The Body Box by Lynn Abercrombie Page B

questions. I wanted to go over what happened when she disappeared. In the statement you gave to the detective at the time, you indicated that your brother Lonnie Driggers had come to visit that afternoon, that he was playing with your daughter.”
    â€œHe ain’t my brother.”
    â€œI thought he was.”
    â€œMaybe he was. But I don’t claim him no more. He killed my baby. I done fell apart after that. Look what he done to me.” She waved her Minnie Mouse glass in a wide arc that took in the whole of the bleak Perry Homes landscape, then looked at me with hard, challenging eyes. Her eyes, I noticed, were the same color as Lt. Gooch’s. “I come all the way down to nigger level.”
    â€œYou want to catch a slap upside the head, sister?” I said.
    Gooch looked at me coldly, but I looked right back. I wasn’t having any of that. Finally he turned back to Tanya Prowter. “What you’re saying, you think Lonnie Driggers kidnapped your daughter and killed her.”
    â€œHe done took her down to that fishing shack of his and kilt her.”
    â€œYou have any proof?”
    She glared at Lt. Gooch. “Proof? I got all the proof I need right here.” She put her hands over her heart.
    Gooch kept looking at her.
    â€œWhat?” she said. “How come y’all don’t believe me? Y’all just like that other sumbitch.”
    â€œWho you talking about?”
    â€œThat other po -lices.”
    â€œWhat other policeman?”
    â€œThe one that done the investigation. Back when she done got kilt.”
    I remembered the name from the file. “Roy Bevis. Lt. Roy Bevis.”
    Tanya Prowter shrugged listlessly.
    I held my composure this time. “Are you saying that Lt. Bevis didn’t think your brother was guilty of the crime?”
    â€œHocus-pocus,” she said vaguely.
    â€œWhat’s that mean?” I said.
    Lt. Gooch held up a hand to me, waving me off impatiently. “Let me ask you this. Let’s say it was your brother done it. But let’s also s’pose, just for the sake of argument, that there was somebody else who helped him.”
    Tanya Prowter took a delicate, prim sip from her tall water glass. As she set it down on the cracked concrete I noticed from the way the “water” clung to the sides of the glass that it wasn’t water at all. It was straight vodka, a good solid half pint of it in there. “What you mean, help?”
    â€œAnybody hanging around? Anybody that seemed suspicious? Any adult males in the vicinity who showed an unnatural interest in her?”
    Tanya Prowter looked disgusted. “You people.”
    Gooch just stood over her. She started to take another sip of her vodka, but the lieutenant’s leg flashed out so fast you almost couldn’t see it, catching the glass with the toe of his cowboy boot and kicking Minnie Mouse twenty feet in the air. Minnie shattered against the wall.
    â€œYou showing disrespect to me,” Gooch said. “You showing disrespect to my partner. Being you being a broken-down welfare drunk, where you claim the right to do that?”
    â€œShit, man,” Tanya Prowter, waving sadly at the wet stain on the wall. “That’s the last I had.”
    Gooch stared at her.
    After a while she said, “That other cop ast the same thing, if there was somebody hanging around. I tole him there was this dude use to come around. Claimed he was Lonnie’s parole officer, be looking for Lonnie, you know what I’m saying. Only later when I ax Lonnie about him, Lonnie tole me he ain’t know who he was.”
    â€œAnd this parole officer. He seemed suspicious to you somehow?”
    â€œHe come around three, four times, say he Lonnie’s parole officer, say he looking for Lonnie. Then he joke around with me, come in the house, make hisself at home. Then he horse around with Evie Marie.”
    â€œAnd he did this more than