Gods Go Begging (30 page)

Most contestants used tape to lift their boobs as high as they could without having the nipples pop out. Not Sabine Johnson. Little Reggie’s mother smiled as she recalled how the bodice would strain over her breasts. Without knowing it, she smiled broadly at the two men who were questioning her and ran her tongue over her upper teeth. There was no Vaseline on those teeth to keep the lips from sticking to them. No caps, no white dye on her teeth or collagen in her lips. She was purely organic, natural, one of God’s favored creatures.

Sabine stood before her latest audience of leering men. Their mouths were moving, but she could not hear them. Even as Jesse repeated a question, Princess Sabine was walking a runway at some distant county fair with a hundred hungry eyes staring at her.

“Do you know how those boys died? Did you hear any gunshots? Did you know any of the boys personally?”

The disturbing sentences seemed to be coming from the crowd at the county fair. Or was it one of the judges who was asking those disconcerting questions? They were most certainly not proper questions for a beauty contest! Princess Sabine stomped her foot angrily. There would be no prizes today, no first runner-up.

“Why don’t you people just go away and leave me alone?” she began screaming. “Just leave me alone! I don’t deserve any of this. I don’t know what happened to Reggie and those other boys. Things happened to them, to all of them. There are winners and losers in everything. Things happen!”

Sabine stopped suddenly, placing a hand over her mouth.

“I don’t know anything,” she said in a new voice, one that Jesse and Eddy had not heard before. Gone was the mother and the beauty queen. The woman standing before them now was far from beautiful. She had a palsied, feverish face and eyes narrowed to glowing slits. With one quivering, extended hand she showed Jesse and Eddy the door.

“My father Butler Johnson would kill you both for the insinuations you’ve made against his little daughter today. He would kill you. Why on earth would I have a personal relationship with anyone up on this hill? I told you, everyone up here is trash.” As she enunciated each syllable, Sabine coated it with bile, placed it on her tongue, and spat it at the two men.

“My father was a gentleman. You two could do far worse than emulate Butler Johnson, but of course you have no breeding. It’s what I do every day of my life—emulate that dear man. My father brought me up with love and devotion,” she hissed. “I brought Reggie up the very same way. He’s a well-bred boy. How dare you come here with all your questions. Now, leave me alone!” Princess Sabine slammed the front door. “I have nothing more to say to you.”

As Jesse and Eddy walked down the hill toward the scene of La Massacre des Amazons, the investigator reached into his pocket and handed something to Jesse. It was an object contained within a crumpled manila envelope.

“I forgot to give this to you. I just got it today. It’s a taped copy of the 911 call that was made from the phone booth across from the Amazon Luncheonette.”

“What’s on it?”

“I don’t know,” answered Eddy. “I thought you should listen to it first. I do know one thing. The guy at police communications said that one of the victims’ voices is on that tape. He said that there is also the barely audible sound of a second, much more distant voice. He said that you can hear two gunshots, clear as a bell on the recording. There were some other sounds on the tape, but he couldn’t make them out. In all honesty, I guess I didn’t play it because I just wasn’t ready to hear it, Jesse. The communications officer told me that she said only one word into the mouthpiece.”

“One word?” repeated Jesse in a barely audible voice.

The thought of hearing a single word from the lips of a dying woman sent a cold chill down Jesse’s back. Long ago he had heard just such a word in one of the ugliest and most beautiful moments he had ever endured. It had been an unclouded, crystalline, and razor-edged moment free of self-consciousness and free of all shame. He had held a dying boy’s head until that precise instant, that slice of a moment when the nuclei of a billion cells in the center of his eye went dim in unison. He had seen the white of an eye shift subtly to gray. He had detected what he thought was a moment of weightlessness in the body of Julio Lopez.

He had felt the sum and the subtraction of it: that faint shift of inner light, that instant when all of the muscles of his warm body quit idling and stalled out forever—that split second of a moment when the last five neurons flickered and faded away.

“Padre!” said Jesse aloud, echoing the very word that had escaped his lips as Julio had succumbed, almost thirty years before.

“What was that? Did you say ‘padre’?” asked Eddy.

