What made Lorenzo angriest was his own mishandling of the case, first letting Jesse weasel her way into the situation, then sending Karen Collucci up to bat. At least Karen, unlike Jesse, had something to offer. Earlier in the evening, when he had first met with her and the other members of her group, he had found the mechanics of their canvass-and-search program impressively organized, possibly even helpful, although, consistent with his grabbing-at-straws approach, he saw Karen as mainly another shoulder for Brenda to cry on, a potential confessor. Somewhere in the back of his head the expression a woman’s touch rattled about like hope incarnate.
He had been careful about what he said to Karen, not wanting her to go in there with any cop-fed predisposition that would taint her testimony in court if it came down to that. She was verbally cautious right back at him, both of them tacitly understanding the importance of threading the needle.
If Brenda was all wrong, Lorenzo was reasonably sure that Karen would pick up on it; it would just be better for all concerned if she came to that conclusion on her own. And no way was he going to inform Bobby McDonald or anyone in the prosecutor’s office tonight of Karen Collucci’s involvement. For the time being, Brenda was a free agent. She could see, go, do anything she wanted, but Lorenzo still feared that the higher powers, if given the opportunity, would nix this dicey move with Karen. He had long ago learned that the trick to getting permission was to not ask for it. They’d find out soon enough—the first open-to-the-public search party was scheduled to roll on out the next morning.
Cruising slow, Lorenzo drew in the usual salutes from the jugglers on every corner, some pantomiming running away, a few taking off for real. Lorenzo wore a fixed grimace of reproach on his mug, exuded a chronic low-key case of the angries, people fucking up everywhere he looked.
The boulevard, as usual, was strobed with reflector tape—on T-shirts, high-tops, shin-length baggy shorts. Lorenzo remembered driving down here with Bump two weeks earlier, Bump taking in the light show and saying, “Once a slave, always a slave.” A kid had explained the reflector-tape craze to Lorenzo last week, telling him, “If all of us are wearin’ it, the cops get all confused.” Lorenzo had countered, “Well, if you all don’t wear it, won’t the cops be confused that way too?” To which the kid had replied, “Yeah, but if we don’t wear it, then we’re just us.”
Another fashion fad this summer was ski goggles tinted rose or yellow and worn propped at the hairline. About one kid out of every three was going for that effect, as if they were about to hit the slopes, though very few of them had ever set foot on anything but cement or city-owned grass. These were the same damned kids who always referred to their neighborhood as Darktown, D-Town, as if the redneck appellation were a badge of honor. They were ignorant of the etymology, the history. All Lorenzo’s pit-stop mini-lectures about how this section of the city, back in the nineteenth century, had been a shantytown—the only area in which blacks were allowed to live, so-called Coontown, Darktown—had come to nothing. The kids mostly shrugged off his street-corner harangues, his stairwell browbeatings, telling him, “That’s old-school shit. We own this bitch now.”
Though not crazy about the majority of individuals out here as a rule, he nonetheless knew that nine nights out of ten he would unflinchingly go the distance to save just one of them. But tonight was that tenth night, and he was just fucking pissed. The angrier he got, the slower he drove, looking for someone to take it out on, zeroing in, then checking himself, zeroing in, checking himself, understanding that his rage had nothing to do with the JFK all-night ski patrol. Sorely tempted, he went ten miles an hour, the jugglers picking up his mood, cutting down on the clowning, starting to look off, as if working out math problems in their heads, cars honking, impatiently pulling around him on the narrow two-way boulevard, the screeching of their tires like a shrill reproach. Lorenzo was unaware that someone had been chasing his car on foot for the last few blocks until the person finally came up close enough to pound on his trunk. Jumping out of the car, ready to deal, he saw that it was Felicia Mitchell, doubled over now and gasping for air.
“’Renzo,” she gulped out his name, grabbed her guts. “Luhrenzo,” she said, leaning into his taillight for support.
He couldn’t tell if she was injured or just winded until he saw her slowly straighten up, lapping at the air open-mouthed, one hand to her forehead, the other fanning her throat. He was double-parked, the cars behind him curved in a steady stream into the oncoming lane, no one honking, because they all knew his name.
