Eyeing Three Building across Hurley, he scanned the lower-floor Lamb Pen windows that hung directly over the park. He knew who lived in each of them—who was legally blind, who was hard of hearing, who knew more shit from sitting in that row of geriatric box frames than the CIA. Lorenzo wasn’t planning to share any of that with the Gannon detectives.
Directly above their heads, at the top of the Conrail wall, a powerful light jerked erratically, up, down, then laterally. Lorenzo returned to the middle of Hurley, looking up and seeing that first video commando, the passenger from the white van, the Betacam held upside down between his legs now. The guy was using his sun gun as a high-powered flashlight, searching for burrows under the razor-topped train fence, any place he could crawl through, dragging his camera after him, and start making some money.
If it was mostly video freelancers so far, they still had a little time to get this over with before the big guns rolled in from across the river. The satellite trucks, the newscasters, the tabloids—the vision of it moved Lorenzo out onto center court.
“Lorenzo.”
He turned to see Bobby McDonald, looking dapper in a wash-and-wear, color-coordinated kind of way but slightly wobbly, having just been pulled out of that golf dinner over in Hoboken.
“What you got?” Slightly built, gray, rumple-faced, Bobby immediately infected Lorenzo with his chronic inability to panic.
“I don’t know.” Lorenzo took a long breath, shifting a few feet in an attempt to block Brenda from Bobby’s sight lines. “I got to tell you, nobody around here’s jumping out in my mind, you know what I’m saying?” Then, tilting his head toward Danny Martin, “He got no business being here.”
“I can’t keep him out. He’s off duty.”
“C’mon, Bobby, he’s family. Call the chief over there. Shit’s gonna happen.”
“I know what you’re saying, but—”
“And that paper they’re running around with? That best be Gannon-based warrants.”
“We’re trying to work it out here,” Bobby said, finally noticing Brenda up against the wall. “So how’d she do with the mug shots?” he asked with an edge, as if knowing that Lorenzo hadn’t been to BCI yet.
“He’s not here,” Brenda called out tearfully to Bobby, to everybody. “I just know it.”
“Hang on.” Lorenzo quickly walked away to avoid the subject and headed toward Bump and her brother, Danny. Bump was holding a steel ring heavy with the keys to all the unoccupied apartments in Armstrong, rhythmically banging it against his leg like a tambourine, his chest rising to his teeth with the strain of trying to contain his anger.
“No, no, no, Danny, Danny, I understand, I understand, but what you got to understand is that this is our house. We got to live with these people, you see what I’m saying?”
Another Gannon cruiser rumbled past—more cops—the headlights catching in Bump’s oversized Buddy Holly glasses, causing them to flash white fire.
“No problem, no problem.” Danny Martin was not even listening, his eyes, light gray like his sister’s, surveying the scene. He wore a wrinkled U.S. Olympic soccer team T-shirt, Gannon being the hometown of the goalie. And he had that same pro-wrestling hairdo that Brenda had described on her son—crew cut in front and long enough on the sides and in back to look like some kind of hairpiece. Lorenzo wondered if Danny and his nephew were close. He hoped that they were not.
“Danny.” Bump touched Martin’s arm, speaking with a soft urgency. “It’s like, you go in, you don’t know who to bang, how to bang ’em, shit’s gonna shut down so fast around here you’re gonna think you’re in a cemetery, so what I’m saying is, let’s just team up on this, my guy with your guy, put our heads together.”
“I have no problem with that,” Danny said, still not listening, eyeing Teddy Moon, who was continuing to hand out warrants; Dempsy and Gannon lining up for them. Lorenzo saw Dempsy cops who hadn’t been in this project in years, everybody wanting a piece of this.
Something or someone had flushed Brenda out from the shadows, and looking back over her shoulder as she fled the wall, she wound up crashing into Lorenzo. The mild collision distracted both Danny and Bump, causing them to turn around. Danny studiously ignored his sister for the moment. “What you got?” he demanded, glaring at Lorenzo.
“I’m working on it,” Lorenzo said, noticing that Danny had some kind of slice across his shin. Blood was dribbling down to his rubber flip-flop.
