The Red Queen Dies (31 page)

“What the hell?” Baxter said.

“Sergeant Perry,” McCabe said, greeting the man. “This is my partner, Detective Baxter.”

“Baxter,” Perry said as the child, snot running from her nose, grabbed for his hat.

Officer Lawrence, who had nodded at them as they walked up, said, “Do you want me to take her, Sergeant?”

“No, I've got her,” Perry said. “You bring the detectives up to speed on why you called.”

Lawrence smiled. It was the infectious grin that McCabe remembered. “Thank you, Sergeant.” She turned to McCabe and Baxter, looking more confident now. “We found something in the house, Detectives. I think it's one of the missing items from the Jessup case.”

Perry said, “I'll keep an eye out for the grandmother. You take them in.”

McCabe thought she could have gone all day without going inside that house. She hated roaches. And as soon as they climbed the rickety steps, crossed the threshold of the house, and saw the peeling wallpaper and the garbage piled in corners and the urine-soaked playpen in the middle of the living room, she knew there were roaches there.

Lawrence said, “We got a call from a neighbor. The baby was crying. The neighbor hadn't seen the grandmother in a while. She said the grandmother spends a lot of time out in the street with her shopping cart.”

“And no one thought of calling before this?' Baxter said, looking disgusted.

“She was okay until a few months ago,” Lawrence said. “Until then, they were just poor, like a lot of other people on this street. But she was doing her best to keep the place decent and take care of her granddaughter.”

McCabe nodded. “Sometimes people just get worn-out.”

“Still,” Baxter said. “Why the hell did the neighbors wait until it got like this to call someone?”

Lawrence said, “The neighbor who called said she was hoping the grandmother would be able to get herself together. She said she knows that the grandmother loves her granddaughter.”

McCabe glanced around and was ashamed that her first thought had been how much she hated roaches. “What was it you found, Officer Lawrence?”

“It's over here.”

Lawrence led them to the far corner, where one of the heaps of garbage was piled.

McCabe saw it right away. A red rose-shaped purse sticking out from beneath cardboard and stained cloth. “Vivian Jessup's purse,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am,” Lawrence said. “I thought it might be.”

McCabe dug into her jacket pocket for her spare pair of crime-scene gloves and reached for the expensive purse from London that had ended up in an old woman's collection of garbage. “Damn, there's nothing in it.”

Outside, a woman shrieked in fury. Lawrence ran toward the door. McCabe and Baxter were close behind.

Sergeant Perry was struggling with a ragged old woman. The woman was trying to pull the baby from his arms. Baxter grabbed her by the arm. She was holding on to the baby's leg. The child began to scream.

“Stop!” McCabe said. “Mike, let her go.”

Baxter backed away.

Sergeant Perry patted the little girl, whispering soothing words.

Lawrence said to the woman, “It's all right, ma'am. We were just worried because your granddaughter was alone.”

The woman stood there, her chest heaving, still holding on to one of her granddaughter's legs. She began to sob.

It took another few minutes of talking to get her to let go of the baby's leg. Lawrence took the woman to sit in her cruiser. McCabe followed and knelt down beside the open door. “Ma'am, we're going to take you and your granddaughter somewhere where you'll both be safe, okay?”

The woman nodded.

“I need to ask you about the red purse we found in your house.”

The woman smiled. “It's pretty. It looks like a flower.”

“Yes, it does. Do you remember where you found it?”

“Where's my grandbaby? Where did that girl say my grandbaby is?”

“She's right over there. See? About the purse. Can you remember where you found it?”

The woman grabbed McCabe's hand. “I want to brush my teeth now.”

“We'll get you a toothbrush and toothpaste. But first we need you to tell us about the purse. Can you remember where you found it?”

“The he/she threw it in the trash can. Thought I couldn't tell. Knew by the way he/she walked.”

“You knew what?” McCabe said.

The woman nodded. “Knew he/she was one of them.”

