The Lost Brother

by Rick Bennet

Long calls his mother. He doesn’t know what he can tell her now.

  19

  “I THINK SHE WANTS ME TO KILL HER.” he says.

  “Joan Price does? Oh, my God, why?” Passer asks.

  She’s sitting with the tall, blond man who sometimes serves as Joan Price’s bodyguard. He had followed Kellogg’s suggestion and called her, though he’d had to wait a day to get his courage up. They’re drinking beer at a country bar in a Maryland suburb. Passer drove out early to trade her car for Desormeaux’s truck, to keep up appearances in her role as Adelia Desormeaux. She and the bodyguard have been talking for an hour now.

  “Well,” he says, “it’s this theory she has about the power of victimization. Don’t ask me to get it right, because I don’t really understand it. But it’s something like, because we live in a time of television imagery, that whoever gets to show themselves suffering the most gets the most sympathy. And after you establish yourself as a victim, you can attack as much as you want.”

  Passer’s on her second beer. Listening to the soft, pretty music. Looking at the bodyguard and seeing that he’s actually attractive, with his bright-blue eyes, slender build, tight jeans, sweet smile. He’s her age but seems younger. Less traveled, although he served in Kuwait and saw action there. He’d enlisted in the army right out of high school, and served four years, and now was out, going to the University of Maryland but unable to feel comfortable there, he said, for political reasons.

  “Liberals always talk about inclusion,” he said, “but you ought to try going to college these days as a Christian white. The blacks there, man, we’re supposed to need them so the place will be more integrated, but they have their own paper, own section of the dining hall, own academic department, own frats, own student government. They’re even building a black-only student union so they won’t have to see us between classes. When I was in the army, we all worked together and bunked together and ate together. That was cool. But at Maryland, man, it’s like, the blacks hate us so much they want everything separate from us, you know?”

  “But would you really want to go to an all-white school?” Passer asked, slipping out of character, maybe because of the beer.

  “No, that isn’t what I said. Just the opposite. But in the army, the blacks carried their weight and didn’t have to worry about respect. At Maryland, though, you can tell, they’re struggling. Nah, it ain’t blacks I hate at all; it’s the goddamned government.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “You know? They’re such liars.”

  “Yeah, like Ruby Ridge, and Waco.”

  “Yeah! Waco, man, letting the FBI handle the investigation—that don’t make no sense. You can’t let an accused criminal handle his own investigation. ‘Excuse me, sir, we think you may have raped this woman, would you please investigate yourself and tell us if you did?’“

  “You ever feel like doing something like that guy did in Oklahoma City?”

  “Ahh.” The boy drank from his beer. Looked at Passer. He had trouble looking her in the eye, intoxicated by more than just the alcohol. “You know, I went downtown once, to Fifteenth and L, because I was so mad about what one of those black racist writers at the Post wrote that I felt like blowing up the building. I’m just so sick of the bullshit hate that paper puts out, I really thought about giving them a taste of their own medicine.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You know, I don’t want to hurt no one. It’s kind of a daydream sometimes, but I couldn’t really do it. I just get so angry, that’s all.”

  He took a drink. “But when I saw those victims at Oklahoma City, especially the children, man, it scared me. I mean, I’ve been angry enough to bomb. I couldn’t, but still I can understand it, you know? It’s just such a bullshit world.”

  A few minutes later, he makes that statement about Joan Price wanting him to kill her.

  “Do you think she was serious?” Passer asks.

  “I think so. She wanted me to kill her downtown, while she was driving through some black neighborhood, so the blacks would be blamed.”

  “She would do that? Go that far for the cause?”

  “Joan’s serious about stuff.”

  “I know. I hope she is. But I can’t believe she’d really want you to kill her.”

  “She’s serious about everything. She said, once, she thought about suicide every day.”

  “Really?”

  “She said it just all gets to her, that no one can get along, that there’s no future, no hope for our species.”

