Freedomland

by Richard Price

  Chatterjee extended a petite hand, which disappeared into Lorenzo’s oversized mitt.

  “Papa Doc, what’s up. She being admitted?”

  Chatterjee shrugged. “Won’t even let me take an X ray.”

  “She good to talk?”

  “I think, I think she’s not… she’s lying about something, leaving something out. She got a little roughed up.” The doctor thrust his hands straight out, palms facing the floor. “Got knocked down pretty hard. Broke her fall with, like this.” He shot out the heels of his palms again, arched his fingers backwards. “Might have fractured …” He took Lorenzo’s hand and ran his thumb and forefinger along the outside bones flanking the wrist. “She won’t let me X-ray, so… and she picked up half the parking lot or wherever. I had to force her to take a tetanus shot. Also, she’s got a nice little contusion up here.” Chatterjee reached up and tapped Lorenzo’s crown. “You can’t fall forward on your hands and cut the top of your head, correct?”

  “I hear you.”

  “So, I don’t know. My feeling? I think she might have gotten raped, but she won’t go upstairs.” He shrugged. “Or maybe she knew the guy who attacked her, you know, like an outdoors domestic.”

  “Maybe she just don’t want anybody knowing she was in a dope spot that time of night,” Lorenzo said dryly, unconsciously voicing why he had taken his sweet time getting over here. “Could be just that.”

  Chatterjee took him by the elbow. “Talk to her,” he said, gently launching him toward the examination room. “Youth wants to know.”

  Room 23 was smaller and more private than the general surgery room—three fixed gurneys ringed with plastic curtains, a view of the Hudson. Brenda Martin, sporting a shiny goose egg high on her forehead from her earlier fall in the ER, sat slumped and disheveled on the edge of one of the gurneys. Her legs dangled lifelessly, and a mahogany spray of Betadine solution ran in a comet tail from her jeans to her chin, as if she had struggled with whoever had tried to disinfect her wounds. Both her palms were fat with bandages, and one wrist sported a Curlex splint.

  Lorenzo eased into the room, not wanting to step up until the two uniforms who were squatting below her, bouncing on their haunches, found a natural break-off point in their interview. Hands folded across his belt buckle, he lay back in the cut, like a soloist waiting for his cue, and attempted to size her up. Thin and colorless, she struck him as one of those people whose fervent desire to be unnoticed, to be invisible, makes them disappear before your eyes. Picking up only an honest aura of emotional distress, he would just have to see what else developed.

  The only other patient in the room, a fat, unkempt white man, sat in a corner reading Moby-Dick. One bare, diabetically bloated foot was propped up on a chair in front of him, an IV drip ran into his left arm from a stand, and under his right arm, nesting on the chair beside him, three yellow semitransparent Foodtown bags bulged with clothing and paperbacks.

  The two other gurneys were unoccupied, one piled high with a wild rumple of bedsheets, the other stripped to its rubberized surface.

  “You say black,” one of the cops said softly, shifting his weight. “Black, like, darker than me? Lighter than me?”

  Brenda held a Diet Coke between her bandaged palms and brought it to her mouth with both hands, as if she were a bear trying to get honey out of a jar. “I told you, I don’t want to say. It was, you know, night.”

  Her voice was small, her eyes stark yet avoiding direct contact. Lorenzo wondered if that was about deception or shame.

  “OK, fair enough,” the cop said. “And you say five-ten, six foot, about?”

  “About.”

  “One eighty, two hundred pounds? You still feel that?”

  “Guessing.” She saw Lorenzo and quickly took him in, head to toe. Lorenzo tried to throw her a smile, but her eyes were moving too fast to catch it, now staring down at her bandages, then across the room to the slovenly diabetic.

  “Moby-Dick,” she said hoarsely, looking again at her lap. “That’s a good book.”

  The diabetic eyed her for a moment before returning to his reading; Lorenzo thinking, Miss Peekaboo.

  “Anything else you can tell us?” the other cop said, shifting his weight in obvious discomfort.

  Lorenzo assumed that they had both positioned themselves below her because they were black, like the carjacker, and wanted to adopt a nonthreatening posture to make her feel as relaxed as possible. But why the hell didn’t they just pull up some chairs?

