The Bridge (27 page)

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Authors: Solomon Jones

BOOK: The Bridge
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There was a moment of awkward silence. Then Lynch sighed.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “This whole thing is just getting a little frustrating. When I came up here with Bayot, I was hoping he would see something that would jog his memory. But Darnell wasn't here—I guess he's somewhere smoking again—and Bayot says he doesn't remember the man's name that got on the elevator with Kenya.”
Wilson reached into her pocket and pulled out a picture of Sonny. “Was this the man you saw?”
Bayot looked at the photo, squinting and turning his head sideways in an attempt to focus in. “I ain't sure.”
“You ain't never sure,” Daneen snapped. “Every time you open your damn mouth, you talkin' about you ain't sure, with your dumb-ass self.”
Wilson turned to her. “Daneen, I think you need to calm down.”
“No. I think y'all need to find my daughter.”
“Tell you what,” Wilson said, her eyes flashing anger. “You tell me what I asked you about, and we can start trying to find your daughter.”
“I told you I can't do that, because I don't know who her father is.”
“You're lying,” Wilson snapped.
“You don't know that,” Daneen said coolly.
“Look, we don't have time to waste,” Lynch said. “So this is what we're going to do. I talked to the guard downstairs and got a list of people who come up here on a regular basis. Daneen's going to look it over and see who's legitimate. Then we can cross-check the list against police records and get Bayot to look through some pictures down at Central.
“Of course, I can't be the one to go with him. So maybe you can do that, Roxanne.”
“Actually, that's what I came here to talk to you about,” Wilson said. “The answer to this whole thing might already be down at the Roundhouse.”
“What do you mean?” Lynch asked.
“They found Judy. They're holding her at homicide.”
“So why aren't you down there questioning her?” Lynch asked.
“Because she says she has some information about Kenya and Sonny that she only wants to talk to you about.”
“Well, that can't happen right now.”
“Kevin, you don't understand,” Wilson said. “It has to happen. I know you're angry that this thing came down to a suspension. But I talked to Captain Johnson today, and I don't think he'd object to you getting in there and doing what you have to do. That's just the feeling I get.”
“Well, they're shit out of luck if they think I'm going down there to bail them out after what they did to me.”
“Kevin,” Wilson began.
Then Bayot chimed in.
“You told me you was tryin' to find Kenya,” he said, looking at the floor and swaying back and forth. “You lied to me.”
“No, Bayot, you don't understand. I was—”
“If you cared about her, you wouldn't care who made you mad. If you really wanted to find her, you would talk to Judy.”
They were all silent as the truth of Bayot's words split the differences between them.
“You tricked me, just like everybody else be tryin' to trick me,” Bayot said. “You don't care about Kenya. You only lookin' for her 'cause you wanna make yourself feel better.”
Lynch looked at the faces around the room, and he knew that they'd all been wrong about Bayot.
And as they all left Judy's apartment to head down to the Roundhouse, Lynch was certain of only one thing.
Bayot was right about him.
 
 
 
