“Hey,” Leonard said, “thanks for the news flash. But I’m gonna tell you something. My first impression was same as everyone else’s. But I’ve thought on things some, and my uncle could be an asshole, but he didn’t kill any kid. I knew him better than that. There’s something else to all of this, I don’t care how it looks.”
Hanson shrugged and spread his hands. “Chester came to the station talking about child killings not so long ago. You know that?”
“No,” Leonard said. “What do you mean he talked about child killings?”
“What I’m saying, is there may be more murders, more bodies than this.”
“Didn’t think you were ripping up my flooring looking for nickels had fallen through the cracks,” Leonard said, “but you still haven’t answered my question.”
“And if he was murdering children,” I said, “why would he tell you?”
“Frankly, everyone thought he was nuts,” Hanson said. “I think he was too, toward the end there. As to why would he tell us? Throw us off. A cheap thrill. Or he was trying to prove what a good cop he could be. Uncover the murders, but not turn up the killer.”
“Which you think was him,” Leonard said.
Hanson shrugged again.
“A friend of ours thinks Chester may have had Alzheimer’s,” I said.
“Could be,” Hanson said. “But Chester said there were child murders, and now there are. One, at least.”
“Didn’t you guys check into what he said?” I said. “You do that sort of thing, don’t you?”
“When we’re not at the doughnut shop. . . . All Chester said was there were child murders going on in the black neighborhood, and that no one outside of the neighborhood gave a damn.”
“Was he right?” I asked.
“There were reports over the years of missing children.”
“How many years,” I said.
“Ten at least. And according to the files all those cases had been looked into, but nothing had been solved. According to written remarks made by a couple of officers no longer on the force, they felt the parents had done the children in because they were too much trouble to care for, but they couldn’t prove it, and they didn’t give a damn. In fact, written at the bottom of one report was ‘One less nigger won’t hurt anything.’ That was just ten years ago. Civil rights is sinking in slow here. At least in the area of law enforcement.”
“There’s always a difference when a crime is a black crime,” Leonard said, “especially if it’s against another black and done in the black section. Black man killed a white, cops’d be on the case like hogs on corn. Listen here, Lieutenant, this lunch is scrumpdillyicious and all, but you’re trying to be too clever. You’re talking, but you’re not saying anything. You’re trying to see if I’ve got any strings you can play, aren’t you? Think maybe I’m holding something back, something could help your case?”
“Could be you’ve forgotten something,” Hanson said. “Could be you know something about him from the past might have something to do with now, the murders.”
“Knew anything, I’d tell you. Him being my uncle or not. Maybe ’cause he is my uncle. You don’t have to burger-and-coffee me to find things out. I told you about the keys, the coupons, the paperback of Dracula. Turned the skeleton in, didn’t I?”
“That’s what you’re doing?” I said to Hanson. “Trying to see if Leonard knows more than he’s told?”
“He ain’t hip,” Leonard said to Hanson. “He can’t see the signs they’re on his face.”
“Yeah, hip’s a problem,” Hanson said. “But you may not be so hip yourself, Leonard. I’m merely being polite here. Getting you away from that place, feeding your face and your partner’s too. I mean, I got a few questions, but they’re all routine.”
Leonard smiled at Hanson.
Hanson smiled back.
A couple of sharks trying to outflank one another.
Leonard said, “Why don’t you run your program by me one more time, and you can leave out the cryptic stuff that’s supposed to scare me, stuff where I’m supposed to think you know more than you know, so if I know more than I’m letting on, I’ll get scared and go all to pieces and spill the beans.”
Hanson said, “All right then. The bare bones. Your uncle said there were child murders. There was no evidence of that. Just evidence that over the years children had come up missing. It wasn’t a case I was familiar with. I gave the file notes on missing kids in the black section a once-over. It didn’t look good, but there wasn’t anything there to go on. What your uncle wanted was for us to give him a team, some men to work with, and he was going to solve the case.”
“He said that?” Leonard said.
“Said he and his associate would prove to us something was happening and who did it.”
“Who was his associate?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t name him. Said it was best he kept his man on the outside. Said he wasn’t willing to turn it completely over to the department because it would be swept under the rug. Said he needed our facilities. Maybe he didn’t even have an associate. Maybe he did.”
“You mean maybe it was me,” Leonard said.
“I didn’t say that,” Hanson said.
“Needless to say,” I said, “you didn’t give Chester his own team.”
“No,” Hanson said. “He was pretty erratic, so he was hard to take seriously. He didn’t really present any evidence, just talked. And sometimes kind of randomly. Like he’d forgotten what he’d come around for. Everytime he showed up, he was a little less with it. Not that we’d have given him his own team if he hadn’t been nuts. No insult intended there, Leonard.”
“None taken,” Leonard said. “But I still don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”
Hanson removed his cigar and put it inside his coat pocket. “OK then,” he said, “I’m through being clever. For now. You fellas want more coffee?”
“I’ll have a Coke,” Leonard said. “Long as you’re buying.”
13.
