Out of the Blues Page 4
“Come on.” Salt patted her leg.
It felt like she and Wonder were beginning to occupy the house rather than it occupying her. Fifteen or so years ago the big nine-room Victorian had been left in her care when her mother had remarried and she and her new husband, along with Salt’s brother, went to live in North Carolina. Getting shot last year had dredged up all sorts of ghosts, a few of whom had resided in the old home.
After Stone’s assault, Wills and other friends had plastered and painted over bullet holes in the walls and ceiling. And she was in other ways trying to make it feel like a safe home again. She slept in the downstairs bedroom. Upstairs she’d ripped out the wall between her parents’ old bedroom and another bedroom to build a dojo, a place of serenity and combat, where she practiced aikido, the martial art that emphasized peaceseeking.
Pepper would be in early the next day for their workout. It would be a comfort to see him. They’d been academy mates and worked the same precinct on adjoining beats for all their uniform time. Both had put in for and made detective the year before, Pepper drawing an assignment in Narcotics. She missed his hundred-watt smile, framed on the left side of his face by a long scar that ran from his forehead to his lower jaw. Over the years they’d tell each other’s stories. Even though he had been the star of the Salt and Pepper Show, he was more Sancho Panza than Don Quixote, comic relief for their adventures. And he’d been the one who’d noticed her name as it appeared on her first uniform name tag, “S.Alt.” Wesley Greer had given her the street name “Salt” and himself the street name “Pepper,” bantering with their friends on the shift about his “hotness” as a law enforcement hero and male.
She shed her dirty, torn clothes and showered, finding little more damage on her body than from a workout. In front of the bathroom mirror she dabbed witch hazel on the abrasions on her face, then padded back to the kitchen.
From the window Salt watched the wind pick up, whirling tree limbs in the old orchard. A white poppy dropped from Wills’ bouquet on the table. She picked up the bloom and stripped a stamen from the throat of the flower, drops of milky liquid clinging to the delicate stem. Like she did with honeysuckle when she was a kid, she touched her tongue to the sweet fluid.
The dog waited by the bedroom door. Her status as a new detective lay heavy. No Pepper partner; no credibility, again; no other woman on her shift; and assigned an old, cold case. “Hellhound on my trail.” Some old piece of the song was earworming her. At the bed she knelt down. While she was neither a believer nor a nonbeliever, she prayed to the mysterious, to the force blowing outside, that Wills would be safe, that she’d do some good, that she’d speak for the dead. In bed Wonder circled around on the quilt, then curled against her leg.
—
SHE LIFTED a rusted iron latch on a gray board door and stepped across the threshold into the dim interior of a one-room shanty. The only light in the room came from the daylight she’d just let in. The room was bare except for a brown medium-sized dog sitting on top of an old cast-iron stove that spilled cold ashes onto a dirt floor.
The dog talked without moving his mouth, “mouf” he called it. He had an old Southern street way of talking. He rolled his eyes, twitched his ears, and moved his head around while he stayed absolutely in place, never moving the rest of his body at all, staying in the same sit.
She got very close to the dog’s face and looked into his yellow eyes.
—
WONDER WAS standing over her, watching, when she opened her eyes. As soon as she did, he bowed with his front legs and jumped off the bed, his nails clicking on the floor toward the kitchen. Trying to hold on to threads of the dream, Salt moved slowly, sitting up and lowering her legs over the side of the bed, but the dog’s words were lost.
She made strong Cuban coffee and took her heavy, white diner cup outside to let Wonder gently herd the sheep to graze at the back of the pecan orchard. Afterward, she showered and dressed in a clean white gi and went into the dojo, sitting a few feet from a small shelf that was close to the floor and on which there were a sprig of the poppy in a small green glass vase, a burning red candle in a votive bowl, and the photograph of the sensei.
