Painted Black, page 7
“Do you have any idea where Lexie might be?” Jo asked. “Or who else I might ask?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t—Oh, here it is.” Cumpton unearthed a DVD jewel case from under a pile of reports in a wire basket. She handed it to Jo. “This program was Jeannie’s idea. We call it improv theater, but it’s a kind of group therapy really. The kids are encouraged to express their feelings and process whatever is going on in their lives under the guise of playacting. This was put together from one of those sessions as a sort of promo when we go fundraising. I believe Alexis is one of the kids we’ve taken an excerpt from, although there are several kids featured that could probably provide a focal point for an article.”
Jo thanked Marge Cumpton with a smile, shaking hands before they parted. Downstairs, most of the kids had headed out, just a few in the back with Keisha, rounding up loose hot dog bugs and sweeping crushed potato chips off the floor. Jo motioned that she would wait outside and Keisha nodded.
As she walked through the gymnasium, she stopped at a public bulletin board next to the exit. Church services began at nine o’clock Sunday morning. Sunday School at ten. A Hoop-Mania Fest poster advertised a Center-sponsored contest that had been over with for two months. And tacked on top of a faded, stained copy of rules of conduct for gym participants, someone had placed a pencil sketch of Lexie Green. She was instantly recognizable, high cheekbones shaded in, hair drawn back in a way that emphasized her fine bone structure. Whoever had drawn this picture had been able to capture the haunting quality of her eyes. Big block letters asked, “Have you seen this girl?” and under a pencil line marking the slope of her slender throat, the artist had signed his work: “CRY.”
CRY. Her pimp maybe? Keisha said he’d been looking for her. But would a pimp put Lexie’s picture up at the Center? The portrait had been sketched with care. The artist had not just drawn the details of the young girl’s beauty, but hinted at the fine woman she could be if given half a chance. Jo hesitated, then took the picture down and folded it. She’d make a copy, she promised herself, and bring the original back first thing Monday after work.
Out in the parking lot, several youth still hung out in small groups. They weren’t pushing shopping carts or carrying garbage bags that labeled them as transients. Yet the mark was there, if you looked for it. It was almost possible to tell how long they’d been on the streets. Two veterans swaggered a bit; there was an edge in their eye and tension in the set of their shoulders. They constantly tested the space around them, prepared for fight or flight. One kid, about fourteen maybe, still had a bewildered puppy expression, like he expected someone to step up any minute and say, “Hey, wait, there’s been a mistake.”
Someone had a large soda from 7-11 and they were passing it around taking turns at the straw. One girl took her sip, then opened one side of the lid and refilled the cup from a bottle she held hidden in her coat. None of them even glanced at the center to see if anyone was looking. She handed the cup to the fourteen-year-old who hesitated, shook his head, then took it after a few laughing quips from the others. But before he could suck unhappily at the straw, an older boy took it from him. Something he said silenced the jibes and earned him a gratified look from the younger boy.
It took a second before Jo recognized the older boy was Chris, who she’d followed to Dunkin Donuts the night before. He stood a little on the fringe of the group, hands in his pockets, and kept looking up the street. The girl next to him had to tap his arm twice to get his attention. He shook his head to decline a turn at the communal cup and flexed his right hand like it was bothering him. Eyebrows drawn together in a frown, he looked up the street again.
Excellent. Now she wouldn’t have to wait until this evening, and wouldn’t have to question him with that Jack guy scrutinizing every word. She stepped outside and started toward him just as the girl Keisha had pointed out earlier—Sheree, wasn’t it?—hurried up and grabbed his arm.
“Come here,” the girl pleaded and pulled him away by the sleeve. A purple bruise that hadn’t been there earlier raised an ugly knot beneath her eye. “I can’t,” Jo heard her wail before they moved out of earshot. “He won’t …”
Jo watched the short conversation from where she stood, unable to figure out the content other than through body language. The boy seemed frustrated and pissed; he gestured wildly as he talked. The girl wept.
