Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Hang on, my back is…” Goldberg rested his fingers lightly on her arm, and it felt good, his touch. Jesse felt jolted, abruptly reacquainted with the unnerving surge that could go through you from simple skin-to-skin contact.

  “Anyways, Ortega. The guy’s born a baby just like everybody else. Born into a family, born into a situation, hits the crossroads of life, he takes the path that his life, to date, has taught him. Correct?”

  “Where we headed?” Jesse asked mildly.

  “I mean, you cannot be what you don’t know. You cannot visualize what you haven’t ever seen, right?”

  “Right.” Jesse was watching some little kids, liberated from bed by the carjacking, taking diving rolls over the refrigerators, coming up giddy and wild-eyed.

  “But whatever Ortega did in life, given the hand that was dealt him, he left behind people who honestly grieved for him. That you made very clear. I mean, the mother, the wife, the three kids … Like, whatever else he did in life, and whoever else he did it to, he loved and was loved in return, right?”

  “OK.” Jesse was restless now and vaguely alarmed that the emotional charge she had just experienced was already beginning to fade.

  “I mean, what’s worse? To die and throw an entire family into grief? Or to die and no one gives a shit.”

  From their height in the Bowl now, they were on eye level with the train tracks on the other side of Hurley Street. A satellite truck was driving along the gravel bed on the inside of the fence there, its antenna like an upthrust sword slicing the sky. Suddenly Jesse panicked. She turned to Goldberg, wondering if she could just tell him to fish or cut bait, demand to see what he had to swap, right here, right now. The news truck was making it hard for her to play games, stay flirty.

  “C’mon.” He winked at her, Jesse thinking, Who the fuck winks anymore? But as if reading her mind, he extended his hand in a promising manner, and so she continued to follow him up the Bowl toward the high end, the One Building-Two Building Gompers Street end of the houses.

  “You know, the only thing I wish…The cop? The one they tried to indict for using that choke hold?”

  “Incavaglia?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy Incavaglia. You know, he was never formally charged. I mean, he was charged in the media, but departmental, Internal Affairs, grand jury totally cleared him. Except you read the paper, what did you read. You read, use of illegal choke hold. You read, six previous civilian complaints for excessive use of force.”

  Jesse nodded, thinking, Six.

  “And like, if you continue to read, you know, like continue on page thirteen, you find out none of those complaints were substantiated. You read Ortega weighed two hundred and forty pounds, had cocaine in his system and chronic asthma, a heart condition, had, what I say? Three violent priors. But you turned on the TV, opened the paper, it was Incavaglia, choke hold. Choke hold, Incavaglia. Had his academy photo up there like a mug shot.”

  “But he was cleared, right?” Jesse said as he steered her in the direction of One Building. “I mean, you take the information as it comes in.”

  “No, no, no. Please.” Goldberg held out his hand as if to fend her off. “Me, you, we’re barely cogs in the machine, right?”

  “Right.” Jesse saw another news truck roll in along the train tracks. “Where we going, Mark?”

  “No. Alls I’m saying is—and this is why I’m kind of glad to finally meet you—is, you did such a bang-up job on the, Ortega’s family, you know, the aftermath, that just for balance it would have been very, what’s the… informative to do a piece, just like that, no more, no less, on Incavaglia’s family. What that incident did to them. You ever follow up on the Incavaglia end of things? I don’t mean the—I mean, domestic.”

  “I would have liked to,” Jesse said warily, something definitely not right here.

  “No? OK. It’s too late anyhow, but just for the hell of it, let me fill you in.”

  “OK,” Jesse said, eyeing the blockade at the Gompers Street exit nearest to Gannon, people on either side of the slant-parked cruiser trying to get out, trying to get in.

  “Anyways, Jimmy Incavaglia, up to the Ortega arrest, was five years AA, OK? Two days after the, the tragedy, you know—with the publicity, the demonstrations, the death threats—he’s hitting the oil like making up for lost time, OK? And, like, today? He’s basically a drunk. They got him on bullshit detail, you know, vouchering evidence, shit like that. And by the way, he’s thirty-two years old, so we’re not talking about some old geezer hanging on to the job with gin blossoms all over his nose. Thirty-two. So there’s that.”

