The Bridge: A Novel Read online

  He was going to pick up the money that Judy had hidden in a place that only the two of them knew about. That money, combined with the cash in his account that he planned to wire to his new location, would allow him to leave Philadelphia and never look back.

  But as Sonny left his loft at seven o’clock on Saturday morning for the short drive back, he had no idea how very wrong his plan had gone.

  Chapter Four

  The heat in Central Detectives’ locked interrogation room was stifling. Judy could feel her thighs sticking to her chair’s vinyl cushion as an oscillating fan recirculated the hot air. It was difficult to breathe, much less answer questions.

  But the heat wasn’t the cause of the rivulets of sweat that trickled down Judy’s back. Judy was sweating because she was starting to believe what the detectives had been saying to her for the past hour: Kenya was missing, and Sonny was somehow involved.

  It didn’t take much to convince her. She was tired after spending the night selling crack to the disheveled pipers who shuttled in and out of her apartment. To make matters worse, the effects of the beating she’d taken from Daneen were starting to wear on her. The copper-colored skin around her eyes swelled to a shiny blue, and there was a steady, throbbing pain at her left temple.

  Though the crust of blood on her cracked lower lip made it difficult to speak, she opened her mouth and croaked a few words.

  “Can I have some water?” she asked Lynch, who sat across the table from her in the cinder-block room.

  “You can have some water as soon as you tell us where Kenya is.”

  “I told you I don’t know,” Judy said, slightly exasperated.

  “What about Sonny?” the female detective on the other side of the table chimed in.

  Judy glanced at the thick-framed black woman, whose piercing eyes seemed to look straight through her.

  “What about him?” Judy said with an attitude.

  “You know what?” the woman said, standing up and moving closer to Judy as she spoke. “You can talk that smart shit if you want. But we got you on possession, conspiracy, possession with intent to deliver, simple assault, aggravated assault—”

  “I ain’t assault nobody,” Judy interrupted.

  “You did whatever we say you did. Now where’s Sonny?”

  Judy looked at Detective Roxanne Wilson and knew that she would have to give an answer. The look in her eyes said she would stand for nothing less.

  It was a look that had come from twenty years on a force where being a black woman pitted everyone and everything against her. It was the look of a woman who had survived shoot-outs and foot beats and unwanted advances, racism and sexism unchecked and unpunished.

  And lingering just beneath the look, there was something else—a sadness that she’d earned from her struggle to raise two boys in a West Philadelphia neighborhood called the Bottom.

  One of her sons had made it. He was a Temple University senior, studying to become a lawyer. The other was dead, struck down eight years before by a drug dealer’s stray bullet.

  Roxanne Wilson had buried her son and promised herself that she would never allow another child to die needlessly. That’s why she had made it her business to be assigned to the Juvenile Aid Division.

  Lynch had called her in shortly after he’d brought Judy to Central Detectives. He knew that Wilson was the one officer in the department who cared more about children than he did.

  That’s why he wasn’t surprised by what she did next.

  “You think I’m playin’ with you?” Wilson said suddenly, nearly leaping across the table at Judy, who flinched just enough to let them know she was about to break.

  “I want a lawyer,” Judy blurted out nervously.

  “And people in hell want ice water,” Wilson said, scowling as she stood over her.

  Lynch stepped between them. “Daneen’s out there riding around with a cop looking for her daughter. But I don’t think she’s going to find her. And deep down, you don’t either.”

  “I don’t know what you talkin’ about,” Judy said, turning her head.

  Lynch smiled. But there was no humor in his grin. “Just like you didn’t know what Daneen was talking about when she said Sonny was having sex with Kenya?”

  Judy looked down and didn’t speak.

  “Stop protecting him, Judy. You know, just like I do, what Sonny’s capable of doing to little girls.”

  “That ain’t fair,” Judy said with tears welling up in her eyes. “It ain’t about that.”

  “Oh, but it is about that,” Lynch said, his stare boring into her. “It’s all about that.”