“It was nothing,” responded Jesse, as he turned down the small walkway that led to the front door of the Amazon Luncheonette. His voice was a mixture of confusion and embarrassment. He stopped halfway to the door, then continued at a more respectful pace. He turned to face Eddy.

“I had a friend once, a padre, an infantry chaplain. He went insane … or maybe he went sane back in 1968. One day he just walked away from the war.”

A shiver lingered between his shoulder blades as he turned to peer through the glass of the luncheonette. He focused his eyes; programming them to ignore all reflections. Suddenly the frozen disarray resolved itself into view. There were jars filled with spices and sauces strewn on the floor and a stovetop covered with unwashed pots. Through the back window of the narrow restaurant Jesse had a clear view of the bedroom beyond. The rear window framed the hill and housing projects. There were signs of ambition, industry, and hope everywhere. The hours and days before their death must’ve been happy ones, thought Jesse.

The women had run through this door, crossed the street, and moved diagonally toward the phone booth on the other side of the street. No blood had been found in the restaurant. Jesse pushed at the new glass door. Despite the band of yellow police tape and a notice from the district attorney’s office, the door opened easily. The cops had forgotten to lock the place after they left. Jesse pushed the door open and the two men walked in slowly.

“Look.”

Eddy was pointing to the industrial refrigerator. The doors had been left ajar. Jesse pulled out his tiny recorder and began his entry by stating the new time and the full date and location.

“I am present with my investigator Edmund Kazuso Oasa. Using a fork retrieved from the sink, I am opening the door further. There is a streak of blood on the door approximately seven inches long. The streak culminates in a single fingerprint. The streak seems intact. No samples were taken. I don’t believe that the police have seen this. There are scratch marks on the inside of the metal door and on the surface behind it. Someone was in here. It should be noted that the shelves have yet to be placed in their respective positions. They are still in a carton to the left of the refrigerator. We are now photographing the door and the interior of the box.”

Eddy stepped forward and focused on the door. “A flash will wipe this out,” he said, then he walked to the front wall and turned on the bank of overhead lights. He switched off his flash unit. The Pentax clicked, then clicked again.

“I’ll tell the DA about this tomorrow morning,” said Jesse as he dropped his recorder into a pocket. “You’ve got to get in touch with this guy Anvil Harp, Eddy. Find out why he didn’t bother to marry a Miss America contestant! Perhaps he never asked her. Maybe she didn’t want him. Find out what really happened. Why was he an indiscretion? I want to know where Little Reggie lived. There was absolutely no evidence of him anywhere in her apartment.

“I want to know why she’s living all alone in a housing project,” continued Jesse. “There were no flowers, no gifts anywhere. There’s no evidence of a man in her life. I want to know why she’s built a motel around herself. Why would someone who should have buckets of money and dozens of suitors have little more than a room full of Italian shoes and a few mementos?”

The investigator was nodding and frantically scribbling notes into his binder. Eddy was wondering where in America these questions would send him.

“Hell, in 1977 in the South, she must have been Helen of Troy,” said Jesse. “She must have been African-American royalty back in Selma and Atlantic City. Did you see her? Did you see her entire life on those walls? How could such a woman possibly fail? How on earth can beauty fail?”

Eddy could not answer the question. Princess Sabine had what every woman allegedly wanted, yet she had nothing at all. The world was ignoring her. Worse yet, the world had forgotten her.

“I’ll get on Mister Harp tomorrow afternoon,” he said quietly. “There can’t be more than one or two Anvil Harps in all of North America. It’s an unusual first name. If he’s written a check or applied for credit in the last ten years, the databases will have him. I’ll do it as soon as I get back from Tracy. According to Bernard Skelley’s sister Margie Dixon, Bernard’s brother Richard used to live in the Fruitvale District with his family. He moved from there to the acorn projects. The locals call the place ‘ghost town.’ ”

“Did Minnie, the little girl who says she was molested by the supreme being, live with Richard in West Oakland?” asked Jesse. “Did Minnie Skelley live in the Fruitvale, too?”

“All of them lived together. Richard had a steady job at a local auto dismantler until it closed. Now he’s a carny again and the family is split up. A lot of their stuff is in storage.

