Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Brenda! Your son. What was he wearing…”

  “He had a blue shirt on.”

  “Dark, light…”

  “Light. A T-shirt. It said, ‘GANNON NARCOTICS, MIDNIGHT MADNESS.’”

  Lorenzo shut his eyes, thinking, Shit, the woman’s brother. His notes flew across the page in a jittery scrawl.

  “Hair?”

  “Black, like, short in front and long in black, back—like some wrestler he watches on TV. I don’t know who.”

  “Pants? Jeans?”

  “Jeans.”

  “Blue? Black?”

  “No. No. Pajama bottoms. He was sick. With Ren and Stimpy on them.”

  Lorenzo struggled over that last bit, not knowing who Ren and Stimpy were.

  “Shoes?”

  “Slippers, big slippers with dinosaur heads. They had batteries in the heels so that they growl when you take a step.” Brenda was suddenly animated.

  Lorenzo scribbled away, mumbling, “Hang on, hang on,” hitting the radio again, repeating the details, adding, “And please notify Port Authority PD in case he makes a run for the tunnels.” Taking a breath, his lungs even tighter now, his asthma coming on, he tried to be on her side, this lady staring at him all of a sudden with those white-wolf eyes, like she couldn’t get enough of his face; this lady putting off the child part of things for God knows how long.

  “Brenda.” He leaned forward, contemplating his own outspread hands. “Your boy’s asleep, right?”

  “He’s asleep.” She nodded, repeating his words avidly.

  “OK, now.” Lorenzo massaged his chest, trying to get at his miserly lungs. “OK, this knucklehead? All he wants, is your car. He just wants to sell that car, OK? If he meant to hurt somebody, he’d of hurt you, all right?”

  “He did hurt me.” Her voice was fruity with conviction as she held up her hands.

  Shit. Lorenzo arched his back. “OK, but I’m telling you. He’s gonna see that kid? He’s gonna pull up to a street corner and put him on the sidewalk. He don’t want no part of that kid, all right?”

  She curled back from him a little, crossed her arms over her chest, fending something off, making him angry again.

  “Now I’m gonna ask you one more time. What were you doing there?”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me what. Tell me again.” Lorenzo patted himself down, looking for his inhaler.

  “I went to get my glasses.”

  “So you took your sick son out at nine o’clock in the evening—”

  “I don’t have a baby-sitter!” she said, almost shouting. “I can’t afford one! What are you trying to do, punish me? Believe me, you don’t have to.” Her voice was raw, Lorenzo fucking up big-time now.

  “Base to South Investigator 15,” the radio goosed him.

  “SI 15,” he responded in a subdued tone.

  “Can you get us a better description of the actor? We’re light on details here.”

  “Stand by.” Lorenzo felt chastened, the dispatcher having to tell him how to do his job now; giving this lady the third degree like that…

  “Brenda.” He sounded contrite. “Let’s do the bad guy again.”

  She exhaled heavily, her shoulders dropping with a “Huh.”

  “He didn’t show you any weapon?”

  “He didn’t need to.”

  “Black—”

  “Black, bald, about five-ten, two hundred pounds.” She rattled off the specs in an exasperated litany as Lorenzo scrawled.

  “Face hair?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No moustache?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know.”

  “Jewelry? Scars?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was he wearing? Shirt, sweater—”

  “Sweatshirt.”

  “What color…”

  “Gray?”

  “Any words on it?”

  “No. Maybe. Wait. Michigan. Michigan? Michigan.”

  “Just Michigan? Not Michigan State? Not, not Michigan University, University of Michigan, no teams, no mascots?”

  “I don’t know. Just Michigan.”

  “Hang on.” Lorenzo sent it out on the radio as Dr. Chatterjee walked in. Lorenzo saw, heard, through the half-open door, a cluster of cops—word going through the city already.

  Chatterjee headed for his locker, eyeing Brenda hard. Lorenzo snapped his fingers to get the doctor’s attention, then mimed an asthma attack—acted out labored breathing, the winking mouth of a landed fish—as he fed details to the dispatcher.

  Brenda abruptly wheeled in her seat to face the doctor. “What if my son wakes up?”