“What the fuck you think you’re doing?” Shouted a man in his twenties who appeared out of nowhere. He pushed past the other kids to tower over Chris. Chris’s head only came to the guy’s windpipe, but he looked straight up into the swearing, flame-cheeked face. One arm instinctively edged the girl back out of harm’s way.
“Leave my bitch alone, got that?” A finger pointed straight between Chris’s eyes. He reached for the girl, but Chris put one hand on the guy’s chest. The move prompted a shoving contest that Jo thought could easily get the younger kid killed.
A long time ago, Jo had tried to stop her dog from fighting with a stray and ended up getting nine stitches—and it hadn’t been the stray that bit her. So instead of reaching for her can of pepper spray, Jo looked around and spotted a police car paused at the corner. He was giving someone a ticket and hadn’t noticed the fight.
Jo stepped toward the street. “Hey,” she yelled, waving. “Hey, over here.” Having a big mouth did come in handy sometimes. She caught the cop’s attention, but when she turned to point to the battle scene, most of the kids had scattered. The girl had disappeared. The bully picked himself up off the sidewalk and ran. And Chris, the kid she’d been worried about, stared her way with no trace of the trust she’d hoped to instill. She was too far away to hear his words, but she’d watched enough action movies edited for television to interpret the “fucking bitch” his lips formed before he scattered off down the street like the others.
Somehow she felt like she’d been bitten by her own dog once again.
Chapter 16
Jo couldn’t shake the feeling as she and Keisha drove to the South Side to find Lexie’s mother. Had she blown it? Would this kid even show up at the meet tonight? She let Keisha do most of the talking.
“There it is.” Keisha pointed to a six-flat building just down the block from the Sixty-third Street stop light. “That’s where I grew up. Till I was ten. The grocery store should be right …” She leaned forward as they drove, directing Jo around a corner. “Here. Here it is. I’m sure this is it. Suyn Lee’s.”
Keisha and Jo had had their late night conversations. So Jo knew her friend considered it kind of a miracle that her mother had managed to shelter her three children from the drug dealers and gangs in a neighborhood known for one of the worst crime rates in the city.
Jo found a parking place on the street by the Emmanuel Baptist Church. A high iron fence surrounded the cement yard of the church. A preacher tended a row of geraniums along the front walk as Jo and Keisha walked by.
“Give praise for the day, sisters,” he greeted them.
“Amen to that.” Keisha’s answer widened his smile.
“God bless you both.” His words followed them down the street.
“Is that supposed to put some sort of protective force field around us or something?” Jo muttered as she held the door to the grocery store open.
“Can’t hurt now, can it? So don’t be such a bitch about it.” Keisha had never tried to evangelize Jo, but expected her open expressions of faith to receive an answering acceptance from her friend.
The store was small. Someone had crushed out a cigarette butt on the worn tile floor. Tobacco bits and gray ash spilled from the twisted filter. A woman pushed her cart down the aisle past them. A baby in the carrier seat, a toddler crouched in the basket and a third child, four or five years old maybe, rode on the front. As Jo noticed them, another boy of eight or so ran up with a box of Lucky Charms. The mother, her scrawny neck corded with tension, snapped at him to put it back and go get toilet paper.
“Can help you please?” the tiny Vietnamese woman at the checkout asked when they stopped by the counter.
They had agreed that Keisha would ask most of the questions. “We’re looking for directions,” she said. “To Linda Green’s apartment. You might know her daughter, Lexie? She used to come in here all the time.”
The woman looked over her shoulder and started speaking rapidly in Vietnamese. A spurt of answer approached from behind a curtain at the rear of the store. The conversation continued as a man came toward them, talking to the woman, but looking at Keisha and Jo. Jo thought she recognized Lexie’s name.
“No trouble,” the man said at last in English, stopping in front of them. “No want trouble.”
“No trouble,” Keisha assured him. “I just want to make sure Lexie is all right. Have you seen her lately? Do you know who I mean?”
Again a conversation between the man and woman neither Jo nor Keisha could understand. Finally the man waved his hands and shooed the woman away, then took her place behind the counter.
