The Killings (4 page)

Wayne smiled. “Okay. Carmen.”

“How are you doing this morning?”

“It’s another day.” Wayne shrugged and sat back casually in his chair. He was more relaxed this morning than he was yesterday.

Carmen was struck by his appearance; though the intervening years had aged him, he still retained that sense of youthfulness in his face, that carefree sense of joy in his eyes. Like all students of true-crime, she was familiar with his mug shots, which showed a completely different man than the one sitting across from her now. That photo showed a man bogged down by the weight of despair, of worry, of a sense of doom.

“It’s the same old, same old,” he said. “Just trying to get by one day at a time.”

“That’s all you can do,” Carmen said. She leaned forward, already angling toward her plan of delivery. “So listen, Wayne. I want to thank you for taking time out of your schedule to talk to me. It means a lot.”

Wayne smiled. “No problem. I wish I could do more to help you.”

“I wish you could too.” Carmen smiled at him again. “I just have a few more questions to ask you about the area you lived in.”

“Sure.”

“You lived within a few miles of the Chattahoochee River, correct?”

Wayne nodded. “That’s correct.”

“Some of the victims were found in that river,” Carmen continued. “On the night of May 22, 1981, detectives who had the river under surveillance heard a splash. A moment later, they pulled you over. You were driving a white 1970 Chevrolet station wagon, the same vehicle a witness described as being on the bridge that spanned the river in the vicinity where the splash was heard.”

“Uh huh,” Wayne said. He wasn’t agreeing with her. He was merely acknowledging the documented facts of the case.

“The murders you are accused of all occurred within this general area,” Carmen said. “The area isn’t much different now. It’s still a poor section of town, largely comprised of lower-income African Americans. There’s also a sizable Hispanic and Asian population there too.”

“Are you Hispanic, Ms. Mendoza?”

Carmen smiled. “Yes.”

“You told me a few days ago that you were Black.”

“I am. My mother is of Black and Irish/Scottish descent. My dad’s of Spanish, Blackfoot, and French ancestry.”

“You’re just all mixed up then, aren’t you?” Wayne was grinning, but it was a grin of good nature. He chuckled.

“Yes, I’m a mutt, Wayne.”

“You’re a pretty mutt, though.”

“Thank you. What about you? You’ve got a light complexion too.”

Wayne shrugged. “Who knows? Lots of Black folks are mixed. I heard my mother telling me there was some White and some Native American in our family tree, but I don’t know how far back it goes.”

Carmen nodded. “I’m sure you know one of the theories of this case ... that some people believe you killed all those children out of a sense of self-hatred for your race.”

“I didn’t kill those kids.”

“I’m just telling you one of the theories.”

“That would be a stupid thing to kill people of your own race out of a sense of self-loathing for it.”

“I agree. Some people even say the murders were committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. That the Klan was hoping to start a race riot and that the sheriff covered up the crimes and framed you as their scapegoat to avoid it.”

“Maybe they did,” Wayne said. “All I’m saying is that I didn’t kill anybody.” His speech and posture were the same as they’d been over the last few days and in the few televised interviews she’d seen him give. Straight denial, completely focused on not admitting to any wrongdoing. She always got the impression that he had honed his refutations so perfectly it was second nature to him, that he had even convinced himself.

“Did you know the murders have started again?”

That got a reaction. He seemed to freeze momentarily, face turning toward her, eyes widening in shock. His voice quavered slightly as he spoke. “What do you mean?”

“The murders ... they’ve started again.”

Wayne Williams looked like he was going to faint. She could tell he was absolutely floored by the news.

She scooted her chair closer to the glass barrier and focused directly on him. “Wayne, listen to me.”

Wayne looked at her, mouth open in shock. His eyes were open and honest, saying
please don’t lie to me.

“The murders I’m talking about have not made the news. Fourteen women and young girls in the last year, some strangled, others mutilated. All of them African American or of mixed race.”

“But-”

“They’re women and girls. Yes, I know. It doesn’t match the victimology.”