  “Talk to him,” Chatterjee said sullenly, jerking his head toward Lorenzo. Seized by this terrible question, she wheeled back. “What if my son wakes up?” she asked, barreling over Lorenzo’s feed to base.

  “Stand by.” He leaned toward her. “Then that’s all the sooner he’s gonna get, you know, let out the car.”

  “He’s gonna be so scared,” she said, her voice taking wing. “I’m never not there for him. Never.” Something was sinking in, Lorenzo feeling her move into a colder, more frightened place. He made himself slow down for her again.

  “Brenda, this is hard, I know, but I’m telling you, we’ll get him back. This is like a fluke. Nobody wants a kidnap tag. No body.” He even smiled for her, as Chatterjee nodded to him on his way out, Lorenzo knowing that the doc would fix him up good, his asthma already lifting with the anticipation.

  “Now stay with me, OK? This is important. Did anybody see you? Was anybody around when this happened…”

  “I’m never not there for him. When he wakes up, he’ll know.” Her voice was calm, certain, almost prophetic, Lorenzo getting the sense that she was preparing herself for a long, perhaps lifelong, bout of self-laceration, and that her value to him as a source of hard information was coming quickly to an end.

  “Brenda,” he said, going for every squeezed drop. “Think on it. You walked all the way back through Armstrong, OK? Straight up the hill, right through the Bowl. You remember all those refrigerators? Somebody must have said something to you on the way—somebody asked what you wanted, what you were doing there, asked you—”

  “I should have fought harder.”

  “Hey, look at you.” He sat up and gestured to her wounds. “You did what you could.”

  “No,” she said with that same self-sentencing iciness, “I let him down. He’s my world and I let him down. He’s worth ten of anybody else. He’s worth ten of me.” Her face contorted with self-loathing. “He’s everything.”

  Lorenzo leaned back, thinking, Family time. He hoped this lady was from decent people.

  “SI 15 to base, I need a reach out to Detective Daniel Martin, Gannon PD. Please have him contact me at the MC.” Then, remembering her saying she didn’t want to deal with her brother, he eyed her for a reaction. She was too far gone for his words to have registered, so he just signed off.

  Before he could get into pushing her for witnesses again, Chatterjee came back in holding a loaded spike. Lorenzo heard the cop buzz out in the hall; it had grown in volume since the last time the door was opened.

  “Brenda, I’m gonna tell you something that’s true.” Lorenzo hiked up his T-shirt sleeve without losing her eye. “Somebody saw what happened. They saw you, and you saw them.”

  “What’s that?” She watched the needle go in through a tattoo of his wife’s face, directly beneath his shoulder.

  “Adrenaline,” Chatterjee murmured. “Straight, no chaser.”

  “Maybe somebody in a window.” Lorenzo was thinking of Armstrong’s Lamb Pen, even though most of them were at the rally. “Maybe… Hold on.” He called for a quick time-out as the adrenaline took him for a three-second spin. He was missing half of what Brenda was saying now, something or other about her own childhood, as near as he could tell.

  “… So she put me out on the side of the road and drove off. I mean she just, like, cir
cled the block to teach me a lesson, but… Can you believe that? That somebody would do that to a child?” Her voice started to break apart. “See, we all say we’d never do to our kids what was done to us—we all say that, right? Well, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I should have thrown myself in front of the car—you don’t need words to do that, right?”

  Lorenzo just watched her, trying to size her up, this lady who had taken so long to come across on the kid end. But those injuries—no way she wasn’t suffering right now. He glanced at her hands again, thinking, If she’s faking this, she’s in the wrong line of work. But also thinking, Check out her house—bloodstains, signs of struggle, chaos. Thinking, This one’s a bear.

  “He’s my heart.” She swallowed half of each word, her knees fanning again. “My heart and soul.”

  There was a knock at the door, and a fat baby-faced cop stuck his head in. “Detective Council? Somebody on the horn, says you called him?”

  Lorenzo got to his feet, tried to take the kid’s measure quickly. “Can you stay with her?”

