Freedomland

by Richard Price

  People laughed a little, wary, Lorenzo wincing for them, for what he was about to do to them.

  One of the cops yawned audibly.

  “If, if I played hookey or smoked me a cigarette, I had fifty mothers to yank my ear. Old school!” He was still pacing. “Old school! Mother Barrett—” Then he stopped, making himself laugh like he had lost his train of reproach. “Mother Barrett, one time, when I was a kid? I stole some chocolate sprinkles from the Chilly Willy truck. You remember that truck came around in the summertime?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Yes-s.”

  Jesse Haus of the Register quietly collected her stuff and crouch-walked up the aisle to the exit. Lorenzo was slightly stung by the bad review—he was just getting started.

  “The Chilly Willy truck,” he repeated, having momentarily lost his place. “Had this, like, a, a service tray hanging out the side, had all the toppings in it, the sprinkles, chocolate, blue, green, rainbow, dip your ice cream cone in there, kids’ eyes gettin’ all, you know.” Lorenzo bugged his eyes, licked his lips.

  The laughing came easier now. Even a couple of the housing cops were smiling, heads turned to the windows.

  “One time, in what I call my pre-po-lice days, I couldn’t help it, I just got so greedy crazy I just, just snatched me a fistful, two fistfuls. The hell with the ice cream cone!”

  Lorenzo acted it out, and people were throwing back their heads, laughing at the ceiling. Miss Bankhead was still rocking, a hand over her mouth, the burden of her knowledge making her oblivious to the show.

  “Man, I just run like the devil, got all up behind One Building.” Lorenzo thought of those damn knuckleheads out there. “Chilly Willy man didn’t even know what hit him. I turn around, gettin’ ready to scarf me a mouthful…” Lorenzo was doing Cosby now, turning, then freezing, his eyes popping with fear, staring up at some invisible gigantic adult. “Turn around, there’s ol’ Mother Barrett give me that eye. You remember that eye she had? Kind of, kind of freeze you in your tracks.”

  “Tell it!”

  “That old lady, she don’t even ask for my side of the story, don’t even let me prepare a lie for myself. She gave me a whack on my behind? I swear, people on the benches was pickin’ sprinkles out their hair for a solid week! That lady done propelled me home that day!”

  People were jerking back and forth in their folding chairs as if someone had them by the scruffs of their necks—hissing with glee, backhanding one another on the arms, Lorenzo laughing with them, one of the cops looking right at him now, grinning like, “OK, you win.”

  “Old school!” he bellowed amiably, waiting a beat for them to come down and then saying in that same pleasant tone: “Yeah, ol’ Mother Barrett. You know when I got called into her apartment this time last year? There was so much blood on the floor that I slipped and fell flat on my back. Yeah.”

  Lorenzo smiled at his sneakers. The air had gone dead and heavy now.

  “She had been shot so many times and at such close range—” And then he just stopped himself, thinking, They got the message. Just let them know you’re here.

  “And don’t tell me the police ain’t doin’ their job. We are the police in our area.” He thrust a finger at the cops in the rear. “They are not here twenty-four hours a day. We are. We got to stand for something. We got to walk upright. If somebody’s doing wrong, they’re doing wrong and we got to stand up. In our homes, in our families, in our hallways, our buildings, our courtyards, and our projects—we, we are the police.”

  A patrol radio crackled again back at the rear wall.

  “Yes-s,” came forth the disembodied response.

  “We lost two in one day. Two beautiful old folks, watched over all of us, year in, year out.”

  Lorenzo prowled the stage, shifting his Glock out from under his gut.

  “There are people in these houses that live in their windowsills.” He was speaking softly now. “The world’s biggest TV, right? That’s what you call it, and you know who you are. I ain’t gonna point you out by name.” He shifted his gun again, hitched up his jeans, and smiled down at the crowd. “People, I just might be this far away from a lockup, and that little bit you got for me might be all that I need.

  “You know me. I’m here twenty-four, seven. All it takes is a phone call.” He scanned the beat-down faces, trying to make eye contact with the windowsill crew—all the seniors living in the two lowest floors of Three Building, the area designated for the elderly by Housing and known by the creepers as the Lamb Pen.

