by Julia Dahl
“Does he have a lawyer coming?” Saul asked.
“He hasn’t asked for one.”
He had, of course. They’d both heard it. But Saul was following Olivetti’s lead. And his son was waiting.
* * *
The apartment Saul once shared with his wife and son was just off New Utrect Avenue in Borough Park. The building was relatively new and the construction astonishingly shoddy. The concrete balconies jutting from the living rooms of every other unit were declared unsafe within six months; they were poured improperly and had begun to crack. Kitchen cabinets and the Formica counters laid atop them didn’t meet at right angles; the prominently advertised individual laundry hookups ended up being nonfunctional because of improper plumbing; and paper-thin walls made an already gossip-prone community increasingly wary of—and entertained by—their neighbors. Saul hated the place the moment they moved in. Fraidy used the fact that the families on either side of them could hear every argument to try to shame him back into observance. During their arguments she took to addressing their neighbors: “Batya Levine, do you hear this? My husband has brought a radio into our home! A radio! He does not care what sort of poison goes into my poor Binyamin’s ears!” Saul brought the radio home to break the silence of the apartment. He tuned it to the public station after his wife and son had gone to bed. He closed his eyes and listened to the wordless music—jazz, he knew now—and imagined himself with other people, people so full of life that they could blow into an object and make it sing. People so in sync with one another that they could create something together out of nothing at all. Their hearts, he felt, must be connected by some powerful force. Was it the music? Or was it something else and music came from that? Saul had never been in sync with anyone. He had only recently even considered what lived inside his own heart, and he certainly never imagined that anyone else could know what he was discovering there.
He felt like a prowler each time he visited Fraidy. The men and women who had been his friends, had attended his wedding and his son’s bris, hurried past as if they did not know him. He understood, to an extent: if they were seen talking to him they, too, might be the subject of rumors. It was simply the way of the community. But knowing it was the way did nothing to dull the resentment and despair he felt when someone he once shared hours of conversation with no longer acknowledged him on the street. At the mailboxes just inside the downstairs entrance, two men—Aron Finkel and Yossi Gold—stood chatting. They saw him approach the glass door. It was nearly midnight; if Binyamin had fallen asleep, the bell would wake him. (Another problem with the building: the buzzers were firehouse-loud, announcing a friendly visit with a heart-stopping blast.) Saul put his hand up and waved; he had known these men his entire life. But they turned their backs on him.
Fraidy buzzed him in. She did not greet him at the apartment door, just left it ajar. Binyamin was sitting at their kitchen table, dressed in his pajamas. The boy had never been particularly hearty; he was born six weeks premature, with a tiny hole in his kidney that kept him in the hospital for a month. But Saul could not deny the clear effect that the breakup of his family had on his ten-year-old son. Binyamin was underweight, with the posture of an old woman and the eyes of an old man. He barely looked up when his father entered the room. Fraidy, too, had changed physically since Saul left their home three years ago. She was uglier, her face pinched. She stood in front of the refrigerator, arms crossed over her chest, the heel of her slipper knocking against the linoleum floor. He imagined the fury inside her exploding. Resentments and disappointments and fears spewed across the room, turning to monsters in the oxygen. Growing large enough to devour them all.
“Binyamin has something he wants to tell you.”
Saul looked at the boy.
“Binyamin?” said Saul. He pulled out a chair and sat, leaned toward his son, but the boy said nothing. “Would you like to talk in your bedroom?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Fraidy…”
“Rabbi Zelman warned me not to let you alone with him.”
“What…?”
“I will give you your divorce.”
“Fraidy, I don’t think this is the right time.…”
She picked up a folder from the kitchen counter and tossed it in front of him.
“Everything is signed. Just like you wanted.”
“Binyamin, would you please go to your bedroom.”
“You cannot tell him what to do! You are not my husband and you are not his father. No more.”
