The Bridge

by Solomon Jones

  Bayot wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He just knew that he wanted to leave.

  “I seen him before,” he said.

  “Where did you see him?”

  “I think he be at Judy’s.”

  “You said the man who got in the elevator with Kenya is always at Judy’s, right?” the brown-haired detective asked. “So it’s possible this is the man you saw?”

  “I guess so,” Bayot said.

  “What the hell do you mean, you guess so? Either you saw him or you didn’t.”

  “I don’t know,” Bayot said, covering his ears as he always did when he was frustrated and afraid. “Leave me alone.”

  The blond-haired detective had seen enough. He snatched Bayot out of his seat and held him at arm’s length.

  “He’s the one you saw,” he said, tightening his grip on Bayot’s collar. “Do you understand? He’s the one you saw.”

  “Get off me,” Bayot said quietly.

  “Tell me that the man in the book is the one you saw, and I’ll let you go. After that you can go home.”

  “Get off me now,” Bayot said.

  The detective looked at his partner, who leaned back against the table, laughing at the two of them.

  Bayot’s face began to tense. His muscles rippled beneath his shirt as he took on the look of a two-year-old poised to throw a tantrum.

  “Get off me!” he yelled.

  Bayot lifted up one arm and brought it crashing down on the detective’s wrist. The detective drew back, cradling the wrist in his hand as his partner stopped laughing and sprang toward Bayot. As he was about to swing, the door flew open.

  “Stop it!” Wilson yelled, running into the room. “What are you doing to him?”

  “He just identified Sonny Williams as the man he saw with the girl,” the brown-haired detective lied.

  “No he didn’t,” Wilson said. “Because Daneen Brown just identified someone else as Kenya’s abductor.”

  “Who?” the detectives asked, almost in unison.

  Wilson paused to look from one to the other.

  “Herself.”

  Lynch rushed to join Wilson in the interrogation room. Judy could wait. So could everything else. If what Daneen was saying was true, Lynch wanted to hear it for himself. And he wanted to hear it from Daneen.

  Sensing his need, Daneen stared past Wilson and the homicide detectives who sat in the room with them. She took a deep breath and focused her eyes on Lynch, staring as if her words were for him alone.

  “The last thing I wanted was for my baby to end up livin’ down the Bridge with Judy,” she said. “She had already messed my life up—or at least let it get messed up—and I wasn’t about to let her do the same thing to Kenya. They took that outta my hands, though. Not that I’m blamin’ nobody for what happened. I shoulda treated Kenya right when I had her. But that was hard to do, ’cause she was a trigger for me. She reminded me o’ that basement floor.”

  Lynch looked down as he realized that he didn’t want to hear it after all. It was too late, though. Daneen wasn’t about to spare him anything.

  “I was raped, Kevin. Once when I was nine, and again when I was seventeen.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything at the time?” Lynch said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What you was gon’ do, Kevin? What was anybody gon’ do? When I said somethin’ the first time, Judy blamed me. So when it happened again, I thought everybody would think I was lyin’. And I couldn’t take that. So I kept my mouth shut, wore my clothes loose, and hid my belly ’til I couldn’t hide it no more.

  “Then I told Tyrone the baby was his, ’cause I just couldn’t see bringin’ that child in the world with a rapist for a daddy.

  “But I couldn’t even do that right, could I? Tyrone died, and everybody blamed me for that, too. And all Tyrone left behind was the truth. So every time I seen Kenya, I would see the truth about her real daddy. I would feel his hands on my ass, his breath on my neck, his tongue on my skin. I would feel him poundin’ into me while I scraped my elbows tryin’ to fight my way up off that floor.

  “I could ignore what I saw in her when I was clean. But when I smoked that shit, I couldn’t, ’cause the high always turned from magic to poison. I would smoke, and then I would feel him inside me again—hurtin’ me, rapin’ me.

  “And when I looked at Kenya, it was like she was him. When I would hit her, it was like I was hittin’ him—gettin’ him back for what he done to me.”

