by Alfredo Vea
Without a word, but lifting her slender arm to direct their attention, the woman backed gracefully away from the door to allow the men to enter. What Jesse and Eddy saw inside her apartment stunned them into five long minutes of rapt and complete silence. In every nook and on every wall were row upon row of professional photographs of a young Mrs. Harp. Here she is a prom queen; there she is Miss Montgomery 1976. In another photo she is kissing the winner of a stock car race at the Macon county fair. In another she is shaking hands with Ed Sullivan.
She is everywhere, lounging like a sleepy kitten on the hood of a shiny new Corvette; posing next to a brand new Kelvinator washing machine. Her professional name was once Tawny Mae Harp. Her true name—her maiden name—was Princess Sabine Johnson. In a corner of the kitchen where a stove should have been, there was a locked display case filled with ribbons, trophies, and long-winded testimonials.
“Harp is not my true name. I was never married to Mister Anvil Harp,” she said quietly, allowing her guests to thoroughly peruse every photo. “He was a mistake.” Her voice was breathy and her red lips enunciated every word perfectly. “He was an … Reggie’s father was an indiscretion.”
She moved easily out of one posture and into another, posing in front of photo after photo, gliding to each as if her stiletto heels were sliding on panes of oiled glass. At the same time her hand was uplifted demurely to indicate a particular photograph without actually pointing directly at it. Her raised elbow, slightly bent wrist, and relaxed fingers performed in concert to form a polite suggestion, a mere implication of an indication. Anything more would have been uncouth, unprofessional.
Jesse noticed that there were no photographs of her family or her children anywhere in the home. Except for a selection of emcees and judges in tuxedos and an autographed photo of Bert Parks, no photos of a child or of an adult male were anywhere present.
“I’m sorry about your son,” he heard himself saying.
“This is a photograph from a rodeo in Mobile.” It seemed as though Princess Sabine Johnson Harp had not heard Jesse’s condolences. “It was quite something for a black woman … for a woman of color to be the queen of a rodeo back in 1973. As far as I know, it hadn’t happened before and it hasn’t happened since.”
“I’m sorry about Little Reggie,” repeated Jesse in a forceful but respectful voice. It was something he wanted to express to this woman before asking her any questions. “I’m sorry about your son.”
Her posture slumped; the perfectly held spine and shoulders collapsed visibly. The politely curved elbow drooped; the bent wrist straightened and fell downward. The once arching breasts dipped below the brim of the bodice. The demure smile on Sabine’s perfect face evaporated completely, leaving behind the bare residue of a professional persona.
“I don’t want to talk about Little Reggie Harp,” she said harshly. “There has to be an end to mourning, doesn’t there? Now, gentlemen”—she sighed with exasperation—“pray, let’s continue our tour, shall we?”
Her studied, prize-winning composure returned to her almost immediately. Neither Jesse nor Eddy had seen an iota of grief in her eyes. Perhaps Little Reggie had savaged her along with everyone else on this hill.
“Here I am on the cover of Ebony magazine, and here on the cover of Jet. My, but I do look rather fatigued in that photo, don’t I? Probably a late dinner and soiree the night before. I was Miss Pike County in 1975 and Miss Coffee Brown in 1974. Why, I was no more than a child when I started winning swimsuit competitions. This is a brand-new shopping center in Tuscaloosa, where I got to cut the ribbon with the mayor, and I shoveled the very first spadeful of dirt. Lord help me, I think I buried His Honor’s left shoe.”
She laughed sweetly and tossed her head to sweep a face full of soft, straight hair to the side and out of her lovely eyes. For the first time she looked directly at the two men who were standing in her hallway. They did not seem to appreciate her awards, her honors. The brilliant smile faded, then disappeared as a look of firm resolve took its place.
She led the two men to a back bedroom that had been converted into a large walk-in closet. Jesse noticed that the unit had originally been designed to be a two-bedroom apartment, yet there was only one bed. He also noticed the bathroom. There was a thin strip of paper stretched across the toilet seat that read “Guaranteed Freshness.” The water glasses on the sink were wrapped in small plastic bags. The tiny soaps were in their wrappers, still unopened. The towels hanging on her racks were all from the Grand Montgomery Hotel.