Sonny struggled mightily, fighting against the hands that clutched at his throat, squeezing his windpipe shut and crushing the life from his body.
No matter how hard he fought, he couldn't break free. The fingers of the hands were too thick, the arms they extended from too heavy, the will of the attacker too strong.
“How it feel to die?” someone asked him through the darkness.
The words grated against Sonny's ears. Each one of them was a knife, cutting him as the question repeated, louder each time.
“How it feel to die?”
The voice was deep, frightening, ominous. And it carried the unmistakable stench of death.
“How it feel to die?”
Sonny tried to answer, but there was no wind to carry his words. He tried to fight, but there was no strength to wage his battle. He tried to pray, but there was no god he'd ever known.
And so he drifted, falling back into a place where his only link to life was the voice. He fell as his vision faded to black. He fell until the smell of death was gone. He fell until the voice called out to him again.
“How it feel to die?”
Sonny snapped awake, looking around in a panic as the cab driver tapped against the taxi's glass partition. Sonny blinked to clear his eyes, and when the fog began to lift, he looked around the cab to get his bearings.
He saw the backpack on the seat next to him, then looked out the window at the bright lights that illuminated the bus station. He
looked at the man who was tapping on the partition, and all of it came roaring back to him.
“What you say?” Sonny asked in a drowsy voice as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
“I said, ‘How do you feel?' You were moving around back there like you were having some kind of attack or something.”
“I'm fine, man,” Sonny said as he sat up. “What I owe you?”
“That depends. Bear doesn't have a bus station. We're in Wilmington. It was the closest one. That okay?”
“Yeah, that's okay,” Sonny said, suddenly in a rush to get out. “What I owe you.”
“Another hundred.”
Sonny peeled it off, handed it to him, and got out of the cab.
As the taxi drove away, Sonny hoisted the backpack onto his shoulder and walked across Martin Luther King Boulevard to the bus station. His mind replayed everything that had happened since Kenya's disappearance—from his initial escape, to the daylong chase, to the murders in the shooting gallery. And finally, his mind went back to Judy.
He absently wondered if she was still there against the wall, her hands tied and her mind consumed with money. He smiled at the image, because in his mind, it confirmed what he'd always believed.
Sonny was better than Judy. He was better because he knew that in the dope game, money was all that mattered. He didn't confuse sex with love, or power with loyalty. Judy, on the other hand, had twisted it all into what she hoped it could be. That had weakened her. And that weakness had allowed Sonny to take everything.
As he walked into the bus station to purchase his one-way ticket to Miami, he was filled with the satisfaction of knowing he'd gotten over yet again. His only regret was that he didn't know what had happened to Kenya.
That, more than anything, wore on him. It made his sweet escape into a hollow victory.
After all, he'd never known love until Kenya. He'd never known that he could hope for someone else, hurt for someone else, want for someone else. But in her innocence, she'd shown him how to do all of those things. And he loved her for it—loved her like the granddaughter he'd never had.
That love had been tested daily as he watched Judy take away everything he'd ever given to Kenya. And while he'd pretended not to care, it had pained him to see Judy hurt her.
That's why it was so easy for him to betray Judy. In truth, it had given him pleasure to do so.
But now, as he stood in a near-deserted bus station in Delaware, he realized that the pleasure had faded. The one person he'd ever really cared about was gone. Nothing could bring her back. That saddened him. But not enough to deter him from what he had to do.
“What time that bus to Miami comin'?” he asked the clerk behind the sales counter.
She looked up at him with tired eyes. “Should be here in a half hour. About ten or so.”
“Can you tell me where the bathroom at?”
The woman pointed to an arrow on the wall. Sonny followed it to the men's room, where he went into a stall, sat down on the toilet, and opened the backpack.
It was the first time he'd really looked at the money since he'd taken it from the roof of the Bridge. The sight of it was breathtaking—an endless sea of green.
He parted the stacks and reached down to the bottom. There were dozens of loose bills there—money that had worked its way out of the rubber bands that held the stacks together.
Sonny decided to take them out and arrange them into a separate stack. But as he gathered up the last few bills, he realized that there was something else.
When he pulled it out, he saw that it was an old diary of Judy's. He opened it and found that the white paper was turning yellow,
and the blue ink was faded in some places. But the words were unmistakable.
Sonny began to read them, and he learned something about Judy that he hadn't known before. He learned that she had a conscience that wouldn't allow her to turn a blind eye to everything she saw.
As he read on, he discovered something about himself, too. He had a gift for peering through the details, sorting through the secrets, sifting out the lies, and seeing truth.
If the ten-year-old secret that the diary exposed was real, then he knew that the truth had come to him in his dream. He had seen it through Kenya's eyes.
He walked out of the bathroom and past the desk, headed for the door.
“Excuse me!” the desk clerk called after him.
Sonny turned around.
“There's been a change. The bus that was supposed to make the trip to Miami broke down. They had to get a replacement out of New York, but it won't be here 'til morning.”
Sonny considered going someplace else—anywhere that would get him far away from Philadelphia. But going just anywhere wasn't an option. He had a plan, and he was going to stick to it.
“You're welcome to go to sleep in one of the chairs,” the clerk said. “The bus should be here by six o'clock in the morning. That'll be here before you know it.”