  One cop tapped his partner on the shoulder and they both turned to him, then stood upright, somebody’s kneecaps popping.

  “Hey, boss,” he addressed both of them, using his business smile. “Can I…” He left it hanging, nodded to Brenda.

  “You gonna write the report?” one of the uniforms asked hopefully.

  Lorenzo shrugged: No problem.

  “Brenda?” the same cop spoke up. “This is Detective Lorenzo Council.”

  Lorenzo smiled at her again, took another half step forward.

  Brenda’s eyes went up as far as his chin, and then she did something that threw him: she extended one of her bandaged hands, saying, “Hi,” almost inaudibly Warily Lorenzo made physical contact. Her fingertips were like ice.

  “How you doin’, Brenda?”

  The other cops began to back out of the room.

  “Not good.”

  He pulled up a chair, thinking, Six-foot, two-hundred-pound black man knocks her around, here comes me—she should be jumping out the window. Shaking my hand…

  “Brenda, anything I can get you?” He tried again to catch her eye. “Anything you need?”

  She raised her soda can. “They got me this,” she said, nodding to the doorway where the cops had exited.

  “You comfortable?”

  “No.”

  “OK, listen. I know you’re upset, all right? And I know you’re probably real tired right now.” He waited for a reaction, but she just stared at her soda. “But the sooner we go through this the faster we can make something good happen, OK?”

  She looked like she was about to cry, her face bunching up again, but all that came out was a vibrating sigh, Lorenzo thinking, Something else.

  “Brenda? Would you like a female investigator here? Would that make you more comfortable?”

  She compressed her lips, eyes on her hands. “I wasn’t raped, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “Good.” He studied her. “I’m glad to hear that. Now, the other officers? They already put out a description of the car and the actor; everybody’s already looking for him, OK? But if you can bear with me, just tell the story one more time, so I can—”

  “I was trying to get from Hurley Street to Gannon,” she said, cutting him off. “I live in Gannon.”

  Lorenzo had guessed as much, Gannon being the mostly white blue-collar town bordering the so-called Darktown section of Dempsy. The city line ran right up against the Armstrong—or, as some preferred, Strongarm—Houses. One of the main jobs of the Gannon PD was to keep an eye on the high-rises, see if any Gannon junkies were scoring dope over there and attempting to hop the fence back into town. That and eyeing the Armstrong youngbloods, watching for four kids on two bikes riding into Gannon and returning a half hour later, four kids on four bikes. The Armstrong teenagers were scared of getting popped over there too, because the Gannon PD liked to make a lasting impression: “Keep our city clean.”

  “I was on Hurley Street, right? And I had heard that—where the street ends? That you could just keep going, you know, drive right through that park—what’s that…”

  “Martyrs Park?”

  “Right, Martyrs.”

  Some park—a half acre of garbage, trees, and benches dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, the Gannon-Dempsy border running right through the middle. Gannon maintained a twenty-four-hour post, informally known as the Watch, a permanent patrol-car presence on their side of the line, directly across from Mart
yrs, in the parking lot of a bankrupt mini-mall.

  “Martyrs Park,” she went on. “See, I had heard…I had heard that you could drive right through and come out on Jessup in Gannon, right?”

  “Yeah, you can,” Lorenzo said, not writing yet, holding a notepad in one hand, a radio in the other. He took in her lank hair, her thin, sloped shoulders, that T-shirt and its public-service announcement.

  He found himself growing somewhat cool to her. Armstrong was always taking shit, but half the customers were from Gannon. Keep our city clean…

  “So I got halfway into the park and, like, where’s the… There’s no road. It’s like a forest, just trees. So, I was starting to back out of the park? Go the regular way? And this guy appears in my headlights. It’s like he just came out from behind a tree or something, and I couldn’t, I didn’t want to deal with him, but I couldn’t see that well where I was going in reverse, right? And before I know it he comes up to the window, says to me, ‘You trying to cut through? You off the path. Path’s over there.’” She was using a black inflection, but lightly.

