Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “You remember his name?” Lorenzo took out his notepad.

  “Not on the tip of my tongue, but I’ll get it for you, and then, yeah, she had this lady come in from an advertising company. She talked about making commercials, and that was fun because she brought this new bubble gum for everybody, had us taste it, and then we all had to come up with names for it, you know, a slogan for it. But I don’t remember her name either. She even brought in this mailman to talk about delivering the mail, and that was fascinating to me, because I like that stuff where they tell you about things you take for granted, and his name was Eddie Taylor, I remember that because…” Felicia grabbed Lorenzo’s wrist, leaned in close, and exaggeratedly murmured through stiff lips, “He was a nice man.”

  He laughed, wagged a finger at her, wrote “Eddie Taylor.”

  “And she brings the boy here?” Lorenzo asked. “What’s he like?”

  “He’s very smart for his age, and the kids here, everybody likes him. He’s kind of the mascot ’cause he’s only four and the youngest kid here, you know, officially, is like six, but he’s nice, he plays with everybody, you know?”

  “And how is she with him?”

  “Good.” Felicia shrugged. “You know, like a mother. I don’t think she has too many friends on the outside, so it’s like, they seem very close.”

  “She have any boyfriends?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. I can’t say. I mean, Lorenzo, she’s from Gannon. She leaves work she goes home to America, you know what I’m saying? I have no idea what’s going on with her outside of this place right here.”

  “I hear you,” he said, smiling. “When was the last time you saw her before last night?”

  “Before last night? Like, that day. Yesterday. And it was crazy here because we were, like, half here, half in Armstrong, you know, setting up a second Study Club there? Which is on hold now, as you can well imagine.”

  “How she seem to you yesterday?”

  “To me? I would have to say she seemed kind of out of it, but you know, that could just be me reading into things, you know, with all this goin’ on now, so—”

  “Out of it, like how.” Lorenzo rubbed his eyes, rolled his neck.

  “Bananas!” some kid screamed, and there was another controlled eruption in the next room.

  “Out of it like, OK, this is just a little thing, but we’re supposed to help the kids with their homework, you know, the kids that got summer school? And she was sitting with this girl Angela. Angela has got a problem with math. And I see Brenda sitting with her, and I look, and Angela’s just, like, out there, daydreaming. And I see that Brenda’s sitting there doing Angela’s math—like, I’ll do it. Just doing it herself, not talking to Angela, not showing her nothing, just getting through it, and she, that’s not like her. She’s very conscientious, Brenda.”

  There was a brief boy-girl argument from the Free Play Room, ending in an aide barking out, “Shamiel!” and the nine-year-old boy snapping back, “Yell at her ugly ass.”

  A moment later Shamiel appeared, walking through the Library Room on his way to the Pool Table Room, hiking up his pants and muttering to himself like an old man.

  “Yeah, OK,” Felicia said, watching the boy until he was out of earshot. “Let me tell you what stayed in my mind about yesterday.”

  She stepped closer, speaking in a whisper now.

  “Shamiel? That boy is like the devil sometimes, and yesterday he got himself ahold of some pushpins, right? And he put them on the teacher’s chair in the Homework Room, by the phone? This girl Mary Stevens, Dottie’s child? She gets me, tells me what he’s done, so I come in the room and I see Brenda standing there talking on the phone and just, like, as I came in? Brenda’s about to sit down and before I could say stop, whomp, she sat right down on those tacks, and, nothing…She’s just sitting there talking, and at first I thought I had misheard Mary about what Shamiel had done, but I look over to him… Lorenzo, and the boy was crying. He’s, like, looking at her sitting there and he’s crying. He was scared, Lorenzo. And she’s talking on the phone I don’t know to who, but when she’s finished? She gets up, there’s all these pushpins sunk into her jeans, and that must of hurt.”

  “You know who she was talking to?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You remember anything she said?”

  “I wasn’t really listening.”

  “Huh.” Lorenzo nodded, thinking, Get the phone log.

