Brambleman (68 page)

“You look nice,” he said. She waved off the
compliment like a bug in the summer night. He hopped in, eyeing her
anxiously. “Where to?”

“The morgue. It’s on Pryor Street, off
Memorial downtown. They want me to identify a body,” she said,
sounding empty and defeated.

“Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.” Charlie concentrated on
starting the car. A minute later, he pulled up to the stop sign
where he’d last seen Demetrious.

“They think it’s my daughter.”

“D’s mother?” The news hit him like a brick.
He gulped nervously and said, “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“She was killed. Probably over drugs or
money.” She waved her hands hopelessly in the air.

“It may not be her,” Charlie said.

“It’s her,” Minnie Doe said, and stared out
the window at the gutter, absently picking at a loose thread on her
dress. “Lord, I’m gonna have to pay for the funeral. I should have
gone to Atlanta Life and got a policy on her. We used to get these
policies. Small ones. The agents would come by and collect
premiums. We called it life insurance, but it was just burial
insurance. Nicest thing some folks ever had was a coffin. Seems a
shame, but there was dignity to it.”

He pulled onto Memorial. “I’m sorry. I don’t
recall her name.”

“That’s right. You don’t. She didn’t merit a
mention in your book. Her name is Shaundra. Shaundra Warner. And
now she’s gone. I read a brief in the paper this morning about some
no-name murder and didn’t even know it was her. Police found the
body yesterday. Beaten to death and thrown in a Dumpster. That one,
I think,” she said, pointing at the trash bin behind Redeemer’s
church as they drove by. “Somebody killed her and just threw her
away. Oh my Lord,” she wailed. Violent sobs wracked her body as she
wept.

Charlie reached over to touch her arm, but
she drew away and squeezed herself against the door. She produced a
white handkerchief to wipe her face. Charlie stared straight ahead
as he drove.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. But what
good are promises?” She honked her nose and sniffled. “Oh, what
would you know? You keep a tight control on your emotions.
Sometimes I wonder if you’re even human.”

After that, they rode in silence. Charlie
turned left onto Pryor Street, driving by the pillars supporting
the western edge of the huge interchange of the Downtown Connector
and I-20, at the core of Atlanta. The Braves were out of town, and
traffic was light.

The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Center
was a new building, its parking lot bordered by a wrought-iron
fence. Charlie parked under the yellow glow of a streetlight. They
entered the front door. Minerva was stone-faced and silent as they
approached the desk. A dark-skinned man closed a copy of
Sports
Illustrated
and placed a call. Moments later, an even darker
man in a white polo shirt came out. A surgical mask dangled from
his neck. “Ms. Doe. Thanks for coming.”

Minerva pushed Charlie away with her hand
like she was a swimmer and he was the pool wall. She and the man
spoke quietly as Charlie stood off to the side. The two of them
walked toward the back. Minerva turned, looking peeved, and
beckoned Charlie to follow. They entered a large room and walked
through a corridor into an adjoining building. Here was a room like
ones Charlie had seen in movies, with autopsy tables in the middle.
Along the wall stood a bank of metal lockers. The place gave no
sign of recent activity except for the strong scent of industrial
disinfectant.

The man went straight to the middle section
of lockers, opened a door, and slid out a corpse on a tray. Minerva
staggered and grabbed Charlie’s arm, bracing herself for a shock.
The stench was subtle, due to the low temperature, but Charlie
could smell garbage mixed with death’s decay.

“She came in about this time last night.” The
attendant spoke gently, with an accent. Nigerian, perhaps. “We
believe she died during the weekend. There will be an autopsy to
tell us such things.”

He pulled a sheet back to reveal the head.
Charlie and Minerva studied the brutalized face, which showed
neither horror nor peace. The woman’s visage was puffed up and
purplish, her eyes swollen shut, as if she had been holding her
breath. There were puncture wounds and welts all over her head. Her
skull, shattered and misshapen, rested flat like a deflated
basketball. Its back had been crushed.

Charlie stepped backward, his stomach
churning. He swallowed hard, trying to keep from puking. The
attendant glanced at him and nodded toward a white bucket. “Do it
in that.”