  “Sure.” The cop smiled, sliding into the room, hat in hand. Lorenzo saw a five-by-seven color photo of a girl in a confirmation dress crimped and crammed inside the roof of the cap.

  “Is that your daughter?” Brenda said even before the guy could take Lorenzo’s seat. Her voice was hoarse and tinkly with tears. “She’s beautiful.”

  Lorenzo took the call at the nurses’ station, having weaved his way through a mob of cops and even a few police-scanning stringers from some in-county papers, giving everybody the same no-comment, averted-eye smile.

  “Hey, this Danny Martin?”

  “Big Daddy Council, how you be, what you need.” The guy was chewing something, kids shouting in the background; off-duty. Lorenzo pictured him on the job: knotted temples and quick hands.

  “Yeah, Danny, I got—I’m here with your sister, Brenda, over in the Medical Center?”

  A long silence. “What happened?” he said, in a flat, almost angry way, the response slightly throwing Lorenzo; then, finally, “She OK?”

  “Yeah, well, she got jacked at the Armstrong Houses. She’s kind of roughed up but she’s all right. But her son, Cody? We think he’s still in the car.”

  Silence. “In the car… Guy’s still out there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “From Armstrong?”

  “We’re on crash alarm. He ain’t gettin’ far.”

  “Where in Armstrong?”

  Lorenzo heard something in the tone that made him regret the call.

  “I think she needs some family right now. You think you can come down here, you know, like, be with her?”

  “Where in Armstrong?”

  Lorenzo palmed his face again, the adrenaline giving him the jumps.

  “Below the Bowl.”

  “On Hurley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which end, Three Building or Five?”

  “Hey Danny, I know where you’re coming from, but we’re on it. I think she needs you here, OK? We’ll wait for you, OK?”

  “Three or Five?”

  “Danny, you know Chuck Rosen? Bump? He’s got it covered, OK? I would like for you…”

  But Danny Martin had already hung up.

  Lorenzo stood there by the nurses’ station, the receiver still in his hand, knowing that he’d just fucked himself good, knowing he had to get over to Armstrong before Gannon tore it up, but he was stuck with the mother. Maybe he could dump her off with the state police artist or get her home. No, he didn’t want to give her an opportunity to clean anything up. Maybe he should get her with other family members or…

  The hospital continued to fill with cops, some escorting victims but most coming by to eye her, a mob of alert loafers angling for a way to get in on the action.

  Lorenzo picked up the phone again, paged Bobby McDonald, his boss, who was over in Hoboken at some kickoff dinner for a charity golf tournament. Then he called Bump Rosen’s house to give Bump a heads up on the impending Gannon offensive into Armstrong. Despite his panic, there was a small sober part of him that was loath to cut in on the son’s big night, but at least it was after eleven—Law and Order would be safely on videotape—and Bump just had to be there. Lorenzo did too, anxiously high stepping in place, chained to the vic, going nowhere.

  “Hey, Jeanie.” Lorenzo reflexively smiled into the phone, as if Bump’s wife could see him.

  “He already left, Lorenzo,” she said with a whiff of reproach.

  “He’s headin’ to Armstrong? So how was the show?” He hung up a few seconds later without having absorbed her response.

  Lorenzo took it for granted that if Cody Martin was still missing twenty-four hours from now the job would be taken away from him. It would either be given to a more senior investigator or turned over to the prosecutor’s office or perhaps even the FBI, and he was half ashamed to admit to himself that he would have no problem with that if that’s the way the world turned.

  Meanwhile, all of Dempsy was out there humping on this. He had gotten as much information from the woman as she was willing to give, and if he could only keep Gannon from trashing Armstrong, he could work those houses better in one night than anybody else taking a week.

  Looking back down the corridor, Lorenzo saw a small crowd of cops standing in the open doorway of the doctors’ locker room talking to the fat kid who was supposed to be guarding Brenda. He responded to this wrong picture by covering the distance from the phone at the nurses’ station to the doorway in a half-dozen long strides.

  “Where she at…” Lorenzo slid through the uniforms and ducked his head into the empty room.

  “She had to go to the bathroom,” the kid said.