Saul put his hand on his son’s back, and his son flinched. It had been months since Saul wept over his estrangement from Binyamin. He missed everything about the boy. The way he smelled, the dirt under his fingernails, the sound of his sneeze. When Binyamin was an infant, Saul held him constantly. For weeks after he came home from the hospital, he would only fall asleep when he was lying on his father’s chest. Saul used to close his eyes and smile, enjoying the weight of the tiny body pressed against his heart. He kissed the top of his head, inhaled, and thanked Hashem for the opportunity to learn how to love. Now the mere touch of his hand frightened Binyamin. It didn’t matter that the source of the fear was not Saul but Fraidy, and Rabbi Zelman, and all the neighbors. All that mattered was that his boy felt unsafe around him. Was it cruel to force him to endure that?
“Tell him, Binyamin,” said Fraidy. “Tell him what you told me.”
“I don’t want to see you anymore,” he whispered.
What was the good of asking him to explain? Or asking if he was certain? Saul’s heart was already so broken that he barely felt the blow. For now, he decided, it was best to leave it alone. The boy did not need to be pressured; certainly not this late at night. There was time, he thought. Time enough to show his son he was a good man, even if he was no longer religious.
CHAPTER TEN
I spend most of Tuesday standing outside a fancy TriBeCa apartment building waiting for a woman TMZ claims is the mistress of a movie mogul whose wife is pregnant with their third child. She never comes outside (smart woman), and when my shift is over I hop on the L train to Bushwick and Henrietta Eubanks’ last address. It’s a three-story building with ugly blue vinyl siding and six buzzers. I press #1 and after a moment, the door buzzes open. I push into the tiny hallway and a mop-haired kid about my age peeks his head out.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m looking for someone who used to live here a long time ago. In the nineties.”
“Ask Ronald,” says the kid. “He’s been here forever. If he’s not sitting out front he’s at the bar on the corner. Maria’s.”
“Thanks,” I say.
The door to Maria’s is propped open. It is gratuitiously dark inside and the bartender sports the most impressive Mohawk I have ever seen: easily eight inches high, dyed pink with snow-white tips. It looks more like concrete, or maybe papier-mâché, than hair. I can’t imagine how she sleeps. At the bar are a black man and two Latino women, all of whom are roughly fifty—emphasis on the rough. The jukebox is low, and instead of conversation, the patrons appear deeply engaged in watching NY1—muted, but with closed captioning—on the TV above the bar.
I slide into a barstool and the bartender comes over.
“Just a Bud Light,” I say.
She bends down and slides open a cooler, twists off the cap, and sets the bottle in front of me.
“I’m looking for someone named Ronald,” I say. “Do you know him?”
“Who’s asking?” says the man at the bar.
“Ronald?” I ask. He nods. “My name’s Rebekah. I’m a reporter for the Trib. I’m looking for a woman who lived here back in the early nineties. Henrietta Eubanks. Any chance you remember her?”
“Hunny Eubanks? Damn. I ain’t heard that name in forever. She long gone.”
“Yeah?”
“Ten years at least. Actually, shit. More like fifteen. She was gone before 9/11. Yeah, I’m sure she was.”
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
&nb
sp; “Nope.”
“You’re not still in touch?”
He shakes his head. “We was neighbors but not really friends. We came up together. Same year in school. She had it tough. I guess we all did. We was both on the streets by sixteen.”
“On the streets?”
“Up to no good. I did stick-ups. She was trickin’. Rock was turning folks into zombies. We was all just living one hit to the next. And AIDS. Shit. I got clean in prison.” He lifts up his glass. “Club soda. She’ll tell you.”
The bartender nods. There is a tattoo of a tiger on the left side of her shaved head.
“I just like her company so much.” Ronald chuckles, then coughs. The cough doesn’t sound healthy. “So what you want Hunny for?”