  She stopped and stared at Lynch for a long time.

  “That’s why I killed her, Kevin. I couldn’t take seein’ her daddy no more. So Friday night, I waited ’til Wayne went to sleep, took some money out his wallet, caught a cab down the Bridge, and I took me a blast. And right after I did that, I saw Kenya comin’ out the projects.”

  “What time was that?” Lynch said.

  “I guess it was around ten o’clock. Coulda been later, I don’t know. All I know is I seen her comin’ out. I called her over to me. Then I told her I was gon’ take her to the store.”

  “When you say you called her over, where were you?” Lynch asked.

  “I was across the street from the building, near the corner, right in front o’ that lot with them real high weeds. When I called her, she came runnin’ up to me.”

  “Was there any conversation?”

  “She told me my eyes looked funny. Then somethin’ musta clicked. She started lookin’ scared, ’cause she know how I get when I get high. She started sayin’, ‘No, Mommy, no.’ Then she tried to run.

  “I grabbed her and pulled her in the lot. I pinned her arms down with my knees and put my hands around her neck. Then I just squeezed ’til she wasn’t breathin’ no more.”

  “And she didn’t manage to bite you or scratch you or anything like that?” Lynch asked. “I mean, it would seem to me there would have been some kind of struggle.”

  “I had her arms pinned down,” Daneen said. “She kept bringin’ up her legs and kneein’ me in my back. She tried to bite me, too, but she couldn’t move her head. After while, I guess she knew it wasn’t nothin’ she could do, so she just stopped fightin’.”

  “So where did you put the body?” Lynch asked.

  “I left out the lot and went under that bridge down Ninth Street. I found me a stick and pried off a manhole cover. Then I went back and got her and threw her down in the hole.”

  “Where exactly?” Lynch said.

  “Somewhere on Ninth Street. I don’t know exactly where. I was high. I was scared. But if y’all go out there and look, you’ll find her.”

  “You’re sure about—”

  “Look, I killed her, Kevin! I killed her, and then I went back to Wayne house and acted like I ain’t know nothin’ about it. Now stop pressin’ me, ’cause I ain’t answerin’ no more questions. If you wanna know somethin’ else, get out there and find Kenya. I’m finished talkin’.”

  Daneen sat back, arms folded, chest heaving as her admission sank into the very walls of the room.

  “We need to know one more thing,” Wilson said gently. “We need to know who the man is who raped you.”

  Daneen turned to her with cold, dead eyes.

  “It was Sonny,” she said, shivering with a lifetime of rage. “He Kenya father.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  By Monday morning, Philadelphia was in an uproar. The police department was issuing hourly statements to keep pace with media demands. When that proved too slow, the press turned to the neighbors to fill in the blanks with rumor and innuendo.

  What had started out as a missing child had ballooned into a scandal. Even Judge Baylor’s death was now background noise, submerged beneath the story’s discordant harmonies.

  With the murders in the drug house, and Judy’s tale of bondage and escape, Sonny’s crimes had reached far beyond the scope of anything in the city’s recent history. The fact that he was still at large was at once chilling, and in a twisted sense, exhilarating.

  But e
ven Sonny’s ruthlessness paled in comparison to Daneen’s stunning admission that she had murdered her own daughter. That macabre detail had taken the story national. Television news magazines scrambled to get crews to Philadelphia from New York and Los Angeles. And while Daneen and Judy remained in custody on murder and drug charges respectively, new developments continued to take shape.

  Daneen’s former lover Wayne bolstered her account when he told detectives that, unbeknownst to him, she’d stolen money from him on Friday. Dot—Sonny’s mistress at the Fairview Apartments—lent credence to Daneen’s stories of rape by telling detectives of Sonny’s penchant for young girls and violence.

  The man who owned Sonny’s Old City loft told police of his double life, describing a quiet man that paid his rent on time and kept to himself. And in the biggest break in days, the cabbie who’d driven Sonny to Delaware came in and told detectives about the trip.

