Back to Lazarus

Chapter 14

14

Before heading down to the PD’s office in Hainey, I stopped by the Handi-Way for a snack and another quick chat with Annie.

“Well, hello,” she said as I came through the door. “You’ve spent so much time around here lately, the rumor is you’re moving in.”

“Must be all that southern hospitality at WFC keeping me here.”

Annie snorted. “That’ll be the day. You can bet you got most of them boys jumping out of their shorts over there, they’re so wound up.”

“Really? Anyone in particular?”

“If there is they wouldn’t tell me. From what I’ve seen, if you work at that prison long enough, you start to figure everyone you meet is either a criminal or about to accuse you of being one. Which one you think they take you for?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Probably a little of both.” I told her that I’d spoke with Charley and Sue Ellen.

“That Charley’s just a doll. He used to have a thing for Sue Ellen. They’d come in here twice a day, along with everybody else, seeing which one could outblush the other. But I haven’t seen Sue Ellen around here at all in the last few months. Maybe Deacon’s teasing got the best of her.”

“Deacon… is that the guy that was in here the other day giving Charley a hard time? In his mid forties, maybe five-foot-ten and running about 230. Brown hair and mustache just starting to go gray?”

Annie folded her arms over her chest and looked at me. “What are you, a cop?”

Any anonymity I might have had was already long gone, so I told her.

“s**t, girl, no wonder they’re paranoid. Probably think it’s about some kind of lawsuit.”

I assured her it wasn’t.

“Well, it makes no difference to me. I got a nephew that landed in jail for a little bit of nothing, and if something happened to him or they didn’t treat him right, you better believe I’d go after them.”

“About that guy…”

“Oh, yeah, that’s Deacon all right. He’s meaner than hell, but like most bullies it’s all talk. There’s a few like him over there—always is in those kinds of places—but I’ve never heard of them getting up to anything serious.”

Mike wasn’t in his cubicle when I got to the PD’s office. I thought maybe he’d gone to lunch, but the guy in the adjacent section said he was in Richard’s office. Richard’s secretary was nowhere to be seen, but his door was ajar and I could hear voices from inside. Raised voices.

“That’s crazy, Richard. Why would I do that?” Mike’s voice was raised, but he sounded more perplexed than angry.

With my usual tact, I knocked once on the door and pushed on through. Mike didn’t look angry either, but Richard was agitated. His face and neck were flushed, and his mouth shone with saliva. He looked at me, licked his bottom lip distractedly, then held it with his front teeth. His eyes flashed with pain, and he released his lip and his pent-up breath simultaneously.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Neither spoke. Richard’s eyes darted back and forth between Mike and me, but Mike just shrugged and gestured for Richard to go on. Richard put his hands on his desk, palms down, and took another deep breath before speaking. “Someone, a man, called my house late last night. My wife answered the phone.” Richard breathed deeply again and sat down. “She was told to be careful of you, Sydney, if she valued our marriage.”

I tried to be nonchalant. “Sounds awfully catty for a man.”

“He said he saw us kissing outside your motel room, and from what he saw, the next time it wouldn’t stop there.”

“You did kiss me.” It was Mike’s turn to flush. “On the cheek,” I clarified. “So much for chivalry.”

“Mine or his?” Richard asked, and started to smile. “My wife actually took it much better than I did. I may be an attorney, but she’s the one in our family who always thinks logically. She said it was highly unlikely that any man who called our house at midnight and refused to identify himself had anyone’s welfare in mind but his own.”

I casually took a seat, but I wasn’t ready to let Richard off the hook yet. “And you thought the anonymous caller was Mike?” My voice was a carefully calculated mix of incredulity and disgust. Richard flushed in embarrassment.

“Well, not really. I know it doesn’t make sense, but my wife just told me about the call, and I wasn’t thinking clearly, and Mike was the only person I could think of who knew I was taking you to dinner.”

“It wasn’t Mike.”

“Well, I know that now, but—” Richard was still defensive, so it took a few seconds for the implications of my certainty to sink in, but they did. “Who was it?”

I finally listened to Mrs. Bibbystock’s voice whispering in my ear. “I don’t know, but he was driving a pick-up. Someone must have followed us from the restaurant. A pick-up entered the parking lot behind us. I can’t tell you the make or color. It blinded me when I was trying to unlock my door. Then the same headlights left right after you.” I let my words sink in before going on. “You’ve got a tail. Who have you pissed off lately?”

“Besides you and Mike? Who else have I spoken to? I’m sure the list is endless. But it’s an odd sort of call, isn’t it? It wasn’t a threat. If it was harassment it was very subtle. It sounds more like a colleague with a twisted sense of humor than a former client with a grudge.”

“Still,” Mike said, “it’s worth having a patrol car swing by your house periodically. I’ll make a call.”

I left with Mike. After he made arrangements for Richard, I told him what had really brought me there—not the latest installment of office melodrama, but an address for Claire Johnson.

“You try the phone book?” he asked.

