A Visible Darkness

by Jonathon King

  I turned back to him.

  “That’s real philosophical, Vince.”

  “Hey,” he shrugged. “I’m Cuban. I know women.”

  We took Diaz’s SUV, the new equivalent to the old unmarked four-door Crown Victoria that used to scream “cop” to any criminal with a brain. The advantage in South Florida was that there were so many SUVs on the road they could blend in most of the time. But we still got second looks from the people hanging on the streets in the northwest zone.

  “I wasn’t so sure about Richards myself when Hammonds made us partner up,” he started in again. “Then one night we’re doing a job on this place the kids called a satanic worship site in this old shut-down trash incinerator. I tell her to wait outside while I check out this big empty furnace room. Inside it gets this weird red glow when you put the flashlight on and I’m checking this pile of melted candles and BOOM! Some fucking psycho drops out of the ceiling on me. Big, strong guy got a fucking tire iron, man. I’m going oh shit and the next thing I hear is Richards screaming, ‘Freeze it up, asshole!’ ”

  I was trying not to grin at the scene in my head. Richards saving Diaz’s ass. So I stared straight ahead and let him finish.

  “She’s got the barrel of her 9mm screwed into this guy’s ear and I believed her, man. I think she would have done the guy.”

  “You ease up on her after that?”

  “Sure, you see how nice I am now,” he said, smiling. “I’m just warning you, man.”

  Diaz slowed and crawled, almost royally, down the street that was considered the Brown Man’s territory. Two middle-aged men walking with a bag of groceries watched us pass, not stopping but turning their heads to follow our taillights, looking to see if anything was going to happen.

  “So we think this cat is a junkie, right?” Diaz said. “Shouldn’t be too hard to pick out if he’s as big as that report says.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe? Hell, guy like that everybody notices, man.”

  He pulled even to the Brown Man’s stool, but the dealer refused to look up. Catching me off guard, Diaz hit the power button and rolled down my passenger-side window.

  “Yo, Carlyle. Was up?” Diaz yelled, leaning forward to look out my window.

  Again, the Brown Man didn’t move his head, but his eyes did and when he saw me, he gathered the moisture in his cheek and spat in the gutter.

  Diaz laughed and moved on.

  “Look, Detective. I know this is your turf, but maybe it’d be a good idea if we tried to be a little less conspicuous,” I said. “My sense of this Baines guy is that he moves a lot on the side streets, out of the main flow.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Diaz said. “How ’bout we stop and get some coffee and then cruise over by his place. Maybe he’s hanging around the perimeter of his momma’s.”

  Diaz pulled into a market he called the “Stop and Rob” and I got two sixteen-ounce cups for myself and held one between my feet while sipping from the other. We drove in silence. I kept my window down, watching the sides of the streets, the activity between houses and businesses and the shadows cast by the high-density security lights in parking lots.

  My old partner in Philadelphia had a habit of trying to educate me with his eclectic reading. Whenever we cruised west Philly and the hard streets were quiet, he would quote from historian Will Durant: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.”

  My partner said that was why historians were pessimists. Historians and cops, I thought. I was starting to believe that Eddie Baines’s life went on even further back from the banks, hidden back behind the tree line. And he only came into the stream to feed at its edges.

  Diaz took the alleys, his headlights off, the yellow glow of his running lights spraying dull out on the garbage cans and hedges and slat fences. When we got to the block before Baines’s mother’s house, he stopped and pulled the SUV along the swale. From here we could see both down the alley behind the house and a piece of the street in front. I finished my first cup.

  “How could somebody do that to their own mother?” Diaz said. “You know, in the Cuban culture, respect for the one who brought you into this world is an unspoken rule. You learn it as a child. And you don’t forget. That’s what holds us together, man, you know?”

  Diaz was that kind of surveillance cop. A talker. It was the only way he could fill the long hours. I didn’t mind. I’d had other partners who were the same. It was like background noise. He talked and watched. I sipped and watched.

  “My own mother came to Miami on one of the first freedom flights in 1965. Only a girl. She had to leave my grandmother behind to the jackal Fidel,” he said, snickering. “That’s what she always called him, my mother.

  “She got married over here, to another Cuban refugee, but my father was never the strong one. She was the one who learned English, got us to school, made sure we were fed, practically pushed my sister through the doors of the University of Miami.”

  While he talked, I thought of my own mother sitting with her rosary, the Catholic habit she couldn’t give up, and how she never again slept in the bedroom she shared with my father before his death. She took my old room.

  At the policeman’s funeral she was silent and dressed in black. And when they presented her with a flag, still not a tear fell from her cheek. She sat at our kitchen table during the traditional family gathering afterward, as relatives moved in and out of her house, eating pastas and meatballs and cheesecakes from Antonio’s Bakery.

  The men, most of them cops, gathered in the backyard, quietly guffawing, beers in their hands despite the March chill. My uncle Keith would come in and rub his palms together and ask her if he could get her anything, and she would look only him in the eye and turn the rosary over in her hands and shake her head.

