No Place Safe (11 page)

There wasn’t much fancy about that stretch of Peachtree—a pawn shop where I bought my stereo, turntable, and speakers on layaway; a Rexall Drugs; two shoe stores that always seemed to sell the same stock—Butlers and Bakers; Kesslers’s Department Store; and McCrory’s Five and Dime as the old folks called it, but I don’t recall anything in the store being either five or dime. McCrory’s is where I’d buy Squirrel Nut Zippers and apple Jolly Ranchers as a sixth grader, and my first set of sheets when I moved out of my mother’s house and into my own apartment at twenty.

In the middle of that stretch was the only bit of elegance in that area—Rich’s Department Store across the street from where I worked. It was where old ladies who peaked in the fifties still came to dine at a restaurant on the top floor called the Magnolia Room, and mothers remembering their own childhoods took their little kids to ride on the Pink Pig at Christmas. These women always looked out of place to me, mainly because they were white and dressed fancy, neither characteristic being a predominant one in Five Points in 1980.

A four-block radius of this point was the territory of a homeless drunk I called Not to Worry because for five years those were just about the only words I ever heard him say, which I thought was strange because if anyone had something to worry about, it was him. He’d say it over and over while he stood leaning against the concrete wall of Rich’s, hoping for a handout from people who didn’t have much more than he did. He’d watch me while I waited for my bus, and I’d pretend I didn’t notice while I kept a quiet eye on him just in case. Sometimes I could smell Not to Worry before I actually saw him coming around the corner toward me, but I always heard him first: “Not to worry, people…not to worry.” He used to frighten me, because even though he was ancient and far too broken down by his life to be much of a threat, he was still scary to an eleven-year-old, the age I was when I first met Not to Worry. Now a child killer on the loose had made Not to Worry seem almost harmless. Still, a few years later when Bridgette was twelve and started to ride the bus with me again, I’d change positions with her so that I’d be closest to him as he stumbled past us.

The nature of Five Points meant we got all kinds in McDonald’s, and witnessed all kinds of craziness. Cokeheads would come in asking for the coffee stirrers that looked like long, skinny plastic spoons. It turned out they were perfect for measuring the right amount of the white powder. In the cold months, we served homeless men who’d been fortunate to raise enough money for a burger and coffee while panhandling on the sidewalk outside. They’d make their purchase, find a seat in a corner downstairs (that’s how big the restaurant was), and nurse one cup of coffee for seven or eight hours. I hated having clean-up detail downstairs because I never knew what or who I’d find down there. Luckily, they usually assigned us to that task in pairs.

It was nothing to see an argument between patrons, and those sometimes escalated to fights. In case this may seem exaggerated based on most people’s fast-food experiences, our management employed off-duty Atlanta cops, armed and in full uniform, as security. You don’t see that at your average neighborhood burger stand. I had a lot of fun there, too, or I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I did. The kids there were more like me than those I went to school with. When school started in the fall, they offered a balance to my day after eight hours of playing chameleon. After a while, I looked forward to punching into the real world after a day at school.

Most of my paycheck went to paying for tuition. Once in a while Ma needed some of it to help pay the light bill or the car insurance, and whatever was left over was mine – half into a savings account and the rest to spend, which didn’t leave much. Usually I spent it on a new outfit for the one Friday a month we were allowed to wear something besides our uniforms to school. Sometimes I’d spend money on Bridgette, letting her pick out cheap toys from the Woolworth’s in Five Points, or we’d cut out five-for-five-dollars coupons from the Sunday paper for Arby’s sandwiches. We’d buy a sack full and take them home for dinner on nights Ma was working late at one of her second jobs. Bridgette and I ate a lot of roast beef sandwiches with Horsey Sauce back then.

