No Place Safe (14 page)

I was first on the bus, but people were trickling in behind me. I was trying to get a head start on a homework assignment when a woman said, “What’s going on out there?”

“Looks like some kind of fight,” said the man in the seat across from her. They both stood up and leaned toward the front of the bus, as if that small movement would give them a better view of whatever was happening fifty feet ahead of our idling bus. I still didn’t move to get a closer look, but watched our bus driver, who I always thought was far too smooth to be driving a bus (though he was still driving the same route when we left the neighborhood five years later). Somehow, he always seemed to have the “laid back but I don’t take no shit” attitude
that would have served him well as a cutthroat businessman, nightclub bouncer, or high-end pimp. He didn’t shift his position in the driver’s seat—one foot propped up against the rail alongside the money-drop machine, wearing his ever-present sunglasses, his mouth slowly but stylishly working a toothpick. It appeared to me he was watching the same scene the rest of the bus was watching, but he was unaffected by it.

He closed the doors of the bus and made that noise that must have something to do with the brakes as air is released, a sound I still associate with my old bus route no matter what city I live in, or the bus system I’m riding on. People continued to stand, hoping to get a better look when our bus passed the commotion. The sound of sirens made the driver pause, and made me finally join the gawkers while admitting I was no better than them. The crowd that had gathered around the fuss made it clear right away that it was a fight—someone was fighting someone else right in the middle of the street.

The driver pulled in to the far left lane to let the police cars through. I could hear through our open windows that the crowd was cheering on whoever was winning, saying what I thought sounded like “get her, get her
.
” A catfight no less. It had to be between two women—who would cheer for a man over a woman? The crowd got louder in its support as the police cars pulled in, making me wonder what made them choose one stranger over the other. The bus slowly made its way past the fight and as soon as I caught a glimpse of the fighters, I had my question answered. It wasn’t a catfight at all. It was a man beating a woman, and the crowd was indeed throwing its support behind the man. She was wearing the deep navy uniform of the Atlanta Police Bureau.

I never got to see what happened next, but I imagine the cops in all those cars that had just pulled in probably beat holy shit out of the man, not particularly concerned about who saw it. Or more likely, they took him away and did it privately since they were greatly outnumbered by the frothed-up crowd. There wasn’t a lot of love for the department during that time; the city was tired of the killings. But that scene frightened me, took me by surprise in a way not much else has since.

The whole ride I thought about Ma as a rookie cop and the time she came home after a night in the hospital because she was beaten by a perpetrator. Being only eight, it didn’t make much sense to me. My idea of cops and citizens then was what I’d been told in classrooms. Officer Friendly was always surrounded by adoring kids in those coloring books they handed out. People were grateful when the cops on
Adam-12
showed up, ready and willing to save the day. Ma’s beating was the first time I realized that a lot of people hated cops, though they complain or cry lawsuit when they need one and that patrol car doesn’t appear within a minute of them calling for help. I wondered if people stood around and watched, cheering on a man who likely had a few inches and fifty pounds on Ma. The thought made my stomach turn, and I couldn’t shake the idea of it for several days.

The second week of September, the medical examiner finally confirmed that the second boy to go missing, the one who was on his way to the movies downtown, was one of the bodies found at Niskey Lake last summer. His name was Alfred Evans. When those first two boys arrived at the morgue at the end of July 1979, the medical examiner had said one of the boys died of a gunshot wound, the other died from an overdose “or something like that.” I wondered if over the year that he spent working on dead children’s cases, this boy’s case in particular, if he’d come to care more about what had happened to them than that statement from his original report would indicate. I imagined he had. It would be impossible not to, as I learned while watching Ma, noticing how working the cases began to change her.

She was assigned as a lead investigator on Alfred Evans’s case now that it had been officially ruled a homicide instead of a missing person case. She still worked on some of the other cases, but mostly in how they tied to her assigned child. That’s what she took to calling him after first naming him Victim Two: “My child, my boy.” It seemed to me Ma was forgetting the rules about keeping some distance from her cases.

