The Bridge: A Novel

by Solomon Jones

  “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 ti
me 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.

  She was tired of the secrets and lies that, for years, had helped her to maintain her sanity. She was tired of pretending that the truth didn’t exist.

  “Are you all right?” Wilson asked.

  Daneen nodded.

  “Do you want a lawyer?”

  “I ain’t do nothin’, so what I need a lawyer for?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilson said. “But I do need to know why you won’t tell me the truth.”

  Daneen breathed in deep, steeling herself for what she was about to do.

  “I guess it been so long since I took the truth out and looked at it, I don’t even know what it look like no more. I just know it hurt.”

  “What’s so painful about the truth, Daneen?”

  “Same thing that’s painful about it for everybody else,” she said. “Truth don’t dress up. It just stand there smilin’ through them raggedy-ass teeth, lookin’ at you like you crazy for callin’ it ugly.”

  Daneen began to play with her hands, nervously pulling her fingers out of the sockets and causing her knuckles to crack.

  “Truth was when my mom died and we had to come up in Judy house with nobody to look out for us. I guess that’s what made me and Darnell so close. It’s what made us look out for each other. See, if I was around, couldn’t nobody mess with my big brother. Not even Judy. I remember the first time she tried to give him a spankin’ for stickin’ his hand in a socket. I stepped in the middle, little as I was, like I was gon’ do somethin’ about it.”

  Daneen smiled. “She whupped us both that day.”

  “But it wasn’t all pain. It was plenty o’ days when me and Darnell had all the fun in the world. We would push each other on the one Big Wheel we had between us. We would race up and down the sidewalks with our shoes off. We would hide in the closet and act like we was campin’ out in the woods somewhere. When I got my first little boyfriend—I guess I musta been about nine—I kissed Darnell to see if I knew how to do it right.

  “I guess it was around that time shit started gettin’ ugly. Sonny was around—had been around for a while, to tell you the truth. And so was a lot o’ his boys. Uncle this and Mister that. I don’t remember half they names. I just remember a lot of ’em used to be drunk all the time. They would come in and sit around, lookin’ at me, and lookin’ at Judy. I think I even caught a couple of ’em lookin’ at Darnell. Course none o’ that mattered to Judy. She just wanted Sonny to keep bringin’ home money. And that’s what he did. He brought home money. But it’s always a cost to that, ain’t it? Like Judy used to tell me, ain’t nothin’ in this world free.

  “Sonny cost us. Not that he was all that bad. He wasn’t. It’s just that it felt like, once he came around, we was left to raise ourselves. After while, I started runnin’ away to get Judy attention. But all that did was make it worse.

  “I still remember the last time I ran away,” Daneen said, breathing heavily. “I ended up down the basement, hidin’ and tryin’ to figure out where I was gon’ go next. It was dark down there, and hot. Plus I thought I heard rats scurryin’. I started cryin’ cause I was scared, and then I started runnin’ toward the door.

  “Somebody grabbed me. I tried to scream, but he put his hand over my mouth. Then he tripped me and threw me down on the floor. He pulled my shorts and my panties down, and then …”

  The tears began to run down Daneen’s face.

  “I was nine years old,” she said. “Same as Kenya is now. I came home all bloody, with my elbows all scraped from tryin’ to fight my way off that cement floor. I told Judy what happened.”

  Daneen’s voice caught in her throat. Wilson reached out and held her hand. When Daneen finally gathered herself, she continued.

  “She ain’t take me to the hospital or to the cops or nothin’ like that. She just said, ’That’s what your dumb ass get. I bet you won’t run away no more.’

  “That’s when I knew I hated Judy,” Daneen said. “But she ain’t the only one I hated. I hated that guy who raped me, too. And even if I couldn’t see his face in the dark, I knew one thing. I was gon’ find out who he was, and his ass was gon’ pay for what he did to me.”

  “Did you ever find out?” Wilson asked.

  “Yeah, I found out,” Daneen said. “But it wasn’t ’til eight years later.”

  Daneen paused.

  “That’s when he raped me again,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “Nine months after that, I had Kenya.”

  Bayot was afraid. Being in a police station for the first time in his life made him feel like he’d done something wrong.

  The two white detectives stood over him, staring down as he thumbed through the book of mug shots they’d had shipped down from Central detectives.

  “You see him yet?” the blond-haired detective asked.

  “I ain’t sure,” Bayot said.

  “Not sure, huh?” the detective said, jabbing his partner with his elbow. “I’m starting to think it was you in that elevator with her.”

  “What you mean?” Bayot said, looking up at him with a terrified expression.

  His brown-haired partner, smelling blood in the water, chimed in.

  “What were you doing on the stairway looking at a little girl on the elevator? What are you, some kind o’ child molester or something?”

  “What’s mo-les-ter?” Bayot asked, struggling to pronounce the word.

  “Oh, we got us a slow one here,” the blond detective said to his partner.

  Both detectives laug
hed. It was a harsh, humorless sound. It was meant to intimidate. And it accomplished its purpose.

  “Tell you what, Mister Learning Disabled,” the blond said. “Why don’t you do us a favor and take another look at the book.”

  “I don’t wanna look at it no more,” Bayot said, folding his arms and pouting like a little boy. “I wanna go home.”

  “Well, that’s just too bad. You’re not leaving here until you tell us who you saw with that girl. That’s if you saw anybody at all, because I think you’re lying.”

  “No I’m not,” Bayot said. “I ain’t lyin’. I seen him. He be up in Judy house. I know him, too, ’cause he always be tryin’ to act like my friend when I see him up there.”

  “Well, if you’re not lying,” the brown-haired detective said, “then why don’t you show him to us in the book?”

  Bayot looked from one detective to the other, then reached for the book and flipped quickly through the pages. He was sure that he would spot the man he’d seen. But then he flipped the last page, and there was nothing.

  “Lemme look at it again,” Bayot said.

  “Go ahead, we’ve got all night.”

  Bayot went back through the book again, more slowly this time, and when he got to the page where Sonny was pictured, the blond-haired detective placed his hand on the book.

  “I want you to look at this page very closely,” he said. “There’s two pictures there, and I think one of them might be the man you saw.”

  Bayot stared up at the detective, searching his eyes for approval, then looked at his partner, who nodded to indicate that he wanted Bayot to take another look.

  He buried his nose in the page for a moment, then sat up and pointed to the man on the left.

  “Are you sure that’s him?” the brown-haired detective asked. “Because it would be okay if you weren’t sure.”

  Bayot looked up at him, confused.

  “You’re not sure, are you?” his partner asked. “What about the other one? Do you think it could be the other one?”

  Bayot looked at the opposite page, and moved his finger until it was pointing to the man pictured there. He looked up at the detectives again.