“And last but not least, where do we pee…” The crowd laughed, and Karen took the opportunity to fire up a smoke. “There’s four Portosans right here, a bathroom inside the church, and two more Portosans out where we’re headed. I would prefer for everybody to go do their business before we head out, because I don’t want anybody lagging behind, trying to get a little privacy, and winding up losing their group, OK?
“And this is Chris Konicki.” Karen pointed out the woman who had been giving blood pressure readings. “She’s a terrific nurse, been with us three years, and she’ll be setting up a first aid station right out on the edge of the main road. If you start to feel exhausted, weak, nauseous, dehydrated, sing out. Let your leader know, and we’ll get you right out to Chris, OK? And oh, to the members of the press. Fellas? We know you got a job to do and we want you to do that job. We want the coverage.”
Jesse looked off, thinking, Fellas, thinking, an old-fashioned kind of gal.
“But you go out with us? You wear your tick suit, you grab your stick, and you stay with your group. No going off and shooting the sunlight coming down through the treetops, OK? This is not National Geographic. Stay with your group. And while you’re out there? You got two eyes in your head just like everybody else. You see something off-kilter? You see something we should be looking at? Don’t be shy, sing out, OK?” Karen turned to her husband. “Lou?”
Louis slid off the wall and steered his son’s wheelchair to the microphone stand. Detaching the mike itself, he hunkered down and held it in front of the boy’s face.
“Dear Jesus,” the kid began, in a high, childish register. The tone of his voice surprised Jesse, who was expecting something with more bass in it. “Bless everybody here, give them a good day, and help us bring…” He faltered, his father whispering in his ear. “Help us bring Cody Martin home.”
From two high windows inside the church, red, white, and blue balloons were suddenly released by an unseen hand and sailed out over the parking lot, drawing a croon of pleasure from the volunteers.
One red balloon impaled itself on a branch and dropped to the asphalt with what Jesse thought was a little more speed than was natural. Walking over to it, she saw attached to the string a prayer card to Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes. She surveyed the parking lot, watching the volunteers, Post-its aloft, as they struggled to get past one another and group up with their team leaders. The kids were now being rolled into various custom wide vans, presumably to be driven home. She watched her brother handing out broomsticks, his eyes glistening, mouth wide open in some kind of expectant gape as Karen leaned into him and whispered in his ear. And she looked at the Friends of Kent van, encircled by frustrated, half-crazed shooters and reporters as if it were some kind of mysterious, power-granting shrine, Brenda somewhere inside, unreachable, stuffing her head full of rhythm and blues.
Saint Jude. Jesse tried to envision him—supernatural, celestial, beneficent—but no matter how hard she tried to believe in him, to see him, she had about as much faith in his intervention here today as she did in ever getting to meet Cody Martin and bounce him on her knee.
There was a flurry of activity at the Friends of Kent van as the women of the inner circle, save for Elaine, still leaning against the church wall, gave the hovering reporters the verbal bum’s rush, evicting them from the immediate vicinity before unlocking the side panel and yanking it open to engage Brenda. Jesse watched as the women stooped before the shadowed maw of the interior, gesturing, hunching their shoulders as they presumably attempted to coax Brenda into the daylight again. They took turns leaning forward, reaching inside the van, hanging there, then grudgingly straightening up, each of them taking a crack at it, all to no avail. Marie finally stepped away and waved to Karen across the lot to give a hand.
Cutting herself free of her conversation with Ben, Karen strode through the crowd toward the red van, Jesse wheeling as she passed and following in her wake. Over Marie’s shoulder, Jesse saw Brenda curled up into the van seat farthest from the door, her face swollen and streaming as she tried to ignore the entreaties of the women to come out and join the group.
“Brenda.” Karen wielded her name like a whip.
“No.” It was a disembodied bray. “Not without Lorenzo.”
“I told you. He’s coming.”
“He’s not here.”
“He’ll be here.”
Marie turned from the van again, almost mowing down Jesse, touched Karen’s arm, and brought her a few steps away.
“I don’t think she can cut it,” Marie said quietly.
“She’s coming,” Karen said, with no flex at all. Then, looking straight at Jesse, as if expecting resistance: “She is coming.”
