The Stones Cry Out Read online

  The Stones Cry Out

  A Novel

  by Sibella Giorello

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my uncle, Fred Danz, the man who said with a smile:

  "Some of life’s best gifts come with obligations."

  Chapter 1

  The dead man's mother lived in a battered gray house on Castlewood Street surrounded by a mean echo of No Trespassing signs.

  My partner for the day Special Agent John Breit took one look at the place. "Good luck in there."

  I didn't believe in luck. For one thing it was Monday, the Fourth of July, and the heat index wasn't observing the holiday. The morning temperature was nudging one hundred degrees and when I climbed out of John's air-conditioned Cadillac, the humidity hit me like a wall. The sticky southern heat only lengthened my walk to the front door. So did the expression on the woman's face, suddenly appearing in the doorway. Her dark eyes hard as anthracite, she watched me pick my way down the cracked concrete path to where she stood. I introduced myself—Raleigh Harmon, special agent with the FBI.

  She turned without response.

  I followed her inside, closing the door behind me. The living room smelled of grape juice and stale cigarettes, and in the small kitchen beside it, Bernadette Holmes waited at a gray Formica table.

  The mother of the dead man.

  "Mama," the younger woman said. “FBI's here."

  Mrs. Holmes looked at me. The Official Investigator. Her brown face was salt-stained from crying, and a sleeveless cotton housedress exposed her heavy arms where a delta of stretch marks flowed in sandy estuaries to her elbows.

  "What happened to my boy?" she said. "What'd they do to my boy? My good, good boy -- he's gone!"

  On Saturday her son Hamal Holmes fell from a factory rooftop. Another man also fell, Detective Michael Falcon of the Richmond Police Department. The seventy-foot drop to the sidewalk killed both men on impact, but exactly how they fell—and why they were on the roof—was anyone's guess. In the two days since it happened, no witnesses had come forward, though the police had already floated a theory that enraged half the city. Mr. Holmes was black; the detective was white. The police claimed the officer was assaulted. Yesterday, the mayor called the FBI, demanding a civil rights investigation. And now, here I was. Official Investigator. The only agent available on a city, state, and federal holiday.

  Me and John, who stayed in the car.

  Lighting a cigarette, the girl with the anthracite eyes lifted her face, catching a mild draft that blew from an air conditioning unit hoisted to the window above the sink. I sat down at the small table next to Mrs. Holmes and offered her my card. She didn't take it. I expressed my condolences for her loss, which she also didn't take, and I didn’t blame her. Even when I meant the words they sounded hollow.

  Finally I explained how the civil rights case would work:

  "I'll be looking into the circumstances surrounding your son's death. I'll need to ask you a lot of questions. Some of them might be difficult to answer."

  Tears welling, she said. "Hamal's body. It's all broken up, ain't it? My baby, is he in pieces?"

  Since the Bureau wasn't called right away, I missed the autopsy. But everybody knows rock crushes bone. When I didn't answer, her sobbing grew louder. I waited, feeling the usual awkwardness, since I could offer only silence, followed by impertinent questions.

  I opened my notebook. "Mrs. Holmes, do you know why your son was on that roof?"

  "Why?” Her voice turned molten with rage. "Why? Because that policeman done chased him up there, that's why. He chased my Hamal to the roof, then throwed him off! God forgive me, but I'm not sorry that policeman's dead. No, I'm not. That man deserved to die. Killing my boy like that."

  The police department, naturally, had a different theory. As a young man, Hamal Holmes built a solid record of breaking and entering. Though he'd apparently changed his ways in recent years, the cops trotted out their claims:

  Holmes broke into the abandoned factory Saturday morning. The detective was working nearby and spotted him, pursuing him to the roof, where a struggle ensued. The only thing everybody agreed on was that both men lost the fight.

  Mrs. Holmes scoffed at the theory.

  "Hamal didn't break into that place. Ain't nothing in that old factory. Been closed for years. My son was a businessman. A real good businessman. Paid all my bills. He didn't need to steal nothing from nobody."