“One of who?”

The woman clutched McCabe's hand and rocked back and forth on the car seat. “The spaceship. He/she came on that spaceship. One of them.” She stared into McCabe's eyes. “You ain't one of them, are you?”

McCabe patted her hand. “No, I'm not one of them. We'll take you where you can brush your teeth now.”

“My grandbaby … where's my grandbaby?”

 

29

 

Baxter drove McCabe back to the garage to pick up her car. It was almost 3:30, and Mrs. Givens's memorial service was at four.

They had checked in with the lieutenant. He'd said Baxter could handle getting the purse to forensics. A team would search the house they had just left for the contents of Vivian Jessup's purse. But McCabe suspected the purse had been empty when the old woman retrieved it from the trash can.

The lieutenant had said McCabe needed to go to the memorial service for Mrs. Givens. Clarence Redfield would notice and thread about it if she wasn't there.

“Public relations,” Baxter said.

“I wanted to go anyway,” McCabe said.

The church was packed. Ushers, middle-aged women in white uniforms, were on duty to conduct late arrivals to the few remaining spaces in the rows of pews. They were also there to attend to anyone who passed out from the humidity that threatened to overwhelm the air conditioning, which seemed to be on the blink.

To McCabe's surprise, Reverend Deke was one of the six clerics on the dais. Although he had no church that she had ever heard of, he was wearing a black robe over his white suit.

The choir rose to sing the opening hymn, and McCabe settled into the seat she had managed to get on the aisle in a pew toward the back. She had dodged the usher who wanted to take her up front to fill in one of the empty spaces there. Not that she intended leaving before it was over, but her mother had taught her when she was a child that one's seat in church should be chosen with care. If the service went on too long, a seat toward the back and on either aisle would allow a swift, discreet exit.

Although her mother had appreciated what she described as the “power and passion of the black church,” she had never been one to sit through endless hymns when she felt she could make better use of her time. Pop, on the other hand, would be there patting his foot and clapping his hands until the end. Even when it happened, as it often did, that he was the lone white man in the place with a little brown girl sitting beside him. Somewhere along the way, they had stopped going to church. Having introduced her to that aspect of her culture, both parents seem to feel they had done their duty.

But McCabe had encountered several of the ministers on the dais at community meetings when she was in uniform. The chief at the time had been giving lip service to community policing. McCabe and the other cops who had patrolled that zone had shown up at occasional meetings to listen to what the ministers and the other residents, who were concerned not only with crime and violence but police behavior, had to say. The chief's theory was that listening had the effect of suppressing unrest. No matter if they didn't do a lot to respond to the complaints and concerns that they heard.

Halfway through the service, one of Mrs. Givens's grandsons stood up to speak.

“This isn't my thing,” he said, standing stiffly in his suit and tie. “You folks who know me know that I'm more comfortable under a car hood.” He cleared his throat. “But I had to speak for my gram. She didn't deserve to die like that. My gram was good people. And you got these little kids breaking into her house and beating her.…” He swiped at his eyes. “My gram wouldn't have hurt anyone. She didn't like to hurt people. She shouldn't have been hurt like that.… It ain't right. You hear me? It ain't right.”

A mumble went up from the congregation and then someone cried out, “It ain't right.” Others picked up the call, chanting “It ain't right.”

McCabe's gaze went upward as the woman beside her sprang to her feet. “It ain't right, and we ain't going to take it no more.”

McCabe was torn between tears at the depth of the emotion there in the church and chagrin that the woman beside her had sent her mind spiraling to Peter Finch as the enraged anchorman in
Network,
yelling, “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

Pop and his movies were a bad influence. McCabe dug into her shoulder bag for a tissue, remembering Mrs. Givens sitting across the table from her only a few days ago.

Around her the chant was now “Ain't going to take it no more.”

Up on the dais, the mayor and the chief were looking a little uneasy.

