Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work

by Michael Lister

  “Only exception was Cedric’s dad,” he said. “He was the least helpful in our investigation, and we didn’t turn up anything of Cedric’s at his place, in his car, nowhere.”

  “Okay?” Battle said. “That enough for you? Can we go back to fighting real crime now?”

  That afternoon, I drove out to Ellenwood, to Fairview Memorial Gardens, to Jordan’s plot near the stone statue of Saint Mark.

  It was a bright, clear day. I preferred the times it was raining when I visited.

  “Last time I was here I said I wasn’t coming back,” I said.

  Next to me, Saint Mark remained implacable, silent witness to my quandary and misery.

  “I thought I meant it, but . . . I’m having such a hard time letting go—of you, of what happened. I’m angry and embarrassed and . . . I just can’t . . . I haven’t been able to get over it all . . . over you . . . yet. And on top of everything else . . . that really bothers me. I should’ve been able to let go a long time ago, to . . . I don’t know.”

  I looked over at the bearded and robed apostle holding his tablet.

  “You ever seen anything like this? You’re not taking notes, are you?”

  Like Jordan, he didn’t respond.

  “Ever experience anything like this?” I asked him. “Ever have that stone heart of yours broken?”

  Still nothing.

  I looked back at Jordan’s headstone.

  “Eventually, I will stop doing this,” I said. “I’ll get better. I’ll heal. I’ll get over you. Just not today.”

  25

  Annie Mae Dozier was a small, gray-haired black woman with thick glasses above freckled cheeks. She wore a simple cotton sheath dress over her thin, narrow frame, and sank so far into the worn sheet-covered couch, a good portion of her wasn’t visible. Like everything else in the place, the blue and white dress was old and faded and looked like something from the sixties to me.

  Her apartment was even more modestly furnished than mine.

  “He was such a good boy,” she said, blinking behind her big glasses. “Smart. Sweet. He was my little buddy.”

  “He came over here a lot?” I asked.

  She nodded her shrunken head. “Fair amount, that’s a fact. Every time his no-good mama go down to the bar or have mens over . . . I’d hear a little tapatap on my door. He say, ‘Aunt Annie, you got any of them little cookies like I likes?’ I always did. I’d feed him, let him watch a video—he always had a video and his uncle gave me a VCR so he could watch ’em over here. He do that or color or both. He loved movies and loved to color. And he loved his Aunt Annie. And I loved him. He the closest thing to a grandchild I’a ever have. Only got one daughter and she ain’t able to have no youngins.”

  “Did he ever confide in you?” I asked.

  “Certainly. He get upset, this the first place he come. I talk to him. Rub his back. Directly he calm down and be back to his happy little self.”

  “What kinds of things upset him?” I asked.

  “Ima notta gonna lie. His whole life was upsetting. Yes sir, it was.”

  “Was he worried about anything? Scared of anything? Anybody bothering him leading up to his disappearance?”

  “He always worried ’bout somethin’. Mama like that . . . he never know she gonna hug him or hit him. Never know when he gonna eat again. No food in the house. Never know when them mens she have over gonna try to mess with him.”

  “Sexually, you mean?”

  She frowned and nodded. “Some came just for him. No interest in that old drunk. She pass out and they mess with little Cedric. I call the police, but they ain’t do nothin’ ’bout it. Then on, she have a man over, Cedric stay over here. I fix him up his own little room—well a corner of my daughter’s room. She was finishin’ up her schoolin’. Hardly ever here. Didn’t mind at all, no sir. She like Cedric. Everybody did. She done grown up and moved out now. She a pharmacist down to McDonough. So proud of that girl. Directly, I be movin’ down there with her. Help out. She make good money, that’s a fact.”

  “Did he mention anyone messing with him or anything he was worried about in the weeks leading up to his disappearance?” I asked.

  It was the same question phrased in a slightly different way. She hadn’t really answered it the first time.

  “No, sir. No more than usual. Nothin’ that stands out.”

  I started to say something, but her tired, old eyes opened wide and she held her bony-fingered hand up.

  “Wait just a minute there now,” she said. “Almost forgots about . . . Creepy bothered with him a bit more than usual ’round that time, I do believe.”

  “Creepy?”

  “That what the kids called him,” she said. “Real name was Daryl Lee Gibbons or Gibsons. Somethin’ like that. Creepy fit him, yes sir it most certainly did that. He wasn’t quite right in the head, eyes crossed, always staring after the kids. Big, fat, slow-movin’ white boy. Always creepin’ up on you. One minute he just there. In the shadows, gazing, licking his lips.”

  “What did he do to Cedric?”

  “Nothin’ far as I know, just followed him around like the rest of the kids, starin’, gruntin’, talkin’ gibberish. But I seem to recall him bein’ ’round more ’round that time. Cedric mentionin’ him followin’ him even more.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Creepy? Moved right after Cedric disappeared. Good riddance. No idea where he be at now. Just not here, thank God.”

  “What do you think happened to Cedric?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Somebody snatch him. Grab him up, take him away, do things to him, kill him and bury him in some woods somewhere. That what was happenin’ back then. Boys just like him—no one lookin’ out for ’em. Snatched. Strangled. Dumped. Gone. Forever.”

