by S. J. Rozan
“If he’s fourteen, he’s too young for Rikers.”
“He doesn’t know that. He’s been stonewalling since they brought him in. Two hours I been shoveling it on about Rikers, finally he gives up your name. How about coming down here and giving us some help?”
Smoke twisted from the red tip of my cigarette, lost itself in the empty darkness. A November chill had invaded the room while I slept.
“Yeah,” I said, throwing off the blanket. “Sure. Just put it in my file, I got out of bed at two in the morning as a favor to the NYPD.”
“I’ve seen your file,” Hagstrom said. “It won’t help.”
Fragments of stories I would never know appeared out of the night, receded again as the cab took me north. Two streetwalkers, one white, one black, both tall and thin, laughing uproariously together; a dented truck, no markings at all, rolling silently downtown; a basement door that opened and closed with no one going in or out. I sipped burnt coffee from a paper cup, watched fallen leaves and discarded scraps jump in the gutters as we drove by. The cab driver was African and his radio kept up a soft, unbroken stream of talk, words I couldn’t understand. A few times he chuckled, so whatever was going on must have been funny. He let me out at the chipped stone steps of Midtown South. I overtipped him; I was thinking what it must be like to grow up in a sun-scorched African village and find your self driving a cab through the night streets of New York.
Inside, the desk sergeant directed me through the glaring fluorescent lights and across the scuffed vinyl tile to the second floor, the detective squad room. Two men sat at steel desks, one on the phone, the other typing. A third man, at the room’s far end, punched buttons on an unresponsive microwave.
“Ah, fuck this thing,” the button-puncher said without rancor, trying another combination. “It’s fucked.”
“You break it again?” The typist, a bald-headed black man, spoke without looking up.
“Hagstrom?” I asked from the doorway.
The guy at the microwave turned, said, “Me. You’re Smith?”
I nodded. He was a big, sloppy man in a pretty bad suit. He didn’t have a lot of hair but what he had needed a trim. “You know how to work these things?” he asked me.
“Try fast forward.”
The typist snorted.
“Screw it,” Hagstrom said, abandoning the microwave, crossing the room with a long, loose-jointed stride. “Doctor says I should lay off the burritos anyway. Come with me.”
I followed him into the corridor, around a corner, into a small, stale-smelling room. It was empty and dim. The only light came from the one-way mirror between this room and the next, where a big kid rested his head on his arms at a scarred and battered table. Two Coke cans, an empty Fritos bag, and a Ring Ding wrapper littered the tabletop.
Hagstrom flicked a switch, activated the speaker. “Sit up,” he said.
The kid’s head jerked up and he looked around, blinking. His dark hair was short; he wore jeans, sneakers, a maroon-and-white varsity jacket with lettering I couldn’t make out on the back. They were all filthy. He rubbed a grubby hand down his face, squinted at the glass. That glass is carefully made: It will show you your own reflection, tell you what’s behind you; it hides everything else.
Hagstrom switched the speaker off again. “Know him?”
“Yeah.”
Hagstrom waited. “And?”
“Gary Russell,” I said. “He’s fifteen. Last I heard he lived in Sarasota, but that was a couple of years ago. What’s he doing here?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s he to you?”
I watched Gary shift uncomfortably in the folding chair they had him on. The knuckles on his left hand were skinned; his jacket had a rip in the sleeve. The dirt on his face didn’t hide the bags under his eyes or the exhausted pallor of his skin. As he moved, his hand brushed the Fritos bag, knocked it to the floor. Conscientiously, automatically, he picked it up. I wondered how long it had been since he’d had real food.
“He’s my sister’s son,” I said.
This small room was too close, too warm, nothing like the crisp fall night the cab had driven through. I unzipped my jacket, took out a cigarette. Hagstrom didn’t stop me.
“Your sister’s son, but you’re not sure where he lives?” Hagstrom’s eyes were on me. Mine were on Gary.
“We don’t talk much.”
Hagstrom held his stare a moment longer. “You want to talk to him?”
I nodded. He stepped into the corridor, pointed to a door a few feet away. He backed off, so that I was the only thing Gary saw when I opened the door.
Gary stood when I came in, so fast and clumsily his chair clattered over. “Hey,” he greeted me, his fists clenching and opening, clenching and opening. “Uncle Bill. How’s it going?”
He was almost as tall as I was. His eyes were blue, and under his skin you could still see a hint of softness, the child not yet giving way to the man. Otherwise we looked so much alike that all the mirrors I had seen that face in over the years rushed into my mind, all the houses I’d lived in, all the things I had seen in my own eyes; and I wanted to warn him, to tell him to start again, differently. But those were my troubles, not his. You could look at him and see he had his own.
I pulled out a chair, nodded at the one he’d dropped to the floor. He righted it and sank into it.
“It’s going great, Gary,” I said. “Nothing like getting up in the middle of the night to come see your nephew in a police station.”
“I’m . . .” He swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing here, Gary?”
He shrugged, said, “They say I tried to rob this guy.”