Although she knew they’d arrived, having heard Pepper’s car coming up the gravel drive from the blacktop to the house, she widened her eyes pretending to be startled and reared back when the kids slid to their knees beside her on the mat. Pepper’s boys, Theo and Miles, seven and nine years old, liked to sneak up the stairs of the old house to try to catch her by surprise. But of course not only had she heard the car, but she’d heard the creaks of certain boards beneath their small, bare toes. Pepper joined them, bowing to the room, then going to his knees and touching the mat in front of the altar with his forehead, the place where the knife-wound scar began in his smooth, otherwise flawless skin. There was just a hint of East India in his African-heritage features and six-foot-two athletic build. He stood, adjusted his gi, and bowed to his sons and Salt. “Namaste,” they replied, their hands in prayer pose, nodding in unison.
The dojo room was an extravagant and sensuous joy. The floors had been reinforced and raised to allow the surface to bend and give. A large single piece of white matting covered the floor, wall to wall. The walls were finished in old wood and bamboo, the windows shortened and raised to shoulder height. Mirrored walls on either side of the door reflected the room’s earth shades: Pepper’s and the boys’ brown skin, the white gis, the dried-grass colors of the bamboo, and the weathered gray wood. Pepper began to lead them in stretches, rolls, falls, and then designating uke and nage, the routines of their aikido practice.
The altar was positioned parallel to the place in the middle of the room where she’d cradled her father’s head, wiping thickening blood from his eyes, as he was dying.
Pepper effected a hip throw, connecting and levering her into a roll. Without speaking, he led the boys in some elbow-control moves. The only sounds in the room were the whipping of Pepper’s hakama, the air as it whooshed from their chests, and their bodies as they tumbled, fell, and rolled to the mat. After an hour Pepper sat down in front of the altar. Sweat ran down their faces as they joined in bowing their thanks.
—
“IT’S ALL OVER the department—Baby Jesus, the chief. You certainly started your new assignment in style.” Pepper high-fived her. They sat next to each other drinking ice tea on the back porch steps. Wonder sat at the paddock gate watching the boys trot around after the sheep.
“Yeah, well, I’m just lucky no one made a big deal out of my not having a radio with me,” Salt said.
Dust clouds hung around the boys’ knees as they stirred the sheep, running after them and patting their dirty wool.
“Ever heard of Mike Anderson?” she asked.
“The bluesman? Don’t tell me they got you workin’ that old thing? I thought it was an overdose.” Pepper pinched some mint leaves from beside the steps. “Already hazing you.” He shook his head. “Those homicide guys are the worst. Who did they partner you with?” He handed her some mint.
“According to Sergeant Huff—‘don’t call him Sarge’—my reputation has preceded me and therefore, at least for this old cold case, I don’t need a partner.” She crushed the leaves against her tea glass.
“What?” Pepper turned to her, scowling.
“Also, I went and saw Stone.”
“What?”
“He made a statement for the record that Anderson was intentionally given a hot pop.”
“Un-fucking-believable. He wants his sentence reduced. What does Wills say about all this?”
“He’s all tied up in the Solquist case. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it. I don’t think he knows.”
“God, he must be getting killed with pressure from that one.”
The boys had the sheep running the perimeter of the paddock. Wonder fairly vibrated watching the activity.
> “What about you, Pep? This has been your first week, too. How is Narcotics?”
“Well, Ann hates it. She’s worried to death and really that’s the worst. I know when shit’s getting hairy, but she’s holding her breath the whole time I’m at work.” Pepper stood and called to the boys to tell them they could throw the Frisbee for Wonder but that they had to go in a few minutes. “I don’t like it that you’re working alone again, Salt.” His scar lengthened as he clenched his jaw.
“Narcotics as hinky scary as I’ve heard? Does Ann have reason to worry?”
