SEVENTEEN
I am a product—and not an entirely happy one—of what we used to call the black bourgeoisie, though that term is a little out of fashion these days. Truth is, we bourgeois types are the biggest snobs on the planet. Even though I’m kind of a failed member of my clan, I still have its prejudices to some degree.
People like me look down on the folks who live in housing projects at least as much—if not more—than the average white country-club Republican. All those things that you hear white people saying about the “inner city” folks—shiftless, lazy, low moral standards, and the rest—you’ll hear us black bourgeoisie saying, too. We close ranks when the white folks are around, but when the doors are closed and it’s just us sisters and brothers, we say it, believe me. We despise those bedraggled black folks sitting on the stoops of those awful rows of sad brick buildings, we despise them terribly. But it’s a complicated thing, because we know that in despising them, there’s some kind of tinge of anguish or fear, some sense of, there but for the grace of God go I.
But a white person in a down-at-the-heels trailer park or a housing project—well, the members of my clan have a special reserve tank of disgust and hatred for them, a nice pure thing that is unmediated by any of the complications of racial solidarity. You can’t know the depth of pleasure I feel when I call somebody “white trash.” Maybe it’s not right, but it’s how I feel.
The white woman sitting on the stoop up in Perry Homes was short and stocky, with a drinker’s flush, puffy eyes, a thin slash of mouth, and a rat’s nest of hair that hadn’t seen soap in a good stretch. She was holding a tall water glass with a fading picture of Minnie Mouse on the side. The woman matched the photo of Evie Marie Prowter’s mother in the file, a mug shot taken from a solicitation arrest.
We pulled over to the curb, parked. Seeing the unmarked car, the white woman stood and started walking away.
“Hey, Tanya!” I said. “Where you going, girl?”
“Yo, I ain’t did nothing,” she said sullenly. She was white, but she talked black. I suppose being the only white person in a two-mile radius, it came naturally to her, but it sounded laughable to me coming out of those skinny lips.
“We’re here to talk about your girl, Tanya,” Lt. Gooch said.
“What that li’l ho Denise done now?”
Lt. Gooch shook his head. “Not, Denise. I’m talking about Evie Marie.”
The woman on the stoop looked up at us for a moment with no particular expression. But her skin had gone another shade paler. “Who the hell y’all people is?”
“My name’s Detective Deakes,” I said. “Cold Case Unit. We’re reopening her case.”
Elise Prowter looked around vacantly, then took a drink from her Minnie Mouse jelly glass. “How come?” she said finally.
“We got new information,” Lt. Gooch said.
She looked at us for a moment. “What new information?”
Gooch shook his head. “I can’t tell you about that.”
“Well.” She gazed stoically off into the distance. “What you want, then?”
“Just a couple questions. I wanted to go over what happened when she disappeared. In the statement you gave to the detective at the time, you indicated that your brother Lonnie Driggers had come to visit that afternoon, that he was playing with your daughter.”
“He ain’t my brother.”
“I thought he was.”
“Maybe he was. But I don’t claim him no more. He killed my baby. I done fell apart after that. Look what he done to me.” She waved her Minnie Mouse glass in a wide arc that took in the whole of the bleak Perry Homes landscape, then looked at me with hard, challenging eyes. Her eyes, I noticed, were the same color as Lt. Gooch’s. “I come all the way down to nigger level.”
“You want to catch a slap upside the head, sister?” I said.
Gooch looked at me coldly, but I looked right back. I wasn’t having any of that. Finally he turned back to Tanya Prowter. “What you’re saying, you think Lonnie Driggers kidnapped your daughter and killed her.”
“He done took her down to that fishing shack of his and kilt her.”
“You have any proof?”
She glared at Lt. Gooch. “Proof? I got all the proof I need right here.” She put her hands over her heart.
Gooch kept looking at her.
“What?” she said. “How come y’all don’t believe me? Y’all just like that other sumbitch.”
“Who you talking about?”
“That other po-lices.”
“What other policeman?”
