Flesh and Bone Page 25

  After three children’s rooms, the last equipped with playpens, cribs, and several cushioned rocking chairs, the hallway intersected with another hall and a stairway. Even before I could hear it, I felt the deep thrumming of a pipe organ down the passage to the left, its bass notes resonating in my core. I passed through a thick doorway arch, which led into an older part of the building; there, a curving passage hugged what I guessed must be the apse of the nave, the semicircular area behind the altar. I turned left into the curve, and within twenty feet I found an arched wooden door helpfully labeled NAVE. It was slightly ajar, and I put an eyeball up to the crack and eased it open another few inches. What I saw made me jump back from the doorway, as if a snake were coiled inside at eye level. Not ten feet away stood the high altar, and to one side, facing me, was the organist. Another ten feet beyond him, farther to my left, was the first row of people, their pew marked with a white bow. I recognized the face of Jess’s ex-husband; on the same pew with him, but several feet away, sat a woman who looked like a seventy-year-old version of Jess. It was her mother, I realized, and it saddened me to think of a mother burying her child. Behind them, blue-suited police officers sat shoulder to shoulder, three pews deep. Behind them, I noticed with a start, was an elegant black woman; her face was half hidden by the broad brim of a hat, but I suspected the face belonged to Miss Georgia Youngblood. Her choice of seat—immediately behind dozens of muscled policemen—virtually confirmed my hunch. I eased the door shut. This vantage point would give me an unmatched view of the ser vice, but it would also leave me dangerously exposed.

  As my mind and my pulse raced to the accompaniment of the pipe organ, the music gave me an idea. I’d toured a number of Gothic cathedrals in En gland and France, and most of them had a balcony or mezzanine ringing the entire nave. I wondered if there might be one in this church, since it was neo-Gothic, and I decided to risk another look. I eased open the door again, less than an inch this time, and was rewarded with a glimpse of dark archways twenty feet up. A set of silvery gray organ pipes filled some of the arches, but most of them looked empty, and they appeared to ring the entire apse. I hurried back to the hallway crossing and staircase, and climbed four flights to the upper level. Again turning left, I found another old-fashioned wooden door. This one wasn’t labeled, but it was directly above the other one, and when I laid my hand on it, I felt the wood quivering in time to the organ’s bass notes. At the top of the door—out of the reach of the Sunday school students—was a small latch, the kind found on screen doors throughout Tennessee.

  Unhooking the latch, I pushed open the door and found a dark, narrow passage, eight or ten feet long, leading to the arches I’d seen from below. To my left, as I felt my way toward the nearest arch, I could hear one set of pipes; looking across the apse through the narrow arch ahead of me, I saw the other set. In addition to the rumbling bass notes and high trills and all the intervening octaves, I could hear the rush of air through pipes, and the clicking of valves deep within the organ’s mechanism. The arch gave me a bird’s-eye view of the altar and the soaring marble structure that topped it, like a twenty-foot-high doll house.

  A white-robed priest stepped slowly into view, carry ing a brass urn about a foot high. He set the urn on a wooden stand in front of the altar, and I realized with a shock that the urn must contain Jess’s “cremains,” the hokey contraction funeral directors had coined for “cremated remains.” From my research, I knew that her cremains—ground-up bits of crumbly bone, whose minerals were the only things to survive the heat of the furnace—would probably weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of five pounds. I knew the chemical composition was mainly calcium, seasoned with a host of trace elements. And I knew that Jess, her essence, was not among the trace elements inside that urn.

  As the priest ascended the stairs to the altar itself, the music reached a crescendo that set my very teeth buzzing. Then the music fell away, and the priest began to speak.

  “In the midst of life we are in death,” he began. “From whom can we seek help? From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered.”

  A chorus of voices rang from the nave beyond. “Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and merciful Savior,” the congregation recited, “deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death.” Ah, my heart answered, but what about the bitterness of empty life? I would have traded places with Jess if I could.