“What was she doing here?” Danny asked, speaking to him as if his sister were not among them, then abruptly turning his beam on her before Lorenzo could respond.
“What, were you out of your fucking mind? What were you doing here, Brenda?”
“Danny, I work here.” She tried desperately to stand her ground but unconsciously dipped into a pleading crouch.
Stepping in front of her, Lorenzo forced another smile. “C’mon, Danny she’s been through some shit here.”
“Hey!” Danny snapped, hand on his chest, “I don’t see no ax sticking out of her head.” Then he stepped around and, hunching down a little to be at her level, pointed at his eyes, almost poking himself. “What were you doing here, Brenda.”
The five of them were abruptly blasted with light, the video shooter from the van having made it down from the wall. Brenda crouched even lower, her fingers splayed in supplication.
“Danny,” she whispered, fresh tears popping from behind crushed lids, matted lashes. “Danny, I swear from the death of my heart…”
The brother raised a forearm to shield his face. “Get that…”
The shooter cut his light and bolted into the shadows before anyone could grab him.
“You call Mom?” he asked sharply.
“No.”
“Don’t.”
Lorenzo stepped in front of her again.
“Danny, you shouldn’t even be here now.”
“Well, you shouldn’t’ve called me then.”
“Some of your people here I understand, but—”
“Hey! Reverse the situation. Would you or would you not be over in Gannon right now, shaking our tree.”
“No, no, I hear you.” Lorenzo was starting to do Bump’s dance. “Just don’t break nothin’, OK?”
“I’m just here. So you’re on point for this, huh?” Danny asked dimly. “She telling you everything?” He turned to his sister with that same withering tone. “You telling him everything?”
“God!” Brenda bellowed rawly. “He’s my son, you motherfucker!”
Unimpressed, Danny gave her his back.
“So who’s the actor?” he asked Lorenzo.
“I said, I’m working on it.”
“What, you don’t know who’s runnin’ hard around here?”
“Not like this.”
“Not like this,” Danny repeated, scanning the Bowl, the endless windows.
“We got any kind of crime scene up there?” Lorenzo asked Bump, nodding toward Martyrs Park as he blindly fished behind him for Brenda’s wrist, to keep her from wandering.
“Are you kidding me?” Bump pushed up his glasses, adjusted his Knicks cap. “It looks like a freakin’ tractor pull.”
A young, uniformed Gannon cop was brought before Danny by a Gannon detective, the kid looking scared: a prisoner of war.
“You had the Watch?” Danny started in, absently taking a swipe at the blood tickling his leg.
“Yeah. Yes.”
“Yes? So where the fuck were you?”
Lorenzo listened in for the moment, letting Danny’s special status and wrath on this one do some work for him.
“I was right there.” The kid pointed back through the trees of the park to Gannon.
“No. You went to Mickey D’s, right?”
“No, I swear. I was right there.” The kid’s crew cut made his eyes seem as big as poker chips. “I swear.”
“And you didn’t see nothing, you didn’t hear nothing.”
“Nothing. I swear.”
“You were
doing the word jumble, right?”
“No…What word jumble?”
“Were you in the front of the mall? Or in the back.”
“In the front. Hey I’m a month on the job. I’m not good enough to fuck off yet.” The kid was dead serious. Bump had to look away to smother his smile.
Danny turned to his sister again. “Why didn’t you go to him?”
“Brenda!” The voice whipped her around. A heavyset young black woman was calling out her name, pushing through some halfhearted police resistance, the scene getting too diffuse and chaotic to patrol. The woman’s arms were out, although she was still ten paces away. Brenda extricated herself from Lorenzo and ran to the offered embrace, stopping a few steps short, as if having second thoughts about being touched.
Lorenzo exchanged glances with the woman, Felicia Mitchell—another forever kid, born and bred in Armstrong, now running all the preteen programs for the Urban Corps; she would be Brenda’s boss if Brenda was working in the Study Club as she had said.
“So who do you think?” Bump asked Lorenzo, without much conviction. “Hootie?”
