On the day I went back to the storage locker for the first time since we’d moved Dee’s things there, I woke up with a powerful hangover. The predictability of it was a comfort: I lay in bed late into the day and my mind fed me a slow, sad diet of memories: Dee and me being followed by a car full of boys. They ride the bumper of our parents’ station wagon while I try to drive. Dee sticks her middle finger out the window, and my face burns so red it hurts. Dee, I choke out in fear. Dee sobs on the Fourth of July. Her whole body is cast in fluorescent firework hues. Me and Dee and Pete splash in the shallows of Lake Michigan just north of the city. Dee takes her shirt off when Pete does. Don’t do that, Pete tells her. Why? She puts one hand on her waist and juts her hips out to the left in a perfect imitation of our mother. With the other hand, she rubs her flat baby chest. He shrugs. Dee climbs onto Peter’s back and wraps her legs tight around his waist. I try to tackle both of them. Dee throws her mouth open to the sky, laughing. Henry stands over me while my knees burn against the carpeting in his bedroom floor. What did you do? he asks me. He brushes the pad of his thumb over both of my lips and opens my mouth.
I tried to focus. What did I want? We all wanted different things. Ma wanted to find Dee’s body so she could be buried next to her baby and her husband. Suze, I think, wanted her sister to finally find some peace. Pete wanted more press in the hopes that this might reenergize local or national interest in our case. Wolski probably wanted to assuage his guilt. And I still wanted to nail Frank. At that point I hoped, and was edging dangerously into the territory of believing, that whatever the psychic discovered, it would bolster my own evidence against Frank. It would prove that he murdered Dee and tried to disappear her body. Maybe it was the psychic’s comment about the photo, vague as it was, that had pushed me toward this notion. I tried to rationalize his knowledge of the photo—but there weren’t many people who knew. (Wolski was one of them.) Maybe I needed to commit, like the psychic said. Maybe, in order for this to work, I needed to believe, without reservations, that it would work. I decided to go to the storage locker. Suddenly, though, the hangover began to overwhelm me, and I felt sick, so I dragged myself into the kitchen, forced down the lone beer in my fridge, and called Wolski.
“You busy?” I asked him.
“What do you need?” I heard some voices on his end, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“I wanted to say sorry about the necklace. I didn’t remember you giving it to me. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. Is that all?”
“I need some help.”
“When?”
“Whenever you can.”
“I’m a little tied up here.” The voices got louder. The tenor of it sounded like an argument, but it was hard to tell. Wolski got louder too. “Text me. I can be where you need me in an hour or two.”
He hung up without saying goodbye. I texted him the address of the storage locker where we kept Dee’s stuff. He never responded to the text, but I knew he’d be there. I closed my eyes and lay back down for another half hour. All I could see were Thomas Alexander’s baby teeth shining in that tiny, immaculate forever smile of his. Then I brushed my teeth and fixed my hair. I avoided the mirror. When I pulled up to the gate of the storage locker, Wolski was already there, smoking and leaning against his car. I thought for a moment I felt something unnameable for him, and then the thought was gone, and as was the case more often than not, I felt nothing.
“Rough night, eh?” he shouted while I was still getting out of the car. I wondered if I should have been braver and looked in the mirror. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He squeezed my shoulder. “We’re gonna get through this,” he said in a low voice. He tried to make his voice like an anchor. Usually, this tone worked on me, but I wasn’t attached that day. A heavy gust of wind could have carried me away.
“I know,” I said. I stood straighter and shrugged his hand off my shoulder. “I just didn’t want to go alone. It’s been a while.”
It had been two decades since we’d boxed Dee’s stuff up and locked it away. I didn’t think Peter had been in here since, and I certainly hadn’t.
Wolski nodded. “Well. Let’s make it quick,” he said. “I need to get back.” I was tempted to ask him what was going on back at the office, but I needed to focus. I hung back while Wolski took the key from me and opened the sliding door. I imagined a large steel mouth with Thomas Alexander’s tiny teeth lining the top and the bottom. Dust flew from the door and into Wolski’s face. He coughed daintily, pretending he hadn’t inhaled it. I stepped over the imaginary row of teeth on the floor and into the locker, which was hot inside even though it was brisk outside. I looked up into the cement cell.
Dee’s paintings were stacked like pallets on top of one another along the walls of the unit. I took one down from a stack near the door. It was a painting of an onion cut in half: deep purples and reds on a dark forest-green background. The paint was smudged and faded now. It was one that had hung briefly on the wall in the Milwaukee Art Museum that spring. I put it back on the stack. I opened a box near the door and found a set of art supplies. I picked up a dirty paintbrush. She used to let me watch her at work, though often she would make me promise not to talk, because I was a distraction; she, however, was allowed to talk. Once she turned to me, her whole body lit up by a long shaft of light spilling through the high studio windows, and she said, You can never really mix the same color twice, but that’s okay. And I remember repeating in my mind, But that’s okay, but that’s okay, but that’s okay, like it was some brilliant bit of Buddhist wisdom. It occurs to me now that Dee was the type of person who seemed to float, without effort, but also without judgment, above all the rest of us sad, rooted people.