  “And he’s pointing to, like, between the trees, and I can’t see where, and he says, ‘Just through there,’ and he’s laughing, but not—I mean, he’s friendly, like, trying to help out, and he says, ‘Just…’ and he opens my car door, says, ‘Look where I’m pointing,’ like I should get out of the car, stand up, and… I knew better, but I wasn’t thinking or something. Next thing I know the guy, like, yanked me out, and I went…” She held up her hands, palms out. “He, like, shoved me down so hard I hit the ground like I fell off a building or something.”

  Lorenzo nodded, glancing at her knees to see if there were dirt stains consistent with the throw down she was describing. There were.

  But she still wasn’t making eye contact.

  “And I, I got up and he was climbing into the car and I yelled, like, ‘Hey!’ and I went to—I grabbed his arm. He came out and this time he tossed me, I landed, like, ‘Whoof.’ I couldn’t get my wind, but I tried. I got up, I tried to, but I couldn’t get the words out.” She was hyper now, Lorenzo just taking it in. “I mean, he was just flying out of there, and I… You don’t know, I just…” Faltering, she shrugged, a small gesture of retreat. Lorenzo was only half listening. He was thinking about a Gannon woman’s getting beat up in Armstrong, in Strongarm, in Darktown Park, hoping he wouldn’t have to deal too much with any of their people—then drifting off even further, dividing their PD into the hotheads and the steady hands, the negotiators and the hard-asses.

  Brenda raised her bandaged hands to her eyes. The sudden movement pulled him back into the room.

  “You OK?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Brenda?”

  “What.”

  “He took your car and reversed all the way out of the park?”

  “Right.”

  “And then drove away on Hurley?”

  “Right.”

  “You possibly see which way he was headed?” Lorenzo thinking, Toward Newark, where else, stolen-car capital of the free world. “Brenda? You see which way he turned off Hurley?”

  Before she could answer, he cut her off. “Excuse me.” Then, into the radio, “South Investigator 15 to base.”

  “Base. Go.”

  “Yeah, on that carjack in the South? Make sure Newark PD is notified. And please reach out to Bump Rosen, have him start a canvass for witnesses in Armstrong.” Lorenzo hated to have to do that. He checked the time: ten-forty-five. Law and Order was still on, Bump’s kid probably only halfway through the courtroom part of the show. He hoped that Bump would dally out the door, wait until his kid was sentenced, at least.

  He turned down his radio. “I’m sorry,” he said to Brenda.

  “You don’t know,” she said, glaring at the far wall, her head jerking. “I tried. I tried to run after him. I tried to tell him.”

  “Tell him what?” Lorenzo hunched forward, elbows on knees.

  She carefully placed the soda can next to her side, on the table. “I don’t want my mother to know about this.”

  Lorenzo nodded, thinking, Buying dope.

  “Brenda, I have to ask you this, but I want you to know that whatever your answer’s gonna be, all I care about is getting the guy that hurt you, OK?”

  “So what was I doing there, copping rock?” Her mouth went tight.

  “I don’t really care, but if that was the case, then that helps me know who to reach out to. You’re not in no trouble. I just need to know who to hit on. You’re the victim, plain and simple. Your mother, nobody needs to know nothing else, you understand?”

  “I’m clean almost five years. I don’t even think about it.”

  “Good, good.” Lorenzo was not particularly convinced. “So—”

  “And my brother’s on the job.”

  “Oh yeah? Where at?”

  “Gannon. He’s a detective.”

  “Huh.” Shit. “What’s his—”

  “Martin. Danny Martin.”

  “Oh yeah.” He nodded as if pleased. “He’s a good cop.” The guy was decent enough but a hothead. A real mess shaping up. “Do you want me to call him?”

  “Not really,” she said in a desultory mutter, as if she shared his vision of things to come.

  “OK, no problem.” He said this easily, but he’d have to call the guy anyhow—professional courtesy. “So, Brenda, tonight—”

  “What was I doing there if I wasn’t buying drugs, right?”

  “I got to ask.”

  “I work there.”

  “Where.”

  “In the houses. I work in the Study Club for the Urban Corps.”

  “The Study Club’s in the Jefferson Houses, isn’t it?”

