Port City Black and White

by Gerry Boyle

  To his mama, who worked so hard for her children. To his papa, who worked so hard and loved his mama so much. To his brothers and sisters, scattered around the world. To his lovely Lily, “who was named just right for her, because she truly is a beautiful flower.” Lily beamed.

  And late in the night, the dishwashers just back from smoking a joint in the alley, two waitresses in the restroom snorting coke off the side of the washbasin, Winston held his glass up again. “Another toast,” he said. “To our friend Brandon Blake, young officer of the Portland Police Department. Brandon had a very close call tonight. It was on the news. But the Lord was watching over him and saved him from harm. So here is to the good Lord, and to Officer Brandon Blake.”

  “To Brandon,” Lily called.

  Everyone cheered. The stoned dishwashers drank to the Portland cop. After a moment, Lily and Winston raised their glasses for a private toast. And smiled.

  In the Saab, Brandon felt invisible. He drove up Commercial Street, the drizzle keeping the Old Port crowds down, guys still standing in bunches outside the pizza shop at the corner of Silver. Two groups were jawing at each other, one guy gesturing, “Come here and say that.” Brandon reached for his radio, thinking to tell the team somebody might want to slide that way. He caught himself. Put the radio down beside the Glock.

  It was eleven-forty on the Time and Temperature Building. Brandon swung up to Congress, letting couples cross, clumps of drunk college guys. He took a right on Congress, drove slowly away from the downtown, a group of homeless people settled down in the park by the courthouse. Driving up Munjoy Hill, he saw some young Somali guys leaning into a black SUV, one guy on the sidewalk watching out. Outside a tavern two women were kissing.

  He passed the firehouse, driving slowly, letting people cross. A guy on a bike slipped up beside the car on the right and Brandon reached for his gun. The guy—hard, gaunt face, looked familiar—glanced at him and their eyes locked, the guy looking like he was trying to place Brandon, too.

  Brandon continued on, took a right down Morning Street, drove the two blocks to Mia’s, recycling bins out on the sidewalks on a Tuesday night. Her windows on the third floor glowed yellow from the nightlights she kept on in every room—ever since Joel Fuller. There was a light on in the apartment on the first floor, the second floor empty and dark. Brandon drove by slowly, watching the mirrors. Headlights showed a block back and he watched them, then took a left toward the Prom. The car followed and he took a right, drove a half-block down, and swung onto the darkened access road to the park, the shore.

  There were cars parked here—people looking for drugs, sex?—and he slowed, watched the mirror. Headlights appeared. The same car? He continued down to the parking lot by the boat ramp, pulled between two trucks, and killed the lights. The car—a white Lexus SUV, New York tags—passed him and continued to the end of the lot, backed into a space, and parked.

  Brandon waited, then took the gun, got out of the car, and walked down the ramp road, then back. He walked in the shadows, approaching the Lexus from behind, thinking Brooklyn and Garden Posse. He heard a woman giggle, then the sound of kissing, whispering.

  The woman sighed. Brandon turned and walked slowly back to the car.

  An eye on the mirror out of the park, down the Prom. A right back onto Morning Street, another look at Mia’s, the yellow glow, the driveway empty. He parked down the block. Picked up his phone and called. A woman answered, a strong accent. Russian?

  “This is Brandon Blake, Nessa’s grandson. I’m just checking on her.”

  “Oh, yeah, Mr. Brandon. The police, he came by. I tell him, ‘Everything quiet here. All the old people, they sleeping like little babies.’ ”

  Brandon thanked her and rang off. Sat and looked out at the dark street, the wind ruffling the shade trees. He could go up, lock himself in, sit there with a beer and the Glock. He stayed in the car, checked the time, and texted Mia again. THINKING OF YOU. MAYBE TALK TOMORROW? He waited. No reply. He put the phone down. The police radio chirped, a traffic stop on Washington Avenue, the drug guys calling for the dog. The K-9 guy called back, the dog barking in the background.

  The phone buzzed.

  YEAH, TOMORROW.

  Brandon nearly smiled.