“She was a witness in a murder case back in 1992. In Crown Heights.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Nah, but that don’t mean nothing. Hunny had her life and I had mine. We was all keeping our secrets as best we could.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Overnight
July 5–6, 1992
Bushwick, Brooklyn
He came to her at strange times. She wasn’t sure how he made his living, only that it seemed like some kind of hustle. Definitely not a nine-to-five. Once he hinted that he was paid to hurt people. He said he ran with a gang, but it wasn’t one she knew about.
Gina thought he was full of shit. But Gina didn’t know him like Hunny did.
She probably should have guessed he’d be waiting for her when she arrived home from the precinct. Gina was on the street in front of their building, pacing.
“I don’t like how he just comes up when you’re not here,” she said. The glue holding Gina’s magenta hairpiece in place was losing its grip on her forehead, the adhesive melting in the heat.
“You smoke it?” asked Hunny.
“I said I’d wait! But I ain’t waiting all night.”
“Just give me a couple minutes,” she said. “An hour most.”
“Fuck, Hunny.”
He was standing at the window upstairs, his hands behind his back. He turned when she entered but did not speak.
“I done what you said,” she told him.
“Good.”
He pulled two fifty-dollar bills out of his pocket and gave them to her. His hands were steady; his gaze direct.
“You said a thousand.”
“After they make an arrest.”
She didn’t argue. He left and Gina came back up.
“You get the money?”
Hunny didn’t want to talk about it.
* * *
Two uniforms came for her early the next morning, just as she was coming down, getting ready to take a cold shower and maybe find some breakfast. The bell rang and when she went to the window she saw the cruiser. She put on her wig and went downstairs.
“Ms. Eubanks?” asked the young officer. He was blond with a military haircut. Sunglasses like the California motorcycle cops on TV. “We need to bring you down to the precinct to look at some photos.”
She nodded and the second officer opened the back door to the cruiser.
“Your chariot, my lady,” said sunglasses.
His partner snickered.
When they arrived at the precinct, sunglasses pointed to the same bench where she’d sat the evening before and told her to wait. There was a copy of the Trib at the far end, and she scooted down to pick it up. On page three there was a photo of a couple and the headline “Massacred! Mom, Dad, Toddler Murdered in Bed.” The black letters swelled. She squinted her eyes and tried to focus. The first floor of a house on Troy Avenue. Neighbors thought the gunshots were firecrackers. The victims were church folk who took in foster kids. How was he mixed up in this?
“Henrietta Eubanks?”
She looked up. The newspaper slid off her lap. The cop standing over her bent to pick it up. It wasn’t the Jewish cop who interviewed her last night. This one was Italian, maybe. Hair on his knuckles and a gold cross around his neck. He smiled at her. The Jewish cop didn’t smile.
“Thanks for coming in,” he said. “Come on back.”
She followed him toward the interview rooms, but instead of talking inside one of the boxes, the cop motioned for her to sit in a chair next to a desk in the big open room.
“Can I get you something while you wait?”
“Dr Pepper?”
He disappeared for a minute, returned with a can of Dr Pepper. She opened it and sipped. The woman in the newspaper photo was beautiful. Like a movie star.
“We’re gonna take you into a room, and you’ll see a group of men. You tell us which one you saw running out of the house last night. That’s it. Easy as pie.”
She nodded.
“You know it was real brave of you to come in and say what you saw,” he said. “I don’t know if my colleague, Officer Katz, adequately related that to you. He’s new. But I’ve been around a while. I get the sense you been around, too. Am I right?”
She sipped.
“I know it wasn’t easy for you to walk in here. I know some cops make life real hard for girls like you. I want you to know I think that’s bullshit. Everybody gotta make a living, am I right? No shame in that. I tell you what, the cops I know go hardest at working girls, they’re the same ones cruising ’round the point after shift. Shit, I know I don’t have to tell you. But listen, I want you to know, we take care of people here at the 77. You help us, we help you. That goes from here on. You’re in a jam, you call me. You got information, we got money for that. People like you, people willing to come forward, you are going to keep this community from destroying itself. Not the politicians. Not the cops, even. People like you.”