  Looking out the window again, Lorenzo saw Curious George and Eight-Ball, deep in conversation, both of them talking with their arms crossed over their chests. His eye was then drawn to an unmarked Gannon sedan, floating up behind Eight-Ball’s Dempsy cruiser. Leo Sullivan eased himself out of the driver’s seat, standing on tiptoe to stretch and yawn.

  Felicia ran her hand through the crook of Lorenzo’s arm. “You want to know what Brenda was mostly about in here?” She pulled him away from the window and ushered him through the double apartment until they came to the Free Play Room. Standing in the doorway, Lorenzo watched as a young girl, standing in the center of a ring of chairs grinned, worked her mouth a bit, then blurted, “Limes!” This provoked a selective scramble as she and three other kids dashed around for new seats until the droop-eyed boy Michael, landing on Mary Stevens’s lap, was pushed off. Taking center stage, Michael yelled out, “Coconut,” causing another three-kid scramble for chairs. Lorenzo saw that each kid held a piece of paper that bore the name of a fruit.

  “You see this game they’re playing? It’s called Fruit Salad. It’s like musical chairs, but we were having a hard time with musical chairs because nobody wants to be out the game, so there was like, a lot of fights all the time. So Brenda, she made up Fruit Salad. Every kid’s a particular fruit and one kid, like, calls out strawberry, banana, or whatever, and those kids got to jump up find a new seat, and the kid who gets squeezed out? He’s the next caller. It’s like a reward for losing. Then when he calls out his, you know, ‘Orange,’ say, he’s back in the scramble. Nobody loses. She figured that out, and it stopped a lot of the fighting.”

  Lorenzo smiled absently as the game went on. “So you don’t know who she was talking to on the phone?”

  “No, I surely don’t.”

  “Was the boy with her that day?”

  “No. She said he was sick.”

  “Sick? She say with what?”

  “Nope.”

  “Tell me something else.”

  “Like what?” He waited. “Lorenzo, you ever see her teeth?”

  “Her teeth?”

  “Last week we were talking about cavities, going to the dentist. And I opened my mouth so the kids could count my fillings, you know, until they started stickin’ them greasy little fingers in there. Mary and some of the other girls they go over to do Brenda, count her cavities? She opens her mouth? Lorenzo, her teeth are down to nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re, like, flat. She must grind them something awful.”

  “Oh shit!” Shamiel’s sharp exclamation from the Time-Out Room turned Lorenzo’s head. “Oh shit!” again. Shamiel was peering down at the street, an odd tenor to his outburst, distress mixed with excitement.

  Lorenzo began to move to the window, but, once again, Felicia hauled on his arm. “You’re coming to my house tonight, right?” Lorenzo wanted to beg off or at least hedge, but Felicia’s voice seemed to be freighted with true anxiety now.

  “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  “He’s crazy, Lorenzo. He’s hittin’ me. Cryin’ all the time. Lorenzo, you can not not come.”

  “Lorenzo!” Shamiel cried out, his face fixed between a grimace and a grin. “They just arrested George!”

  “Who did.” Lorenzo was on the move to the window, along with whoever else had heard Shamiel’s announcement. “Eight-Ball?”

  “No, no,” Shamiel said. “He got took off in the other, the plain car.”

  Leo Sullivan, Lorenzo thought, looking
down at the street. Everyone was gone by now, a suspect was in custody—news at eleven.

  Lorenzo slant parked in front of the Gannon Municipal Building and took a side entrance to a second-floor landing, exiting out into a spacious, harshly lit vestibule. It was barren, save for two pay phones and a reception window manned by a black Gannon cop, Julius Raymond, an old whist buddy. Julius acknowledged him with a nod, buzzing him through a paint-chipped metal door.

  Lorenzo stepped through to the Gannon PD intake center. Four wreathed photographic portraits of martyred cops were suspended over a wall-length booking counter, staring across the room at a Plexiglas holding cell that, at this moment in time, hosted three prisoners—an Iranian steroid dealer, who Lorenzo knew by the tag Elvis; a bored-looking black kid unknown to Lorenzo, sitting sprawled on the floor, an Afro pick sticking up behind his right ear like an antenna; and an out-of-towner, a red-eyed, blond-bearded dude in jeans and a black T-shirt. Lorenzo guessed he was a long-distance trucker on his way to New York, popped for scoring some rock in the Roosevelt Houses—the last dope spot before the Lincoln Tunnel—and snatched up by Gannon narcotics as he cut back through town toward the New Jersey Turnpike.