  Wilson stepped back, looking at the two of them and trying to figure out what they meant.

  “You remember, don’t you, Judy?” Lynch asked. “I do. Sonny likes children. Always did. Even back when I was nine years old, I remember Sonny liking kids. He would come around to see you, Judy. He was all flash and smooth talk. You remember, right? Had a stroll you could see from a block away. Used to lean to the left and dip his shoulder, swing his arm and drag his foot just a little bit. And it all looked so cool. Had all the little boys trying to walk like Mr. Sonny. But we never could quite get it down.

  “I remember the ice-cream man would come and Sonny always seemed to time it just right. We waited for him, too—spotted him walking down the street, swinging that arm and dipping that shoulder. We’d run up to him because we knew Sonny was always likely to pull out a whole bunch of money.

  “I can still see it, clear as day. He used to take a rubber band off his roll, because a bill clip just wasn’t big enough to hold it. He would fold all those bills back and peel dollars from underneath. Then he would give everybody one. A whole dollar. We’d run and go buy our little ice cream and still have fifty cents left over for the next day.

  “I didn’t know until later on that those dollars came from the money he made selling dope. Didn’t know that the man we found in ’72, slumped over in the stairway with a rubber tube around his arm and a needle in his vein, had died from the shit Sonny was selling.

  “All I knew about was the ice-cream money. Remember the money, Judy? Remember the dollar bills he used to give all the kids whenever they wanted some ice cream?”

  Judy was rocking back and forth in her chair now, wearing a blank stare and listing to the right, like a ship sinking low in an ocean full of dark memories.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said in a monotone. “Things different now.”

  Wilson looked at Lynch with a question in her eyes. And Lynch didn’t hesitate to answer it.

  “One day they found this little girl named Tish,” he said, looking at Wilson but speaking to Judy. “She was in the trash bins behind the main building, underneath the garbage. She was naked. I remember that she was naked because that was the first time I had ever seen a naked girl.

  “She didn’t have a thing on her body, but her face was sticky, like she had been eating something sweet. Her hands were sticky, too. And they were closed real tight.”

  Lynch paused to allow the phrase to linger in the air.

  “Maybe that’s why they didn’t see it at first,” he said.

  “See what?” Wilson asked.

  Judy didn’t give Lynch a chance to answer.

  “The dollar,” she said. “They found a dollar in the little girl’s hand and tried to say it was Sonny. They tried to say he bought her some ice cream and lured her back there and raped her and killed her. But they never found nothin’ to prove Sonny did that.”

  “And why couldn’t they?” Lynch asked.

  “’Cause it wasn’t Sonny,” Judy said, a fire suddenly burning in her eyes. “I know it wasn’t.”

  Lynch sat down in front of her and gazed at her with something approaching sympathy.

  “How do you know it wasn’t Sonny this time?” he asked softly.

  A tear rolled down Judy’s cheek, and she looked away.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  And with that, she b
egan to tell them everything.

  After leaving his Old City apartment and driving through a gentrified neighborhood called Northern Liberties on his way to North Philly, Sonny drove west on Girard Avenue from Third, watching as the morning rituals unfolded.

  Men stood outside the Seventh Street bar where prescription drugs like Xanax were bought and sold. Dope fiends trudged toward the Eighth Street hospital, where methadone fed their heroin addictions. Desperate junkies stood on every corner, selling the bus tokens they’d received from a nearby outpatient program.

  It was a drama played out by actors who didn’t know or care that they were being watched. Sonny was their audience. And he was anxious to use Judy’s money to leave the theater of the streets. Because anything would be better than another day in North Philly.

  By the time he passed Ninth Street, he could see the projects, ahead and to his left. Almost immediately, he sensed that something was wrong. When he slowed the car and glanced down at the projects, he saw what had given him that feeling.

  There were two police cars parked on the corner, and there was an officer standing on the corner, holding a notepad and questioning one of the neighborhood children. Another officer walked along the edge of the trash-strewn lot a few blocks down, near the corner where Daneen had waited for Lynch just hours before. He seemed to be conducting some kind of search. But Sonny couldn’t be sure, so he kept driving.

