Two nights before, at a bar on Warren Street in Roxbury, Dontelle Howe had asked Patrick Kenzie, “You got kids?”
Patrick half nodded, a bit confused on how to answer. “One on the way.”
“When?”
“Any day now.”
Dontelle Howe smiled. He was a trim black man in his early thirties, with close-cropped dreads and clothes so crisp you could smell the starch from two rooms away. “First?”
Patrick nodded.
“Ain’t you a little old?” Dontelle took another dainty sip from the one brandy he allowed himself every weeknight. Weekends, he’d assured Patrick, he could drink his weight in Henney, but weeknights and Sundays he kept his limit at one because every morning he drove a bus full of forty-five children from their homes all over the city to Dearborn Middle School in Roxbury, about two blocks from the bar where he’d agreed to meet Patrick after work.
“A little old?” Patrick checked himself in the bar mirror — a little grayer, okay, a little heavier, fine, a little less on top than he would have hoped, sure, but not bad for forty. Particularly forty years lived as hard as he’d lived his. Either that, or he was bullshitting himself, which was just as likely. “You don’t look like you’ll be auditioning for any boy bands yourself, Dontelle.”
“But I already got two in grade school. Time they’re in college and me and the woman are kicking it somewhere in Florida? I’ll be your age.”
Patrick chuckled and drank some beer.
Dontelle Howe’s voice grew deeper, more somber. “So no one’s looking for her? Still?”
Patrick made a mezza-mezza motion with his hand. “Police think it’s a custody thing. Father’s a real piece of shit, and no one can find him. No one can find her, either, so they think it’s a case of one plus one equals she’ll turn up.”
“But she’s twelve, man.”
“She” was Chiffon Henderson, a seventh-grader Dontelle Howe picked up every morning from the Bromley-Heath Housing projects in Jamaica Plain and dropped off nine hours later in the same spot. Three nights ago, Chiffon had left her bedroom in the back of the unit she shared with two sisters and her mother. The leaving wasn’t in dispute; the question of whether it had been voluntary was. She’d exited through a window. No signs of struggle or forced entry, though her mother had told police that Chiffon often left her window open on a mild night even though she’d been warned a thousand times not to. The police were focusing on Chiffon’s father, Lonnie Cullen, a deadbeat dad four times over to four different households, who hadn’t checked in with his parole officer this past weekend and couldn’t be found at his last known address. There was also some talk that Chiffon may have started seeing a boy who lived in one of the other buildings in the projects, though no one knew his name or much about him.
Chiffon’s mother, Ella Henderson, worked two jobs. By day she checked in patients for four ob-gyn partners at Beth Israel; nights she cleaned offices. She was a poster child for the burdens of the working poor — so much time spent trying to feed your kids and keep the lights on that you never spent any time with them until the day they told you it was too late to start trying.
Two days ago, she’d checked in Patrick’s wife, Angie, for her final appointment before their child, expected to enter the world a week from today, would be delivered. As Ella Henderson double-checked the insurance info and verified the parents’ dates of birth, she began to weep. It was weeping without drama or noise, just a steady stream even as her polite smile remained in place and her eyes remained fixed on her computer screen.
Half an hour later, Patrick had agreed to ask around about her daughter. The lead cop on the case, Detective Emily Zebrowski, had a current caseload of twelve open investigations. She told Patrick she welcomed his help, but she saw no evidence of an abduction. She admitted if it were an abduction, Chiffon’s bedroom was the place to do one, though — a tall elm towered over her window and those above her; her building was at the rear of the Heath Street complex and the city was five months behind replacing bulbs in the lamps back there that had been shot out by drunken persons unknown on New Year’s. Emily Zebrowski told Patrick, however, that no one heard a peep that night from Chiffon Henderson’s bedroom. People rarely vanished involuntarily, the detective said; that was more something you saw on TV than encountered in the real world.
“So your operating theory?” he’d asked.
“Her father,” Detective Zebrowski said. “Guy’s got priors the way other guys have nose hair.”
“To what end?”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s a scumbag,” Patrick said, “I get it. But his scumbaggedness makes sense usually, right? There’s motive behind it. He steals one of his kids, he wants to get paid or get the mother off his back for something. But here the mother’s got no money, she’s never sued him for child support or alimony, and what guy with his psychological makeup wants to bring his twelve-year-old daughter back to his spot, have her ragging on him from dawn to dusk?”
Detective Zebrowski shrugged. “You think d-bags like Lonnie Cullen think things through before they do them? If they did, they wouldn’t know the number on their orange jumpsuits better than their own birthdays. He did it because he’s a criminal and he’s an idiot and he has less impulse control than a flea at a livestock auction.”
“And the boyfriend angle?”
“Looking into it.”
Two nights ago Dontelle said to Patrick, “But you don’t believe it?”
Patrick shrugged. “Deadbeat dads dodge their kids, they don’t kidnap ’em, not the ones who’ve been out of the picture as long as Lonnie has. As for the boyfriend theory, she’s, what, shacked up with him for three days, they never go out to grab a bite, call a friend?”
“All I know,” Dontelle said, “is she seemed like a sweet kid. Not one of them typical project girls who’s always frontin’, talkin’ shit. She was quiet but... considerate, you know?”
Patrick took another drink of beer. “No. Tell me.”
“Well, you get a job like mine, you got to do a probation period — ninety days during which they can shitcan you without cause. After that, you with the city, man, gotta fuck up huge and be named Bin Laden for the city be able to get rid of your ass. I hit my ninety a couple weeks ago and not only did Chiffon congratulate me, she gave me a cupcake.”
“No shit?” Patrick smiled.
“Store-bought,” Dontelle said, “but still. How sweet is that?”
“Pretty sweet.” Patrick nodded.
“You’ll see in about twelve years with your kid, they ain’t too into thinking about others at that age. It’s all about what’s going on up here” — he tapped his head — “and down there” — he pointed at his groin.
They drank in silence for a minute.
“Nothing else you remember about that day? Nothing out of the ordinary?”
He shook his head. “Just a day like any other — ‘See you tomorrow, Chiffon,’ and she say, ‘See you tomorrow, Dontelle.’ And off she walk.”
Patrick thanked him and paid for the drinks. He was scooping his change off the bar when he said, “You had a probationary period?”
Dontelle nodded. “Yeah, it’s standard.”
“No, I know, but I guess I was wondering why you started so late in the school year. I mean, it’s May. Means you started in, what, February?”
Another nod. “End of January, yeah.”
“What’d you do before that?”
“Drove a tour bus. Drove from here to Florida, here to Montreal, here to P-Town, all depended on the season. Hours were killing me. Shit, the road was killing me. This job opened up, I jumped.”