Out of the Blues (12 page)

I
know how you feel, girlfriend,” said Salt. Pearl's face, drawn and sad, looked up from the stack of flyers on the passenger seat beside her—a Be-On-the-Look-Out, or BOLO, for “Pearl White, aka Pearl Wolf, Pretty Pearl, Black Female, 5'3", 135 lbs., dark skin, and possibly mentally ill.” Salt sat behind the wheel of the Taurus parked in a deserted parking lot. Sunday mornings left this part of downtown forlorn, its surfaces bare, the shabbiness exposed.

The Sunday eleven o'clock bells rang out across the city, calling and reminding folks of the morning's services. The harmonizing tolls of the bells from the northeast, the brassy sound of one church bell to the near north, and another farther away chiming a melodic peal accompanied scores of birds winging across the sky. The air above filled while Peachtree Street below was mostly deserted, at least on the south end where Salt sat watching. If there had been any peach trees anywhere around, somebody had probably chopped them down long ago and tried to sell pieces to tourists. “Peachtree” was the name wrongly
repeated after people misunderstood “pitch tree,” the original name of a Creek Indian settlement called “Standing Pitch Tree” for a large, gangly, lone pine tree that had marked the location. Not that there weren't plenty of pretty peach trees in Georgia. Their blooms sweetened the spring, and the fruit was longed for all year by those who knew where and when to buy. But the pitch tree, pedestrian, unlovely, with prickly cones and needles, a more practical and useful species, had been the original marker.

In the pay lot Salt kept an eye out over three or four other empty lots nearby. The sun had begun to move from behind the pawnshop, bail bondsman, and shoe repair place that lined the sidewalk on the east side of the street, businesses that mostly served people involved with the city court system and jail located two blocks south. Once the sun got directly overhead, without benefit of any shade tree, the lots would begin to heat up. One block over and under a city rail stop, the Greyhound bus station picked up and delivered brave or desperate souls.

The street wasn't completely deserted. It was just that its denizens kept mostly out of sight until desperate and in need of some kind of, usually emergency, help. Within a half-mile radius there were churches, hospital annexes, the Gateway Center—all organizations that were moving away from the shelter business in favor of resolving the causes of a person's homeless status. All except for those like the folks now arriving across the street. A sky-blue passenger van pulled into the middle of the lot and stopped. “Deliverance Church of the Holy Spirit” over a sunburst behind a cross was airbrushed across its sides. Exhaust continued from the rear for a bit before a white male driver in his mid-fifties cut the engine, came around, slid open the door, and held it for three women dressed in slacks and identical blue T-shirts with the cross-and-sunburst logo. All four went to the rear of
the van and began to slide folding tables from the hold. They immediately had help. Two heavyset men appeared from nowhere when the tables began being unloaded. The church people quickly acquiesced to the men's insistent takeover of the table setup. A third citizen of the street, a skinny young man with baggy britches and a sunk-cheek hungry look, joined the group and began offering unneeded help, as there were only two tables to be set up. A lively conversation ensued between the three street dudes, and although Salt couldn't hear the words, it was easy to guess the gist by the speakers' animated gestures. Meanwhile, the multitudes arrived and a line or two lines of sorts had begun to form.

Bibles and pamphlets were put on display on one of the tables, and large cardboard boxes that held what Salt's experience told her were the ubiquitous sack lunches were stacked under the second. Very quickly it was like Jesus' miracle of the multiplying loaves and fishes, only in reverse, as the lot began to teem with mostly dark and hungry faces, far more mouths than was possible for the supply of under-the-table boxes to satisfy. Pushing and shoving began between the two lines, and Salt radioed for a beat car, then drove over to the fray. It took barely a second for the Taurus to be recognized as a city detective car, and some of the combatants broke off from the mostly still-verbal disturbance. But the pamphlets had begun to litter the asphalt, and one of the boxes holding the lunches had been pulled from under the table, its contents on the way to becoming another point of contention. Salt stopped and got out beside the church ladies and gentleman. “I have a patrol car on the way,” she told them.