  His mind raced as he tried to figure out what the officers were doing. It took only a few seconds for him to decide that children and vacant lots had nothing to do with him. Still, he opted to be cautious, and rode to Eleventh Street, where he parked his car and began the walk back to Judy’s building.

  As he strolled the passageways that ran through the labyrinth of street-level houses surrounding the high-rise, he could feel eyes upon him. People were staring out from the closed windows of apartments where whispered rumors about the fate of Kenya Brown had already begun.

  Sonny ignored the incessant buzz that seemed to ring louder with his every step. He walked in through a hole in the chain-link fence that surrounded the back entrance of Judy’s building. Then he stepped between the Dumpsters that had replaced the trash bins where the dead little girl had been found years before.

  The back entrance, like the front, was a large, open passageway without doors. He walked inside and stepped around a pole. Then he disappeared into the hallway near the front entrance to catch the elevator.

  He pushed the button and waited for the car to descend to the ground floor, hoping that the officers wouldn’t come inside the building.

  When the elevator arrived, and the doors slid open, he stepped on and pressed the button marked 12. The rusting cables creaked as the elevator began its slow climb. Sonny looked straight ahead at the doors, then glanced offhandedly at a torn piece of cloth in the corner. It looked to be from a striped cotton shirt.

  He turned away, thinking nothing of it. After all, there was always some random piece of clothing littering the projects. He’d seen everything from pants to skirts and panties, even used condoms and tampons. So a ripped piece of someone’s shirt was nothing.

  Or so he thought.

  Sonny looked down at his watch, then cursed under his breath as the elevator slowed to a stop at the fifth floor. The doors lurched open and a little girl who looked vaguely familiar stared up at him, her eyes abruptly filling with something that looked like fear.

  “You gettin’ on?” he said, trying not to sound as aggravated as he felt.

  “No,” Janay said absently as she spotted the torn piece of Kenya’s shirt in the corner.

  Sonny jabbed impatiently at the twelfth-floor button.

  When the doors closed, Janay ran down the hall to tell her mother what she’d seen.

  Judy sipped the water Lynch had brought her a few minutes before, then glanced at him and Wilson and wondered how much longer they would keep her at Central Detectives.

  She had spent the last half hour venting about Sonny. Judy knew the detectives needed to know more than she was telling them. But once she began to talk about the pain of loving Sonny, she didn’t want to stop. Even as she withered beneath the words.

  Lynch stood back and watched warily as her silken black hair fell down in strands around her bruised face. Before his eyes, it seemed, the rough sensuality of Judy’s sturdy feminine frame began to fade. The light in her face went flat—stamped out by the words she spoke about Sonny.

  She saw him watching her and tried to force herself to think of happier times. And then she tried to speak of them.

  “I used to be somethin’ else,” she said with a wry smile that faded almost as quickly as it appeared. “Had men fightin’ just to get next to me.”

  She paused, staring straight ahead as if she were caught in the memory.

  “I used that pretty young skin and them long, thick legs to get their attention. Used that hard switch to make sure they seen how I looked in a skirt. Used my eyes to make ’em look twice in case they missed it the first time. If they was real cute, I’d lean down just so, ’til they got a real good look at everything. But they couldn’t touch nothin’ less they had some money. And if they had enough, they could touch it all they wanted.”

  Judy’s face creased in a sly, flirtatious grin.

  “You know how that song say ‘you gotta use what you got to get what you want?’ Well, trust me, I was usin’ mine. But it ain’t never work like that song. I would use it and use it and use it, and I still ain’t get what I wanted.”

  “And what was it that you wanted?” Wilson asked, cocking her head to one side as she looked down at Judy.

  “To get the hell out the Bridge,” Judy said, then rolled her eyes because a sister should have known better than to ask such a thing.

  Duly chastised, Wilson fell silent.