“Lorenzo.” Felicia tried again, dipped at the waist, struggled to get her breath back. “Lorenzo.” She grabbed his wrist. “I saw you go by. You said you…” She dipped again. “Whoo…You said you’d come up tonight.”
“For what?” he asked, and the hurt look on her flushed face sealed his obligation.
Felicia had reluctantly allowed him to hit a drive-through Hardee’s before going to confront her boyfriend, and Lorenzo was wolfing down two cheeseburgers and a strawberry shake as he climbed the stairs to her fourth-floor walk-up. Situated on a side street off JFK Boulevard, her apartment had too many things in it—too many textures, too many surfaces, too many colors. Lorenzo’s automatic reaction on entering was to take a hit of asthma spray. The small living room was chockablock with fancy: a rose-tinted glass coffee table fronted a black velour couch, sheathed in plastic and flanked by two smoke-tinted glass end tables that were topped with chrome gooseneck lamps. This arrangement faced a large-screen TV that anchored a floor-to-ceiling gold-plated wall unit, the glass shelves filled with sentiment and whimsy. There were dolls, figurines, photo albums, videocassettes, Nintendo gear, and framed eight-by-ten cap and gowners—Felicia graduating high school, graduating college; her brother graduating college; her son, Shawn, graduating elementary school. The living room floor was painted jet black and lined with knee-high vases filled with peacock feathers, ostrich feathers, and stalks of multicolored wheat.
To add to his sense of claustrophobia, the sound on the TV was too loud, George Benton singing “Masquerade,” the picture on the yard-square screen both snowy and rolling, impossible to make out. The air itself was too busy for him, dense with the smell of fried meat and, under that, the odor of beer, lots of beer.
“So did he…” Lorenzo tenderly probed the cut on the back of his head, blinked away the meat-tinged air. “Did Billy hit you tonight?”
“Not yet,” Felicia drawled. “But he’s over there in the bullpen warmin’ up.” She gestured toward the far wall. “Wait till you see this shit.” At first, Lorenzo was confused—they seemed to be the only people in the room. But when Felicia turned off the TV, George Benton continued to sing and Lorenzo realized that the living room wasn’t as small as he had thought. What he had taken for the far wall was a partition, the music coming from behind a four-foot-high bookshelf, this one filled with books. When he left Felicia behind to circle around the shelf, he decided that “partition” wasn’t the right word, that a more appropriate one would be “barricade.”
Billy Williams was a young man, fleshy and tall. He sported a thin, parted moustache, which had the paradoxical effect of enhancing the babyishness of his open, round face and converted his eyes into artless magnifiers of whatever emotion churned through his brain at any given moment.
Wearing only a pair of white BVDs, he sat in a beery haze on a sheetless foam mattress behind the bookshelf. The mattress was on the floor, so his knees came up to his shoulders and his moderate gut pressed against his thighs. The music was coming from a miniature boom box, the detachable speakers positioned like earmuffs on either side of his pillow.
Billy’s world behind the bookshelf ran about eight feet by ten, with a single, unshaded window. Two pressed suits hung from a curtainless rod, like misshapen drapes, imperfectly blocking out the light from the street, cutting it up into odd curves and angles so that it hit the wall like dispersed fragments of a kaleidoscope. Underneath this light show, lined up along the baseboard, were
three spit-shined pairs of dress shoes, flanked by crisply folded piles of T-shirts and boxers on one side and a stack of razor-creased slacks on the other, a semicircle of balled dress socks trimming the lot like the fanciful border of a garden.
Beneath the window, at right angles to this dresserless wardrobe, sat Billy Williams’s entertainment center, an orderly arrangement of paperbacks, textbooks, CDs, and four stacked six-packs of beer. The CDs were mostly jazz, the paperbacks science fiction, and the textbooks business-oriented.
Even given the almost military orderliness of the possessions arrayed before him, indicative of discernment, education, and aspiration, Lorenzo, who had never set eyes on this guy before now, felt as if he had just entered the half-cocked make-do world of the homeless.
“Hey, Billy.”
