Last Night

by Karen Ellis

  Fuck you, New York City Housing Authority, for building apartments like living tombs that segregate a whole race of human beings.

  And you too, America, for slavery and its cotton-picking aftermath. For the fibers that never leave your lungs when you breathe the free air that isn’t so free when your skin is black or half black or even just one drop black.

  And you, NRA and Congress, for keeping the killing machine going with your lust for money and guns. For all this havoc down on the streets where you never, ever go.

  And you, Mo Crespo, you, for…for breaking his mother’s heart…for not sticking around to show him how to do this…for making him swallow anger that erupts at the wrong times…for this…for everything.

  Don’t think. Just pull.

  Once they’re at the edge of the projects, Dante takes the lead and Rodrigo the rear, with Crisp walking between them rolling the suitcase. Anyone who is out at this hour is engaged in the industrious pursuit of trying to get somewhere, which works in their favor. Time for work, school, day care, the parole office, dumping bodies. Crisp’s stomach heaves bile into his throat. He swallows. Keeps pulling.

  Twenty minutes into Dante’s chosen route the streets grow bleak and bleaker until they’re the only people in sight. Once they clear a decimated ball field they enter an end-of-the-world scene of tow pounds and dump sites and parking lots for shipping containers. When a rat zags across Crisp’s path he stops looking down and instead looks up: seagulls gliding in a blue sky. It’s shaping up to be a clear morning.

  If he could only get home and tell his mother and grandparents how sorry he is for all the trouble he’s caused since Wednesday. Really, deeply sorry. If she still wants him to call Princeton, he’ll call Princeton. If that’s now off the table, he’ll find another way to live his life.

  Don’t think. Just pull.

  They turn off Columbia Street onto an unmarked road separating the Gowanus Bay from the Erie Basin.

  “Hurry up,” Dante commands. He points to a rocky spot at the edge of the water. “There. Set it down.”

  Crisp brings the suitcase to a rest.

  “Unzip it.”

  Rodrigo falls into a crouch and pulls the zipper until it yanks to a stop. He announces, “Stuck.”

  Crisp can see that a slip of fabric from Jerome’s shirt is caught in the teeth of the zipper, but he doesn’t say anything, he stands back and watches Rodrigo struggle.

  “Maybe we should push the whole thing in,” Rodrigo suggests.

  Dante answers, “No.” Because the suitcase could lead back to Dante, which Crisp implicitly understands. Dante takes a switchblade from his jacket pocket and bends down to cut at the stuck fabric, pushing the knife in, sawing. When the zipper comes loose and he pulls out the knife, the blade is coated in blood.

  “Look: Jerome got blood on my knife,” Dante says. “Fuck him.” He hands it to Rodrigo, who cleans the blade at the edge of the water and returns the knife spotless.

  With the suitcase now open, Crisp glances at Jerome, a bruised and bloodied contortionist in death. Vomit bucks again and Crisp begins to gag.

  “Put some rocks in his pockets and get him into the water, Rod,” Dante orders.

  Rodrigo drags Jerome as far as he can before dropping him under the surface, and emerges soaking wet. He zips up the suitcase and this time drags it himself as the three make their way back into the neighborhood.

  They turn off Columbia Street onto Lorraine, where stores are beginning to open. A semitoothless man at the newsstand waves to Dante and he waves back. At Golden Fingers Dominican Hairstyles, a bulky Latina in a minidress a size too small spots Dante through the window and rushes out the door.

  “Alva, baby.” Dante opens his arms and offers his cheek for a kiss. Instead, she slaps him.

  “Where you been?”

  “Just flew in from Paris, France.” Glancing at the suitcase, trying to make her laugh, but she won’t have it. “What you doing open so early?”

  “Nunna your goddamn business.”

  “What’d I do?”

  “Shana got a fever—me and her up all night long.”

  Dante’s expression sobers. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I ain’t no doctor! My mama got her now, says her fever comin’ down. You gonna check in on her?”