  The media’s rush to plumb the depths of the story made Lynch’s reinstatement almost a nonissue. That enabled him to work unmolested as he scrambled to find the truth beneath the madness.

  While Wilson teamed with homicide detectives and Water Department employees to search the sewer system around the projects for Kenya’s body, Lynch headed back to the Bridge to talk to the woman whom he believed could tell him what he needed to know.

  When he arrived at her apartment, Lily was waiting.

  “I was wonderin’ when you was comin’ back,” she said, opening the door. “I only got a few minutes to talk, Kevin. I gotta be at work down the bar in a half hour.”

  “It won’t take long,” Lynch said, walking in as a picture of Sonny flashed on her television screen. “Especially since you’re already watching what’s going on.”

  “Whoever don’t know what’s goin’ on by now must not have no TV, ’cause it’s on every channel.”

  “From what I can see, it’s more drama than anything else,” Lynch said as he sat down. “The reality is, everybody’s just waiting for the body to be pulled out of the sewer.”

  “Well, they’ll be waitin’ for a mighty long time,” Lily said sarcastically.

  “I take it you don’t believe Daneen’s story.”

  “Do you?”

  Lynch smiled ruefully. “I don’t think it would have been possible for Daneen to come across town on a busy Friday night, take Kenya into a lot and kill her, then dump the body in a hole without anyone seeing her.”

  Lynch paused, rubbing his chin as he thought about the case.

  “The only thing I can’t figure out is why she would lie about it.”

  Lily looked at him expectantly.

  “That’s why I came here, Lily. I figured you might know.”

  “Only Daneen can tell you that, Kevin. I just know it’s a lot more to her than what you see. The girl been hurtin’ since y’all was runnin’ around tryin’ to figure out if y’all was gon’ be boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  Lynch looked up, embarrassed that Lily knew.

  “You wanna know what I think about Daneen?” Lily said, ignoring his embarrassment. “I’ll tell you. I think she seen too much when she was little. That’s what turned her into the type o’ person she is now.

  “She can’t sit back and watch other people get hurt, even after they hurt her. She just can’t stand to watch pain, ’cause she know what it feel like.”

  “She hurt Kenya, though,” Lynch said. “There’s no denying that.”

  “Yeah, she did. And that’s why she ain’t try to get her back after they took her the last time,” Lily said. “She thought she was doin’ the child a favor by lettin’ her go.”

  Lynch sat quietly and considered what Lily had told him.

  “I think you’ve got Daneen all wrong,” he said. “She’s a user and a liar who’ll say anything to get her way.”

  “You right, Kevin. But even when she usin’ people, she don’t do it to hurt ’em. She just do it to get what she want. And when she start feelin’ like she hurtin’ ’em, she start backin’ up.”

  “So what does that have to do with her lying about this?” Lynch asked.

  “Don’t you see, Kevin? She lyin’ to keep somebody else from hurtin’. I don’t know who it is no more than you do. But I’ll tell you this much. Daneen blamin’ herself for whatever happened to that baby. I know if it was me, I probably be askin’ God why He ain’t take me instead o’ my child.

  “What I’m sayin’ is, Daneen ain’t lyin’ just to be lyin’, Kevin. She punishin’ herself. And I bet she probably doin’ it to keep somebody else from gettin’ the pain she think she deserve.”

  Lynch looked Lily in the eye.

  “She told us Sonny raped her,” he said. “She said he’s Kenya’s father.”

  Lily was stunned.

  “I don’t know what to say about that,” she said. “But you know I always thought he had somethin’ to do with this. I said it from the beginnin’, and I’ll say it now. Sonny the only person I know mean enough to hurt a child.

  “But mean as Sonny is, it’s one thing I ain’t never see him do,” Lily said. “I ain’t never see him mistreat that baby. He always treated Kenya like one o’ his own. So if Daneen say he Kenya father, you might wanna take her serious. You know it’s always a little bit o’ truth up in a lie.”

