Out of the Blues (19 page)

A
s was often the case when Salt woke, Wonder was asleep with his back to her, lengthwise facing the open window. Early-morning light played with the breeze on the hydrangea bush outside. She lay still for a bit watching the tips of the dog's ears quiver and the embroidered half curtains flutter in the breeze. She reached with her index finger and touched the knob at the top of Wonder's head, his cue to roll on his back. He splayed his hind legs and folded his front legs in total acquiescence. This early-morning ritual was the only time or place he was off duty enough to bare his belly. “Breathe on me, breath of dog.”

He cut his eyes as if to say, “That's not what you usually say.”

She ran her finger through the spot at the bottom of each ear where his fur sometimes tangled. She rubbed the nicks, scratched his scars, and then buried her face in the soft fur under his chin, inhaling his light musky realness. “Dog breath.” She ruffled his fur and rolled him over, and he bowed his down-dog stretch and hopped from
the bed, waving his tail in anticipation as she got into running shorts and sneakers.

—

T
O
COOL
DOWN
from the three-mile run Salt walked the last fifty yards from the county road in front of her property and up the gravel drive, appreciating the beginnings of the new fence. She visualized how it might look once completed and painted white and began to think about all the trees, shrubs, bushes, and flowers and the vegetable garden that she might plant once she had the sheep taking care of the mowing. In the back at the chest-high paddock she slid back the bolt to let the sheep into the orchard. where they kept the grasses and weeds under control while enjoying the pecans when they fell in season. She barely had to supplement their feed.

The tree was twenty or so yards back, one of the more than thirty pecan trees on the property. The only thing that distinguished it now was the footboards she'd nailed to the trunk. Winding down from the run, she broke into a sweat that gathered and ran down her legs, painting muddy tracks along her dusty calves. Still breathing hard, hands on her hips, Wonder panting at her side, she walked to the tree and looked up the trunk to where the footboards ended at the branch. Without stopping to think, she took hold of one of the head-high boards and stepped up on the bottom rung. Hand over hand she climbed to the last rung and with an easy motion swung her arms around the branch above, settling her rear on the smooth scoop of her old childhood haunt. The warm wind tousled the limbs, branches, and leaves, waving them in the morning sun, scattering the light and bouncing it all around her. “Ranger. I remember. Ranger.”

She sighed and lowered her chin to her chest.
“Breathe.”
She had watched her father's breath leave, had not thought anything about giving him her breath.
“Breathe.”
Where did it go?
she'd wondered in
that moment when his breath was gone. That precise moment of her ten-year-old life when she realized her father was dead and she should have tried to give him her breath. “If I could find your breath—”

Breathe on me, breath of God

Fill me with life.

She imagined hearing the choir sing. “What could I have done to get you to stay in this life? I didn't think to give you my breath. If I had done enough, been enough, could you have stayed? I did not give you breath.” The thoughts came in the same old pattern.

Wonder stared up from below, happily swishing his tail. “Breathe on me, breath of dog.”
Ranger. Dan. Breath of dog.

—

T
HE
R
OTTIES
and the warm aroma of just-baked biscuits met her when she let herself in Wills' place. “Honey, I'm home,” Salt called, walking down the hall while scratching the dogs' ears, their nails tapping and sliding on the polished wood floor. The fragrance became increasingly delicious as she neared the kitchen and her appetite was further enhanced by the sound of perking burbles from the coffee brewing on the counter.

She'd called Wills after coming down from the tree. He suggested breakfast before they went in to work.

He stood next to the stove pushing soy patties around a small pan. “I could get used to hearing that,” he said, smiling at her. He was wearing his standard work clothes—a short-sleeved dress shirt and khaki pants, covered with a white half apron tied under his chest. A day-of-the-dead skull tie was slung over his leather carryall on a chair by the wall.

“Oh, yeah. Wait till I've told you my latest adventure. I need some
advice, dude. I'm actually asking for help.” Her phone rang. “Hi, Chuck. Hold on.” She motioned to Wills. “I actually need to take this one.” She put the phone back to her ear. “Yep. Honda Accord. Yep. You got it. Passenger front window. Anytime today. It'll be in the parking lot. Blue. Yep. BIF2988. Thanks, Chuck.” She turned the phone off, tucked it in her bag, and looked up at Wills waiting. “Sorry, but Chuck's fixing my window today.”

“Your window?” Wills piled the biscuits in a red ceramic bowl lined with a green kitchen cloth.

“Wills, I'm telling you right away. I'm going to tell you all of it. I want to be better with you, to not be so, so . . .”

“Hungry?” he asked.

“I'm starved,” she said as she sat down and began giving him the details about the surveillance. “Don't dog me out. I'm doing this. Okay? I didn't have any clear idea what I was looking for or who I might see, but I set up across from Magic Girls.”

