Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “He’s there all the time, Lorenzo. If he’s so worried about saving the damn carfare, why doesn’t he just move in, get out my hair al together.” Lorenzo’s left eye began to throb.

  “Look,” Billy said. “I’m not even from around here. I came up here to be with her. And now I don’t even have nothing to go back to, you know what I’m sayin’? It’s, like, her city, her friends, she’s the one with the job, she’s the one with the connections, she’s the one can call you up, get you over here to intimidate me.”

  “I ain’t intimidatin’ you. I’m talking to you man to man and I just have one thing—”

  “To say to me. I cannot hit her. And I agree. No debate on that, but let me tell you. Whether I hit her or not don’t make any difference no more, because I am finished with her. I won’t sleep with her, I won’t break bread with her, I won’t talk with her, I won’t look at her. I am finished!”

  “Good!” Felicia bellowed. “So move out! Lorenzo, tell him to move out. He livin’ half the time in his mother’s house anyhow, so tell him to get the other half of his ass over there too.”

  “I am over at my mother’s house because my mother is dying!” Billy shouted at the floor. “I am over at my mother’s house because that’s the only place on Earth I got left where I can feel like a whole person!”

  “Yeah, an’ all he does when he comes back here after he’s finished feeling like a whole person is to hole up in that hamster cage over there, drink beer, and feel sorry for himself because he’s living off me.” Billy started trembling, Lorenzo watching the rage bubble under his skin. “And you know, Lorenzo,” Felicia added. “All due respect to his mother and whatnot—”

  “Whatnot,” Billy repeated through clenched teeth.

  “But I know he’s got some shorty over there. Tellin’ me he’s watchin’ his mother’s house… Like what, the house is gonna run into the street? Nah, nah, he’s knockin’ boots over there, Lorenzo. I might be abused, but I’m not stupid. He wants to be treated like a man? Let him act like a man. Either move out or move in, because I can not take this pup tent in my house one day longer.”

  “Her house, her city, her friends, her friends, her money her job, her connections, everybody on her side.” Billy’s face was a glistening river. “Man, you don’t even know me. You don’t…How can you not like me? I was watching you on TV. You made me feel good. You made me feel inspired.”

  “Well, look—” Lorenzo’s beeper went off: Bump. “You and me. We know each other now, right?”

  He handed Billy one of his cards. “You need me, you call me, same like her, ’cause now everybody knows me and I know everybody,” he said, raising his voice to include Felicia. “So I’ll be waiting for a call. And when I’m called, whoever calls me? I will come.”

  Billy nodded, mute now, as if not sure whether he was being validated or threatened. Lorenzo leaned forward and spoke in an intimate whisper, theatrically excluding Felicia. “How long you been living like this?”

  “Just, you know, this week, a few days. I moved my stuff,” Billy responded in Lorenzo’s hushed, confidential tone.

  “And you been hittin’ her this week too.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you have.” Lorenzo inched away, speaking softly. Billy said nothing. “Yes, you have,” Lorenzo repeated.

  “It’s been a bad week,” Billy stammered. “You don’t know.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lorenzo kept close, waiting.

  “I consider myself a gentleman.”

  “So.” Billy stared at his hands. “You cannot hit her, brother.”

  “I know… I’m kind of out of my own depth right now.”

  Lorenzo nodded, and without moving his head, without turning his gaze, he reached across to the stack of neatly folded T-shirts, plucked one, and offered it to Billy so that he could wipe his eyes. Billy stared at the shirt for a moment, as if confused, then slipped it on, Lorenzo thinking, Damn…

  “You talk about respect,” Lorenzo continued in that quiet, forceful tone. “When you hit her, do you gain her respect? Or lose it.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.” Billy’s eyes were trained on the floor.

  “Her son. What are you teaching him when he sees you—”

  “I agree, I agree.” Billy cut him off, as if the picture were too unbearable, too shameful.

  “Do you want to leave her?” Lorenzo ducked his head a little, trying to lift Billy’s eyes.

  “No.”

  “Do you?”

  Silence, then, “No.”

  “’Cause if you do, I’ll find you a place to stay.”

  “No.”