“I think he might even still be in County,” Lorenzo said, scanning the crowd that was starting to come down off the refrigerator crates, get closer to the party. Almost half the teenagers infiltrating Hurley now were wearing Top Cop gimme caps, the show having spent the past week trailing a narco unit working greater D-Town—Armstrong and JFK Boulevard.
“Salim.” Lorenzo beckoned to one of the kids who was talking to someone standing in shadow. The kid hopped to his name, coming over.
“Hootie in or out?” he asked, eyeing Felicia and Brenda and, behind them, attempting to skirt the light, Jesse Haus, the Dempsy runner. Annoyed, he moved to eighty-six her. In response, Jesse made a hands-up gesture of surrender but retreated only a few steps. Lorenzo was too stretched to pursue her.
“Hootie?” Salim turned him back around. “In. No, out, out. He just got out.”
“If that child was black, none of you all would even be here,” a blaze-eyed woman in a housedress yelled from the sidelines. “This place here would be deserted!” She raised a chorus of approval from those around her.
“Oh please.” Bump nearly dropped to his knees. “Not now, OK?”
Mindlessly absorbing the bedlam of Hurley Street, Lorenzo wound up keying in on Jesse Haus, who was still eavesdropping on Brenda and Felicia. This time when he caught her eye, she pressed her palms together prayerfully then slipped out of sight. Now it would take a real physical commitment on his part to get her out of here, so Lorenzo decided to let it be, a part of him still feeling he owed her something for the article that landed him on Rolanda Watts. He resented it, though, thinking, Nothing more expensive than a free gift.
The Armstrong Bowl abruptly burst into light—that sun gun again—the people on the crates shielding their eyes. Lorenzo spotted at least one more reporter up there, sharing a crate with Herbert Cartwright, seemingly writing down everything he was saying. Herbert sat erect as a pharaoh, his hands palms-down on his thighs. Lorenzo wondered if the reporter knew that Herbert was retarded. He never worried as much about the first wave of reporters, those who hit a crime scene like it was D day, as he did about the reporters who would come later—those who knew to be patient, to lay back for a few hours until the cops withdrew; the ones who knew how to time their entrance, then get in deep.
Without ever actually having touched, Brenda and Felicia seemed to have broken their embrace. Brenda was stepping back now, and Lorenzo attempted to reclaim her.
“Lorenzo!”
Another heavyset woman was windmilling her way through the crowd, eyes bulging.
“My mother’s having a angina attack and they ain’t letting nobody out the houses!” Her fleshy collarbone shimmered with sweat. “Now, I’m gonna get her to the hospital if I have to run people down to do it.”
“Hang on,” Lorenzo sputtered. He spun around, eyed Leo Sullivan, moved to confront him, to confront anybody losing track now of what he was doing here, what came first here, realizing how much time he had wasted coming back, what a bad move it had turned out to be, how helpless he was to protect anybody in a situation like this. Once again he surrendered to the likelihood that this carjack job was his for only a day, before the prosecutor’s office would grab it.
“Who’s Hootie?” Danny came up on him again. “I’m hearing Hootie now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“He’s into lawn furniture.”
“Lawn furniture,” Danny repeated. “You’re talking about Buster?” Hootie had a different tag in each city. “Buster does cars too?”
“I don’t think—”
“Did you find him at least?” Danny didn’t wait for an answer, just marched off looking for Hootie, for Buster.
“Carmen.” Lorenzo laid a hand on the bug-eyed woman’s arm. “Can you get your mother to the medics over there?” Lorenzo followed his own finger and was surprised to see that a line had formed at the back of the ambulance, as if it were an ice cream truck. People were most likely gravitating to it with everything from heart trouble to amorphous depression.
Brenda started to wander off again, and Lorenzo gently corralled her with outspread arms. She was walking with small, tripping steps, occasionally dragging the toe of a shoe, and he wondered how many of those codeine tablets she had scarfed down on the ride over here, any number over one being too many.
It was now a quarter past midnight—time, if possible, to justify this disastrous visit. Steering Brenda toward the neon-orange tape that ran across the closed end of Hurley Street, he braced himself for a walk in the park.
