Out of the Blues

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  “Ow.”

  “Ignore them,” Rosie said. “Around here everyone refers to them as the Wild Things. Daniels, Thing One, and Barney, Thing Two.”

  —

  GARDNER MOTIONED Salt over, nodding his head toward Wills on the phone across the aisle.

  Wills stared straight ahead at the cubicle wall, avoiding eye contact with his partner, who was making exaggerated faces in response to what Wills was saying into the phone. “Yes, ma’am . . .

  “Since you were ten years old.” He noticed Salt but quickly turned his back on her and Gardner.

  “Visions . . .

  “I’m sure the Hahira police do appreciate your help . . .

  “No, ma’am, we have someone we use here in Atlanta . . .

  “An Atlanta psychic. He’s very good, very professional . . .”

  Gardner covered his mouth and fled toward the break room.

  “We’ll keep that in mind—a silver key and a swamp . . .

  “Bye now.”

  Wills punched the end-call button on the desk phone and banged the handset against his forehead.

  —

  “GOOGLE IS MY FRIEND,” Salt said to the screen. For hours she’d played with, practiced on, searched, and learned some of what was available using the law enforcement and public search engines. She’d found nothing about the corporation that owned the Chicken Shack.

  “Welcome to Homicide.”

  She looked up and into the steady, focused eyes of Manfred Felton. He held out his long hand. “I see you and Rosie have hit it off. Lucky you,” he said as Salt took his hand and stood.

  “So far today has been much better than yesterday,” she said.

  “I heard. Nice work. Sarge giving you a rough time? And I bet the Wild Things”—he swept his eyes around the room—“haven’t been tumbling over themselves to make you feel at home either. It’s just as well actually. And if it will help you feel better and put things in perspective, imagine how it was five years ago when I first came to the squad.” He leaned against the partition and crossed his arms.

  She’d heard. He was a legend now, the first openly gay detective in the department; he’d risen in the mythology and lore of not only their department but homicide units all over. He had endured. Endured, overcome, and solved homicide after homicide—the red balls and easy cases called “bones,” as in to have been thrown a bone—all while enduring. His rate was one hundred percent clear-ups, every case cleared—unheard of. Now after five years he no longer had to endure. He had the record. He could even look forward to stone-cold who-done-its because he had the record.

  “I don’t think I can imagine how it was,” she said. “I really can’t complain, then, but I would have liked just the possibility of solving my first case.”

  Felton pointed to the open file on her desk. “I see by the coffee rings that he gave you a cold one.”

  “Coffee rings. Is that what you call ‘a clue’? Detective Felton, behold the Mike Anderson case.”

  Brow furrowed, he picked up an imaginary magnifying glass and perused the spread file in a Sherlockian manner. “Elementary, my dear Watson. Follow the hound.” He winked.

  THE ANDERSONS

  The pristine, snow-white Doric columns on the small porch of the Andersons’ bungalow gave Salt pause. She straightened her shirt collar and jacket. Mike’s parents still lived in the house in the West End neighborhood where they had been living when Mike had died.

  The West End, like the city that would annex it, began at a crossroads. It had official historic status and was exemplary of many of Atlanta’s older neighborhoods. It started as a working-class and racially mixed community, and then became affluent and all white. In the ’60s and ’70s, rapid white flight caused the neighborhood to become more middle-class and all black. But holes of poverty opened up during the crack epidemic of the ’80s and early ’90s. Even still, pockets of the neighborhood had remained stable, especially around the University Center, where Mr. Anderson taught mathematics, and recently there had been some signs of gentrification.

