He was seen by most people in the department as a politician, not a cop, and was despised as a result. But that didn't matter to him. He'd gotten where he was by crushing everybody in his way. Notwithstanding the smile.
When he had taken over the department four or five years back, he'd had a large number of walls knocked out to make himself an office of vast proportions. I'd heard it was almost three times larger than the mayor's. The mahogany-paneled walls were hung with folk-art paintings in bright colors—old ladies in do-rags chopping cotton, crazy-looking pictures of Jesus, that sort of thing.
The Chief had three or four aides, all of them young, light-complected men who wore spotless, crisp dress uniforms and were as beautiful as male models or movie stars. Captain Goodwin—the one who had muffed the search of Delwood Anderson's house—ushered me across about twenty yards of deep pile carpet to Chief Diggs's huge desk. The Chief rose, beaming, came around the desk, and gave me a big hug like we were old friends. “How's your daddy, girl?” he said. My father is tapped into the same circle as the Chief, the movers and shakers in the city of Atlanta. My father and the Chief were also both Omega Psi Phi men, which is a big deal. “I haven't talked to him in a coon's age!”
“Neither have I,” I said. I've always been the black sheep of our family, and we don't get along much. The trouble I got in last year has only made things worse between the two of us.
He clapped his hands together, smiled brightly. “Yesss, yessss. Cold Case squad. My, oh my, that must be strictly fascinating. Strictly
fascinating!
” The Chief loved ornate words, archaic words, phrases your grandmother might say.
“Yessir, so far it's been very, ah, very . . . Well, I think
interesting
is the word.”
The Chief gave me another squeeze, not quite grabbing a hold of my booty, but not quite
not
if you know what I mean. Then he hustled around the desk, sat down. The desk, a mirror-polished immensity of granite perched on a couple of polished steel legs the size of oil drums, was stone empty. Except for a file folder that sat dead center in front of his chair. It was my personnel file.
Chief Diggs opened the file, made a great show of putting on a pair of reading glasses, pretended to read the file with some care, then looked up at me, his surprisingly fat hands pressed together as though in prayer, and said, “I'm not one to remind people of favors I've done for them. When the opportunity arises to assist a deserving individual, I just harken to the call. Bread on the waters, am I right? Mm-hm. Yes. Bread on the waters, indeed.” He closed the file. “However, I feel compelled to mention, in your case, that a certain amount of trouble has been gone to. By myself. By the troops here in the office. Certain individuals in the power structure downtown. Yes. Yes. I think you understand that a certain amount of cap-in-hand type behavior was involved. Which, for a proud black man such as myself, gives a certain . . .” He made a stabbing motion in the vicinity of his heart. “A certain
pain
. You with me?”
“If you're saying that y'all went up to Cobb County, out to the suburbs, kissed a bunch of white ass to get me out of the trouble I was in, well, look, I understand how you feel, sir, and I just want to say how much I—”
The gleaming smile grew broader. “Nah, girl, see you don't understand. I'm here to explain, and you're here to listen quietly and then say, ‘Thank you very much indeed, Chief Diggs, for saving my fine black ass when Mr. Charlie was very much eager to put the same fine black ass in the penitentiary. ' We on the same page, young lady?”
“Yes sir. Absolutely.”
I knew that when I got busted while trying to buy crank up in Smyrna last year, my father had pulled some strings. But I didn't really know exactly how it had played out, or how high up the string-pulling went. I guess I'd chosen to remain ignorant. Well, now I knew.
Chief Diggs leaned back in his chair. Behind him were dozens of framed pictures, him shaking hands with all kinds of big wheels—senators, civil rights leaders, mayors, Bill Cosby, Mariah Carey, a very freaky-looking Michael Jackson.
“You know anything about the history of the Cold Case Unit?”
I figured it was time to rein in my mouth. “No sir.” “Well, let me give you a little background. You familiar with one Mr. Barton Millwood?”
“Isn't he on the Fulton County Commission?”
“Actually, Mr. Barton Millwood is the
chairman
of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. Now, as you're aware, the city of Atlanta is located in Fulton County. As you're also aware—relative to the metropolitan area,
in toto
—the city of Atlanta proper is rather small. We—African-Americans, I'm talking about—now dominate the governmental structure of the city of Atlanta. But certain important aspects of governance in our region continue to be under the purview of Fulton County, and therefore of our dear white friends on the north side. Yes. You know all this, of course. But here's where it plays out. Certain funding decisions, certain plans involving major personages in the city of Atlanta, certain aspects of progress and economic development, remain in the stranglehold of Fulton County, which has that nice fat northside tax base to draw on. Yes. While the city of Atlanta languishes, taxwise. I won't bore you with specifics, with cases, but let's suffice it to say that this is how the world works. Give and ye shall receive, that type of thing.”
