The Stones Cry Out (2 page)

The crowd hollered back. The signs jabbed the summer air.

And then a woman screamed.

Even on television her voice sounded pitched to heaven. High and terrified, her cries made every head turn. But everyone turned too late. The bodies were landing, hitting the sidewalk. On tape the sounds were nauseating thuds, like coffin lids slamming shut.

More screams followed that, then chaos. Pandemonium.

The police reports and city newspaper claimed Hamal Holmes hit the sidewalk first, landing near the curb. Detective Michael Falcon's body hit soon after, coming to rest beside the factory's 1889 cornerstone that dedicated the building to Jesus Christ. A medical examiner’s report later found no illegal or intoxicating substances in either man's system. No chemicals that could explain their loss of balance.

But the ME report almost didn’t matter. The city had already divided by color. Black versus white.

When she handed me the case, my boss at the Bureau didn’t sound hopeful.

"You won't find witnesses," said Victoria Phaup, Supervisory Special Agent of the Richmond field office. “But ask some questions; make it look like we care. Then close the case."

"Close it?"

"Close it. We've never solved a forty-four—" code for civil rights “—and we never will. It's a silly game of chasing down prejudices. And it drains manpower."

"Then why did we take the case?" I asked.

"Because the public's paying attention," she said crisply. "If we didn't take it, the mayor would turn around and file claims against us. So, make the rounds. And take John with you. For backup."

John Breit joined the Bureau when J. Edgar was still running the agency. He should’ve been top man on the office totem pole, but John had "issues.” Which was why he was the only other agent guaranteed available on a holiday weekend.

Now, climbing out of his Caddy on Ludlow Street, he looked like somebody on a train chugging two stops past Angry, heading for Furious.

"Quicker if we split up," I said. “I can take one side of the street.”

“We stick together." He locked the car.

Every porch on Ludlow had a full view of the Fielding factory. But half the windows were boarded with splintered plywood. Only six looked occupied, and though we knocked on them all, nobody answered. The last house sat on the corner, directly facing the factory. A half-painted white clapboard, it had a small sign over the door that said, "Jesus Lives Here."

I climbed the short stoop, listening to the plastic blades of Astroturf squeaking under my shoes. I could also hear John behind me, breathing through his mouth. Despite the heat and humidity, we both wore blazers to cover holstered weapons, and the front of John’s white shirt was soaked with perspiration.

Iron bars guarded the front door. But before I could knock, the door behind the bars opened. The woman who stood there was thin, with the wide stance of a toddler, and she appeared to be waiting for us. When I introduced myself and John, she watched us carefully. Her rheumy brown eyes were covered with a blue glaze, like kilned clay. She tilted her head, listening the way blind people do.

"I heard the whole thing," she said. "I heard it all, start to finish."

"All of it, on Saturday?” I asked.

"Yes."

"May we come in, Mrs...?"

"Miz," she corrected. "Miz Iva Williamson. And I don't know what that's a good idea. I can't be sure y'all are who you say you are."

Pulling out our billfolds, we handed them through the bars. She barely touched my identification but her mahogany fingers swept over John’s photo and the embossed lettering. She bent over the card, placing her strange eyes within an inch of it. “Difficult man."

She handed the billfold back, but as John took it, she wrapped her brown hands around his wrists. "You got burdens, son. Heartache. You need Jesus."

John offered her his best Bureau smile. It looked close to a grimace. The guy accepted "God talk" the way an allergic reacts to peanuts. On the Astroturf porch, his disgust mingled with the smell coming from her home. Fried onions and too many cats. The smell hung on the humid air like clothes pinned to a line.

"Miss Williamson," I said, "may we ask you a few questions about Saturday, if you don't mind?"

"Go on, let 'em all watch. I don’t care what they see. I’m cradled in the arms of the Lord." She spread her arms wide. “And the Lord was with me that day."

"Yeah, okay,” John said. “We can come back later. I mean--if that’s better for you."

"Man came and painted my house," she said, as though John hadn't spoken. "Seemed like a right nice boy. But he did me wrong. Oh, so wrong. That’s how come I don't take no chances no more with visitors. You gonna have to stay out there."

"That’s fine," I said. "We'd like to know if you—"

"Sometimes I still hear birds. Some mornings I open my door and the birds are chirping like happy chir-ren."

Children. She pronounced it the rural Virginia way, and as the word left her mouth, a burgundy Bonneville crawled down the street. The driver was a mid-twenties black male, red bandana covering his hair. At Miss Williamson’s house he slowed and threw us an expression that said he wished us dead. He gunned the engine at the corner, the squealing rubber slicing the air like a scream. As the car fishtailed around the Fielding factory, I wrote down the license plate.

"Ma'am, would you feel more comfortable coming to the office?" I asked.

"No birds that morning," she continued, as though nothing had happened. "That morning all I heard was people hollering. Yelling. Oh they was loud! So loud I just about closed my door. See--" she pointed to the green carpet at her feet. A two-foot patch was worn down to the burlap backing. "I keep my chair right there. Staying put. Keeping my ears open. That's how I live."

"You hear much?” John said. “You know, sitting inside the door like that?"

Her rheumy eyes clicked toward his deep voice. "You parked your nice car down the street. ’Cross from the Milson house. That'd be four-two-oh-one."

John looked down the street, counting house numbers to the cherished Cadillac. This time his smile was genuine. "Well I'll be da—"

"You will be." She wagged her bony finger. "Unless you give your heart to God. Tell him your burdens, son. He ain't gonna arrest you. He gonna set you free."

"I'm sure you manage fine out here,” he said.