Looking up to the sound of his name, Billy eyed Lorenzo with a liquored vagueness. He wasn’t all the way drunk, just slow on the draw.
“What’s up?” Billy said tentatively.
“I’m Lorenzo Council.” He stooped to extend his hand, Billy taking it, still off balance.
Then Billy’s eyes sparked, his mouth tightened into a grin, and his grip became firm. “Yeah, OK, OK. Yeah, I know you. How you doin’?” Billy’s greeting had the hard joyfulness of a man starved for contact.
“I’m good. How ’bout you?” Lorenzo tossed back, wishing the guy would put his pants on.
“Hey,” Billy said, raising his hands, taking in his space with a smirk. “Hangin’ on, you know.” He turned down the music, the sound of canned laughter rising now from the TV on the other side of the room.
“I hear you got a problem.”
“Me?” Billy curled his fingers into his hairless chest. “I got lots of problems. Which one are you inquiring about?” Before Lorenzo could kick in, Billy’s face suddenly transformed, his eyes and mouth going round with delayed panic, as if he had just remembered leaving the gas on somewhere. Looking back over the bookshelf, Lorenzo saw Felicia slouched sideways on the couch, eyeing the rolling, snowy TV show, her glum face smeared into a supporting fist.
“What”—the sound of Billy’s voice turned Lorenzo around again—“What’s wrong.” His face still held that almost stricken look of anticipation.
“I understand you been doin’ a little, layin’ on of the hands there, brother.”
“I what?” Billy ducked his head, mouth agape.
“She says you been hittin’ her.” Lorenzo found a place to sit, balancing himself on a stack of hardback books, getting closer to eye level with the man on the floor.
“Who… her?” Billy said, raising his arm and crooking his index finger over the bookshelves like a periscope. “That’s… Oh wow.” He lowered his face into his palms and remained like that for a long minute. “Oh wow.”
Lorenzo spread his legs a little wider, propped his elbows on his knees, got his face down a little lower.
“You cannot hit her, you know that, right?”
“Hit her…” Billy’s voice echoed off the cup of his hands. He raised his face, looking at Lorenzo head-on. “That’s what you’re here for?”
Lorenzo just stared.
“Hit her,” he said, looking off, giving Lorenzo the impression that he was taking a moment to sort himself out, to restow all the things in his mental footlocker. When he finally began to speak again, Billy’s voice had an entirely different register, still agitated but less fearful.
“What, she says she’s a battered woman or something?” He looked off again, snorted. “Naw, man, that’s…” He shook his head no, but suddenly tears began to drip down his cheeks, curve around his nose. “I never laid a hand on her.”
“Ask my son, Lorenzo. Ask Shawn,” Felicia called out from beyond the shelves.
“Shawn never saw me hit you.”
“Yes he did.”
Billy clucked in disgust. “She ain’t no battered woman, are you kidding me? I ain’t even from around here, but I will tell you, the people in this city? They whack their women. You go to the hospital, I’ll show you battered women.” There was nothing in Billy’s expression or voice that seemed to accommodate the fact that he was crying. It was as if tears were blood, just a liquid that seeped from the body without needing a corresponding emotional acknowledgment.
Billy struggled to his feet, gangly and slack. He reached over the low bookshelf and, without actually looking at Felicia, trained the nearest chrome-plated gooseneck lamp on her face and bare arms, the light harsh and raw, bleaching her out. “You look at her. Look at her.” Billy’s voice was climbing, febrile, addressing Lorenzo as if Felicia were inanimate. “You look at her top to bottom. Where’s the marks, where’s the bruises, where’s the broken bones, where’s the black eyes.”
In the spirit of her boyfriend’s oddly impersonal aggression, Felicia refused to react to the glare of the light, her sullen eyes still fixed on the abstract TV snow.
For a long moment, Billy hung over the partition, one hand on the neck of the lamp, as if waiting for some acknowledgment of Exhibit A. Then, abruptly, he collapsed cross-legged on the mattress. “Hey, I grew up in a house, and my father, he was dead wrong in what he was doing, but I know what a battered woman looks like, all right? But while she’s got you here? Why don’t you ask her what she’s done to me.”