“Yes, sir.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Now perhaps you were not aware of this, but Mr. Barton Millwood, the head of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, suffered a tragedy some years ago. His brother-in-law was murdered. Inside the city limits of Atlanta. And the case was never solved. I gather that this fact has chafed him like a burr under the saddle, as it were. And he never misses an opportunity to throw this fact in our faces. Incompetence of city administration, blah blah blah, the usual sort of
sub rasa
racist statements and implications. Yes. Yes. Now, apparently some time last year he was watching the television—I watch television very rarely myself, it's a wasteland of vulgarity and triviality in my view—but at any rate, apparently Mr. Barton Millwood very much enjoys a little television in his spare hours. And he was watching a program,
60 Minutes
,
20/20
, one of those shows, and they had a segment about a Cold Case unit in some other city. Baltimore, I believe.
“Well, Mr. Barton Millwood, who knows nothing about law enforcement or the administration thereof, is seized, you see, absolutely
seized
with the brilliance of this idea. Sure, he thinks. Wouldn't it be wonderful and peachy to take several productive detectives off of the City of Atlanta Police Department's already overworked and scandalously—this is strictly between you and me, of course—scandalously underfunded homicide squad, and assign them to poking around in a bunch of moldy old unsolved cases. With the end in view, of course, of serving a personal end—specifically the solving of the murder of his half-witted brother-in-law, who apparently didn't have the sense that God gave a dog, because his murder occurred while he, a white man, was wandering around on foot in a high-crime African-American area downtown with a blood alcohol level of point one three, doing who knows what, but one can only suspect probably trying to pay some crack whore to suck his johnson, quite frankly, at four o'clock in the morning. You see?”
“Um—”
“Bottom line, detective, is this. That white sumbitch Millwood threatened to hold up funding for a very important and sizable civic project—which, I might add, was going to generate a great deal of revenue for a number of important minority-owned firms in the city—if we did not agree to create a Cold Case Unit.”
“I see.”
The broad smile came back. “Now, I must be frank. We did not choose you or Lieutenant Gooch because of your magnificent records in law enforcement. We chose you because we had to staff this unit with
somebody
. Persons with actual bodies.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It's been nine months, young lady. It's been nine months, and that ignorant cracker down there in the basement, so far as I can discern, has made zero headway on the one case that matters to me, to the mayor, to our good friend Mr. Barton Millwood, and, not least, to the health and well-being of both your unit and you personally. That case is the murder of Mr. Barton Millwood's moron brother-in-law, may he rest in eternal and undying peace.”
“I see.”
“What I'm telling you, I need to know what in hell that redneck son of a bitch is doing down there.”
He laced his fingers together and stared hard at me. Still smiling, but not in a way that reassured me.
I could see where he was coming from. And I certainly felt no particular loyalty to Lt. Gooch. But at the same time it rubbed me a little bit the wrong way, being asked to rat on my boss. “I have to be honest with you, Chief Diggs,” I said finally. “I haven't been there but a few days. I'm just getting my feet wet.”
“Blah blah blah. I'm asking you a simple question. What in the name of creation is that man doing down there?”
“Frankly, Lieutenant Gooch is, ah, somewhat opaque to me also.”
“Opaque? Nothing opaque about it. He's a malingering no-account redneck dipshit. That's clear as glass. But again, that's not what I'm asking. I want to know what he is
actually and physically
doing down there.”
“Reading,” I said finally.
“Reading.”
“Case files. He has big piles of them stacked around his desk. And he reads them all day.”
“Is he working any cases?”
“He's, ah, he's sort of helping me get started on one right now.”
“Norman Givvens?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is he working on the Norman Givvens case?”
“Who's Norman Givvens?”
The Chief eyed me over the top of his tortoiseshell reading glasses. “What have we just been speaking about, young lady? Norman Givvens is Mr. Barton Millwood's brother-in-law.”
“Oh. I see.”
The big smile disappeared for a moment, and Chief Diggs eyes briefly grew cool. Then the smile was back, like sun bursting through a cloud. “Keep me in the loop, girl. I want to know what he's up to.”
“I'll do that.”
The smile went away again. “At a certain point in time, debts will have been paid and obligations met.” Suddenly his accent had gone all street sounding. “And when that time comes, the hammer gonna fall on this bullshit little cold case unit. So you can either be holding the hammer, or standing
under
it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good girl. Tell your daddy that Brother Diggs says hello.”
I stood to go. When I had reached all the way to the door at the far end of the vast room, the Chief called out to me. “And Mechelle?”
“Yes sir?”
“Your indictment papers are still sitting in a drawer up there in Cobb County.”
“I realize that, sir.”
“If I hear that you've spent one more
instant
on little Jenny What's-her-name, I will personally make sure that you're sitting in the Cobb County jail by the end of the week.”
I stared at him. How did he know? And how much did he know?
He must have heard the questions rattling around in my head. “I know because I know everything, Mechelle,” he said. “I know
every
thing. Interviewing that little girl's mommy? My God, what were you thinking?”
I couldn't imagine how he had found out. “Sir—”
“Do your job downstairs with Gooch. Forget the girl.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Otherwise your career is over.” And in case I hadn't paid attention the first time, he repeated himself. “Forget the girl.”

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