  “You know I am.”

  “You bring her some ice cream.”

  “I will.”

  “Chocolate chocolate chip.”

  Dante nods.

  “Why Rodrigo’s all wet?”

  “Dude pissed his pants.”

  “My ass.” Alva cracks a smile. She studies his hair and reaches to nudge an errant strand back into place. He runs a palm over her rear and Crisp thinks, This is it, this is when I should bolt, knowing that he’s running out of time. “Chocolate chocolate chip,” she reminds Dante.

  “Rod!” he shouts. “You go in there and see if they got any!”

  Rodrigo makes a show of entering the grocery store. Alva goes back inside, igniting a series of bells as the salon door falls shut. As soon as she’s out of sight, Rodrigo returns to the sidewalk.

  Dante starts walking again and Rodrigo and Crisp follow.

  As far as Crisp can tell, no one seems to notice him; it’s as if he’s just another loser in training. His blood starts to boil, anger on top of fear now. He has got to get away.

  I shall either find a way or make one.

  He scans the surroundings and there is no place to go, mostly closed shops and boarded up storefronts, another housing project across the street. They walk under a dilapidated scaffold and emerge in front of a brick building with a colorful sign: Bumblebee Day Care.

  A small school bus grinds to a halt and two red stop signs flap out from either side. The bus door folds open. Tiny voices spill out before a potbellied matron steps off the bus. A dozen tiny children emerge onto the sidewalk carrying lunch boxes. The front door of the day care swings open and a tall man steps out, another man who knows Dante. They wave at each other and Crisp sees his chance. The eye in his needle. Passage back to a world where…

  Don’t think. Just go.

  He leaps into the moment of sweet chaos.

  18

  Friday

  The first thing Lex notices in Dante Green’s apartment is a haze of something, maybe blood, on the floor in the main room. The officers step around it as they check everywhere: the living room with a strip kitchen and a padlocked refrigerator, a bedroom with a giant mirror leaning against one wall, a bathroom with a torn shower curtain and a jumble of towels, garbage bags, tools. More blood.

  An officer emerges from the bedroom with a silver Faraday bag. She holds open the top to show Lex two phones: one a flip, the other an iPhone in a glittery case.

  “What about that?” another officer asks of the refrigerator.

  “Open it.”

  One of the officers produces a bolt cutter and severs the padlock. The door swings wide. Inside the dark fridge is a long black case.

  “Lay it down right there.” Lex indicates a spot on the cracked linoleum floor, away from the blood. The way the officer’s neck tendons strain, Lex can tell the case is heavy. He hunches down to unzip it.

  Pistols. Rifles. Machine guns. Service weapons with their serial numbers filed off. An arsenal of presumably illegal firearms ready to make their way onto the streets.

  Lex and a few of the officers gather to take a look, shaking heads, mumbling curses. One asks, “Why do we even bother?”

  “Close it back up,” Lex instructs. “Drop it at the lab. I’ll alert ATF.” Disappointment simmers, because the girl was right, this guy Dante is selling guns, and because this kind of firepower has no place on the streets.

  While he waits for the forensic techs to arrive, Lex calls Saki to check in. “Glynnie’s tucked away at home now?”

  “I dropped her off ten minutes ago,” she tells him. “Just got back to the station house. Your boy’s mother is here—she’s downstairs with
Gus.”

  Lex is pleased to hear that the public information officer is still with the 8-4. Gus has a soft touch and Katya needs that right now. Lex tells Saki, “I’ll be over soon.”

  “What happened at the Houses after I left?”

  “So far everything Glynnie said checked out except for one thing: Crisp isn’t here.” He adds, “No, two things: She didn’t say anything about the blood on the floor in the main room, unless that happened after she was gone.”

  “Blood,” Saki echoes. And then corrects him: “Three things don’t check out. The second boy. I tried, and the girl still won’t talk about him.”