  The priest began to chant, a high incantation that had no discernible melody, and I lost the thread of its meaning, circling back instead to the opening words of the ser vice. “In the midst of life we are in death.” No, that’s backward, I thought. In the midst of death, Jess and I were most alive. It was our daily bread. We were oddities, she and I: a doctor who never had a live patient, and an ivory-tower professor immersed to his elbows in death and dismemberment. Could we have made an odd life together, I wondered, sharing space and hearts and bodies in Knoxville or Chattanooga or somewhere in between? The power couple of the dead set, I thought, and smiled at the grim humor even as tears sprang to my eyes for the loss of what might have been. I knew I was grieving for something that never really existed except in my imagination, but the loss cut deeply all the same.

  As the congregation read a response to some prompting I hadn’t heard, I shifted my stance, and when I did, I kicked a chair hidden in the dark catwalk. It grated on the stone floor, and the priest looked up in my direction. As he registered my presence, his eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed sharply. I realized that the police had probably briefed him about me, the forbidden intruder, and I suddenly pictured him interrupting the service—Jess’s service—to have me hauled away. I clasped my hands in front of my chest in a gesture of prayer, a gesture whose sincerity I hoped he could see. Maybe he did; maybe he saw sorrow etched in my face, or tears streaking my cheeks; maybe he simply didn’t want to interrupt the ser vice. At any rate, his expression softened, and he turned back to his text. “O God of grace and glory,” he read, “we remember before you this day our sister Jessamine. We thank you for giving her to us, her family and friends, to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. In your boundless compassion, console us who mourn.” He never looked at me again, but at that moment he seemed to be speaking to me, speaking for me, alone among the crowd.

  At the end of the main ser vice, the priest invited the mourners to join him for a brief burial ser vice in the courtyard beside the nave. Then he lifted the brass urn from the altar and processed out the nave.

  Retreating into the maze of hallways and stairwells, I made my way by blind reckoning in the direction the priest had indicated. I soon found myself in an elegant lobby just outside the parish offices; then, down a long, sunny hallway, I glimpsed windows looking out onto an enclosed garden. At the garden’s center was a sunken circular courtyard inlaid with black and white tiles that formed the pattern of a labyrinth, a symbol of spiritual pilgrimage. To one side, in a raised bed of flowers and hostas, stood a statue of an angel, and in one edge of this plot was a freshly dug hole, perhaps a foot square. The priest stood there with the urn, and the tightly bunched crowd faced him. I recognized Preston Carter in the group; I also saw the woman I’d known at a glance to be Jess’s mother. She held her head high, almost defiantly—another recognizable echo of Jess—but her face told how much the show of strength was costing her. She kept her distance from Carter, which I took as a sign that she had not forgiven him for what ever had caused the rift between him and Jess.

  The priest began to speak, and I crept to a window to catch his words. I got there just in time to see him pour the urn’s contents into the ground. He straightened and then raised both hands in a gesture of blessing. “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ,” he said, “we commend to Almighty God our sister Jessamine, and we commit her body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious to her, the Lord lif
t up his countenance upon her and give her peace. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I whispered. “Sleep well, Jess.”

  CHAPTER 36

  I SLIPPED OUT THE church’s side door and made it back to Broad Street undetected—more to the point, unarrested—and had just climbed into the Taurus for the sad drive back to Knoxville when I heard a soft, familiar voice. “You not speaking to me?” Miss Georgia was decked out in a sleeveless calf-length black dress that simultaneously covered and stunningly packaged her willowy body. A hint of cleavage showed at the neckline; the naughtiness was somehow both undercut and underscored by a panel of sheer black mesh stretching from the neckline up to her throat. The outfit was topped off by a pair of black gloves and the broad-brimmed black hat I’d seen in the church, trimmed with a spray of black feathers. Miss Georgia raised a stiletto-clad foot to the running board; the movement caused a long slit in the dress to open, revealing a stocking top, a garter, and several inches of bare thigh above the stocking. It was an elegant, womanly thigh, and it startled me all over again to recall that Miss Georgia was not actually a woman. “Dr. Bill, I’m sorry about your friend,” said Miss Georgia. “I saw it on the TV, and I cried and cried. She a classy lady.”

