Sacrificial Ground fc-1 Page 8

  The bright yellow dress was visible from a great distance, and Frank saw it almost immediately. He guided the car slowly over to the curb and glanced toward the playground.

  “That her?” he asked.

  Caleb’s eyes were already on her, and they seemed to soften as he looked at her. “Oh, yeah, that’s her,” he said, almost in a whisper, “sitting by the swings.” He looked at Frank. “You might say she always did love things to be in motion.”

  It was well past noon, and as he got out of the car and headed down the small, bare hill toward the playground, Frank could feel that the steadily building summer heat had already turned everything dull and slow and sluggish. Even the children who dotted the playground moved ponderously through the thick, pulsing air. They hung like overripened fruit from the climbing dome, or swung slowly back and forth, as if moving through layers of gelatin.

  “Hey, Bea,” Caleb called as he walked up to her.

  The woman looked up immediately, saw Caleb, and smiled sweetly as she looked at him. “Didn’t think you was coming back.”

  “I said I would,” Caleb told her.

  She shrugged. “Well, you know what I’m used to.” She leaned gently against the tree, as if it were a source of cool air. A wave of dark perspiration swam out from beneath the arms of her dress. Another hung in an almost perfect crescent over her upper chest.

  “Kids still getting to you?” Caleb asked.

  Beatrice smiled languidly. “They more than I can take, Cal.” She waved her hand over her face. “And this heat. I almost forgot what it was like down here.”

  “You’d get used to it, if you didn’t rush back up North,” Caleb said, as if he were trying to persuade her to linger in the city.

  Beatrice shook her head. “Naw, I got to get back.” She glanced at Frank, but said nothing.

  “This is Frank Clemons,” Caleb told her. “He’s in charge of the case.”

  Beatrice grinned at him. “Top man, huh?” She winked at Caleb. “That’s good. I like working with the man on top.” She laughed. “Hey, Cal, you tell this white boy about me?”

  “I got nothing to hide, Bea,” Caleb said somberly. “You know me when it comes to things like that.”

  “So he told you I was once a working girl?” Beatrice asked Frank.

  “Yeah.”

  “Way back when, though. Long gone from now.”

  “You work with computers these days,” Frank said.

  “Right, computers,” Beatrice said. “Them other times is passed me by.” She nodded toward Caleb. “He was skinny as a rail back then. Wasn’t you, Caleb?”

  I was, yes.

  “Handsome, too,” Beatrice said. She shook her head despairingly. “But so thin. Lord, you could just about see through him.” She leaned forward and patted his belly. “Look like somebody done knocked you up, Cal.” She glanced back at Frank, and he saw the wildness in her eyes. “But he could go all night back in them days.” She turned back toward Caleb and smiled affectionately. “Could ’bout wear a girl out, couldn’t you?”

  “With the right help, I could,” Caleb said, and the two of them laughed softly.

  “I understand you’ve been staying at a house near Glenwood?” Frank said.

  “That’s right,” Beatrice told him. “I been takin’ care of my sister’s kids. She on her honeymoon. I never figured she’d get married again, but she done it, so I come down to see after the kids.”

  “Caleb says they keep you up at night?”

  “That’s right, too,” Beatrice said. “They don’t got much sense, them two. They run all over me. Like wild animals.” She pointed toward a small dirt hill. Two children were tumbling down it, spewing waves of dry dust into the air. “See ’em. Like monkeys.” She shook her head. “Shit, if I’d acted like them two, my mama would have nailed my bare feet to the kitchen floor.”

  Frank took out his notebook. “So you were up early on Tuesday morning?”

  Beatrice nodded, her eyes looking closely at his face. “You had a talk with the wrong guy, looks like.”

  “More than one,” Caleb said.

  Beatrice smiled. “’Member when them two got after you that time? You was all busted up.”

  “Tuesday morning you were up, is that right?” Frank repeated.