  I glanced at the girl, still smoking at the sink. She flicked her ash, returning my gaze.

  "Are you his sister?" I asked.

  "Wife." She pointed the cigarette at my notebook. "You can put this in your little book: My husband didn’t do nothing wrong.”

  I didn’t move.

  “You deaf? I said, write it down."

  "I know this is a difficult time for your family but when—"

  "You don't know nothin'."

  Actually, that was true. I turned back to the mother, once more sliding my card toward her. "Mrs. Holmes, I'll be the agent in charge of the civil rights investigation. Please feel free to call me anytime, day or night. Any questions or concerns, let me know. And please call if you hear of anything that might help our investigation."

  But she wasn’t looking at me. She stared across the table to a small television. Sound muted, closed captioning ran across the bottom of the screen. "That policeman killed my son."

  "When all the evidence is—"

  The widow took four steps forward. She was barefoot and held the cigarette like a javelin, poised to throw. "We done seen the evidence. It's in the morgue. My husband, he's dead. Dead! Dead!"

  Mrs. Holmes released another wail and somewhere beyond the kitchen, children began yelling. Their voices came through the walls, but the widow raised her head and hollered back, demanding silence. They obeyed. She turned to me.

  "You came here to help the cops. We know how it works."

  "That's not how it works. This is a civil rights investigation. The FBI is investigating the police for possible violations. They are completely separate from our work."

  "You're still one of them. I can smell it."

  I glanced at Mrs. Holmes, still staring at a small television. Montel, the talk show host, was pawing his bald head with one hand, swinging the microphone with the other. The text announced today's topic: "I can't trust you!"

  "Mrs. Holmes, who told you what happened on the roof?"

  "I don't remember."

  "Do you recall what was said?"

  “No.”

  "Did anyone tell you why Hamal was on the roof?"

  "They told me Hamal was dead. After that my mind was gone."

  Montel batted the microphone through the air like a wasp was loose in the studio. The camera panned to the audience. People applauding. When I glanced back at the dead man’s widow, her deep reserves of anger had compressed even further, all that hate-fueled anthracite hardening with heat and pressure.

  "How did you hear about your husband's death?"

  “I heard.” She took the last drag off her cigarette and tossed it into the sink. It sizzled. “And I heard it’s time for you to go.”

  Her motherin-law nodded absently, and I followed the widow to the front door.

  Holding the door open, she wore the same expression as when I arrived, but now as I walked past she wished me good luck. Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

  And I decided there was no point telling her: Luck didn't exist.

  Chapter 2

  The white Cadillac was still parked at the curb with the engine running and the air conditioner set to arctic blast. When I opened the door, John was closing his cell phone.

  "I’ll bet they were happy to see you,” he said.

  "Comple
te and total cooperation."

  He grunted knowingly. But his bloodshot eyes kept flicking to the rearview mirror. Sitting down, I turned around and looked through the back window. An emaciated man stood on the sagging wooden porch next door, the platform jutting over powdery brown soil. His fingers were lashed around one of the columns, holding tight. Even from here I could see his sunken eyes. They were full of curses for the fancy white car and the fat white man tucked behind the wheel. More disturbing was an object laying in the dirt below, like something dropped from the sky. A small pink bicycle.

  "The bike," I said. It was a girl’s bike. A little girl's bike. “Did you call the second precinct?"

  "Oh, yeah, Raleigh. First thing. I called the cops and told them to do their job. Give me a break. There’s enough animosity out here—on all sides—to last another hundred fifty years."

  When he pulled away from the curb, I was still looking out the back window. The stick figure staggered forward, latching the spidery hands over the next porch column. I took one last look at the pink bike, then turned around.

  "Don't look so upset," John said. "Child Protective Services just got a call. Anonymous but urgent."

  "That's who you were calling?"