  “I feel that way sometimes,” Passer says sincerely.

  Passer asks about Ells. The bodyguard says he never heard of him before the murders. She asks if LTC has anything more “direct” going on, because she really is willing to do anything to help the cause. He says they just do political stuff.

  She leaves the young man in the parking lot. He tries to kiss her good night, but she turns her cheek. He doesn’t press. She tells him to drive carefully. He tells her the same thing.

  She drives out to Frederick, to trade the truck back for her car. Desormeaux is awake when she pulls up at his house. He comes out and tells her that the answering machine has a message for “Adelia.” She goes in. Listens. It’s Joan Price, asking her to call tonight.

  Passer calls. Joan asks her to come over, gives directions. Passer drives there in the pickup truck, hoping maybe she’s going to be included in something big but bothered by Joan’s tone of voice. It seemed too upbeat. Deliberately upbeat. Passer has good instincts about little changes in people’s behavior. From Kellogg, she’s learned the importance of trusting those instincts.

  *

  Joan Price drives to the nearest twenty-four-hour convenience store. Buys milk and eggs and bacon (having first made sure there were none already in her refrigerator—she had poured out half a bottle of milk to do that). Tries to pay for the purchase with a hundred-dollar bill, which the clerk at this hour (midnight) of course cannot break. Pays for it with some ones and loose change instead. She chats a minute with the clerk, expressing concern about whether it might rain tomorrow, as it did earlier today.

  This convenience store is on a major commercial strip in Prince George’s County and is surrounded by racially mixed neighborhoods. But the crime here is not so mixed. The store has been robbed six times in the past year, always by blacks. There have been four assaults in the store parking lot in that time, all by blacks.

  The store adjoins a divided highway from which there is no left turn out of the parking lot. Customers needing to turn left, as Joan does to get home, go around the back of the store, down the alley there, to a side street. Joan pulls through this alley. There is a shopping center’s unwin-dowed rear wall on one side of the alley, and the convenience store’s unwindowed rear wall on the other. No homes. No traffic now.

  Joan pulls up at the stop sign there, looks around, sees no one, and dashes to a sewer drain. She crushes the hundred-dollar bill into a ball, lights it with a match, burns it down, brushes the ashes into the drain, hearing the water rushing there from the earlier rain (which is good, she thinks, because she knows homicide investigators might check the drain).

  She returns to her car and reaches into the back seat, where she has a large, helium-filled balloon held down by a heavy blanket. She holds it out the driver’s-side window (the night is warm enough to warrant the window’s being rolled down).

  She’s tied a thick cloth napkin to the bottom of the balloon (having tested the balloon before to make sure it could carry the napkin away).

  She dumps her now moneyless purse’s contents out the driver’s-side window and drops the purse itself after it. She gets her gun, the same one she used to kill the drug dealer downtown, from the glove compartment.

  She grips the gun in her left hand, by the open driver’s-side window (she’s right-handed).

  She’s already wiped the gun free of all prints.

  She holds the gun with the napkin, very lightly, using only her th
umb and forefinger. She looks straight down the barrel, down that dark tunnel. As she has at least once a day since she lost her family, and every night after every speech, overwhelmed always by the futility of it all, the unfairness she knows is in her words, unable to stop what she’s doing in any other way. She’s so tired. But even with this, her last mortal act, she’s determined to accomplish something.

  She prays. Pulls the trigger.

  People who are planning to kill themselves don’t buy groceries first.

  They don’t make plans to meet someone later that night.

  They don’t use their left hand when they’re right-handed.

  They don’t express concern for the next day’s weather in small talk with convenience-store clerks.

  Their hands don’t pass gunpowder-residue tests.

  They aren’t missing a hundred dollars (which the clerk saw she had).

  They don’t do it at a side street’s stop sign.

  They usually leave a note.

  Women almost never use a gun.

  No one shoots themselves in the eye.

  And suburban whites don’t use guns whose slugs later match up with unsolved D.C. drug dealer homicides.