19
Lorenzo awoke that morning at eight-thirty, the latest he’d slept since he’d stopped drinking eight years earlier. He dimly recalled a confused dream about Bump, then realized it wasn’t a dream. The phone had rung at two-thirty—Bobby McDonald calling to inform him that his partner had got his ass kicked, been gang-jumped while walking to his car on Hurley Street, the final score three broken ribs, a fractured eye socket, and no positive IDs.
Flinching, Lorenzo now recalled that he had meant to jump out of bed and make it to his partner’s bedside at the medical center, but he had obviously laid back down at the end of the conversation for what was intended as a few more minutes of shut-eye. His failure to rally for Bump left him feeling vaguely ashamed, but then another foul flashback, his long one-on-one with Brenda over in Freedomtown, left him feeling flat-out disgusted.
Earlier in the previous day, when they had had their long, hot God-versus-therapy pep talk in the empty apartment overlooking the crime scene, Lorenzo had considered Brenda’s inability to give it up as a failure on his part; he had failed to get her to the place where she needed to be mentally in order to say the words. But last night, over in Freedomtown, he had done everything but show her his ass, and as far as he was concerned, she was the one who had come up short.
His only misgiving, in retrospect, was his declaration that this would be their last “quiet talk”; he might as well have told her straight-out to get herself a lawyer who would instruct her to shut her yap. But no matter now. His time was over and he was done with it, ready to hand the investigation, and Brenda, over to the FBI, as agreed. Finally rolling out of bed, he called McDonald and threw in the towel. They set up a meeting for eleven o’clock with the FBI, and running out of the house with a prepped toothbrush in one hand and two powdered doughnuts in the other, he figured he had just enough time for a bedside visit with his partner before his debriefing.
Driving over to the medical center, Lorenzo realized that he had forgotten to bring his asthma spray. The midmorning air was already dense with some kind of superheated toxic crud, and he had to pull over to a drugstore to buy an over-the-counter inhaler, the harsh solution and propellant of which, he quickly discovered, made him feel like he was taking deep drags off a cigar. Twenty minutes after making his purchase and after perfunctorily glad-handing his way through the reception area, the elevator, and the fourth-floor nurses’ station, Lorenzo walked into Bump’s semiprivate room. The bed was blocked from his sight by three visiting patients and a nurse.
At any given time there were always a goodly number of Armstrong tenants checked into the medical center, and apparently, once the word had gone out about the beating, at least these three had decided to make a call. They stood around the bed in thin hospital-issue seersucker bathrobes and cardboard slippers—two relatively young women, who Lorenzo knew were battling AIDS-related illnesses, and an older, heavier woman who suffered from diabetes. The nurse, too, was Armstrong-bred, born, raised, and still living there, her parents having moved in the day the houses opened for business back in 1955.
“Damn!” Lorenzo announced himself, after putting on his happy face in the hallway. “This like some, some block party in here!”
The three women greeted him loudly but the sight o
f Bump’s face made Lorenzo go deaf. Broken blood vessels had turned the whites of his eyes a vivid red, and there was a bulge, as if someone had slipped a large marble under the skin between the corner of his left eye socket and his left temple, the bulk of it so pronounced that it gave that side of his face an Asiatic slant. The unearthly tint of his eyes, matched by the brilliant natural orange of his beard, made him look like a Scottish demon.
“Damn, boy!” Lorenzo locked in his grin. “You look like Damien or something.”
“Ask Big Daddy, Kath,” Bump addressed the nurse with a little too much animation. “Lorenzo, I’m trying to pull her coat about Shuckie. True or false, he’s gettin’ that little gangster man walk, right?” He turned his head back to the nurse before Lorenzo could respond. “I’m serious, Kath, I think it’s high time you laid on some of that Mommy stick with him.”
“Well, I tell you,” she said in a low murmur of concentration. “You see him out there messin’ up? You do your job.”
“Hey”—Bump waved a hand—“that goes without saying, Kath, but what I’m sayin’ is that the bud’s gotta be nipped in the bud. It’s gotta be handled in-house, otherwise me and Lorenzo, alls we can do is, you know, snip it as it grows, but the shit’s gonna pop right back up again, you know what I’m saying?”
