The Bridge (25 page)

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Authors: Solomon Jones

BOOK: The Bridge
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Within minutes, they were transporting Judy to the Twenty-fifth District, where she was placed in a locked cell before being transferred to police headquarters in Center City.
She was put under guard and taken into an interrogation room. And then they lit into her, one after the other, wielding their questions like bludgeons.
But after hours of questioning by a team of four detectives, Judy sat at the table with a half smile, feeding them the same response she'd given from the beginning.
“I ain't talkin' to nobody but Kevin Lynch,” she said, staring straight ahead with eyes that had forever been changed by Sonny's betrayal.
“Y'all can either get him in here, or I'll take it to my grave. I done already died anyway, so it don't make no difference to me.”
 
 
 
As he returned to the Bridge from the hospital, Kevin Lynch felt like he was walking out of his new life and back into his old one.
Since Friday, transitioning between the two had become increasingly difficult, especially with thoughts of his wife and career piled atop childhood memories of beatings and unrequited love, dead children and friends killed for drugs.
He forced himself to ignore those things, however. Because he was determined to face his ghosts.
As he got out of his car and walked toward the building, he marveled at the darkness that enshrouded the Bridge. He knew that it
came from the grief over Kenya's disappearance. But he also knew that in spite of the pall that hung over the building, it still held light.
There were childhood games and innocence, mother love and healing, selflessness and dreams. All these things existed within the walls of the Bridge. Lynch knew that, because those things had allowed him to escape.
He only hoped those things could emerge once more. He hoped that they could save Kenya.
And so, Lynch walked into the building and did what he'd intended to do before he'd received the call about his wife. He stood in the middle of the foyer and tried to imagine that he was Kenya, preparing to go up to the tenth floor and ask for permission to stay the night at Tyreeka's.
He immediately noticed that the guard booth was occupied for the first time since he'd come there on Friday.
“How you doin', man?” he said, walking over to the gray-haired, bespectacled man sitting behind the inch-thick glass.
The security guard nodded warily. Lynch figured he had seen more than his share of everything while working there, and found silence to be the best response to most of it.
“My name is Kevin Lynch,” he said, smiling. “I'm working on the Kenya Brown disappearance, and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
“Cops already been through here,” the man said as he smoothed down his light-blue uniform shirt. “But I'll tell you like I told the other ones. The guy that was supposed to be here Friday night probably wasn't on his post when all that happened.”
“Well, if he wasn't here, where was he?”
“I don't know. But I'll tell you this. He miss a lotta nights. I ain't tell them other cops this, but I think he on that stuff. Course it ain't my job to supervise him, so …”
The old man let the sentence trail off.
“Was he supposed to be here last night, too?” Lynch asked. “Because I was here yesterday, and I didn't see a guard in the booth.”
“Listen, man. The company don't really pay us nothin', so it's a lotta nights when guys don't show up.”
“What about you? Do you miss nights, too?”
“I been workin' all my life,” the old man said. “I don't know how to do nothin' else but show up. They pay me, and I do my job the best way I can.”
“So what exactly is the job?” Lynch asked.
“Well, we supposed to make people that don't live here sign in when they come to see somebody in the buildin'. A lot o' times that don't happen, 'cause people just walk on by. But that's what we supposed to do.”
“Did you ever notice the people who visited Judy Brown's place?”
“Judy Brown on the seventh floor? Shit, you can't help seem' the people that go in and outta there. It's like the Hit Parade up there. And I ain't talkin' about no music.”
“What do you mean?”
“The hit parade, man. That's what I call it, anyway. 'Cause every time I come in here, I see people paradin' up to Judy place to get a hit.”
Lynch couldn't help smiling as the old man pressed on.
“You could look at most of 'em and see they was on that stuff. Most of 'ern ain't sign in, but the people that did, they usually put phony names on the sheet. Matter fact, here go a old sign-in sheet right here. Take a look. You'll see what I'm talkin' about.”
The man reached underneath the desk in the guard booth, pulled out a few curled sheets of paper on a clipboard, and handed them to Lynch.
Lynch looked at the names with Judy's unit number next to them and copied them down in a notebook.
“Did you or any of the other guards ever call the police and tell them what you thought was going on up there?”
“You learn to mind your business,” the man said. “You gotta get off work at night, and you don't want nobody knowin' you tried to cause problems in here, 'cause it's a long four blocks to the subway.”
“I understand,” Lynch said. “You see and you don't see.”
“That's right,” the old man said, bobbing his head vigorously.
“What about Kenya Brown, the little girl I'm looking for,” Lynch said, pulling out her picture. “Have you ever seen her before?”
The man looked at the picture. “Yeah, I seen her. It's hard not to see her. She different from a lot o' these other little girls you see runnin' in and outta here. She still got a little bit o' innocence about her.”
“Ever talk to her?”
“She would wave, and I would wave back. But no, I never talked to her. People get funny when you talk to they kids.”
Lynch thought for a moment, looking around the foyer and trying to imagine where Kenya would have gone first when she came back in on Friday night.
“I guess, if you saw her coming in and out a lot,” Lynch said as he looked around, “you would have noticed if she liked the elevator more than the stairs.”
The man nodded. “I did. She took the stairs most o' the time. Course she knew, just like everybody else, that the elevator was real slow. But there was one other thing I noticed about her.”
“What's that?”
“At night, especially if it was a lot goin' on in the buildin', she would wait for the elevator. I think she mighta been scared to take the stairs by herself. Tell you the truth, I can't blame her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“A lotta shady folk be hangin' in that stairway at night, especially on the weekend. One boy like to hang in the stairway and act like he crazy—talkin' to hisself and what not. I think he on that stuff, too.”
“Do you know his name?”
The old man was about to say it, but a group of residents came into the building, watching as he talked to Lynch.
Figuring it would be better if they didn't hear him give the name, he wrote it out on a piece of paper, folded it, and handed it to Lynch, who opened it and read it.
“He usually be up there at Judy apartment,” the guard said. “That's where he like to hang at when he ain't in the stairway. But I guess with Judy gone and everything shut down up there, you might find him in that apartment up there on six.”
“Thanks,” Lynch said, folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. “I appreciate your help.”
“Don't thank me,” the old man said. “Just find that girl. She a good little girl. She ain't never bother nobody.”
Lynch nodded and walked over to the elevators a few feet away. He pushed the button, then looked at his watch to time its arrival. It took a little over a minute and a half for the doors to open.
And when he got on, he could feel the very thing he'd been hoping to find. He could feel Kenya's spirit.
 