  “All it takes is a phone call.” Lorenzo avoided looking at the Barretts’ old neighbor Miss Bankhead, gracing the room with a respectful half bow instead. “And I thank you for having the courage to come to this here meeting. Allah, Jesus, Jehovah, or Muhammad, God bless each and every one of you.”

  As the rally broke up, Lorenzo lingered in the community room small-talking, looking for that furtive I-got-something-for-you-but-not-here eye, slowly working his way to the exit, people saying “I hope you get him” and other useless shit.

  He tracked Miss Bankhead as she toddled from port to starboard on her three-hundred-pound arthritic bulk, pacing himself through the hugs and tears so that he could catch her outside without looking too obvious about it, but one of the housing cops snagged his arm.

  “Yo, Big Daddy, you hear about your boy there, Supreme?”

  Lorenzo stopped, half smiling: Your boy. “Yeah, he got himself locked up again.”

  “Big time, Mo,” the cop, Eight-Ball Iovakas, said. He went up on tiptoe to let another heavy woman exit between them.

  Eight-Ball’s radio crackled.

  “East 202.” The dispatcher’s call-out was as flat as a dead man’s EKG.

  “Two-oh-two. Go,” the responding unit answered in kind. Lorenzo and Eight-Ball were barely listening in.

  “Report of a bowling ball dropped from the roof of 15 Weebawken, Roosevelt Houses. Please respond.”

  Eight-Ball turned the volume down. “I heard Supreme just gave it up, like, ‘Whoop, they it is.’”

  “I heard that too,” Lorenzo said distractedly, still trolling the crowd for eye contact. The room was lined with children’s self-portraits from the day-care program, big crude faces in poster paint on oak tag, each one entitled, I AM SOMEONE.

  “So how’s this going here?” Eight-Ball nodded to the enlarged memorial photos, now being carried out under the arm of a maintenance worker.

  Lorenzo shrugged. “People scared. You know how it is.” He started to peel off, eager to catch Miss Bankhead, but Eight-Ball’s radio came to life again.

  “South 111.”

  “One-eleven. Go.”

  “One-eleven, please respond to medical center emergency room. See female vic of a possible carjack at that location.” Both of them were eavesdropping more intently this time, since South District was their territory.

  Lorenzo peeked at his watch: ten-fifteen, batter up, Bump Rosen sitting at home now watching his kid play a preteen homicidal skinhead on prime-time TV. Lorenzo’s beeper went off, as if to confirm the favor swap. The carjack would be his once the uniforms took the preliminary report.

  “Awright, boss.” He tilted in the direction of the exit, but Eight-Ball touched his arm again.

  “Lorenzo.” Eight-Ball nodded toward the cleric, who at the moment was talking to the assistant on-site housing manager. “You better tell Abdool Ben Fazool over there to go easy on this ‘Raise me a army’ bullshit. Somebody might believe him.”

  “Tell him yourself.” Lorenzo smiled thinly, then moved off, looking for Miss Bankhead. But she was nowhere to be found.

  As he pulled the Crown Victoria out of his parking spot, Lorenzo’s headlights caught a tall woman clutching an armload of dry cleaning. She was standing in the path of his car, rocking slightly from foot to foot.

  Lorenzo rolled up alongside her, laughing. “Hey, baby, what you doin’ in the middle of the street? I run you down you ain’t gettin’ dime one off me. I
’m indemnified.”

  “So I’ll sue the city,” she said, and moved closer to the car door. Ruth Raymond was a forever tenant, born in the Armstrong Houses some thirty-five years ago.

  On a sultry night like this one, the plastic sheathing over the folded clothes adhered to her bare arm like cling wrap. Lorenzo wondered where she got ahold of dry cleaning after ten in the evening.

  “I like what you said in there, Daddy.” Ruth’s face was like putty. She had been drinking heavily since her son died six months ago, shot for his shearling parka. “You know who you should talk to? Miss Bankhead. You know that lady knows something.”

  “I believe she does.”

  “You know she’s been down to North Carolina must be like nine or ten times in the last year—just going up and back on the bus, as heavy and old as she is? I swear, Big Daddy, something’s eating her to death. She can’t even sit still in her own living room, watch TV no more.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “All units wanted for carjacking in the South District. Nineteen ninety-one Toyota Camry, four-door, color beige, New Jersey reg 665 Gamma Delta. Roger.”