“Magic Girls—thug central.” He turned with his hands on his hips.

“Wills. Mostly I wanted to get a sense of Spangler, who he hangs with, bodyguards, posse pals, associates, the usual suspects, who I might need to go around to interview him.”

“Did you stop to think that since he's connected to my case that you might talk this over with me?” He stirred eggs with his back to her.

“You've got your hands full and we're not officially assigned partners. What would you have said if I told you I would be doing the surveillance? I can't check in with you asking about every move I make. If I've got an opportunity, I need to be able to take it. Same as if I were a guy. So I set up in the vacant building across from the club.”

“God, God, God. This is going to be the death of me. And to think I was the one encouraging you to go for detective.”

“Wills, you are going to have to trust that I can handle myself.
And I am going to promise to try to ask for help when I need it. Like now.”

“Salt, even a guy would make a phone call, pull out with radio.”

“But wouldn't you just have worried if I called first and then had my phone off? And okay, so maybe I'm sensitive about being treated different, but it's sometimes hard to know when someone's safety concerns are a disguise for paternalism and thinking that a woman's not up to the job.”

She told him the rest—about Spangler and Madison, and Madison's assault. Then finding the window busted.

They sat with mugs of rich Cuban coffee, real butter, watermelon-rind preserves, free-range organic eggs, and soy sausage. “Have you noticed I'm not even ranting about your run-in with Madison?” said Wills.

“No, you're not. Why?”

“I'm also going to try to do this better. I'm not going to go flay the skin from his body inch by inch. I'm not going to go remove his eyes from his head or his teeth with a tire iron. I'm not even going to say a fucking word to him. In fact, I'm going to seriously avoid him or any place he might be.” Wills put his mug down on the table and started clearing the dishes.

“Uh-oh.”

“No. You're right, honey. As things stand it would be just your word against his. But I know how to get more. This needs, we need, help and I have friends. You have friends. We can do this.” He refilled her cup.

“What about his connection with Midas Prince and now Spangler? What about all the cops who work EJs for him? I don't know who we can trust. Do you?”

“The EJ thing is a problem. Right now I don't know who all works for him either.” Wills sat back down with his own fresh cup of coffee.

“I've had EJ discussions with Pepper several times. I think he's even worked some jobs for Madison,” she said. “Ann called me and she and I are going to go to lunch tomorrow. I think she's worried. She and Pepper are having a hard time with the new assignment.”

“Understandable. Narcotics is the most dangerous job in the PD for lots of reasons. And it can change people if they start to identify with the dark side.”

“I'm assuming you mean that metaphorically?” Salt widened her eyes.

“God, you Southerners are so sensitive—Atlantans especially.” He shook his head. “Everything has a subtext about race. It's tiresome.”

“Sister says the city has a black dog hanging around.”

“Black dog?”

“A hellhound.” She looked down into her cup. “Wills, one of the reasons I wanted to see you is because I was thinking about my dad this morning and I realized that I might be, I don't know, for lack of a better word, haunted by his death, by having found him after he shot himself. This case of the blues, Michael Anderson's death, my father's blues collection, Dan Pyne bleeding out while I tried to give him CPR—it's all brought up some things I'd forgotten.”

He laughed. “Shazam! Well, aren't you the smart shrink. You think? A little girl finds her father bleeding to death from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head and he dies in her arms. Yeah, that might put a crinkle in your gray matter.”

“The dog in my dream . . .”

He looked at her from under raised brows.

“Don't give me that look. Besides, no one, no cop, is a blank slate. We all have scars, even you.” She reached across the table for his hand.

Wills got up, came around behind her, and encircled her in his arms. “Remember when we first came together, I told you I wanted
you, in part, because of your history. I do have broken places myself, and you wouldn't be you without the history.”

“This stuff blindsides me sometimes. It comes up and I want to remember and I don't.”

“Well, Detective, we've got a lifetime to figure it out.”

I
knew I'd be seein' you soon.” The hinges of the screen door made a salutatory rasp as Sister Connelly, wearing one of her immaculate, albeit worn, old-fashioned housedresses and flat sandals, opened it wider. With her halo braid, tight and neat, adding inches to her already impressive height, she narrowly missed the doorframe as she motioned to Salt. “I've got a fresh pitcher of tea. Come on back to the kitchen.”

Passing the small parlor as they went down the hall, Salt said, “This is a treat. I feel like I've graduated—getting invited to your kitchen.”

“Might as well, you keep comin' 'round anyway.”

“I come because you know The Homes. You've been living here forever and you know almost everybody and who's kin to who.”

Sister's house was a small hundred-year-old cottage near The Homes and across the street from the apartment that had been the scene of the murder a year ago.