  He took a right on Hull Street, refusing to answer. Refusing to let me see his beating heart. I stared out the window, squinting into the sunlight. This close to the James River, the summer light cast hues that seemed different from the rest of Richmond. Brighter, harsher, the white light exposed every ravaged bit of this riverbank south of town. All the abandoned mills. The worn-down factories. The brick buildings standing tall and empty and proud, like old ladies dressed up for a dying church.

  But once upon a time, despite formal rules of segregation, white and black families lived and worked together in relative peace on Southside. Days in the factories and mills, nights in the neighborhood bars or the tidy asbestos-wrapped houses that camped like tents on field grass. But that well-intentioned idea of desegregation changed everything. Richmond suffered massive “white flight” during the 1960s, leaving the city desperate for tax revenue. The metropolitan area soon incorporated land to the south, swallowing up the working class neighborhood and spitting out this weird netherworld of abandonment. What was once a self-contained town turned into a dumping ground for industrial warehouses stuffed with Philip Morris leaf tobacco and public housing projects that bred poverty, addiction, and violence.

  But in recent years Southside residents had started asking for some changes. Two days ago on that fateful Saturday, six hundred people had marched down Bainbridge Avenue, circled Hull Street and cut over to Decatur, all the while chanting slogans and raising fists for a protest that was billed as "The Parade for the People." Near an empty factory that once produced Fielding Felt Hats, the crowd stopped near the impromptu wooden stage. Later, on the six o'clock news, the tape would show a crowd that swelled through the streets, waving angry signs, and clapping for Mayor Louis "LuLu" Mendant. The mayor stood on stage and blamed the neighborhood’s bad schools and vicious crime rate and soaring unemployment on white people. And money. Specifically, white people who didn't pay their taxes. The mayor said he needed that money to fix these problems.

  "These old buildings don’t do anything!" the mayor yelled from the wooden stage. "And these white slumlords say that’s why they don’t have to pay their taxes! But I’m telling you, that money belongs to you! It belongs to you--and you! And you!”

  The crowd hollered back. The signs jabbed the summer air.

  And then a woman screamed.

  Even on television her voice sounded pitched to heaven. High and terrified, her cries made every head turn. But everyone turned too late. The bodies were landing, hitting the sidewalk. On tape the sounds were nauseating thuds, like coffin lids slamming shut.

  More screams followed that, then chaos. Pandemonium.

  The police reports and city newspaper claimed Hamal Holmes hit the sidewalk first, landing near the curb. Detective Michael Falcon's body hit soon after, coming to rest beside the factory's 1889 cornerstone that dedicated the building to Jesus Christ. A medical examiner’s report later found no illegal or intoxicating substances in either man's system. No chemicals that could explain their loss of balance.

  But the ME report almost didn’t matter. The city had already divided by color. Black versus white.

  When she handed me the case, my boss at the Bureau didn’t sound hopeful.

  "You won't find witnesses," said Victoria Phaup, Supervisory Special Agent of the Richmond field office. “But ask some questions; make it look like we care. Then close the case."

  "Close it?"

  "Close it. We've never solved a forty-four—" code for civil rights “—and we never will. It's a silly game of chasing down prejudices. And it drains manpower."

  "Then why did we take the case?" I asked.

  "Because the public's paying attention," she said crisply. "If we didn't take it, the mayor would turn around and file claims against us. So, make the rounds. And take John with you. For backup."

  John Breit joined the Bureau when J. Edgar was still running the agency. He should’ve been top man on the office totem pole, but John had "issues.” Which was why he was the only other agent guaranteed available on a holiday weekend.

  Now, climbing out of his Caddy on Ludlow Street, he looked like somebody on a train chugging two stops past Angry, heading for Furious.

  "Quicker if we split up," I said. “I can take one side of the street.”

  “We stick together." He locked the car.

  Every porch on Ludlow had a full view of the Fielding factory. But half the windows were boarded with splintered plywood. Only six looked occupied, and though we knocked on them all, nobody answered. The last house sat on the corner, directly facing the factory. A half-painted white clapboard, it had a small sign over the door that said, "Jesus Lives Here."