  Lorenzo lowered the volume on his radio.

  “Yeah, I heard that she was the first one walked in the apartment, found the bodies,” Ruth said, seeming to retreat slightly from the coconut-scent deodorizer hanging from his rearview “Yeah, she was.” He nodded solemnly.

  “Must of put the fear of God in her, seeing that,” Ruth said, getting teary now.

  “Must’ve.”

  “She knows something, Daddy.” Ruth grabbed his forearm. “Please make her say it.”

  “I’m tryin’.”

  He had gone as far as grabbing up Miss Bankhead’s grandson on an old unexecuted warrant, offering to swap the kid’s freedom for her information, but even the kid had said it—“My grandmother gonna take that to her grave”—forcing Lorenzo to go through with the arrest.

  “All units, further information on South District carjack. Vehicle occupied by black male, five foot ten to six feet tall, shaved head. Last seen driving west on Hurley.”

  “How ’bout you, Mommy? You got anything to help me out with?”

  Ruth looked right, left, then pressed her dry cleaning up against the driver’s door.

  “Give me a card,” she said, low and urgent.

  He produced one from his cup caddy, holding it upright in his lap. Ruth reached in through his open window, crumpled the card in her fist like tissue paper, and slid it under the dry cleaning, Lorenzo thinking that it must be the fiftieth card he’d given to this woman since her son died.

  “I’ll call you, all right?” Ruth said out the side of her mouth, eyeing the buildings.

  He nodded, not holding his breath over this announcement. “Ruth, you get yourself some sleep. You look tired.” Then he slowly rolled off.

  “Sleep, that’s all I do,” she called after him. Then, louder, “And tell Housing to get them damn refrigerators out of the Bowl. They give me the creeps.”

  Lorenzo drove to the emergency room musing on the call: carjack, female victim, Hurley Street. It was an unlikely crime for the location, a potholed cul-de-sac at the bottom of the Armstrong hill, a broad strip of asphalt canyoned between the high-rises climbing to the east and a sloped Conrail retaining wall to the west, ending in a grubby pocket park that straddled the city line with neighboring Gannon. Hurley was more of a half-assed parking lot for the tenants than a bona fide street. The combination of murky desolation and a spongy borderline made it a good dope spot and, by extension, no place for a violent crime that would only draw police and shut down business.

  Lorenzo entered the ambulance bay of the medical center with a wave to the guard, the grinning and glad-handing starting immediately. Everybody knew Lorenzo “Big Daddy” Council in this city, and vice versa. He pointed and laughed at the personnel behind the nurses’ station, greeting six people at once while scanning the room for Penny Zito, the triage nurse, and shaking hands with the goateed guard, a kid he had once arrested for possession with intent. He had secured this job for him when the kid came back out.

  Given Lorenzo’s effusive and tireless presence, his social ability to bat from either side of the plate, it was inevitable that there existed word, mostly pie-in-the-sky 4:00 A.M. diner talk, that if his buddy Michael Hooks, director of the Urban Corps, made a successful run for mayor, Big Daddy Council could become the new police commissioner.

  “Mister, Mister,” Lorenzo said, beaming down at the guard, taking in the pierced nostril, the stumpy ponytail. “How you doin’?”

  “Hey, you know, one day at a time, right?” The kid almost blushed with pleasure.

  “I hear you,” he responded, in an Amen singsong.

  Penny Zito entered the hall from the waiting room, most likely returning from an outdoors cigarette break. Lorenzo sought her eyes over the guard’s head, looking for a quick eyeball read on the carjack victim: Bullshit or for real.

  Penny coughed loose and crackly into her fist, shrugging in response to Lorenzo’s raised chin: Tough call. She was a good reader who could give him an accurate thumbs down for a whacked-out lush screaming bloody murder or cock her head toward the examination room, meaning, “You better get in there.”

  “How you been, Pen?” he called out loudly, already laughing in anticipation of whatever she would say—not that she was so funny but because that’s the way Lorenzo was. “Number one Nana, huh?”

  “I’m telling you…” She coughed in her fist again, the breakup sounding like radio static.

  “Yeah, I hear you. Where’s she at?”

  “In twenty-three, with the most dangerous man on earth.”

  He laughed hard, staggering forward as if the wisecrack had whacked him in the small of his back. “Che Guevara, huh?”

