We had Chick-fil-A and Orange Juliuses and talked about murder.
“Been worried about you,” he said. “Was glad to get your call. Should’ve known it was for information on a case.”
“It was for the pleasure of your company,” I said. “Case info is only an added bonus.”
“Right.”
We ate in silence for a few moments.
Frank Morgan was a family friend. He had been involved in the original Atlanta Child Murders investigation and then on the task force. He was an honorable, decent man, a straitlaced straightedge who gave cops a good name, so square he was cool.
He had been better to me than anybody since I had been in Atlanta, and had become a kind of father figure since my relationship with my dad had become so strained.
“How are you?” he said. “Seriously.”
“I’ve been better. Not gonna lie.”
“Here’s the question. Do you believe you’ll be better again?”
“Not particularly, no.”
He nodded slowly, and looked as if I had confirmed something for him.
“How about you?” I said. “How are you?”
He shrugged. “I’m okay. Always tired. Not enough time in the day. Too many bills. Wife wants more.”
“Of?”
“Everything. Me. Money. Things. Time. Most days I’m a rat on a wheel.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s life. Whatcha gonna do? Thanks for asking.”
“Sorry I haven’t more.”
“You kiddin’? You’re the only one who ever does.”
We held each other’s gaze a moment, then nodded, then looked away, a little embarrassed.
We ate some more—just to be doing something.
A few students from the college came in, secured food, and sat at a table across the way. I waved.
“Think they think I’m your sugar daddy?” Frank asked.
“You did buy my lunch, but parole officer’s more likely.”
He nodded and smiled.
We were silent a moment, and I could tell he was working his way up to telling me something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Not gonna be easy to hear,” he said. “Need you to prepare yourself for . . . some bad news.”
“I’ve already had the worst,” I said. “Promise this will pale in comparison.”
“Martin Fisher’s mother,” he said.
Martin Fisher, who had been like a son to me in many ways, was a speech-impaired latchkey kid who had latched on to me while were both living at Trade Winds. I had found him dead in my room less than a month ago.
“She’s been pressing for charges to be brought against you,” he said. “Claiming all sorts of horrible things about you.”
Simultaneously, my stomach soured and tears stung my eyes.
“I’ve been keeping it from you,” he said. “Trying to let you heal up—and because I knew nothing would come of it. I was making sure of that. But . . .”
“But what?” I said. “Charges are being filed after all?”
“No. But when she found out they weren’t, she went out and found herself a lawyer. She plans to bring a civil suit against you.”
“What’s she gonna take? My VCR?”
“I’m working on it,” he said. “But I need you to do something for me. Stay way from the mom. Keep clear of Trade Winds. Don’t say or do anything about the case. And don’t visit Martin’s grave. Can you do that?”
I nodded.
“We’ll get it straightened out. I promise. Just be smart and lay low. Let me take care of it.”
“Thank you, Frank. I . . . really . . . Thank you.”
“Sorry to be the one to break such bad news,” he said. “Ruined your lunch, didn’t I?”
“It’s okay.”
“You wanna just forget about Cedric Porter?” he said.
“Whatta you think?”
He smiled, and sliding the file folder beside him across the table to me said, “Cedric Porter. Didn’t make the list because he never went from missing to murdered.”
“But Darron Glass did,” I said.
“Don’t get me started on that damn list. Why Glass and not Porter? I have not a clue.”
I nodded and opened the folder.
“You know in most missing kids cases—especially those who don’t turn up—a family member took them. I’m not saying Cedric isn’t one of Williams’s that wasn’t found, just that it’s more likely a family member saw what a shitty mom he had and tried to give him a better life.”
“‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’”
“What’s that? I know that one. I’ve read it.”
“Last line of The Sun Also Rises,” I said.
“Right. Hemingway. I should’ve gotten that one. Thing is . . . we looked at all the family. The mother . . . what’s her name? Ada? And the brother, guy who has the video store . . . Lonnie. They both passed a polygraph. Had nothing to do with the kid’s disappearance. The father, Cedric Porter, Sr., wasn’t as cooperative. Wasn’t in the picture. He and Ada never married, never lived together. I’m not sure they were ever really together for any length of time. Maybe only long enough to . . . conceive Cedric. He wouldn’t agree to take a polygraph, but we looked at him pretty hard and never turned up anything.”
Ada and Lonnie passing the polygraphs made me recall how Wayne Williams had failed not one but multiple.
“The mom claims he still calls her,” I said.
“Really? Maybe he does. Doesn’t say where he is or why he left?”
“From what I’ve been told just that’s he’s okay but can’t come back.”
“I think that would be best-case scenario,” he said. “Maybe it’s true.”
“Best-case occasionally is.”
“Check out Mr. Optimistic.”
I smiled as I checked the date Cedric went missing and tried to recall enough to compare it to the dates of the victims on the task force list.
“The timing fits,” I said. “He could’ve been a victim of one of the Atlanta Child Murderers.”
“Murderers?”
I nodded.