  Having completed their hike to the top of the Bowl, they entered the breezeway of One Building, usually more active than any of the breezeways at the bottom but almost deserted now, save for some cops running warrants. Jesse was desperate to blow.

  “OK. His wife, Jeanette, she—they always had a rocky thing, I won’t bullshit you, but now they’re no more, they’re not together. She couldn’t take it. Jimmy and Jeanette, they’re like me and you, born and bred Dempsy still living here, so the whole family thing, they had no insulation. I mean, maybe if they lived down the shore like half the job does—you know, Toms River or somewheres—but the newspaper hits the street? They’re right here, twenty-four, seven.”

  Jesse took a business card out of her jeans. “Do you want to talk about this tomorrow or something?”

  “Come on.” He took the card and began walking her along Gompers. “Just let me finish. So Jeanette, here’s what else. She taught sixth grade at Thirty-one School. You know Thirty-one School? Rough, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Anyways, half the kids, Dominican, Puerto Rican; other half, black. Now, these kids, they watch the TV, their parents read the paper. It’s Mrs. Incavaglia’s husband who did this. And they come into class, you know, staring at her, so she had to transfer out, which is a shame, because she liked it there and she was good. They needed her, plus, on top of that, you know, she’s coming home to a drunk, going to sleep with a drunk, waking up with a drunk. And the kid, their kid—that’s the worst of all. Eight, nine, goes to, went to Forty-four School, coming home every day bloody. The poor kid’s fighting off half the fourth grade and Jimmy, what’s he gonna do, go down to the schoolyard and straighten things out? He’s a spic killer, right? It’s in the paper—he can’t. So they take the kid out, put him in Saint Mary’s over in the Heights. Same shit, same shit. The kid looked like a punching bag. So now he goes to some Catholic school in Bergen County, spends two hours a day on a bus, his dad’s not living at home anymore, his mom’s all bent out of shape. And that’s their follow-up profile. Scattered to the winds, each and every one of them.”

  They were approaching the blockade at the opposite end of Gompers, near Two Building, another slant-parked cruiser.

  “I’m sorry to hear all this.” Jesse was still on full alert, but she meant it, especially about the kid. Her own childhood had been marked by ostracism too.

  “Well, it’s nice of you to say.” Goldberg came to a halt and painfully arched his back again. “You know, in all honesty, even before all this shit, Jimmy was, you know, at best a so-so cop. But given all the heartache that came out of this for him and his family? All the, the bullshit? It would have been more bearable, or more something, if he had only been indicted or if Internal Affairs had actually found something, but… It was the media. Well, shit.” He took a seat on the hood of the Dempsy cruiser. “You probably hear this crap all the time.”

  “Hey, Mark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Where?” He shrugged. “We’re here.”

  He turned to the Dempsy uniform posted by the car. “This is a closed crime scene, correct?”

  The uniform stared at him for a beat, then nodded.

  “You see this here?” He indicated Jesse as if she were inanimate. “This, is a fucking reporter. So do your goddamned job and kick her ass out.”

  He turne
d and left her there, just walked off, massaging his lower back while Jesse, white with rage, momentarily shook off the tentative herding touch of the young uniform and barked blood.

  “Six civilian complaints? How many others didn’t even bother to file…”

  Without turning around, Goldberg flipped her a fadeaway bird, and then, unlike Felicia, he tossed her business card in the brown patchy scrub that, in Armstrong, was known as grass.

  5

  The tape strung across the Hurley Street face of Martyrs Park created a zone of relative peace, isolating the crime scene from the chaos by a good fifty feet, although the area surrounding the actual scene, a few yards off a paved footpath, had apparently been trampled into incoherence before the tape was in place. Lorenzo saw at least three sets of tire marks in the rain-softened earth and enough shoe prints to diagram a complicated dance routine.

  The park itself wasn’t much more than a ragged half acre of playground and natural scruff, the footpath separating a fenced-in grouping of swings, slides, and monkey bars from a miniwilderness of sneaker-hung, vine-throttled elm trees and a scatter of bushes.