  He pulled away, took a left, a right, snaking his way through the Hill, the streets quiet. He continued down Congress, a few people walking toward him, making their way home from the bars. A girl walking alone, carrying her shoes, weaving down the sidewalk. Brandon slowed, thought of following to make sure she made it home safe. Then he saw another girl trotting after the barefoot one, saying, “Hey, wait up.”

  He drove on, the downtown quiet in the rain. A stocky black woman with a satchel, plodding along in green hospital scrubs. A kid wheeling a bike past the art school, the locked back wheel lifted off the ground. Brandon reached for his radio, put it back down.

  Skaters in the park at Congress Square, boards clattering. Brandon smelled weed, saw a kid lift a forty-sized paper bag to his mouth. A Mercedes stopped at the red light in front of him, Brandon seeing two heads, a couple arguing. The guy driving shouted something, then ran the light. Brandon waited for the green, continued on past the welfare hotels, the old guys standing out front like they were waiting for the bus, anything but going up to the room. He took a right by the American Legion, swung down to Deering Street, and cut across.

  A right, a left, and he was there. Drawn to the place like a stray dog making its way home.

  The building was quiet. Third floor dark. The Youngs’ place, too. Lights on at Cawley’s and the Ottos’, the living room but not the bedrooms. The Ottos sitting up, worrying, Samir and Edgard on the run, Fatima dead. How many times can your world come apart before it doesn’t go back together again?

  Brandon rolled slowly past, buzzed the window down. He looked up, his gaze falling just in time to lock eyes with a guy standing at the side of the building. Young, black. He spun around, a cell phone in his hand, sprinted down the alley into the darkness.

  Somebody sitting on the building, a True Sudanese Warrior? Brandon hit the gas, took a right at the corner, another right at Park. Pulled in and killed the lights and sat. Waited. People were coming down the block, a couple with bags, a couple pushing carts. Street pretty active for midnight They paused over the recycling bins, heads bobbing up and down like sandpipers on a beach. Cans clanked. A bottle fell to the bricks and smashed. A guy came out a driveway, talking on his phone.

  The kid from the house.

  Brandon got out, slipped the gun in his waistband, pulled his shirt over it. Started down the sidewalk. Saw a woman come around the corner at State, her cart rattling.

  Big Liz.

  Brandon stopped, stepped to the side in front of a big brick tenement. Big Liz approached, the wheels on the shopping cart squeaking, the cans and bottles rattling. She was muttering to herself, “. . . not going there . . . not me . . . no way, motherfucker.”

  Brandon stepped out. “Big Liz,” he said. “How you doing?”

  The old woman shrieked and pulled back, cans spilling to the sidewalk. “I’m not goin’ there, Blake. You can’t make me. You can’t make me.”

  She was backing up, the cart in front of her. Brandon started after her, saying, “It’s okay, Liz. It’s okay.” He grabbed the front of the cart and Liz stumbled, pulled herself back.

  “I don’t know nothin’, Blake,” she said.

  “Didn’t say you did, Big Liz,” Brandon said.

  “Not goin’ there, not anymore. You want to go, you go by yourself.”

  “Go where?”

  She pushed the cart toward him, tried to wrestle it around. “It isn’t my fault he’s burnin’, Blake,” Big Liz said. “The cellar people, they’re mean bastards.”

  Brandon held the cart. “Who’s burning? Who is it, Big Liz?”

  “The baby. He’s burnin’, but I can’t do nothin’. I ain’t goin’ back there. Sorry. I shouldn’ta looked. Shouldn’ta listened. They know you kno
w, they drag you down, Blake.”

  “You aren’t going back where, Big Liz?”

  “What?” she said.

  “Where? Where are you not going back to?”

  Big Liz yanked the cart back, moved it to the right to pass. “To the hell hole,” she said. “To the hell hole where the baby’s burnin’.”

  “I’ll go, Big Liz,” Brandon said. “Where is it?”

  “You know, Blake,” Big Liz said. “You don’t need me to tell you.”

  “What do I know?”

  “They sucked the baby down. They can do that, with their big suckin’ hell machines.”