  As Joan well knows. Just as she knows that even if her plan isn’t perfect, there will be enough evidence contradicting a ruling of suicide to satisfy those wanting to believe she was murdered. By someone certainly assumed to be a black.

  Passer finds a note on Joan’s door, saying: “Adelia, I’ve gone to the store. Back in a sec. Let yourself in, make yourself comfortable. Joan.”

  The police come by just then and, after some questions, tell Passer that her friend has been murdered.

  Passer starts trembling. She has trouble breathing. After what she learned from the bodyguard, she can’t believe Joan was murdered, but she can’t believe it was suicide, either.

  She sits down on the steps.

  She remembers going to a movie once on a date with a black man, to a theater in a black neighborhood, to see a film made by a black director, with black actors, for black people.

  The theater that night was packed, all black. The movie’s opening scene was of two black males going into a store, robbing it, and killing the Asian storekeeper. And as the storekeeper’s head exploded from the black male’s gunshot, as Passer cringed at the sight, she heard a roar around her and was stunned by the more horrible sight, not on the screen but in the audience, of people laughing, clapping, cheering, high-fiving. All around her. Everyone. Her date too. She cried. Her date didn’t understand. She left. He wrote her off as weird.

  She remembers hearing a famous writer, a black woman, say she was surprised to still be alive, because as a young woman she’d been sure she’d kill herself, so constantly depressed about the world was she. Passer understood that.

  She remembers that while working as a youth on one of black mayor Tom Bradley’s campaigns in Los Angeles, she heard about a black woman columnist in Chicago who’d written an essay, during a racially divisive election, about why she hated whites. Passer had looked up that essay. Read it. Understood the hurt, anger, and exhaustion behind it. Researched further and found that the columnist had later killed herself. Understood that too.

  Sitting on the front steps at Joan Price’s house, sheltered from the drizzle by a slight overhang, late at night in a silent suburb, she sees, across the street, a balloon drifting slowly along the treetops, something hanging from it, she can’t tell what.

  20

  LONG IS AT HIS MOTHER’S HOUSE in her kitchen. The phone rings. His mother answers. Looks confused. Looks at Long.

  “It’s for you,” she says, stunned.

  Long and his mother stare at each other, not understanding how someone would know to call him here. “Is it that white man, Kellogg, or that girl, Passer?”

  “It’s a black man.”

  He takes the phone. Listens a moment to the silence.

  “Anybody there?” says a familiar voice. “Long?” Long: Yeah.

  Khalid: Know who this is?

  Long: Yeah.

  Silence.

  Khalid, dejected: Then I guess it’s true. Long: What?

  Khalid: I can’t believe it. I had to call to be sure.

  Long: What?

  Khalid: You’re Henry James’s brother.

  Long: Yeah, that’s right. Who gives a fuck?

  Khalid laughs. Sadly: Man, I’m sorry.

  Long, keeping his echoing, deep, emotionless voice: What’s up? How’d you know I’m here?

  Khalid: That’s the same thing as asking how I know you’re Henry James’s brother, isn’t it?

  Long: How you know?

  Khalid: It don’t matter.

  Long: How you know?

  Khalid: Listen, man. The boy is dead.

  Long is silent.

  Khalid: I mean, he will be soon. Real soon. Good as dead.

  Long: What’s going on?

  Khalid: I can’t tell you. I’m sorry. It’s not my people doing it. It’s not my people who found him.

  Long’s anger is rising: Where is he, Khalid? What’s going on?

  Khalid: The boy called your house a little while ago. Talked to his sister for a minute, to tell her he’d be home tomorrow. The number he called from led back to a pay phone across the street from where he was.

  Long: Led back? By who?

  Khalid: The people who are probably still listening. Long: Who?

  Khalid: The boy’s your nephew? I’m sorry, brother. It’s just the way it goes.

  Long: Where’s the boy, Khalid?

