The Sacrifice (11 page)

Now it was twenty years later. The inner city had lost population, like most of Pascayne. Red Rock still resembled a battle zone.

In her (unmarked) police vehicle driving the devastated streets of Red Rock. Neighborhoods of single-story woodframe houses and two-story brownstone row houses. Churches, soup kitchens. Public housing projects by the river. Human habitations in clusters surrounded
by empty lots, acres of abandoned and derelict buildings. Along the riverfront, miles of desolate old factories, mills. And one of these Jersey Foods where the girl had been found.

Iglesias had studied photographs of the scene: the cellar, the stairs leading down to the cellar, the exterior of the building covered in graffiti to a height of about ten feet. As in much of Red Rock there was an exhilaration of violence enacted against what you could see: walls of buildings, broken windows, fences.

It seemed fitting, the badly beaten, sexually abused black girl had been found in the cellar of one of these condemned buildings.
Left to die
was the refrain heard on the street.

White cops, kept her tied up, raped, left to die
. This was the refrain of the street.

It hadn’t been clear, from Sybilla Frye’s fragmented statement, how long she’d been “hog-tied” in the cellar. There was evidence that the girl had wet herself but minimally on the tarpaulin which suggested that she hadn’t been in the cellar more than a few hours. Countless footprints in the cellar’s soft sinking floor both human and animal, and much evidence of human activity over a period of time, but nothing that suggested recent activity except in the specific area where the girl had been found lying on the tarpaulin. Here there were seemingly fresh footprints belonging to just two individuals and these were not likely prints made by adult men. Scattered throughout the cellar were the desiccated remains of small animals. Bones to which mummified tufts of fur accrued. Despite rumors on the street there’d been no human bones discovered in any area of the factory.

The filthy tarpaulin upon which the girl had lain, clothesline allegedly used to bind the girl’s wrists and ankles, dish towels allegedly wrapped around the girl’s head and shoved into her mouth
to gag her—these had been examined by Pascayne PD forensics team, and had yielded “inconclusive” evidence. On the tarpaulin were badly smudged fingerprints and encrustrations of mud and dog excrement. Iglesias had requested that the department forensics team examine virtually everything in the cellar, but this wasn’t possible—there was just too much, and resources were limited.

Of the debris accumulated in the cellar over a period of years it was possible that there was an item—for instance a soft-drink bottle or can tossed into a corner—bearing the prints of Sybilla Frye, that would suggest the girl having come or having been brought to the cellar voluntarily, to stage the scene.

Her story is a lie. Yet, no story is entirely a lie.

She is telling us—she was badly hurt, and her life was threatened. That’s real—isn’t it?

Yes. That is real.

“Off’cer, I’m telling you Sybilla
not here
. She stayin in some safe place to convalesce. The doctor say she had a ‘severe trauma’—she ‘anemic’ from all that blood she lose.”

Iglesias had come with a warrant to search the premises for Sybilla Frye. With two patrol officers she gained access to the household at 939 Third Street in which Sybilla Frye lived with her mother, a younger sister and brother, and the mother’s common-law husband Anis Schutt. But as Mrs. Frye had angrily insisted, the girl wasn’t there.

“Go ahead, Off’cer, look! Nothin to see!”

Iglesias stood in the doorway of the girl’s closet-sized room. A narrow bed over which a soiled comforter had been drawn. Bare floorboards, chenille throw-rugs. A chest of drawers. A single window
with a cracked blind. Stuffed animals, a limp Raggedy Ann doll with a sallow face. Photos of smiling black faces, predominantly young, Scotch-taped to a dingy wall—Sybilla’s relatives and friends.

The rest of the wall space was covered with glossy posters of rock musicians. Iglesias recognized most of the figures—Tina Turner, Whitney Houston were her own favorites.

“Mrs. Frye, please tell me where Sybilla is. She may need further medical care. You should want to cooperate in this investigation.”

Ednetta had come up behind Iglesias incensed and panting. Just barely audible Ednetta murmured what sounded like
God damn bitch.

Iglesias felt her face flush with heat. But she spoke calmly and without rancor.

Telling Ednetta Frye that her daughter had made “serious charges” and that it would be determined eventually what had happened to her—“It will be better for you, and for Sybilla, if you cooperate now. We only have your daughter’s welfare in mind.”