  Mike’s father opened the door wearing leather slippers of the kind rarely seen anymore. “Mr. Anderson, I’m Detective Alt.” Salt started to offer her hand, but rather than responding he extended his arm, parting the air to the hall. “Please come in.” He guided her into a small formal parlor furnished in faux French Provincial and ceramic pastorals, all cream and gilt. Mrs. Anderson (Salt was somehow sure she’d prefer the Mrs. to the Ms. prefix) stood from a rose-colored chair as they entered and indicated with a nod and an outstretched hand that Salt should sit on a brocade settee. Mr. Anderson continued to stand, his hands folded around a hardbound book. Both Andersons, small in stature, had the same dark walnut hue and both were dressed in what Salt thought of as prayer-meeting clothes, not Sunday dressy but well dressed.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, I hope I’m not reopening old wounds, but as I said when I called, we received new information about your son’s death that has to be followed up.”

  “What information? From whom or where did this information come?” Mrs. Anderson emphasized the word “information,” as if it were distasteful.

  “There is some reason to doubt the credibility of the source, but I have been assigned to the case, and procedures dictate that there be follow-up.”

  “‘Procedures dictate,’” Mr. Anderson repeated.

  “So why are you coming to us?” Mrs. Anderson stiffened against the upright back of her chair. “You have no idea how painful this is. Suicide is the worst tragedy for its survivors. We have all these questions that can probably never be answered. For years we have been trying to let this go. And here you are.” A large graduation portrait of Mike hung on the wall behind Mrs. Anderson’s chair. He looked like both parents except for a huge smile and a ’fro, mushroom-shaped by the mortarboard. The tassel dangled beside the corner of his right eye, lightly brushing his rounded cheek. There were no other photographs, none marking his successes as a musician, no posters, no framed reviews.

  “I thought . . . I was hoping you would be the best source for me to get a general sense of how Mike’s life was in the days and months before he died. Or the name of someone who I should talk to about any specific problems he was having.”

  Mr. Anderson tightened his grip on the book. “Isn’t that all still in the records, a file?”

  “Honestly, because his death was ruled accidental rather than a homicide, it wasn’t given much investigation. Back then drug overdoses were coming in in record numbers.”

  “Detective, you come here to us because of some procedure. But Michael was our child, our only child. You have no idea how it is to lose someone to suicide. It’s a tomb we try to dig ourselves out of every day, trying not to ask questions that we can never get answers for.”

  Salt looked down at her hands, feeling a quickness in her chest and a flash to the yellow-eyed dog in her dream.

  “You see, Detective.” Mrs. Anderson was leaning forward. Salt looked up. “We knew we were losing Michael, that he’d chosen the wrong road, long before his death. Oh, they called it ‘accidental,’ but we knew that was out of consideration for us—because they didn’t know if he intended it or not. But we’d tried, as soon as he took up that juke-joint music, to turn him back to the straight path. He chose.”

  “‘Juke-joint,’ you mean the blues?” Some lyrics from her dad’s tapes ran through her head. We can’t let the blues die, blues don’t mean no harm. “He was so talented. My father had some of his recordings. You must have been proud of him.”

  “He got taken with trashy music, blues, rap, devil’s music, ignorant music. My daddy would forbid that kind of old field noise when I was growing up.” Mrs. Anderson sat up straighter and looked away.

  “You come here askin’ again ’bout our son is like throwin’ dirt.” Mr. Anderson’s other accent was showing.

&nb
sp; “I am sorry. If you could suggest someone else I could talk to.”

  “He had talent, could play the piano beautifully, classical and sacred. But he took up the guitar, started hanging around all kinds of folks. Quit going to church. We tried everything.” Mrs. Anderson looked out to the sunset beyond the curtained window. “And at the end, our pastor, Reverend Prince, did his best with our son. We felt blessed that Midas Prince took time—even back then he was a mighty busy man—to try to reclaim Michael.”

  “So Reverend Prince met with him before he died?”

  Mr. Anderson looked over at his wife. “I don’t think even you could get in to see the pastor these days. We haven’t talked to him personally in, what? Five years or more?”

  “He’s grown Big Calling into the second largest congregation with the largest church building in this city.” Mrs. Anderson looked down and tapped the watch on her wrist. “It’s time, dear.”

