Two tears rolled down Helene’s cheeks, and she wiped at them with the back of her wrist.
“I know that,” she said, her attention back on the TV. “I’m not stupid.”
“Yes you are,” I said, and walked out to the backyard.
Standing in a circle around the mound, we blocked it from the view of any neighboring row houses. Broussard pushed the spade into the dirt and overturned it several times before we saw the wrinkled top of a green plastic bag appear.
Broussard dug a little more, and then Poole looked around and bent over, pulled at the bag, and wrenched it free from the hole.
They hadn’t even tied the top of the bag, just twisted it several times, and Poole allowed it to revolve in his hand, the green plastic crinkling as the tight lines spread apart at the neck and the bag grew wider. Poole dropped it to the ground and the top of the bag opened up.
A pile of loose bills greeted us, mostly hundreds and fifties, old and soft.
“That’s a lot of money,” Angie said.
Poole shook his head. “That, Miss Gennaro, is Amanda McCready.”
Before Poole and Broussard called in the forensics team and medical examiner, we shut off the TV in the living room and ran it down for Helene.
“You’ll trade the money for Amanda,” she said.
Poole nodded.
“And she’ll be alive.”
“That’s the hope.”
“And I have to do what again?”
Broussard lowered himself to his haunches in front of her. “You don’t have to do anything, Miss McCready. You just have to make a choice right now. Us four here”—he waved his hand at the rest of us—”happen to think this might be the right approach. But if my bosses find out I plan to do it this way, I’ll get suspended or fired. You understand?”
She half nodded. “If you tell people, they’ll want to arrest Chris Mullen.”
Broussard nodded. “Possibly. Or, we think, the FBI might put the capture of the kidnapper before your daughter’s safety.”
Another half nod, as if her chin kept meeting an invisible barrier on its way down.
Poole said, “Miss McCready, the bottom line is, it’s your decision. If you want us to, we’ll call this in right now, hand over the money, and let the pros handle it.”
“Other people?” She looked at Broussard.
He touched her hand. “Yes.”
“I don’t want other people. I don’t…” She stood up a bit unsteadily. “What do I have to do if we do it your way?”
“Keep quiet.” Broussard came off his haunches. “Don’t talk to the press or the police. Don’t even tell Lionel and Beatrice what’s going on.”
“Are you going to talk to Cheese?”
I said, “That’s probably our next move, yeah.”
“Mr. Olamon seems to be holding the cards at the moment,” Broussard said.
“What if you just, like, followed Chris Mullen? Maybe he’d take you to Amanda without knowing it?”
“We’ll be doing that as well,” Poole said. “But I have a feeling they’ll be expecting it. I’m sure they have Amanda well hidden.”
“Tell him I’m sorry.”
“Who?”
“Cheese. Tell him I didn’t mean nothing bad. I just want my kid back. Tell him not to hurt her. Could you do that?” She looked at Broussard.
“Sure.”
“I’m hungry,” Helene said.
“We’ll get you some—”
She shook her head at Poole. “Not me. Not me. That’s what Amanda said.”
“What? When?”
“When I put her to bed that night. That’s the last thing she said to me: ‘Mommy, I’m hungry.’” Helene smiled, but her eyes filled. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. You’ll eat in the morning.’”
No one said anything. We waited to see if she’d crumble.
“I mean, they’d have fed her, right?” She held the smile as tears rolled down her face. “She’s not still hungry, is she?” She looked at me. “Is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
12
Cheese Olamon was a six-foot-two four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who’d somehow arrived at the misconception that he was black.
Though his flesh jiggled when he walked and his fashion sense ran toward the fleece or thick cotton sweats favored by overweight men everywhere, it would have been a large error to mistake Cheese for a jolly fat guy or confuse his bulk with a lack of speed.
Cheese smiled a lot, and there was a very real joy that seemed to overtake him in the presence of some people. And for all the wincing that his dated, pseudo Shaft-speak could induce in people, there was something strangely endearing and infectious about it. You’d find yourself listening to him talk and you’d wonder if his adoption of a slang very few people—black or white—had ever truly spoken this side of a Fred Williamson/Antonio Fargas opus was misplaced affection for black ghetto culture, deranged racism, or both. In any case, it could be damn catchy.
But I was also familiar with the Cheese who’d glanced at a guy in a bar one night with such self-possessed malevolence you knew the guy’s life expectancy had just dropped to about a minute and a half. I knew the Cheese who employed girls so thin and skagged out they could disappear by ducking behind a baseball bat, took rolls of bills from them as they leaned into his car, patted their bony asses, and sent them back to work.
And all the rounds he bought at the bar, all the fins and sawbucks he pressed into the flesh of broken rummies and then drove them to get Chinese with it, all the turkeys he handed out to the neighborhood poor at Christmas couldn’t erase the junkies who’d died in hallways with spikes still sticking out of their arms; the young women who turned into craven hags seemingly overnight, gums bleeding, begging in the subways for money to spend on AZT treatments; the names he’d personally edited from next year’s phone books.
A freak of both nature and nurture, Cheese had been small and sickly through most of grade school; his rib cage had shone through his cheap white shirt like an old man’s fingers; he sometimes had coughing fits so violent he’d vomit. He rarely spoke. He had no friends that I remember, and while most of us ate lunch from Adam-12 and Barbie lunch boxes, Cheese carried his in a brown paper bag that he carefully folded after he was done and took home to use again.
Both parents walked him up to the schoolyard gate every morning for the first few years. They’d speak to him in a foreign tongue, and their brusque voices carried into the schoolyard as they fussed with their son’s hair or scarf, fiddled with the buttons on his heavy peasant’s coat, before setting him free. They’d walk back down the avenue—giants, both of them—Mr. Olamon wearing a satin fedora at least fifteen years out of fashion with a weathered orange feather in the band, his head cocked slightly, as if he expected taunts or trash to be hurled down on him and his wife from second-story porches. Cheese would watch them until they were out of sight, wincing if his mother paused to pull a sagging sock back up over her thick ankle.