Little Boy Lost by J.D. Trafford
CHAPTER ONE
It started with a pickle jar, half-filled with pocket change and a few dollar bills. The girl came into my office. She set the jar on my desk and sat down in the chair across from me. Her feet barely touched the ground.
Her name was Tanisha Walker.
“How old are you?” I asked.
She sat up a little straighter. “Eight and a half.”
“Got a daughter about that age, little older.” I leaned over and picked up the jar, examining it. On one side somebody had written in big block letters with black marker: CUSS JAR.
“Your mama know you took this jar?”
Tanisha shrugged. The beads in her hair clicked. “Ain’t my mama’s jar.” She thought about it for a moment, biting a nail, and then elaborated. “It’s my granny’s, an’ she won’t mind . . . least don’t think she would. Why should she? Ain’t doing nothin’ ’cept sitting there, and so she—”
I held up my hand, cutting off the nervous ramble. “Maybe.” I put the jar back down on my desk. “Guess that depends on what you plan on doing with the money.”
“Gonna hire you with it.” She was serious. “Like they do on TV.”
I took a moment to consider her intentions.
It’d been a long time since I’d lived the life of a typical lawyer. I certainly wasn’t like the ones on television. I didn’t have any staff. I answered my own phone and made my own copies. I drove a rusted-out Honda Civic, not a BMW. My suits didn’t fit quite right, and my office was located in a half-empty strip of old storefronts on the north side. The storefronts stuck out among the burned houses and vacant lots like the remaining teeth in a broken mouth.
But I wasn’t a charity, either.
I had bills due, and after looking at that pickle jar, I figured that this girl was only going to be able to pay me about ten dollars for my services. At the moment, I wasn’t feeling that desperate. Maybe tomorrow.
“Why a lawyer?” I asked. “Right now you should be in school, not hiring lawyers.”
“My brother’s gone missing.”
“Well that’s an issue for the police.” Passing the kid off on somebody else seemed like a fair resolution.
“I called the police, done nothing.” The girl crossed her arms in front of her chest. “They don’t care. They’re glad he’s gone.”
“Who’d you talk to?”
The girl shook her head. “A white dude.”
“Did you file a report? What about your mama or your granny? What are they doing?”
The girl looked away. She didn’t want to talk bad about her mother or grandmother, and I didn’t intend to ask her about her father. A little black girl in this part of Saint Louis living with her mama and granny—I knew she ain’t got no daddy.
Then my lawyer brain kicked in. Assumptions made during an initial interview are where most mistakes are made. If she were white, I’d have asked about her daddy straight away. So I forced the question.
“Where’s your father?”
The little girl shook her head. “Don’t know.”
And that, my friends, was a kick in the gut. Even though it was exactly the answer I had expected, I hated when the stereotype rang true.
I leaned toward her, trying to let the girl go gently. “I’m not sure you need a lawyer. Sounds more like you need a detective.”
That answer did not sit well with the girl. She had come to hire an attorney, and it was doubtful that she was going to leave without some sort of a commitment. Saint Louis girls are stubborn like that, especially on this side of Forty.
The phone rang.
I answered on the second ring, hoping it might be somebody with a real legal problem and more than a pickle jar.
“Law office.” I turned away from Tanisha and looked out the window. “This is Justin Glass.”
“Good,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “I’m needing a money-hungry ambulance chaser, like real bad, man.”
“I happen to be with a potential client at the moment.” I looked back at the girl in time to see her eyes widen as she inched up to the edge of her seat, clearly pleased to hear herself referred to as a client of any kind. I turned away from Tanisha as my younger brother, Lincoln, called my bluff.
“Client?” He laughed. “You do know that the word client is defined as an individual who actually pays your poor ass some money? And we both know—”
“What do you want?”
“Hoping to buy you lunch today, catch up a little.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. The Glass family business was politics. Our father was a local hero of the 1960s civil rights movement, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the most senior United States congressman in Missouri. My brother, a state senator with ambitions, was always conspiring with our father’s chief of staff to expand our empire. When I was younger, I may have cared, but that feeling was lost. I had no interest in any of his ideas. “Don’t have time today,” I said. “Maybe next week.” I hung up the phone and then turned back to Tanisha.
She looked at me with big brown eyes, holding her breath.
“I really appreciate you coming in here, but”—I pushed the jar of coins slowly closer to her—“I’ve got some real important matters going on right now.”
I rolled back my chair a little farther from my desk. I was seeking some distance, knowing that I was about to disappoint her. It wasn’t the first time I’d drawn back from somebody needing my help. “Just not sure that I can—”
Tanisha knew what was coming. A tear rolled down her cheek.
I, nonetheless, marched forward. “Like I said, I’m just not sure that you need a lawyer. I don’t think I can help you.”
Tanisha nodded and wiped her eyes dry. She then took a breath and came back at me, hard. “Ain’t nobody want to help us.” She stood. “Ain’t nobody else. Just you.” She looked at me with such intensity, such honest longing. It was as if this girl knew all my secrets and all my problems, but those didn’t matter. A flawed man was better than nothing.
The silence grew.
Tanisha didn’t back down.
I can’t tell you why I took the case. I had thought that any remotely noble part of me had died years earlier, along with my wife. I wish that I could say that this was the moment when I woke up from a long, dark sleep, but that’s not true.
Regret and doubt filled me the moment I told Tanisha that I’d make some calls.
CHAPTER TWO
My old air conditioner had stopped working. From the time I left to get a sandwich to the time I returned with it, the temperature inside my office had risen about fifteen degrees. This was late August in Saint Louis, a final boil before the summer turned to fall.
I picked up a ragged old copy of the Yellow Pages and used it to prop open the door. Then I tinkered with the air conditioner for about thirty minutes before giving up.
By the time I sat down at my desk, the back of my shirt was soaked through with sweat. Breathing hard, I stared at the open front door and hoped for a cool breeze.