No Place Safe (19 page)

*

Ma called the next morning. “How did last night go?”

“Okay.”

“Good. Well, I’m getting some good interviews down here, got a few more to do.”

“That’s nice.” I hoped my lack of enthusiasm flew through the phone wire.

 “How’s Bridgette?”

“Okay.” I decided I’d give her as little as possible. If she really wanted to know how we were, she’d be here.

“What’s she doing?”

“Watching TV and eating cereal. You want to talk to her?”

“No, she’d just ask me to come home now and I can’t just yet.”

“She’ll be mad she didn’t get to talk to you.” And why couldn’t she come home now? She’d said it would only be overnight, that she’d be home by dinner.

“I’ll call again later. Look, I need to stay over one more night to get these interviews done. You think you could manage another night?”

I wanted to say no. No, because if I say yes, leaving us alone will become easier for you. No, because those aren’t your kids and we are. No, because those kids are dead and we’re not. But I didn’t say any of those things.

Until the summer the killings began and I got the volunteer job at the hospital, I’d spent all my summers in Cleveland with my grandparents. It gave Ma a chance to be a woman instead of a mother. She tried to pack all her fun into those three months—pool parties, dating, and whatever else she could get into.

If she had the money, the day after school let out Ma would put us on a plane where the stewardess would look after us, or Grandma and Granddad would drive down to get us. I always preferred the plane over driving because in the southern half of the trip, we couldn’t use the bathrooms unless we were in some sizeable town, and those were scarce along I-75. My grandparents knew the route well, and if we were asleep in the backseat, they’d wake us up and say, “Last bathroom stop before Whites Only country.” If we had to go after that stop, which one of us always did because it’s difficult for a small girl to hold her water through two states and four hours, we had to go in a ditch off the side of the road.

I didn’t know until I returned in my late teens that my grandparents lived in a truly bad part of town. I was unaware of the danger during those summers I spent running errands to the A&P alone through back allies, or joining my cousins (who also stayed with my grandparents each summer) to fight another group of kids who allegedly had looked at one of us wrong days earlier. Bridgette, my cousins, and I would sit on the porch playing poor kids’ games like
I Spy
and
That’s My Car
until all hours, trying to figure out the song a car horn played as it went by. It was the thing back then in that neighborhood, if you were a player, for your horn to play a few notes from “Superfly” or “Shaft,” and for you to sound your horn as you approached so everyone knew you were coming and could stand on their porches and watch you drive by as you gangster-lean on your armrest, left hand casually resting on the top of the steering wheel, in a shiny Lincoln Mark IV or a Buick Deuce and a Quarter.

The summer I was nine or ten, I went to a day program at my grandparents’ church and had to walk the mile there alone. I was slightly afraid of the walk, and made a weapon out of a stick with a piece of rope tied to it, the other end of the rope tied around a rock. I know now that it would have been little help if I’d ever had to use it, but it made me feel safer then. I’d hide it in some bushes in front of the school until I pulled it out again before starting the walk back to my grandparents’ house. Those summers in Cleveland, I learned to fight because I had to, but I’d never associated needing to protect myself with living in a bad neighborhood until that return trip. It was definitely ghetto, and I knew four years couldn’t have changed it. I’d changed, and saw things differently with my seventeen-year-old eyes.

The way the neighborhood was going down was the reason my grandparents considered returning to Georgia where they were born and where most of their children now lived. They decided to come spend Christmas week with us to get a feel for living in the south again after forty years. Life in Georgia for black folks in 1940 was the reason they’d left. Returning seemed like a step back somehow, but there had been no steps forward living up north for longer than they could remember.

Now they were sitting in our living room on their first day in Atlanta, asking Ma about how things were going with the case.

“We’ve been trying to keep up with it in the news,” Grandma said. “There’s something about it now almost every day. Everybody keeps asking what I know, ’cause they know how you’re a lady detective and all, working on the case.”

“That’s right, I tell folks at work how my daughter is working on this famous case, and how you’re gonna find the killer any day now.” My grandfather was as hopeful as I was when Ma first joined the Task Force, before I understood how difficult the task was.

“Well, Daddy, I think you’ve got more faith in me than I do.”

I’d read in the paper that people were angry about the continued questioning of parents, including those in Ma’s case.
Why don’t they go and find the real killer, instead of harassing her family?,
the people kept asking. I asked Ma the same question.

“We always look at the family, you know that. More times than not, it’s the family.”

I wondered if she wasn’t wasting time while the
real
killer was walking around. I felt guilty questioning her, but I could see the logic in what the people were saying.

*

Because of the city curfew and because Ma wouldn’t have let me hang out after dark whether there was a curfew or not, I had to celebrate my fifteenth birthday at home instead of at the mall, or in a video arcade, or if I was with my school friends, drinking beer while leaning against the car of someone who looked old enough to buy a six-pack. Ma promised we’d go see a movie instead after dinner.

She called to say she’d be a little late, go ahead and start making dinner and she’d be home soon. Grandma had cooked dinner, we’d eaten it, and the dishes were cleaned and put away when Ma called again to say she would be a little while longer because she was still working. She told me the details as if that would make it less wrong of her for not taking me to the movies on my birthday after keeping me from going out with friends.

She was still at the Task Force, interviewing a witness who knew the first two boys killed. The man once lived on Niskey Lake Road across the street from where the boys’ bodies were found. He’d dated the sister of the suspect who’d last seen Alfred Evans alive. He’d given karate lessons to Edward Hope Smith, either at his house on Niskey Lake Road or sometimes behind the Greenbriar skating rink the victim and I liked to visit. She included me in that sentence, I guess to show that she was staying late as much to protect me as to find out who killed the boys. She was finding too many connections for her to stop the interview now.

