Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Again,” she said, the word weighing a ton.

  He pressed Record. “This is Dempsy detective Lorenzo Council. I’m sitting here in the interview room of the Southern District station house on July the second at 2:55 P.M. With me is Brenda Martin, a white female, aged thirty-two, who resides at 16 Van Loon Street, Gannon, New Jersey, phone number 420-7210, Social Security number 183-40-3947.” Lorenzo tried to wink at her, as if to communicate that this was a scam they were pulling, him and her. “This statement is in relation to the death of Cody Martin, aged four.”

  Lorenzo hesitated as a ripple shot through her frame.

  “Brenda? Now, once again, I have to advise you of your rights.” His tone formal, for the prosecutor, for the walls.

  “See, you have to understand something,” she cut him off. “I wouldn’t, I couldn’t have always been there for him.” She sounded reasonable, lucid—gone. Lorenzo was bumped off course more by her tone than by her words.

  “Excuse me?”

  And then all was lost to chaos. Brenda, wild-eyed, a horse in a burning stable, exploded out of her chair—her CD player clattering across the floor, the dislodged batteries rolling—and threw herself at the far wall as if there were an exit there that only she could see. Lorenzo, not having time to rise from his seat, instinctively snaked out an arm and caught her around the middle, intercepting her, bringing her down on his lap. Brenda flailed, squawking now, as Lorenzo hugged her from behind, his chair rearing back on its springs as if they were trying to land a marlin.

  “Can I get some help in here?” Lorenzo barked in an oddly polite and formal tone, addressing the one-way mirror, the bathroom wall, the amp on Bobby McDonald’s desk. Brenda whooped like a freight train as he struggled to restrain her, the tape recorder joining the CD player on the floor. With one of Lorenzo’s hands around her waist, the other diagonally across her chest seizing her shoulder, Brenda whirled them both around the room on the caster-footed chair, propelling them sideways into a wall, Lorenzo repeating his request, this time with a little more snap: “Can I get some help.”

  24

  The men’s room had cleared out by the second call for help—the three remaining detectives who were listening in through the wall struggling past one another to leave—and Jesse was finally alone, still locked in her stall.

  She could hear Brenda’s muffled wails and entreaties mixing with the terse directives of the cops as they tried to restrain her, one of them calling out for Joyce Bannion, the only female detective on the tour. There would be no recorded statement this night, and Jesse’s guess was that Brenda was headed for the hospital, not the jail. She would most likely be sedated, rehydrated, and left there overnight with a female cop on guard. In the morning, the judge, the prosecutor, and the public defender would come by for a bedside arraignment, and as soon as she was considered adequately recovered, Brenda would be transferred to County.

  Jesse remained in the stall well past the time of Brenda’s removal from the building. For the last hour, this room had hosted an endless procession of eavesdroppers, most of them hanging in only long enough to say that they had been there but one or another of them rattling the door of her stall every few minutes or so, so that Jesse’s head was split between absorbing Brenda’s tale and fending off discovery. The taut intensity of this double-jointed alertness had left her with a borderline migraine.

  Jesse hadn’t begun to appreciate the quality of the hatred that would soon rain down on Brenda until she overheard her asking Lorenzo, “Do you know what I like in bed?” and then, answering her own question, “I like someone’s hand right here… And I like a hand here.” No one in the bathroom could see where either “here” was, and, braced to absorb a medley of wisecracking speculations among the dozen or more cops who were listening in at that moment, Jesse was taken by surprise when not one of them mouthed off. In that silence she intuited complete condemnation: the sexual preferences of Brenda Martin received as morally offensive and repugnant information.

  When the normal ambient racket descended once more on the third floor of the station house, Jesse started to punch in Jose, but she had to shut the phone down when two cops came in to use the facilities.

  “You know what I’d do?” one asked the other over the sound of erratic splashings. “I’d tie her down in her cell, plaster the walls and ceilings with pictures of the kid, give it a week, then toss her a razor.”