Sonny stood in the middle of the near-empty bus station for a moment, then shook his head slowly and sat down in one of the plastic chairs that were bolted to the floor.
The contents of the diary were still swirling in his mind. So he took it out of his pocket and stared at it for a moment. Then he walked over to a trash can and threw it away.
A few moments later, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, hoping he could forget what he had read.
When they left the Bridge, Lynch took Bayot, while Wilson transported Daneen. They drove to the prisoner's entrance on the Seventh Street side of police headquarters in order to avoid the reporters who were camped out front.
Lynch could see them milling about as he got out of his car with Bayot and walked down the ramp that led to the basement holding area. He wondered how much of the real story the reporters actually knew. More important, he wondered how much of it he would learn by speaking with Judy.
Lynch walked through the door, and the police officers who worked as guards stopped to watch him as the prisoners raised their usual raucous cry from the large holding area known as the bubble.
Lynch stood still for a moment, unsure of why the officers had stopped working. Then one of them began to clap. Two more joined in, and then three. After that, the room exploded in applause.
Embarrassed, Lynch worked his way through the crowd to backslaps and words of encouragement.
“We're with you, Kevin,” a gray-haired white officer told Lynch.
“Don't let 'em hold you down,” said a female officer seated by a typewriter.
“You'll be back,” said an officer who was standing next to the fingerprint station.
What they didn't know was that Lynch was already back. And he was going to make the most of his return.
He nodded his appreciation for the support of his fellow officers, and with Bayot, Wilson, and Daneen close behind, took the elevator up to the second floor.
When the four of them walked into homicide, a lieutenant scrambled to the door to meet them.
“Detective Lynch,” he said, extending his hand. “I guess you've already heard that Judy Brown is asking for you.”
Lynch took his hand hesitantly. He didn't know the man, and didn't care to. The only thing he was concerned about was finding Kenya.
“This is Bayard Jackson,” Lynch said. “He says he saw Kenya on Friday night, and he may have seen a man who was with her on an elevator around ten o'clock. This is Kenya's mother, Daneen Brown, and this is Roxanne Wilson. She's the lead detective on the investigation into Kenya's disappearance.”
“Good,” the lieutenant said. “I can get some of my guys out here to take a statement from Mr. Jackson. Then we can interview Ms. Brown.”
“No,” Lynch said. “That's not the way we're going to do it. Your guys can interview Mr. Jackson. But Detective Wilson is going to question Ms. Brown while one of your detectives sits in.”
“I don't know if you heard this, Lynch, since you're suspended and all,” the lieutenant said sarcastically, “but Judy Brown did make one statement to us before she asked for you. She said Sonny Williams murdered two people in a heroin shooting gallery down in the Badlands. We found two bodies in the bedroom and another one downstairs. We're charging Williams with all three, which makes this a homicide investigation.”
“Homicide or not, you've got one witness who says she knows
what happened to Sonny and Kenya. She only wants to talk to me. So we're going to do it my way. And it really doesn't matter to me whether you like it.”
“I don't think you know who you're talking to, Lynch.”
“I don't think I care,” Lynch said. “I'm in charge here, or I walk.”
Captain Silas Johnson, who'd sat in the back of the office watching them, got up from his perch on the side of a desk.
“So is that what we're doing now, Kevin?” the captain said as he approached the front of the office. “Giving everybody hell because poor Detective Lynch wasn't treated fairly?”
“No,” Lynch said. “We're letting me do what I do better than anybody else you've got. But hey, we don't have to do that. I can turn around and go back out that door. Then you can explain to those reporters out there why a man who killed three people and injured three police officers is still on the loose, and the only one who's been punished for it is me.”
“Come here,” the captain said as he walked to a small office in the back of the room. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”
“Last time you told me that I lost my job.”
“Well, I guess that means you don't have anything to lose this time. Besides, it'll only take a minute.”
He stopped next to a door, holding it open for Lynch, who eventually relented and walked back to meet him.
When they were both inside, the captain closed the door.
“Have a seat, Kevin.”
“I prefer to stand.”
“Suit yourself,” the captain said, sighing as he sat down. “I didn't come down here to argue with you. I came because I wanted to be here when you arrived. I wanted to make sure you understood that I've already talked to the commissioner, and there's a good chance we can make all this go away.”
Lynch looked at him with a cynicism that bordered on contempt.
“Okay, there's more than a good chance,” the captain said, reading
his expression. “We will make it go away. But we need you to do this thing with Judy. We need you to talk to her.”
“I'm not here to get my job back,” Lynch said. “I'm here to get the truth. And I guess I've already gotten part of it.”
“Which part might that be?”
“The part about the department not giving a damn about me. Anytime you can make a suspension with intent to dismiss go away just like that, then there really was no need for the suspension in the first place, was there?”
“Look, Kevin—”
“Where's Judy?” Lynch asked. “You want me to talk to her, and that's what I'm here to do. You don't need to explain the politics of it, Captain Johnson. I get the politics.”
The captain stared at him. “She's in the back.”
Lynch walked out the door without another word, slamming it behind him and storming into the interrogation room, where Judy sat quietly between two detectives.
“Well, lookee here, it's the man of the hour,” one of the detectives said bitterly.
Lynch ignored him. He'd seen his kind before. Young, white, and angry that a black cop was better at the job than he.