  “Till the break of dawn.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Well, they ain’t much traffic on them sidestreets that time of the morning. So, I heard a car, and I looked out the window, sort of hoping it was my sister. It was a crazy thought, like maybe she done got tired of that fat bastard and left him on the beach. It was a crazy thought, but you know, when you want something bad, it does things to your mind.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “Fancy car,” Beatrice said, “like you don’t see much around here.”

  “Do you know what kind it was?”

  “It was a red little thing. What they call a ‘coupe,’ I think. It looked like a foreign car.”

  “Did you happen to notice what model it was?”

  “I don’t know models much. Used to, I did. Back when they was just a Buick and a Ford. They got too many of them foreign cars now.”

  “Was it new?”

  “Oh yeah, it was new. Real shiny. Red as a rose. Only brighter. Bright red.”

  Frank wrote it down. “Which way was the car coming?”

  “Up from Glenwood,” Beatrice said, “going sort of slow.”

  “So you were facing the headlights?”

  “Yes,” Beatrice said, “shined right in my eyes. But then he flashed them off, and it was black night again.” She looked at Caleb. “Black as my old ass, right, Caleb?”

  Caleb took out his pipe. “Double or single headlights, Bea?”

  “Two of them,” Beatrice said. She looked scoldingly at the pipe. “So you still smoking that thing?”

  “Just like always.”

  “How’s your poor wife stand it?”

  “Just like always,” Caleb said, and again they laughed together.

  “Where did the car stop?” Frank asked.

  “’Bout halfway up the street,” Beatrice said. “It circled a time or two. Then it pulled up to the curb right by that empty lot. Then the lights went off.”

  “Could you see the car clearly?”

  “It was pitch black, except for that one streetlight down on Glenwood.”

  “But you’re sure about the color?”

  “Yeah, I could see it good enough for that.”

  “Could you see any people in the car?”

  “One guy. He was behind the wheel.”

  “Could you describe him?”

  “You mean his face?”

  “Yes.”

  “Naw, he was too far away for something like that,” Beatrice said. “He waited a while before he got out, just set there behind the wheel. Then he got out and sort of looked up and down the street.” She smiled. “White guy, though. I could tell that much.”

  “Could you tell what he was wearing?”

  “Work suit, something like that,” Beatrice said. “You know, one of those one-piece things that sort of go on like my daddy’s overalls used to.”

  “Did he just stand by the car?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “For how long?”

  “Oh, maybe a minute, maybe two. I wasn’t timing him.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He went around to the dark side of the car and opened the door.”

  “The door on the passenger’s side?” Frank asked. “Not the trunk?”

  Beatrice nodded. “Then he pulled something out. It looked like an old carpet. I figured he was dumpin’ it in the lot. Nobody supposed to do that, but that old rusty car, God didn’t put that there, you know? I figured that’s why he’s looking all around, ’cause he ain’t suppose to be dumpin’ no trash in that lot.”

  “Did you see anything in the carpet?”

  “Nah, I didn’t,” Beatrice said. “But it was
rolled up real loose like, and from the way he was walkin’ it seemed a lot heavier to him than it ought to have been.” She looked at Caleb. “It must have been real heavy. ‘Cause one time, he dropped it.”

  “Where did he drop it?” Frank asked immediately.

  “Oh, maybe a few yards into the lot, just about in front of that old car.”

  That was about where Angelica’s shoe had been found, and Frank made a note of it in his book.

  “He didn’t put the carpet up on his shoulder no more after that,” Beatrice added. “He just sort of drug it along, pulling it as he walked backwards.” She glanced toward the children. They were now beyond the hill.

  “Stay close now, Raymond,” she called loudly. “And you watch out for Leila.”

  “Where did he take the carpet?” Frank asked.

  “Into that lot, like I said.”

  “Where in the lot?”

  “’Bout the middle of it.”

  Which was about where the body had been found, Frank realized, and which meant that she probably had seen the things she described.

  “What did he do in the lot?” Frank asked.

