Jesse, used to this type of postcrime twenty-twenty hindsight, felt unchilled by the footage of Brenda, but she found herself totally unprepared for the wallop that seeing Cody Martin as a living, breathing child delivered.
Cody had been to her an abstraction, his existence conjectural, confined to photos, anecdotes, and a vacant bedroom. Now, the unthinking sideways glances at his mother, the look of mingled fascination and shyness that crossed his face when an older Armstrong boy abruptly leaned across the worktable, the splay of his fingers as he brushed a gluey palm against the chest of his T-shirt, all of it, any of it, was just too much, too much, and Jesse, caught off guard, felt this boy rushing into her for the first time—and by extension, the horror, the absolute horror, of his death.
And along with Cody came Brenda again, every fragmented memory of her over the last few days—her stark gray eyes, her wracked sleep, her staggering gait in the punishing heat, the cold, damp feel of her skin, too, all of that, in the context of the living child she had lost, came rushing in, and what Jesse felt right now was love, a precious and fearsome love for both of them, like the Infilling gone mad. They had invaded her, set up house in her, had become part of her, Jesse understanding that this seizure of her heart was permanent and would persist impervious to all exterior judgments, moral, criminal, or social.
“How’d they, where’d they get that video?” she asked mildly.
“You want me to find out?” Ben, as always, ready to help.
The image shifted again, this time showing a mass of people, standing in groups or alone, before the facade of the Chicago Fire in Freedomtown, standing with their arms folded across their chests, or taking snapshots, or wiping tears, rocking from foot to foot, no one really moving, the trampled earth smothered in flowers, toys, and balloons.
Jesse reached for the remote and turned up the volume. “The local residents here, Tim, have already dubbed this sad place the Wailing Wall.” And Jesse was out of there.
With the previous day’s announcement of Brenda’s arrest and that day’s arraignment, the media invasion had metastasized yet again—more sat trucks, more news vans, more camera crews streaming out of the Holland and Lincoln tunnels from the east and pulling off the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway from the south—the new reporters and shooters hitting the streets of Gannon and Dempsy like tourists piling out of a charter bus. It was easy for Jesse to tell who was fresh; it was in the crease of the slacks and the avidness of the eyes, an anxious, fevered look, as the new troops scrambled to absorb the world of this story in a few quick gulps, get physically and mentally centered in the scene as swiftly as possible and start the search for unexplored angles.
Dempsy County itself had changed, at least temporarily, taking on the aspect of an open-air museum of horror: This is where she said she was carjacked; this is where she lived; this is where the boyfriend lived. This is where she worked. This is where she rented movies. This is where the refrigerators were burned. This is where she confessed, where he confessed—each mundane and dreary location taking on an air of sinister holiness. But indisputably, the greatest attraction of all was the burial site in the ruins of Freedomtown. The weather-beaten facade of the Chicago Fire had been transformed into a tragic magnet for both journalists and civilians, the vast number of people—the curious, the grief-stricken, and the titillated—who felt compelled to stand beneath the ravaged mannequin generating its own unique sidebar.
The earth, carpeted with tributes, and the wall, the lowest eight feet of which had simply vanished behind a shaggy paper coat of personal messages—poems, letters, prayers, to the boy to the family, to the public, to God, secured with thumbtacks, pushpins, tape, or simply stuffed into the splits and cracks of the half-rotted boards—conspired to camouflage this forlorn ground, change it into a happy place, a festive place, a positive place, the loneliness of it, the bottomless abandoned quality of it obscured by a blizzard of bright colors and human chatter, by sunlight bouncing off the bay, a picnic with tears.
As Jesse drifted through the crowd, she noticed that most people tended to stay in one spot, stood rooted, holding their youngest kids in their arms, or slightly tilted into one another. The only restless activity was the attempts of the mobile kids, the three- and four-year-olds, bored and bewildered, to get at the memorial toys—the Flintstone action figures, the G.I. Joe and Lion King and Hercules dolls that lay amid the bouquets and Styrofoam crosses. The kids strained to get at the Mickey Mouse balloons and the Mattel Hot Wheels, their mothers, grandmothers, yanking on their arms, crouching down and going blaze-eyed, hissing, shaking fingers as if the kids were acting up in church, each child, in his own inarticulate way, responding: “Then why did you bring me here?”