Sometimes she talked out loud while going over case files. I thought it was because the information was just too much hurt to keep locked in her head, that by speaking the words she was filtering some of the bad out of them. I could hear her reading a report from the Fulton County Department of Family and Children’s Services while I loaded the dishwasher. “It says they have ‘no record on this child other than a pauper’s funeral.’ I guess that’s something, at least there was no cause for DFACS to ever be a part of his life before he died.”

It seemed sad to me that the boy, even though I knew his spirit was gone and he was really just a body, had to lay in the cold morgue all that time with no one to claim him, no one to cry over him and mourn his passing for more than a year. Surely his mother cried, first when he went missing, then when she finally gave him up for dead, if she ever did. But I don’t imagine it’s the same thing as when you cry for someone you know in your heart of hearts is gone for good because you watched him be lowered into the ground and you threw a handful of Georgia clay onto the casket, maybe a white flower because children’s funerals always seemed to have white flowers.

So I asked Ma what took so long.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Because it’s top secret?”

“Because I’ve been asked that question a hundred times already, and a hundred times I didn’t have the answer people wanted to hear.”

“If you answer me this one question, I’ll leave you alone.”

It was a lie, and we both knew it when the words left my mouth. I wanted to know all about the kids—what they did for fun, what places they went to, and mostly, what made them trust the person who would steal them from their families—kids who lived lives that would have made them a bit more suspicious than most. Or maybe that’s what made them more willing. What made them go away with this person when they knew kids were disappearing? I wanted to know so I wouldn’t fall into the same trap. Without me explaining this, Ma knew the reason for my questions. And most times, she answered them.

“For one thing, he’d been in the woods for three days. In July. The police accurately matched the missing person report on a boy who had disappeared about the same time the boy in the woods had probably died. They asked the parents who had filed the report to identify the body from the woods.” The look on Ma’s face let me know she was uncomfortable telling me this, but my look let her know I’d nag her until I got an answer. “The parents tried to identify him but couldn’t positively say it was their child, given what the heat and the animals had done to him.”

This didn’t make me squeamish, little did. But it made me wonder if a parent can see a child’s face look any other way than the way it did the last time they set eyes on it. I wondered if maybe they thought it could be him, but their hope was stronger than whatever power it would take to accept that their child was lying on cold metal in the medical examiner’s office. Did they say,
No, this can’t be my child
, when they thought maybe it was? Did it hurt to know that for three days he’d lain out in the woods, exposed, away from the care they’d surely have given his body if they’d known where he was?

There wasn’t much Ma could tell me about the boy’s life that might help me understand why he trusted the person who killed him, why he got into the car or turned his back on his killer, or was willing to go inside his home. What I did learn only showed me how often my world intersected with the boy’s, despite our worlds being so different. The clothes he was wearing were bought in a shop just on the other side of Central City Park from where I caught the second leg of my bus ride to school. His family bought their groceries at the Big Star on Memorial Drive, and we’d shopped there before. His sister, like the boy whose body was found a few hundred yards away, skated at the same roller rink I did. MARTA was his main source of transportation. He liked to go to the Omni for the wrestling matches, and I went for the movies and the video arcade. There was nothing in this information that taught me what to watch for, only that I’d better be watching.

Ma said she had another “person of interest” she was checking into, the last person to have seen him alive, a man who’d said he’d given the boy a ride to the bus stop so he could catch the bus and make his movie on time. I didn’t know it then, but that man’s name would be forever in my memory. For six months, it was spoken around our house during the one-sided phone calls I overheard, quietly spoken words that I eavesdropped on from my bedroom door.

“Are you anywhere close to catching him?” I asked.

“It isn’t about catching him. We know where he is. It’s about being certain that he even had a thing to do with it.”

I wished that he did, that Ma would discover this was the person who had made kids afraid to hang out past dark, made parents put their children on lockdown for more than a year. Like everyone else, I was ready for it to be over.