  Jesse waited for the cops to leave, then slipped back out in the hallway. Blending into the general rush and buzz of the postarrest station house, she tried Jose again. He clipped the phone on the first ring.

  “She get charged?”

  “Yup,” she said, keeping her head down, loitering in a sea of police.

  “Homicide?”

  “Yup.”

  “When’s the presser?”

  “Seven-thirty or so. They got to get their shit together, line up a few of the brothers to keep the peace. Let me just give you the dead nuts on the confession now. I’ll do the write-up of the Friends of Kent search for tomorrow No rush on that, right?”

  “Go.”

  “She claims the kid—it was an accident. Said the boy drank a bottle of Benadryl.”

  “Sounds like an honest mistake. Go.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “What.”

  “A mistake.”

  “What?”

  “Says the kid was mad at her.”

  “For…”

  “Going out.”

  “Bullshit. Go.”

  “She goes out, comes back, the kid is dead.”

  “They recover the body?”

  “In Freedomtown.”

  “Buried?”

  “No, on a fuckin’ Ferris wheel.”

  “Who’s the man?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘going out.’ With who.”

  She started to say, then realized that, although she knew the guy was Felicia Mitchell’s boyfriend, all she had on him was a first name. In addition, she didn’t know if Lorenzo was going to make the Billy end of things public information, and she didn’t want to jam him up if he wasn’t.

  “I’ll call you back in a minute.”

  “Jesse, wait—”

  She hung up, eased herself into the squad room, and headed for Lorenzo, who was standing over his desk, salaaming into the phone.

  “You were right. You were right. But I had to pursue the story as told to me. I had to do my job. That’s the way it is, Rev. That’s… You were right. I done said that about sixty times already, OK?”

  Rev: Jesse guessed Longway, but it could have been Howell, McMichaels, or Bowers—lots of activist revs out there. Jesse eyed a crumpled pink dry-cleaning slip by Lorenzo’s phone, the back of it inked with a scribbled list of twelve names, Lorenzo speed-humping his way through all of Dempsy’s high-profile minority players.

  “But now, here’s the deal,” Lorenzo said. “Are you going to help me tonight? ’Cause I need you up there. I need…Hey, I’m pissed too, I’m pissed as a motherfucker, but so now what do you want to happen tonight, huh? What, you want to see fireworks? You want Devil’s Night? Who do you think’s gonna…Who do you think’s gonna get hurt most tonight if we don’t… What… Hey. We’re gonna have… Who do you think… Don’t you think they’re gonna be all set up for that?”

  Jesse, practiced at reading upside down from years of talking to people from the visitor side of the desk, committed as many of the twelve names to memory as she could, the move for her here to hit some of these people before the presser, get herself a slew of first reactions, keep ahead of the story.

  “Let me tell you something about tonight.” Lorenzo lowered his voice, shifting into a tone of confidential menace. “They’re most likely gonna have three, four hundred police out there in riot gear, a hundred, hundred fifty by Armstrong alone. Now, you ain’t gonna see them unless something goes down, but my question to you is, given what I just told you, don’t you think we got enough brothers
in the joint as is? Or do you think we gotta lock up a whole ‘nother busload tonight. Would that make you happy? Or how ’bout the medical center. Whose heads gonna get bust out there tonight? Think, Rev…Gannon? Naw, man, you want to see Gannon police tonight you got to go to Gannon. You want to see Gannon police for the next six months? You’re gonna have to go to Gannon. That one’s like money in the bank.”

  Or better still, Jesse thought, she would work on becoming part of the story, presenting herself as Lorenzo’s secret liaison, hot out of the confession box: Detective Council thought you might need to know this about what Brenda Martin said; Lorenzo wants to know if you have any questions he can help you with. Make herself a human information bridge, runner to the stars. Jesse was counting on the scene being too hectic and emotional over the next twenty-four hours for anyone to take the time to check her credentials on this one.