Of course I hadn’t, but I was saved from humiliation when he failed to find a listing for Miss Johnson there. We moved on to the computer, where he pulled up the latest version of Autofind. I told him we had used an older version years ago at the Public Defender’s office.

“Oh, well this is amazing! They’ve done so much to improve it since then.” Mike’s eyes sparkled behind his glasses. “It’s much more accurate, and it draws on more sources of information. What’s your birthday?”

I tried to speak normally, but my throat had gone dry. I wondered if my report would look suspicious, like one of those “a-ha” moments on TV shows around minute thirty-eight where suddenly the hero and audience realize nothing is as it seems. “No self-respecting woman would tell you that.”

Mike had no interest in repartee. He shrugged. “Whatever. You’re not going to believe how much information they have on you in here. It’s pretty scary, really.”

“Let’s just skip the demo. You can show me how to use it while you look up Miss Johnson.” I had her birthdate from the old police report, so Mike had pulled her up before he was done complaining that I was no fun. There was no question that we had the right person when one of her previous addresses matched up to her address in the report. She had no work address listed, so I’d see if I could catch her at home that afternoon. Mike printed out directions for me.

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled up in front of a brick duplex on a residential block. I’d say it had seen better days, but “better days” had avoided this neighborhood entirely. Spaces that were once front gardens were almost universally under concrete now, like broad sidewalks, often oil-stained from their conversion to parking. Some of the parking looked long-term. A rusty old Impala sagged on flat tires two doors down. I’ve been around enough really bad neighborhoods that I couldn’t say I felt unsafe, but I did feel unwelcome. I also couldn’t say how much of that feeling came from the residents and how much was a projection of my own white middle-class guilt.

One half of the duplex I’d parked in front of was an exception to the predominant drab deadness. Ferns hung from macramé planters, and petunias brightened window boxes. The ground in front was sealed with concrete, but it did host a birdbath filled with colorful rocks and surrounded by salvaged containers of every sort. Some had living plants, others were filled with plastic pinwheel flowers that sat motionless in the heavy air. A flock of pink flamingoes congregated at a crack in the concrete. Tacky, but colorful.

That was not where Miss Johnson lived.

My destination was the other half of the duplex, dull as the rest of the block with burglar bars and heavy curtains on the windows. A woman answered the door almost immediately. I’d parked on the street rather than her concrete yard, and she’d had plenty of time to observe my approach.

“Claire Johnson?” I asked.

“Yes. What do you want?”

“My name is Sydney Brennan.” I handed her a card. “I’m an investigator and I was wondering if I could speak to you about some people who used to be your neighbors.”

“Ohh. This’ll be about that no-good little Damian down the street. It’s about time somebody did something about him. Playing that loud music all the time and his drawers down below his privates, there’s no question what he’s up to.”

She let me through the door, then shut and locked it behind me as she rattled on about Damian. She indicated a seat on a sofa and sat in the neighboring armchair. The large flowers that patterned the furniture had faded beyond recognition, but each piece was bedecked by a bright solid-colored afghan folded into a triangle. “Little punk drug dealer, that’s what he is.”

Now that I’d gotten in the door it seem like a good time to let Damian off the hook. “Miss Johnson, I’m not here about Damian.”

“Must be one of his cousins then. Lord, I don’t even begin to know how many children they got over there.”

“No, ma’am. This is actually about some of your old neighbors, from a long time ago. Over on Patience Street. The Thomases. Do you remember them?”

I had her birth date, so I knew before meeting her that Claire Johnson was fifty-one. Otherwise I might not have been able to guess her age beyond a ten or fifteen-year range. The darkness of her skin and within her home masked most signs of aging in her face, but she wore the garment of an older woman, a shapeless thing that hung from her ample chest and fell in folds to her knees. When I said the name Thomas, she somehow looked both older and younger simultaneously. She was momentarily animated, perhaps possessed by the memory of inhabiting her twenty-five-year-old body. Then she sighed deeply, and while the memory of youth remained in her eyes, her posture began to sag and her cheeks seemed to slide off their bones.

She nodded, and I thought I saw the ghost of a smile. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember them.” She leaned back in her chair, smoothing the folds of her housedress and picking at a speck of fuzz. “Isaac and Vanda. I used to babysit their little girl Noel. Of course, I guess you knew that already, didn’t you?” I nodded. “What do you want to know?”

“What do you remember about them? Were you there when they moved in?”

“Yes, I was. Let me see. They’d only been there a couple years when—well, you know. I was living back home with my momma when they moved next door. I had me a little bit of trouble about a boy, but that’s neither here nor there.” She grinned a bit as she alluded to her notorious past.

“Looking back, it’s sad. They seemed so happy then, like they had a whole new life ahead of them. Noel was such a sweet little thing. A little odd, always with her nose stuck in a book, but a good kid. Never a bit of trouble. Sure didn’t take after her momma on that count.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t know? Oh, that Vanda was a hell raiser all right. She couldn’t have been much older than me, but into the kinda trouble that women weren’t getting into around here then, if you know what I mean.”

“Men?” I asked.