  After they all left she rarely saw them again. When I would come on Sunday morning to drive her to First Methodist, she would still be at the table, dressed warmly, watching the dust float in the stream of early light flowing through the back window.

  The only times I remember any part of a smile coming to her face was when she and Billy’s mother would greet each other in the basement of the church. They would hug one another like sisters, holding hands, the contrast of my mother’s now pale and blue- veined hands wrapped in the wrinkled brown of her friend’s.

  Within two years she was diagnosed with cancer. I took her to the doctor’s and then to a clinic four times before she gave up. She simply said no more and refused to be taken from her house. Neighborhood women would bring her dishes to eat, try to sit by her side, but she would not confide in them.

  When my mother became too weak, Mrs. Manchester would come on the Broad Street subway from her home in North Philly, walking the last several blocks to the house. She would clean and cook and sit with my mother for hours, reading from the Bible. The relatives and neighbors accepted the black woman’s role in a house where they themselves were not invited by considering her a kind of nurse and housekeeper.

  For two more years my mother hung on. Near the end I would come each evening before my night shift started and make sure she had at least eaten something. A real nurse was visiting now, someone from hospice care. They had set up a morphine drip that my mother had refused at first, but then acquiesced to out of pure weakness. I would sit by the side of her bed, the same bed I had slept in through my childhood and teenage years, and massage her legs, the only place she would admit to having pain.

  She still recognized me, and when I would bring her hand up to my cheek she would say, “Maxey, forgive me.”

  And I would repeat that there was nothing for me to forgive.

  When she died the rest of the family was aghast when they found out that I wa
s honoring my mother’s wishes and having her cremated. She had fought through her duty to lay next to my father for too many years and did not want to do so for eternity.

  It was only after she passed that my uncle Keith took me aside and told me about the arsenic poisoning. The liver failure that my father had suffered could easily have been attributed to cirrhosis, even though the medical examiner had come up with an unnatural level of arsenic in his system. Being the nature of the police club, whose circle of influence included the M.E.’s and prosecutors and neighborhood politicos, that information had been quietly buried or simply ignored. It was the first time I had to admit to the benefits of the code of silence.

  “Nobody knows,” said my father’s only brother. “And nobody blames her for the bastard he was, God rest his soul.”

  Mrs. Manchester came to the funeral service, causing a whispering among the relatives and family friends who attended at the Methodist church. The old black woman sat in a back pew long after everyone else had gone. As I left, she rose and came up to me and held both of my hands and said, “God forgives.”

  It was well after midnight when Diaz called it quits.

  “We ain’t going to even see this junk man in the dark,” he said, turning down another alley. “I say we get Bravo shift to make sure they stop by the kitchen dumpsters in the morning, try to nab the guy diving for something to eat. The guy has to eat, no?”

  I talked him into taking another swing through the alley behind the Thompson house, on a gut feeling.

  “You’re talking about a psycho returning to the scene of the crime, Freeman, and we don’t even know for sure if this guy did the crime.”

  We were coming out of Ms. Thompson’s alley when Diaz flipped on his headlights and the beams caught the off-limits crew huddled on the opposite corner.

  “Fuck is this group of homeboys up late on a school night?” Diaz said.

  “Pull up,” I said.

  We stopped with my window facing the crew. The leader recognized me through the open window and took a step forward. Diaz was smart enough to keep his silence.

  “You teamin’ up wit the five-oh eh, G?” he said, looking past me to Diaz. “I thought you guys didn’t get along, you know, all that big- footin’ shit you see on the movies.”

  “I’ll assume you haven’t got anything,” I said, ignoring his act in front of Diaz.

  “We got our word out. I’ll call you, like I said. But you best answer quick.”

  I nodded and we moved on.

  “That your connection, Freeman? Crew of wannabes working way outside the action zone?”

  I didn’t turn my head.

  “Let’s call it a night, Detective. You’re probably right, you should turn that kitchen suggestion over to the daysiders.”

  29

  Eddie was under the I-95 overpass, tucked up as high on the concrete slope as he could get. His coat was wrapped tight around him and he was shivering.

  After Mr. Harold had given him two more hundred-dollar bills and promised he would meet him at the liquor store in three days, Eddie went to buy more drugs. He knew Mr. Harold would keep his promise. He hadn’t seemed mad at all that Ms. Thompson wasn’t dead, if that was true. Eddie had asked him if he should go again to her place on Thirty-second Avenue and Mr. Harold said no, he’d have to talk to someone else and find out what they should do. He had given him the money and even let Eddie get out of the parking lot before he started the Caprice and drove away.

  Eddie had started feeling better, was getting back to his routine, pushing his cart at night when he saw the blue-and-red lights flashing down the street near his momma’s house. He was coming down off a high and couldn’t figure out why the police cars were pointing at each other.

  From behind a hedge he watched them waving cars on when they slowed down to look. People that he recognized, neighbors of his mother, were standing near the cars, walking back and forth, asking the cops questions and then turning away in frustration. Ms. Emily was out there with her old robe and slippers on, her hair all standing up straight and stiff-like, her voice like his momma’s, all high and preachy.