“Margie says he worked as a carny about ten years ago. He runs a game booth in a parking-lot carnival that’s working down in the Central Valley right now. It’s real small-time, there’s only seven mechanical rides, two tents, and two or three hot food stands. The carnival is due in Hayward next weekend, so I’ll get a close look at Richard. When the supreme being was in town he used to stay at his brother’s house in Oakland. Margie is going to give me the rundown on the entire family history.”

“Why is Margie talking to you?” asked Jesse.

“The Skelley family has disowned her. They haven’t spoken to her in years. Her ex-husband, Wallace Dixon, is a black man who drives for Alameda County Transit. I spoke to him on the phone. Seems like a decent sort. He pays his alimony right on time. Now she’s running around with an eccentric English professor from Stanislaus Junior College. His name is Eric Caine. I ran them both in the database and superior court records. Neither of them has a rap sheet. I’ll do phone interviews with them tonight.”

“A black man and an English professor, eh?” Jesse laughed. “Which one does the Skelley family hate more?”

When they reached the phone booth, both Jesse and Eddy were suddenly aware of the dozens of eyes watching them. Without knowing it, they had become aware of the cumulative breeze that is created when a dozen sheer curtains are moved cautiously aside. Without hearing it, they sensed the sum of a dozen sighs. The witnesses to the murders had gone back to their windows to watch as a neighborhood wound was reopened.

There had been no rain since the shooting, and spots of dried blood were still visible on the sidewalk. The telephone had been removed because it had been losing money since the night of the killings. In truth, not a single soul had used it since that night. There were bare wires hanging down from a hole in the wall. Before leaving the area, Jesse had nervously pulled at the wires. Had these strands of copper and plastic felt the desperation in Persephone Flyer’s voice?

As he drove down Mississippi Street toward the Hall of Justice, Jesse wondered what that single word on the tape would be? He opened the envelope and pushed the cassette into his car radio, then he waved at Eddy, who was driving toward the Bay Bridge in his own car. The radio was turned off so that the 911 tape wouldn’t begin playing until Jesse was perfectly ready to hear it.

After a long thoughtful pause at a stop sign, he turned his car down Sixteenth Street, turned left on Market, and began driving toward Twin Peaks. It was then that he realized that he needed to decide what his destination was before driving any farther. He could go to Glen Park, where Carolina would be having her dinner and watching the news, or he could drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and spend the night alone in the little room he kept at the Sonoma Inn Motel. This might be as good a night as any to “communicate” with her. He winced at the thought of it. Those conversations always ended the same way: with a paralyzed and mute Jesse leaving in the middle of a vegetarian meal, and with Carolina frustrated and sobbing. Might as well get it over with, he thought, though he couldn’t decide which he dreaded more, the communication or the tofu. Suddenly his fingers reached for the radio and turned it on.

He fully expected to hear Benny Green, the Modern Jazz Quartet, or the Horace Silver quintet. The question of where to sleep had caused him to forget for an instant that there was a tape lodged in the radio, ready to play. What he heard first was the monotone voice of the communications technician as he announced the date and the exact time of the incoming call. Then Jesse heard the single spoken word: a long airy vowel, a soft consonant of pressed lips, a short and guttural vowel, and, finally, a moment of sibilance that faded off to eternity. He began to finger his dog tags once again as he heard the consonants and vowels that would serve to punctuate a lifetime, the single word that would have to suffice.

He sped past Carolina’s house, up Sloat Boulevard, down Nineteenth Avenue, and back toward the city. She had been home, her front room lights had been on. She was probably in her darkroom wondering when, if ever, he was going to come by. Jesse could see her in his mind’s eye, carefully rinsing a photograph, the acrid scents of acetic acid and melancholy filling her lovely nose.

He drove erratically and carelessly, crossing double lines and running stop signs as he played and replayed that single word. When the sound of two gunshots filled his ears for the fifth time he pulled to the side of the road to compose himself before driving on. He passed Balboa Street, turning down Geary, and pulled over at the Dublin City Bar, leaving his car running and the driver’s door wide open. He ran into the bar and stood impatiently at the cash register, his face glistening with sweat. His old friend Hollis had seen him come in and greeted him with a wide smile.