*

On a Sunday evening after I had come home from a day of training on my new job and had showered the fast-food smell off of me, Kevin came by to visit. Ma and Bridgette were home so we went for a walk. By now I realized that there wasn’t much to our relationship other than his asking for sex and me trying hard to turn him down. He had that scent, the way a boy/man smells warm and so unlike me after he’s played a short game of H-O-R-S-E in the sun, or after I’ve watched him mow the lawn without his shirt. Past the scent of soap from his morning shower, just before he crosses over into funky. Man smell. I could detect it on him as we walked the quarter mile to his house. It was given that we’d mess around a little. The question was where.

“We can go to my house. My mother won’t be home for another half hour.”

The idea of going to his house when his parents weren’t there scared me. Being alone in his house, and him swimming in man smell, might finally wear me down, drown out Ma’s warnings about no babies in her house.

“But what if she comes home a few minutes early?” I said, hoping it was enough to scare him. For added effect, I said, “And you know she’d tell your father.”

Kevin’s father, from what I could tell, had the same effect on him that Ma had on me, and I wondered if it existed between other kids and their cop parents. It’s a mix of emotions that goes beyond a typical child-parent relationship. There is awe of their courage to do what they do. Throw in a child’s pride in being able to brag that his mother or father carries a gun—an exaggeration of the playground taunt
My dad can beat your dad
, made even more exotic and intimidating when it’s a mother. Underneath all that is fear; cops have a sometimes imperceptible aggression that, even though it’s intended (and necessary) for dealing with bad guys, carries over into their emotional relationships and can sometimes be a bit scary even to their own children. You know your cop parent would never hurt you, but it doesn’t escape you that they are paid to handle far greater threats than you could ever pose.

“Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t go to my house,” Kevin said. “Then there’s only one place left.”

“Where?” I asked, wondering why we were walking toward his house if that wasn’t safe, either.

“The path. No one will be on it now.”

The George High path was a shortcut through the woods that separated our  subdivision and the high school. Originally it was just a path worn into the dirt by the kids who preferred the short walk to taking the Bluebird school bus around the long way, but recently the city or the school had decided to pave it and make it official. Kevin lived just three houses away from the path, which made it a convenient place for our stolen kisses, his fumbling attempts to unfasten my bra while I slapped him away with one hand and ran the other up his becoming-muscular back. There was no comfort to it, no park bench or even a flat rock to sit on. The best I could do was lean against a tree while we kissed, reminding Kevin afterwards to brush bits of white pine bark and dried moss from the back of my shirt. What it provided was cover and a measure of privacy, but we hadn’t used the path in a few months for two reasons.

“You know I don’t like going up there anymore, since that boy got jumped and beaten up so badly,” I said.

“I told you they got the kids who did it. He shouldn’t have been making a play for someone else’s girlfriend.”

“They put him in the hospital for it.”

“Yeah, well, no one’s waiting to jump us in there.”

I wondered whether that was true, given the gossip I was beginning to hear about Kevin, that our arrangement wasn’t exclusive, that he was quite the player. But jealous sixteen-year-old boys lying in wait weren’t my only worry.

“I’m not going into any woods while the killer is on the loose.”

“What? The killer is nowhere around here.”

“But he’s getting closer. I know more than you do.”

“I know, too. My father tells me.”

“Yeah, but he’s not working the case. My mother is unofficially assigned to it. I know more about it.”

Kevin dropped the tactic of saying he knew what was what. That was the good thing about going with a boy whose father was a cop. He understood things none of my other friends did. But that didn’t mean he was willing to give up a make-out session. He was smart and a smooth-talker who usually got his way, a combination that made him persistent.

“Ah, come on. If the killer’s in there, I’ll protect you.”

I looked at him, beautiful and already more man than boy, his face becoming defined, the whisper of hair above his lips, the shoulders broader than I remembered them being that summer night behind the forsythia bush. But he was still part boy. I bet some of the dead boys, the older ones, thought the same thing.

“You’re the one he wants. Who’ll protect you?”