  “I agree. I agree.” Lorenzo rubbed his eyes so vigorously that his glasses flew off. “So what’s it gonna be … Naw, I can’t cash in a maybe. Maybe’s like a unsigned check. Well then, think about this. Me and you are talking right now, ’cause me and you are—I mean, we go back, man, we go…But I want you to think about who’s really asking you for this favor. I want you to think about who’d be bending over backwards to kiss your ass in this city if only you’d get up there tonight. And then I want you to think about what you need around here… Right … Right. Man says to me, ‘I’m sorry’ I say, ‘How sorry are you? The swap line is open.’” Lorenzo laughed at the response to that, his fingers anxiously tapping the dry-cleaning slip.

  Jesse caught Lorenzo’s eye, signaled for a time-out, and got waved off.

  “No gain without pain. No gain … Hey, you be as mad at me as you wanna be. Alls I’m asking is you think about who’s gonna do the hurtin’ tonight and who’s gonna rake in the overtime… No. Long-term too. Long-term too…Then we got differing philosophies on our hands, brother. We got … Seven-thirty abouts. In front of the courthouse … Well, if you got to think about it, you got to think about it. Alls I can say is, I’ll be sorely disappointed to see you absent. No, I know you don’t have to answer to me. Alls I’m doing is telling you how I’d feel. Hey, the only person we all got to answer to is the man in the mirror, brother. The man … Yeah, well, God too. I stand corrected.” Lorenzo laughed again, furiously scratching his jaw this time. “I stand corrected. All right. All right.” He finally hung up, the laugh vanishing as he ran his finger down the slip. He reached blindly for the phone again, whispering to himself the next number on the list.

  “Who’s Billy?” Jesse asked, causing him to misdial.

  “Hang on.” He dialed again, too pressed to look at her.

  “Can I run with this Billy?”

  “No, you cannot,” Lorenzo declared flatly, still not looking at her. “Diane, hey,” he said with a quick, nervous laugh. “Yeah, it’s me. Is the rev in?” Lorenzo waited, taking the momentary pause to finally give her his eyes. “I believe we’re even now, Jess. So you’re gonna have to leave, OK?”

  Ben was double-parked in front of the station house, and as Jesse headed for the car, a Chevy Nova pulled up, two detectives emerging from the rear seat, a tall, fleshy black man, maybe thirty years old, between them. Although uncuffed, this guy seemed to be definitely in the shit. His face was haggard, ripple-pouched, and his clothes looked like they had been thrown on in the dark—a clean but misbuttoned white shirt and a pair of charcoal dress slacks, sunlight glinting off the half-open fly. In that moment, he looked like nothing so much as an exhausted waiter, but Jesse picked up a vibe of education and some kind of slapdash white-collar résumé: computers, marketing, low-level management.

  She gave it a shot. “Hey, Billy?” He turned to her with entreating, half-drowned eyes, then disappeared into the building.

  Jesse decided to hit on the Reverend Longway first. As Ben drove her to Armstrong, she reconnected with Jose and filled him in on the confession, continuing to lay it out as Brenda had presented it—an accident followed by a panic attack—tamping the explanation for the bogus jacker down to a tight quote: “I was scared. I never thought any of this would happen.” It was more or less what she had said, and, save for a cursory description of her giving it up to the Friends of Kent outside the abandoned children’s dormitory earlier in the day, the tale of Brenda’s auto-da-fé would have to keep for the next cycle.

  Set in the community center, the Armstrong housing office was fronted by a glassed-in reception area. Jesse recognized the heavy-set woman manning the phones, Betty something, a tenant working off her rent. She was normally a buoyant person, but when Jesse approached the perforated speak-through, Betty threw her a tight-mouthed glance, then turned away, focusing her attention on a portable TV, Jesse thinking, This is not good.

  “Hey.” Jesse propped her elbows on the small ledge beneath the speak-through. “Is the rev in? I have a message for him from Lorenzo Council.”

  “You can give it to me,” Betty said, her eyes never leaving the rolling screen.

  “Actually, I can’t.”

  “Then you’ll have to wait,” she said tersely. “He’s busy.”

