Two Graves Dug

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Over there,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the northeast corner of the building; and as I walked toward the edge of the roof, the wind suddenly picked up and smacked me in the face with a hard, frigid hand. My eyes watered and I wasn’t certain it was because of the force of the cold air.

  “Did the police check for footprints, scuff marks, that kind of thing?”

  “Yeah,” Griffin said nodding. “They did all that. Took pictures, picked up pieces of gravel, took measurements.” He shrugged. “I don’t think they found anything.”

  I didn’t think so, either. The girl was dead before she was thrown from the roof, so there’d have been no need for a struggle. But in the interest of thoroughness, I stepped to the edge of the roof and looked out, then down. I tried to imagine a little girl’s brown and broken body on the pavement below and found that the imagining made me dizzy. I stepped quickly back and turned to catch Basil Griffin watching me.

  “Why you say you won’t find who did this?”

  “I’m not a cop, Mr. Griffin. If I do anything that gets in the way of an official police investigation, I could lose my license. And I can’t risk that.”

  “So what can you do?”

  “I can try to find out what the police know that they haven’t told the families. I know that the police believe that divulging too much information too soon can jeopardize an investigation. But I also believe that victims deserve as much information and truth as possible.”

  Basil Griffin harrumphed. Really and truly harrumphed like some fat British guy in one of those high-brow BBC or PBS program. I was impressed with the sound he made, if not with its intent. “They deserve more than that,” he said, not attempting to conceal his contempt.

  “I agree,” I said. “I just don’t know how I can give them more than that.”

  “You can find the evil bastard who’s hurting little girls,” Griffin said, and turned and walked away, leaving me to follow him down from the roof.

  I called out to him. He stopped and turned back to face me. “I’d like to talk to the other guys—Boggs and Lopez and Jenkins. Is that all right with you?”

  He gave me a look I couldn’t read. “I can’t stop you, can I?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “But this your building and it’s not right to enter another man’s house without first knocking on the door.”

  He gave me another look, and this one I read loudly and clearly. It nailed me to the wall, and not with gentle, pain-free suction cups. I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. “You think you got no right to find this...this monster. I think, Mr. Rodriquez, you got no right not to try.”

  “Can’t you find out things without the police having to know what you’re doing?” Yolanda clearly was on the side of the victims and Mr. Griffin, leaving me standing alone in the defense and protection of our mutual livelihood. “After all, you were one of them. You know how they operate. You should know how to operate around them.”

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t operate around them, I said I couldn’t get in their way.” And to demonstrate my intentions, I brandished the piece of paper on which Basil Griffin had written the names, addresses and social security numbers of his three assistants, and I added his name to the list before passing it on to Yolanda. “As soon as you get a chance,” I said.

  She was edgy and tense and I kept asking her what was bothering her. After the third time, when she almost bit my head off, I stopped asking. I also stopped talking to her. I went to my desk, retrieved my notebook, and began logging all my impressions of Basil Griffin, of the building, and all the things he told me. Then I read the pile of information Yolanda had collected for me from her computers. Some of it chronicled local cases, but a good bit of it detailed serial assaults and murders of young girls in other parts of the country. That this should be so common an occurrence as to produce so much information was frightening and sickening. That’s what I was thinking and feeling when I realized that Yo was standing at the corner of the desk. I looked up at her and almost reached out to grab her. She looked sick and weak. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “They knew him,” she said quietly. “Those little girls. Whoever is doing this is someone they knew.”

  I nodded. Either that or they thought they had reason to trust him. I’d skimmed an FBI profile in the material Yolanda had prepared and it suggested the same thing.

  “And he’s still around, Phil. He’ll do it again.” Something in her voice, some sad and ugly thing that I’d never heard before, raised me to my feet. I reached for her but instead of allowing the embrace, she gave me a piece of paper. My itinerary for the next three days: All day tomorrow at NYU doing the security audit; three appointments the following day for a new client—a big east side limousine service instituting a policy of background checks on all its employees following the robbery of several customers by drivers; and appointments the day after that with the principals of the schools attended by the five rape victims.