Near the mirror was a small, two-cup coffeemaker. Jesse looked at Eddy, who had also seen the bathroom. Sabine slid open a door and turned on an overhead light fixture that lit the entire contents of the closet. There were hundreds of dresses, costumes, and bathing suits on rotating racks. One entire wall of the room was hidden behind stack after stack of shoe boxes. Every label was French or Italian. There were no coats or warm jackets. Her entire wardrobe was summer.
“Did Reggie live with you, Mrs. Harp?” asked Eddy. “There is nothing in this apartment that would belong to a man … or a boy. Nothing that I can see.”
Her jaw became tense and jutting. She quickly pulled a bathing suit from its rack and stared at it intently. Slowly, the concern on her face began to melt away.
“Of course he lived here,” she said in an absentminded whisper. “I’m his mother, aren’t I?”
She smiled at the bathing suit as she spoke. It was strictly regulation, one-piece with absolutely no padding in the breast area, not even a smidgen. Completely unmindful of the men in her dressing room, she imagined herself stripping naked and pulling the tight bathing suit onto her body. The image sent chills down her spine. All these years later and it would still fit.
“I can’t help it if he chooses to sleep here and there. I can’t control him anymore.” She smiled mechanically while glancing downward toward her ample breasts. From the time that those two hills had been mere bumps beneath her T-shirts she had wished and cajoled her mammary glands into being. It was clear to both Jesse and Eddy that this woman’s downcast glance at the geography of her chest was one of her favorite views. It was also clear that Sabine had just referred to her dead son in the present tense.
“Did you know any of the other boys who died?” asked Jesse, remembering the task at hand. “Were they friends of Little Reggie?”
“I don’t mix with the people up here,” Sabine answered with impatience and indignation. “This is only a temporary situation. I’ll be leaving here soon. I really don’t belong up here … never belonged up here. Please don’t judge me by this place. People up here are trash.”
The last sentence flew from her mouth like spittle. Seemingly embarrassed by her outburst, Princess Sabine smiled meekly then returned her attention to the bathing suit. She carefully inspected the leg holes, and a look of pride filled her face. Most of the other girls would put two-sided tape in the leg holes to keep the suit from riding up on the thighs. Not Princess Sabine—never.
Most contestants used tape to lift their boobs as high as they could without having the nipples pop out. Not Sabine Johnson. Little Reggie’s mother smiled as she recalled how the bodice would strain over her breasts. Without knowing it, she smiled broadly at the two men who were questioning her and ran her tongue over her upper teeth. There was no Vaseline on those teeth to keep the lips from sticking to them. No caps, no white dye on her teeth or collagen in her lips. She was purely organic, natural, one of God’s favored creatures.
Sabine stood before her latest audience of leering men. Their mouths were moving, but she could not hear them. Even as Jesse repeated a question, Princess Sabine was walking a runway at some distant county fair with a hundred hungry eyes staring at her.
“Do you know how those boys died? Did you hear any gunshots? Did you know any of the boys personally?”
The disturbing sentences seemed to be coming from the crowd at the county fair. Or was it one of the judges who was asking those disconcerting questions
? They were most certainly not proper questions for a beauty contest! Princess Sabine stomped her foot angrily. There would be no prizes today, no first runner-up.
“Why don’t you people just go away and leave me alone?” she began screaming. “Just leave me alone! I don’t deserve any of this. I don’t know what happened to Reggie and those other boys. Things happened to them, to all of them. There are winners and losers in everything. Things happen!”
Sabine stopped suddenly, placing a hand over her mouth.
“I don’t know anything,” she said in a new voice, one that Jesse and Eddy had not heard before. Gone was the mother and the beauty queen. The woman standing before them now was far from beautiful. She had a palsied, feverish face and eyes narrowed to glowing slits. With one quivering, extended hand she showed Jesse and Eddy the door.
“My father Butler Johnson would kill you both for the insinuations you’ve made against his little daughter today. He would kill you. Why on earth would I have a personal relationship with anyone up on this hill? I told you, everyone up here is trash.” As she enunciated each syllable, Sabine coated it with bile, placed it on her tongue, and spat it at the two men.