  “Yes, she was,” I said.

  “How come the police not let you in the church, Dr. Bill? Everybody talkin’ ’bout that after the fun’ral. You loved her, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “I think maybe I did, or I could have. I was just beginning to find out.”

  “You did; it was all over your face that night at the club. She crazy ’bout you, too—I axed her, and she told me so. Anybody deserve to be in there at that woman’s fun’ral, it was you. You and her mama. Who tell the police to keep you out?”

  “Her ex-husband,” I said. “I think he thinks I killed her. So does Detective Sergeant John Evers. So does the district attorney.”

  “You?” Miss Georgia threw back her head and cut loose with her high, cascading laugh, whose femininity was undercut slightly by the prominence with which her Adam’s apple bobbed into view. “Dr. Bill, you as meek as a baby lamb,” she said. “No way you do something bad to a woman, ’specially a woman you in love with. I got me a mind to go find that ex-husband and bitch-slap some sense into him. Bitch-slap me some po-lices, too.” She grinned lasciviously. “Some of them white-boy po-lices? They just dyin’ to be bitch-slapped by a long-legged Nubian goddess.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. “I appreciate your willingness to take up for me, Miss Georgia, but I don’t want to drag you into my troubles.”

  “Sweet Jesus, did somebody say drag? Tha’s one of my most favorite words. I am all about drag, and draggin’, and bein’ dragged. Next time somebody start messin’ wif you, they gonna find theyself messin’ wif me. Then they be the one in a mess.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Next time the police—the po-lice—mess with me, I’ll holler for help.” She gave me an exaggerated wink of approval.

  “Dr. Bill, I done found out somethin’ ’bout that case you and Miss Jess was workin’ on.”

  There was a deli near the corner—Ankar’s Downtown—so I suggested we get a bite to eat while we talked. “You know I gots to watch my girlish figure, but I would just love some sweet tea,” she said. I held the door for her, then ordered two teas and a bag of chips, and we headed for a booth that looked out of earshot of the handful of other customers. Heads turned as we walked through the deli; Miss Georgia beamed at all who stared, as if accepting tribute. And in a way, maybe she was.

  Once seated, she took off her gloves, laid them on the table, and drew a sip of tea through a straw so as not to smudge her coral lipstick. “Oh my,” she sighed, “that is refreshing.” I took a swig of mine and popped a potato chip in my mouth. It was a thick, kettle-cooked chip, so it crunched loudly. Miss Georgia crinkled her nose in disapproval.

  “You said you found out something,” I said. “Tell me.”

  She reached down under the table and produced a folded piece of paper which I guessed had been tucked into the top of her stocking. When she unfolded it, I saw the forensic sketch artist’s two renderings of Craig Willis, in drag and in men’s clothing. “I axed some of my friends—girlfriends and boyfriends—about this person you and Miss Jess was wondering about,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, “we identified him by his fingerprints after I talked to you.” I described finding the skin from the hand, and how Art had donned the skin like a glove in order to take prints.

  “Dr. Bill, that is just fascinating,” she said. She sounded like she meant it, and I was grateful for the compliment. “One of my boyfriends, he recognize the picture—the regular picture, not the one in that tatty Dolly Parton outfit—and he say, ‘That guy is not a drag queen; that asshole motherfucker is a chicken hawk.’ ’Scuse my French, Dr. Bill.”

  “Chicken hawk? What’s a chicken hawk?”

  “Iss a bird. And iss a pedophile. Chicken hawk swoop down and grab li’l baby chickens. They’s even a damn chicken-hawk support group, calls isself ‘Nambla.’ Stand for ‘North American Man-Boy Love Association.’ Nambla say men should be able to have sex with boys of any age, long as the boys consent.” She paused, then added, “What ever ‘consent’ mean to a six-year-old chile.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this,” I said.