“I hear you.” The woman was calm, as if she understood that Bump was just yakking to drown out the terror, busting a nut to act like he was still out there working Hurley and Gompers, patrolling the towers. “And he’s got your schedule down cold, Kath. Nobody could ever accuse him of being a dummy.”
“I hear you,” she said again.
“A knucklehead yes, but not a dummy.”
Lorenzo could hear the panic that fueled Bump’s chatter, intuiting that it wasn’t the trauma of the beating itself that was driving him now—the damage probably looked a lot worse than it was—but the fear of the unknown: potentially a diminished capacity to do the job, physically mentally or even the possibility of losing the job altogether. For a cop like Bump that would be the spiritual equivalent of death, the utter annihilation of identity.
“Big Daddy.” One of the younger women, Lorraine Powell, spoke his name in a hoarse drawl, standing there dying, holding an unlit cigarette. “You best catch these niggers.”
“I’m on it,” he said absently, entertaining a nightmare vision of Bump over the coming years locked into lawsuit after lawsuit with the city.
“We all gonna be on it,” said the other young woman, Doris Tate, three kids and a college degree, also dying.
“Y’all got some friends around here, boss.” Lorenzo beamed down at him, took another hit of that caustic spray.
“You got that right,” the older woman, Betty Castle, said, bobbing her head. “Like, no offense to the police in general, but I can’t see hauling my behind out of a hospital bed to come down an’ visit too many of y’all, if you want to know the truth.”
Bump took Betty’s hand. He started crying, covering his demonic eyes with a forearm, the sudden movement making his IV bag sway on its stand.
“Hey Bump.” Doris Tate put a hand on his chest. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll take your beating, you take my virus, what you say.”
Bump laughed, or at least stopped crying. “Let me talk to my man here, OK, ladies?” The women trailed out and Lorenzo watched them leave, his face averted from Bump, giving his partner time to regain his composure.
“Your family come by yet?” Lorenzo finally turned. Bump nodded slightly, looking off. Lorenzo pulled the curtain. “You know who did it?”
“Yup.” Bump nodded tightly. Lorenzo waited. “Brenda Martin.” There were no tears anymore.
“Who?” He took another hit of spray.
“She’s killing us, Lorenzo.” Bump wiped his blood-drowned eyes. “Either you wrap this fucker up or you give it over to someone who can.”
“Done,” Lorenzo mumbled, hating the taste that word left in his mouth.
Two blocks from the medical center it dawned on Lorenzo that he could’ve gotten his regular prescription Ventolin inhaler from Chatterjee or from any number of doctors in there whom he had come to know from years of rapes and assaults. Looking at his watch, he saw that he had just enough time to turn around and make a quick Ventolin run, but before he could manage a full 360, his cell phone rang.
“Lorenzo?”
“Who’s this?” He straightened out and headed back to the hospital.
“This is Karen Collucci.”
“Hey. You off on the hunt yet?”
“What are you doing right now?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“I got a meet with the FBI.”
“Do me, do yourself a favor. Pull over to the curb, and hear me out.”
A few minutes later, the Crown Victoria was heading off in yet a third direction, this time toward the parking lot of Saint Agnes, where the search party was in its final moments of shaping up before hitting the wrecked, overgrown campus of the William Howard Chase Institute. On the way over, Lorenzo called Bobby McDonald again, told him that Brenda had just asked to talk to him—not exactly true—and secured for himself another temporary reprieve before surrendering the investigation.
Karen Collucci had told him that Brenda refused to go out on the search unless he was part of it, but the leader of the Kenters still wanted Lorenzo to keep his distance from Brenda after she had seen his face. He could understand Karen’s strategy of separating, in Brenda’s mind, the centurions from the housewives, but since she had gone and asked for him…
Whatever the logic, Lorenzo knew that the only reason he so readily agreed to become part of this torturous and lung-searing exercise over the next few hours was the quickening of his blood when Karen had uttered her name, Brenda. He still wanted, craved, just one more encounter, and he’d take it any way he could.