He was a real talker. And she didn’t quite know what to make of his speech. He was trying to convince her of something, that much she could see. But what? Maybe he was working up to it. Maybe he was about to tell her he knew she wasn’t anywhere near Troy Avenue the night before last. He leaned forward, looked at her hard. She waited, ready with a story about watching the fireworks from the roof of a friend of a friend’s apartment building. But he didn’t ask anything. He just tapped his palm on the desk.
“You need anything else?”
She shook her head.
“All right, then. Just hang tight.”
She finished her soda and watched the other cops move in and out of the room, helping themselves to coffee and donuts from a station in the corner, click-clicking on typewriters, ignoring her entirely.
The Italian cop came back and asked her to follow him into a little hallway with a window that looked into another room. After a minute, the men walked in, each carrying a number. She knew one by sight. Quentin Something. He used to hang in Williamsburg, but she hadn’t seen him in a while. He didn’t ever seem like a killer. She looked at them all. Number four was the kid she’d seen the detectives bring in in cuffs last night. Maybe he was involved in some way. Made sense.
“Number four,” she said. “That’s him.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Morning
July 6, 1992
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
After the lineup, DeShawn asked to use the bathroom, but the Italian cop told him to sit in the interview room again and wait. The clock on the wall said it was 10:00 A.M. He’d been in the precinct almost fifteen hours. His head ached. It felt as though the nerves behind his eyes were exploding. They shot pain into his neck, his ears, his jaw. If they didn’t let him go soon he was gonna piss himself. The night before last, with Toya, felt like weeks ago. He had barely slept then, either, but that happy exhaustion was animating. When they’d emerged together from Michael’s building into the late-morning sun and walked the three blocks to Lou’s Diner for pancakes, DeShawn felt ready to run a marathon. Even hours later, he was playing great when the cops yelled for him. Now that energy was gone entirely. He wanted to put his head on his arms and fall asleep for a day—two days. They still hadn’t said why he
was even in this windowless hole.
Another hour went by. And then two. He hadn’t eaten in a whole day. Wild, empty waves of nausea rolled through him. He squeezed his eyes shut and crossed his arms over his stomach. When the feeling passed he opened his eyes, but the darkness was still there, in blotches popping against the air. He’d seen enough TV to know the mirror opposite him was a window. Was someone watching? And what was that lineup all about?
Finally the door opened and the Italian cop entered the room.
“I want to call my dad,” said DeShawn.
The cop chuckled. “Your dad?”
“Yeah. I know my rights. I’m a minor.”
“I think we both know your dad isn’t gonna be able to help you, DeShawn.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did he hit you?”
“What?”
“If he hit you, or touched you. He’s not your biological dad, right? Maybe he was coming into your room at night. Maybe you couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe he started doing it to your brother.”
“What are you talking about? Malcolm didn’t touch me! I want to call him. I know I get a phone call.”
“You get a phone call when you get to jail, son.”
DeShawn blinked. He put the heel of his hand into his right eye and pressed hard.
“I gotta use the bathroom.”
“Too bad,” said the cop. “So what was it, then?”
“What was what?”
“What pissed you off so bad? Did they threaten to kick you out?”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“Why’d you shoot them, DeShawn!”
Suddenly the cop was screaming at him. Standing up, spitting. He slapped his hands on the table and DeShawn jumped in his chair. His bladder gave way. Warm then cold down his leg, soaking his shorts. He’d peed the bed until he was in junior high. Sabrina said it was normal for someone who had been through trauma, but it embarrassed him. Made him remember that they weren’t blood and that she and Malcolm could let him go anytime they wanted. But they never did let him go, and Sabrina saw that it pained him to bother her at night. She put extra sheets in his closet so he could change them himself.