  “Do you remember a guy who used to live in Memorial Manor the kids called Creepy?” I asked.

  I had stopped by Second Chances after leaving Annie Mae’s and on my way to return my movies to Lonnie’s.

  “Not just the kids,” Camille Pollard said. “We all called Daryl Lee Gibbons that.”

  She was just as stylishly dressed and looked just as tired as when Mickey had introduced me to her.

  “Do you think he could’ve taken Cedric or the other kids?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it crossed my mind, but . . . Daryl Lee just seemed too slow—mentally and physically, too simple. Seemed to me more like he wanted to be a kid, or thought he was, than wanted to hurt one. Either way, I always kept my kids away from him. They were younger, of course, but . . . The thing is . . . I’ve always thought the killer—or killers, if there are two—are black. And not just ’cause they’d have a better chance of going unnoticed, but because . . . You familiar with the concept of self-hatred?”

  I nodded, finding it a bit difficult to take her seriously with her asymmetrical bob bobbing about.

  “For some people it runs very deep. Minorities, the poor, the marginalized and disenfranchised are culturally conditioned by the majority, the power structure, to hate themselves. It’s so entrenched, so deeply ingrained most don’t even know they do it.”

  She spoke with conviction, but it sounded like something she had heard or had read—perhaps in a college class or special lecture on race and culture she had attended.

  “But you can’t be oppressed and tortured and told that it’s your fault and you’re worthless and it not have an effect on you,” she continued. “You can’t be poor and without possibilities when everyone else has plenty, and plenty more coming—all while they’re telling you the reason you don’t have more and don’t do better is because you’re slow and stupid and lazy and ignorant and criminal and—without it causing you to start to believe it yourself. Think about a kid in a family being told that he’s less than. He grows up believing it. If he’s also told that or made to feel that way by a teacher, he believes it even more. But what if everywhere you look, everything you hear, every single thread sewn into the fabric of your life, of life its
elf, was telling you that you and your family and your kin and kind are inferior, less than—not just a nigger, but a nigger for a reason. Women are told it. Jews are told it. So many are told it. But no one is told it like black people in America. I’ve always thought the killer was a self-hating black person.”

  I thought about it—about how this black woman who was dating a white man and had straightened her hair and dressed and spoke in a way many would describe as white, was speaking so eloquently of self-hating black people.

  “But,” she added, “we did mention Creepy to the police back then—both when Jamal and Cedric went missing. Don’t know what they did about it. Then he vanished too. One day he was here. The next he was gone. Nobody knew where he went.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  “Let me tell you a dirty little secret,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  As usual, her shop was empty, but she still lowered her voice.

  “All the kids who got snatched back then . . . all those poor missing and murdered children . . . went missing and got murdered ’cause nobody was watching them like they should.”

  Blame the victim, I thought. It’s what Job’s so-called friends did. It’s what far too many people do. Who’s practicing self-hating now?

  “I’m not sayin’ they should’ve been taken or killed, just that if they were where they were supposed to be and being watched like they should’ve been, it wouldn’t’ve happened.”

  I remember hearing Wayne Williams say something just like that.

  “But Cedric’s is a special case. His mom’s the worst. Sorry as the day is long. So what if she had a rough childhood. So what if she been abused or mistreated or . . . whatever. It’s no excuse. It’s no reason to . . . be like she was with her boy. She’s as self-hating as anyone I’ve ever seen—and not without reason. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if she didn’t kill her own boy.”

  “What can you tell me about Daryl Lee Gibbons?” I said.

  Lonnie frowned, shook his head, and looked down.

  I waited.

  “How’d you find out?” he said.

  “Find out what?”

  “What I did. That’s not why you’re asking?”

  “His name came up. Just trying to find out what I can about him.”

  “He didn’t take Cedric,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because . . . I thought he did.”

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I beat that boy bad. Real bad. Back when Cedric went missing. Creepy was the first place I went. Searched his apartment. Questioned him. I was convinced he had taken Cedric. I was out of my mind with . . . I was real messed up. Convinced Creepy had hurt and killed him and buried him in the woods between here and the apartment complex. I beat him so bad I believed he’d’ve told me if he had done anything to my boy.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m ashamed of what I did, but I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again.”

  “I understand.”

  We were quiet a moment.

  “Did he report you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Have no idea why.”

  “Guilty people avoid the cops,” I said.

  “You think he . . . and I . . . let him go?”

  I shrugged. “Not saying that. Just that it might be a possibility. Or that he was guilty of something else.”

  “Or that his life was such shit he just expected treatment like that,” he said.

  I remembered the movies in my hand and set them on the counter.

  “Keep ’em. I know you ain’t watched ’em yet.”

  “You sure?”

  He nodded.

  “Thanks.”

  “Be good to see you back at a meeting,” he said.

  “I will be soon,” I said. “Soon as I can. It helped. I’m doin’ better. I’ll be back. Count on it.”

  “I will, then.”

  “I hear Daryl Lee just disappeared,” I said. “Here one day. Gone the next. Do you know why or where he went?”