  “Yeah,” Judy said with a sigh. “I used it. I used it ’til I looked up one day and it was just all used up. Time I figured out I needed to do somethin’ different, I wasn’t twenty no more, wasn’t even thirty. I was forty, with two kids, stretch marks, and varicose veins. Had to buy everything two sizes small just to make myself look halfway presentable.”

  Judy laughed. It was a guttural sound that rumbled deep in her throat. Lynch and Wilson looked at each other, then at her.

  “By that time Manny, my kids’ father, he was gone. Shot some nigga in the Liberty Bell Bar on Broad and Girard in ’68. Got life in Graterford. ’Course life ain’t last long for him, ’cause he got shanked in the shower a couple years later. I don’t even know what for. All I know is he left us here all by ourselves, with no money and no idea what to do.”

  Judy’s breath caught in her throat, and she lowered her gaze, slowly shaking her head as she gathered herself. Wilson stared at her and realized for the first time how small and frail Judy was.

  When she felt Wilson’s stare, Judy looked up at her. Their eyes met, and Judy’s lips curled slightly at the edges. It was almost a smile, one that was tinged with unspeakable grief. Judy took a deep breath and continued.

  “The Vietnam War was damn-near over by then,” she said with a sigh. “But Man-Man—that’s what I used to call my oldest—he dropped out o’ Edison High and joined the Marines. Figured he was gon’ come back with some G.I. Bill money and move us out the projects. I guess he thought he was gon’ be different from the rest o’ them boys who came outta that school and came back in boxes. But I knew better. So I just watched him go and held back the tears. I knew I’d have to cry ’em one day, so I figured I might as well just save ’em.

  “Six months later some Marines came to my door. Told me Man-Man died fightin’ on some hill he probably couldn’t even pronounce. Funny thing is, I had them tears saved up, but when it was time to let ’em go, I couldn’t. I guess I just went numb. I stopped thinkin’ I could get out. And I stopped carin’ about gettin’ my kids out, too.

  “My daughter Joan got real wild after that. Started runnin’ with them boys from down Crispus Attucks
Homes. Smokin’ weed and bein’ fast. I guess she was lookin’ for another brother after she lost Man-Man. She ain’t find no brother, though. All she got was pregnant. Poor child figured she wasn’t gon’ tell me. Figured she was gon’ be slick. So she took a hanger and stuck it between her legs. I guess when the bleedin’ started she just kept diggin’, figurin’ that’s what was supposed to happen. I found her on the floor in the back room. Blood everywhere, hanger in her hand.

  “Her baby was gone,” Judy said, sniffing to contain a muffled sob. “And so was mine.”

  Her shoulders shook as she covered her face with one hand and cried silently. The detectives stood over her, watching and waiting for her to say something they could use. To this point, she hadn’t, and they couldn’t wait much longer.

  Lynch reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “What does this have to do with Sonny?” he asked evenly.

  Judy wiped her eyes, then picked up the glass of water from the table and sipped. She breathed deep, then she continued.

  “He was like the one thing I never thought I would lose. After my kids and their father was gone, and the men stopped lookin’ as hard as they used to, Sonny was there. Seem like he just popped up outta nowhere.

  “He acted like he wanted to stick around for a minute and that was good enough for me. I guess by then I knew not to expect nothin’ to last but a minute. I guess I knew I had to hold on to whatever I got and squeeze every last drop o’ good out of it.

  “I looked at Sonny the same way I looked at everything else. I was gon’ use him up and get rid o’ him before he got rid o’ me. But it ain’t work out like that. I fell in love with him.”

  Judy looked directly at Lynch. But this time she didn’t see a detective. She saw the little boy she had watched grow up in the projects.

  “Sonny was just like you said he was, Kevin. He loved children. Loved ’em so much that after my oldest sister died and Darnell and Daneen moved with me for good—it was like they lived there anyway, much time as they spent up there—Sonny ain’t bat a eye. He just made room and made a way. Treated ’em just like they was his own kids.