  I opened my mouth to thank Yolanda, to tell her how much I appreciated what a masterful job was doing working this case, but she wrapped her arms around herself, shivered, and walked away, returned to her world behind the Shoji screens. So much for partnership. And so much for sitting around feeling like a useless piece of shit.

  I was out the door and headed toward Arlene Edwards’ restaurant without a well-formed idea or a concrete plan. I was fueled by mad. And hunger. I was so pissed off at Yolanda that I’d gotten all the way inside the El Caribe, had straddled a stool at the counter, and was being stared at by Arlene’s youngest son, Bradley, before I knew what I was doing.

  “What’s up, Mon? You look knackered.”

  “Well, good, Bradley, ‘cause that’s how I feel. I’m also hungry.”

  “That part I can fix. The other part, you’re on your own, Mon,” he said with a wide grin, the resemblance to his mother startling in that moment. He also, in that moment, looked markedly younger than eighteen.

  “I’d like to talk to your mother, too, if she’s free,” I said, looking around and realizing that it wasn’t often that Arlene Edwards wasn’t visible in her establishment. She no longer did the cooking, though she supervised it; and she no longer ran the day-to-day operation—that was a job that Bradley shared with his two-years-older sister Sarah, until they both completed their studies at Hunter College.

  He nodded and a mantle of sadness settled around him like a shawl. “She’s in the office. She just sits there, staring at her menus and recipes and at photographs of home.” He sighed deeply, like an old, weary person. “Come on. I know she’ll want to see you.”

  I slid off the stool and followed him through what I now noticed was a crowded dining room. Every table was occupied as were most of the stools at the counter. Two waitresses were delivering trays of food-laden plates to the tables and when I passed close by one of them, my stomach rumbled at the scent. I followed Bradley through the kitchen and thought I’d faint at the sensory overload.

  He knocked on the door marked OFFICE and though I didn’t hear anything from within, he turned the knob and opened the door. “Phil Rodriquez is here to see you, Ma. And he’s stayin’ for lunch. Why don’t you eat somethin’ with him?” His voice was gentle and persuasive and, as I followed him into the office where she was seated at an old roll-top desk, I saw her look up and smile gently at him.

  “I’m not so hungry, Son,” she said to him. And to me, “Hello, Phillip. I’m glad you came. I was going to call you later.”

  I walked over to her and did something I’d never done before: I took her hands, leaned down and kissed her cheek. She gripped my hands and held them tightly for several seconds before releasing them.

  “Maybe I’ll eat some peas and rice, Bradley,” she said to her son. “And you know how Phillip eats: put everything on the stove on his plate.”

  We all smiled real smiles, brief though they were, and Bradley left, closing the door. I sat down in an old-fashioned wooden swive
l chair that was the mate to the one occupied by Arlene. I leaned back too far and felt as if I would tip over backwards. I quickly righted and composed myself, but she hadn’t noticed my tilt. She was shuffling a thick pile of papers—menus and recipes, Bradley had said.

  I watched her and waited for her to be ready to talk. I wanted her to hurry because she was in so much pain I felt its weight. Her dead granddaughter... her murdered granddaughter...her only grandchild...was the child of Arlene’s oldest daughter, Sylvia, who was a physician’s assistant with a private practice in Brooklyn Heights. Looking at Arlene, I couldn’t imagine what condition Sylvia was in. I’d met her once, when Yolanda and I were having dinner at El Caribe. It was when Sarah’d had her appendix out, two years ago, and Sylvia was pulling her shift at the restaurant. Present too, that day was Norman, Arlene’s eldest son, and a bright little sprite named Anna who seemed to be everywhere at once. Two boys, two girls, and all of them so devoted to their mother— and to each other and to the first and so far only next generation child in the family—that he couldn’t imagine being in the same room with all of them present. The grief would be paralyzing.