 
 
Wilson heard the news of Judy's arrest as she left Central Detectives. But instead of going to police headquarters by herself, she dialed Lynch's cell phone.
When she got an automated message saying the phone was inactive, she loaded Daneen into the car, and the two of them tore out of the parking lot with a portable siren blaring in the unmarked car.
“Did I hear them say somethin' about Judy?” Daneen said, as they raced through Chinatown on the way back to North Philadelphia.
“They said Judy's at the Roundhouse,” Wilson said, referring to Philadelphia police headquarters. “She's asking for Lynch. I'm going to go get him.”
“How you gon' do that when he suspended?” Daneen said impatiently. “Why don't you just ask her whatever you gotta ask her yourself?”
“Why should I start questioning Judy again when I still haven't gotten a straight answer from you, Daneen?” Wilson replied, as the
car sped past the male prostitutes who frequented the dark corners of Thirteenth Street near Callowhill.
“I don't know what you talkin' about,” Daneen said.
“Sure you do. I'm talking about Kenya's parents. You and her father.”
“I can't get into that,” Daneen said through clenched teeth. “Why can't you just respect that? Why you tryin' to make me tell you somethin' that ain't got nothin' to do with findin' my daughter?”
“Can I tell you something, Daneen? I just left Captain Silas Johnson, commander of Central Detectives, who placed me in the lead of this investigation and told me to do whatever I have to do to find your daughter.
“He thinks like anyone else would think after taking a look at the file from DHS. He thinks you look like a pretty good suspect, based on the way you used to bounce your daughter around when she was with you.”
“He can think what he wanna think,” Daneen said flippantly. “I know I ain't have nothin' to do with it.”
“I know that, too,” Wilson said. “But you're hiding something from me—something that might help me find your daughter. That's obstruction of justice, and I can lock your ass up for that, Daneen. So you can either tell me what I want to know, or we can hold you in the Roundhouse and feed you cheese sandwiches for a week because somebody accidentally lost your paperwork.”
They pulled up in front of the Bridge and parked behind Lynch's car.
Wilson got out first. “Don't answer me yet, Daneen. Right now, we've gotta find Kevin. Because if Judy says she'll only talk to him, he needs to be there. But I'll tell you this much. You will answer me. One way or the other, you're going to tell me who Kenya's father is.”
 
 
 
Renee had spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out what she'd done to anger Darnell. She knew that his temper was volatile—especially when he wanted to get high. But the way he'd blown up
when she'd mentioned Kenya wasn't about a high. It was about grief. And Renee was determined to make that grief go away.
As she made her way back to the Bridge with the crack she'd hustled turning tricks for the past few hours, she hoped that the peace offering she'd brought with her would be enough to earn his forgiveness.
When she walked in through the back entrance of the building and saw Darnell coming toward her in the foyer, she had reason to believe that it was.
“What's goin' on, baby?” Darnell said, smiling as if nothing had happened.
“That's what I should be askin' you,” Renee said cautiously.
He sighed and threw an arm over her shoulder.
“I'm sorry about earlier,” he said. “I guess this thing with Kenya just startin' to get to me.”
“I know it is. But I got somethin' to make you feel better.”
She opened her hand and showed him ten capsules of crack. He reached out for them, and she pulled them back, stroking his crotch with her free hand.
“You gotta earn these,” she said with a grin.
“Don't play with me, Renee. I ain't in the mood for that shit right now.”
Her grin faded, and her pale skin grew red. And in a rare moment of defiance, she told him what she thought.
“I know you don't really want me, Darnell. But you ain't gotta act like it. I mean, I ain't Lily, but at least I'm here with you. That's more than I can say for her.”

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