The concrete steps up to the front yard were broken, uneven, without a guardrail. I took them one at a time, favoring the hip and knee I’d had replaced. I could feel the eyes on us. The conversation on the porch stopped.
Sandy stopped at the foot of the stairs onto the porch. A small black man separated himself from the circle, crossed to the top of the stairs, and said, “May I help you?” He said it politely, usher polite.
Sandy stood mute, so I said, “We came to express our condolences to the girl’s grandmother.”
The man didn’t move aside but looked at me. “Do we know you, sir?” He had a subtle accent, not Western Hemisphere.
“No, I don’t think so. We were in the restaurant where the girl was kidnapped.” As soon as I said it, I realized how pathetic I sounded. Grasping.
One of the men farther back on the porch, deeper in shadow, made a snort of derision. I could hear muttering. Sandy was studying the stairs, holding on to my arm as if it were a life preserver.
“You saw my daughter? Last night?” The man didn’t come down the steps, but he leaned forward at the waist, as if he were looking into a fish tank.
I nodded. “This morning. About three. She came in the diner for some breakfast.”
The muttering grew louder. “And the police have talked to you?”
“Sure. They were there this morning. They catch the guy yet?”
“What guy?” he said, placing his cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
“The bald white guy,” Sandy said. “That picked her up.”
Another man emerged from the group. He was black as well, much larger, younger, beefy with the wide head, nose, round cheeks and chin I’d come to associate with Central Africa.
The bigger man said, “What did this guy look like?” He had no accent. He stood well apart from the first man.
I described the bald white guy. As I talked, I could see faintly someone deeper on the porch writing on a spiral pad. The large man turned toward the porch when I was finished, said something I couldn’t hear, listened, and nodded.
“Mrs. Johnson’s not here. Who shall we say came to call?” He said it perfunctorily, like the kiss-off from a good administrative assistant.
I gave him our names. He nodded, as did the smaller man. Neither seemed prone to continue our conversation or move aside to invite us in, so we nodded in return and headed back to the street. My heart was beating so loudly I could almost not make out the laughter as one voice said, “You tell ’em Phara’s back at the club?”
“Well, that was a clusterfuck,” I said as Sandy started the car. I was plenty warm now, although the heater still didn’t work. I hadn’t been exactly scared, but I was certainly on edge.
“How can they laugh with that poor girl dead?” Sandy said, nose twitching again. “With her father standing there? Have they no respect? And that grandmother? What a bitch.”
“What I don’t get is why they didn’t know about the bald guy.”
“Maybe the cops are afraid they’d go after him themselves.”
“Maybe they should.”
Sandy dropped me off at home after a silent ride across town. We didn’t even say goodbye, just nodded, knowing we’d see one another again in a few hours at the Waffle House.
Tex had not returned yet so I had the apartment to myself. I filled the tub with hot water and soaked for a while, until my back and hip stopped aching. I usually shower, because the tub brings back memories of bathing my daughter, Iris, when she was two or so. I’d keep an old pair of swimming trunks on the rack on the back of the bathroom door to wear, because she loved to soak me with hand splashes of water, and I enjoyed it too much to convince her to stop.
I found the same old crowd seated in their same old places when I arrived at the Waffle House about 3 the next morning. Sandy was on break, her feet on the manager’s desk and Art Bell on the radio. Otilio waved to me and slid a coffee cup down the counter, following with the coffeepot to fill it.
“How you doon?” he said, accent heavy. I knew he didn’t expect, even want, a reply. He understood English fine but didn’t have any confidence in his ability to speak it.
I shrugged and unfolded the New York Times, my daily indulgence, a buck from the box outside the door. I could, and usually did, spend hours working my way through each day’s issue, even before I began the crossword.
I didn’t get far this morning, though. About 3:30 A.M., just as Sandy came back on duty, a TV truck pulled up outside. An attractive young black woman, buried inside a thick down parka, got out. The parka fell lower on her thigh than her skirt did.
She came inside. The truck kept running, and I could see the silhouette of the driver, his head against the headrest. I recognized the woman as a reporter on the morning news, which I usually watched before going to bed. She did the weather reports, too.
She flagged down Sandy as she was carrying the coffeepot on a circuit of the counter. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Sandy put the pot back on the warmer and took a step back. “What you want?” She was beginning to do the nose thing again.
“I understand Nancilee Harper was in here last night before she was killed?”
I waited for the reporter’s notebook to appear, but the woman kept her hands in her parka pockets. Sandy looked at the floor, shook her head, and walked into the back room.
The reporter glanced around the room, appraising the rest of us, before approaching Notebook Guy. I heard her repeat the question to him. Sandy peeked through the door just as the guy replied with a word salad, the way he does when he’s been palming his medications. I winked at Sandy.
Unfortunately, the reporter persisted by moving down one table to the old couple. Vern and Viv knew who I was. They knew about Iris. The reporter sat down at his invitation, and the three of them talked for a long time.
Sandy finally had no choice but to come out of the office when a four-top of security guards came in. When I saw the old guy and the reporter looking at me, then at Sandy, I threw a few dollars on the counter and left. Sandy watched me go as she dealt a tray full of waffles to the guards.
Against my better judgment, I watched the early news later that morning. They led with the girl’s report. She did a standup with Vern and Viv in front of the restaurant.
“This is Tayndra Stephens. Behind me is the Waffle House restaurant on Staley Road, where twenty-four hours ago young Nancilee Harper was abducted, in front of eight witnesses who did nothing to stop her kidnapper. An hour later, she was dead.”
She skewered, skinned, and hung the old couple, who seemed oblivious to the callous impression they were making on the audience. All the time they talked, Sandy was visible in the background, moving back and forth in the same forty feet of behind-the-counter space that now circumscribed her life. The reporter made sure to work my name into the report.
“Among the witnesses was Tim Parker, ex-husband of the waitress you see behind me, Sandy Parker. Only three years ago, Parker was charged with drunken driving and negligent homicide in the death of their only daughter, Iris, who, ironically, was also twelve. The charges were later dropped. Neither Parker nor his ex-wife would comment for this report.”
Jesus.
I was seriously mulling over the bars that I knew were open and quiet at 8 A.M. when Sandy called.
“You saw the news,” she said.
“Yeah. Good decision, refusing that interview.”
“Thanks. Tony got here a little bit ago.” I could hear her twisting the cord again.
“The detectives say he’s somebody she met online. They found a bunch of messages on her computer from a chatroom, going back a couple of months, from a boy named Torrey, who claimed to live on a horse farm near Springfield. The plan was his cousin would pick her up here and take her to his estate.”