  “I seen him lay the carpet down in the weeds,” Beatrice said. “That’s the last I seen. One of them kids started some shit, and I had to go tend to them.”

  “So you stopped watching him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You didn’t see him leave?”

  Beatrice shook her head. “Next time I seen that street, it was maybe an hour later. Car was gone by then.”

  Frank wrote this last statement down in his notebook and ended it with a large black period.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Beatrice smiled faintly. “Don’t guess it adds up to much, does it?”

  “It’s very helpful,” Frank told her truthfully. He pocketed his notebook. “How long do you expect to be in Atlanta?”

  “Maybe another week.”

  “Let us know before you leave.”

  “I’ll tell old Caleb here.” She smiled. “We’re old buddies, ain’t we?”

  “Yeah, we are,” Caleb said.

  Moments later, when the two of them were back in the car, Caleb glanced wistfully toward the playground, his eyes lingering for a moment on the woman in the bright yellow dress. She seemed like a spot of light in the surrounding green. “You know, Frank,” he said softly, “there’s nothing like the past to make the future look like hell.”

  9

  “It was murder, Caleb,” Frank said determinedly, as he and X Caleb made their way through the lunchtime crowds on Peachtree Street. The great towers loomed over them, a thousand small suns winking in a thousand separate mirrors. The heat rose from the street in steamy waves and rippled upward.

  Caleb swabbed his face with a red handkerchief. “With malice aforethought,” he said. He pocketed the handkerchief and elbowed his way around a strolling couple. “You know what tipped me off? The way he dumped her. You don’t do that to someone you care about.” He shook his head. “My daddy was full of shit, but I remember that when he was laid out in his coffin, my mother reached over and straightened that poor bastard’s tie.”

  They reached the small, treeless park at the center of the city. It was made of cement blocks, with little triangles of closely cropped grass. A large lunchtime crowd of clerks and office workers was munching sandwiches. A few scattered derelicts elbowed their way through the crowds, and to the far end of the park, a small area had been taken over by poor, unemployed men who slouched about in fishnet shirts and drank beer from cans wrapped in paper bags.

  “The heat don’t make them nicer,” Caleb said with a small, thin smile. He sat down on one of the few wooden benches and patted it softly. “Take a load off, Frank.”

  Frank sat down. “Headquarters would love it to be an accidental death,” he said.

  “Fuck them,” Caleb said. He swabbed his neck again. “They got a low attitude about life, and they always have. Top floor’s black now, but nothing else has changed. There’s only one rule: cover your ass.”

  Frank watched the long line of barely moving traffic that circled the park: taxis, delivery vans, private cars, and here and there a bicycle that whizzed by everything else. For an instant, he felt a strange envy for the men and women on their bikes, for everything that seemed less stranded and bogged down.

  “They don’t see the bigger thing,” Caleb said, “the top brass. It makes them crazy ’cause they don’t.” He crammed the handkerchief in his coat pocket. “So you get this murder and then that one and then the one after that.” He shook his head. “Things blur.”

  “Not much of a way around that, though, Caleb,” Frank said.

  “I know one,” Caleb said. “You got to do a trick in your mind. You got to think that every murder is the first one that ever was.” His eyes shifted over to Frank. “In every one, there’s some little thing that strikes you,” he added. “I saw a little boy who’d been murdered once. His big brother had shot him. He was laying on the floor, and there was a little toy pistol still in his hand. That did it for me, that little pistol. I kept thinking about it, and in the end, it was all I needed to track that son-of-a-bitch brother down.”

  Frank nodded slowly.

  “Now with Angelica, it’s her hair,” Caleb said, “the way it was all laid out around her head. Just like a gold fan.”

  Frank looked at him unbelievingly. “You think about that? About her hair?”

  “Yeah,” Caleb said. “It’s what keeps the fire going in me.”