  For those who wished to shortcut their way across the city line on foot, the paved path led to a breach in a low stone wall that emptied out into Gannon, but the gap there was barely four feet wide. Those who needed to drive had to know to peel off the footpath about a third of the way in from Hurley, then slowly weave their way between the trees until they came to a second breach in the wall just wide enough for a sedan to squeeze its way through carefully. Most Gannon and Dempsy cops knew this shortcut into and out of Armstrong so well that they could exit and enter Martyrs without taking their feet from the accelerator.

  Standing at the convergence of the footpath and the car trail, Lorenzo scoured the trees, the benches, the skeletal skyline of the playground fixtures, wiping sweat from under his eyes with the heel of his hand. “OK, you be the car. You came from Five Building, right?” He flung a hand back behind him. “You drive in here from Hurley. Show me where you got off the path.”

  Brenda stood there blinking. “I can’t tell.”

  Lorenzo looked directly through the park and over the low stone wall to the Gannon post across Jessup. The cop there stared back from inside his cruiser.

  “I can’t tell,” she said again.

  “OK.” Lorenzo continued to eye the cruiser, which was posted beneath a fizzling streetlight in the shut-down mall. The cop was close enough for Lorenzo to see that he was drinking from a can of Mountain Dew—no way he wouldn’t have seen a violent crime right here.

  “OK, hold on. Can you show me where this guy came out from?”

  As Brenda studied the lay of the land, Lorenzo surveyed those Lamb Pen windows in Three Building that so closely abutted the park that tenants could reach out and pluck leaves off some of the trees. Two of those windows were occupied—by Miss Dotson, leaning on her pillow-padded sill, smoking a cigarette and calmly meeting his gaze, and Mother Carver, outlined in silver blue by the TV playing behind her in the darkened room, staring blindly through her glasses out over the trees to the clapboard skyline of Gannon.

  “Lorenzo, you come back and talk to me later. I got something to tell you,” Miss Dotson said evenly, dropping her cigarette and closing her window. Directly below half the windows on that side of the building were individual mounds of cigarette butts, like half-smashed pyramids in the dusty earth.

  “There,” Brenda said, her voice throaty with discovery. “He came out there.” She pointed out a tree. Lorenzo looked around the base of the trunk. Nothing.

  “All right, and you stopped your car…”

  “Like…” She took a step to the left, two steps to the right. “I don’t know, I can’t—”

  Suddenly she darted forward, reaching for something, and Lorenzo reflexively grabbed the back of her shirt.

  “My bag…”

  “Just leave it.”

  It had been run over and lay there as if ironed to the ground, caked stiff with drying mud.

  “OK, yeah. Now.” Brenda’s voice took on a trembling energy. “OK. I stopped, here.”

  Lorenzo pondered how to phrase what he wanted to say so as not to make her defensive. “Brenda, hold on.” He waited until he had her eyes. “If I ask you a question please don’t give me an answer because you think I want to hear it, OK? If I ask you something and you don’t remember? Say, ‘I don’t remember,’ OK? Don’t ever be afraid to not know the answer or to tell me something other than what you think I want to hear, OK? Alls you got to do is say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember’” Lorenzo was overstating his point, nervous, trying to hold too many possibilities in his head at once.

  She just stared at him.

  “OK.” Lorenzo settled himself. “You say the guy knocked you down, tore off before you could say anything, right?”

  She continued to stare.

  “OK, good. When you stepped out of the car, were you holding your bag?”

  She hesitated, trying to read his eyes, then said, “No.”

  “No. OK. No. Now, where do you keep your bag when you’re driving?”

  “I don’t know. Next to me.”

  “On the passenger seat? On the floor?”

  “On the passenger seat.”

  “OK. Let me ask you something else. It’s hot tonight, right? Did you have your air conditioner on?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. I guess.”

  “That means your windows were probably up too, right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “OK. So you get out the car, the guy pulls you out, knocks you down, jumps in, tears out of here. Is that what you told me?”