“Sit.” Sister motioned her to one of two red vinyl chairs at an
aluminum-rimmed Formica table in the middle of the tiny kitchen. She took a large pitcher out of the refrigerator, removed its plastic cover, poured two glasses, and added ice from the freezer. A bouquet of collard greens lay on the counter by the sink. Salt began to get the same feeling she'd had before at Sister's, of shape-changing, of growing larger, like Alice in Wonderland, the already small kitchen growing smaller. Sister was so tall the two of them filled the room.

“I meant to tell you at the cemetery, I went to see Stone.” Salt took a slow sip of the tea, remembering how sweet Sister made it.

“How's he doin'?”

“Terrible.” The tea slid down Salt's throat like syrup. She didn't usually drink her tea sweetened, but Sister's was old-fashioned sweet, the sugar added when the tea was hot.

“He was never going to make it,” Sister said. “Just too messed-up from the git.”

“What do you hear about Lil D?”

“Latonya don't put much in the street, so he probably takin' care of her and that baby.” Sister nodded her head to Salt, as if she were affirming something.

“Dantavious.” Salt said the baby's name. Sister's back door was half pane glass. A wood-line barrier behind the house separated her quiet residential street from the parallel, more heavily traveled city street on the other side. But the trees grew up close, leaving her just a small backyard. Birds flitted back and forth across the view from the door's glass panels. An open worn Bible lay on the table at Sister's elbow. A black cat clock on the wall ticked with a switching tail.

“Is it Lil D or the new job brought you 'round again?” Sister asked.

“In a way both, I guess. I found a recording that belonged to my dad of Mike Anderson with Pretty Pearl. I think I told you I'd been assigned to look into some new information about his death.”

“So that's it—your daddy.”

Salt stood up, went to the back door, and looked out. “Can we go sit on your front porch? It's too pretty to be inside.”

“I got your glass. Come on.” Sister was halfway down the hall by the time Salt turned around.

The old woman sat down on a hard-back wood chair and waved Salt to the two-seater swing. “I'd like to just sit on the steps here if you don't mind—better view of your yard,” said Salt.

There were flowers blooming everywhere in the crowded yard and along the wood fence. And everywhere there were starter containers: coffee cans, plastic tubs, anything that could be used to hold seedling plants. A climbing rose had grown up and into the trim on one of the corner supports. Flowering vines had begun sprouting on the fence posts. It all blended in an impressionist blur around the paint-peeling, weathered-wood house, patched in places with faded-tin advertising signs. “Atlanta's prettiest, best time of year,” Salt said.

“Your father loved this city, too—one of the reasons he was a good policeman. He'd come by sometimes, even if he didn't have no real reason or police business.”

“I just have these little pieces of him that I remember, since I was only ten when he died. But sometimes something will happen, like last year when I was shot, and I am able to grab at another piece.” Salt put her nose to the fragrant jasmine that twined around the post beside her.

Sister had been rubbing the smooth, shiny skin that stretched over her big knuckles, then she looked up sideways, narrowing her eyes at Salt. “You think maybe you took this job so's you can make a whole out of them pieces? You chasin' a ghost?”

“That's funny—chasing ghosts. It's what homicide detectives do, in a way. It's my job. You have the best memory of anyone I've ever known and you knew my dad.”

“Lord, chile. You can't expect me to remember much from maybe ten conversations that he and I had twenty or more years ago.”

“No, but you might have noticed something, remember some impression.”

“What kind of impression? What are you looking for?”

Salt felt a constriction in her throat, a hardening under her breastbone. She held her fist there. “Do I remind you of him?” She closed her eyes when her view of Sister's yard blurred.

“You mean are you like him?”

Salt nodded.

“You worried you are or are not like him?” Sister leaned toward Salt with her elbows on her knees and hands folded together. “Do you want to be like him or are you worried you messed-up from the git?”

“Both probably. Did he ever say anything, like he saw or heard things?”

“Not that I remember. Mostly my recollection of him, and I'll tell you straight, when I think back on him, it's how he saw connections, how things come together, crossroads, where the black dog sits. There's the song goes, ‘None of us are free 'long as one of us is chained, none of us are free.' He understood how we all tied together. As much as anybody I ever knew. I used to think it was because he was a policeman. But it's come to me, since I met you, that it was just his way. He paid attention and got the connections.”

The building across the street, where last year a twelve-year-old girl with tight braids had led Salt to her mother's body, was now stripped and gutted. “At first I thought maybe you were here about that killin' that's so much in the news these days. The rich lawyer's wife and her girls that were shot.”

“Solquist?”

“Yeah, folks 'round here been talkin' about the detectives, all kinds
of police, looking for DeWare. What kind of connection he have with killin' rich white people on the north side?”

“Good question,” Salt said. Only the brick façade of last year's murder scene remained.

“You thinking about Stone again, and last year?” Sister asked.

“Should I?”

“Who else?” Sister said.