  Lynch sat for a moment before getting up to leave.

  “Where you goin’?” Lily asked.

  He stopped and looked back at her. “I’m going to see if I can find that little bit of truth,” he said.

  And then he was gone.

  Homicide detectives believed they had just enough truth to find Sonny. They combined the information the cabbie had given them about Sonny’s trip to Delaware with Judy’s tip concerning his Miami business connections. Then they pinpointed the bus Sonny had boarded in Wilmington, and communicated the bus number and license plate to every state police force from Delaware to Florida.

  The bus pulled into a Maryland rest stop a half hour after the communique. A few minutes later, it was surrounded by police.

  Most of the passengers were still on board, staring out the windows with mild curiosity as plainclothes and uniformed officers jumped from their cruisers and fanned out across the tarmac.

  Two of the officers boarded the bus, quietly instructing the driver to evacuate the passengers because of a possible leak at the gas station.

  As the passengers walked calmly to the restaurant at the far end of the rest stop, three officers discreetly checked their faces against a picture of Sonny.

  While they did that, three officers entered the rest stop’s gas station, fast-food restaurant, and convenience store.

  Sonny was in the fast-food restaurant’s men’s room, splashing water on his face in an effort to shake the remnants of the dream he’d had as the bus barreled southward on I-95.

  Staring at his red-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, Sonny could still picture Kenya’s mouth opened wide in the same silent scream that had haunted his sleep. He could still see her assailant standing before her. He could still see that it was someone they both knew.

  As he left the bathroom and walked out the side door of the restaurant, the dream still haunted him. But when he heard the distinctive crackle and hiss of a police radio, it was forgotten.

  Sonny’s heart beat faster as he lowered his head and glanced sideways at the officers milling about.

  As he made his way between the cars that were parked throughout the lot, the sounds of the crackling radios faded. So did the voices of the increasingly restless bus passengers. Then someone yelled out.

  “Hey, wait a minute!”

  Sonny slowed and reached for the gun in his waistband as a white man approached him from behind.

  “You forgot this inside,” he said to a woman walking in front of Sonny.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking her purse from him.

  Sonny relaxed and walked toward two minivans parked next to one another at the far end of the lot.

  When he reached the
vehicles, he crouched between them, tried the sliding door on the first van and found that it was locked. He tried the other. It was open. As he slid the backpack inside the van, his gun dropped to the ground.

  He was about to crawl out to pick it up when two men approached. One of them was talking on a cell phone.

  “We’ll be home soon, honey,” he said. “We’re only three hours away.”

  Sonny left the gun, scrambled back into the van, and shut the sliding door as quietly as he could. He crawled around the seats and curled into a fetal position, covering himself with a blanket that lay crumpled in the back of the van.

  Seconds later, the man on the cell phone disconnected his call and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “How many times are you gonna call your wife?” the passenger asked as he got in.

  “She gets all crazy if I don’t call her every couple hours when I’m on these business trips.”

  “I think you’re just whipped,” the passenger said.

  The two of them laughed as the van made its way back to the highway. But Sonny wasn’t listening to them. All he heard was the fading chatter of the police radio as they drove away from the rest stop.

  The only other sounds that mattered were the engine’s hum and the whisper of tires against asphalt.

  He didn’t care where he was going anymore. But wherever it was, he was sure of one thing. He would have to take his memories of Kenya with him. Because try as he might, he just couldn’t make them go away.

  Darnell was hoping to erase some memories of his own as he sat alone in Judy’s living room, waiting for Renee to return with more crack.

  But when the knock came and he opened the door, the reminders came flooding back again.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be here,” Lynch said as he walked inside.

  “I don’t see why,” Darnell said. “I ain’t got no place else to go.”

  “You weren’t here yesterday when I came by with Bayot,” Lynch said.

  “That’s ’cause I was with my girl Renee. She bought me a little somethin’ to take my mind off Kenya. But I’m here now, so wussup?”