Gate 76 Page 6

  “Baby, I just got off the plane. I’m going to be here three days, maybe more. You gotta buckle down, OK? Find something to do. When I get back, I promise—”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Seriously, I got work to do—”

  “And I have nothing to do!”

  “—and you’re putting all this worry in my head. I gotta focus here. You know, like when I’m home, I focus on you. I give it all to you when it’s us time. Don’t I, Miriam? Don’t I?”

  Long silence. Puff of the cigarette. Exaggerated exhale. “Yeah, Freddy. I guess. I just feel like I go a little crazy when you’re not around.”

  “Go out with your friends and have some fun. I know you don’t like being alone. Go be around people and you’ll find something to do.”

  She found something to do all right. When we were in the delivery room at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital and the kid came out, the place went dead silent.

  The nurse said, “Um…” And then just stopped.

  Miriam was panting and crying. “What is it? What’s wrong? Oh my God, he’s not dead, is he?”

  The baby had dark skin—very dark—and a full head of tightly curled hair. The nurse laid him on Miriam’s breast and said congratulations. Miriam looked at the baby, and then at me, and I knew. I think everyone in the room knew what the blood test later confirmed. He was beautiful, but he wasn’t mine.

  The day after the blood test, Miriam was in bed with the baby sleeping beside her. I laid the tray of eggs and toast and coffee in her lap, and I remember how nervous she was. She kept looking at me, trying to gauge my mood.

  “Who is he?” I said. “Who’s the father?”

  She screwed up her eyes like she was trying to remember the answers to a history quiz. As she was thinking it through, she popped up one, two, three, four fingers. And then she put on her bravest smile and said, “I’ve already narrowed it down!”

  Miriam didn’t contest the divorce. At the time, I thought that was pretty decent of her. Then one night when she was drunk, she told me over the phone that she didn’t want me spending money on a lawyer when it could just go straight to her. I had promised her a little cash to help her get on her feet, mainly because I was worried for the boy. That was fifteen thousand bucks I didn’t need to spend.

  Here’s the thing about people like Miriam and her ex-boyfriend Lenny D. They find each other one way or another. It’s not just luck. The misfits can always sense what kind of person they mis-fit with.

  And then once in a while some new guy comes along and he thinks he’s gonna rescue some poor, unappreciated beauty. He has quite an imagination, that guy. He doesn’t get why his wife’s better qualities aren’t coming out, even after he’s given her better circumstances. He thinks he’s doing it wrong. He’s just not working hard enough to bring out her real shine. All the way until the day he wises up, he thinks he’s doing it wrong.

  I still check in with her every week or two, mostly to see how the kid is doing. If I’d found her with some guy like my dad, beating her up, I’d have got rid of him. Or I’d try to take the boy.

  Now she’s married to this Serbian guy whose name I can never pronounce. Take the middle third of the alphabet, nine or ten letters, and remove all the vowels. That’s his name. They live in Bethesda. I don’t know if she still sleeps around, but if she does, that’s his problem. The home is stable enough, and the boy is healthy and safe, but I think he’s a little confused. He calls both me and Miriam’s husband Daddy. I sometimes wonder if that’s genetic. Her lover and Lenny’s dad is whatever man happens to be around at the moment.

  I always have to brace myself when I see her, because she’ll get under my skin one way or another, even when she’s not trying to. Standing on the front porch of their little blue house, I take a minute to collect myself before I ring the bell.

  She opens the door, and there’s little Lenny standing at her side, with a sippy cup full of apple juice and a big smile. His hair is a lopsided Afro with a giant dent in the left side, where he had been leaning against something.

  “He needs a haircut,” I say.

  “He just got it cut,” Miriam says.

  “Nobody wears their hair like that.”

  “Colin Kaepernick does, and I think it looks good,” she says. “Oh, and by the way, it’s nice to see you too. How about starting with a greeting?”

  She’s wearing a high-waisted dress that’s grey on top and black from the midsection down. Good for a job interview, but she’s still too pretty.