I waved my hand, showed him the walls. “Not here. We’ll get to that. What are you doing in New York?”
He picked at a dirty fingernail, shrugged again.
“Your folks here too?”
“No.” Almost too low to hear.
“They know where you are?”
“No.” He looked up suddenly. “I need to get out of here, Uncle Bill.”
I dragged on my cigarette. “Most people in here say that. You run away?”
“Not really.”
“But Helen and Scott don’t know where you are.”
He shook his head.
“You still live in Sarasota?”
Another shake.
“Where?”
No answer.
“I can find out, Gary.”
He leaned forward. His blue eyes began to fill. With an effort so desperate I could see it, he pulled himself back under control: boys don’t cry. “Please, Uncle Bill. It’s important.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get me out of here. I didn’t hurt that guy. I didn’t even take anything off him.”
“No?”
He spread his hands; a corner of his mouth twisted up. “He didn’t have anything.”
“Why are you here?”
“Something I got to do.”
“What?”
“Something important.”
“What?”
He dropped his gaze to the table and was silent.
I sat with him until my cigarette was done. Once he looked up hopefully, like a kid wondering if you’d stopped being mad at him and were ready to play catch. His eyes found mine; he looked quickly down again.
Wordlessly I mashed out the cigarette, got up, opened the door. Hagstrom stepped out of the observation room at the same time, and I knew he’d been listening to what we’d said.
Back at his desk in the squad room, Hagstrom brought us both coffee in blue PBA mugs. “I checked you out,” he said.
I drank coffee.
“Your sheet: five arrests, one conviction, misdemeanor; interference with an officer in the performance of his duties.”
“You want to hear the story?”
“No. That officer was kicked off the Department the next year for excessive u
se of force. You also did six months twelve years ago on a misdemeanor in Nebraska.” He shook his head. “Nebraska, for Christ’s sake. Where is that?”
“In the middle.”
“You think your sister still lives in Sarasota?”
“Even though the kid says no? Maybe. Helen and Scott Russell. Street has a strange name . . . Littlejohn. Littlejohn Trail.”
Eyes on me, Hagstrom picked up his desk phone, dialed Florida information. I worked on the coffee. After a while he put down the phone again. “No Helen Russell, no Scott, no Gary, anywhere in the Sarasota area.”
“They move around a lot.”
“You got any ideas?”
I shook my head. “Sorry.”
“This is your sister?”
I didn’t answer.
“Christ,” Hagstrom said. “My brother’s an asshole, but I know where he lives.” He finished his coffee. “I wondered why the kid wasn’t afraid you’d call his folks.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I just drank coffee.
“Mike Dougherty, lieutenant, Sixth Precinct?” Hagstrom said. “Says hello. Says he’s a friend of yours.”
“That’s true.”
“In fact, you seem to have a lot of friends on this Department. Especially for a guy who’s been picked up half a dozen times.”
“Five.”
“Whatever. You’re Captain Maguire’s kid.”
I took out another cigarette, lit it, dropped the match in a Coke can Hagstrom fished from his trash. I made myself meet Hagstrom’s eyes. “That’s true too.”
“I never met him. Leopold did.” He tipped his head toward the man who’d been typing when I first came in and was typing still. Leopold looked up, surveyed me silently, went back to work.
“What I’m saying, Smith, I hear you’re okay.”
I finished my coffee. “I never heard that.”
That got a snort from Leopold. The third guy, off the phone now, looked up from the sports page of the Post, went back to it.
“This kid,” Hagstrom said. “Your nephew. He’s fifteen?”
“That’s right.”
“If I put him in the system now, he’ll have a hell of a time getting out.”
I nodded; I knew that was true.
“We’ll find your sister, but Child Services will have to check them out. Wherever they live now, they’ll contact the child protection agency there. There’ll be an investigation. He’ll be here, in Spofford, while that happens. Even if they send him home, they’ll start keeping records. He have brothers or sisters?”
“Two sisters. Younger.”
“Your sister and her husband—they abuse these kids? That why you don’t speak to them, maybe?”
The question was asked with no change of manner. Hagstrom sipped his coffee and waited for the answer.
“No,” I said.
“That the truth, Smith?”
“Yes.”
“So why’d the kid run away?”
“You heard him. He says he’s got something important to do. He also says he didn’t run away.”
“When I was his age, ‘something important’ only meant a girl. Or a football game.”
“Could mean the same to him.”
“Does he do drugs?”
“I haven’t seen him in a while. But he doesn’t look it.”
“True.”
Hagstrom studied me, making no effort to hide it. I finished my cigarette and shoved it in the Coke can. The cop with the paper flipped the pages. The other kept typing. Somewhere else a phone rang.
“I’ll release him to you if you want him.”
“All right.”
“I never did the paperwork. What he said, he didn’t take anything from that wino? It’s true. I got no reason to hold him, except he’s a green, underage kid who doesn’t even know how to pick his targets. A wino on Thirty-third Street, jeez. Will he tell you where his parents are?”
“I don’t know. But I can find them.”
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