He stretched his back, bending out from his waist, and grinned as he put on an affected street patois. “What? Now I’ve got two womens worryin’ ’bout my black ass?” His parents being middle-class and teachers, he’d grown up in a home where standard grammar was mandatory. “Actually, my folks used to go to the same church as Mike Anderson’s parents, long time ago. That church got to be huge and they didn’t really know the Andersons well. I just remember them saying something about his death before they left that mega scam. You know that church, Midas Prince’s church. They left there and never looked back.
“Come on, Theo, Miles. Time to get this show on the road.” He stood and strode off toward his sons, giving her the “come-back smile” that worked like a magnet and made people want to hang with him. Salt resisted an unfamiliar urge to run and hug him good-bye. They didn’t hug.
—
THERE WAS little furniture left after her mother and brother moved out, just enough to do: a bed in the downstairs bedroom, a dresser, the kitchen table, an old sofa and chair in the living room. The library was empty except for a worn wine-colored Oriental rug and the books. The cassette tapes were in a battered, brownish pasteboard suitcase the size that a man might have carried on an overnight business trip in the ’60s. Salt slid the case from the shelf, sat down beside it on the carpet, and pried the tarnished latches open, releasing a faint muddy odor as she lifted the top.
There were a hundred or more tapes in hard plastic cases. Some had factory labels on the spines and others were hand-labeled, her father’s long, loopy writing sliding off the edges. “I can’t read my own writing,” he’d say. “Blind Will” read the label on one tape. Other tapes were blank on the spines, and Salt slid them out in order to see what was written on the tape face. Like the rest of the library, the tapes seemed to be in no particular order, unless, like the library, it was a system peculiar to her father.
The red cedar shelves were full of books belonging to multiple generations of her father’s family, though most were her dad’s. They were in the order he had read them, with the books about depression on the far wall opposite of where Salt now sat. There was a ledger of his reading on one of the shelves beside the pocket doors.
She let her fingers rove at random through the tapes and by feel slid a tape from the collection. On the shelf beside the case was a tape recorder of the type that used to be used in offices for recording work to be transcribed. The police department had only within the last few years quit using them to record statements of witnesses and victims.
Salt plugged the recorder in an outlet, inserted the tape labeled “Pretty Pearl at the Blue Room,” and pushed play. As she adjusted the volume knob on the side of the recorder, a woman’s voice, accompanied by a lone piano, broke soulfully through the scratches and drags of both the tape and machine.
Spread your wings and fly
Lil gal, you gonna spread
your wings and fly.
Salt leaned back into the corner. Her father’d had lots of good days. With the grass prickly on her legs and the ground smelling of green onions, he’d be bent over something in the black-dirt yard, weeding, planting seedlings, or sometimes just touching leaves, petals, and stems. Stretching his back as he stood, he’d call her “Angel.” She’d run and jump into his arms, his shirtsleeves warm from the sun. He’d lift her to his knees, holding her out, stiff-legged, arms spread wide and facing the world. “Flying angel, spread your wings.”
She began to remove each tape and stack them according to genre. About half the tapes were blues and the other half jazz and gospel. One tape, its case less worn and scratched, plastic hinges intact, was labeled “Mike Anderson and the Old Smoke Band.”
I dreamed I heard the Marion whistle blow,
And it blew just like my baby gettin’ on board.
I’m goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.
The familiar sadness settled like a heavy, old quilt. She worked, ran, worked out in the dojo, took care of the sheep with Wonder. But it would settle nevertheless, as she tried to hold together the pieces of her ten-year-old self. “The blues, eh, Pops?” The spines of the books across from her told part of his story: Depression and Other Major Psychological Disorders, Dealing with Depression, Living with Mental Illness.
Salt pressed the stop button.