4
Between the second- and third-floor landings in one of Four Building’s stairways, two Kevlar-vested Dempsy narcotics cops—one bearded, one bald—had a young but wizened-looking customer chest-wedged against the wall, the bearded cop digging into the guy’s front pants pockets, the bald one holding some paper in his fist, pressing it against the cinder block over the poor bastard’s head. From her perch one flight up on the third-floor landing, Jesse assumed it was some kind of two-bit warrant, possession or shoplifting. Keeping herself quiet and out of sight, she held her nose against the smell: Lion Piss, the odor having grown denser and more potent since she first smelled it as a kid in the Powell Houses, way back in the sixties.
“Oh shit.” The bearded cop extracted two amber vials, one from each pocket, held them up for perusal. “Oh, shit.”
“Fuckin’ Rudy.” The bald cop shook his head with theatrical disappointment. “Rudy Kazootie.”
With the warrant over his head, the cinder block at his back, the hot-looking police in his face, and the jail-time bottles under his nose, Rudy’s eyelids began to flutter.
“Naw, naw, naw, man.” Rudy pointed to the vials. “That’s beat.”
“It’s County.”
“Naw, naw, naw, it’s beat, it’s salt, it’s pete. You you you want to lock me up, you lock me up for impersonating a drug addict, man, ’cause—”
“Who’s this?” The bearded cop produced a fax-papered mug shot, held it six inches from Rudy’s face. “Quick. Who’s this?”
Rudy squinted, the picture too close. “That’s Luther’s brother, right?”
“You’re on the money. What’s his name?”
“What’s that … Hootie, yeah, Hootie. Hootie.”
“Right again,” the other cop chimed in.
Hootie. Jesse loved moments like this—coming into a land unformed, the story, the information just hanging there, unplucked.
“Now, like your life depends on it, right now, where can we find him?”
“Now? Oh wow, yeah, OK. OK. You can find him maybe at Sly’s house.”
“Sly?”
“Yeah, that’s like his partner in crime.”
“Sly in Two Building?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” Rudy was still trying to control his fluttering lids.
“We need him
bad, Rudy, and if he ain’t there you just made the A-list.”
“Yo, if he ain’t there you come back here and tell me. I want you to come back and tell me, because I will find him for you. I swear on my moms, loc, you will get results tonight.”
The cops gave him a long stare before pulling back, the bearded one dropping the vials on the cement floor and crushing them under a work-booted heel.
“Yo, thank you, man. You just saving me from myself.”
The cops went south, Rudy north, muttering as he lunged up the stairs. On the landing he almost plowed into Jesse. Her abrupt presence made him clutch his chest and stagger backwards into the wall.
“Easy, easy.” Jesse put out a hand.
“Damn!” Rudy drawled, calming down, eyeing her now. “You a cop?”
“What do you think?”
“Naw, naw.” Rudy brushed past her, continuing up the stairs. “I’m done thinking for today.”
“Hootie did this?” she called out after him.
“Hootie? Who the fuck is Hootie,” the words trailing down to her, disembodied, Rudy gone round the bend.
On frantic nights like this, on stories like this, Jesse always counted on people’s second-guessing themselves—giving her the once-over and concluding that nobody, on the face of it, could be as vulnerable as she seemed, pegging her as either a nut job or an undercover and letting her go about her business unchallenged.
As Jesse exited Four Building, which, flanked by Three and Five, centered the high-rises that faced Hurley Street, she scanned the scene before her, a real backyard do: cops, restless tenants, the beginnings of a roaming media presence, all caught in the crossfire of headlights, the effect somewhere between a discotheque and a nighttime artillery barrage.
She picked out at least four other reporters sneaking around, including one slipping in as she watched, a lanky skinhead from across the river whom she had seen at other stories. The guy glommed on to Bobby McDonald as he came through the Hurley Street blockade, keeping pace with him but walking backwards, miming a conversation for the benefit of the border patrol until he was inside the club. McDonald looked a little unsteady on his feet, oblivious to the fact that he had just given someone a free ride.
Freedomland Page 9