  “Sorry,” I say. “The hair thing bugs me.”

  “You look good, Freddy. You really do.”

  “Yeah, so do you.” I hate admitting that. I thought the attraction would go away over time, but it hasn’t.

  “Did you take him to the white barber?” I say.

  “I’m not going to drive all the way to DC.”

  “Yeah, but the white guy fucks up his hair.”

  “Watch your mouth,” she says.

  Lenny has his arm around her knee. He keeps leaning forward, swinging himself around and ramming his face into her thigh.

  “He doesn’t know how to cut it,” I say. “Look how lopsided it is.”

  “We just haven’t combed it out yet. What are you two doing today?”

  “Are we going to the zoo?” Lenny asks.

  “Yes, we’re going to the zoo.”

  “How did he know that?” Miriam asks.

  “We talked about it a couple weeks ago. You ready, pal?”

  “Yes,” Lenny says. He’s staring up at me with those big dark eyes, holding his Finding Nemo sippy cup in the crook of his arm.

  Miriam hands me a shopping bag. “There’s more juice in there, some Gummi Bears, goldfish crackers, cheese sticks, and raisins. Take the booster seat out of the car. I’ll be home around two. He usually naps at one, but try to keep him going. I’ll put him down when you guys get back.”

  At the zoo, we have a mission: find the lion, the cheetah, the panda, the elephant, and the gorilla, and give them invitations to Lenny’s birthday party. I picked up the invites two weeks ago, when we planned this over the phone. Lenny wanted to be sure they all knew he was turning four.

  The panda enclosure is a steeply sloped hill with grass, bamboo, and boulders, surrounded by high concrete walls. At the rear is the panda house with the plate-glass windows. The pandas aren’t out today.

  “Where is he, Daddy?”

  “He’s probably inside. You want to go in and check on him?”

  He stuffs two fistfuls of Gummi Bears into his mouth and says something I can’t understand.

  I squat down in front of him and ask again, “You want to go inside?”

  He just stands there wide-eyed, trying to chew. He can’t even close his mouth all the way. It’s like he has a baseball in there.

  “How many Gummi Bears did you put in your mouth?”

  He holds up two fingers as his eyes begin to water.

  “Two? I think you have more than two in there.”

  Then he pulls two empty bags from his pocket and shows them to me.

  “Come on, Lenny. You only need one or two bears at a time. You can’t even chew that many.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Why don’t you take some out?”

  He puts both hands to his mouth and spits out a blob of rainbow-colored goo that would barely fit in an adult’s mouth.

  “Hold this,” he says.

  “You know what’s going to happen if I take that. You know it’s going in the trash.”

  His eyes get wider. “No, Daddy!”

  “What’s the rule when you give me things you pulled out of your mouth? I thought we were clear on that.”

  Now he’s in a quandary. Should he give away the sticky little treasure or try to force it all back into his mouth? He looks at the blob of goo with a mixture of longing and sorrow. It’s that same thing we all feel when our heart’s desire
is right in front of us and we know we can’t have it.

  “What’s a fair solution?” I ask.

  “I’m going to eat the red part,” he says.

  For the next few minutes, he eats out the red bits and deposits the cast-off green and gold chunks in my hand. I used to wonder why parents of young kids always carried hand sanitizer. Now I wonder how I always manage to not have any.

  Two pandas come into the yard while he’s chewing. When I point them out, he drops the rest of his Gummi goo onto the pavement, pulls himself up onto the railing, and announces that both bears are invited to his party.

  “Hey,” I say. “The cards, remember?”

  I hold up an envelope containing an invitation made out to “Panda.” He takes it from my hand, says “Here,” and tries to throw it into the enclosure. But the envelope sticks to his hand.

  “No,” I say, taking the envelope back. “That’s not how we do it.”

  We go into the panda house and give the card to a woman wearing a National Zoo uniform.

  We go through the same routine with the elephant, the gorilla, the cheetah, and the lion. Lenny wants me to drop him into the lion’s enclosure, so he can hand-deliver the invitation. It takes me a while to persuade him to give it to a zoo employee instead.