The man put his arms over the shoulders of two of the huddled women and bowed his head. The third woman, taller and larger than he, kept her head up.

“I'm Detective Alt, Homicide.”

“My God! Could we have been killed?” The tiniest of the women squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in the man's shoulder.

“Coincidence. I was out looking for a witness who's been seen around here. I was across the street.” She pointed. Just then her eye was caught by a quick there-and-gone reflection off the window of the shoe repair shop.

The beat cars must have been close because two units arrived within minutes and began further restoring peace. The downtown officers ignored the creative obscenities being lobbed at the church people by the original street helpers, who clearly felt mistreated as they were asked to move on and denied their sack lunch. “Suck on this. Eat shit. Shriveled white pussy. Knobby-kneed bitch.”

One of the ladies looked down at her knees as if scrutinizing them for the first time in a new light. The man smoothed his thinning hair with a trembling hand. “This was God's will. God sent you,” he told Salt. The small group drew in toward her.

“Have you been saved?” One of the women asked without any sense of irony, and handed her a dusty tract.

Salt took it. “Ma'am, I'm glad I was able to help you out today, but haven't the Gateway folks gotten you the information about how to help out here? Why the city would rather not have street feedings?”

“Yes. But God has laid it upon our hearts that we should give our, His, message to these people personally.” The woman looked over her shoulder with wary, wide eyes, took off her glasses, and began wiping the lenses with a tissue from her pocket. Her smaller colleague put her arm around the large woman, patting her back.

The last words from the two slighted heavies came as they turned the corner of a building. “Pussy motherfucker.”

The churchman shook his head as if he were taking it personally.

The uniforms enlisted two street guys, who they called with
friendly familiarity “Pimp Daddy” and “FU,” to manage an orderly distribution of the bagged sandwiches, as well as the stack of pamphlets. There were a few homeless women pushing shopping carts, some empty and some with cargo, on the periphery of the feeding. Salt unfolded one of the Pearl BOLOs from her jacket pocket. She searched over the heads around her, on the lookout for women of the approximate weight, height, and skin color as Pearl, although the photos often distorted skin tone and people gained and lost weight. So height remained the most reliable search criterion. Unfortunately, Pearl was average to short. Salt pegged a couple of the women as possibilities and tried to get closer to compare them to the mug shot before the distribution ended. After the food was gone, the rush away was like a receding wave; the parking lot and sidewalks in all directions cleared. A few tracts blew about as the Deliverance folks folded and loaded the tables without assistance.

Again, there was a change in the light, a glimmer or glint catching Salt's eye, as a woman walked rapidly by the shoe repair store window. It was hard to judge her height because she was wearing at least three hats: the top one, a navy blue Braves baseball cap, was perched on the dome of an elaborate wide-brimmed lime-green confection of the type referred to in the circles of black church ladies as “crowns,” and barely visible underneath was something red and knitted, probably a stocking cap or do-rag.

Salt hurried to her car and grabbed the Handie-Talkie she'd left on the console. By the time she'd locked the car and radioed her status—“on foot and following a subject”—the behatted woman, already a block away, was disappearing in a gap between two storefronts. Salt crossed the street, ran to the alley, and then steadied herself, touching the walls of the buildings as she jogged down the weedy, crumbling concrete and stone steps. At the bottom she faced a brick wall in front
of her, and to the left an expanse of space leading to the Gulch, where everything—tracks, weedy fields, and small mounds of rubble—provided limited options for hiding. To the right was a passageway between buildings that seemed to narrow farther down. Salt rushed to get a quick view of as much of the Gulch as she could see. Except for some dark figures across the tracks in the distance, the space looked deserted.

