Details at Ten (18 page)

“I overheard two of the Rockies talking. They didn’t see me. It’s so fucking crowded in there and I was waiting to shower, and I overheard two Rockies—they were high on some homemade liquor snuck in here. They’d just got busted for stealing a Jeep. They said something about ‘the package’ being too hot to stay in the hiding spot. They said ‘it’ had to be moved. I’ve been watching the news. I saw you. I heard about the kid Butter.”

“Where do they have her? When did they say they were going to move her?” A break! I heard my heart thumping inside my chest. My mouth got dry.

Romere leaned forward. “You’ll help me, right?”

“Yes! Yes! If you’re telling the truth-”

“I ain’t lying!”

“Where? When?”

“A garage on Sixty-second and Parnell. No exact address. But a garage on Sixty-second and Parnell at two-thirty
P
.
M
.”

I looked at the clock—it was 1:30
P
.
M
. now! I jumped up and spun on my heels.

“Don’t forget! Don’t forget!” Romere shouted behind me.

My cameraman grabbed his gear and we headed to Sixty-second and Parnell. I called the cop shop but Doug wasn’t there. I told them what was going down. Then I paged Doug twice and got no answer. We were speeding like crazy. I looked at my watch. I looked at the road. My watch. The road. It was 2:00
P.M.
We were moving but not like if Zeke had been driving.

Finally we got there and stopped at the opening of an alley and parked. I got out and peeped around the corner. There was a black Chevy parked about three doors down. No squad cars were in sight.

“See anything?” my cameraman asked.

I pointed and he began rolling.

One of the garage doors began to open, and a young man, twenty-something, wearing an oversized football shirt and jeans peeped out. We ducked back. Then I watched him and a teenager dressed in cutoffs and a basketball T-shirt carrying a steamer trunk out of the garage. It’s the kind of trunk you packed your clothes in going off to college.

My chest got tight. Where are the police? How can Butter breathe in there? My legs began to tremble. God please, I thought. The older man dropped his end on the ground. It sounded like a cheap firecracker as it hit the concrete. I clenched my fist. I heard him curse at the teenager, telling him not to walk so fast. Then he wiped his hands on his back pockets. Two seconds later all hell broke loose.

“Hold it! Hold it!”

Cops were coming from everywhere. From two of the other garages. From the yards catercorner to the trunk. I spotted Doug. The older man dropped his end of the trunk and raised his hands. The teenager went for a gun in his waistband. Doug dived and tackled him around the legs, the teenager hit the ground, and the gun flew out of his hand. Doug flipped him over. The teenager swung and missed; Doug punched him twice, knocking him unconscious.

“Move! Move!” I spoke over my shoulder and we moved in, slowly rolling the entire time, catching it all on video. “Channel 8 News!” I announced our presence. Some of the officers cursed. Doug looked up at me but he didn’t say anything.

The other officers stopped me about three feet from the suspects as they worked to cuff them. The trunk was still on the ground. Then I saw what was leaking out of it.

It was blood.

I stopped, stunned. All my fears burned in my throat and eyes. I opened my mouth and sighed. Doug walked over to me and clutched my shoulder. “You don’t want to see this.”

One of the officers popped open the trunk, and Doug said, “Turn away.”

“Damn!” I heard my cameraman curse. A couple of the cops made comments. What am I going to tell Butter’s mother? Her grandmother? And Trip? What kind of anger would be in his heart after this?

“You just butchered the man,” I heard one of the cops say.

The teenager shouted, “So what! He smoked our boys in the park!”

“Shut up!” the older suspect shouted. “Don’t say nothing, fool!”

The man?
I turned and looked quickly when I heard the latch snap back closed. Now the blood was gushing out of the sides of the trunk.

“Doug?” I said, feeling relieved and surprised.

“That’s the third suspect in the double murder in Fellows Park. They really hacked him up.” Doug looked over at me. “How’d you find out about this anyway?”

“I paged you after I got my tip. Did you get the page?”

“Yeah, couldn’t get back to you, obviously. Who tipped you?”

I thought for a second then decided to tell Doug my source; it didn’t matter at this point because it was just a fluke anyway. “Regal Romere.”

“The Bandit charged with the Fellows Park murders.”

“The same, Doug. He’s trying to get out of county jail. He overheard snatches of a conversation two Rockies were having. Romere thought the little package they were talking about moving was Butter.”

“Huh, that’s ironic. That’s one of his boys sliced, diced, and Zip-loc’ed in that trunk. We’d been looking for him since we arrested Romere and the other suspect. Street talk said he’d made a run to Virginia where his brother lives. My gut kept telling me he was still around somewhere. I just didn’t think he was dead in a trunk.” Doug scratched his head with a single index finger. “We’ve got to book these guys. What’s next for you?”

“They’ve got to switch another body out here to finish the coverage. I’ve got to get some rest for the rally tonight. I want to be fresh for that. I’m going to do a couple of cop interviews here and then run home and fall out.”

“Get some rest,” Doug said, touching my arm. “You could use it.”

Little did I know that in the very next hour there would be a real break in Butter’s kidnapping story. That break was just waiting to happen for me back at my apartment.

A
s soon as I walked in the door the message light on my answering machine was flashing fiercely at me. “Yo baby, yo baby, yo!”

I sat on the couch, put the phone next to the takeout food I had stopped to get. I flipped open the pad I keep taped to the phone, grabbed a pencil, and began playing back my messages.

Message #1:

“Georgia, this is Clarice. Got your tape back here. Girl, they messed up that guy in the trunk! Thanks for covering for me. Ron came in and is going to turn that part of the story for us. I know you’re tired. Zeke will still meet you at Reverend Walker’s church at seven-thirty
P
.
M
. for the rally. Zeke might be a little cranky because we told him you specifically requested him. And Zeke said, ‘On my off day? Thanks a whole lot!’ Sooooo, watch out, girl, he will have his ’tude on. But you’re all set, okay? Peace.”