  At ten past one, we’re finishing lunch at the restaurant near the lion’s enclosure. There’s a TV up in the corner tuned to CNN. Why? Why not cartoons? Who comes to this place besides parents and kids? Do we need all the problems of the world to intrude even here?

  They’re showing footage of the ship in Monterey Bay recovering wreckage from the plane. I seated Lenny facing away from the TV, but he still turns and looks now and then.

  I send a quick text to Bethany saying I should be back in the office by three. She says there’s not much going on there. Just her and Leon slogging through the list.

  Lenny stuffs a French fry into his mouth and says, “I’m going to be a policeman when I grow up, just like you.”

  “I’m an investigator,” I say, “not a cop.”

  “But you catch bad guys.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I’m going to be like you.”

  No, I think. But you might be like Ed. Your road will be marked with hardship and disrespect. People will throw obstacles in front of you every step of the way.

  When Ed tells me about some of the things he’s had to put up with—the hazing in the military, having to prove himself a thousand times to colleagues and superiors who accepted the abilities of his white coworkers without question, all the little slights and insults he let pass without remark—I wonder if Lenny has the toughness for it. He’s a sweet kid who thinks every man is his daddy and the lion wants to be his friend.

  There’s Obasanjo on TV again. It’s that same photo of him smiling at the picnic, only they’ve zoomed in to a grainy close-up and cropped out the guys who were standing on either side. I can’t tell what they’re saying about him now, but I don’t want Lenny to look.

  He stuffs two ketchup-covered fries into his mouth and says, “Why are you sad, Daddy?”

  Because no matter how much I want to protect you, I can’t.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You want to do some police work?”

  “OK.”

  I can see he’s getting sleepy. He usually does after lunch.

  * * *

  Anna Brook has an apartment on Quarry Road in Adams Morgan, just off Columbia. Harvard Street comes out of the zoo parking lot and goes almost right to it. It’s a two-minute drive, and Lenny’s asleep by the time I find a parking space. I scoop him out of his booster seat and carry him to the entrance. His head is against my shoulder, and he never wakes up.

  The building is a standard World War II–era apartment block: six stories, brown brick with a little courtyard in front and air conditioners humming in every window. Behind the glass door, the marble-floored lobby is tiny. Just a side table, a big mirror, a wall of silver mailboxes, and a pair of elevators. And no way in unless you have an electronic key fob or you can ring someone upstairs to buzz you in.

  A. Brook’s name is printed next to the button for apartment 204. I start hitting the buzzers for the top-floor apartments, and on the fourth try, I hear a little click and the door unlocks. I take the elevator up to the second floor and walk left down the narrow, carpeted corridor. Lenny’s hair rubs against my cheek and makes it itch.

  Apartment 204 is on the southeast corner of the building, overlooking the street. It’s got a steel door, like every other apartment in the corridor, but the deadbolt doesn’t match the others. It’s newer, recently installed, and it takes one of those special keys with the divots in the side. The kind you can’t duplicate at a hardware store.

  I can see through the gap between the door and the frame that the deadbolt is locked. I knock a few times and listen, but it doesn’t sound like anyone’s in there. A door ten feet down the hall opens up, and a white-haired woman of eighty or so pokes her head out.

  “Are you looking for Anna?” she asks. Her eyes move back and forth between my face and Lenny’s.

  “I know she’s not here,” I say. “I just couldn’t help knocking.”

  “You heard the news?” She blinks her dark watery eyes at me with sympathy.

  “I came to get her mail,” I say. “And make sure things are in order. Her family will want to collect her belongings.”

  “Poor Anna,” she says.

  “Any idea what was troubling her? You know, she didn’t look so good lately.”

  “Oh, it was that fellow,” she says and shakes her head. “Such an awful, awful man.”

  “You know who he was?”

  “No, but I could tell when she’d been around him. She wasn’t right.”