  “What?” the question came from right behind him, like a throw-down challenge. Lorenzo wheeled around.

  “I said put out the smoke,” the security guard snapped, up on tiptoe, going in the face of a black man with a shaved head, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

  The guy glared one-eyed through the ascending drift of his own smoke at the much shorter guard. “Get the fuck out my goddamn face.” He would have smacked the kid down if it hadn’t been for the infant lying in his arms. “The fuck is wrong with you,” he said, the squinted eye narrowing, his other one a reddening homicide beam.

  Lorenzo thought the baby might be dead.

  “Put out the smoke,” the guard snapped again, reverting to jail head—inching up closer, his ear to his shoulder, doing the D-Town matador dance.

  Lorenzo leaned in between them, crooning “Army, Army,” carefully taking the cigarette from between the guy’s lips while blocking out the guard with his body. Army reared back, ready to deal, baby or no, until he saw who it was.

  “Lorenzo!” Army gestured with his chin to the baby girl in his arms, then to the guard. “Get this Swiss Navy nigger out my face before he ends up in one a these beds here.”

  The guard opened his mouth, but Lorenzo gave him a look: I got it covered. He put a hand to Army’s shoulder and eased him around until he was facing the nurses’ station.

  “She all right?” Lorenzo peered down at the infant swaddled in a yellow bath towel, her tiny heart-shaped face exuding an unnerving stillness, nothing akin to natural sleep.

  “Naw, she ain’t all right.” Army twisted his mouth in derision. “What the hell you think I’m doin’ here?” He turned his head to glare at the guard. “They gave her this MRI thing this morning? She ain’t come out of medication all day. They gave her too much, or some damn thing.”

  A nurse came by and took the baby; they had been waiting for her. Army hunched over a clipboard and signed his name, straightening up as Lorenzo nodded to the guard.

  “She was, I don’t know, like, born with something wrong. Doctor says she had a stroke in the belly.”

  Lorenzo jerked his head. “The baby’s belly?”

  “N
aw, the mother. You know, when she was carrying her? We brought her in. Doctor says to my wife, ‘Were you doing drugs when you was pregnant?’ My wife says, ‘She’s my granddaughter,’ but, you know, yeah.” He looked off, sighing. “My daughter, when she had this one? She just cut out, ain’t seen her since, and you know, like yeah, she wasn’t, taking care of herself, my daughter, so…” Army sucked air through the side of his mouth, shook his head, Lorenzo thinking, What goes around comes around, volume 99. “Now this one’s mine too,” Army muttered. “Like starting all over.”

  Lorenzo kept his mouth shut, thinking anything he said right now would be too much like rubbing it in, with Army Howard being, among other things, an on-again, off-again midlevel dealer since the seventies.

  “Yeah, go on an’ say it.” Army lit another cigarette.

  “I ain’t said nothing, Army.” Lorenzo smiled soberly, his eyes subdued and level.

  “No, huh? Well, you can say it anyhow because you ain’t wrong.”

  “C’mon, brother, put out the cigarette.”

  “Naw, I want Captain Crunch to put it out.” Army glared at the guard across the floor. The kid ignored the taunt, having had time to think about things.

  Lorenzo shrugged, stepping away. “I hope she’s OK.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Army said through his teeth, still staring down the guard. “Captain Crunch motherfucker…”

  Heading down the corridor to Room 23, Lorenzo greeted another security guard, an X-ray technician clutching a dozen fresh transparencies for the surgery room, and a drunk brought in by cops after taking a beating at the bus terminal, his face a bounty of lumps. The drunk looked at Lorenzo and said almost sweetly, “It’s OK, I’m all right. Thanks, thank you.”

  “Yo, Pops, you gonna stop gettin’ oiled now?” Lorenzo was just saying it because you had to say something.

  The drunk smiled sheepishly. “Most likely not.”

  “Young man.” Chatterjee’s elegant monotone rang out as the doctor floated toward Lorenzo now, his trim collegiate threads spattered and soiled, from his oxblood loafers to his blue broadcloth shirt and gold silk grenadier’s tie. Lorenzo knew that this disarray was a nightly state of affairs for Chatterjee that usually came less than halfway through his shift no matter how long the hem or how high the buttons of his examination-room whites.