  “Ain’t nobody in that house, I’m tellin’ y’all. Ms. Baines done left to go back up to Carolina to be with her people,” she was singing to one of the cops. “Y’all got us standin’ out here for nothin’, an’ I’m gonna miss my Survivor.”

  Eddie left after he heard his mother’s name used. He took the alleys and the back ways and stopped once behind the auto glass place to mix his last package of heroin. Before the sun came up he was here, under the bridge.

  Nearby, three homeless men were taking turns with a WILL WORK FOR FOOD, GOD BLESS YOU sign. Two would stay down under the bridge, sharing a bottle, while the third climbed up for handouts on the off ramp. When one man’s allotted time was done, they would switch. When they first saw Eddie curled up, they watched him carefully, eyeing his cart down below. But when they got brave and came close, Eddie unfolded himself and stared into their faces and they backed off and went on with their routine.

  Now, with the traffic humming and burring across the concrete above him and the full sun hot just a few feet away, he was cold.

  Maybe if he waited for the dark, he thought, maybe then he could be invisible again.

  After Diaz dropped me at the sheriff’s office, I spent the rest of the night sleeping in my truck, parked in a spot along the ocean- front. It was windless but I could still hear the surf sliding up on the wet sand. I was awake when the sky went from dark to gray to a green-blue blush, and then the sun rose like a bubble of wax. When it cleared the horizon it threw a trail of light crystals across the flat water.

  My cell phone rang at 7:00 A.M.

  “Sorry if I woke you at an inopportune time,” Billy said. “But I did manage to get some information and I wanted to pass it on while you were in the thick of things.”

  “You saw the news?”

  “The demise of Dr. Marshack seems particularly coincidental, and I know how much you despise that standard.”

  “So spill already,” I said, trying to rub my eyes into focus before realizing that there was a film of salt spread across my front window.

  “Dr. Marshack did indeed work at the prison at the same time as McCane. He left a year after McCane was bounced.”

  “Have you talked with our partner recently?” Billy asked.

  “I paged him,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “I’ll call his main office in Savannah, find out if he is still supposed to be on the job,” Billy said.

  When I filled him in on the way Eddie Baines was fleshing out, Billy went silent for an uncomfortable stretch.

  “Nothing to tie him to the deaths of our women?”

  “Nothing but a feeling, Billy. But we haven’t been able to talk with him yet. I’ll call you,” I said and punched the set off.

  The sun had gone white and the air in the cab was already thick and hot. I rolled up the window, kicked on the A.C. and went to find coffee.

  I was sitting at a sidewalk table at a beachfront café watching the early sunbathers make their trek to the sand when McCane called.

  “Hey, Freeman. I didn’t catch you loungin’ around in someone’s bed this morning getting’ a little on-the-job perk, did I?”

  I took a long drink of hot coffee, counted five cars rolling by on the avenue and waited until my jaw unclenched.

  “Freeman? You there, bud?”

  “You lose your beeper, McCane?” I finally answered.

  “Nope. Got it right here with, uh, three of your pages on it.”

  “You been on vacation?”

  “Matter of fact I was down to Miami,” he said, putting a southern “ah” on the end of the city’s name. “You ever been on that Miami Beach, Freeman? There is some kind of modelin’ show goin’ on down that way, bud. Girls out on the sidewalk with legs right up to their…”

  “Spare me, McCane,” I interrupted him. “You bother checking out the news up here?”

>   “Well now, I did see where our Mr. Marshack bought his. Didn’t pick up quite how in the papers, though. Kind of thing they tend to keep out, so’s they can narrow down the suspect field,” he said with a matter-of-fact tone in his voice. “But I suppose you got the inside story since you and your detective friend was there.”

  “You were watching?” I asked.

  “I was just rollin’ in. Was figurin’ on setting up a little morning surveillance, follow the guy to work since the night tail wasn’t getting me much.”

  “So you weren’t there overnight?”

  “Unfortunate,” he said. “Your friends got any suspects?”

  I didn’t answer, wondering who it was that McCane might be tailing now since the doctor was no longer available.

  “It might be a good idea if you and I get together and put some of these pieces together, McCane. If you’re not too busy, I’m thinking Mr. Manchester’s office this afternoon?”

  “All right, bud. I got a few errands to run. But why don’t ya’ll set it up and page me with a time.”

  After McCane hung up I sat finishing my coffee, and watched a girl across the street on rollerblades take an ugly tumble on the sidewalk. A few other morning walkers stopped to help her up and even from here I could see a bright pink oval of blood on the side of her knee that had been sandpapered off by the concrete. While the small commotion attracted attention I put my money under my empty cup and slipped away, watching carefully for any parked cars nearby, looking for a single man sitting in the driver’s seat.

  I was back in my truck, just easing into traffic when the phone rang again.

  “Freeman.”

  “Good morning. Heard you and Diaz had a wonderful time last night,” Richards said.

  “Yeah, a true conversationalist, that partner of yours,” I said.

  “If you haven’t had breakfast yet, can you meet me over at Lester’s?”