  No way would they keep George Howard out here in plain sight.

  “Lorenzo.” Julius Raymond, who stood behind the booking counter now, tilted his head toward yet another door, buzzing the latch. Lorenzo found himself marching down a long, shadowed corridor, the walls lined with old photos of tommy guns and Model Ts, Saturday night specials, and bell-bottoms—decade-by-decade group portraits of long-gone coppers, laminated and framed reproductions of ancient local headlines featuring labor strikes, explosions, derailments, crashes, and sinkings. Lorenzo ducked his head into door after door, chanting to himself—Stay calm, Stay respectful, Stay calm, Stay respectful—until he found what he was looking for, the detectives’ squad room. Lorenzo walked in, and George Howard, encircled by six plainclothes detectives and handcuffed to a desk, his left eye a red egg, almost leaped at him, blurting out his name and dragging that heavy piece of furniture halfway across the room before he was restrained by Leo Sullivan and the others.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Lorenzo asked, forcing himself to smile.

  “Ask him,” Leo said, folding his arms across his chest and perching his butt on the edge of the desk.

  “Yo, Big Daddy, this is whack.” George looked like he was about to cry.

  Lorenzo’s eyes strayed to a fax of the jacker sketch taped to the wall.

  “Whoa,” Lorenzo laughed. “Fellas, you got to go through me.”

  “Not for this,” Leo said, shrugging.

  “Not for what.”

  “Child support.”

  “For what?”

  “George, where does Keisha live? The Mary Bethune Houses, right?” he asked. Then, to Lorenzo, “Local girl, Big Daddy.”

  “Lorenzo,” George started to blubber, his lower lip shivering, “they tryin’ to set me up.”

  “Set you up for what, brother?” asked a black detective, Boris Hope, a big, broad man in a three-piece suit. “You hear anybody talking about anything other than you being a suck-ass father?”

  George rested his forehead on the edge of the desk, inches from Leo Sullivan’s knee.

  “You pick him up in Jefferson?” Lorenzo asked.

  “That we did. Right, George?” A little tremor of adrenaline belied Leo’s chipper tone.

  “Hey, fellas,” Lorenzo said. “You can’t just bop on over—”

  “We did it by the book, boss,” Boris Hope interjected. “Went in with one of your guys, everything strictly kosher.”

  “One of my guys?”

  “Nicky Iovakas.”

  Eight-Ball. Lorenzo tamped down his rage, taking in Leo and the others, all slouched around the prisoner, looking like a hard-ass Dutch masters portrait.

  “But I tell you, Council,” Leo said. “We came up on my man here with this two-bit warrant? Guy gives us them bug-eyes, like to jump out of his skin. Right, George?”

  “No.”

  “No? You went all-out rabbit on me, right?”

  “’Cause you were coming for me.”

  “So? So fuckin’ what. You didn’t run all those other times, right?”

  “Well, you was chasing me.”

  “Let me ask you.” Leo Sullivan stood up, hitched his pants. “How many times I come on you with paper, huh? Do I or do I not always give you fair play. Now, all those other times, what was it? Possession, possession with intent, assault that one time? All that stuff a lot fuckin’ heavier than this piece of shit, right?” He flicked the warrant with a thumb. “Right?”

  “I don’t know what you got writ on there,” George muttered, dropping his head between his knees. “I ain’t a mind reader.”

  “Well, you must’ve thought it was something pretty fuckin’ bad, right? First you pull a Carl Lewis on me, then we catch up, you go swing on me?”

  Ergo the shiner—George playing right into their hands. Lorenzo turned to the window, knowing this was all bluff and bluster, not worth getting into Gannon’s face over.

  “But you know what, George?” Leo continued his play. “I’m no mind reader either, so maybe you can tell me what you thought we were coming at you with that was so fuckin’ bad that you rather go down swingin’ than play the game, ’cause I know you know how to play the game, and I know you’re not so stupid as to take a poke at me over child support, right? Right?”