“My father was a gentleman. You two could do far worse than emulate Butler Johnson, but of course you have no breeding. It’s what I do every day of my life—emulate that dear man. My father brought me up with love and devotion,” she hissed. “I brought Reggie up the very same way. He’s a well-bred boy. How dare you come here with all your questions. Now, leave me alone!” Princess Sabine slammed the front door. “I have nothing more to say to you.”
As Jesse and Eddy walked down the hill toward the scene of La Massacre des Amazons, the investigator reached into his pocket and handed something to Jesse. It was an object contained within a crumpled manila envelope.
“I forgot to give this to you. I just got it today. It’s a taped copy of the 911 call that was made from the phone booth across from the Amazon Luncheonette.”
“What’s on it?”
“I don’t know,” answered Eddy. “I thought you should listen to it first. I do know one thing. The guy at police communications said that one of the victims’ voices is on that tape. He said that there is also the barely audible sound of a second, much more distant voice. He said that you can hear two gunshots, clear as a bell on the recording. There were some other sounds on the tape, but he couldn’t make them out. In all honesty, I guess I didn’t play it because I just wasn’t ready to hear it, Jesse. The communications officer told me that she said only one word into the mouthpiece.”
“One word?” repeated Jesse in a barely audible voice.
The thought of hearing a single word from the lips of a dying woman sent a cold chill down Jesse’s back. Long ago he had heard just such a word in one of the ugliest and most beautiful moments he had ever endured. It had been an unclouded, crystalline, and razor-edged moment free of self-consciousness and free of all shame. He had held a dying boy’s head until that precise instant, that slice of a moment when the nuclei of a billion cells in the center of his eye went dim in unison. He had seen the white of an eye shift subtly to gray. He had detected what he thought was a moment of weightlessness in the body of Julio Lopez.
He had felt the sum and the subtraction of it: that faint shift of inner light, that instant when all of the muscles of his warm body quit idling and stalled out forever—that split second of a moment when the last five neurons flickered and faded away.
“Padre!” said Jesse aloud, echoing the very word that had escaped his lips as Julio had succumbed, almost thirty years before.
“What was that? Did you say ‘padre’?” asked Eddy.
“It was nothing,” responded Jesse, as he turned down the small walkway that led to the front door of the Amazon Luncheonette. His voice was a mixture of confusion and embarrassment. He stopped halfway to the door, then continued at a more respectful pace. He turned to face Eddy.
“I had a friend once, a padre, an infantry chaplain. He went insane … or maybe he went sane back in 1968. One day he just walked away from the war.”
A shiver lingered between his shoulder blades as he turned to peer through the glass of the luncheonette. He focused his eyes; programming them to ignore all reflections. Suddenly the frozen disarray resolved itself into view. There were jars filled with spices and sauces strewn on the floor and a stovetop covered with unwashed pots. Through the back window of the narrow restaurant Jesse had a clear view of the bedroom beyond. The rear window framed the hill and housing projects. There were signs of ambition, industry, and hope everywhere. The hours and days before their death must’ve been happy ones, thought Jesse.
The women had run through this door, crossed the street, and moved diagonally toward the phone booth on the other side of the street. No blood had been found in the restaurant. Jesse pushed at the new glass door. Despite the band of yellow police tape and a notice from the district attorney’s office, the door opened easily. The cops had forgotten to lock the place after they left. Jesse pushed the door open and the two men walked in slowly.
“Look.”
Eddy was pointing to the industrial refrigerator. The doors had been left ajar. Jesse pulled out his tiny recorder and began his entry by stating the new time and the full date and location.
“I am present with my investigator Edmund Kazuso Oasa. Using a fork retrieved from the sink, I am opening the door further. There is a streak of blood on the door approximately seven inches long. The streak culminates in a single fingerprint. The streak seems intact. No samples were taken. I don’t believe that the police have seen this. There are scratch marks on the inside of the metal door and on the surface behind it. Someone was in here. It should be noted that the shelves have yet to be placed in their respective positions. They are still in a carton to the left of the refrigerator. We are now photographing the door and the interior of the box.”