Beep!

Message #2:

“Hi, Georgia, it’s me.”

I hit the stop button—Max’s voice made my heart jump. Why was he calling? We had broken up and he refused to return my calls. Now out of the blue he phones? I thought of the slant of his mouth when he laughed, the glow of his gold-nugget eyes, his soft hair, slim body, and the way his mind became a speedway when he was working angles to a breaking story.

I pressed the play button again.

“… ran into old Liz here in Washington covering a story, she asked about you. I said you were fine and gave her your phone number. That’s all, bye.”

That’s all. Just like Max to call and not even say hope you’re doing well. A night of passionate lovemaking flashed through my mind. I doubled forward—willing myself not to call Max back or think about him another second!

Beep!

Message #3:

“Georgia, this is Mom. Well, Ms-I’ve-got-a-secret. Your sister tells me this man you were with at the Blues Box is a police detective. I don’t know if I like that at all. You’ll be constantly worried about something happening to him. But Peaches says he’s awful handsome—”

“I said he fine, sister-twin! Ma, quote me right if you’re gonna tell what I told you after you said you wouldn’t!”

“—Be quiet, girl, whose fault is it that you can’t keep a secret? I’m the mother and I can do what I want. Georgia? Call your mama dear. Bye.”

Beep!

Message #4:

“What a long beep! Georgia, this is Carmen at the phone company. I’ve got that information you wanted on that call made to your apartment the other morning. The call came from 50-23 South Hedge. The phone is registered in the name of Viola Martin. That’s 50-23 South Hedge, registered in the name of Viola Martin. I got this straight from the researcher handling the police request. He hasn’t called them yet—went to lunch—so you’ve got it first! Talk to you later, bye!”

Viola Martin, 50-23 South Hedge? I hit the rewind button on the answering machine again: “… came from 50-23 South Hedge. The phone is registered in the name of Viola Martin… .” I pressed the stop button, shoved the white plastic fork in my mouth, and left it there to bob around as I chewed. I got up and grabbed my reporter’s notebook.

I found it, flipped back through the pages, chewing awkwardly with the fork still in my mouth, searching until I came to my notes at the hospital. The old lady at the table … Auntie Vee … yes, that was the name I had scribbled and Jason Martin gave me the family’s address of 50-23 South Hedge.

The ransom call came from the Martins’ house—the family of the young girl who died in the drive-by shooting.

I hit the showers. It was my second shower of the day, not because the humidity had made my clothes bunch up like satin sheets against my behind, but because water helped me to think. The warm rush of liquid soaked my skin and released from it the stress of the past few days. The stress seemed to ooze from parts of my body, blowing water bubbles that beaded on the edge of my collarbone, on the tip of my nipples, and on the cuticles of my fingers. I was trying to relax and deal with this latest development.

Now I knew that my early morning ransom call had definitely come from the Martins’ house. My mind could now only settle on one person. One suspect.

Jason.

Was it his voice on the phone?

I had struggled to etch the telephone voice onto the slack reel of tape in my brain; at the time it was being tugged at by the tension of Butter’s disappearance and the excitement of possibly finding her.

When I tried to match that voice from the phone with that of the man who met me beneath the el tracks, I was sure they were one and the same.

But was it Jason’s voice? Had time and stress dulled my senses so Jason didn’t sound familiar when I met him in the hospital? I could easily have missed the connection because I wasn’t looking for it. His voice was deep enough. But people can alter their voices, too. Was it Jason I was after?

Jason said he left town before the gangs could jump him in. Did he? Doug had mentioned that once you’re in a gang you’re in for life. Maybe they jumped Jason in and his family sent him away after he got into trouble? What did Jason know about Butter’s disappearance? Could he help us find her?

I threw on my lightest weight clothing, got in my car, and drove like the Zeke over to the Martin house. I was going to ask plenty of tough questions. I also needed to beat it there before the police—especially Doug, who had been tying my hands on this story quite a bit lately.

The house at 50-23 South Hedge was four doors down from Butter’s place. Each house on the block was constructed the same, from white wood frame. Families tried to distinguish their homes by painting the borders of the windows different colors, from candy red to royal blue to banana yellow.

The Martin house was painted steel gray. Shiny wicker baskets hung from hooks drilled into the overhang that provided a patch of shade the width and length of a giant envelope. The flowers inside the baskets had pooped out, losing their vibrant colors to a battered brown because of the heat wave that was now, thank God, subsiding.

The front door of the Martin house was open behind the protective mesh of a silver screen door that was buff taut at the top and beer gut at the bottom. I could hear a bunch of people chatting and moving around inside the house. I rang the doorbell and an elderly man sitting by the door leaned out and around, peering at me from behind low-on-the-nose glasses. He reached up to unfasten the screen door. His fingers looked old, tight, and stuck together, and they couldn’t flick the tiny button beneath the handle.

“Hey,” he yelled. “One of y’all kids come unfasten this door here, shoot.”

I saw Jason Martin come snoop-footing toward the door. He opened the screen, stepped up, and partly closed the wooden door behind him.

“Jason, I need to talk to you.”

“Please,” he said firmly, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. “The family … we really don’t feel like talking. All the other television stations came here with cameras and stuff. We turned them all away. Really, we just want to be to ourselves for a while.”

“Jason, as you can see I don’t have a crew with me.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m here for another reason, an important reason that can’t wait another second.”

“Look, I don’t want to get into anything—”

“You’re already in it and if I were you I’d give me some time.”

“In what?” Jason’s face took on a hard edge to it. “And what do you mean ‘if I were you’?”