  “As we told you, Miss Alt, we have to be at our lodge meeting by seven-thirty.”

  Salt stood. “I appreciate your seeing me on this short notice.”

  Mr. Anderson escorted her to the door, looked back into the house, and then came out onto the porch, closing the door behind him. “I don’t want you to think we’re not appreciative of your efforts, but my wife, especially, cannot seem to lose the doubts about whether we did or did not do enough to try to save our son.”

  “I am sorry and feel your loss.”

  “He’s buried in Westview.” Mr. Anderson abruptly turned, went back inside, and closed the door.

  Salt made her way back to the Taurus at the curb and then sat behind the wheel for a while, absorbing the vermillion and gold streaks against the deepening sky.

  WESTVIEW

  About mid-April, around four in the afternoon, on a sunny day, maybe a Sunday, not every year, just most years, the spring wind might gentle, warm and easy. For an instant the forsythia would still have a few bright yellow blooms left, while the bright pink, white, fuchsia, and pastel azaleas would begin to unfold from their tight buds, and the wisteria vines would be growing heavy with new leaves and lavender and purple blooms. Orange-throated jonquils and buttercups, bright tulips, flourishing phlox, and the trees, the pinks of the apple, sweet peach, weeping cherry, and purple redbud and the whites of the dogwood and Bradford pear, all would coalesce in a grand symphony of color and fragrance. Then the breeze might increase and blow the petals apart, upward, out, and the air would fill with soft, whirling beauty while the old hardwood trees stood stately dressed in their simple, new light green foliage, spreading their limbs over the deepening green of the hills, all against a perfect robin’s-egg-blue sky, all a glory of an Atlanta spring day.

  But as Salt drove through the main gate of Westview Cemetery, she left most of those busy, pollinating, renewing goings-on, left them all over the rest of the city’s avenues, parks, and yards. Westview was nearly bereft of trees, and the flowers there were mostly plastic. Here and there could be seen a lone magnolia or an old oak shading the graves over on a hill, such as were left. The place had long ago been leveled and shorn of greenery. That shearing had begun when cannons blasted earth and men apart in the Civil War battle of Ezra Church, the site on which the vast cemetery now existed.

  Other than a solitary figure that appeared and disappeared as she drove up and down the dips and peaks of the drive around the perimeter, Salt was the only visitor. As she grew closer, the lone figure became recognizable, first as a woman and then, as her crown of braids became more distinct, as the woman Salt knew as Sister Connelly. The old woman stood at the foot of a grave facing the headstone. She didn’t move an inch and only lifted her head as Salt parked beside the row, got out, and walked over. “Oh, my Lord. Ain’t white folks done enough to black folks so’s you ain’t got to keep on torturing me?” Sister was the folk historian of The Homes, her age indeterminate but her memory sharp. She lived across the street from last year’s murder and knew all the players and their stories.

  “How would I have even known you were here? I got promoted to detective and assigned a cold case. The young man’s grave is somewhere . . .” Salt walked the pea-gravel path between the rows. “Why are you here?”

  “At my age most of my friends and family are either already here or we escorting them here.” She was looking at each gravestone as she followed Salt along the next row. “You feel that?”

  Salt thought she heard faint drums but now wasn’t sure. It could have been some nearby construction blasts. There was a slight trembling in the ground about every thirty seconds or so.

  “This who you investigating? I hearda this child.” Sister stopped and stood beside Salt. “A hellhound on his tail, a black dog.”

  Standing about two and a half feet tall, a dog, shiny and black, snout raised in what could be a snarl or just sniffing the air, marked the grave of Michael Anderson, born April 3, 1950, died November 17, 2005.

  “Is that what the dog means, a hellhound from the blues?”

  “Black dogs can means lots of things, hellhound or just black dogs. They lead folks to heaven or hell; dogs sit at crossroads. This whole city got a black dog sittin’ right in its middle.”