"Now, I'm not disagreeing with them folks, what they're saying. Ain't right the man don't pay his taxes. I pay my taxes, look what I gotta put up with. Place needs cleaning up. This was a right nice neighborhood when I was coming up. Now look. Cock-a-roaches come in and out all night long. I want it to stop."

John sighed. "We all do."

"Miss Williamson,” I said, redirecting. “What can you tell us about Saturday?"

"Well, I can tell you I didn't vote for that mayor. Years ago that man come by my door looking for votes. Told me he was a Christian, he did. But I figure that man would tell me he got a twin named Muhammad if that’s what got my vote. I was thinking about that when I heard them."

We waited.

"Heard what?" John asked.

"Must've been near noon because my porch was under the shade. The sun was directly overhead. Almost like now."

"You're saying you heard the bodies, when they hit the ground?" John asked. "Or you heard that woman scream?"

"I hear those same screams comin' from these houses late at night. Just like that. People going down."

"So you heard the woman scream," John said, trying to pin down her statement. "And what—"

"You know how I know?"

"Know what?"

"That they're going down."

He gritted his teeth. "How do you know?"

"Because believers don't got screams like that. Believers got eternal life."

"Well," John said, “that's certainly a big help, Miss Williamson. Thank you very much for your time. You have a good day."

He was cooked. Gone. Ready to climb back in the cherished Caddy and ditch this hostile street. Finish the holiday with an ice-cold six-pack. Or two.

"That's what them screams told me," she continued. "People didn't do what they should, and then it was too late."

"Thanks again." John stepped away.

But she raised her face, the strange eyes quivering. "We know not the number of our days, only the Lord knows. And you can ask him how many you got, but he ain't gonna tell you."

John was already down the steps as I slipped my card through the bars, into her palm. Her skin felt as rough as pumice.

I asked to contact her again. She nodded.

"Wish you would," she said. "I don't get too many visitors. Not the good kind anyways."

===============

Back in the beloved Caddy, with the air conditioner blasting, John reluctantly followed my request to drive past the Fielding factory. He circled the block, sullen, while I stared at the roof line.

"Don’t even think about going up there,” he said.

Meaning, he wasn't hiking six flights in July for a civil rights case that Phaup wanted closed yesterday.

But as if to silence any request that still might come, he stopped at the factory’s entrance doors, letting me see the chains looped through the handles. The yellow police tape hung in ripped fragments, and the sidewalk held brown stains. The iron-rich blots had soaked into the porous concrete, marking the termination of two lives and the ignition of a racial fuse stretching back centuries.

Somebody had spray-painted graffiti on the brick wall. "Dirty Cops.” And "They Killd Hamal."

"This is such a sad place." I said under my breath. But John heard me.

"This isn't sad, Raleigh, it's pathetic. We come knocking on doors, looking into a crime
they
complained about, and nobody answers. Why? Because we're white and we're law enforcement and we actually want things to change. These people are killing themselves—killing
themselves
—with drugs, guns, prostitutes. And some poor blind woman has to live behind bars. You see her life?"

"I'm just saying—"

"Say nothing. Go back to the office. Write up the report. Tell it like it is. Nobody will talk. Then close it."

"That's exactly what Phaup wants."

"And for once, she's right. Civil rights cases do nothing but stir up even more trouble."

Five minutes later we were crossing the Mayo Bridge heading for downtown Richmond, leaving Southside behind. When I finally glanced over, taking in John's profile, I could see the crimson veins mapping his broad face, the rough topography grown from thirty-five years with the FBI, two failed marriages, rumors of alcoholism, and the only other agent available on a holiday weekend for driving around hostile territory asking questions nobody wanted to answer.

"Were you always this cynical?" I asked.

He glanced in the rearview mirror, watching Southside shrink out of sight.

"You'll see," he said. "You'll see.

Richmond City Hall was nineteen stories of uninterrupted government dreariness. On Tuesday morning, I walked into the building and found another eyesore in the middle of the lobby, a bronze statue of a disheveled man with his mouth agape and his large eyes pleading with heaven. The engraved plaque beneath it said, “Misery.”

The idea behind it was miserable too. Some civic group had donated it to the city, hoping “to stop violence in our community."

When it came to death, Richmond was a horrible overachiever. The city once ranked fourth in the nation for per-capita murders. Everybody had something to say about that, including artists and civic patrons who didn't understand crime and punishment but donated statues to the public square under the misguided notion that elevating the culture would somehow stem the killing tide. My years with the Bureau -- first as a forensic geologist, now as a special agent -- had shown just the opposite was true. America’s most creative cities, the places run by the smart people with lots of college degrees, who considered themselves open-minded and tolerant, were the very same places spawning the bloodiest destructions. It wasn’t anything new; the well-intentioned were once again laying the groundwork for that road to hell.

On the second floor, the mayor’s pretty secretary told me that he was waiting, even though we didn’t have an appointment. When I walked into his wood-paneled office, the mayor stood and buttoned his custom gray suit that matched his smoky agate eyes. As soon as he shook my hand, he unbuttoned the jacket, sitting behind his desk. I sat across from him.

"What did you find out?" he asked.

"I found out that two men can fall off a roof in broad daylight and six hundred people standing right there can somehow see absolutely nothing."

The mayor stared.

I told him about my visit to Mrs. Holmes and the bereaved widow who though the FBI was reporting to the cops. "But you were at the demonstration," I said. "Why don't we start with you. Tell me what happened."

He tented his manicured nails. "You ever protest anything?"

"Not with six hundred of my closest friends."