  “We just opened up a second club in the basement of Five Building.”

  Lorenzo hesitated, things coming a little fast now. “OK, yeah, yeah, I heard about that, OK, OK,” he finally said, nodding. The Study Club was an afterschool program set up to keep preteens off the streets and, in some cases, out of their home situations as much as possible.

  He read her T-shirt again—IT TAKES A WEAK MAN TO DISRESPECT THE STRONG WOMAN WHO RAISED HIM—thinking, Maybe she’s the goods. Maybe. “Yeah, I had heard you were coming in there. OK. OK.”

  His tone of mild enthusiasm made her lean forward, her speech speeding up as if she had a fixed amount of time to win him over. “See, we just moved some of the stuff over from Jefferson yesterday, and I was home tonight? And I couldn’t find my glasses, so I thought maybe they got packed by mistake, so I went over to Five Building, you know, to look through the boxes? But I didn’t have the right key and I couldn’t get in and then—So I was just trying to get back quick to Gannon, and—” She suddenly pulled up short. “I told you the rest.”

  She was working it too hard—no eyes, hiding her face, hiding. Boyfriend? Black boyfriend? Rape? Dope? What…

  “OK.” He rubbed his palms, marking time, the two of them sitting in silence, an expectant vibration in the room.

  The diabetic sneezed, flipped a page, yawned.

  “How you feel about coming down looking at some mug shots now?”

  She gave him a small shrug, not answering, making no move to stand up or conclude, knitting her fingertips, waiting.

  Lorenzo cocked his head, trying to raise her eyes from her lap. “Brenda?”

  She grudgingly flicked him an agitated glance.

  “Brenda.” He leaned forward, twisting his head so that his face was in her sight line. “What are you not telling me…”

  She shrugged again, trying to find somewhere else to look, a bandaged hand flying to her mouth.

  “Brenda.” Lorenzo’s voice was soft. “I can’t help…” He faltered, hit with a wave of dread, a distinct fear of finding something out that he’d rather not know. “I can’t help but feel like something else is bothering you, you know what I’m saying?”

  She nodded vigorously in confirmation, withdrawn but alive to the moment, as if wait
ing for a first kiss, the right question.

  “I’m gonna ask you again. Do you want a female investigator in here?”

  She shook her head no, still waiting, her chest visibly rising and falling with each breath.

  A movement caught his eye: one of the seemingly empty beds erupted in a flurry of sheets. Someone had been lying under the rumple all this time and now was coming to life with a musical moan, making the diabetic sigh loudly and mutter, “Jesus Christ.”

  “Brenda. Did you know the guy?”

  She slowly hit herself in the forehead with the Curlex splint. Then she did it again, clenching her teeth and keening. Lorenzo read the tune as fear and frustration.

  He pressed in closer, stayed on her, almost touching.

  “Who’s the guy, Brenda.”

  She glared at the wall, her eyes iridescent with tears, the keening kicking up a notch.

  He touched her knee. “Brenda, this is your lucky night. I own Armstrong. There isn’t nobody I don’t know. Who’s the man, Brenda? Who did this?”

  “My son…” she said to the wall.

  “What?” Lorenzo was thrown, reading her as around thirty years old. “Whoa.” He put out a hand like a stop sign. “Hold on.”

  Brenda packed up, her body jerking involuntarily, once, twice, as if cold.

  He moved to touch her again, get her back, then decided to keep his hands to himself.

  “Your son what…”

  She raised her forearm to mask her eyes, knocking the soda can to the floor. The hollow clatter made the diabetic cluck his tongue.

  “Is in the car.” The words came out of her in a tremulous hoot. Lorenzo sat up as she finally stared at him straight on, no more peekaboo, her eyes terror-blasted, as if she expected him to rise to his full height and beat her to death.

  2

  At ten past ten in the evening, the stains that dappled the cement steps of the D-Town tenement stoop were still vivid, uncongealed, and Jesse Haus’s first thought was that her timing was off, that she had made the scene too early. On the other hand, although a Dempsy police cruiser was still parked next to her brother’s Chrysler, the crowds were gone and the bright plastic crime-scene tape lay in a discarded tangle atop a balding shrub.