Ednetta snorted in derision. She was badly out of breath from the stairs. “Off’cer, you best go away now. You see Sybilla ain’t here like I told you.”

“Where is she? With relatives?”

Ednetta frowned. The way in which she stared at Iglesias suggested that yes of course, Sybilla was staying with relatives. And probably not far away.

“She stayin where she safe. Ain’t gon do any good if you hound her, ma’am.”

Iglesias was pained that Ednetta Frye so disliked and distrusted her. There seemed nothing she could say to persuade the woman otherwise.

The animosity of men, she could comprehend. Sex-hatred of the female was common in the culture. But the animosity of a woman so like herself—so essentially
herself
—was something very different.

“We both want what is best for Sybilla, Mrs. Frye. I wish you would cooperate with the investigation and with me. I wish you would help
me
.”

“No cop is gonna help us. No ‘white cop’ is gonna arrest any ‘white cop.’”

Thinking
But I am not a “white cop.”

Iglesias was satisfied that Sybilla Frye wasn’t at her mother’s house but still the brownstone had to be thoroughly searched, upstairs and down. And the dank smelly cellar into which, as she descended the wobbly stairs, flashlight in hand, Iglesias felt a thrill of sheer visceral revulsion for people who lived in such quarters—who could not help themselves to live in any other way.

Within a day Iglesias had traced the girl to Mrs. Frye’s grandmother’s home in an apartment building on Eleventh Avenue.

Here, the elderly white-haired Pearline Tice told Iglesias that her great-granddaughter was “resting” and couldn’t “speak with a stranger.” But Iglesias managed to talk the elderly woman into opening the door to the room in which Sybilla lay in bed with a cover pulled to her chin, staring stonily in Iglesias’s direction. When Iglesias greeted the girl, Sybilla gave no sign of hearing her.

The girl’s eyes were still bruised but not so badly swollen as they’d been when Iglesias had last seen her. Her face was near-normal except for stitches in her lip and above her eyebrow.

Her hair had been washed and brushed. Wild frizzed and nappy dark hair tied up in a scarf.

“See, Off’cer, S’b’lla all right—she ain’t
sick
—just needin to conval’sce. Her mother don’t want her to start back at school till she is feelin strong again.”

Politely Iglesias requested if she might ask Sybilla just a question
or two?—and Pearline Tice said sharply that Iglesias should ask
her
, and she would ask the girl.

In this way Iglesias conducted a kind of interview with the girl—hardly an “interview” of any substance.

Asking if Sybilla could provide any further descriptions of the
white cops
, or of the van in which she’d been kept; and if she would allow a doctor to come to her, to examine her, since the examination at St. Anne’s ER had not been completed.

Pearline Tice shut the bedroom door while she conferred with Sybilla. Whatever the elderly woman and her great-granddaughter said together, in lowered voices, Iglesias couldn’t hear. She thought
But I have found her, at least. She is still alive.

Iglesias had learned about Pearline Tice by questioning some of Ednetta Frye’s neighbors. When she’d arrived at the weatherworn old sandstone apartment building on Eleventh Street, that looked at a little distance as if it were uninhabited, she’d had the impression that Sybilla Frye had been out of bed, and watching TV in the front room; when Pearline Tice admitted Iglesias into the apartment, the TV had been switched off and Sybilla had hurriedly retreated to a back bedroom.

“Off’cer, S’b’lla not feelin strong enough to talk right now. Ednetta has got to be here, if S’b’lla be ‘questioned.’ So, I’m askin you to leave.”

Already! Asked to leave.

Iglesias was accustomed to interviewing individuals who lied to her, who claimed forgetfulness, and sometimes ill health. A police officer expects dishonesty. A police officer is not naïve. Yet, in the matter of Sybilla Frye, Iglesias was baffled. She didn’t believe the girl’s story—yet, there was a story, which she was determined to expose. She protested to Pearline Tice that at least Sybilla Frye should be examined
by a doctor, more thoroughly than she’d been examined in the ER. There’d been no rape kit, and now it was too late. There was the risk of infection, sexually transmitted diseases, complications following the girl’s injuries . . .

“S’b’lla been examined by a doctor, her mother take her to.
She
all right and just restin now, I’m tryin to explain.”

“A doctor? A private doctor? Who? I need his name, please . . .”