Eddy stepped forward and focused on the door. “A flash will wipe this out,” he said, then he walked to the front wall and turned on the bank of overhead lights. He switched off his flash unit. The Pentax clicked, then clicked again.
“I’ll tell the DA about this tomorrow morning,” said Jesse as he dropped his recorder into a pocket. “You’ve got to get in touch with this guy Anvil Harp, Eddy. Find out why he didn’t bother to marry a Miss America contestant! Perhaps he never asked her. Maybe she didn’t want him. Find out what really happened. Why was he an indiscretion? I want to know where Little Reggie lived. There was absolutely no evidence of him anywhere in her apartment.
“I want to know why she’s living all alone in a housing project,” continued Jesse. “There were no flowers, no gifts anywhere. There’s no evidence of a man in her life. I want to know why she’s built a motel around herself. Why would someone who should have buckets of money and dozens of suitors have little more than a room full of Italian shoes and a few mementos?”
The investigator was nodding and frantically scribbling notes into his binder. Eddy was wondering where in America these questions would send him.
“Hell, in 1977 in the South, she must have been Helen of Troy,” said Jesse. “She must have been African-American royalty back in Selma and Atlantic City. Did you see her? Did you see her entire life on those walls? How could such a woman possibly fail? How on earth can beauty fail?”
Eddy could not answer the question. Princess Sabine had what every woman allegedly wanted, yet she had nothing at all. The world was ignoring her. Worse yet, the world had forgotten her.
“I’ll get on Mister Harp tomorrow afternoon,” he said quietly. “There can’t be more than one or two Anvil Harps in all of North America. It’s an unusual first name. If he’s written a check or applied for credit in the last ten years, the databases will have him. I’ll do it as soon as I get back from Tracy. According to Bernard Skelley’s sister Margie Dixon, Bernard’s brother Richard used to live in the Fruitvale District with his family. He moved from there to the acorn projects. The locals call th
e place ‘ghost town.’ ”
“Did Minnie, the little girl who says she was molested by the supreme being, live with Richard in West Oakland?” asked Jesse. “Did Minnie Skelley live in the Fruitvale, too?”
“All of them lived together. Richard had a steady job at a local auto dismantler until it closed. Now he’s a carny again and the family is split up. A lot of their stuff is in storage.
“Margie says he worked as a carny about ten years ago. He runs a game booth in a parking-lot carnival that’s working down in the Central Valley right now. It’s real small-time, there’s only seven mechanical rides, two tents, and two or three hot food stands. The carnival is due in Hayward next weekend, so I’ll get a close look at Richard. When the supreme being was in town he used to stay at his brother’s house in Oakland. Margie is going to give me the rundown on the entire family history.”
“Why is Margie talking to you?” asked Jesse.
“The Skelley family has disowned her. They haven’t spoken to her in years. Her ex-husband, Wallace Dixon, is a black man who drives for Alameda County Transit. I spoke to him on the phone. Seems like a decent sort. He pays his alimony right on time. Now she’s running around with an eccentric English professor from Stanislaus Junior College. His name is Eric Caine. I ran them both in the database and superior court records. Neither of them has a rap sheet. I’ll do phone interviews with them tonight.”
“A black man and an English professor, eh?” Jesse laughed. “Which one does the Skelley family hate more?”
When they reached the phone booth, both Jesse and Eddy were suddenly aware of the dozens of eyes watching them. Without knowing it, they had become aware of the cumulative breeze that is created when a dozen sheer curtains are moved cautiously aside. Without hearing it, they sensed the sum of a dozen sighs. The witnesses to the murders had gone back to their windows to watch as a neighborhood wound was reopened.
There had been no rain since the shooting, and spots of dried blood were still visible on the sidewalk. The telephone had been removed because it had been losing money since the night of the killings. In truth, not a single soul had used it since that night. There were bare wires hanging down from a hole in the wall. Before leaving the area, Jesse had nervously pulled at the wires. Had these strands of copper and plastic felt the desperation in Persephone Flyer’s voice?