  “Arlene.”

  She raised her eyes to mine and I thought, as I did every time I saw her, what a magnificent woman she was. She always reminded me of the actress who had played James Earl Jones’ love interest in a short-lived television series a few years back. Gabriel something-or-other was the name of it, and like most of the really good stuff on television, it didn’t last. What was the name of that actress...she’d died a few years back...Madge Sinclair!

  “Basil Griffin told me you were at the building. You could have talked to Sylvia and Erroll.”

  I shook my head. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to the parents of another murdered child. I had no choice but to talk to Bert and Angie Calle—there was no buffer. But I could and would avoid talking to Sylvia and Erroll Cummerbatch by talking to Arlene Edwards. “Tell me about her,” I said, and settled back into the chair, though not too far back, to wait for her to talk. I figured she’d need a while. She surprised me.

  “She was an absolute delight, that child,” she said, a delightful smile lighting her face. “Happy, playful, bright, funny. She was named for me. Did you know that? Anna Arlene. And she never caused a moment’s trouble. Came home from school on time every day and went right to her desk to do her homework. That’s why Sylvia knew immediately that something was wrong that day. She didn’t run to meet her at the door. She hadn’t been home at all, you see.” She ran out of breath, words and energy at the same time.

  “When and where was the last time she was seen, Arlene, and was she behaving according to her routine?”

  She nodded her head vigorously. “Yes! She left the school with the same friends she walks home with every day.”

  I wrote down their names and streets where they lived. I also wrote down the name of the woman who met her own daughter at the corner every day and who’d seen Anna Arlene that day, had watched her turn the corner and head home, her door key in her hand. The child had gotten to the corner of the block where she lived, safe and sound. Then what happened? Did somebody follow her in? Was somebody already inside, waiting? Who else was on the sidewalk in front of that building who might have seen, who might remember? Before I could ask, a knock on the door heralded the arrival of food. Bradley, the tray hoisted over his shoulder and balanced on one hand like a pro, entered cautiously, then relaxed when he saw that his mother was composed and that our conversation was calm. He lowered the tray and rested one side of it on his mother’s desk and balanced it on his raised knee. He placed a plate of steaming pigeon peas and rice before his mother and another before me. Before me he also placed a plate heaped with curried chicken and curried goat, and side dishes of fried plantain, meat pies, and spicy greens. From his back pocket he removed napkin-wrapped utensils for both of us.

  “I’ll bring you something to drink in a little while. It’s really packed, Ma. And people want to know how you are,” he said almost shyly.

  “Tell them I’m grateful for their concern, Bradley, and that I’ll be out to the dining room shortly.”

  I’d already unwrapped my silverware and laid my napkin in my lap before Bradley got the door closed, and I had a fork full of curried chicken aimed for my mouth when Arlene stopped me with a look. I waited, food suspended mid-air, to understand the reason for her expression. Then she bowed her head. Grace. I listened, said “amen” at the appropriate time, and began inhaling food.

  “This is the best island food in New York,” I said between chews and swallows, and it was. I’d been eating it for more than ten years. “But I can tell you didn’t cook it.” I knew that would elicit a reaction from her.

  She stopped chewing and raised an eyebrow. “And how can you tell that, Sir?” Her tone was polite but she’d left plenty of room for annoyance if she didn’t like the answer.

  “This is cooked by recipe. And it’s wonderful. Don’t get me wrong. But when you were doing the cooking, Arlene, it was cooked by instinct. The spices varied, the cooking times varied, and you always experimented. I remember the time you sautéed some beef jerky in coconut milk and ginger just to see how it would turn out. And it wasn’t too bad!”

  She laughed a real laugh and let it ring out for a while. It was a beautiful sound, but it hurt my heart and made my eyes sting and I had to fake choking to get my napkin up to my face.

