The Bridge: A Novel

by Solomon Jones

  “When I asked you if you were in Judy’s apartment, you said I was going to tell. Did that mean you were in there?”

  Bayot nodded bashfully.

  “So if you were in there, how could you have been outside the apartment, watching Kenya go in?”

  “I was in there early. But then I had spent all my money, and Judy told me I had to go.”

  He furrowed his brow and stuck out his bottom lip. “She always tell me I gotta go when I ain’t got no more money.”

  “So why were you on the steps?” Lynch asked.

  “I told you, that’s where I be at,” Bayot said. “Don’t nobody mess with me there. They don’t be callin’ me crazy and stupid and all that other stuff.”

  Lynch felt sorry for him. But he didn’t have time for compassion, so he pressed on.

  “You said you saw her the first time around nine o’clock,” he said. “So I guess that means you saw her again after that.”

  “Yeah, she came back out after while. I seen her comin’ down the steps, and I thought if I let her see me, she might want to play. So I waited ’til she got down to, like, the third floor, and then I stood in front of her.”

  “Did she say or do anything at that point?”

  “She told me to move. First I thought she was playin’. But then she pushed me and ran outside.”

  “Was that the last time you saw her that night?”

  “I thought I saw her one more time. But I ain’t sure, ’cause she was in the elevator.”

  “What did you think you saw?”

  Bayot’s eyes darted about like he was unsure of what to say.

  “What is it, Bayot? What did you see?”

  “I don’t want to get nobody in trouble,” he said.

  “Just tell me what you saw.”

  “You gon’ tell him I told,” Bayot said, as more tears formed in his eyes.

  “Tell me!” Lynch shouted.

  Bayot jumped, covered his ears and began to babble. “I came up the steps, and I was just gon’ go to sleep in here, but it was a lotta noise ’cause they was havin’ a party, and I stopped on the steps and looked. Then I seen the elevator doors open and then Kenya was on there, and I ain’t want her to see me ’cause I knew she was mad at me, so I backed up and peeped around the doorway. This man got on the elevator with her and it looked like she hugged him. And he hugged her back. And then the doors closed, and then I ain’t see her no more after that.”

  He sat breathing heavily when he was finished. Lynch watched him, waiting for more. When nothing more came, he asked another question.

  “Do you know who the man was who got on the elevator with her?”

  Bayot nodded quickly.

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know his name,” he said. “He be up in Judy apartment, though. He be up in Judy apartment all the time.”

  Wilson and Daneen rushed into the building and up to Judy’s, rightly assuming that they would find Lynch there.

  When they walked inside and found Bayot standing next to him, Daneen was confused.

  “What you doin’ with him?” she asked, her eyes shifting from one to the other.

  “The same thing I’ve been doing since Friday,” Lynch said, avoiding her eyes for fear of rekindling their last conversation. “I’m trying to find Kenya.”

  “With him?” Daneen asked incredulously.

  “He says he saw Kenya on the elevator on Friday night,” Lynch said. “A man who hangs around Judy’s got on with her when it stopped on the sixth floor. Kenya apparently knew the man pretty well, because she hugged him right before the doors closed.”

  Wilson glanced at Bayot. “Do you know who the man was?”

  He looked down at the floor and shook his head no.

  “Did you see what he was wearing?” Wilson asked.

  Bayot looked away, afraid to speak to her.

  “It’s okay,” Lynch said patiently. “She’s a friend of mine. Her name is Roxanne. You can trust her just like you trusted me.”

  “Why are you talking to him like that?” Wilson said. “Is something wrong with him?”

  “Bayot slow,” Daneen said with a hint of annoyance. “People usually don’t pay him no mind.”

  Wilson looked at Lynch. “Don’t you think you’re reaching here, Kevin?”

  “I’ve talked to everybody else, and I’ve pieced together everything Kenya did on Friday, except what happened when she left Tyreeka. Bayot’s the only one who saw her after that. Are you saying I should ignore that just because he’s slow?”

  “No, Kevin. I’m just saying he might not be all that reliable as a witness.”

  “Well, I don’t care what you think,” he said sharply.

  Wilson took a step back, stretched her eyes wide, and met his attitude with one of her own.

  “Look, Kevin. I know things have been a little rough for you with the suspension, and your wife getting sick, and whatever this thing is between you and Daneen. But don’t try to take it out on me. In case you forgot, we’re both on the same side, here. So you’d better start caring what I think, because when it all comes down to it, I’m your only link to the department—the same department that turned its back on you as soon as it needed a fall guy.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to question my judgment.”

  “If I question what you’re doing, it’s only because I’m trying to help you,” Wilson said. “That is what you asked me to do when you called me in on this, isn’t it? Or did you forget that, too?”

  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 fe
eling 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 wha
t he had read.

  Chapter Seventeen

  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.”