Three days later and the morning was very bright and the light that came through the windows was splotched with eyeshade-green patches from the sun shining through oak leaves and there were intervals of jet-black shadows made by the bars over the windows.
We had spent the time since the discovery of the body out at our places outside of town, but now we were back. The cops were through and no more kid skeletons had been found, though Leonard had profited fifty-five cents found on the ground beneath the flooring, turned in by Hanson, who may have done it to prove to us he was an honest cop. Hell, it might have even come out of his pocket.
The law had been nice enough to haul off the newspapers and the rotten lumber, just in case a clue was lurking in a knothole or behind the sports sections, and Leonard bought some one-by-eight pine boards and a sack of nails and we went to putting in new subflooring. That’s what we were doing the morning I’m talking about. The boards were fresh cut and the weather so hot you could smell the resin on them and feel a powdering of sawdust on your hands. It was a little odd, putting that flooring down and living in a house where just a few days ago Leonard had made a bony discovery, but with the newspapers hauled off, the smell of new lumber, and the hot sunshine sticking through the windows, the house seemed different somehow, as if it had never held the remains of a long-dead child.
When we had a good chunk of flooring replaced with Lap ’n’ Gap decking, Leonard said, “Let’s break it.”
We poured some lukewarm coffee into our cups and went out on the porch and sat in the swing. It was not so humid this day, so maybe that was better, though it’s always been my contention that at the bottom of it all, the distinction is bullshit. Bake or fry, hot is hot. Least when it’s humid, I know I’m hot, when it isn’t, I get the feeling I’m being cooked up secretively.
We sipped the coffee for a while and looked at the street and watched a few cars go by. Over at the crack house, it was quiet.
Leonard went back into the house
and came out with a bag of his favorite cookies, vanilla creme. Well, actually his favorite is vanilla anything. He kept the bag on his side of the swing and didn’t volunteer me any cookies. He made me ask for one.
“You haven’t been the most talkative about all this,” I said.
“A board’s a board,” Leonard said. “You do what I say, you won’t fuck up.”
“Your uncle, Leonard. You haven’t talked about your uncle.”
“I’m still putting it together. Not just the stuff with the skeleton, but my life.”
“Is this going to be one of those insightful moments?”
“I think so. You see, all I ever wanted was to be loved and comfortable and fulfilled in my work. Way it stands, the family I cared about is dead, and has been dead for years, except one, and he just died, and without ever saying he was sorry or just taking me as I am. I guess I’m more comfortable now financially than I was a short time ago because he’s dead, but the house I inherited and loved turns out to have a dead kid under the floorboards, and my uncle is supposed to have put him there, and if that ain’t shitty enough, I’ve got no work to go to or feel good about. Think I sound sorry enough for myself?”
“You could maybe throw in a favorite dog got hit by a truck or something. And you didn’t mention Mama or a train, like in the country-and-western songs.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. And I do have my cookies. What about Florida? What’s she think about all this?”
“She came out to my house day before yesterday. She was sorry about the whole thing. Shocked. What you’d expect. She said to give you her best.”
“I notice she hasn’t been back over here.”
“Yeah, well, we just got back. What’d you think, she’d be waiting on the porch?”
“I guess I’m getting sensitive in my old age.”
“She’ll be back. Or I think she will. I hope she will.”
“How’s the relationship?”
“I’m not sure. We like each other. We have sex and we can joke with each other, and I want there to be more to it than there is at the moment, but I get the feeling she doesn’t want to be seen with me in public.”
“I have the same problem.”
“Seriously. I think it’s because I’m white. She said as much once, but I thought she got past it.”
“She may know better than feeling that way, but that doesn’t mean she can get completely past it. Not in that short time anyway. Hey, look at it this way, she’s made great strides. She’s fucking you, and you’re white.”
“That’s what I like about you, Leonard. You’re such a romantic.”
“Hap, you think my uncle killed that kid?”
“I don’t know. It looks that way. Main thing is you don’t think so.”
“I did at first, and you told me not to jump to conclusions. Remember?”
“I’ll be honest. I thought he did it the moment you found the body. I said what I said to be nice to you. There’s things point to him having done it, besides the obvious, the skeleton under the floorboards. Stuff like him being a cop freak. That by itself doesn’t mean anything, but lots of times, people who are into wanting to be cops and can’t, people obsessed with it, have some kind of control fixation. Child abuse, the abuse of anyone weaker than you, is a form of control. Like rape. Wife-beating. Maybe your uncle was an abused child and it affected him. It all goes together.”
“I know my uncle.”
“You knew your uncle.”
“He didn’t change that much. I never got any indication from him he was an abused child. And if he was, it didn’t make him a child abuser. Lots of abused children aren’t child molesters. He was the one taught me how to live, how to think. He didn’t just turn around one day and start wanting to kill children.”
“It could have been going on for a time.”
Leonard shook his head. “Nope. And I don’t think he had a power fixation. I think the man wanted a job with respect, and law enforcement was it. He just never got it because of who he was and where he was. He may have begun to lose his head some at the end, but that doesn’t mean he lost his ethics. I want to know what happened, Hap, no matter what the results, and I want you to help me.”
