“Here are some school pictures.” Mrs. Rhodes laid out a handful of wallet-size portraits. “Hanna must have traded with her friends; I don’t know who most of these children are. This one’s Hanna. I would say maybe third or fourth grade.”
Hanna had a long, heart-shaped face, still a few front teeth missing in her cocky smile. Her hair was done in an asymmetrical Afro. I said, “Very cute.”
“Yes, she was.” Mrs. Rhodes had no tears. “She was a pretty little child. Not an exceptional child in any way, except to her mother and me. But she was pretty. Wild and pretty.”
“May I borrow the picture?”
“If you like.”
“And this?” I held up the disentangled bead-chain. There were five spent.38 shells, pierced and hanging on the chain like charms. The shells were stained with brown, as if rolled or dropped in a pan of paint. I could see fragments of fingerprints.
Mrs. Rhodes fingered the shells. “What is that?”
“A little souvenir, I think. Something special did happen to Hanna.”
Chapter 29
“I had it all wrong,” I said. While Mike put away the camera in the back of the car, I held the brownie he had carried away from Mrs. Rhodes’s buffet table. “I listen to your rowdy stories and I have to remind myself they’re ninety-two percent pure bull. Now and then I forget to do the math, so I get suckered right into believing them as told.”
“What are you talking about?” He took back his brownie. “You saying I’m a liar?”
“Yes. And I’m saying I’m deeply chagrined for entertaining for even a moment any notion that you might have abused LaShonda and Hanna. I walked you into that house wishing we had stopped to get your body armor, because the way you talk about what you used to do in the good old days-kicking butt and taking names later-I’m thinking it might get real ugly when these people set eyes upon you. But it was like a neighborhood reunion in there, Sugar.”
“You should have been chagrined, Miss Berkeley-has-a-big-dictionary. Hell, I know all their kids. Arrested most of them. We’re family.”
“Exactly my point.” I jabbed him with a finger. “Maybe you arrested eight percent of their kids. For jaywalking or something. The rest? Ninety-two percent pure bull. Some tough guy you are, Flint. You swagger in and swap brownie recipes.”
He laughed and I got a chocolatey peck on the lips before he unlocked my car door for me and opened it. As I climbed in, the string of bullet shells dangling from my neck tinkled like a wind chime. I pulled up the chain and looked at the shells again, being careful not to touch any of the brown stain I was certain would prove to be the blood of Wyatt Johnson.
“You know you can’t keep those,” Mike said, closing his door behind him.
I know.” I let the chain fall back against my chest. LaShonda had run right away in a panic, but Hanna had stayed behind, and not hidden in some old car, either. Not until later. It took a fairly cool head to scramble over and around the bleeding, dying body of Wyatt Johnson to collect her souvenirs-like collecting seashells.
The coroner thought it had taken Wyatt Johnson a minute or two to expire; long enough to pump out a lot of blood. Had Wyatt spoken to Hanna? Had he explained how powerful those spent shells could be-a ticket to the gas chamber if they could be tied to the shooter’s firearm? She was street-wise. Had she figured the angle all by herself? The big question on my mind was, who had she told? Who had known she had to be silenced?
“You’re quiet,” Mike said.
I was wrong about something else.”
“Two admissions in one day? Unbelievable. Did you and Mrs. Rhodes smoke something funny in that back bedroom?”
“I had persuaded myself that there had to be a second person in the restroom with Wyatt Johnson.”
“There was.” He chewed the last of his brownie. “You’ve got the proof of that hanging around your neck. Hanna went in there.”
“Before that. Bart Conklin told me how his brother used to hang around waiting for someone to commit a robbery, then he’d go in and rob the robber. Because of the missing shells and the way the body was lying, I thought someone must have been in the restroom with Wyatt. I thought maybe Conklin had interrupted Wyatt making a deal with someone, and ripped them off. Or tried to. And that the girls didn’t see the third man because they ran off. But Hanna would have seen him. Nosy little thing, she hung around.”
“I keep telling you, Wyatt was just taking a leak. It’s that simple.” Crumbs in his mustache eroded his air of authority. “Trust me, this is how it went down: Conklin sees Wyatt drive up in a nice car, and because he’s an asshole, he wants it. He follows Wyatt into the can, tries to hold him up. It goes wrong, Wyatt gets shot, Conklin runs the hell away. Period. He didn’t even know he’d killed a cop until he heard it on the street later.”
I must not have looked like a buyer. Mike sighed heavily as he turned from me to start the car. “I know you want something bigger, Maggie. But that’s all it was. Just a crappy heist that went wrong.”
I said, “But,” before I accepted the futility of arguing a point I was not clear on.
Mike turned onto Ninety-second Street. “Now that you’ve seen the new color on the walls, how do you like it?”
I said, “I wanted Kelsey to be there somehow.”
“That night? No way. You want a big drug deal, or some undercover scam, or at the very least a loose woman. But you can’t make it, baby. Not with Wyatt. Not with Kelsey, either.”
“Kelsey looks guilty. There’s more to his involvement.”
He laughed. “If looks could convict us, we’d all be in the slam. The only thing Kelsey was guilty of back then was drinking on the job. And another thing: You’re never going to know any more about what happened that night than you do right now. So, I want you to think about Wyatt’s family for a minute. Is it nice to go around suggesting things you can’t substantiate? It makes them feel bad, and what does it do for you?”
I slouched down in the seat and watched the scenery for a while. Maybe I would have to accept what he said about Wyatt, but Jerry Kelsey was guilty of a whole lot more than drinking on the job. I just didn’t know what. And for sure I was not ready to argue that one with Mike.
It was Sunday afternoon. Every church we passed leaked music. Family groups in their Sunday finest strolled along the streets. Very festive. But all I could see was LaShonda running off in a panic, and Hanna, braver, more street-wise, going in for a better look. Gathered up the bullet shells as her prize, blackmail currency if she got wise enough. Was she hiding herself in that derelict car, secreting her new treasures, or just taking a nap when James Shabazz called her name?
I said, “Mike?”
“Thought you went to sleep.”
“Hanna’s new affidavit is a fraud.”
“I know.”
“Someone didn’t want her to say so.”
“I know.”
“That’s why she died.”
“Uh huh.”
“What else do you know?” I asked. But he just smiled, a the way to South Pasadena.
We rejoined the painters at the South Pasadena house. A brother-in-law cum electrician had installed an upgraded electrical service. I spent the better part of an hour with him in my new work space, showing him where I needed outlet strips along the baseboards. I talked him into removing a piece of the hardwood floor so that I could have some recessed outlets in the middle of the big room. Before he got away from me, I also talked him into some strip lighting.
When I had pushed him as far as I dared, I joined the cadre of painters upstairs and worked on windowframes for a few hours.