Miss Johnson laughed. “Well, I done told you, even I knew about that kind of trouble. But yeah, she was into men, but not just for being into men.” She spoke those last words slowly, and when I still looked at her blankly, lowered her voice and looked around her living room for spies. “She was into men for the money.”

“She was a prostitute?”

Miss Johnson gave me a disgusted look, but whether it was for saying the word aloud in her home or saying it so loudly as it burst out of me, I couldn’t be sure. “I wouldn’t use that word. It wasn’t that she did it professional-like. She just needed the money.”

“I thought Isaac had a job.”

“I didn’t say they needed the money, now did I? I said she needed the money. See, she had herself a drug problem. Might not sound like a big deal now, with those kids out there dealing on the corner.” I hadn’t seen any kids dealing on the corner.

“What kind of drugs?”

“Well, I can’t say for sure. I can tell you she was messed up on something most all the time I saw her, not that I saw her that much. Seems like she slept most days, and she went down to Jimmy’s bar of a evening. To get high or get some money to get high.”

“Did her husband know?”

“Isaac would have to have been a blind man not to. Yeah, he knew. Such a good, kind man. Handsome, too. Always working, always taking care of the little girl, and trying to clean up after Vanda besides. I’m sure he tried to get her to stop early on, but then I guess he gave up, just tried to keep her from doing too much damage.”

“Did they argue about it?”

“From time to time, but not as much as you would think, with her out every night of the week. Like I said, I think he gave up on her. Or at least gave up on trying to change her. But some nights you’d hear ‘em—mostly Vanda really—screaming such filthy things. She could’ve taught them kids on the corner a thing or two, with that mouth.”

“Did you ever see them fight?”

“You know, I can’t say that I did. I seem to remember after it happened that people talked about him beating on her. Somebody said he even went to get her from Jimmy’s once and made a scene, but I can’t say that I ever saw it.”

She settled back, shaking her head, then suddenly sat up so straight she almost stood from her chair. “No, wait, I tell a lie. There was one night, must’ve been a few months before she died. Lord, I never seen that man so angry. I was sitting in the front room reading a novel, like I always do.” She pointed to boxes full of what looked like lurid-covered romance novels in the corner. “I don’t know where everybody else was. In bed maybe. I heard this racket, and the porch light was on next door. There was Isaac, dragging Vanda out the front door. She was crying, but he wasn’t saying a word. At least not until he got her out of the house. I ran over to see what was going on. I was afraid she might’ve done something, that something might have happened to little Noel. I used to worry about that a lot. Anyway, Vanda was crawling, hanging onto his legs, and Isaac pushed her away and down the front steps of the porch. He went after her and stood over her. I thought maybe he was checking to make sure she was OK. Vanda was just sobbing and carrying on.”

Miss Johnson stopped for a moment and hugged her arms around her body without seeming to realize it. “You know, the Lord says to love thy neighbor, but I’m just a flawed human being and I never did like that woman. I didn’t like what she did to Isaac, and I didn’t like what she did to the child. But it hurt my heart to see her in that state. And then, he looked down at her, like he could spit, and said, ‘Whore.’ That was it. Just that one word. And she kept wailing.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” she admitted. “I just stood there. Isaac went in the house and came out again with a paper bag of something, metal and glass by the sound of it, that he threw in the trash. I followed him when he went back in the house, to see if Noel was okay. He got on the phone, and I heard him say, ‘Come get your daughter. She’s not welcome here any more.’ Her folks came to pick her up that night. She was still sobbing in the yard when they showed up.”

“What about Noel?”

“I don’t know. I never did see her that night. She wasn’t standing around, and I didn’t feel like I should go nosing about, so I left. Vanda was gone a couple weeks, but she did come back. I didn’t see it. She was just there one day. And she did better for a while. Things quieted down, and she quit going out all the time. But it didn’t last out the month, and she was at it again.”

“Miss Johnson, what was in the trash can? What did Isaac throw away?”

She looked offended. “What makes you think I would’ve looked in somebody else’s garbage?”

“I would have.”

She grinned. “Yeah, well, I guess maybe we have something in common then.”

“What was it?”

“Just what you think. Drug stuff, for smoking it. I might not know how to use it, but I could figure out what it was used for easy enough.”

I checked my watch and saw that it was time to leave for Ida Pickett’s. “Well,” I said as I rose, “thank you, Miss Johnson. You’ve been a big help.”

She walked me to the door and looked out carefully before opening it. “Damn kid pushers,” she said. “You know, I just don’t get it. I don’t know what they put in that stuff to mess people up so bad, make ‘em so stupid. Just like Vanda. I thought she had everything when they moved here. She was a beautiful woman then, before she stopped eating and drinking anything that wouldn’t get her high. And here she had a good-looking, hard-working man who adored her, a sweet child and another on the way…”

I’m sure my mouth dropped in a rather unattractive fashion. “A what?”

“Oh yeah. You didn’t know that? When they moved here Vanda was pregnant, just barely showing. Maybe four or five months along.”

“What happened to the child?”

“Vanda had a miscarriage.”