*

During my two-week training at the restaurant on Hightower Road, a twelve-year-old boy whose prize possessions included a Pete Rose Baseball board game and an Around the World notebook, disappeared. Christopher Richardson had last been seen in his nice, middle-class neighborhood on the way to the local recreation center. We didn’t know until later in the summer that the killer was just gearing up, taking advantage of the warm months when kids could be found everywhere—playgrounds, recreation centers, public pools. It seemed memorials were made of places considered as much a part of being a kid in summer as eating tree-ripened peaches and riding bikes down hills to catch a cooling breeze. Those places were spoken of as
the last place so-and-so was seen
. When kids talked about them, they said,
No, Mama won’t let me go there anymore.
The addresses of those places appeared in the
Special Bulletins on Missing Children
later printed and circulated by the police.

By the end of June 1980, seven-year-old Latonya Wilson had disappeared and ten-year-old Aaron Wyche was found dead the day after he disappeared, under a bridge that crossed railroad tracks in Dekalb County. The girl’s disappearance didn’t seem to fit; she was a girl for one thing, and her parents said she was taken from her bed while she and her family slept. Up to that point, all the victims had been taken off the street and none from within a block of their homes. Aaron wasn’t listed as a homicide at first because the coroner said he’d fallen from the bridge and was smothered by the leaves and ground cover that he’d fallen into. It would be nearly a year before he would be added to the official list of missing and murdered children. Aaron’s mother never believed the theory because she knew her child, and he was afraid of heights. He wouldn’t have been playing around on a bridge in the first place. 

Because he was last seen alive only two miles from my house, Ma became more strict about where Bridgette and I could go, how late we could be outside, even in our own neighborhood. One of my favorite things about summer was playing basketball late into the night around the neighborhood, at the house of whoever had the most lenient parents, those who didn’t mind the sound of a basketball hitting their driveway long after dark. An hour past dark was the only time of day when the humidity didn’t feel as real as a fourth player in a game of three-on-three, an extra man whose defense wore me down. The scent of honeysuckle nectar, made sickly sweet when it cooked in the midday sun, was pleasant on a night breeze. But Ma said no more late-night ball games, we had to be in by dusk.
And don’t make me have to come looking for you.

As summer got into full swing, the total of missing and murdered children had grown to ten. It was just the beginning.

In mid-July, Ma told me that she was being assigned officially as an investigator on the newly created Special Task Force on Children. Along with the Task Force came the city authorities’ long overdue admission that the murders were connected, though they were careful not to call them serial murders. Even before joining the investigation, at the district attorney’s request, Ma had begun looking for patterns. She first thought the child murders might be related to the John Wayne Gacy serial killings in Chicago. During the winter lull in the Atlanta murders, Gacy was on trial for killing more than thirty boys and young men, and Ma wondered if the Atlanta killings were the work of a copycat murderer or a Gacy accomplice that had escaped detection in Chicago and had moved south. But the fact that Gacy’s victims were white was enough of a departure from the Atlanta killer’s modus operandi for Ma to drop that theory.

She and her partner at the DA’s office revisited a case they’d worked on when their boss brought it to trial the year before. In early April 1979, a nine-year-old white boy named Dewey went missing. His disappearance was widely publicized, and fliers and news reports stamped a slogan across the city:
WHERE
’
S
DEWY
?
The boy’s body was found a few days later near some railroad tracks. There was a lot of pressure from the white business community to find the killer—nine-year-old white boys just didn’t turn up dead in Fulton County. The result of the investigation was the arrest of Donald Wayne Thomas, a black seventeen-year-old boy. Thomas was tried and convicted of the murder and received the death penalty, one of the first to receive a capital punishment sentence after the use of the death penalty resumed in Georgia in 1977. Months before the first black child went missing, that trial exposed the racial tension that had always lurked just below Atlanta’s surface. A black man convicted of killing a white boy raised hard feelings that had roots going back to slavery, grown ripe through lynching in the twentieth century.

Ma and her partner thought they saw a connection between Dewey’s murder and the current murders. Like Dewey, one of the boys found in June was found near railroad tracks. They got a tip that Dewey’s father and some of his friends said they would “get some black boys” since it was a black boy who killed his son. It was with that that she launched into her official role as a task force investigator.