  “No.”

  “So what are you hidin’?”

  “Lorenzo.” George looked to him for help, then to Leo. “I ain’t done nothing.”

  “Think hard,” Boris said.

  “Damn, man, you ask Lorenzo. I’m looking for work, got squeezed out at Action Park, had this other job, guy that was hired like two weeks before me? He din’t put down on his application that he did time. The boss, he found out and he wanted to fire him, right? So they fired me, too, ’cause I come in after him and this way they could say it was a layoff, you know, it don’t look like they’re picking him out. You ask Lorenzo, man.”

  “Think hard, George.”

  “Aw, see, you motherfuckers, man, you think—” George cut himself off.

  “We think what?” Boris Hope asked, but George dug in.

  “You best do some soul searching, Bubba.” Leo Sullivan stood up. “I make one phone call, you’re a career offender. That means no bail, hot sun, summer in the city. You go into County right now? I hear they’re like at six hundred percent over capacity. I hear they’re bunking up in the gym, I hear they’re bunking up in the laundry room. In the laundry room. In this fucking heat? Oh!”

  “Career offender for what?” George squawked. “For child support? I don’t even have a motherfuckin’ job. What’s puttin’ me in jail gonna do for me payin’ child support. Whose child is gonna get supported with me in jail, huh?”

  “Fuck the child support,” Leo said, then tapped his still-red cheekbone.

  “Aw, Lorenzo,” George begged hopelessly. Lorenzo shrugged, turned away. “Yeah, an’ like you ready to lock me up over this except if I fess up to something more worse, much more worse, and then what, I walk?”

  “The less you jerk us, the less you get jerked in return, right.”

  Diverted by the skirl of bagpipes, Lorenzo looked out the window and saw a funeral procession inch down the stairs of a massive church across the street. Even given the bagpipes, there was a minimal uniformed presence; Lorenzo guessing that the body was the widow of a retired cop.

  “Oh man, I don’t understand the motherfuckin’ system no more,” George moaned.

  “No?” Leo reached for a golf club that stood in the corner. “I think you understand the system very well, George.” He braced himself for a putt, wiggling his hips. “In fact, I think you got a fuckin’ Ph.D. in the system.”

  Lorenzo watched as the coffin came out of the church, the pallbearers negotiating the long, steep stairs.

  “Where’d you get that T-sh
irt, brother?” Boris Hope said, grimacing. “Put a mouse on your chest? Man, you must really hate yourself.”

  “Yeah, see, you think I jacked that baby last night, right?”

  There was a barely perceptible ripple in the room, Leo not even looking up from his invisible golf ball. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t even bring that up. Did you hear anybody say anything about that?”

  “George,” Lorenzo finally eased into this. “Brenda Martin, she know you?”

  “Yeah, from the Study Club. What I’m gonna do, jack someone I know?”

  “You mean, as opposed to jacking someone you don’t know?” Boris said.

  “Naw, man, you just…Hey Lorenzo,” George beseeched again. His shiner was as slick and dull as steel.

  “Leo, you want to put this to rest one way or the other?” Lorenzo offered calmly, threading the diplomatic needle. “Pick up the phone, call her, ask her if it was George Howard. ’Cause I would like to know myself.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d love to do that, Council, except we can’t fuckin’ find her right now.”

  “Well, hey, if you had reached out to me from the jump…” He faltered, seeing George’s good eye go white all around, the kid half rising, frightened. Before Lorenzo could turn to see what had scared him, he was bulled sideways into a file cabinet—someone barreling into the room full speed.

  Despite being handcuffed to furniture, George was the only one set to receive this violent presence and, fueled by fear, he caught Danny Martin square in the face with his free hand. Danny, not even recoiling, cracked George’s temple on the corner of the desk, coming down on top of him and grinding a balled copy of the jacker sketch into his bloody mug, snarling, “This is you? This is you?” The detectives hauled Danny off by the chest and throat, dragging him backwards out of the room as he bellowed, “Hey George! You know God? Fuck God. There is no God. I’m God. It’s just you and me, motherfucker! Just you and me, you hear me?”