The Snow Angel (7 page)

“You see, he loves Christmas. His favorite Christmas song is ‘The Little Drummer Boy…”

His voice trailed off. Then he composed himself.

“Many of you have seen Darryl in his TV commercials. So you know what a charming boy he is. But there are other things about him which are truly extraordinary.”

Childress held up a photo of Darryl seated on the lap of a black Santa Claus. He spoke faster, hurrying through his thoughts. “This picture was taken just last week. When Santa asked him what he wanted for Christmas, you know what he said?

“He said he wanted an end to war. He'd seen war news from the Middle East and Africa. He said he didn't want any more children to suffer because of grown-ups.

“You see, Darryl is a precocious child. Somehow he has this talent—this gift—for getting inside the shoes of other people, for feeling their pain.

“Darryl always shares his toys with other children. And when he outgrows his clothes, he always…” Louise began to sob. Stephen put his arm around her. “He always insists that we take his old clothes to the Goodwill, so some less fortunate boy can have nice things, too.

“That's the gentle soul you're looking for, officers.” He put his face in his hands and sobbed. ‘TTease find my son!”

With that, the screen went dark. The room was dead silent. Jablonski left the lights off for a second. When he turned them back on, everyone in the room sat grim-faced.

“Okay, gentlemen and ladies,” Easterly said softly. “You new people hit the streets. The others report back at 0700.”

The cops solemnly filed out of the gym. Easterly looked over at Jablonski, hope fading from her eyes.

V
era Bell fixed her husband a late dinner of soul food—chitlins, ham and collard greens. She had been raised here in the north and didn't care much for such cuisine, but sometimes indulged him when he ate alone. Bell had come from Deep South poverty, where such dishes were dietary staples.

Cassie and Ikey were in the den, watching a Charlie Brown Christmas special. While his wife cooked, Bell finally described the crime he was working.

The disclosure hit Vera hard. Her years in Central Receiving had toughened her to many things. But the violation of children still got to her. “Don't tell the kids,” she said quietly.

“They'll find out soon enough.”

“Well, don't let it be tonight.”

“The mother's a nurse. Her name is Louise Childress. I don't suppose you know her.”

“Black?”

“Yes.”

Vera searched her memory. “No, I don't think so.” She bit her knuckle. “My God, what a horrible thing for a mother.”

Bell wanted a drink. He remembered that he hadn't been to a meeting in several days, and he silently vowed to get to one as soon as he could. Maybe a meeting where there are other cops. “Ralph Kane is in on this one,” he said quietly, almost as an afterthought.

His wife stopped her work and looked at him. “Ralph Kane?”

“Just my luck.”

Vera studied her husband. “Ike, that old resentment will eat you alive.”

“It's okay as long as I don't see the—as long as I don't see him.”

Vera saw the pain in her husband's eyes. She put down the knife and went to him. She put her arms around his huge body and clung to him. “You're still my hero, you know.”

Bell rocked her gently. “And you're mine.”

They held each other tight for a long moment. Then Cassie and Ikey walked in on them. Cassie tittered. Bell scooped up both of them in his arms. He went into his tough-guy imitation. “Okay, punks, it's time for bed.”

They laughed hilariously as he carried them past the Christmas tree and upstairs to their rooms. They did not notice the pain deep in his eyes.

Easterly stretched out on her office couch, hoping for some rest. Jablonski had gone home. She had told the cadet who replaced him to summon her with the slightest fragment of news.

Now she stared at the ceiling, going over and over the kidnapping, trying to put herself in the minds of the thugs. Without any hints, she was drawing a blank.

The biracial nature of the crime puzzled her. You just didn't see many salt-and-pepper crimes any more, not with the racial friction in this part of the country. In a perverse sort of way, this was diversity at work.

Then she reflected on the biracial marriage of the Childress couple, how difficult such a thing must be. Her own marriage to David Goldman crossed cultural lines. She was a WASP, he a Jew. But neither of them was religious and both were white. They weren't stared at everywhere they went.

Then a horrifying thought hit her. What if this caper wasn't professional at all, but a kinky thrill crime? Suppose the kidnappers had a thing for little boys? She didn't want to think like that. She and David had gay friends, none of whom would think of harming a child. But a good detective has to consider every possibility. In the absence of a ransom demand…

She sat back up, unable to rest. The thoughts of her husband comforted her.
Dear David.

She went to her desk and called home. David answered on the second ring. “Hey, tough guy,” he said lovingly.

“I just wanted to hear your voice,” she said.

“A rough one?” He knew better than to pry for details.

”It's a little kid, David. A kidnapping.”

“Oh, God!”

“Say a prayer, if you remember any. This one doesn't look good.”

There was a long silence while he absorbed that. Finally he said, “Bobbie, do you have any idea how much I love you?”

She smiled. “I was hoping you'd say something like that.”

Kane sat in Harvey's Place, sipping a scotch and listening to the blues singer:
“…We ‘re having a party, for the sad and the lonely, and it's Members Only tonight…”

He idly watched a young couple fondling each other in a nearby booth. It annoyed him.
Why don't you just take her somewhere and fuck her?
He gestured at Harvey for another shot.