Jesse saw that the stones were gone, Billy’s cairn most likely disassembled and spirited away by souvenir hunters, along with the yellow crime scene tape, the empty film canisters, and discarded rubber gloves, all the detritus of an exhumation swiftly falling into the hands of the first wave of pilgrims. The scooped earth of the grave itself seemed to have been taken too, fistful by fistful, until the hole had become three times its original size, that gaping pit instantly filled with flowers.
Jesse wandered through the site as if it were a field hospital, compulsively scrawling down sights and sounds with blank alertness: a man in a suit crying into a cell phone; a staked crayon drawing of Jesus beckoning, arm extended, “Come, my child” written above his head in a word balloon; a green plastic telephone glued to a Styrofoam heart, JESUS CALLED printed underneath.
She watched at a discreet distance, as a young blond woman, her face red and puffy, asked the two-year-old girl in her arms, “Can you say, ‘Jesus loves me’?” The baby curled herself deeper into her mother. The woman asked again, her voice cracking, “Can you say it for Mommy?” The baby’s continuing refusal made the mother’s voice climb even higher, to a teary whisper. “Please?”
Another mother, stooping to be on eye level with her little boy whispered into his face, “See what they do to you if you don’t behave?”
Jesse slowly worked her way to the wall, the voices washing over her.
“I heard that child was sexually abused.”
“By who, her?”
“No, the boyfriend. That’s why they killed him.”
“God makes good things come out of bad. You watch.”
“I’m telling you, her story cannot be told yet.”
“She should of just told the father, ‘Take the damn kid, it’s your turn.’”
“I guess the sound of that little boy saying, ‘Mommy I love you’ wasn’t enough for her.”
“God gave a son too, you know.”
Another little boy looking up at his mother, commented in a confused yet sober tone, “I thought they killed kids with swords.”
Enough. Jesse flipped her pad shut and scanned the celestial bulletin board, reading a poem in Magic Marker.
It doesn’t end in this muddy sod
Little Cody Martin is in the arms of God
So go, littlest angel, go romp and play
We’ll all be together on Judgment Day.
Next to that, was an announcement, neatly typed:
This child’s sacrifice was not in vain. It brings us all together black and white in our common bond of sadness. It reminds us how human we all are and how hurt and pain touches us all. Go to God now, little angel, and thank you.
Then, from behind her, Jesse heard some woman say, “I couldn’t help it either. It gets away from you.” Spooked, she turned but saw no one within earshot who looked like they could have said that. Feeling a hand on her shoulder, she turned back to the wall again and found herself facing a beautiful blue-black man, tall, an archangel.
“Why are you here?” he asked softly.
“What?” Jesse blinked.
“What brings you here?”
Jesse just stared, wondering if this was real. “What do you mean?”
“I’m with the Dispatch.�
� The hallucination held up its reporter’s pad.
“Fuck off,” Jesse said, flashing her own, then began wading her way out through the splashy sorrow, a barely perceptible whiff of rot following her to the car.
31
The march was called for five in the evening, the collection point the Hurley Street cul-de-sac at the base of the Bowl.
It was hoped that the heat and humidity would have dipped to a tolerable level by five and that, if the march took off any time near the designated hour, there would be enough of the day left for the event to end in some kind of natural light. No one wanted a massive dispersal in the dark, the breakup being the most unpredictable moment in any demonstration of this nature.
But things were off. At four-forty-five, the humidity was still slap hammering the world, and as Lorenzo scanned the basin of Hurley Street, he counted as many media types as marchers in the crowd. He was cheating, too, adding in the dozens of little kids from the houses—some of them running around barefoot, going nowhere—and all the knuckleheads lurking in the building lobbies, every one of them back-stepping into the shadowed void of the stairwells whenever he was able to make eye contact. Donald De Lauder and his 125 followers were nowhere to be seen.