“Just let me wrap this up,” she said, “and I’ll be home soon. Oh, and I told this witness I’d give him a ride to the train station after, so he’d agree to stay a bit longer and finish his statement.”

A ride to the train station?, I wanted to yell. Is she a taxi service now? Will she be in an unmarked car where she’ll be protected from this witness by the thick wire mesh that separates front seat from back? We both knew she wasn’t looking at this guy as a witness but as a suspect, whether the man knew it yet or not. Would her partner be with her when she drove this man to the station? And was this her version of soon, which I knew by now could mean hours turned into days, or my version of soon, which was now? But I said none of this, and took my anger out on my grandmother, saying I didn’t want a piece of chocolate cake
or
sweet potato pie, even if she had baked both because they were my favorites.

I knew I was acting like a child even though I’d just marked another year closer to being an adult, but I was tired of acting grown-up, asking no questions and just dealing with it. On my birthday, I wanted to be a kid. I didn’t want to sit in my room watching the clock as Ma’s
soon
turned into the hours I expected it would, wondering if the witness knew she was marking him as a suspect and had gotten her gun away from her, had dropped her in some wooded place where animals would make it difficult for me to identify her weeks from now. Someone would show me her necklace with the gold Queen Nefertiti charm she always wore and say, “Do you recognize this? It’s all that was left.” By the time I heard her keys in the front door late in the night, I was thankful God had brought her home safe and angry at her for missing my birthday, all at the same time.

*

One night I decided to sneak a look at Ma’s notes when she left them on the table to go pick up the Chinese food she’d ordered. I turned down making the food run with her, but she took Bridgette along. Them leaving gave me a chance to snoop around in Ma’s files, a bad habit I’d taken up since she started on the Task Force. I read notes on the main suspect in her first case.

He was still the last person known to have seen the boy alive. He said he took Evans to the bus stop and watched him get on the bus, but we can’t find a single person who remembered seeing the boy on the bus. The suspect said he never saw the boy after that because he left town that day for a job in south Georgia and didn’t return to Atlanta until January of 1980. He offered as proof a speeding ticket he’d received on his way to his new job site on July 26
th
or 27
th
, which still doesn’t explain away the fact that Evans was seen with him on July 25
th—
it’s only a three hour drive—he left Atlanta on the 26th. I learned that the new job didn’t start until November 1979. He had gotten a speeding ticket, but it was dated November 4
th
. And as far as his being out of town until January 1980, in the last three weeks of August 1979, he was on a maintenance job in Atlanta. He also was in town to turn himself in on an outstanding rape warrant on December 12, 1979
.

Ma doubted every word out of his mouth. After interrogating him, he changed his story. He had returned to Atlanta four days after Alfred Evans had gone missing, which is when he learned of the boy’s disappearance, when his mother asked if he’d seen the boy since the day he’d given him the ride to the bus stop. He also admitted that he had lied about the car he was driving when he gave the boy a ride. It was a Chevy, not a Ford. He didn’t buy the Ford until August. Ma told the man his growing list of lies was making him a prime suspect, and he requested a polygraph to prove his innocence.

Just as I was getting to the good part, where Ma began catching the suspect in his lies because she’d had surveillance on the homes of his alibi witnesses, checking out his stories, I heard her car in the driveway, and quickly tried to put her papers where I’d found them.

A couple of months passed between disappearances. Maybe the killer took the holidays off, which always made me wonder if he wasn’t a regular family man with kids at home himself, who had to work extra hours to cover the Christmas bills, who was affected by the holiday spirit the way most sane people were. An almost-regular man who had some kind of crazy hatred of black boys. Maybe the cold kept kids off the streets making them more difficult to steal away, but it was just like the winter before when we had a four-month break in the killings. Unlike last winter, there wasn’t the hopeful feeling that it was all over. People knew not to get excited just because it was the new year and the last child went missing in mid-November.

Sure enough, the killer justified keeping our guard up. Three days into 1981, fourteen-year-old Lubie Geter went missing from the Stewart-Lakewood Shopping Center in Southwest. When he wasn’t found in the next couple of days, the city went through the played-out routine of suggesting there was hope he was alive, even though by now, most folks didn’t expect as much. A Missing Child
flier went out showing his picture, looking for all the world like a boy I might know. He was just a regular boy like all the others, trying to hustle a few dimes by selling Zep Gel car deodorizer in front of the shopping center.

*

When I walked through the doors of the Task Force, the place was jumping. Something about the latest disappearance seemed to mobilize the community more than the others. Maybe it was because the boy was the first to go missing after a two-month break. Maybe people realized we were starting yet another year with the killer still loose. It seemed half of Atlanta had a tip to share on the latest abduction, because the desks just inside the front doors were full. The building sat close to the street, and everyone knew it was the home of the Task Force, which meant everyone and their mother was able to walk in and share premonitions, eyewitness accounts, what they saw in a dream last night, and psychic revelations.

The desks in the front were manned by recruits, trained by the detectives to do triage of the tipsters, separating the “probables” and “maybes”
from the just plain crazies. The first two groups would get a chance to tell their story to a detective, while the crazies were told “thank you very kindly for your help,” and sent on their way. That day, it appeared the recruits were outnumbered by the people sitting in chairs and leaning against the walls, waiting for their chance to help catch the killer.

I headed toward Ma’s desk, weaving through the crowd, watching the eagerness on all the faces to provide the tip that would solve the case, feeling the energy of people charged with new hope and fresh anger. When I found Ma at her desk, I wanted to ask if some recent development had brought so many people in, but I knew better than to discuss the case while she was at work. She looked up at me, surprised.