“What makes you think you have to ask?”
14.
We finished our coffee and were about to go back to work, when across the street we saw the old, black lady on the walker come onto her front porch. It was a slow and dutiful process, her coming outside, and watching her made me nervous. The screen door slammed her in the hip because she couldn’t move away from it fast enough, and she wobbled and the porch groaned loud enough for us to hear across the street. I bet she didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but I could see boards sagging as she went.
She looked across the street at us and we waved. She waved back, careful to do it so her arm didn’t come off at the shoulder.
She stood in the frame of her walker and watched us awhile, then slowly lifted her hand and flicked a come-over signal with her fingers.
We went over and stood at the bottom step of her porch and looked up at her. The hot sunlight lay on her like a slice of thin cheese and showed her to no advantage. She looked as if she had been boiled down and wrung out and left to dry. The wrinkles in her face were very deep and rivered with sweat. Her prune-colored eyes were runny and the whites were no longer white; they were a Hiroshima of exploded blood vessels: pink, red, and blue. Her false teeth hung too low in her mouth at the top and were set too high at the bottom, giving the impression of living things trying to climb out of a hole. Her head was mostly bald and her hair was spaced in gray tufts and looked like dirty cotton that had been blown by the wind to collect on a damp, black rock. Her breasts sagged and wobbled against her ribs inside her simple blue shift. She wore fuzzy pink house shoes on her feet and one black toe, like a water-logged pecan, poked through a hole in the right one.
I tried to imagine her younger, middle-aged even, but it was impossible to envision that she might ever have looked any different.
I said, “We help you with something, ma’am?”
She took a deep breath, collecting enough wind to speak, ignored me, and turned to Leonard. “You,” she said, “the colored boy,” just in case Leonard might be confused on his ancestry. “I heard about your uncle. I don’t believe it for a minute. I don’t care if they found babies in his toilet, he didn’t murder and saw up no chil’ren. I’ve known that boy all his life.”
“Word sure gets around,” Leonard said.
“Ain’t no secrets in nigger town,” she said.
“No, ma’am, guess not,” Leonard said.
“And if the policemens catch anybody it’ll be an accident. They done decided it was Chester, and that will be the end of it.”
“What I’m afraid of too, ma’am,” Leonard said.
“Them boys next door,” she said. “Y’all don’t have nothing to do with them niggers. They’re on drugs.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said. “We was kinda thinkin’ they were.”
“You can tell way they walk,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.
“And they sell’m too,” she said. “Every little chile you see go in over there and come out, they done sold them some drugs. They kill’n their own, and I betcha some fat-cat peckerwood somewheres is on the gettin’ end of the money.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.
She looked at me, as if examining my fat-cat white peckerwood tendencies. I guess none showed. Her wrinkles shifted. She said, “Listen here, I got some apple and pear pies baking. You boys come on in and help me get ’em out of the oven a’foe they burn up. I wore myself out bakin’ ’em.”
We mounted the porch and it screamed at us. I looked down and saw a split in the boards and the ground looking up at me. That old lady fell through those boards, she’d break a leg or kill herself.
The smell of baking pies from inside was rich and fine and made me hungry. I opened the screen d
oor and held it. Leonard stood beside her while she used the walker, and after she made a few short steps she said to me, “Close the screen door, son. You’re lettin’ in flies. I’m gonna be coming for a bit.”
I closed the screen until she got closer, which, true to her words, took awhile, and when she was close enough, I held the screen open and she and Leonard went past to the tune of straining boards.
I followed inside and closed the screen and left the front door open because it was hot in there with all the heat from the oven and there being only a little rotating fan on the kitchen table to cool the place. I felt mildly dizzy, as if I had been riding too fast on a merry-go-round. When I looked back at the screen door, it had begun to bead and buzz with house flies hoping for a chance to wipe their shitty legs on some pies.
The kitchen was very clean, and beneath the smell of the pies I caught a hint of Pine Sol. I wondered if she cleaned the place herself, and couldn’t figure the how of it if she did. Being frail as she was, a bathroom trip would be like an expedition through the South American jungles.
One wall was quite amazing. It was papered with snapshots taped to it, some in color, some black and white, some very old and very faded. Where the wall gave them up was a doorway, and through the doorway I could see another room, and the part of the wall I could see in there was also covered in photographs.
Over the stove hung an ancient dime-store painting of a serene Jesus dressed in red robe and sandals, a worshipful beggar at his feet. The painting was in a frame behind clean glass, but the frame was too big and the glass wasn’t pressing the picture and the picture had started to fade and heat-curl at one corner, giving the impression that Jesus’s robe was rolling up and would soon expose private matters to the beggar.
The rest of the kitchen was cabinets and pot-holder hooks with pot holders and transparent, time-yellowed curtains over a slanting window.
“Turn the oven off and get the pies out,” she said, and leaned forward on her walker as if getting lower would help her breathe better.
Leonard turned off the oven and got a gloved pot holder off a hook and opened the oven and took out three thick and beautifully crusted pies and sat them on top of the stove. The smell of pies filled my head thick as an allergy.