  He shook his head. “No idea. Hope it wasn’t ’cause of what I did to him or, even more so, because of something he did and I let him go, but . . . it was around that same time.”

  “Sorry to have to ask this,” I began, then paused.

  “What?”

  “Your sister.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t hold back. Finding Cedric is all that matters—and I know how she . . . what a mess she is.”

  “I think she’s lying,” I said.

  “She definitely is,” he said. “It just has nothing to do with Cedric’s disappearance—least not that I could ever find. She’s lying about where she was and when she finally made it to the bar because she was scoring some dope or turnin’ a trick. Probably is indirectly why Cedric got snatched—’cause she wasn’t tendin’ to him—but I never found anything to say she was directly involved. And believe me I looked. And if I had, I wouldn’t cover it up. She had her chance to grow up and become something, to change and be better, and she didn’t. Cedric didn’t get his.”

  “You got yours and you took it,” I said. “And AA is a big part of it, isn’t it?”

  “The biggest. Ada is lost. Nothin’ I can do about that. But Cedric . . . I was gonna make sure he made it out, made something of himself. I was gonna . . . He was gonna have a good life.”

  26

  Mickey Davis and I were at the Varsity to see Cedric Porter, Sr.

  It was late, and the world’s largest drive-in was mostly empty, its large rooms vacant, its tables in need of bussing.

  We had arrived a little earlier than planned, and it would be another half hour or so until Cedric Sr. finished his shift. And though we hadn’t come to eat, since we were here with a little extra time on our hands we agreed we’d be fools not to.

  “What’ll you have?” the large African-American woman behind the counter asked.

  She wore a red shirt, white apron, a red Varsity paper hat, and the weariness of a woman needing a break from her life.

  I had a cheeseburger, fries, a fried apple pie, and a Coke. Mickey had a couple of chili cheese dogs, onion rings, and a Frosted Orange.

  While we waited, I read a few statistics about this unique place from a plaque on the wall. It’s the world’s largest single outlet for Coke. It can hold six hundred cars and eight hundred people. Every single day it serves more than two miles of hotdogs, one ton of onion rings, five thousand fried pies, and twenty-five hundred pounds of potatoes. On Georgia Tech game days some thirty thousand people come here to eat.

  I thought about Rudy’s little roadside diner in Pottersville and said aloud, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  “No we’re not,” Mickey said.

  We carried our red trays of food up some stairs and into one of the empty rooms, and ate the way men do when women aren’t around.

  That thought made me miss Summer and long to be with her in my bed again soon.

  “Guess who’s got a record?” Mickey asked, his soft voice hard to hear in the empty, open space of the room.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Creepy Gibbons. Took less than ten minutes and two calls to turn up.”

  I hadn’t mentioned Daryl Lee to him. Camille must have.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “A little L and L.”

  He had started making a little more eye contact with me, but only a little. He still mostly had the eyes of a shy and insecure child.

  Lewd and lascivious acts are any touches to the genitals, breasts, or butt of a minor—clothed or not.

  “No details yet,” he said. “Have no idea what he did, where, or when, but should know tomorrow.”

  What if he was responsible for what happened to Cedric and the others? What if that’s why he moved right after? What if the murders didn’t stop, just changed locations? What if he was missed somehow in the original investigatio
n?

  Eventually, Cedric Porter, Sr. joined us.

  He was still wearing his red paper hat and white apron. The apron was soiled with grease and smeared with ketchup—which looked like dirt and bloodstains.

  Beneath his paper hat, he was bald, his large head smooth and gleaming. Below it, the rest of his body was big and round like his head.

  “Tired and ready to go home,” he said as he collapsed into the booth with us. “What this about?”

  “Cedric, Jr.,” I said.

  “What about him?” he asked, defensive. “Whatta two white boys got to do with a missin’ black boy?”

  “We’re tryin’ to find him,” I said. “Reinvestigating his case along with some other similar ones.”

  “Coulda save you a trip,” he said. “Never had nothin’ to do with that boy. Didn’t take ’im. Don’t have ’im. Don’t know nothin’ about who did.”

  Not quite sure what to say to that, we were all quiet a moment.

  I glanced over at Mickey. He shrugged. He had yet to offer anything to the conversation. Why start now?

  “Look,” Cedric said. “His mama crazy. Okay? She gave that kid my name ’cause she wanted to give him a name other than her own. He wasn’t my kid. I got kids. I take care of ’em. Why I work this lame-ass job. Why I’m too tired to talk about this shit. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with him ’cause he wasn’t mine and his mama a crazy-ass bitch tryin’ to run a con on me. That’s it. That’s all I know.”

  He began pushing his enormous girth up out of the booth, the table and bench creaking from the strain.

  “One more question,” I said.

  “If it quick,” he said, standing over us now.

  “Do you have any idea who his actual father was?”

  “No. Not really. Lots of candidates. Why?”

  “Because,” I said, “maybe that’s who took him.”

  27

  All day I had hoped to hear from Summer.

  Since I had no way of getting in touch with her, no idea where she lived or what her number was, my only option was to wait and hope to hear from her.