McCabe thought, Should have sat in back near the door, guys.

Reverend Caswell, the minister of the church, got to his feet and raised his arms. “No, it ain't right,” he said. “We need to do something about the violence in our community. We need the help of our friends, the chief of police and the mayor of our city, to get the services that we need in our community. We need services as good as the people in the rest of the city receive. We need to keep our young people from going to juvenile institutions and then on to prison, from going to the emergency room, and then on to the graveyard. We need to break this cycle of violence that took our beloved sister, Mrs. Margaret Givens, from us. We need to do away with both the droogie boys and the bad cops. We need to bring healing and peace to our community.”

Each statement was met with a chorus of “Amen” and “Yes, Lord.”

Reverend Caswell was followed by each of the other ministers on the dais, each of whom echoed the same theme with a prayer or a song.

After Reverend Deke's rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the mayor was invited to speak.

“I have heard your words,” she said, glancing from one side of the room to the other. “I have heard your cries for justice.” She spread her hands. “If I could change what has happened and raise that poor woman from her grave, believe me, I would. All I can tell you is that Chief Egan”—she glanced at the husky man with the crew cut sitting behind her—“and I will not rest until we have reduced the crime and violence in this community. We will continue to work with you.…”

McCabe tuned out as the mayor drifted into the standard speech from mayors about crime and violence.

She turned her attention to Clarence Redfield's profile. Sitting several rows in front of her, he was looking down. Probably at his ORB. He was probably treading live from the memorial.

As the service was ending, McCabe slipped out of the pew. She nodded to the usher in her aisle as she left.

On the church steps, she stopped to take a deep breath. Motion caught her eye. Four boys were riding down the sideway on their bikes. They stopped near the steps, looking up at the open doors.

McCabe nodded and smiled. She turned and went back into the vestibule, out of their line of vision. “Dispatcher, officer needs assistance. Possible gang activity about to occur.”

She gave the location and emphasized that it was the memorial service and that the mayor and the chief were inside the church.

The dispatcher informed her that several patrol cars were nearby, responding to an acoustic readout showing shots fired and a report about a street brawl. She would send them to the church.

McCabe listened to the service ending behind her.

The boys on their bikes were still waiting. One of them was fiddling with a brown paper bag in the basket of his bike.

McCabe stepped out of the vestibule and strolled down the steps. “Hey, guys, what's up?” She held up her badge. “Can I help you with something?”

“Just hanging to watch the people come out of the church,” one of them, who looked about ten and had a gold stud in his ear, said. “It's the thing for that old lady who was killed, right?”

“Right,” McCabe said. “You knew her?”

They looked at one another. And then the one with the intricate pattern in his hair said, “A little. Whenever we'd see her over at the park…” He looked embarrassed. “She used to give us cookies.”

“She used to give us homemade cookies that she'd made,” one of the others said.

His friends nodded their heads. “That lady could slam down on some cookies,” the one with the earring said.

They glanced at one another again and then the one with the bag in his bike basket said, “We brought her some flowers.”

McCabe said, “Is that what's in the bag?”

He opened the bag and drew out a bouquet of daisies. “We thought she'd like this kind.”

McCabe said, “I'm sure she loved daisies. Why didn't you guys go to the memorial service?”

The first one shook his head. “Nah, that ain't our thing. We just wanted to thank the old lady for the cookies.”

The one with the intricate pattern in his hair scowled. “We would have stopped them guys from hurting her if we'd been there.”

“Yeah,” the others said in chorus.

The one with the bouquet in his hand held it out.

McCabe took it. “I'll see that Mrs. Givens's family gets these, okay?”

“Okay,” the one with the gold stud said. “Tell them the old lady made really good cookies.”

“I will. Do you guys happen to know—” McCabe broke off as she saw the first patrol car turn into the street.

Oh shit.

The boys glanced sideways at the patrol car. The inner doors of the church opened and people began to spill out.