  Frank turned away and looked at the stream of traffic again. He could not think of small things to sustain him, as Caleb did. For him, it was just the opposite. Instead of a toy pistol, a fan of hair, such small, incidental things, he sensed something infinitely large which lived in the darkest quarters of the city or swept out like a prairie wind across barren, dust-covered fields. It was something which fed on the shadows in which it lurked, and then, suddenly, without warning, stepped out of them and into the adjoining world, swept out like a gnarled hand and pulled someone back into it, leaving only traces behind, a toy pistol for Caleb to remember, or a strand of golden hair.

  In his mind, he suddenly saw Angelica’s hair. But he did not see it as Caleb did, but as Karen had painted it in the portrait on Cummings’ wall. Something in the portrait clung to his mind like a silver hook. Slowly, delicately, he tried to bring each feature into view: the shining black shoes and white socks, the gently tapered ankles, the red velvet dress and the lace that curled about its hem then rose in a swirl of white to her chest, where it gathered gracefully in a small white pool. He could see Angelica’s neck rise from the lace collar, and then her face, so beautiful, framed by the blonde hair, each feature so perfectly wrought that it seemed separately made. He noted the ears, the full red mouth, the lines of her chin and cheekbones. Then, at last, he settled upon her eyes. He could see them very clearly, the blue irises, the black pupils, the oval pools of white. It was the irises that drew him back. Something was missing, the tiny white specks that give the eyes their light They had not been painted in the portrait, and because of that, Angelica’s eyes looked dead. Years before, her sister had painted her this way, but even now, as Frank felt a cold wave pass over him, he could not imagine why.

  He was still thinking about it when he got home several hours later. For a long time, he stood on the little porch and watched night fall over the city. He stared first at one cluster of lights, then another, but always through the cloudy haze of Angelica’s painted face.

  He glanced down at his feet, as if hoping to find a clue clinging like a piece of street debris to his shoes. But there was nothing there, nothing anywhere but in his mind, feelings the facts could not warrant, vague, half-formed intimations. There were times when he was sure his father had been plagued by such odd sensations, times when his deep-lined face would look so wounded that everything around him seemed to grow quiet, and the world would appear as some small, crouching animal, huddled,
frightened, sleeplessly listening for the footfall of a larger, predatory beast.

  For relief, Frank lit a cigarette. He allowed it to burn for a while, then tapped the ashes and watched them fall slowly toward the ground. They twirled gracefully in the heavy summer darkness, lightly, playfully, as if there were no earth beneath to catch their fall. But the earth came up quickly, and even from several feet above, Frank could see the ashes as they collided with it and shattered into feathery specks of white.

  Suddenly, in his mind, he saw Angelica’s face shatter in exactly the same way. It was as if something had exploded beneath it, blowing its separate parts in all directions and leaving only the already lifeless eyes to spin like two dull marbles in the empty air.

  He started to go back into the apartment, but as he turned, he felt a tremor move through him. It came from the ground beneath him, and he tried to imagine its source, a slight shift in the foundation, some tiny burrow caving in. He glanced at the window, to see if he could detect any trembling in the glass. But it was still. Everything was still. It was only in him, and so he simply waited for it to pass.

  When it was over, he looked back into his apartment. It was an unappetizing clutter of fast-food boxes and newspapers. He could not bring himself to go inside.

  The car was his escape, and within a few seconds he was moving down the city streets. Driving at night renewed and invigorated him. The flow of light, the feel of the air as it rushed through the open windows, worked on him like a tonic. For it was as if the streets belonged to him in some special way. He sometimes felt like the sole survivor of a bombed-out and abandoned kingdom, a ghostly presence, silent, restless, with nothing for thought but his own inchoate feeling, nothing for guidance but his hands on the wheel.

  It was almost an hour later when he found himself far past the midtown towers. On his left, he could see West Paces Ferry Road as it came to an end at Peachtree Street. As he turned onto it and headed north, he could see Karen’s portrait of Angelica as if it hung like smoke in the passing web of trees.