*

When Ma told her she couldn’t afford private school anymore, Bridgette was happy. Toward the end of the school year, she’d gotten into it with one of her teachers, and had told the principal that the teacher was ignorant, and couldn’t pronounce certain words correctly. It was true—the woman would say “streen” instead of “screen,” or “ax” instead of “ask.” And we were paying good money to be in that school. Bridgette was only ten, but she was like a small grown person in some ways. She didn’t take anything off anybody, including teachers. This was an admirable trait, and even though I’d have her on my side in a fight any day despite her being four years my junior, it made life more difficult for her than it had to be.

Anyway, the teacher had called Ma and said Bridgette didn’t have any home training if she could question a teacher that way. Being that Bridgette got her ways straight from my mother, Ma went down to the school to have a few words with the teacher
and
the principal. After that, Bridgette was enrolled in the Atlanta public school system. This was okay by her because she hated Catholic school. There was too much structure, too many rules, both of which made Bridgette nervous.

Ma used the minority-to-majority transfer to get Bridgette into one of the best schools in the system, which of course meant it was way across town in a white neighborhood. Even then, I knew that the best of everything—unless it was something that only black folks had any use for—was always located in the white neighborhoods. This included the grocery stores with the freshest produce, libraries with the best reference books for school papers, hospitals where there were enough doctors and nurses and beds to go around. Bridgette was going to a school that sat right in the middle of it, on Peachtree Street between the Brookwood and Buckhead neighborhoods. Between old Atlanta money and even older Atlanta money.

I’d left the West End a year ago, and I still missed it—the cadence of voices similar to mine, a few notes of loud and familiar music from passing car windows, and the store across the street that sold candy like Mary Janes and Now and Laters instead of the Skittles and Starburst
that were popular with kids at my new school. I knew Bridgette would miss it, too, but I was glad I wouldn’t have to worry about her being in the same neighborhood that the killer was finding his prey.

My relief that she might be safer grew every time a child went missing, including the fourteenth child, ten-year-old Darron Glass. For a few hours after he disappeared, there was a scant bit of hope that he might be found. He was last seen on a Sunday in mid-September, and a few hours later, his neighbor went running next door to get the boy’s foster mother, who had no telephone. Someone was on the neighbor’s line claiming to be the boy. By the time the foster mother reached the phone, it had gone dead. It was hoped that he might call again, but he never did. Still people hoped, because Darron’s brother told the police Darron had threatened to run away from his foster home to a relative’s house, but he never showed up there, or anywhere else. His lasting mark on the investigation is that to this day, he’s the only child whose body was never confirmed found.

 He was last seen at Second Avenue and Glenwood Road in Southeast, an area straddling the Fulton/Dekalb County line and less than a mile from his home. The intersection of these two streets, if you were to look at it on a city map, bordered the East Lake Country Club. What most folks think of country clubs, and the life of those whose travels take them past one daily, would likely not match this particular country club or the lives of the people who lived nearby. Not in 1980, anyway. There was a time when well-to-do Atlantans and nationally famous players golfed there, but by the time the killings began, white flight had long ago changed the economics. By the time kids started dying, the East Lake area was known not for golf but for the housing project that was built to fill the space left by white people fleeing the city for the suburbs.

Back then, East Lake Meadows, when spoken of by people who didn’t live in the projects or within a mile of it, was something foreign and barely imaginable. In 1980, it was in a section of Patrol Zone Five where drugs were traded, violent crimes committed, and gunfire rang out with such regularity that it earned the nickname “Little Vietnam.” It made me grateful that when Ma was a beat cop, she was assigned to Zone Four, far from safe but at least it wasn’t East Lake Meadows. For Atlanta, it represented one of the neighborhoods that exists in all cities of decent size, a part of town where no one who didn’t have to be there would ever go anywhere near. The second child killed, Alfred Evans, lived in those projects. Sometimes when my bus passed the projects near my neighborhood, I’d remember seeing the lady cop beaten up downtown and wonder how Ma’s day was going while she questioned cop-hating, child-grieving people in the Meadows.