I grabbed the paintbrush and was about to leave when I noticed her old Walkman in a box of tapes. It was one of the bright yellow ones that had SPORT written in large block letters across the side. Flimsy headphones, the foam now crumbled, were still plugged in. I remembered Frank had given the Walkman to her. At the last moment, I chose the Walkman instead of the paintbrush. I rushed out of the unit and motioned for Wolski to help me slam the heavy door shut again. The lock was sticky, and I fumbled with it. Wolski took it from my hands, his large fingers brushing the backs of my own, and I stepped away. He snapped the lock into place with a terrifying click, and I jumped back. Wolski moved to keep me from falling backwards. I let him. He nodded into the top of my head. I put a hand on his chest.
“Hey,” I said. “Did you tell the psychic about the photo?”
Wolski looked hurt, or like he was pretending to look hurt. I was suddenly saddened, and very exhausted, by the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference.
“You know I wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t do that.”
I wasn’t sure about this. “Okay,” I said.
“He knows?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think so, not really.”
Wolski left in a hurry, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he, along with his MPD brethren, was dealing with another crisis.
News of Thomas Alexander’s request for police protection had only stirred up fresh outrage over the city’s clear support of the psychic’s tours and the mayoral office’s historic apathy regarding police brutality. More people were now joining the victims’ families in protesting the tours and the police presence in that area of the city. Besides the victims’ families, most people hadn’t been particularly interested in protesting the tours, but people were eager to protest the MPD. They had been doing so for years. Because every year there were more police killings of Black Milwaukeeans. Many of these cases failed to make national news, and I’m sure there were many that never made the local news either. The coverage of Terry Williams’s murder stayed with me. Maybe because he was the same age as Dee when she disappeared, or maybe because it happened near Bradford Beach, a place that is, for me, inextricably linked to that summer. Or maybe it was the way they assassinated his character after he died. All of it disarmed me. Made me feel like we were living on overlapping loops of loss that circumnavigated one another. I couldn’t see how we would get out. But I could see the years stretching out in either direction and understand that all of this had happened before and it’s still happening now.
On a summer night in 2017, a Milwaukee County deputy fired several rounds into a car whose driver was fleeing from a traffic stop. That driver, nineteen-year-old Terry Williams, was murdered across the street from Bradford Beach. The young woman in the passenger seat was gravely injured. The deputy said he had feared for his life, even though the car was not headed in his direction. In the days that followed, the news pored over this young man’s history, reporting on his rap sheet. The reporters seemed eager to explain the teenager’s death, and in order to do so, they needed to make him irredeemable and deserving of his fate. I saw this happen again and again. They’d done the same thing to Sylville Smith a year before Terry Williams.
After these murders, protests spread and flourished on the North Side, in Riverwest, Harambee, and Tosa. People marched up and down MLK Drive. UWM students joined the protests and helped organize community events. In those days, the news almost never used the word protest or protestors. They preferred the word riot: They sought out small-business owners to interview in front of damaged storefronts—people who gave impassioned descriptions of looting and destruction. During the last set of protests, the police department sent cops in riot gear into the streets and enforced curfews. The governor sent in the National Guard. They arrested dozens of protestors. People marched downtown and stood in front of the Milwaukee Police Department headquarters with their hands in the air for hours on end.
Whenever protests erupted, I had memory flares from the summer Dee disappeared. Activists had held multiple rallies in front of the serial killer’s apartment after learning that officers had automatically trusted a white man more than the Black women who had tried to flag the killer’s suspicious activities. Just like in 1991, protestors made demands and the city made promises. Olive-branch stuff. For example, the previous police chief resigned, and they brought in a new one. The protests would die down when it started to get cold again, kids went back to school, and the national news outlets that had covered Milwaukee finally left, but only after almost everyone ran some version of the following headline: “Milwaukee Remains One of the Most Segregated Cities in the Nation.” Many white people in Milwaukee were shocked to hear people say this about their city, though they had only to look at their neighborhoods and their children’s schools to know it.
As far as I could see, the police reaction to real or perceived problems was to add more police. That was what they’d done in Walker’s Point when the psychic arrived. They’d tried to quietly squash the protestors by restricting access to Specter’s and other establishments on Second Street. They added horse cops, and bike cops, and motorcycle cops, and cops walking around with their fingers looped through their belts. Two helicopters noisily patrolled the neighborhood from the sky. But the more police the department threw at the situation, the angrier people got, and the more the protests’ popularity grew.
I sensed Thomas Alexander was nervous but hopeful about the situation. Though the optics weren’t ideal, they still put him and his show in the spotlight. Who cared what was in the spotlight with him if he was the shiniest thing in it?
Wolski grumbled about the whole situation. “Only way this will die down without somebody getting killed is if it snows. Nobody likes protesting in the snow,” he said to me and Pete once.
“It’s April,” Pete told him.
Wolski shrugged. “Crazier things have happened.”