  “They sucked it right out of the apartment?” Brandon said.

  “And under the ground, Blake.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Burnin’, Blake.”

  “Burning where, Big Liz? Can you show me?”

  Big Liz yanked the cart away, her eyes narrowed. “It’s bottle night. You know I don’t have time for this talkin’ shit.”

  Brandon fell away. Turned back up toward the car, the kid from 317, now long gone. He looked at his phone. It was 12:15. Ten-fifteen in Minneapolis. He walked back to the car, slung himself into the seat. Started a text and then stopped. Called. The phone rang. Again. Again. He was about to put it aside when there was a rattle, a bump. Mia’s voice. Scratchy. A bad connection.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi,” Brandon said. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He read her tone. No anger, maybe some sadness.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m doing fine.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brandon said.

  “It’s okay. Me, too.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

  “Sure, I do,” Mia said. “I’ve been thinking. I think I’ve been trying to make you into something you’re not.”

  “Well, maybe the something I am wasn’t so good. I don’t blame you.”

  “But I do love you, Brandon,” Mia said. “I just had to figure that out, I guess. That I do want to be with you.”

  She’d started to cry.

  “But not now. They haven’t caught the guy—and I think maybe it could be somebody from New York, those posse guys down there, after you saw the guys they sent up.”

  “What, Brandon?” Mia said. “I couldn’t hear all of that.”

  “It’s still not good here.”

  “I want to come back,” Mia said.

  “When?’

  “Soon.”

  “I don’t know,” Brandon said, the words eaten up by the static.

  “We’ll figure things out,” Mia said. “We’ll find a way.”

  “How?”

  “We just will,” Mia said, the phone crackling. “We just have to.”

  “I love you, you know,’ Brandon said.

  “I do—.” More static. “—you. That’ll be enough, right?”

  “What?”

  The call broke off. Mia was gone. Brandon sat for a moment, then put the phone down and looked out at the dark street, the darker park, and picked up his gun.

  Chooch got up from her chair because she felt like her butt was going to sleep. That and phlebitis. She’d read that people who sit for more than two hours straight have a 40 percent higher chance of developing phlebitis—blood clots. The blood clots can move to the brain and cause all sorts of trouble. Like death. She’d told Johnny, the other dispatcher who worked ten to six, but Johnny said he didn’t believe all that crap on television, said they just wanted to sell you drugs.

  But Chooch got up anyway, walked out of the darkened dispatch room, down the hall. Did some knee bends. Looked at the bulletin board. Guns for sale. Lieutenant’s kid wanting to mow your lawn. One of the secretaries starting a cycling club. A clerk from City Hall advertising “a business opportunity” that everyone knew was Amway.

  Nothing new.

  Chooch had a liter of Diet Coke in the fridge, way cheaper than the Big Gulp from 7-Eleven. She got the soda, some ice from the freezer, refilled her big plastic jug with the straw sticking out.

  She headed back, hoping for a quiet rest of the night. So far, it had been one thing after another. A schizophrenic guy who said there was a burglar in his apartment with a gun, only they didn’t know he was ill until they got there, six units, Christiansen and his dog, SWAT getting ready. All that firepower and they find the guy sitting in bed with his fingers in his ears, telling the cops to stop making so much noise.

  Trouble with people coming and going in the city so much, you didn’t know who was who, who was wacked out and who was just a criminal. But that was the population out there, the reality you had to deal with.

  “There but for the grace of God,” Chooch said, arranging her soda, her pad, a plastic bag of green grapes. Antioxidants. Johnny got up to go to the restroom, and Chooch was about to sit when she heard the fax machine start to spew.

  Lately it had been like spam: ads for uniform supply companies, law enforcement conferences, the pages filling the tray, spilling onto the floor.

  “What a waste of trees,” Chooch said, and walked over, took the sheaf of paper from the machine.

  It was from a cruise line—so they had this number now? What? Send a boatload of cops down to Montego Bay, blow all that OT money, come back broke and hungover?

  Chooch crumpled the papers, started to fling them into the trash can. Glanced down. Saw the name, INVESTIGATOR BRANDON BLAKE, PORTLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT. Investigator? These guys needed a better list. Chooch looked more closely.