But the price would be high, Lorenzo knew, envisioning the William Howard Chase Institute on a day like today, anticipating the interminable slog through a swelter of crumbled outbuildings, knee-high grass, sinkholes, and wild bramble—the visceral wallop of expected mortifications making him reach for his spray again.
The Chase Institute was in shambles, nothing more than an urban ghost town—half wilderness, half living menace—but Lorenzo had heard on more than one occasion from a local history buff, a lieutenant in Narcotics, that at its inception the Chase Institute for the Mentally and Physically Incapacitated had been a world-class showcase. The lieutenant had shown him archival photos of the 1904 ribbon-cutting ceremony, in which a top-hatted fat cat in a wicker-backed wheelchair, William Howard Chase himself, offered to the world a trim, bucolic seventy-five-acre campus consisting of ten residential cottages for adults, two larger dormitories for children, two workshops, a rehabilitation-oriented gymnasium, a Universalist chapel, a dining hall, a five-acre truck farm, and a small theater. The buildings had been constructed of limestone, the lieutenant had said, the grounds surrounded by lush forest, the air scented by the sea, the faculty idealistic, and the trust fund flush.
In its first few decades, the institute became the standard by which all other rehabilitation facilities were judged, but the crash of 1929 wiped out the institute’s trust fund overnight, and the state of New Jersey, faced with the dispersion of seven hundred incapacitated patients, stepped in and took title. This, the lieutenant had said, was where the place became fascinating from the criminologist’s point of view. By the mid-1930s the Chase Institute was more commonly referred to as William Howard Disgrace, a surly and abusive little corner of hell, greatly overpopulated and understaffed, owned and operated more by the poorly paid attendants than by the administrators, in the same intimate way that prisons are owned by the guards.
It became a dumping ground—the new influx of patients mostly abandoned by guilt-ridden, financially strapped families—and with this class of patients, this new breed of staff, there followed decade after decade of deteriorating service, murderous abuse, and two-fisted thievery. The once-pristi
ne greens were overrun with weed and brush, the broad, flower-trimmed pathways cracked and pot-holed, and the limestone on many of the buildings seized and split by the tenacious growth of creeper vine. Ground-maintenance equipment disappeared, was reordered, and disappeared again. In the infirmary, drugs were more pilfered than administered, the staff finally taking to ordering directly for themselves. In the dining room, meat, canned goods, boxed goods, and dairy products were routinely resold to local supermarkets and groceries. The workshops were routinely stripped of tools and machinery.
Anything that could be requisitioned from the state—window glass, bedsheets, athletic supplies, Bibles, wheelchairs, shoes, roofing tiles—disappeared once it was received. There was organized pimping of the younger patients, both male and female. There were unexplained pregnancies, disappearances, deaths. Mildly retarded children grew to severely retarded adults without ever leaving the grounds.
Four decades of systematic plunder and mayhem finally came to a dead halt in the summer of 1967, when a reporter from the Dempsy Register going undercover as a newly hired orderly vanished three days into his assignment. Within a week, the institute was flooded with state investigators, local police, and the press.
Chase became a dark star—this Lorenzo remembered on his own—yielding weeks of national media coverage. After six months of investigation by the state, the gates of William Howard Disgrace were finally padlocked. It took another two years to truly shut it down, two more years to successfully relocate all of the three thousand patients who had been imprisoned there, including two old men who had come to Chase as children during the First World War. Within months of the last relocation, the forest began closing in again, reclaiming the campus with supernatural speed. By the early 1970s, the William Howard Chase Institute for the Mentally and Physically Incapacitated looked like nothing more than an overgrown outpost of Magna Graecia, most of the cottages and outbuildings barely visible from one to the other, lush veins of green bursting through the crumbling cement of a fifty-year-old pool, three times Olympic size, that had never seen a drop of water. And after all the hearings, investigations, audits, and commissions launched in 1967 came to an end, the reports published, the players dispersed, there was not one successfully pursued criminal prosecution, nor was the reporter ever found, even though half the grounds of the institute had been backhoed into a moonscape. This, too, as the lieutenant would have put it, was fascinating from the criminologist’s point of view.
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