“Could be,” he said. “You think the mom is faking the calls? Think she’s crazy or hiding something?”
“I intend to find out.”
“Of course you do, and I would discourage you, but it might be just the thing you need to bring you back and take your mind off all this other shit.”
“Too bad Bobby Battle’s not here. He’d damn sure discourage it.”
“I invited him, but . . .”
“He still blame me for the death of one of his brothers in blue?”
“Him and every other cop. Do yourself a favor and don’t get pulled over.”
Something inside me sank—though I thought everything was already as low as it could go.
Suddenly Frank’s eyes grew wide at something he was seeing over my shoulder and he said, “Oh shit.”
Chapter Nine
“What is it?” I asked, turning to look.
“See that guy in the white silk outfit?”
Just outside an Afrocentric men’s clothing store, a large black man in white slacks, shoes, and short-sleeved shirt stood talking to a smaller white man in all black. Unlike the unadorned white guy in black, the black man in white wore a white pimp hat with a red feather in it, an enormous gold chain, and leaned a little on a red-handled wooden cane.
“Yeah?”
“That’s Tyrone Jedediah Johnson.”
“He looks like a Tyrone Jedediah Johnson.”
“He’s got like sixteen warrants for fraud and theft. I’ve been looking for him for a while. He’s a possible witness in another case I’m working. If I can get him to testify, I’ll help him out with some of his warrants.”
“But not all sixteen.”
He nodded. “Not all sixteen.”
He unclipped his radio from his belt and handed it to me. “I can’t imagine ol’ Tyrone Jedediah Johnso
n not wanting to talk to me, but if my, ah, conversation with Mr. Johnson goes south in any way, radio for backup.”
With that he was up from the table, crossing the food court, then out into the main corridor of the mall and approaching Tyrone.
As Frank approached, both men looked wary.
When he held up his ID, the white man in the black outfit bolted, but Tyrone, who didn’t look capable of running, remained.
Since Frank had no interest in the white guy, my guess was it didn’t matter that he took off. So I waited and watched.
Based on the body language, Tyrone Jedediah Johnson was apparently amenable to helping himself by helping Agent Morgan with his other cases.
The two men talked for a few moments, Frank making his case, Tyrone nodding and shrugging, only occasionally shaking his head.
Then from the opposite direction he had left, the small white man in black rushed up behind Frank and hit him hard with a sap to the back of the head. He did it on the run, jumping up a little at the last second and coming down with all the force of his movement and weight on the crown of Frank’s head.
As Frank went down, I jumped up.
I ran toward the two men who were now standing over Frank looking down at him.
By the time I neared them, the smaller man was tugging at the bigger man’s arm, trying to get him to leave with him, but the bigger man, who had pulled a gun and was pointing it down at Frank, was having none of it.
He was about to shoot Frank in the face.
All I had was a radio.
When I got close enough to the two men, I threw the radio like a baseball at the black man’s head as hard as I could.
Because I was running and because I was not a baseball player, I missed.
As the big man moved to avoid the flying radio that wasn’t going to hit him away, I lowered my shoulder and tackled the smaller man into him, all three of us falling to the ground a few feet away from Frank.
The smaller man began scrambling to get up right away, kicking at me as he did. But the bigger man was by far the more dangerous because he still had the small revolver in his hand.
Lunging, slipping, sliding, crawling, then gaining ground and lurching forward, I grabbed at the gun, but the best I could do was reach his wrists, which I latched onto with both hands and held on to.
He tried to break free of my grip, but I was able to hold on.
He tried to buck me off—and partially did, but I didn’t let go of his wrist.
Then out of my peripheral vision I saw the smaller man pick up the bigger man’s cane, pull it back like a baseball bat, and take aim at my head.
I ducked my chin down toward my chest and prepared for impact, but as the man began his swing, Frank kicked his legs and swept the man down. Once he was down, Frank raised his right leg and brought the heel of his shoe hard down on the man’s face and at a minimum breaking his nose. The man dropped the cane and stopped moving.
Withdrawing his .45 from the holster on his belt, Frank slid up to where we were and jammed the barrel of the gun into Tyrone’s temple.
Tyrone immediately stopped resisting and released his grip on the revolver.
“Shit, Tyrone,” Frank said. “All you had to say was that you didn’t want to testify.”
Chapter Ten
For a movie lover like me, Lonnie Baker’s store, simply known as Lonnie’s Video, was a special kind of magic.
Films at my fingertips.
Rows and rows of beautiful boxes with iconic images, each representing a VHS tape I could actually take home for the night, transforming my apartment into a movie theater, my bedroom and the small television into my own private screening room, as if I were a studio head instead of a college student.
The shop was dusty and disorganized, crowded and cluttered, but I barely noticed. It held more movies than any store I had ever been in—more than the smallish space was designed for. It held mostly VHS movies, but there were still a fair number of Betamax boxes mixed in.