“That’s Shaundra Warner,” Minerva said. “My
daughter. That’s her tattoo.” She pointed at a red serpent on the
corpse’s left arm. Charlie felt dizzy, having also recognized the
marking. This was the woman he’d seen in Max’s Place, the one who
chased after him, shouting that he owed her something.

“I am sorry for your loss,” the man said.
“Unless you want to stay for a time, we will leave this place.”

“I’d like to leave, please.” Minerva turned
away, putting her hand over her mouth. The attendant covered the
face and slid the body back into its slot, then closed the locker
door with a
click
.

They returned to the front desk, where
Minerva filled out a form. When she finished, she sighed and looked
at Charlie, then handed the clipboard to the man in the polo shirt.
He gestured to the
Sports Illustrated
guy, who held out his
free hand for it. “Is that all?” asked Minerva.

“We’ll call you if we need anything,” the
front desk attendant said. “Otherwise, after the autopsy, we’ll
contact the funeral home.” He checked to see that he could read
what Minerva had written, then nodded sympathetically. “I know how
difficult this is. May God be with you.”

“Thank you,” Minerva said.

Charlie was already backing toward the door.
Minerva followed. Out in the parking lot, he said, “I’m sorry.
That’s so terrible.”

She breathed deeply and muttered, “I hope I
don’t end up in there.”

“Me neither.”

“You’re likely to,” Minerva grumbled. “You
keep messing with people.”

She marched quickly to the Volvo, rubbing her
arms as if warding off a chill, even though it was a hot summer’s
night. In the car, she said, “I prayed that they catch those people
who did this, but I don’t think anyone even cares. If something
happens to you or yours, Mr. Sherman, it’s a big deal because
you’re … you know. At least you, of all people, should know. Dirt
gets done to a poor black woman, it’s the same as it was a hundred
years ago. Well, I needed for you to see her. I didn’t want her to
go without a trace, without you noticing or understanding. So now
you know.”

“Now I know.”

She looked out the window, then turned back
to him. “It’s wrong, the way they make you pay to tell the world
your loved one’s gone. That doesn’t seem right. I’ll pay for an
obituary notice in the paper. I want people to know she’s gone.
They can’t just stuff her in a Dumpster and throw her away. That’s
not right. I’m not living in a world like that, no sir. But I may
have to let the county bury her. I need to save my money to pay for
Takira’s baby. I have to put the living before the dead. Demetrious
doesn’t know yet. I guess I’ll have to find somebody else to take
me to see him.”

“That would be best.”

“In his own twisted, stupid way, he was
trying to help his momma, but he doesn’t know how to do things
right. You may not understand it, after the hurt he’s caused, but
that makes him worth saving.” In a voice full of heartbreak and
hopelessness, she said, “I just don’t know how to do it. Don’t know
that I have the strength. They want to kill him with the death
penalty, that’s what I’m hearing. That’s not right. It’s not like
they ever gave … a damn about the boy that died. Now they claim
they do. That’s the biggest lie of all.”

Charlie stared straight ahead as he drove
away from the morgue, passing a black car as it entered the lot.
His face was expressionless.

“The other night when your wife came on the
TV,” Minerva said, her eyes downcast, “He was at my house and saw
her standing by that Mercedes, and—I shouldn’t say anything
else.”

“I figured it was something like that.” He
turned onto Memorial and drove past state offices and the old
Archives building.

“I look in your eyes and you seem lost,”
Minerva said. “I used to think you did the Lord’s work. Don’t know
why. You get showered with money and you just get lonelier. You
can’t buy back what you lost. Listen to me.” She shook her head.
“I’m sitting here talking and I don’t even know what all you lost.”
She looked out the window at men in the projects, drinking from
brown paper bags. “Don’t know you at all.”

Perfunctory, pragmatic, and polite. That’s
how Charlie wanted to play out this tragic scene, without
mentioning that he’d met her daughter, because that certainly
wouldn’t help. “Do you need anything from the store before I take
you home?”

“No. Thank you.”

They rode quietly the rest of the way to
Minerva’s house. When Charlie pulled onto her street, Minerva gave
him a wide-eyed look like he’d frightened her.

“What?” he asked. He pulled to the curb and
cut the engine.