“No come here. Not long time. Mother—” He made a paah! sound of disgust. “She too lazy come here. Send baby child.” He held his hand about three feet off the floor to indicate the approximate size of the child. “Always buy Little Lotto.” A second paah! made clear his opinion of anyone who put trust in the lottery.
His last remark brought a high pitched protest from the woman who lingered within earshot. He dismissed her concerns with a sharp comment and gesture of his hand, then looked at them defiantly. Jo suspected the woman feared exposure for allowing a minor to purchase a lottery ticket, and the man was daring them to cause a stink about it.
“Do you know where they live?” Jo asked.
The answer came out half Vietnamese and half English, with lots of hand waving, but after a few minutes of it, they had down a description of a red brick building two blocks south. The grocer had no idea what floor the family lived on, but there was a bum always on the stoop outside, he said. The children often hung out the window to shout rudely at people who passed below.
Jo thanked the man, then bought a bag of chips and paid with a ten dollar bill, telling him to keep the change. That seemed like a fair exchange for the information received.
Back out on the sidewalk, Keisha stopped and looked around, shaking her head.
“It still looks the same,” she said quietly. “Bring me back here and I’m eight years old again, hurrying to school hoping no one will notice me.” She grinned suddenly, taking a chip out of the bag Jo offered her. “’Cept now, if someone tries to mess with me, I’m more likely to respond with a knee to the groin ’stead of running away. Like you’re doing,” she added, serious again.
“What you say, sister?” Jo said in mock imitation of one of Keisha’s favorite phrases. “Karate class taught me a few moves that work better than old fashioned nut crunching.”
“Karate only helps you confront the outside enemy, not the one eating away your insides. Your father is your father, girl. No matter what. You got to deal with that.”
Deal with it? How could she deal with something so dark and disgusting? With the fact that even if the accusation against her father had never been proved, she was still terrified it might be true?
“I deal with it my way, Keisha.” She closed up the potato chip bag and put it in her purse. “Now, are you coming with me to confront Lexie’s mother, or not?”
“Well, someone’s got to protect the poor woman,” Keisha answered, “the mood you’re in.”
“Checks Cashed,” read the large yellow sign of a currency exchange on the corner. “Money Orders $5.” Children’s shouts came from down a side street, the words too indistinct to tell if they were innocent or insults. Rose’s Fresh Fried Chicken inhabited the ground floor of the apartment building Linda Green lived in. The smell wafting outdoors lay thick in the air, like grease coating a wall.
To enter the stairwell, Keisha and Jo had to step over a sleeping man with his hands crossed protectively around a scuffed pair of wingtips tied to his belt. His snore didn’t waver one octave.
“There’s no names,” Jo said. “Figures.”
Only two of the mailboxes at the bottom of the stairs even had a slot to slip a name card inside. One of these simply said, “Fuck you.” The door of the other had been pried halfway off its hinges and dangled toward the floor. Inside, a wasp nest hung in one dirt-seamed corner.
“You’re the community expert, Keisha,” Jo said as she started up the narrow stairs. She was careful not to touch the sweat-packed hand rail. “Do we just start knocking on door after door, or what?”
“Now does that sound like a sensible thing to do, Jojo? In this neighborhood?”
When they reached the second floor, Jo stopped and listened. From behind the door to her right came the sound of a man and woman arguing in Spanish, so they bypassed that door. The apartment to the left sat silent, even after Jo knocked.
Because the grocer had seen the kids looking out the street-side windows, they did not bother checking the four other apartments down the hall, but went up a second flight of stairs even creakier than the first. The top step cracked so loudly beneath her foot that Jo jumped. Then before she could steady her pulse, the door to her right burst open and a scrawny kid no older than five ran out.
“Get your boney ass over to Tyree’s quick, you hear me?” shrieked a woman behind him. “Or you know I’m gonna blister it raw, boy. Ain’t gonna stand for this lazy shit ’round here no more.”