  “What?” Lorenzo got in the kid’s face; the other cops reared back slightly.

  “She had to go,” the kid said, his voice climbing defensively.

  Lorenzo stared at him.

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  She was in neither of the women’s rooms in that sector of the hospital. Lorenzo had recruited two nurses to do the search, then taken off on his own into the less populous, more shadowed hallways connected to the ER wing.

  After a few minutes of bobbing his head into doorway after doorway he finally found her standing motionless in a six-bed examination room, one bandaged hand gripping the doorknob of a private john. She was making no effort to enter, just standing there as if entranced, her eyes fixed on an encounter taking place at the far end of the otherwise deserted room, where two men, partially obscured by a plastic curtain and apparently unaware of her presence, were talking in loud, hyperactive gulps. Lorenzo quietly stepped over the threshold, but then, catching the nature of the conversation that had seized her, silently retreated. He stood just inside the doorway, sensing the damage that could take place if either of these men were to become distracted.

  “Thomas, hear me out.” The speaker was a flush-faced detective in jacket and tie; Lorenzo tried to remember his name: Mallon, Mallory. “The doctor says to me, ‘The child has bruises around her genital area, there’s some tearing of tissue down there,’ OK? You do the right thing, you bring her in, OK? But then you tell me your wife works nights, your daughter gets scared, so you sleep with her. Isn’t that what you told me? OK. So. You be me. What am I to think?”

  “No, no, no, no,” the other guy said, pop-eyed with agitation. “No, I sleep with her. In the bed. Not, you know—I’m sleeping.”

  “Thomas.” The detective laughed, like the guy was nothing more than a rascal. “You say she wakes you up crying, it’s just you and her in the house.”

  “And I rush her here. You saying I shouldn’t have?” Thomas arched his chin to the ceiling and vigorously scratched his stretched throat.

  “You did the right thing. I told you that. But what I’m asking you is, maybe you did something in your sleep, like, you were sleeping, you know, and you couldn’t help it. You didn’t realize. Do you think that’s a possibility?”


  “No, no, no. I want to tell you something. There’s no way that could be, because I’m very careful. I wear four pairs of underpants to bed, just in case, OK?”

  “Four.” The detective nodded.

  “See?” Thomas unbuckled his pants, pulled them down to reveal a pair of boxer shorts stuffed with three other pairs beneath, the waistbands staggered from directly beneath his rib cage to below his hips.

  The detective finally noticed Brenda standing there, one hand on the bathroom doorknob, and his face went blotchy.

  “What are you doing there?” He glared at her, livid, all of his carefully contained anger prematurely exposed; a jagged row of cigarette-stained teeth slanting above his lower lip.

  Brenda ignored the detective and his rage. She stared at the father—his staggered pairs of shorts, his taut and hairless belly.

  “You should burn in hell,” she said, then turned to see Lorenzo in the doorway. He signaled her his way impatiently.

  “Don’t you touch me,” she nearly hissed as she pushed past him, marching back toward the ER. No problem, Lorenzo thought, imagining himself free of her, losing himself so deeply in the wish that, by the time she collapsed, a slow-motion, rickety, hands-out descent, she had gotten far enough away from him that he had to fight his way through a crowd.

  Ringed by those who should have known better, Brenda sat on the floor, the nurse Penny Zito squatting before her, talking in a comforting gravelly murmur and holding one of Brenda’s hands in both of her own.

  Brenda was sobbing, her mouth locked open, braying over and over, “I woo-want to be with him, I woo-want to be with him,” a nasal hiccupy lament, inconsolable and childlike. Lorenzo felt for her, knowing that if her kid was awake, if her kid was alive and awake right now, that’s exactly what she should be feeling. In her despair and loss the woman had become her own missing son.

  Lorenzo dropped down alongside Penny and was quickly joined by Chatterjee. The three of them eased her upright, Chatterjee murmuring in Lorenzo’s ear, “Either we put her in psychiatric or you leave with her now. It’s only going to get worse.”

  Lorenzo carefully steered her down the hall, his fingers lightly planted between her shoulder blades. “I’m taking you out of here, OK?”