She turned and ran toward the right and narrowing end, finding a human-sized passage the shape of cartoon-like mice holes busted through the wall. On the other side there were no other remains of the structure, only a weedy embankment that led her to more tracks and a tunnel farther down. Stopping to listen, she thought she heard movement coming from the darkened direction to the right, toward the tunnel and Underground. She radioed her position as the cross street under Peachtree, though it was hard for her to determine exactly where under Peachtree she was. The small flashlight on her key ring wasn't going to be of much help, so she kept it off but handy as she walked into the increasingly dim tunnel. Decades of runoff had left an almost black slime on the concrete walls. The smell of creosote and black tar from the track crossties was strong. A pair of broken, rumpled red sneakers hung by their laces from the end of an iron support sticking out of the concrete. A shopping cart missing one of its wheels was turned on its side, rusting against a wall.

In the tunnel the whine of cars passing overhead drowned out sound, but occasionally, when there was a lull in the overhead noise, Salt could hear something—footsteps, shuffling, scampering, some kind of movement down the line. Light at the end of the tunnel flickered as if something or someone was passing back and forth, a silhouette in motion.

She startled slightly when she felt the mobile phone in her pocket vibrate, but when she looked at the screen it registered “no service.”
All the metal supports overhead would also make radio reception iffy, but she tried to check in anyway. “4133 to radio.”

“Unit calling radio, go ahead,” replied dispatch to Salt's relief.

“Continue to hold me out” . . . where? Salt had lost track of the streets she was passing under.

“Radio copy.” The dispatcher presumed she was still at her original location.

She came out of the tunnels into an open stretch where the plastic-bag-catching weeds grew tall, where mounds of old tires and other trash had been dumped from the railing above. It was strangely like a meadow, a post-apocalyptic meadow. In contrast to the tunnel, the sun was bright and directly overhead. In waves the hot breeze fanned tall grasses and wildflowers—Queen Anne's lace, yellow ragweed, blue bachelor's button.

Near a waist-high pile of rubble, a movement out of sync with the rhythm of the wind caught Salt's eye.

The lot was a minefield of bottles, cans, and broken glass beneath the overgrowth. “Pearl?” she announced herself. Next to the other side of the stack of tires, a hem of iridescent brown cloth lifted in the breeze. “Pearl?”

“Don't look at me. Don't come around back here,” said a woman's voice.

‘I'm staying right here.” Salt stopped where she was, several yards from the tires. “Pearl?”

The brim of green preceded a dark caramel face as she peeked from behind the mound.

“You are Pearl? Right? Pretty Pearl?”

The green brim fluttered slightly as it caught the wind. “Who aksin'?” The reluctant woman's accent was heavily urban Atlanta, with some rural Southern roots.

“They call me Salt, Detective Salt, with the Atlanta Police. I've
been looking for Pretty Pearl—you, I hope. I want to ask you some things about Mike Anderson.”

The woman began keening such as Salt had never heard in all her years in the street. It was some kind of lament, like a howl but also like a lullaby, a moaned ululation. “Ah ooh, ah ooh, ah ooh.” Loud but not shrill, from some place deep down. “Ah ooh, ha. Ah ooh, ha.”

Among the waving weeds, sunlight glinted on long bladed grass, off bottles and broken glass. The cry morphed to indistinguishable sounds, words. “Water—awa, waa . . .” The woman Salt now knew was Pearl moved out from the stack of tires, flinging herself to the ground, her full skirt spreading, the iridescence catching the light. “Gas-o-leen,” she sang.

Salt walked closer. This was definitely the voice from her father's tapes. “Pearl, let's talk.”

Her age could have been anything between forty and seventy. She put up a hand to stop Salt.

“What can I get for you? Water?”

“I ask you for water, gave me gasoline,” Pearl sang.

“I need your help, Pearl. I'm trying to find out what really happened to Mike Anderson. Maybe we can help each other.” Certain though she was that this was Pearl, anyone would have been hard-pressed to match her face to the mug shot in the flyer. Expression animated and changed her features. Her color was very different, wrinkled and darker from the sun and elements. Salt searched her pockets and found a business card and some cash. “Here is a little money and my card. How can I find you?”

Pearl sat up, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Salt walked within reaching distance and squatted down next to Pearl, who leaned back on stiffened arms but inclined forward to accept the offered five and card.

“My phone number is on the card. I'd like to be able to talk when you're ready.”

“Church.”

“Which one? Where?”