Speaking in Tongues

stole her purse, got the keys and broken in?”
    Tate considered this. “Maybe. But her driver’slicense has Bett’s address on it. How would a burglar know to come here? Maybe she had something with my address on it but I don’t know what. Besides, nothing’s missing that I could see.”
    “Don’t see much worth stealing,” Konnie said, looking at the paltry entertainment equipment. “You know, Counselor, they got TVs nowadays bigger’n cereal boxes.”
    Tate grunted.
    “Okay,” Konnie said, “how ’bout you show me her room?”
    As Tate led him upstairs Beauridge’s smooth drawl rolled, “Sure you got nothing to worry about, Mrs. Collier—”
    “It’s McCall.”
    Upstairs, Tate let Konnie into Megan’s room then wandered into his own. He’d missed something earlier when he’d made the rounds up here: his dresser drawer was open. He looked inside, frowned, then glanced across the hall as the detective surveyed the girl’s room. “Something funny,” Tate called.
    “Hold that thought,” Konnie answered. With surprisingly lithe movements for such a big man he dropped to his knees and went through what must have been the standard teenage hiding places: under desk drawers, beneath dressers, wastebaskets, under beds, in curtains, pillows and comforters. “Ah, whatta we got here?” Konnie straightened up and examined two sheets of paper.
    He pointed to Megan’s open dresser drawers and the closet. “These’re almost empty, these drawers. They normally got clothes in them?”
    Tate hesitated, concern on his face. “Yes, they’re usually full.”
    “Could you see if there’s any luggage missing?”
    “Luggage? No . . . Wait. Her old backpack’s gone.” Tate considered this for a moment. Why would she take that? he wondered. Looking at the papers, Tate asked the detective, “What’d you find?”
    “Easy, Counselor,” Konnie said, folding up the sheets. “Let’s go downstairs.”

Chapter Five
    What would Sidney Poitier do?
    Joshua LeFevre shifted his muscular, trapezoidal body in the skimpy seat of his Toyota and pressed down harder on the gas pedal. The tiny engine complained but slowly edged the car closer to the Mercedes.
    Come on, Megan, what the hell’re you up to?
    He squinted again and leaned forward as if moving eight inches closer to the Merce were going to let him see more clearly through his confusion. He assumed the man, not Megan, was driving though he couldn’t be sure. This gave him a sliver of comfort—for some reason the thought of this guy tossing Megan the keys to his big doctor’s car and saying, “You drive, honey,” riled the young man beyond words. Made him furious.
    He nudged the car faster.
    Sidney Poitier . . . What would you do?
    LeFevre had seen In the Heat of the Night when he’d been ten. (On video, of course—when the film had originally come out, in the sixties, the man who would be his father was doing basic training pushups in Fort Dix and his to-be mother was listening to Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross while she worked on her 4.0 average at National Cathedral School.)The film had affected him deeply. The Poitier character, Detective Tibbs, ended up stuck in the small Southern town, butting horns with good-oldboy sheriff Rod Steiger. Moving slow, solving a local murder, step by step . . . Not getting flustered, not getting pissed off in the face of all the crap everybody in town was giving him.
    Sure, the movie didn’t have real guts, it was Hollywood’s idea of race relations, more softball than gritty, but even at age ten Joshua LeFevre understood the film wasn’t really about black or white—it was about being a man and being persistent and not taking no when you believed yes.
    It choked him up, that flick—the way important movies always do, those films that give us our role models, whether it’s the first time we see them or the hundredth.
    Oh yes, Joshua Nathan LeFevre—an honors English major at George Mason University, a tall young man with his father’s perfect physique and military bearing and with his mother’s brains—had a sentimental side to him thick as a mountain. (The week that students in his nineteenth-century-lit seminar were picking apart a Henry James novel like crows, LeFevre had slunk back to his apartment with a very different book hidden in a brown paper bag. He’d locked his door and read the entire novel in one sitting, crying unashamedly when he came to the last page of The Bridges of Madison