“The one that done the investigation. Back when she done got kilt.”
I remembered the name from the file. “Roy Bevis. Lt. Roy Bevis.”
Tanya Prowter shrugged listlessly.
I held my composure this time. “Are you saying that Lt. Bevis didn’t think your brother was guilty of the crime?”
“Hocus-pocus,” she said vaguely.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
Lt. Gooch held up a hand to me, waving me off impatiently. “Let me ask you this. Let’s say it was your brother done it. But let’s also s’pose, just for the sake of argument, that there was somebody else who helped him.”
Tanya Prowter took a delicate, prim sip from her tall water glass. As she set it down on the cracked concrete I noticed from the way the “water” clung to the sides of the glass that it wasn’t water at all. It was straight vodka, a good solid half pint of it in there. “What you mean, help?”
“Anybody hanging around? Anybody that seemed suspicious? Any adult males in the vicinity who showed an unnatural interest in her?”
Tanya Prowter looked disgusted. “You people.”
Gooch just stood over her. She started to take another sip of her vodka, but the lieutenant’s leg flashed out so fast you almost couldn’t see it, catching the glass with the toe of his cowboy boot and kicking Minnie Mouse twenty feet in the air. Minnie shattered against the wall.
“You showing disrespect to me,” Gooch said. “You showing disrespect to my partner. Being you being a broken-down welfare drunk, where you claim the right to do that?”
“Shit, man,” Tanya Prowter, waving sadly at the wet stain on the wall. “That’s the last I had.”
Gooch stared at her.
After a while she said, “That other cop ast the same thing, if there was somebody hanging around. I tole him there was this dude use to come around. Claimed he was Lonnie’s parole officer, be looking for Lonnie, you know what I’m saying. Only later when I ax Lonnie about him, Lonnie tole me he ain’t know who he was.”
“And this parole officer. He seemed suspicious to you somehow?”
“He come around three, four times, say he Lonnie’s parole officer, say he looking for Lonnie. Then he joke around with me, come in the house, make hisself at home. Then he horse around with Evie Marie.”
“And he did this more than once.”
“That’s what I’m saying. He seem nice enough, though.” She hesitated. “He brang me a bottle of Tanqueray once.”
“That sound like something a parole officer would do? Bring somebody a bottle of top-shelf gin?”
She looked away, didn’t answer.
“The day Evie Marie disappeared. This here parole officer fellow, did he come to your home?”
Again, there was no answer.
“Was that the day he brought you the Tanqueray? Hm? Did he give you the Tanqueray and then maybe go out in the yard, horse around with your little girl while you was drinking up that bottle?”
“It was Lonnie,” she said listlessly.
“You got drunk and fell asleep, didn’t you? While that man was playing with your girl.”
Evie Marie Prowter’s mother started shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, a slow insistent motion.
“What did he look like, Ms. Prowter? What did the man look like?”
She shrugged. “Normal looking. Blond hair.”
“A white man,” I said.
“Yeah. White dude.”
“You remember his name?”
“Nah. But I know he parole officer. He done show me his badge.”
“Anything else about him? What kind of car did he drive?”
“How the hell I’ma remember a thing like that? Ten years later. Shit.”
When we got back in the car, Lt. Gooch said, “Check the file. You got the sheet on Tanya’s brother in there?”
I riffled through, found a police file on Lonnie Driggers. “Yeah.”
“Was he on parole in 1992?”
I studied the sheet. “Nope,” I said finally. “1988, went in for three on possession of burglary tools, some other things. Served nineteen months. Finished his parole in ’91. After that he was clean.” I felt the tingling between my shoulder blades again. “Whoever was hanging around with that little girl, he was no parole officer.”
“Mysterious stranger strikes again,” Gooch said.
“What next?”
“Victim One,” Gooch said. “Gerald Bokus, age 7. Disappeared from a battered women’s shelter down in Columbus, November 12, 1987.”
Lt. Gooch scooped up the files, dropped them on my lap. “You read. I’ll drive.”