“There is something strange about you. Once I
thought you might be an angel, and then I realized I was being a
fool, you were just a man, a selfish man at that, with a small
version of the truth. Oh, it was truth. And it was a hammer. All
metal and cold. But now I think there’s something behind you,
backing you up, a huge dark shadow I can’t see through. I’m not
afraid of the devil. And I know you’re not him. You don’t have the
power, especially not over me, and you don’t have the tongue for
it, either. But tell me, is that who you’re working for? Because
the kind of things that have happened don’t just happen. And they
are
evil. This is … this is some kind of Bible curse. On
everybody. You’re not talking.” She paused a beat. “You’re not
saying I’m crazy. You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you? In
the name of God,” she cried out, her voice taking on a keening
quality, “tell me I’m not crazy!”

A moment of silence passed. “You’re not
crazy.”

“I can’t tell if you’re good or bad. I can’t
figure out your nature. Are you trapped? Did you make some sort of
deal?”

He hung his head. “Turns out it was a
trick.”

“I’m entitled to more than that.”

“I thought I was, too.” He sighed. “I met a
stranger. He doesn’t have a name, and he … I’ve seen him come with
a storm.”

“With a storm?”

“Out of nowhere, on a sunny day.”

“Go on.”

“I was given a job. I was going to tell the
truth about wrongs that had been done.” He laughed sardonically.
“It seemed so
right
… but no good deed goes unpunished.
There’s wreckage everywhere. Boils and pestilence. People killed.
Shootings and bombings and lightning strikes. The contract that I
signed started out normal, just something from an office-supply
store. But then it changed.”

“How?”

“A penalty for failure was written in blood.
And then my signature turned to blood. And then the whole thing
turned to blood.” Charlie took a deep breath.

“Oh, Lord. I suspected something … but it’s
hard to believe.”

“I’m so sorry all of this happened. I was
going to kill myself the night this started … and this thing came
along.”

“You were going to kill yourself. And then
you made a deal when you didn’t have anything left to lose—”

“That’s never the way it is, no matter how we
see it. I know that now.”

“All along, you were a dead man walking,” she
muttered. “It all makes sense now. Doesn’t make it any easier,
though.”

They got out of the car. On the sidewalk to
her house, Charlie reached to touch her arm. She pulled away from
him and said, “You’re cursed.” She shook her head and surveyed the
neighborhood. “It is hard for me to be strong. There’s nothing left
but that girl and the child she carries. I’m burying my baby, and
her boy’s life is over before it begins. All I have to look forward
to is to see my great grandchild being born into a world like
this.”

The porch light flashed on and the door
opened. Takira came out, her belly as swollen as the full moon
overhead. She looked forlornly at Minerva as the old woman trudged
up onto the porch.

“Take care of her,” Charlie told the
girl.

Minerva embraced Takira. “You and the baby
are all I’ve got.”

“Yes ma’am.” Takira returned the hug. “We
need each other now.”

“You go inside now,” she told the girl, then
spoke to Charlie in her sternest tone. “I don’t care if you
are
cursed. You need to take back what you wrote about me. I
am
not
that man’s daughter. My father is John Riggins, and
he died before I was born.”

“I can’t change what happened.” He thought of
Ben and wished he could.

“You changed
everything
. You laid out
a path of destruction like poison breadcrumbs. You changed the past
and that changes the present and that changes the future.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say you’re sorry when you’re not. But
now that you’ve said it once, and used my boy for your precious,
scientific DNA tests, don’t ever say it again. That man is
not
my father. He didn’t have anything to do with me. Just
leave him out of my life. I don’t want any part of anything he
touched. I’m dropping the suit. Let the greedy bastards have it.”
She waved her hands in disgust.

“But Minerva—”

“And you’re a greedy bastard, too. That’s why
you signed some contract in the first place, one you stuck with.
You have no idea what the truth is. And now there’s no way to heal
the wounds. There’s no balm that will get rid of the hurt. Not just
me. All around.” She held out her arms wide. “I don’t know what I
was thinking, talking to you in the first place. You just caught me
at a weak moment. It’s best if you stay away from me. Like it does
me any good to tell you that.”