  “Let’s pick up Green.” Lex decides on the spot. “Your precinct—you want to do the warrant?”

  “Done,” she says. “What about an APB for Crisp?”

  “I’m on it. And I’ll put eyes on his building so we’ll know right away if he comes home.”

  “When you’re finished there—”

  “Yeah.” He already knows what she’s thinking. “I’ll make my way to you.”

  He catches a ride in one of the squad cars returning to the station house—sitting in the backseat like a perp, staring through scratched Plexiglas at the back of a pair of cops’ heads. The image of all that weaponry locked in Dante Green’s refrigerator returns to him with a visceral jolt at the thought of the immensity of damage you can do with a single gun. How did Crisp, Glynnie, and the mystery boy step into that quicksand—or maybe the question is, how can you not step in it, sooner or later, when it’s all around you?

  They park on Gold Street. Lex gets out in front of the station house where he was once briefly posted and realizes just how adapted he’s gotten to the other end of Brooklyn, with its wraparound sky and crosshatch of fresh breezes. At the Coney Island station house, just half a block from the ocean, you open a couple of windows and in whips the salty air. Here, the air feels stagnant and it smells of something unpleasant. Gas, maybe. Garbage from the dumpster across the street. Barbecue from the housing projects on the other side of Gold. Coffee from the new Starbucks on the corner where they finally finished that flashy high-rise.

  He remembers the weak brew from the old squad’s Mr. Coffee and suddenly craves something much stronger to tackle whatever it is they’re facing now. Two nights with almost no sleep is starting to creep up on him from behind with gnarly fingers and a stranglehold; as always, he has trouble breathing when he’s sleep-deprived.

  Adam calls these bouts of suffocation “anxiety” but Lex thinks that’s bullshit: we aren’t built to function without sleep—it’s just the lungs protesting. Adam thinks a lot of things are anxiety when it comes to Lex. The “hypervigilant work ethic.” The “stoic self-denying” reactions that Lex thinks of as patience or, better yet, fortitude. Their disagreements over semantics are always friendly, but with a bite. Thinking of Adam, Lex grinds his jaw to plug a surge of emotion.

  At Starbucks, he orders a pair of cold double shots with whole milk. He has no idea how Saki drinks her coffee, or if she drinks coffee at all, but if she doesn’t want it he’ll have it himself.

  As he passes through the station-house lobby, his brain pings before he even sees the sign directing visitors to the property clerk down a hall to the left. During the months he worked here, the awareness that this was where drugs were held before transfer to the evidence vault made his skin crawl with want. The mere knowledge of the treasures in there turned him into a creative genius figuring out how to crack the code to the electronic door lock without being noticed, and in his imagination he was always caught. Not responding to the urge took a lot of energy, and this was the real reason he put in for a transfer, with the official rationale that the 6-0 was closer to his new home.

  Lex rides up in the dingy elevator to the second floor, emerges into the overlit hallway, listens to the dull clap of his boots on the linoleum—all of it so familiar it’s almost as if he never left the 8-4. He stacks the two cups so he can ease open the squad room door. Looking around, he spots some familiar faces and some new ones. A former colleague nods, another waves, a third offers a vague headshake that could mean anything.

  He finds Saki two desks over from his old spot near a painted-shut window. Her desk is very organized, a neat stack of papers weighted under a snow globe with all the fake snow settled at the bottom and the detached snowman free-floating in water.

  “You solve that crime yet?” Lex uses one of the coffees to indicate the snow globe. “He doesn’t look good.”

  She glances away from her monitor. “The glue wore out, I guess.”

  “Case solved, then.” He offers her one of the cups. “It’s cold.”

  “Is that whole milk or skim?”

  “You didn’t ask about two percent.”

  “I also didn’t ask about one percent because the Starbucks down the street only serves whole or skim, and there isn’t any condensation on the outside of the cups so I assume you got them at the closest one. Correct?”

  “Correct. It’s whole. That okay?”