Over the next half hour, though, the cars continued to roll in, the public buses dropped off more and more bodies—some from Dempsy, others from wherever—and by five-fifteen, five-thirty Lorenzo had to admit what they had here was a bona fide presence. Most of the people he was happy to see—families, seniors, males of a certain age and carriage—but some looked like potential trouble, and Lorenzo found himself bracing carload after carload of young men, immediately going up in their faces, saying, “You fellas here for the demonstration?” Giving them cop’s eyes, saying, “I’m Detective Lorenzo Council.” Shaking their hands one by one. “And I’m glad for your support.”
The crowd continued to grow—more cars, more drop-offs, two city council members—Lorenzo breathing a little easier, but still no sign of De Lauder. Between two parked cars in the shadow of the Conrail retaining wall, the Reverend Longway somewhat slag-faced from his hospital stay, formed a circle with three other ministers, all of them holding hands, chin to chest, praying. That group was circled by three crouching, duck-walking shooters and filmed from above by a fourth, dangling over the edge of the fence that topped the Conrail wall, his free hand clutching the mesh as he got his aerial of the ministers’ scalps.
Lorenzo saw Tariq Wilkins, the kid who had tried to rappel out of his bedroom window that first night, make his way down from the high end of the projects, swinging on his crutches as he cut through the Bowl, his grandmother bringing up the rear. Then Teacher Timmons appeared, the kid Danny Martin had clocked that same night, coming down to Hurley now with his mother. The one person he didn’t see, the one he decided he needed to see, was Curious George Howard.
Another wrecking crew rolled up, twelve guys, all sporting baggy camo, emerging from three Jeeps bearing New York plates. Lorenzo did it again, giving them the iron-eyed glad hand, then spying a bulge in one guy’s fatigues. “What you got there, boss?” The kid, stocky, shaved head, about eighteen, fished out a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. Lorenzo asked him to drink it now, then toss away the bottle, the others half pivoting with glee at the request, all high-pitched sniggers and “Ho shits,” their boy showdowned straight out of the car. The kid smirked at Lorenzo, trying to step up, saying, “I ain’t thirsty yet.”
Before Lorenzo could strategize a second, half-friendly directive, his eye caught a brace of hard bright blue gleams winking through the foliage of Martyrs Park. Stepping away to get a better view, he spied a phalanx of Gannon motorcycle cops across the city line, the hard blue of their crash helmets glinting in the sunset. Lorenzo forgot the Coke-bottle showdown, wondering, worrying if Gannon was planning to make a goal-line stand. The time was five-forty-five, the crowd large enough now to draw a crowd, but still no De Lauder.
“Why are you marching?” Lorenzo turned to face a Betacam, then saw, over the shoulder of the accompanying reporter, Millrose Carter. “What?” Lorenzo watched Millrose, the Man Who Never Sleeps, work his way down the Bowl to Hurley, calling out, “Hey!”—grinning, silver-eyed with liquor, briskly rubbing his hands. “I’m here,” he said. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Lorenzo was laughing suddenly, buoyant.
“Are you marching against your brother officers?” the reporter persisted.
“I’m just here to help things go off right,” Lorenzo said distantly, dancing a little, as usual. Finally seeing Curious George emerge from his grandmother’s building, he said, “Awright, George” under his breath, happy.
“But you are marching, so how do you feel about the march?”
“Hey, I’m like, if you’re right? Be you white, black, green, police, or whatever, I’ll back you one hundred percent. But if you’re wrong, I’m gonna be on you one hundred percent,” Lorenzo said, doing the word mambo, then, noticing the Convoy brothers coming down the Bowl, ending the interview with a faint “Excuse me.”
“You guys coming along?” he asked Eric and Caprice, smiling his warning smile.
“Hell, yeah.” Eric shrugged. “We got to represent.” Lorenzo shook Eric’s hand, held on to it.
“Who else is coming?”
“I don’t know,” Eric said, shrugging again. “Maybe Corey and them?”
“You guys know it’s a march, right?” Lorenzo’s eyes strayed to Martyrs Park.
