ELEVEN

The sheriff was no stereotype, that was for damned sure.

From the upscale furnishings in his office to the pipe rack on his desk, the David Hockney reproductions on his walls to the soft classical music—Haydn, I was pretty sure—Edward Brodsky was anything but what he looked. A bull of a man he might be, but I was willing to bet nobody’d ever stuck him with the name.

His big desk was a nice grade of dark maple and the dove-gray carpet looked like wool. Behind the desk was his “glory wall,” the framed documents and photographs he’d accumulated through the years. The one that caught my eye went a long way toward explaining his abrupt demeanor. Wood-framed, it featured a dark-blue background on which were mounted the distinctive gold badge of the L.A.P.D. and a chrome-plated pair of handcuffs. On a gold plate fastened to the bottom of the frame were the dates, 1966–1996.

I thought for a moment about the years of conflict between FBI-LA, and the Los Angeles Police Department. All the way back to Hoover himself. From the Black Dahlia case to the 1984 Olympics, the Rodney King beating to corruption in the infamous Ramparts Division. Cases the bureau didn’t want any more than Parker Center did, but had no choice about investigating. Christ, no wonder Brodsky didn’t like us.

The sheriff circled the desk to a high-back leather chair, sat, gestured toward the matching black leather armchairs down front. We sat. He stared at us for a moment.

“What brings you to Brookston?”

I almost mentioned the badge and cuffs on the wall behind him, but decided not to. Sleeping dogs and all that. No point making it any worse than it appeared to be.

“We’re working on the president’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court. Judge Brenda Thompson. She told us she lived here in Brookston for a few months in 1972. I’d like to run her name through your records department.”

“You could have done that on the phone. Surely you didn’t drive all the way down here for a records check.”

I looked at him, then argued with myself. Old habits are hard to break—his attitude was proof of that particular bromide—but I could probably afford to take the high road. Probably had to, as a matter of fact. Whatever Brenda Thompson had been up to in Brookston, we had little chance of finding out without Sheriff Brodsky’s help.

“Actually,” I told him, “there is something else.”

“Thought there might be.”

“Adoption records, Sheriff. Any way to see them?” Not a real lead, but a good way to test our new relationship.

“Got a court order?”

“No court order, but a release form. From Judge Thompson herself.”

“She’d be the mother?”

Shit. Not a great way to start. Now I had to say the words I’d been trying to avoid.

“I’m afraid I can’t say anything more, Sheriff. I mean no disrespect, but it’s just not possible to tell you that.”

He grinned without a trace of warmth. “The more things change …”

He didn’t bother finishing. Didn’t need to.

“No court order,” he continued, then leaned forward with his big forearms on the desk. “That’s the problem. Adoption records are more protected than anything we deal with. Nothing but a court order will even get you in the door.”

He looked away for a moment, then back at us.

“You’d want to look for abortion records, too, I imagine.”

I shook my head. “We’re talking 1972 … a year before Roe. Not likely there’d be any records before that.”

“Hard to know for sure until you look.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything. I looked at my watch, then at the sheriff.

“Can you point us toward the county clerk’s office?”

He pointed upward. “Next floor. Right above our heads.”

We started to get up, but his voice stopped us.

“How long you plan to be around?”

“Hard to say. We’ve got some other routine stuff to do, but we’ll touch base with you before the end of the day.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourselves. Call me if you need any help.”

It was one of those things you say, I realized, but it was the friendliest he’d been since we’d come through the door.

“We’ll do that, Sheriff. Thanks.”

We rose and left his office. He didn’t bother to show us back to the reception counter but we didn’t need the help. In the stairwell to the second floor, Lisa turned to me.

“What the hell was that all about? The attitude, I mean.”

“Retired cop, Lisa. L.A.P.D.”

“Of course. I saw the badge and cuffs, too. But Jesus …”

“Get used to it, partner.” I started up the stairs. “After a while you’ll stop caring.”

Upstairs, the customer service counter at the Cobb County Clerk’s office had been recently varnished, the smell even stronger than in the sheriff’s department. A young man wearing a white shirt and black string tie stepped up to help us. I flipped my creds open and he nodded.

“We need to verify a death record,” I told him. “The name is Sarah Kendall. Died in 1972. June 1972.”

He scribbled on a pad at his elbow. “Just give me a minute,” he said, then grabbed the pad and hustled away to an oak filing cabinet, slid out a narrow drawer and removed a small white card, brought it back to the counter.

“Sarah Kendall, yes, right here.” He glanced at the card and frowned, then at his pad. “Wait a second, though,” he said. “Did you say 1972?”

“June 1972 … probably late in June.”

He held out the card. I took it from him, examined the fading typescript, then nodded at the 1991 date, satisfied at having confirmed what Lisa had been told over the phone. It’s never a good idea to trust information you get over the phone. Now it could go into our report.