  “I can just pick up the phone and get you a room tonight, won’t even cost you a penny.” Lorenzo was getting carried away a little, but he didn’t think Billy would go for it.

  “No.”

  He gave the answer a few reflective seconds. “OK, then…” Billy’s tears dripped in a lazy leak, like bathwater through a ceiling. Lorenzo put a hand on Billy’s bare knee and moved in closer. “You’re an intelligent, well-spoken young man, Billy. So, c’mon now. It’s time for you to start collecting yourself, you know what I’m saying? We need you.”

  Billy’s mouth worked wordlessly, his eyes brimming. “You are absolutely right,” he finally said with tremulous conviction. “You have yet to meet the real me.”

  Lorenzo’s beeper went off, this time the forensics lab, and he rose to his feet. “Well, I would look forward to meeting that individual.”

  Billy followed him out into the living room, hopping into a pair of jeans along the way. Felicia, sprawled on the couch, looked like she hadn’t moved an inch in all the time that Lorenzo had spent behind the bookshelves in Billyworld. Lorenzo knew that she thought he had wound up taking Billy’s side, but all he had done, as far as he was concerned, was to play to the man’s vulnerability, stroking him into a state of at least temporary positiveness.

  “Hey” Billy offered his hand, his breath yeasty and sweet. “I really enjoyed talking to you. I don’t have too many full-bodied conversations with people these days.”

  “The feeling’s mutual.” Lorenzo smiled tightly, watching Felicia roll her eyes. “But just you all remember, I get a ring on my beeper? Whoever calls me, I am coming back.”

  “Good.” Billy bobbed his head.

  “’Cause this isn’t just about you and you. It’s about…” Lorenzo chucked a thumb toward the other end of the apartment, toward Shawn’s closed bedroom door. “That’s the catastrophe.”

  “I agree.” Billy bobbed his head again, passed a quick finger across a tear-mottled cheekbone.

  Felicia twisted her lips way up on one side of her face, refused to look at either of them.

  “You all have a good night now,” Lorenzo said, lingering despite himself, feeling that, after all the back and forth, he and Billy hadn’t really talked about shit. Finally taking his leave, Lorenzo stood quietly outside the apartment door, listening for the sharp sounds of a fight. After three minutes of hearing nothing but TV laugh track, he left the building.

  Upon opening the door to his mother’s apartment, where he intended to wait out the end of Karen Collucci’s sit-down with Brenda Martin, he saw the answering machine winking redly at him from across the darkened living room. There were two messages, the first from Atlantic City, his mother calling to inform him that she had won two thousand dollars playing some kind of jackpot slot machine and was extending her stay with Lorenzo’s aunts for however long it took to return the money to the casino. Lorenzo was vaguely amused that his mom seemed unaware of what had to be the hottest ongoing news event in the tristate area. But then he recalled from his one halfhearted trip to AC that the casinos had neither clocks nor windows.

  The second call wasn’t nearly so joyous or oblivious—his wife, Frankie. She was furious, in tears, one of the New York tabloids having run a sidebar on Jason, on the fact that the catching detective’s kid was a twenty-two-year-old jailbird. Listening to his wife’s distraught rail
ing, he stood bobbing over the answering machine, mumbling, “I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it,” knowing there was nothing he could do but eat it and move on.

  When Frankie came to the end of her lament, Lorenzo became aware of a liquid tickle at the nape of his neck. Apparently, while listening to his wife, he had reopened the gash on the back of his head, vigorously scratching the barely formed scab until the blood was streaming down his back like water.

  Changing into a fresh shirt, he pulled out his pager and saw the last number registered there: Forensics. Assuming Bump had paged him earlier simply for an update, Lorenzo returned the call to Forensics first, not really expecting any great revelation from them—Brenda’s handbag, the last time he had laid eyes on it, was mashed and frosted with mud. As it turned out, he couldn’t even raise anyone at that office to answer the phone.