  Khalid: Look, man. It’s like this. Those stupid FBI motherfuckers the Director put in charge of city corruption investigation? I told you about that little arrangement. The Goof Squad. Well, they also are handling the tap on your mother’s phone, ‘cause the Director wanted to know all that’s going on with the videotapes shit.

  Long: Tell me where the boy is, Khalid. That’s all you got to do.

  Khalid: You got to forget him, Long. He’s gone, okay? I mean, he saw too much. He knows too much. Okay? Long: He’s just a boy, Khalid.

  Khalid: Shit, man, I ain’t happy about it! But like you said when you gave that order that time in the joint—about how I had to take out that homeboy of mine who weren’t nothing but eighteen—death ain’t no thing.

  Long, forcing calm into his voice: Khalid, give me the boy.

  Mrs. James has been listening closely.

  Khalid: Long, it’s out of my hands. He does know too much. And I don’t just mean all the videotapes he saw. I mean, he saw someone knifed tonight.

  Long: Who?

  Khalid: The man who found him and took him in, the night of the murders. The man who’s been hiding him all this time.

  Long: Who’s that?

  Khalid: Come on, man. Just let it go. The boy is gone. Good as gone. They’re just interrogating him a little more now, ‘cause they’re scared he might have called someone else besides his sister. They want to know who else might know what he knows. But I left there ten minutes ago. They probably done the boy by now.

  Long: Khalid, listen now. You owe me, right? Tell me that. Tell me you owe me. Khalid: I owe you.

  Long: Then tell me where the boy is. Silence.

  Long: Come on, man.

  Click

  “God damn it!” Long yells, banging the phone against the wall.

  His mother looks at him. “They found the boy? But what? What else?”

  Long can’t answer. He looks into his mother’s terror-filled eyes and can’t answer.

  He moves quickly to the stairwell landing, bounds up the steps four at a time. Opens his niece’s door without knocking.

  She’s on her bed, watching television. Looks up at him as he bursts in.

  “Girl, where’s your brother?” She looks at Long, frightened.

  He realizes that and softens his features, his voice. “Girl, I need to know where he is.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t!”

  “Did
he say anything about where he was? Like, what neighborhood?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say if he was in a house or an apartment?”

  “He said he was in a basement.”

  “Good, good. Now, when did he call you?”

  She thinks about what was on television when he called, looks at her clock, figures it out. “An hour and ten minutes ago.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. James says. “I remember the phone rang, but it’s almost always one of her girlfriends, so I let her get it.”

  The girl speaks quickly. “He said not to tell you! He asked me if anything happened when his letter came, and I said no, and he said nobody did anything, no police did anything, or FBI? And I said no, and he said then maybe it was safe to come home, and I said I thought so because Uncle Long was here, and he said I was lying, and I said no I am not, and Uncle Long is so big nobody can hurt us now, and he said Uncle Long is really there? and I said yes! and he said maybe it really was safe to come home, and I said, should I get Grandma? and he said no, because she’ll want him to come home now, and she’ll tell the police and the FBI and he wouldn’t be able to convince her not to except by showing her the videotapes he had, that Daddy had, that explained why it might be the police or FBI that killed Mommy and Daddy.” She started to cry. “I knew I should have told you, Grandmommy. “

  “That’s okay, hon,” Long says. “That’s okay. Now who did he say he was with?”

  “A man.”

  “Okay Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know the man, or he didn’t tell you?”

  “He said it was a man I didn’t know.”

  “Did he know him?”

  “No, the man found him. In the alley that night, behind our house.”

  “What kind of man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Black or white?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He spends a few minutes asking the girl more questions, but she can’t tell him anything else. His mother sits with the girl. Long goes downstairs.

  He goes out the back door, through the little yard there, to the alley. Thinks, who might have been in a city alley at night? Thinks, the police would have asked everyone who was around that night, that morning. Even the reporters would have. But what about whoever wasn’t around anymore?