  “Sister, sometimes I only half understand what you tell me.” Salt knelt beside the funerary canine, felt all around his haunches, and slid her hand along the smooth place between his ears.

  “I only half understand what I tell is why.”

  Salt stood. “You know more than you think you know, is that it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s always what Pepper and I tell each other. Kept us from getting killed, helped us talk about things we didn’t have an understanding of or the words to explain.”

  “So you detecting killings now? Murder?”

  “I was assigned to the Homicide Unit.”

  “How come you ain’t workin’ on that one all in the papers and on TV, that rich family? I’da thought they’d have all the detectives on that one. What it bein’ white folks on the north side.”

  Salt stood. “I guess they think I don’t know enough to help much.”

  “That’s how it goes all right. They put the little know-nothing detective working a dead junkie, bluesman. Same ol’ same ol’. Even dead the rich folks get better attention.”

  Salt rubbed the scar running through her scalp.

  “That still bothering you? Where you got shot?”

  Salt lowered her hand. “Not really. It’s just a habit.”

  “You get dreams?”

  “Everybody has dreams.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  SORTING GOD WITH WILLS

  God, these frogs are loud,” Wills said to the dog lying serenely beside the glider. The dog, waiting for the woman, his snout between outstretched paws, moved his eyes in acknowledgment of the man’s voice. To the dog the man was a small deity whose words held only a little more significance than the other lively sounds of the night—tree frogs, her car still a ways off on the highway, the sheep in the nearby paddock rustling against each other in sleep, one of the small wood beams in the big house settling, and a night bird.

  There were fast, smoke-like clouds flying across a high half-moon. The black dog, barely visible, picked up his ears before the headlights could be seen coming up the long drive. The man and dog rose and walked toward her parking spot under the pecan tree. She switched off the engine. Both wedged themselves into the space of the opened car door. The dog was on her first, licking the air, his front legs across her lap.

  “My turn.” Wills, only a few inches taller than she and built like a high school football coach, muscular without definition or working at it, reached in, extending his hand to lift her from the driver’s seat.

  “You guys!” She smiled, moved the dog’s paws, accepted his outstretched hand, and stood.

  “Tired?”

  “Not too
bad.” She handed him the keys and he went to the trunk for her gear bag.

  “I’m anxious to hear how it went, first days as a new detective. I remember how eager and proud I was. Everybody was talking about your first day, the child murderer, Hamm’s case, your collar, the chief at the scene. It’s already turning into quite the story.”

  She ruffled Wonder’s fur as they walked to the house and up the steps where moths and their silhouettes flew around the back-porch light.

  Salt changed into soft jeans and with grateful bare feet joined Wills back outside. The glider made a melodic creak as they sipped a single glass of whiskey between them.

  “Who did you get partnered with? I’ve been out on this case so much I’ve barely even talked to Gardner, much less anybody else on the squad.”

  “Huff didn’t seem very happy with having me foisted on him.”

  One of the sheep asserted herself with her own distinctive “Bleeek.”

  “Huff, don’t call him Sarge, will come ’round. You earned the assignment. And speaking of calling or not calling names—I have to watch myself. I can’t be calling you ‘Honey’ in front of anyone. The less they suspect, the less attention we’ll get.” The rules for employees stated that neither spouses nor domestic partners could work on the same shift in the same unit. Although she and Wills weren’t married and didn’t live together, and it was a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, supervisors and commanders were reluctant to have to consider romantic attachments in managing their people.

  “So who did Huff put you with?”

  The night bird called again, some deep-throated animal sounded, and the tree frogs made a chorus.

  “Uh-oh, I know that tone of voice,” Wills said when she didn’t answer.

  “Maybe there’s a good reason lovers shouldn’t work together. This might be harder than we thought.” Salt turned and put her back against the glider armrest, knees bent, her feet tucked under Wills’ thigh.