ROSIE’S MAGIC
On a rusted iron panel of the railroad trestle that ran alongside the mammoth brick Sears, Roebuck building, a graffiti portrait of Blind Willie McTell stared out at the city. The police department leased parts of the old building to temporarily house some of its units, which were now, unit by unit, being moved into the new headquarters building downtown. Homicide was scheduled to be one of the last to leave, so the massive structure was almost empty. At over two million square feet, the building was one of the largest in the Southeast, now only echoing the glory days of catalog commerce, when the rails received goods and then sent them out again, destined for little towns throughout the region. Those rails had delivered, made real, what the treasured catalog had brought into the realm of possibility. Aunt Fanny got the Sunday corset that made her look and feel like a movie star. Great-uncle Jim got heavy overalls—the good ones for town—and a pipe. Cousin Hazel ordered flower seeds, almost any kind—just looking at the packets could make her dream.
Salt parked, gathered a considerable bouquet of flowers from the backseat, and walked from the oil-stained parking lot onto the receiving dock and into the cavernous superstructure. The high ceilings would have accommodated tons of merchandise and all those boxes, stacked, waiting on pallets to be shipped. An ancient elevator with a filigree brass door lifted her slowly past the smoky windows of the empty floors until the bounce stop at the eighth floor where she got out and rolled the elevator panels closed. She walked through to the front side of the building where the windows faced Ponce de Leon Avenue and looked across to what should be hallowed ground, the place where Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1949 by playing the all-white Atlanta Crackers in old Ponce de Leon Park. Now it was a parking lot for some big-box stores. The old stadium was built in 1907 and torn down in 1966 when Atlanta joined the major leagues with the acquisition of the Braves, along with a new facility built closer to the center of the city and expressways. Atlanta was derelict in honoring its past. A massive magnolia tree that had marked center field and fair ball territory still stood high on the hill above the retail strip, while all that was left of the old green-painted wood bleachers and green-and-yellow dirt playing field were old photos that hung in a restroom corridor of one of the food markets. Atlanta’s black fans had been segregated to an area under the railroad trestle that ran above and alongside right field. Jackie had stolen home in the third game of the exhibition series with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
At the door to the Homicide offices, Salt switched the bundled camellias to her left arm, swiped her card, and waited for the green light on the panel.
“Look at you, Girl Detective,” Rosie said standing from behind the receptionist’s desk. She was six foot seven in heels and wore an electric-blue sheath dress. “That pink matches your lip color so perfectly.”
“They will look even more perfect on your desk. For you, Rosie.” Salt handed her the bouquet. “These will have to do till the roses come in.”
“Oh, my God.” Rosie looked down into the pink and green in her arm
s. She had been, before beginning the transition, a beat cop and renowned headbanger. When she looked up, her eyes were brimming. “No one’s ever. Oh, shit.” She opened a drawer, fumbled, and came up with a handful of tissues. “Go on. Go back there to your cubby and let me get these in a vase.”
Salt punched the numbers and pushed through to the inner office. As she made her way to the back, one of the day-watch guys and Barney were the only heads visible over the tops of the partitions. The under-cabinet light was on above her desk and where yesterday there’d been only a few bent paper clips and dust now sat a state-of-the-art computer, flat-screen monitor, and keyboard. She switched on her Handie-Talkie, then touched a key and the monitor lit up with a law enforcement search screen. Radio was quiet. She was still getting used to not being bound to the constant demands to answer calls as she’d been as a beat cop, whose time is owned by radio calls. In Homicide her time was hers when she wasn’t on a fresh scene, but she would be owned by the cases and her solve rate.
The broken chair was gone, replaced by one that was ergonomic-looking, blue-cushioned, and turned to welcome her. The cubicle even smelled nice; lavender had been stashed somewhere. The drawers were stocked with tablets, forms, and unopened boxes of other supplies: pens, hand wipes, disposable gloves, crime scene booties, even a couple of juice boxes and power bars.
“You like it?” Rosie came up the aisle smiling and carrying a vase with the flowers.
Salt’s head came just below Rosie’s chin when they hugged. “Thank you.”
“Us girls have to stick together,” Rosie said.
“What girls?” Barney stuck his head up over the next-row partition.
Daniels’ fingers waggled above the partition close by. “You didn’t bring me flowers, honey.” Something flew over from Barney’s side.