“You need to ask Ednetta about that.”

Mrs. Tice spoke stubbornly. Iglesias made a note—
Doctor?

The mother had taken Sybilla to a black doctor in the neighborhood, very likely. Iglesias hoped this doctor was competent. She had a dread of Sybilla Frye infected with HIV and not knowing until it was too late.

Over Pearline Tice’s shoulder, not more than five feet away, the girl in the bed gazed at Iglesias with heavy-lidded slow-blinking eyes; not overtly defiant or impudent, yet with a subtle twist of her puffy upper lip, that suggested a sneering little smile.
Can’t make me talk to you! Can’t make me do any fucking thing I don’t want to do.

A single window in the room and no furnishings except a bureau. The air was overheated, and smelled of the girl’s hot body and bedclothes that needed changing.

Iglesias tried to address the girl over the great-grandmother’s shoulder, but Pearline Tice blocked her and shut the door, firmly.

“Off’cer, this girl not a ‘criminal’—this girl was
hurt
. You and anybody else got no right to harass her. Please leave my home, now.”

“Mrs. Tice, may I speak with
you
? Your great-granddaughter was found badly beaten, she has accused ‘white cops’ of having repeatedly raped her, beaten her, left her to die . . . You must understand that she needs further medical treatment, and she should have psychological counseling; whoever hurt her has committed a serious
felony, and must be apprehended. We can’t just—pretend that nothing has happened . . .”

Pearline Tice escorted Iglesias to the door. The elderly woman was scarcely five feet tall, frail-bodied, yet suffused with the strength of indignation.

“Mrs. Tice, how much do you know of what happened to Sybilla? What did they tell
you
?”

Pearline Tice had opened the door to the hall and was waiting for Iglesias to depart. Her face was a mass of fine wrinkles, like a soft glove that has been crumpled. Her hair was silvery white, thin, plaited shoulder-length. Her eyes were intelligent, alert, wary. Iglesias understood that the elderly Mrs. Tice was by nature a polite, gracious woman—it was painful to her to be rude to a visitor.

White cop. White cops. The enemy.

In a lowered voice, as if reading Iglesias’s thoughts, and touching Iglesias’s elbow in a grandmotherly gesture, Pearline Tice said, “How you come to be one of
them
, Off’cer? You have got to know the Pascayne PD, they racist and vicious to black folks however they can get away with it. They still killin us, treat us like animals like in the ‘riot’ in ’67—not so many of us being killed like in the past, so they call that ‘progress.’ If S’b’lla tells what they did to her, she would not ever be safe in Red Rock. And her mother, and anybody in her family. Our minister say, if she ‘bear witness’ it will be on TV and in the papers. But if she ‘bear witness’ she will be in danger. It will be hard for her to return to school where everybody talking about her. Say there are police officers—like you—wantin to help her. But they would never find the ones who hurt her, we know that. No white cops is ever gon be ‘arrested’ for hurtin a black girl. By this time they probly been transferred to some other police department downstate in some southern county of New Jersey where the Klan still rides.”
Mrs. Tice laughed. Still she was gripping Iglesias’s elbow in an oddly intimate gesture.

“Mrs. Tice, if nothing is done, whoever hurt Sybilla will get away with it. If she’s been sexually assaulted—he will do it again. Or—they will do it again.”

Now gravely Mrs. Tice said, “Yes ma’am. They will do it again. Nobody gonna stop that.”

E
dnetta sayin to me, Anis my daughter is hurt bad.

It was white men hurt Sybilla, she sayin white cops—five, six of them that kidnapped her and hid her away, raped and beat her, and hog-tied her in the cellar of the fish-food factory leavin her to die.

And she looking at me. Scared, and her eyes wet with tears, and her face kind of melted-looking, and her mouth like something bruised.

Anis? You hear me?—it was white men done it.

And I’m—I am—in the kitchen of the house. Dragged a chair around, and leaning on the back of the chair heavy enough to break it. Damn leg hurting so, the pain come so fast.

Anis? That’s where she was. S’b’lla missin, the white cops arrested her on the street she say. S’b’lla comin home from school Thursday, an they arrested her. And all that while when she was gone, the white cops had her.

Anis, it was when I was lookin for her. All that time, lookin for S’b’lla on the street and beggin people help me find her an she be captive to these men.