“How are you, Judy?” Lynch asked.
She looked at him with a quiet madness playing in her eyes. “I been better.”
“I won't be needing either of you,” Lynch said to the detectives. “You can both leave.”
“We usually don't do one-on-one interviews in homicide,” one of them said. “Especially with a male detective and a female prisoner.”
“Well, homicide isn't handling this interview,” Lynch said. “I am. And the video camera's on, isn't it? It'll all be documented. So if you'll excuse me, I need some time alone with Ms. Brown.”
They walked out reluctantly, watching him over their shoulders as they left the room.
“They don't like you,” Judy said, after the door closed.
“Fuck them.”
“You shouldn't talk like that, Kevin. You know Ms. Eunice wouldn'ta liked you talkin' like the rest o' the folk from the projects.”
Lynch picked up a chair from the far side of the room, put it down in front of Judy, and sat down.
“No,” he said wearily. “She wouldn't like it. But then, there's a whole lot of things going on in the Bridge that she wouldn't have liked.”
“I guess you right,” she said, stopping to reflect on the truth in Lynch's words.
“You know, Kevin, I used to watch your grandmother and wonder why she was so rough on you. I thought maybe she ain't like you 'cause you wasn't her blood. But lookin' at you now, I guess she knew somethin' the rest of us ain't know.”
“Yeah, she knew how to kick my ass when I didn't do what she told me to do,” Lynch said.
“I think it was more to it than that. I think she knew somethin' I'm just now findin' out.”
Judy smiled, but just barely.
“She knew the key to life is the company you keep,” she said. “That's why she told you to stay away from Daneen.”
“Judy, she didn't—”
“Yes, she did, Kevin. She told you to stay away from Daneen 'cause she saw where things was headed with her. She saw it even before I did.
“And when she saw that, she saw what this thing with Kenya is really about. I know you think it's the drugs and the hustlin' and all that. But that ain't what made this happen. The trouble with Kenya started before she was born. It started with everybody in my house, from me on down, lookin' for a way to feel better. Lookin' for somethin' to make the truth go away. See, you was there, but
you ain't live the Bridge like we did, Kevin. Your grandmother made sure you hoped for somethin' different. We ain't have that. All we had was what we saw. And to us, the only way out was to hustle.
“We all thought Eunice was crazy for watchin' everything you did and everyplace you went. But I guess she wasn't. 'Cause while she was makin' sure you was comin' up right, everybody else in the Bridge was fallin' apart. Especially us.”
“What do you mean by falling apart?” Lynch asked.
“That ain't important right now,” Judy said earnestly. “What you need to know is what I called you down here to tell you. Sonny ain't do nothin' to Kenya. I thought he did in the beginnin', but that was just me bein' crazy. The truth is, I knew he had my money, and I was gon' try to get it back.”
“What money?” Lynch asked.
“The money we had stashed in a backpack on the roof. The money we was gon' use to start over. Least that's what I thought. But Sonny had other ideas.” She shook her head. “That's why he ran, Kevin. Not 'cause he did nothin' to Kenya.”
“So where do you think he is now?”
“My guess would be he headed down Miami. I know he had some people down there he did business with sometime. He ain't never give me no names or nothin'. I guess he figured the less I knew, the better. And he was right, 'cause if I knew where Sonny was right now, you best believe I would tell you.”
Lynch looked at her for a long time before he spoke.
“I don't believe that, Judy. I think you're just trying to buy time for him. Deep down, I think Sonny could do anything to you, and you would still love him. I think you need him to treat you the way he does.”
“You mighta been right about that a couple days ago,” Judy said. “But you ain't right no more. Sonny took everything I had and left me for dead up in a damn drug house. You think I'm still tryin' to
protect him after he did some shit like that? You can believe what you want. But the truth is the truth.”
“You've gotta give me more reason to believe you than that.”
“It's like I told you,” Judy said. “It all go back to Kenya and the fact that she ain't really have no business here in the first place.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“It mean Daneen ain't have no choice but to lie about that baby and who her father is,” Judy said.
“So you know who he is?” Lynch asked.
“I was never really sure. Daneen told me somethin' about it, but I ain't never believe her. I thought she was just makin' it up to get my attention. I ain't know 'til she had Kenya that it was true.”
“Well, who is it?” Lynch said anxiously. “Who's Kenya's father?”
“You mean Daneen ain't tell you yet? All this time y'all done spent together these past couple days, and she still ain't tell you the truth?”
“Why should I have to hear it from Daneen?” Lynch asked “Why don't you tell me?”
“'Cause she the only one who really know,” Judy said. “I just think I do. She swore she wasn't never gon' tell nobody. And in all these years, she never did.”
 
 
 
Staring across a scarred wooden table in another interrogation room as a homicide detective looked on, Daneen was getting annoyed with Wilson.
“Why you keep askin' me the same shit over and over again?” she said.
“Because you keep telling me everything but the truth,” Wilson said. “But I'm going to do you a favor and share a little truth with you. Sonny's wanted for four murders, if you include the vehicular homicide that killed Judge Baylor. If you're holding something back
from me to protect him, some smart prosecutor is going to want to try you as an accessory to those murders. So before we go any further, you might want to get a lawyer in here, Daneen, because this is serious.”
Daneen stared at Wilson, trying with all her might to maintain her tough exterior. But she couldn't, and as her face crumpled, and the tears began to flow, the pain Daneen felt was not about Wilson and her questions. It was about herself.

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