The kid careened into Keisha and just about tumbled down the stairs head first, but recovered quickly and flew to the ground floor.
“What you looking at?” The woman had come to the open apartment door and held the edge of it in both hands. She glared at Jo and Keisha like she might threaten to blister their asses also.
“Linda Green. Am I right?” Jo was more than just guessing. Lexie lived in the cheekbones of her mother, in the slender neck and the shape of her eyes, though beauty had long since died in the older woman.
“Who’s asking?”
Jo stepped forward and held out her hand. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. “I’m Jo Sullivan, and this is Keisha Taylor. We’re friends of Lexie’s.”
“Lexie? Shee-it.” Green ignored her hand and blew the word out in a hiss. When she walked back into the apartment leaving the door open, Jo took that as an invitation to follow. “That girl don’t have no friends.” Green turned and flopped down on a worn sofa. “She owe you money? Cause I ain’t got no money. And wouldn’t give you none if I did.”
“We’re trying to find Lexie, is all,” Keisha told her. “We’re worried something’s happened. Have you seen her?”
“Now that’s none too likely. That girl knows better than to come ’round here asking for money. Last time I seen her she looked like a Goddamn whore—makeup up the ass, skirt so tight you couldn’t slide a hand up her thigh. Looked like a Goddamn whore, I told her.”
“When was that?” When Green looked blank, Jo added, “The last time you saw her.”
“Hell, I don’t know. Three, maybe four months. Six maybe. How the hell do I know?”
“Do you know anyone else who might know where she is?” Keisha asked. “We just want to make sure she’s all right. She seemed upset the last time I talked to her. Scared. We’re kind of worried .”
“That girl like a cat with nine lives—always lands on her feet. She prob’ly has lots of places to go.” Green laughed bitterly. “Maybe one a her johns set her up somewhere.”
This is your daughter here, Jo wanted to shout at her. Not some street whore. How could the woman not care? Forcing a calm tone, Jo asked, “What about her aunt in Rockford? You think maybe she might have gone there?”
“Thelma? Shee-it. Ain’t seen my sister in … twenty years, I bet. She ain’t even met Lexie.”
“Where does your sister live? Do you have her address? Phone?” As Green continued to shrug, Jo added in exasperation, “Name? Can you tell us her last name?”
“Thornton. Married Jesse Thornton when she was sixteen.” She snorted with laughter. “Big as a goddamn house, and her thinking she was so much better’n everyone else. She’s a nurse now I hear, at the Rockford hospital. Still high and mighty.”
Jo had to bite back her thought: “You just don’t like anyone, do you?” Instead, she gave Green a business card and said, “If Lexie does call or come by, tell her we’re looking for her, okay? Ask her to get in touch.”
Through the doorway to the kitchen they could see an old porcelain sink attached to the wall. The drain pipe underneath it had a rusty rag wrapped around it to catch a leak, and a rust-ringed pool of water lay evaporating on the warped floor tiles.
“That lying little whore? She better not show her face ’round here. You think that’s a hard ass thing for a momma to say, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes. Well, when kids don’t respect you, when they be lazy, moody and talk their filthy mouth at you, that’s when they stop being my child, you hear what I’m saying? All my kids know that. Lexie just gone too far is all. All my kids know if you cross that line you be outta here.”
That did it. Jo stepped forward. “And what do you do when your boyfriends cross the line?”
Green’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What you saying?”
“What did you do when your boyfriend raped your twelve-year-old daughter? Wasn’t that crossing the line? Who do you blame for it—Lexie or the monster? I’m betting it’s the child. Wouldn’t want to make waves with anyone willing to put food on the table, crack in your pipe, and a dick in your—”
“Jo, stop.” Keisha pulled on Jo’s arm just as Linda Green broke out in a series of shrieks that would probably wake the drunk sleeping on the stoop downstairs. Jo let herself be led out into the hallway, returning the woman’s foul language with words just as filthy. Her mouth tasted bitter with them. By the time they reached the car, all she could do was stand there and shake, fists clenched. Keisha took the keys from her.