“You need a woman, Ralph,” said the old barkeep, eying the couple.

“I've had plenty of women.”

“I see you're even more cheerful than usual.”

“Can you just serve my booze without the commentary?” Kane descended deeper into his thoughts.

He wondered what Angela was doing these days, if she was still with that stockbroker or banker, whatever he was. Stability, that's what she said she wanted.

What she really meant was that she had grown tired of his drinking and his anger. She implored him to stop drinking, to seek help for whatever it was that bothered him.
How could I expect a woman like that to understand a man like me?

Kane winced at the thought. He couldn't blame her. Hell, he didn't even understand himself.

He belted down the next shot and closed his eyes, trying to visualize the kidnapping. Instead, his mind once again conjured up the girl in Saigon. He tossed a ten on the bar. “See you around,” he muttered to Harvey.

“Careful driving,” Harvey said. “It's snowing again.”

Kane got up and walked out into the night.

A
full moon streamed into the bedroom through a break in the fast-moving clouds. Bell, unable to sleep, and still unaccustomed to the new house, watched the show. The barren tree swayed in the wind. The temperature must really be dropping, he thought.

Bell looked over at Vera, sound asleep. Her body was still in great shape. The nature of her job kept it that way. Vera Lincoln Bell was one wonderful woman, he thought, far too good for him.

Before getting in bed, Vera had knelt down and said a prayer for little Darryl Childress. She had invited her husband to join her, but he had been too embarrassed to do such a thing. So he had merely watched her.

Now he thought about Cassie and Ikey, who was only a year older than the kidnap victim. Their usual Christmas excitement was subdued this year. Last week they had attended the Christmas play at their new school, the only black children there. Bell could feel their pain.

Then he remembered that his mother would be arriving Christmas Day from the family farm near Mobile. He hoped this crime would be resolved by then. He was supposed to pick her up at the airport.

Bell reflected on his mother, fighting senility, and of his surviving family in Alabama. He fretted that Eddie, his oldest brother, was still drinking. More than once since Bell had sobered up, he had been tempted to go south and try to rescue Eddie from himself. But it wouldn't have done any good. Even God couldn't have stopped Bell's own drinking, not until he was ready.

Then Bell tried to picture his father, known as Big Ed, who had been murdered by a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of thirty.

That's how Ike had come to regard his father's death—not a suicide but a murder. Big Ed was a gentle soul, tormented to the end by the memory of having witnessed the lynching of
his
father by the Ku Klux Klan. So his suicide made the crime a double murder, by Bell's reckoning, a double murder that took twenty-three years.

Horace Bell, a sharecropper, had gone to town to drink one night and—so the story went—insulted a white woman. Forty-eight hours later, night riders dragged him from his bed and hanged him from an elm, right in front of his family. Bell's father was seven years old at the
time. He'd never gotten over it.

Seven. The same age Darryl Childress is now. The same age I was when Big Ed shot himself.

Bell didn't want to be thinking about his father. It was one of those intrusive thoughts which came to him from time to time, unbidden, a ghost. He had very mixed feelings about the man.

Edwin James Bell had never been the same after Horace Bell was lynched, or so went the family lore. Bell never knew him to be anything but slightly peculiar. He was a good person, never abused the children or anything like that. But he was withdrawn and dreamy, rarely laughed, and often displayed sudden emotional reactions. Sometimes that frightened little Isaiah. It always confused him.

Ike Bell's only pleasant memories of Big Ed were of their occasional bass fishing expeditions in the flat-bottom boat they kept behind the barn. But that was so long ago, and Bell had been so young, that the memories were vague. Someone—Bell never knew who it was—had taken a black-and-white photo of the father and son on the river. As far as Bell knew, it was the only picture ever taken of him with his father. But it was a bad picture, and Bell could barely recognize his own face, let alone his father's.

Big Ed had ruined even that good memory by his choice of suicide locations. He had stood next to that same boat behind the barn when he shot himself, so he fell forward into it. His big brother Eddie heard the shot and was the one to find the body.

The preacher at the funeral had called the suicide “senseless.” But for Bell, it always had made perfect sense. The Jim Crow South was a society almost calculated to drive a black man insane. Now Bell reminded himself for the thousandth time that the man knew not what he was doing. It was almost a mantra he recited to himself when he felt himself getting angry at Big Ed for depriving him of a father. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

Then he remembered how his own drinking had very nearly deprived Cassie and Ikey of a father. Thank God a counselor at the Vet Center had confronted Bell about it, and that he had gone for help.
Maybe the cycle is broken.

The thoughts of his own children caused Bell once more to think of Darryl Childress. He wondered how Darryl would be affected by whatever these animals were doing with him at this very moment.

Bell couldn't bear to dwell on that. He slipped out of bed, went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk. Then he donned boots and a parka and went out into the frigid back yard. There he lit a cigarette and watched the moon disappear behind a cloud.

He said his own silent prayer for Darryl Childress.