  I climbed the short stoop, listening to the plastic blades of Astroturf squeaking under my shoes. I could also hear John behind me, breathing through his mouth. Despite the heat and humidity, we both wore blazers to cover holstered weapons, and the front of John’s white shirt was soaked with perspiration.

  Iron bars guarded the front door. But before I could knock, the door behind the bars opened. The woman who stood there was thin, with the wide stance of a toddler, and she appeared to be waiting for us. When I introduced myself and John, she watched us carefully. Her rheumy brown eyes were covered with a blue glaze, like kilned clay. She tilted her head, listening the way blind people do.

  "I heard the whole thing," she said. "I heard it all, start to finish."

  "All of it, on Saturday?” I asked.

  "Yes."

  "May we come in, Mrs...?"

  "Miz," she corrected. "Miz Iva Williamson. And I don't know what that's a good idea. I can't be sure y'all are who you say you are."

  Pulling out our billfolds, we handed them through the bars. She barely touched my identification but her mahogany fingers swept over John’s photo and the embossed lettering. She bent over the card, placing her strange eyes within an inch of it. “Difficult man."

  She handed the billfold back, but as John took it, she wrapped her brown hands around his wrists. "You got burdens, son. Heartache. You need Jesus."

  John offered her his best Bureau smile. It looked close to a grimace. The guy accepted "God talk" the way an allergic reacts to peanuts. On the Astroturf porch, his disgust mingled with the smell coming from her home. Fried onions and too many cats. The smell hung on the humid air like clothes pinned to a line.

  "Miss Williamson," I said, "may we ask you a few questions about Saturday, if you don't mind?"

  "Go on, let 'em all watch. I don’t care what they see. I’m cradled in the arms of the Lord." She spread her arms wide. “And the Lord was with me that day."

  "Yeah, okay,” John said. “We can come back later. I mean--if that’s better for you."

  "Man came and painted my house," she said, as tho
ugh John hadn't spoken. "Seemed like a right nice boy. But he did me wrong. Oh, so wrong. That’s how come I don't take no chances no more with visitors. You gonna have to stay out there."

  "That’s fine," I said. "We'd like to know if you—"

  "Sometimes I still hear birds. Some mornings I open my door and the birds are chirping like happy chir-ren."

  Children. She pronounced it the rural Virginia way, and as the word left her mouth, a burgundy Bonneville crawled down the street. The driver was a mid-twenties black male, red bandana covering his hair. At Miss Williamson’s house he slowed and threw us an expression that said he wished us dead. He gunned the engine at the corner, the squealing rubber slicing the air like a scream. As the car fishtailed around the Fielding factory, I wrote down the license plate.

  "Ma'am, would you feel more comfortable coming to the office?" I asked.

  "No birds that morning," she continued, as though nothing had happened. "That morning all I heard was people hollering. Yelling. Oh they was loud! So loud I just about closed my door. See--" she pointed to the green carpet at her feet. A two-foot patch was worn down to the burlap backing. "I keep my chair right there. Staying put. Keeping my ears open. That's how I live."

  "You hear much?” John said. “You know, sitting inside the door like that?"

  Her rheumy eyes clicked toward his deep voice. "You parked your nice car down the street. ’Cross from the Milson house. That'd be four-two-oh-one."

  John looked down the street, counting house numbers to the cherished Cadillac. This time his smile was genuine. "Well I'll be da—"

  "You will be." She wagged her bony finger. "Unless you give your heart to God. Tell him your burdens, son. He ain't gonna arrest you. He gonna set you free."

  "I'm sure you manage fine out here,” he said.

  "Now, I'm not disagreeing with them folks, what they're saying. Ain't right the man don't pay his taxes. I pay my taxes, look what I gotta put up with. Place needs cleaning up. This was a right nice neighborhood when I was coming up. Now look. Cock-a-roaches come in and out all night long. I want it to stop."