Aging and faded boxes crammed onto shelves—often in the wrong category and covered in cat hair—meant that renting from Lonnie required a certain amount of patience and an openness to serendipity. But I didn’t mind. I liked to browse, to lift each box from the shelf and read it thoroughly before returning it, right-side up this time, or keeping it, carrying it to the register to rent, then carrying it home, possessing it for a brief period—just long enough to be possessed by it.
When a young couple in the shop finally decided on which romantic comedy they were taking home with them and took it, presumably home, I was once again the sole customer perusing the shelves.
As I rounded the corner from Drama to Classics, I could feel Lonnie’s gaze from behind the counter leave his book and come to rest on me.
“What’s it gonna be tonight?” he asked.
“Can’t decide,” I said.
“Oh the tyranny of too many choices.”
“I always get more than I can watch and have to check them out again.”
“Moderation’s not one of your strong suits, my young brother.”
“Guess it’s not.”
From somewhere out of Comedy, Shaft, Lonnie’s black Bombay cat, landed on the top of Classics and stared down at me. His sleek black coat was taut and shiny—even beneath the dim fluorescence of the shop.
“What do you have it narrowed down to?”
When I looked back over toward him, I saw Foxy Brown, his other black Bombay, crossing the counter in front of him, and I knew what was about to come next.
“Five, four, three, two . . .”
He sneezed loudly, pushed Foxy Brown off the counter, and blew his nose.
“Bless you,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“Tell me again why you have creatures you’re allergic to roaming around the joint.”
“Came with the store,” he said. “Whatcha gonna do? So what all you gonna take home and not watch tonight?”
“Think I’ll just go with Casablanca,” I said.
“Again? How many times does that make?”
“A few.”
“Hundred,” he said. “I’m gonna get you your own copy. Hell, pretty soon you can just have that one.”
“Why is that?”
“A Blockbuster is moving in across the street.”
“A what?”
“Video rental superstore,” he said. “It’s a chain spreading across the country. You think I carry a lot of movies? I’ve got maybe twelve hundred. They carry over eight thousand. And tons of each one—’specially the new releases. Everything’s computerized. Huge store with lots of room. No way I survive.”
“Ah man. I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“They claim to be all family friendly and shit. No porn. No unrated films. But they offered to buy me out and let me keep running it—until they realized I had closed down my back room. Used to have an adult section in the room right behind here,” he said, pointing down the short hall that ran beside the counter. “They’ll rent that shit—just through the mom and pop shops they buy and not their Blockbuster brand. But I closed that thing down probably five years ago. Ain’t about to open it back up.”
“How come?”
“Don’t want to deal with the creeps it brings in. And closing it down is tied to my sobriety and Cedric’s disappearance. The world changed for me back then. Can’t go back to that.”
I nodded. “What’re you gonna do?”
“No idea. Stay here until I can’t anymore. Then . . . I don’t know.”
“Anything I can do to help? We could get the word out, start a ‘support your local video store’ campaign before they even open.”
“Thanks man, but it would only delay the inevitable. I’ve seen it happen to too many other stores. This scenario only ends one way.”
He was resigned.
As we fell silent, I returned all the boxes to the shelves except for Casablanca, which I carried to the counter.
“Oh,” he
said, “a classic. Good choice. I think you might just really like this one.”
He filled out the rental form, and as I signed it, he searched for the tape among the rows of brown hard plastic cases on the shelves behind him.
It was a slow, inefficient process, and watching him I felt the same hopelessness about the future of his shop as he did.
“Here you go,” he said, placing the case on the countertop.
“You mentioned your nephew and I saw that you know Miss Ida,” I said. “We’re in a group that’s trying to find out what really happened to Atlanta’s missing and murdered children. We’re having our next meeting at your sister’s house so she can participate—and we’re going to focus on Cedric and any cases similar to his. Would you mind talking to me about it?”
He thought for a long moment. “Tell you what,” he said. “You go to an AA meeting with me, and I’ll talk to you about it for as long as you want.”
On my way back over to Scarlett’s, I found little Kenny Pollard, the youngest son of Camille Pollard, the owner of the consignment shop Second Chances, playing with super hero action figures on the walkway out in front of his mom’s store.
He was ten, small for his age, adorable and outgoing, and I had avoided interacting with him as much as humanly possible—not an easy feat given his extraverted little personality, the amount of time I spent in close proximity to his mom’s shop, and the fact that we lived in the same apartment complex. But his older brother, Wilbur, a sullen, angry fourteen-year-old who always eyed me suspiciously, helped.
“Hey Mr. John,” Kenny said, looking up at me with his big black eyes—eyes so wide, so innocent, so open, I had to look away.
“Just John,” I said before I realized what I was doing.
Martin Fisher saying Yon, Yon echoed through my mind, and I had the urge to run.
“Hey Mr. Just John. How are you today?”
“I’m okay, Kenny,” I said, glancing back at him as I tried to keep walking. “How are you?”
“Why ain’t there a black Spiderman?” he asked. “Or Superman or Batman? Do you know? Why they all white?”
“They shouldn’t be,” I said, pausing a few feet away. “It’s not right.”
BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries) Page 4