  “Any idea when it started?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t say.” She looks again at Lenny, then back at my eyes. “She always seemed a little troubled. She was too free with the men. Every night a date.” She puts her hand to her cheek and shakes her head again. “I told her there’s a kind of man who watches for women like her. He’s always got his eye out for the girl who says yes.”

  “Well it sounds like he found her.”

  “Do you know she brought me food when I was sick?” She pauses to look for my reaction, then adds, “Every day for two weeks. She’d bring me breakfast in the morning, and I could tell she’d been out all evening. Imagine that. Coming in from a long night, and still you think about the old lady who’s too sick to get her own breakfast. How did you know her?”

  “I’m a family friend. Just picking up the mail.”

  She eyes me for a second and nods. “Well, the mail’s downstairs. You walked right by it on the way in.” Then she shuts her door and turns the deadbolt, and I hear the little chain slide along its track.

  The sound rouses Lenny, and I say, “Hey, kiddo, I’m gonna put you down for a minute.” I set him carefully on the floor, and he leans his head against the wall and shuts his eyes.

  I take a toothpick from my pocket, stick it into the crack between the door and the frame and snap off a little piece. If I don’t find that toothpick fragment sitting on top of the deadbolt the next time I come by, I’ll know someone’s been here.

  * * *

  I get Lenny back in his car seat for the drive home, but before I start the engine, I get a text from Bethany. It’s a link to a story on CNBC. I click through and watch the video, keeping the volume low so I don’t wake Lenny.

  The anchorwoman is saying investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board dug a partially melted metal fragment out of an interior wall of the plane’s cargo hold. They’ve identified it as the clasp of a metal ammunition box. Another fragment retrieved from the remains of a suitcase pulled from Monterey Bay shows the box was loaded with a military-grade plastic explosive called C4.

  The news cuts to an image of the kid, Obasanjo, being marched out of a building near San Francisco toward a w
aiting car. He’s wearing a white t-shirt and blue high-water pants that look like hospital scrubs. He’s surrounded by guys in dark jackets from the FBI and the TSA. He looks scared as hell.

  I call Ed, and before I can get a word out, he says, “You see the perp walk?” I can hear the anger in his voice.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He sure looks uncomfortable.”

  “Did you notice all the cops were white?”

  “No, but now that you mention it—”

  “You know what it looks like to me?” Ed says. He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “A scared black man in chains being paraded in front of the cameras by a bunch of white men?”

  “Take it easy, Ed. Don’t let your emotions get the best of you.”

  “Usually the Bureau is a little more sensitive about scenes like this,” Ed says, “And it can’t be just Obasanjo. There’s no way a metal ammo box could have gone through TSA security, unless someone wasn’t doing their job. They have chemical scanners that specifically look for C4. Obasanjo, or whoever did this, had some inside help. Or someone in TSA screwed up royally.”

  “That’s what the airline is hoping,” I say. “If TSA’s to blame, it gets them off the hook. Kind of sick, huh?”

  “Yeah, Freddy. That is kind of sick,” Ed says, “but unfortunately that’s how it works. And while I have you on the phone, I’ll let you in on a little secret. You remember that crazy guy from Idaho? Owen Briscoe?”

  “Yeah. They find something on him?”

  “Not him,” Ed says. “But one of his associates: a guy named Delmont Suggs. He drove Briscoe from Idaho to the airport in Spokane. Briscoe connected from there to San Francisco.”

  “What was Briscoe doing on a plane?”

  “Going to visit his brother in Hawaii,” Ed says. “This guy Suggs is trouble. Former military, special ops. He formed his own militia up in the mountains a few years ago. It’s mostly disbanded, but he still has a handful of followers. The guy’s got a beef in his heart against just about everyone—especially the US government.”

  “You think he gave Briscoe a bomb to take on the plane?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re trying to track him down before the news media connects the dots and broadcasts the fact that we’re looking for him. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be too receptive to a visit from the Feds. The airline has a former Bureau member in Idaho keeping them informed of what’s going on. Leon and Bethany are digging up what they can on him, but the Bureau has a fuller picture, and it’s not good. I’ll let you know what I learn.”