  She took a quick sip of air, held it, then cautiously nodded.

  “Then how did your purse get out on the ground? The guy had to see the purse. If he saw the purse, no way he’s just gonna flip it out the door. He’s gonna look through it for money, credit cards, a wallet, and he’s doing this in the dark, right? Then he’s got to roll down the window or open the door to toss it, right? But that all takes time, you see what I’m saying?”

  “What are you saying,” she said, frightened. “That’s my bag.”

  “No, no, no. What I’m saying is, maybe he was here longer than you think. You could’ve hit the ground hard, you know, like, dazed, and he could’ve been here for a while. Or maybe you were right! Maybe he drove right off. That’s why I need you to tell me what you truly remember and if the answer is ‘I don’t know,’ say, ‘I… don’t… know.’”

  Lorenzo sensed someone coming up behind him. He wheeled and faced the brother.

  “The windows are up, they’re down. Who gives a fuck,” Danny Martin said, waving off the entire crime scene. “Fuck the bag. What the hell are you doing here, Council? If you’re gonna work the hood, work the hood. What are you doing here?”

  Lorenzo told himself he was dealing with the uncle. “Danny, hear me out. Maybe the guy did just drive off. Then he turns around, sees the kid in the backseat, panics, comes back here, dumps the kid off, and tosses out the bag. See what I’m saying? The kid might still be here.”

  Danny stared at him. Then, without a word, he turned and marched over to Bobby McDonald, who stood on the paved side of the tape, hands in pockets, squinting up at the trees as if attempting to count the number of pairs of sneakers thrown up there bolo-style and left to dangle like rubberized fruit.

  “Bobby,” Danny began imploringly, Lorenzo watching, listening. “Don’t do this to me.” Blindly Danny swung an arm back and gestured to Lorenzo, who did a quick about-face. “Bobby, this is my flesh and blood. Please. I don’t deserve this.”

  Lorenzo felt panic creep like a cream back from his forehead, across his scalp, and down to the nape of his neck. He raised his eyes to Brenda, who, miserable, was cringing in apology. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Danny, look, I know where you’re coming from,” Bobby answered calmly. “But the fact of the matter is, you got it ass backwards, kid. You j
ust caught yourself a major break here. Lorenzo’s the big dog in these houses, don’t you know that? For my money, you can pull out all your people and I’ll pull out most of mine. Just let the man work—we’re gonna have this wrapped in no time. Think about it.”

  Lorenzo heard everything without turning back to the voices. Danny’s blatant contempt followed by Bobby’s serene pitch gave him a brand-new head on this: My houses, my catch, The End.

  “Brenda.” He coughed, choking a little. “You see that patrol car over there?” he said, pointing out the Gannon cruiser on post. “You know about the Watch?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “You didn’t think to go to him?”

  “Look. I hit the ground, I got up, I hit the ground again, the car peeled out, I’m in the hospital.”

  “The guy dropped the kid off?” Danny’s voice came up again behind Lorenzo, who slowly smoothed his brow: Easy easy.

  “OK, good,” Danny said with heat. “Then where is he? Who’s got him? Somebody’d of brought him out by now, right? No. Bullshit. This bird’s on the fly and he ain’t comin’ back. But I’m gonna tell you something. Wherever the fuck he’s gone to? If it happened here, the answer’s here. And we’re not leaving this place until somebody gives it up. Now, you might be king of the jungle and whatnot, but what I want to know is, are you gonna work the hood? Or just protect it…”

  When Lorenzo finally turned to face him, the sight over Danny’s left shoulder drained him of all anger. Out of a second-floor window of Four Building, Tariq Wilkins was dangling from a thin white cord, spinning and screaming. Lorenzo was able to see it was Tariq even from the park, because the headlights isolated and illuminated him like a solo trapeze artist in a darkened big top. People were yelling up to him and rushing under as if to catch him, but when the cord finally broke, when the truth of his weight started coming at them, they retreated. Tariq landed with a flat whap on the asphalt and was instantly swallowed from sight as everybody rushed back in. And once again, Brenda Martin was left alone.