  Karen Collucci’s call came a few minutes later, as Lorenzo was dozing off in front of the bathroom mirror, once again trying to dress his head wound. Karen gave him a thorough report—the taped message to Cody, the maps, the scent bag, and the dog. Regarding her gut take on Brenda, Karen was noncommittal, but she seemed to feel that it was imperative that the mother join them in the next day’s grid search of the defunct Chase Institute and its abandoned campus grounds. Lorenzo asked her if she felt like they had any real chance of coming across Cody Martin tomorrow, and Karen responded to the question with a long, pointed silence. Then she said that, if all they were searching for was a body, they could just send out the damn dog. Lorenzo asked her for a few hours to think about it. Rapidly approaching the end of his tenure here as catching detective, he wanted at least one more crack at Brenda Martin himself.

  Without any solid notion of a game plan, Lorenzo trudged up the stairs to Brenda’s apartment. A stench akin to cooked diapers emanated from the ground-floor apartment, climbing along with him.

  Jesse came to the door, Brenda’s phone snug against her jawline. She was dumping to her editor and greeted him with a perfunctory nod.

  Brenda sat on the couch. Her face was red from crying, and with her headphones on, she wasn’t aware that he had come into her home.

  “Brenda Martin’s small apartment is broiling tonight… There are no air conditioners, no fans…and yet the windows remain shut… for the cooler night air would be accompanied… by the cries and the entreaties of the crowd beneath her windows—no—the crowd below.”

  Jesse was full of shit. Someone, probably her brother, Lorenzo guessed, had come up with four fans and placed one in each corner of the living room. The air was still soupy in here, but at least it was circulating.

  “Yet despite this suffocating heat…the Friends of Kent, four women and a man…sat in this room for over an hour…wearing the red satin baseball jackets—bomber jackets… that bear the logo of their organization.”

  Lorenzo took a dinette chair and brought it alongside Brenda on the couch. He could hear “Take Me to the River” coming through her phones, the beat pulsating around her head. He studied her, angling for a sign on how to proceed. His pager went off: Forensics playing phone tag.

  “Their leader, Karen Collucci—two I’s, two C’s—has the fierce, unblinking eyes of a fanatic… but her cause is righteous.”

  He mimed slipping off the headphones, but Brenda was living behind her eyes, living inside her music.

  “What’s wrong with—you should see this. OK, zealot. How about zealot?” Jesse offered.

  Lorenzo reached out to touch Brenda’s knee, bring her into the world, but truly lost for an angle of approach he opted to step off. He rose from the dinette chair and retreated to the shadowed doorway, where, in order to buy some time, he again reached out to Forensics, this time successfully. The conversation lasted less than ten minutes, Lorenzo saying next to nothing, just listening, punctuating his silence with head bobs. When he hung up, he scrawled the name MAGDA BELLO on the cover of his notebook. The pen skittered in his fingers as if he had just received one of Chatterjee’s asthma chasers. Considering himself armed now, motivated, though still without a plan, he finally called back Bump Rosen to get him started on finding Magda Bello and, more immediately, to simply ask his advice.

  Bump’s offering was pithy and sweet: “You genuinely feel for her, boss. Use it.”

  Lorenzo returned to the dinette chair, Brenda still off in the music, swaying in a rapture of avoidance. “I’m Your Puppet” was coming through the phones now, and all at once it occurred to him—the proper setting for their next encounter. He touched her knee and she levitated.

  “Hold on,” Jesse said to her editor. “I’ll call you back.”

  “Brenda.” Lorenzo leaned forward in the chair. “My boss says to me the FBI’s gonna come in tomorrow on this. We kind of held them off because we thought we could do it just knockin’ on doors.” He paused to read her face: no real fear there, just exhaustion and misery. “But I’m startin’ to think we need the, the expertise.”

  Brenda stared at him, then, as if seized up, abruptly bared her teeth. “He’s killing me,” she said, slowly tossing her head from side to side.

  “Who’s killing you?” Lorenzo asked calmly, pretty sure he knew who she meant. But when she failed to respond, he refrained from pursuing it.

  “Brenda, you getting any sleep?”

  She looked at her lap. He turned to Jesse behind him. “She get-tin’ any sleep?”

  Jesse stepped back toward the kitchen, raised her chin for him to follow. “I’m making some coffee, Brenda,” she declared in a too-loud voice.

  Lorenzo came into the small cooking space, unavoidably crowding her. “What’s up.”