“I’ll need a copy of this,” I told him. “Certified and exemplified.”

“Of course.” He started away, then came back. “It’ll take a few minutes. Is there something else you’d like to see while I do it?”

I nodded. “Marriage records. For 1971 and 1972, please.”

The clerk moved to another oak file cabinet, this one closer to his desk, opened the middle drawer, pulled out a spool of microfilm, and brought it to us.

“You’ll need the reader for this stuff,” he said. He pointed at a battered machine in the corner, then led us to it and strung the spool into the machine. “Just turn this crank,” he began, but I cut him off.

“I’m an old hand,” I told him. “We’ll call if we need you.”

I waited until he was gone, then began to crank.

I felt Lisa move up close and watch over my shoulder. Her hair smelled even better than it had the other day, the wildflower scent even more inviting out here in the country. Her shoulder felt warm where it was touching the back of my left arm, and I had to force myself to concentrate on the task at hand.

I started with marriage records from June to December 1971, but saw almost immediately there was no point. Twenty names before the middle of July alone, twenty young black women who had married in Cobb County. At that rate we would have at least a hundred names, and there was no way to work with that many. Not at this stage anyway.

“Not a chance,” Lisa said, her mind as close to me as her body.

I went back to where the clerk was working on the death record. He looked up at my approach. Lisa stayed behind but I knew she was listening.

“Sarah Kendall,” I said, “have you got anything else on her? Who she was, who she was married to? Maybe what she did for a living?”

He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “She’d be in fictitious names registration if she ran any kind of business here.”

“Would you mind checking?”

The clerk went to a second file cabinet, came back empty-handed.

“Nothing,” he said.

I glanced at Lisa and she came over to us. “What about churches?” she asked. “If she were a regular churchgoer, where would we start looking?”

“Our records wouldn’t have that … church stuff, I mean.” He paused. “Come to think of it, we might could have that. Her marriage certificate would show a church, if she was married in one.” He went away and came back, showed us the certificate. “Baptist,” he said, his voice proud. “Same as me. She was married at my church, the one I just started going to. Emmanuel Baptist, out on Falls Lane.”

I studied the certificate. Copied the data into my notebook. “How do we get to the church?” I asked.

“I can save y’all a trip by calling Brother Johnson, if you want.”

It would save time as well, I thought, but once again the telephone was not the way to go. The kinds of questions we would be asking had to involve eye contact and body language, so I asked for directions instead, got them, and headed with Lisa back to the parking lot.

Halfway to the church my brain began to turn heavy again.

I’d never seen Brother Johnson’s Emmanuel Baptist Church, but I’d spent the first third of my life there nonetheless. I knew what it would look like, smell like, sound like, and I didn’t want any part of it. Besides, Lisa didn’t need me along just to ask a few routine questions. She could drop me off by the side of the road, go ahead on her own to interview the reverend, come back and pick me up. It sounded like a good plan until I realized what would happen. That Lisa would stare at me in surprise, demand to know what the hell I thought I was doing. That I didn’t know her at all well enough yet to tell her.

Fifteen minutes later we were there.

The church building lay at the end of a wooded lane about two miles from the courthouse and turned out pretty much as I’d pictured. Not much larger than a single-family home. White shingles, faded blue trim, same color blue on the double doors leading inside. What it didn’t have that I’d expected to see was a steeple. The only thing that distinguished Emmanuel Baptist Church from the grange hall we’d just passed was the plain wooden cross above the front doors.

Lisa parked the car out front and we went up the walk to those doors. I turned to her. “You do the talking this time. I want to watch the preacher.”

Which wasn’t the whole truth. I did want to watch him, but I needed to watch myself as well. My track record with preachers wasn’t good, my fuse far too short with the clergy. A lot safer to keep myself out of it.

“Sure,” Lisa said, as she grabbed the brass handle on the right-hand door and pulled it open.

An eighty-something black man looked back at us from the front of the church. A tall man with a short ring of curly white hair around his mostly bald head. His eyebrows were white as well, but as we approached him I saw something I couldn’t remember seeing before. His eyes were dark brown, but the lashes were just as white as the rest of his hair, and the effect was startling. He straightened up from the work he was doing on the church’s old-fashioned organ, smiled with a full set of perfect teeth as he walked up the aisle to greet us.

I began my routine search for his tell as Lisa did the credential thing and introduced the two of us to him. Reverend Johnson’s smile stayed in place—no mean feat considering what his memories of earlier American justice and the FBI must have been—but I wasn’t surprised. Preachers learn to smile early in the game, to keep on smiling even though they know better. His voice was thin but still had plenty of strength.

“How may I help you folks?”

“We’re trying to run down some information on Sarah Kendall,” Lisa told him. “The young man at the county clerk’s office told us she’d been married in this church. That you yourself had performed the ceremony.”

