Cold Springs(65)

Chadwick scanned the area where they'd ended up—a sunny corner of the loft that passed for Race's bedroom. A cheap cotton sleeping bag was spread out on the cement floor next to a scatter of CDs, clothes, loose ammunition. Three cellophane-covered library books were stacked neatly against the wall next to a better sleeping bag—a green down one, rolled up in a red bungee cord. Chadwick stared at the down bag, trying to figure out why Race wouldn't use that one instead of the cotton one, then wondering where he'd seen the bag before—the green fabric, the red cord around the middle.

Faded letters were marked next to the zipper, AZ. It was Ann's old sleeping bag, the one she'd brought to the faculty retreat at Stinson Beach, when they'd looked at the stars together.

“Was Mallory staying here?” he asked.

Race's eyes darted around, as if he'd missed something he should've seen. “I was just—keeping the bag for her. You know.”

Chadwick knelt down, picked up one of the library books. It had been checked out from Laurel Heights: a Thomas Jefferson exposé about the DNA tests on his black descendants. Chadwick had read it himself about a month ago. The book under that was by Howard Zinn, the bookplate inside inscribed, Donated by Ann Zedman. The third title was Black Athena. “You keeping these for Mallory, too?”

“Why you say that—you figure I can't read?”

“Mrs. Zedman told me you were gifted.”

“So gifted she kicked me out of school.”

“You blew that. You brought a gun on campus.”

“The hell I did.”

“It just appeared in your locker?”

Race rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “You ain't gonna believe me anyway. Listen, I got friends coming over, man—they going to drill a hole in you the minute they see you. You going to kill me, you better do it quick.” He cut his eyes toward Jones. “That what you brought her along for? She your nigger gun?”

“Watch your mouth, little man,” Jones said. “'Fore I put my boot in it.”

Race scowled, but he had to blink to keep from crying.

Chadwick picked up a bullet from the tangle of clothes, turned the brass in his fingers. “You prefer guns over knives, Race?”

The boy hugged himself tighter.

“Your mother was stabbed to death,” Chadwick continued. “Six- or seven-inch blade.”

By the front door, the radio kept playing—Marvin Gaye, ridiculously happy music in the big empty space of the building.

“You think it was me?” Race asked. “That what you think?”

“Police found two people's blood at the scene. Attacker and victim. DNA says they were related.”

Race put his forehead down, rubbed it against his knees. “No. No, no.”

“Mallory's dad says he's been getting blackmail letters from your brother Samuel. That true?”

The boy was shivering.

“Hey, little man,” Jones tried, her voice softer now. “Come on. Just answer him.”

Race said something into his knees.

“What?” Chadwick asked.

“I said yeah. Samuel sent those letters. Said Zedman was gonna get his.”

“Get his. For what?”

Race glared up at him. “You know for what . . . your kid. She used to come around. Slumming and shit. Samuel didn't want to fall for her, but he did, and then you go and keep them apart. And she kills herself, and the police are all like—she was infected. She was poisoned. How you think that made him feel?”

Chadwick felt Kindra Jones staring at him.

Out the open window, the sun flooded from behind a cloud, cutting a yellow arc of light down the side of the next building. A jackhammer pounded a five-beat cadence. The loose fire escape bobbed and swayed on its bent ladder, ten feet out from the window.

“Why the Zedmans, then?” Chadwick asked. “If Samuel was mad at me, why take it out on them?”

“You left, man. Not so easy to get to you. You didn't have nothing left to steal. Zedman—that was different. You all a piece of the same world, man—Laurel Heights. All that shit. Samuel hates all of you.”

“And yet he sent you there.”

The look in Race's eyes wasn't anger, exactly, but a memory of anger, as if he were hearing a story whispered over a telephone. “He used to say it was my duty. Show them up. Improve myself. But he hated the place. After they kicked me out—he said f**k it. Those kids—I used to come home crying. They'd ask me what kind of car my momma drove. And what was I supposed to say? My momma take the bus? She drive whatever her boyfriend's driving? They used to ask why I wore the same shoes every day. And I got to look at them like, ‘This is the only pair I have.' And they just stare at me, okay? And then they talk over me, the rest of the day. Improve myself? So I can be like them? Hell with that.”

“What'd that Zinn book say about the Revolution?”

“Said it didn't have nothing to do with freedom principles and Locke and Hume and all that shit. Said it was rich white landowners escaping their debts from England and setting themselves up to get even richer and more powerful.”

“What'd you think of that?”

“I think the book was written by a rich white man. So the Revolution must've worked.”