“How can they be the same?” The look on Wayne’s face was changing from one of shock - of a sudden realization that maybe this was his chance to get a new trial, to be free - to the realization that he was being fooled. “This … this is impossible. You’re just fucking with me now.”

“I’m not. I wouldn’t joke about something like this.”

She could see him growing angry. Already his tone of voice was changing. His facial expression and his body posture were becoming more rigid, tense, aggressive. He scooted back in his chair, putting distance between them. “Almost thirty young Black men and boys killed. And they think I did it! And now you tell me it’s starting up again and this time it’s young women! What are you, crazy?”

“Not all the victims of the Atlanta Child Killer were boys. Some were young girls.”
And your last two victims were young men in their early twenties, Carmen thought. Only reason you were given the moniker The Atlanta Child Killer was due to all those other victims - they were all children.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything.”

“Why hasn’t this made the news?”

“Why do you think?”

Wayne opened his mouth to reply and then stopped. He looked at her, understanding dawning on his features.

She held his gaze. “Fourteen young Black women and girls, from the same part of town. A few of them were prostitutes. Some were crack heads. Still others were simply lower-income women who worked low-wage jobs. It hasn’t made the news because the FBI is keeping a very tight lid on it.”

“The FBI?” Wayne shook his head, chuckling. “Those motherfuckers can’t find their own dicks.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Carmen said. “But there
is
a task force, and there
are
seasoned homicide detectives and profilers on the case. I think it’s only a matter of another week, maybe less, before the press gets wind of what’s going on. A local alternative paper has this journalist writing for them, a guy who specializes in this kind of thing. He’s already speculated in his weekly column that the city may be facing another serial killer. If you ask the police and the FBI, though, they deny it. They won’t be for long though. Today’s Tuesday. By Saturday morning, there’ll be another victim. And when she’s found, it’ll be hard to ignore.”

Wayne Williams was looking at Carmen in amazement, as if he couldn’t believe what she was saying. “I don’t understand. Even if ... even if somebody else out there ... if whoever killed those kids back then ... even if that person had been in their twenties, at the earliest they’d have to be in their fifties now. They’d be
my
age.”

“That’s certainly a possibility.”

“Would you mind telling me more details?”

“I can, but now is not the time. What I need from you is something else. Something we haven’t really gone into during our talks.”

“What’s that?”

“I need you to tell me about a woman you knew in the neighborhood.”

“A woman? What woman?”

Carmen leaned forward and whispered the woman’s name. She got an immediate reaction. Once again, Wayne Williams seemed to freeze up, as if facing a sudden, cold shock. He averted his eyes from hers. He swallowed several times, looking every place but at her - at the four walls of the temporary holding cell he was in, the black telephone receiver he held in his left hand, the clock on the wall behind her.

“I’ve never heard that name in my life.”

“You’re a horrible liar, Wayne,” Carmen said.

Wayne looked at her. For a moment their eyes locked.
He knows very well who she is,
Carmen thought.

“I should get going,” Wayne said.

“When they find a perpetrator for these crimes, he’s going to be just like you, Wayne. Do you want to see another young Black man like yourself rot away in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he didn’t commit?”

Wayne had been on the verge of hanging up, of getting up and leaving when she said this. Her little speech stopped him. He nodded at her, this time meeting her gaze. “Go on,” he said.

“I can’t help you with your case,” Carmen began. “But if you tell me what I need to know, maybe you and I can put a stop to this.”

The enormity of what Carmen Mendoza was saying to Wayne had a visible effect on him. All of a sudden it appeared that he had a great weight on his shoulders, that he was saddled with its burden. He sat forward and slumped over. He scooted his chair closer to the glass partition and regarded Carmen with his haunted brown eyes.

“I’ve never told anybody about this,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Not even that other writer who wrote a book about me. Guy wanted details of my childhood and high school years. I told him all of it. All except ... about her.”

“Will you tell me?”

Wayne nodded.

“Why me and not another writer? Why me and not the police?”

“Because when you said her name, it was the first time I’d even thought of her in more than thirty years.”

“You didn’t think to bring her up when you were a suspect?”

“There was no reason to.”