  “I’m glad you came to see me, Phillip,” she said when she’d stopped laughing. “You’re a good man, but your memory is not so good. It was coconut milk and coriander and it was terrible!”

  Yolanda remained edgy and distant over the next several days, but she was very pleased with my work for NYU and for the limousine service, the owner of which had written a healthy retainer check and promised enough steady business to keep Eddie Ortiz and Mike Smith busy a least a couple of days a week, right through until the first of the year. I felt pretty good about things, too, which was, as Yo would say, a growth step for me since both those jobs had taken me away from my morning routine for more than a week.

  I was back on it this morning, however, walking my route despite the steady, cold downpour that had stalled vehicular traffic and created an umbrella traffic jam on the sidewalks. Neither snow nor sleet nor rain...Mrs. Campos and Willie One Eye were their usual cordial selves. They’d missed my daily visits, they said, but not only understood the call of duty, were happy for me that it was business that had kept me away. These people, too, were proprietors of their own businesses. So was Itchy Johnson, but his reception was a different matter.

  He was flat out rude and inhospitable to me when I walked in. “Leave that raincoat and umbrella up there at the front,” he yelled at me. “Don’t want water drippin’ all over the damn floor.”

  I stopped unbuttoning my slicker and turned around, ready to head back out into the rain. The young barber in the chair closest to the door said, barely audibly, “Don’t mind him. He’s had his ass on his back the past few days. Been askin’ ‘bout you.” His lips had barely moved while he spoke and he had continued cutting zigzag patterns into the hair of a kid young enough to have been in school that time of the morning. He motioned toward the back with his head and I turned back toward Itchy and he was watching me. I finally unbuttoned the coat and hung it on the rack and stuck the dripping umbrella into the stand and made my way back to the back of the shop. Itchy was seated at his table and he thumped it with his fist when I reached him. An invitation to sit.

  “How are you, Itchy?” I asked, pulling out a chair.

  He grunted but didn’t utter words of greeting. Instead he said, “Seems like you been keeping yourself busy.”

  I nodded. “I have. We’ve got a full plate. A few new clients added to the old ones and all of them getting busy at the same time.”

  “Still taking that fat Wop’s ill-gotten money?”

  I almost stopped breathing. I’d never before heard Itchy use a racial epithet, but th
at’s not what surprised me. Most people, no matter their color or ethnicity, will stoop to maligning another group given the right circumstances; I’d known that all my life. What concerned me was that he seemed to be watching for a reaction from me. “Carmine is a client, yeah, Itchy,” I said carefully. Maybe too carefully.

  “So that means you’ve seen that Mason broad?”

  My scalp tingled and little bumps raised up all over my by body. This was different from the ‘Wop’ comment. This was more sinister than mean-spirited. “You mean Dr. Jill Mason?”

  “Yeah, I mean Dr. Jill Mason.” He spit the words out of his mouth in a not so charitable imitation of my tone.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen her lately,” I said, my antennae up and searching for I didn’t know what. I found out soon enough.

  “Well, good.” Itchy’s fist hit table a couple of times and he seemed relieved. “Didn’t make sense to me you jumpin’ in that girl’s business on that fat wop’s say-so. He oughta stay in his own damn neighborhood and mind his own damn business and you can do the smart thing: Take the fool’s money and run!” Itchy laughed and slapped his thigh, not realizing how widely he’d missed the mark. “Anyway,” he said, no trace of mirth remaining. “Everybody knows she’s been a few bricks shy of a full load since that accident. Come to think of it, she always was a little strange. Even when she was a little girl.”

  “I need to go, Itchy,” I said, hoping I was keeping my voice calm and my tone neutral. He was calling somebody strange? I passed the young barber and gave him a look. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling but kept on cutting. I put on my wet coat and retrieved my wet umbrella and stepped out into the rain. I hoped it would wash away the ugly feeling I’d gotten from Itchy.