His smile disappeared for an instant before coming back even stronger, but he was too slow to keep me from noticing. One more time and I’d own him. He fiddled with the hearing aid in his right ear.

“That’s better,” he said. “Now what was that again?”

Lisa repeated it.

“Sarah Kendall,” he said, his words slow. “Yes. Yes, I believe I did marry her and her husband. Sarah was a member of my church for more than forty years, God bless her, right up to the day the Lord took her home.” He smiled again. “Why don’t you folks come into my office. We’ll be more comfortable there.”

I glanced over his shoulder at the raised pulpit, then back up the rows of plain wooden pews to the open front doors, and through them to the bucar outside. Talking to the preacher out there in Lisa’s Pontiac would have been just fine with me, but wherever his office turned out to be it was better than where we were at the moment. Standing next to that pulpit that I couldn’t even stand to look at.

“That’s very kind of you,” Lisa said. “Perhaps you could lead the way.”

He did so, Lisa right behind, me hanging back. The varnish smell was just as strong as it had been at the courthouse, but more authentically churchy here. We passed the pulpit and I tried to ignore it, but it was too late. My stomach clenched hard enough to stop me in my tracks. A series of images flashed through my mind before I could stop them. Images I’d never been able to forget … or forgive.

Sally Ann Hampton had been every bit as precocious as I was, another teenager filled with raging hormones and just as much curiosity, but Pastor Monk hadn’t seen it that way at all. In his book the wages of sin was death, and that’s what he tried to do to me when he caught the two of us behind the pulpit. Until the janitor showed up and pulled him off, long after Sally Ann had buckled up her bra and beat it out of there.

Now just the sight of a pulpit was enough to bring it all back, and most especially what had happened at services the very same night. The hideous humiliation of Pastor Monk’s public condemnation, the vilification that had banished Sally Ann and her family from the congregation, followed by his scathing denunciation of his own wife and my mother as the Jezebel who’d allowed her son to become a fornicator. Finally, horribly, his order to the congregation to shun my mother for her sin, the order that took from her the only thing in the world she cared about, that reduced her life to misery and inevitably to the suicide that Good Old Dad took as the ultimate sign of her unworthiness.

Rage has no sense of time and space, I’ve been told by one shrink or another since that night, and looking at Reverend Johnson’s pulpit almost thirty years later, the feelings were still strong enough to make me sweat. I shook my head in an effort to dislodge the pain, then hurried to catch up with Lisa and Reverend Johnson.

“Like I said,” the preacher began, once we were seated before the unadorned wooden desk inside his tiny office, “I knew Sarah very well.” He glanced out the door in the direction of the organ. “Matter of fact, she played that very organ until she was too sick to come to church anymore.” He shook his head. “I work on it every week, but it’s never sounded the same since she passed.”

“How about her niece?” Lisa asked. “Brenda Thompson. You must have known her, too.”

His smile went out completely. He turned from Lisa, stared at the ceiling. “Brenda Thompson,” he mumbled. “Sarah’s niece, you say.”

He looked back down but still not directly at either of us. Fiddled with his hearing aid again, cleared his throat, then massaged the entire front of his neck and spoke quietly into the top of his desk.

“I thought I knew all of Sarah’s people, but I never met any Brenda Thompson.” Now he did look at Lisa. “Should I have?”

“Not at all, sir,” she said. “But what about church records? Would you have something to refresh your memory?”

A soft chuckle. “Records? Lord, no. Everybody knows everybody down here. Don’t spend a whole lotta time on records.”

I stared at him. No records? Good thing Pastor Monk wasn’t here. Wouldn’t he have something to say about that?

Lisa glanced at me and I nodded that I’d heard enough, seen enough. Lisa thanked him for his time. We shook hands, and he showed us out to the front doors, closed them behind us. Before we could get to the car I could hear the insistent hammering of a single note from the organ. In the car Lisa started the engine, but turned to me before putting it into gear.

“Well? What do you think? He telling the truth?”

“You tell me.”

“He’s lying about not knowing Brenda Thompson. Kept his body angled away from us, his eyes anywhere but on mine. Then the throat rubbing. Like he was trying to squeeze the words up his neck to get them out of his mouth.”

I nodded. Good girl, I would have said in a less-militant era. Maybe it was time to start taking her to the card rooms with me.

“Where now, boss?” she wanted to know. “Where do we go to find out why he’s lying?”

“The hospital. Got to be one around here someplace.”

“What about release forms? The only release we’ve got is signed Brenda Thompson. If the reverend doesn’t even admit knowing her, why would we think Thompson would use her own name if she ended up at the hospital?”

“Never hurts to ask.”

“May not hurt to eat half a dozen doughnuts either, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to use your time.”

“I have a cunning plan.”

She stared at me. “It sure as hell better be.”