Carmen was silent for a moment, letting this sink in.

Wayne shifted in his seat. “She ... she’s not still alive, is she?”

“I don’t know, Wayne.”

“Because if she is, well ... that would be impossible.”

“I know. The few people who would even talk to me about her told me she’s been dead for more than thirty years. I couldn’t find a birth record, but she had to have been at least a hundred and ten.”

Wayne smirked.

“She was at least a hundred years old when my grandmother was young. She was older than that. A hundred and seventy. A hundred and eighty maybe.”

Carmen smiled sympathetically, the way you smiled at an eight-year-old before you told him there was no Santa Claus. “That’s not possible, Wayne. No one lives that long.”

“No one normal lives that long. But she wasn’t normal, was she? Obviously you know that or else you wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t know very much, Wayne. I’m hoping you can fill in some of the blanks.”

Wayne bowed his head, closed his eyes. Carmen let him gather his wits. Finally he looked at her, determination on his face. “Okay. When do you want to start?”

“How about now?”

“Let me ask you a question first. These murders, what makes you think they’re connected?”

Carmen raised an eyebrow. “The mutilations.”

She watched Wayne Williams’s eyes widen.

“They’re the same as others that have happened.”

“Others that have happened?”

Carmen nodded. “Some are mutilated, some strangled, others are shot or bludgeoned. There’s always a pattern in each cluster. That’s one connection. The other connection is the victims themselves. All Black, some mixed-race, all from the same general area. I noticed the pattern when I first started researching your case. That’s what got me intrigued about it. So why don’t you tell me more about what you know about her?”

For the next forty-five minutes Wayne told her. What he told her was just the tip of the iceberg, but it confirmed everything. And it chilled her. She couldn’t help it. Listening to it made her shiver.

In time, the skin along her arms and the back of her neck broke out in gooseflesh.

FOUR

July 20, 1911, Atlanta, Georgia

As always, when Robert Jackson saw Henry Parker mount the steps to his barbershop and saunter inside, he felt a twinge of nostalgia for days past.

It was a slow day. His only customer was Stan Brady, a seventy-five-year-old former slave who came in twice a week for a shave and once every two weeks for a trim. Stan practically lived in his shop every other day of the week. Mostly he liked to look at the magazines Robert kept in neat stacks on the small coffee table in the waiting room or on magazine racks. Stan couldn’t read, but he liked to look at the pictures, especially the covers for
All Story,
a pulp magazine.

The door hinges squealed as Henry stepped inside. “Need a shave, Bobby boy!”

“Yes, sir,” Robert said. He motioned for Henry to have a seat in the middle chair. As Henry settled himself in the chair, Robert draped a cloth over the skinny man’s frame and wheeled him around, facing the mirror. Henry was two years older than Robert and was like a big brother to him; they’d grown up together, their parents working for the same sharecropper. Robert and Henry had bonded instantly as boys and had been close friends ever since. “Just a shave, or do you want a trim, too?”

“No trim this time,” Henry said.

“Yes, sir.” Robert headed to the sink and turned on the hot water. As he began the process of mixing up the shaving cream to spread across his customer’s face, he made an attempt at small talk. “Been downtown lately?”

“All this week,” Henry said. “You should hear what that sonofabitch Cal Marshall wants to do this time.”

“What’s that?”

“He wants to set up a recruitment center on Broadway.”

“A recruitment center? For what?”

Cal Marshall was the Atlanta chief of police. While normally confined to his desk downtown, Chief Marshall had been an unmistakable presence in the area over the past few weeks due to the Atlanta Ripper murders, which was what the
Atlanta Constitution
had taken to calling them. They had originally called them the Jack the Ripper murders, after the infamous London killer of twenty-three years ago. Twelve Black women killed since January 1911, with the latest just last week: Lena Sharpe, a forty-year-old woman found mutilated shortly after her daughter was attacked by a “well-dressed Negro man with a broad-rimmed black hat.” Lena’s daughter had set out looking for her mother when the woman failed to come home and was stabbed in the back by the unknown man after he’d told her, “Don’t worry, I don’t hurt girls like you.”