  Miss Georgia looked away. When she looked back, I saw deep-seated hurt in her eyes. “You know that tree it talk about in the Bible—the tree of good and evil?” I nodded, startled—Art and I had discussed it, in the same context, a few weeks ago, or a lifetime ago. “Somebody make me eat some fruits off that tree a long time ago,” she said. “You choke down something like that, it stick with you for life, Dr. Bill.”

  I felt a wave of compassion for Miss Georgia, but I didn’t want to pry and I didn’t know a graceful way to express it. Instead, I simply told Miss Georgia about Craig Willis’s arrest for child molestation in Knoxville, shortly before he moved to Chattanooga; she nodded. “See, thass what I’m talkin’ about. I tole you that night at Alan Gold’s I’d remember if I seen anybody in that sorry-ass drag-queen getup.”

  “So a chicken hawk couldn’t also be a drag queen?”

  For the second time in as many minutes, Miss Georgia looked uncomfortable. “Don’t never say never, Dr. Bill. They’s some mighty twisted people in this world. And queers be some of the twistedest.” I studied Miss Georgia for any hint of irony in her expression, and detected none. “But my friend, he say he cannot imagine this guy in drag.”

  “But that’s how he was dressed when he died,” I said.

  “When he die? Or when y’all find him?”

  “But what’s the—” Suddenly I saw what she was getting at. “You think maybe whoever killed him dressed his body in drag for some reason?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “How come?”

  “You the forensic genius, Dr. Bill. Why you think?”

  “To make it look like a hate crime?”

  “See, baby, you know it. It just takes you a while to know you know it. Sort of like the way you was slow to know you love Miss Jess.”

  “But surely whoever killed this guy knew he was a pedophile,” I said. “So wouldn’t it still be a hate crime?”

  “Yes and no,” she said. “Different kind of hate. So different kind of crime.”

  Something was crystallizing in my mind. Slowly, to be sure, but definitely. “So if it’s a different kind of hate,” I said, “and a different kind of killing, that means…” Miss Georgia nodded encouragingly. “That means a different kind of killer, someone killing for a different reason.”

  “Dr. Bill, you so brilliant,” she said.

  “Oh, stop,” I said. “Now you’re patronizing me.” Miss Georgia’s laugh pealed throughout the deli, causing another round of head-turning. “So instead of just some redneck yahoo who’s enraged by a man in drag, we’re looking for someone who hates pedophiles. Maybe somebody he molested who wanted revenge?”

  Miss Georgia lo
oked doubtful. “You think some li’l boy done turned killer?” She shook her head. “That fella not old enough to have victims what be growed up. Besides, a boy been molested might turn molester his own self. Shit flow downstream, we say here in Chattanooga. Y’all might not say that in Knoxville, being upriver and all.”

  “Well, Craig Willis sure flowed downstream,” I said. “But if it wasn’t someone he molested, then who?” Miss Georgia rolled her eyes and drummed her fingers on the table. Finally I got it. “A parent.” Then I thought of my grandsons, and how enraged I would be if someone molested them. “Or a grandparent.” And then I thought of Art, and his quiet fury at the predators he was stalking day in, day out, and of what he’d told me about the officer who caught Craig Willis in the act of molesting Joey Scott; I wondered how it might have affected that officer to see Willis set free without so much as a trial. “Or a frustrated cop.”

  Miss Georgia beamed at me. “Now you usin’ that big ol’ brain of yours, Dr. Bill.” She took another sip through her straw, then frowned at the thin plastic tube. “I can’t get no satisfaction through this staw. I guess I just be out of practice suckin’ on things.” She winked at me, then put her lips into a pout and wrapped them around the straw again. “Oh, the hell with it,” she finally said in a huskier voice. She extracted the straw and dropped it on the table, then hoisted the glass and drained it in three larynx-pumping gulps. Then she set down the glass and looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen on her face before. She looked shy, and scared, and utterly free of the dramatics and affectations she hid behind so much of the time. “Dr. Bill, could I ax you something? Iss a highly personal matter.”