“Jesus Christ,” Felicia groaned.
“See, she’s doin’ to me what my mother done to my father. Emasculating me, tearing me down, humiliating me.”
“You cannot hit her,” Lorenzo said quietly.
“Well.” Billy slapped his bare legs. “I tell you what. She says she’s gonna file a charge on me? Hey, I grew up in a house where you pull out that gun, you shoot or you leave it in your pocket. I grew up with no games.”
“No games?” Felicia called out. “Then how come he made himself a fort in there.”
“No games.” Billy clenched his teeth.
“You cannot hit her,” Lorenzo repeated evenly, feeling a headache coming on.
“So I say to her, ‘You do what you got to do, but if that’s the case, then you best be prepared to take it to the max because I’m gonna take it to the max too.’”
“Meaning what…” Lorenzo asked, suddenly more interested.
Billy’s tears still dripped, as if disconnected to the face, the voice. “Meaning you file your charges, I’ll file mine. But see, here’s the dilemma for me, because I might have hit her once.”
“Once?” a dull drawl from the other side of the room. “Try once a night.”
“Once,” Billy repeated sharply. “But on my end, let me ask you. Is verbal humiliation indictable? Is, is, is tearing down my manhood indictable?”
“You cannot hit her,” Lorenzo said evenly yet again, smiling, elbows on knees, eye to eye.
“Is, is spiritual castration indictable? And, like, right now, here we go again. Like, here you are, right? Now, I just saw you on Rolonda Watts last month. I’m watching you on the TV, and I like what you said, you know, about peer pressure on kids, the importance of role models. I was with you one hundred percent on that, and I said to her, ‘That’s your guy, right? I like his mentality’ She turns around to me, says, ‘Oh yeah? Well, he don’t like you.’”
“He’s lying, Lorenzo,” Felicia called out, a little louder this time.
“Man, you never even met me,” Billy wailed.
“No, I haven’t,” Lorenzo said patiently, palming his scalp, tapping his feet.
“Now, tearin’ me down to people I admire? People I don’t even have a chance to make an impression on? Is that an indictable crime? No, right?”
“Billy, north, south, right, left, all conversation here between me and you begins with ‘You can not hit her’”
“Man, I never laid a hand on her.”
“Yo brother! You just told me you did!” Lorenzo said, laughing like they were just hanging out. “C’mon there, Billy.”
“Tearin’ me down just because… Hey You don’t even… I was good. I graduated in the to
p fifteen percentile of my college class. I go over to Wall Street? They put me in some back room making cold calls. But I was the best they had, and how many other black brokers you think they had back there, because I didn’t see anyone but me. Come lunchtime, I didn’t even have nobody to talk to, but I was the best.”
“Billy,” Lorenzo said, not really following his flow, “you can not hit her.” Along with Billy’s seemingly disconnected tears, Lorenzo started to experience the man’s self-contradicting words as just verbal smoke, as if his mind and mouth had a vested interest in not comparing notes.
“I mean I was rackin’ it up. And let me tell you something, people pick up their phone and hear me? With my voice? My inflections? Trying to get them to invest their money and I do it better than any of those white boys? You know I had to be good.”
“All right then.” Lorenzo made a steeple of his splayed fingers. “But, Billy—”
“And I still love her.” He tilted his head toward the bookshelves, his facial expression finally, if fleetingly in sync with his tears. “She is a very, very special woman, but if you try to emasculate me—”
“‘Emasculate.’” The word came sharply from over the border. “That’s his favorite word, Lorenzo, ‘emasculate.’”
“Look, you don’t—” Billy abruptly cut himself off, taking such a violent swipe at the wetness under his eyes that it almost seemed like he was slapping himself.
“Last year, OK? I buried my father, and I lost my job.”
“You better jump in there, Lorenzo,” Felicia said. “He’s gonna talk all night if you let him.” Lorenzo winced at her timing.
“Now my mother is in the hospital with cancer, OK? In Paterson. I don’t even have the carfare to go see her. She got a house in Plainfield? I don’t even have the carfare to watch it for her.”
Freedomland Page 37