  “I usually drink skim.” She reaches to take the cup from him anyway.

  “You’re welcome,” he says.

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  Lex smiles. Something about her no-nonsense attitude puts him at ease. “This case is turning into a real shitstorm. Wish I’d done the APB on Crisp sooner.”

  “Don’t blame yourself—you couldn’t have known.”

  “I thought we were looking for a couple of teenagers. Now I’m not sure what we’re looking for.”

  He’s reaching for a chair to pull up beside Saki’s desk when she says, “If you want to set up shop here, Suarez is out this week.” She points to an unoccupied desk amid the cluster of workstations.

  “Probably a good idea.”

  “So, are you planning on talking to Mrs. Spielman?”

  “Yes, but I should warn you,” he tells her, “it’s not Mrs. She doesn’t like that, I found out. You want to be there?”

  “Sure. Maybe she knows something about the other boy—I can’t get him out of my mind. By the way, did you know Green’s on parole for armed robbery?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “After you called me, I glanced over his record. He broke into an apartment when the owners were sleeping. That put him away for five years; he’s been out for two. Before that, he did a couple two-year stints for possession of stolen property. He’s also been tagged for domestic violence.”

  “How bad?”

  “Beat up the mother of his daughter. Never happened again, at least not on record. Social services has it that he moved out of the shared apartment eight years ago, before the longer sentence.”

  “Nothing on record about weapons?” Lex asks. “Besides the armed robbery.”

  “No, just that one time. Maybe he changed his game.”

  “Put away three times as a thief? I’d branch out too. Anything else of note?”

  “Before the armed robbery there was a decade of petty charges, turnstile jumping and stuff like that, and later a couple of muggings.”

  “Started small and worked his way up,” Lex says. “So he’s ambitious.”

  “He’s stupid,” Saki corrects. She scoots her chair away from her desk and stands. “Ready?”

  “Yeah. Thanks. And you’re right: Dante Green is an idiot par excellence.”

  That gets a smile out of her. He smiles back. Together they take the stairs down to the public information office to temporarily relieve Gus of his guest.

  They walk in to find Katya narrating the pages of an old-fashioned photo album she must have brought with her from home. Gus is sitting beside her and leaning over the pictures. At the crack of the door opening, the public information officer’s bald pate rises, revealing his face: sagging jowls crusted with salty stubble.

  “If it isn’t Lex Cole!” Gus sits back with a broad smile.

  Lex strides over and offers a handshake. “Couldn’t keep away.”

  “Back for good?”

 
“Just coordinating on a case with Detective Finley.”

  Hearing that, Gus’s expression shifts. He shoots a wary eye at Saki, who hangs back, looking annoyed by all the small talk.

  “Thanks, Gus.” Lex pats him on the back and he seems to relax.

  Lex waves Saki over to meet the mother. While the women greet each other, he glances at the open album and sees a photo of Crisp Crespo as a little boy, cross-legged on the floor in front of an enormous Lego world that looks like the melding of several themed sets.

  Tapping the photo of Crisp in his Lego kingdom, Lex says, “Quite a kid you’ve got there.”

  Katya closes the book. “Where is my son?”

  “We don’t know yet.” Lex’s tone is even as still milk, his policy being never to lie to a parent about a child, but at the same time to parse information judiciously. “We do know that he and his friend Glynnie Dreyfus, and apparently a younger boy, were together last night at an apartment in the Red Hook Houses.”

  Katya’s lips pull apart but it’s a moment before words emerge. “So much of what you just said doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”

  Saki asks, “Have you met Glynnie Dreyfus?”

  “I’ve never even heard of her. If she’s a friend of Crisp’s, it’s news to me. Are you saying she lives at the housing project?”

  “No—her family lives in a brownstone in Boerum Hill,” Saki answers. “Apparently she’s acquainted with your son through mutual friends. She observed him from her roof-deck last Wednesday playing basketball on top of the House of Detention.”