“Like, what, check your Uzis at the door?”
“What?” Lorenzo said. He was distracted again, unable to keep his eyes off those blue gleams peeking through the trees.
Coming out of Martyrs, Gannon-side, Lorenzo stood before a dozen motorcycles, the cops nodding to him but laying back behind their silvered shades.
“Hey, fellas.” Lorenzo put his hands in his pockets, jingled his change.
“Evening,” one of them said.
“I guess you know they’re coming.” He gave it a grin.
“That’s what the drums say,” the same cop answered. Lorenzo didn’t know any of them, or at least couldn’t ID them in all that headgear.
“I hope you’re not gonna try to stop us coming through.”
“Free country,” another cop said.
“’Cause we got the press, we got families, senior citizens…”
“No problem.”
“’Cause I don’t want nobody hurt.”
“Us neither.”
“Here or there.” Lorenzo gestured ahead and behind him, meaning black or white.
“Amen to that,” the cop who mentioned drums said, bobbing his head.
Lorenzo stood his ground for a second, as if there were something else to say.
“All right, then…” He finally turned back to the park.
“Hey, Council?” One of the cops, he didn’t know which one, turned him around. “Thanks for the overtime, bro.”
A few steps back inside the park, Lorenzo dropped to one knee to retie a sneaker.
“Some fun, huh, Jess?” he said without looking at her. She was half hidden, leaning against the low stone wall that marked the Gannon-side perimeter.
“I didn’t want to get in your way,” Jesse said, pushing herself up, embarrassed.
“Hey.” He switched downed knees, began retying the other sneaker. “You go where you want. Just when I start blastin’? Try to stay out of my line of fire.”
“Yeah, OK,” she mumbled, and followed him back out into the potholed Armstrong side of things.
Three steps into Hurley Street the Reverend Longway came hustling up, looking antsy and hot.
“How you feeling, Rev,” Lorenzo asked.
“Let’s go, let’s go.” Longway ignored the query.
“De Lauder ain’t here.”
“Well, shit.” The reverend thrust a curled wrist in Lorenzo’s face: five past six. “He had a watch on last time I saw.”
As if on cue, three yellow school buses pulled into the cul-de-sac, all of Hur
ley Street breaking out in spontaneous applause in reaction to this infusion of so many new heads.
The bus doors opened with a pneumatic sigh, and De Lauder’s people began piling out—kufis and Kangols, more seniors than middle-aged, more middle-aged than young, like in church. A third of the people carried homemade signs.
Some of the men coming off the bus wore mustard-colored armbands emblazoned with the letters JNL, Lorenzo assuming that these were the “security ushers” that De Lauder had mentioned in the hospital, nothing more imposing about them than a uniform look of sober alertness. De Lauder appeared in the doorway of the last bus, and Longway was up in his face, flashing him the time before the man could even set foot to ground. De Lauder shrugged helplessly, gestured to the small army of marchers that he had had to collect, then said something to make Longway smile. With the rev mollified, De Lauder stepped off the bus and began to look around him, eyeing the locals as if assessing their mettle.
“Hey.” De Lauder acknowledged Lorenzo, swinging out an arm in a lazy arc and snagging his hand in a loose, waggling grip. “Glad you made it.”
“Glad you made it,” Lorenzo said with a little edge. De Lauder caught sight of the motorcycles through the trees. “Don’t worry about it,” Lorenzo said.
“If you say so,” De Lauder said, then made a lassoing gesture that took in all of Hurley Street. “You know everybody here?”
“’Bout half.”
“All right, let me run it down to you. We’re gonna shape up about six across. The ministers, the victims, their families up front, and get, like, the cameras in front of them, you know, walking backwards, gettin’ us coming on. Now I’d like my people to line up like, flanking the others, kind of containing them, help us keep it orderly. And me and my men? We’re gonna be, like, every half dozen rows, flanking the flankers, have a couple of guys bringing up the rear. But you, I’d like you to be sort of a free safety, you know, like a free-range prowler, ’cause you know who to be watching around here up front. This is like a big X-factor situation and we just don’t have the local information.”
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