  “They had this cadaver dog?” Jesse put on water, let the tap run to cover conversation.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Guy says, ‘Body’ the dog makes a beeline for under the dining table, starts rubbing its cheek on the carpet, you know, with its ass up in the air? Just rubbing, rubbing, acting all agitated like—” Jesse made a high-pitched whimpering sound.

  “Huh.” Lorenzo knew all this from his conversation with Karen, knew also that the dog’s frantic reaction was inconclusive. The problem with these cross-trained animals, Lorenzo had been informed, was that sometimes you gave them the wrong trigger word. The trainer would be looking for a corpse, saying “Body,” and the dog would discover drugs or a gun, then look back at the trainer, antsy and whining, as if to say, “Can we discuss this?”—wanting the “Seek” command instead.

  Obviously there had been no corpse under the table, but Sherlock, a four-word all-star, could have picked up residual body fluids—blood, vomit, piss, or shit—or zeroed in on heroin, marijuana, cocaine. It was hard to say without taking a carpet sample, but there was definitely something of interest ground or spilled or rubbed into that fabric.

  “Anything else?” Lorenzo blinked away sweat, the kitchen greasy and close.

  “She’s a bitch, that Karen Collucci.”

  “She’s a zealot.” Lorenzo smiled. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah.” Jesse shifted her weight and gestured to a milk glass on the side of the sink. It was half full of some kind of pale-green effervescent liquid, a ring of cakey sediment marking the waterline.

  Lorenzo leaned over the glass and the raw, caustic fumes snapped his head back. “Whoa.”

  “What do you think?” Jesse paradiddled her nails on the stove.

  Lorenzo looked through the cutout to Brenda, who was curled into her music on the couch. He took the glass and emptied it into the sink. Quietly rummaging around in her cutlery drawers, he came upon a box of Ziploc bags and dropped the glass into one.

  “She talk about killing herself?”

  “Nope, uh-uh.”

  Lorenzo grunted and slipped the glass into his jacket pocket.

  “So what’s up on your end?” Jesse yawned into her fist, a spasm of fatigue making her body shudder involuntarily.

  “Nothing,” Lorenzo lied. The kettle whistled and Jesse turned it off, not interested
in coffee. “I want to take her for a ride,” he said.

  “A ride?” Jesse echoed, getting a little knotty.

  “Yeah, and she might or might not be coming back,” he added, answering the next question in advance.

  “Can I ask where you’re going?”

  “Nope.”

  “We still got a contract, right?”

  “Get some sleep,” Lorenzo said, backing out of the kitchen. “Sleep near that phone there.”

  As Lorenzo rolled down late-night Jessup Avenue, Brenda softly sang to herself in the shotgun seat, Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now.” Her right temple was pressed to the passenger window, the headphone wires hanging jagged and kinked to the Discman in her lap. Lorenzo smiled nervously as he worked his way down the finger of land that was the city of Gannon, heading toward Gannon Bay. As he turned off Jessup onto F. X. Kiely Avenue, four blocks from the water, Brenda suddenly came to life, sitting up and slipping off her headphones. “Where are you taking me?”

  “I’m taking you someplace peaceful,” Lorenzo said, parking in front of a chain-link fence that was foaming with weeds and brush. “You need some serenity.”

  “Are you taking me to my son?” she asked, her voice hollow and stiff.

  Lorenzo got out of the car, walked around to her side. “I wish I could, Brenda,” he said, opening her door. “I truly wish I could.” The gate was unlocked, so that Lorenzo had only to raise the hinged clasp. He offered Brenda his hand.

  “Why are you taking me here?” Brenda took a step back, her face chalky in the moonlight.

  “Brenda,” he said softly, holding the gate ajar with his foot.

  “What’s in there?” She took another step back.

  “History” he answered, carefully taking her by the hand.

  Inside the gate, Lorenzo walked her along a quarter-mile curve of shattered macadam jutting out into the bay. A thin crescent of derelict pavement, it was flanked on one side by water the color of steel and, on the other, as far back as anyone could see, by abandoned acreage upon which—in no discernible pattern of plantings—humped, erratic man-made shapes cloaked in moonlit vegetation, rose from the ground like the overgrown ruins of some lost jungle civilization.