  It was from a public relations assistant named Alicia, Mermaid Cruise Lines, West Palm Beach, Florida.

  Dear Investigator Blake:

  Here is the information you requested regarding the passenger and crew list for the Ocean Princess . . .

  Investigator Blake? The information he requested? “Freakin’ Blake,” Chooch said. “How does such a quiet guy manage to stir up so much shit?”

  She took the papers down to the mailroom, started to stick them in Blake’s mailbox. Stopped. Looked down at them. Lists of names. Passengers on a ship. Crew, too. Passengers from all over the country, crew from all over the world. Lots of Filipinos. One of those places people went off to work, sent money home. Good for them, busting their butts, Chooch thought, walking back down the corridor with the papers still in her hand. She thought of her father, came to America from Mexico, hardest working, most generous guy she’d ever known, put his kids through college, half his family at home, too. People they dealt with now, half of them never worked a day in their life. Reason they got in so much trouble—too much time on their hands. Devil’s workshop and all that. Drugs, drinking, fighting.

  She was back at her desk, the phone going before she sat down, Johnny on another call. Chooch put the papers down, made a mental note to call Blake in the morning before she left. Who knew when he’d be in. She reached for the headphones, heard Johnny beat her to it: “Portland Police Department, may I help you?”

  Chooch sipped her Diet Coke. Picked up Blake’s stuff again. The passenger list was on top, alphabetical. Ocean Princess. People from Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina. She ran a pencil down the column, saw a few Mainers. Why would you go on a cruise to Maine if you were from Maine? Chooch said to herself. Johnny was still on the call, some lady who wanted her drunken son removed from the house.

  The ships went to Canada, too, but still. If she went on a cruise, she was going to the Caribbean. Or Greece. She’d seen pictures of the Greek Isles.

  “What ocean is in Greece, Johnny?” Chooch said when he was off the call.

  “I don’t know. The Mediterranean?” Johnny said.

  “I was thinking the Aegean,” Chooch said.

  “Maybe there’s two.”

  Another call; Johnny picked up. Chooch was picturing clear blue water, blue as mouthwash. White sand beaches, all the buildings painted white, too. Who goes on a cruise to St. John, freakin’ New Brunswick?

 
She picked the Mainers out. Kennebunk. Brunswick. Retired people; probably their kids gave them a cruise for their anniversary. “Go for a boat ride, eat a lot of food, go to the shows. Good times,” Chooch said aloud.

  Hey. Here was one from Portland. What, get off the ship down on Commercial Street, walk up to the house? Now that made no sense. Well, fools and their money. From the Eastern Prom, too. Could see her house from the ship.

  Lily Lawrence. Now, why was that name so familiar?

  Chooch typed it in. Up it came. Lily G. Lawrence, twenty-eight. Hey, the shooter in that Eastern Prom home invasion. There was a connection to Blake. Something with his girlfriend?

  “Oh, Brandon,” Chooch said, picturing it now. The friend wants to find an address for the cute guy in the next cabin. Says to Brandon, You’re a cop? Can’t you find that out? To which Brandon is supposed to say, Sorry, no can do. Instead . . .

  Chooch turned the papers over. “Gonna have to have a talk with that boy,” she said. “If it isn’t too late.”

  Twelve-forty, the rain stopped, the city still dripping. Brandon was on Park Street, sitting in the car. A woman walked by—short white skirt, heels, sodden top, red hair wet and straggly—and then stopped. Fiddled in her bag and walked back. She leaned down, tapped on the passenger window.

  Brandon opened it, and she leaned her head in, breasts dangling, peering at him with hollow junkie eyes. Brandon thought of Chantelle as the woman said, “Hey. Wanna party?”

  And then she saw the gun, stuck between the seat and the console. She said, “Whoa,” and pulled back.

  “Portland PD,” Brandon said.

  “Fuck,” the woman said.

  “I’m off duty,” Brandon said.

  “Oh,” the woman said, leaning in again, flashing a smile, brown teeth. “So you wanna—”