  “It’s kind of urgent.”

  “I said, he’s busy.”

  “You a reporter?” The speaker was a teenager standing in the paint-chipped doorway behind the receptionist. The kid looked scared—fish-mouthed and blinky. “My father’s on the phone, but you can come in if you’re a reporter.”

  Longway’s son steered her past a Xerox machine, past an out-of-order bathroom, past an empty room set up for the housing police, and into the deepest office. There were three desks and three phones, all being used now by people Jesse recognized from the job: Longway; another minister, Irvine Rainey; and a lay activist named Donald De Lauder. In mood and activity this humid, food-smelling room came off as a cloning of Lorenzo and his own desk earlier: the call going out farther and farther into the city.

  “I’m Jesse Haus,” she said to the son, the only one not engaged. “I’m with the Register.” The kid kept his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and stared at her nervously, hungrily, his mouth agape. “I just…” She hated to waste questions on this terrorized boy. “I just came from … Did Lorenzo call you? He called you, right?” She was just saying it, knowing that he had.

  “You have to talk to my father,” the kid said, glancing anxiously at Longway, who, head down, was working the phone.

  “I just came from hearing her confession, taking her statement, and Lorenzo asked me to come over and ask you if you needed to know anything,” she said, stage-loud for the benefit of the phoners.

  “Do I?” The kid touched his own chest, incredulous.

  “Young lady,” Donald De Lauder announced sonorously as he carefully hung up the phone. “Are you about to tell us how it is?” Longway’s son gratefully stepped off.

  “Well, I can tell you how it was—you know, how it went.”

  “You’re going to tell me—us,” he said, gesturing to the two other men on the phones, “the extenuating circumstances.”

  Gaunt, hollow-eyed, and B-ball tall, De Lauder wore jeans, a dashiki, and, despite a haunted history, cop shoes—spit-shined, bulbous, and black. He was an ex-cop, a Newark PD undercover who in the late sixties had been accidentally shot during a police raid of a Black Panthers cell he had infiltrated.

  “Well,” Jesse said, his “young lady” now grating on her, “if you think it would be important for you to know, yeah, I can do that.”

  “Is she responsible for the death of her child?” he asked.

  Jesse winced. “That’s a tricky one.”

  “Well, how about we ask you a simpler question.” The Reverend Longway abruptly joined in. “Was the child abducted from these houses?”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Jesse said cleanly, knowing Longway had already been apprised of this fact.

  “No,” he repeated, declared. “Then you just told me all I need to know.”

  “Basically,” Jesse p
lowed on, wanting more of a reaction, “the situation might not have been all that calculated.”

  “I’m not really interested.” Longway folded his arms across his chest and settled on a corner of a desk, as if inviting her to take her best shot.

  “Let me,” he began, squinting into the middle distance, “let me tell you what you might have seen and heard over the last few days but apparently have not understood. And you might want to write this down, because I doubt if you’re alone in your lack of comprehension in this city.” Longway waited, demanding by his silence that she take dictation. Jesse was happy for the exclusive, the quotes, the whatever, but felt off balance. Why was he giving her this mini-interview when the whole world would be listening to him in a few hours?

  “When you talk to the police,” Longway began, “they will tell you that a child’s life was at stake. They will tell you that they were operating on the information that they had received, that, that perception, comes before fact. That, that time, was of the essence.”

  Jesse was scrawling, murmuring, “OK.”

  “All good and well, all good and well,” Longway sang, hands up. The last guy still on the phone, the Reverend Rainey, a handsome but gelatinous mountain of a young man, finished his call and lent an ear, the entire phone campaign coming to a halt.

  “But let me propose to you another situation.” Longway grinned. “And you tell me if this sounds plausible.” Both Rainey and De Lauder were already nodding in affirmation, most likely having already heard what Longway was about to put forth, and suddenly Jesse got it, this whole exclusive one-on-one in the midst of high-pressure chaos. He was practicing on her; she was just a test run for the presser, an out-of-town audience, Jesse thinking, I’ll take it.