The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  The Lightning Rule

  Brett Ellen Block

  For my mother and father,

  always.

  This book is dedicated in loving memory

  to Joseph Kapustik.

  It is also dedicated to the city of Newark

  and to those who lost their lives or

  lost loved ones during the riots.

  Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing, ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off the tongue.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY,

  FROM THE ARTICLE “ON BLUE WATER,”

  ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, APRIL 1936

  Contents

  Epigraph

  One

  The basement was where the dead were kept. The murder…

  Two

  Evenings came later than usual that summer. The sky dimmed,…

  Three

  Emmett smelled the fire before he saw it. Smoke was…

  Four

  The house was dark when he got home. The television…

  Five

  The night’s events had made the front page of the…

  Six

  Two patrolmen were there to meet Emmett at the subway…

  Seven

  Daylight felt like a beating. The sun was a jab…

  Eight

  The entrance to Newark City Hospital was as inviting as…

  Nine

  The dispatcher on the police band frequency sounded bored. Since…

  Ten

  Otis Fossum didn’t utter a single syllable until they reached…

  Eleven

  Emmett found Otis Fossum pacing the lobby like an expectant…

  Twelve

  Rose Street wasn’t that different from any other street in…

  Thirteen

  The Fourth Precinct could have passed for a condemned building.

  Fourteen

  The name “Newark Street” was department slang for the Essex…

  Fifteen

  In Newark, justice had a face and a name—it was…

  Sixteen

  The sun was glaring off a sea of car chrome…

  Seventeen

  The day was escaping, leaving Emmett empty-handed with nothing to…

  Eighteen

  When Emmett pulled into his driveway, all of the lights…

  Nineteen

  The summer heat had a way of making the nights…

  Twenty

  The Fourth Precinct had not been built to withstand the…

  Twenty-One

  All of the bulbs in the streetlamps on Springfield Avenue…

  Twenty-Two

  Midnight had come and gone, yet the Central Ward was…

  Twenty-Three

  The watery dawn light woke Emmett, that and the voice…

  Twenty-Four

  Getting into the Fourth Precinct was more difficult that morning…

  Twenty-Five

  The station’s front door was in Emmett’s sights. He was…

  Twenty-Six

  The sun was up, but Meers would not have known…

  Twenty-Seven

  By the time Emmett returned home, Mrs. Poole had tidied…

  Twenty-Eight

  Barricades had been erected at every major intersection, funneling streams…

  Twenty-Nine

  A fleet of open-top, military jeeps was parading down Irvine…

  Thirty

  The beauty of a cage was its simplicity. Light and…

  Thirty-One

  The lines at the roadblocks were longer than they had…

  Thirty-Two

  Miscommunication was that morning’s running theme. The police band had…

  Thirty-Three

  So many things to do, so little time. During his…

  Thirty-Four

  Life had come to a standstill at Emmett’s house. When…

  Thirty-Five

  Time was against him. Ionello and Vass had a ten-minute…

  Thirty-Six

  Valentine’s was an unassuming café on a corner of Mount…

  Thirty-Seven

  Telling the difference between day and night was nearly impossible…

  Thirty-Eight

  Sirens were caterwauling from somewhere in the distance, momentarily drowning…

  Thirty-Nine

  Porch lights were lit all along Emmett’s street. Such hot…

  Forty

  Morning came on like a fever, a hot flush that…

  Forty-One

  Emmett sat in his battered car in the hospital’s parking…

  Forty-Two

  City Hall was closed. Not because of the riots, but…

  Forty-Three

  The noon sun was leering down on the city. Its…

  Forty-Four

  Fortune was fickle. It could undermine the best-laid plans in…

  Forty-Five

  Rain marched on the corrugated roof of the zinc refinery,…

  Forty-Six

  Pale light was coming through Emmett’s bedroom window. Drizzle pattered…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Brett Ellen Block

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Wednesday

  July 12, 1967

  The basement was where the dead were kept. The murder victims, accidental deaths, and suicides were on the top shelves. Next down were abductions followed by arsons, assaults, then auto thefts. Below were burglaries and robberies, filling tier after tier. Vice charges were at the bottom. Solved or unsolved, every case died with the passing of time. Their final resting place was the Records Room of Newark’s Fourth Precinct.

  Rows of manila files lined the labyrinth of shelves, like a library that carried thousands of copies of the same book. Due to the dampness of being underground, the folders had a tendency to rot at the edges, giving off a peculiar odor of decay. Some cops called the basement the “paper graveyard.” Detective Martin Emmett called it his office.

  He had a corner to himself with a metal desk, a chair, a lamp, and a telephone, not much more. There were no windows. He had gotten used to that. What Emmett couldn’t get accustomed to was the silence. The basement spanned the breadth of the police station, a quarter of a city block, and the absence of noise echoed around the aisles. Emmett tried a radio, but couldn’t get any reception, so he brought a windup clock from home and left it in the desk drawer. The muted ticking chipped away at the quiet, though it was almost as maddening.

  The Fourth Precinct wasn’t the city’s largest, however it handled the heaviest caseloads and the highest volume of reports. Once a case was closed or over three months cold, it was sent to the Records Room to be cataloged. That was Detective Emmett’s new job. Oddly enough, being in the basement gave him a bird’s-eye view of the goings-on at the station. No doubt his lieutenant realized that would happen when he assigned him the post. Emmett wondered whether that was part of the punishment.

  In the two and a half months since he had become the station’s unofficial undertaker, he learned not to shelve the reports too fast. Filing them took mere minutes, and his shift was eight hours long. He would be twiddling his thumbs by lunch if he didn’t give himself something to do. Each day a few folders would trickle down, dropped off by cops happy to have cleared them or disgruntled at having a file hang open and having to admit defeat. Emmett understood how they felt. Putting a case to bed was better by far. For him, the wo
rst was knowing he might not get the chance to close one of his own again.

  Three cases had arrived that day: a purse snatching, a domestic assault, and a rash of bicycle thefts where somebody had taken a bolt cutter and snipped the chain links holding the locks. Ultimately, the mugger was never identified, the woman in the domestic refused to press charges against her boyfriend, and the bikes could not be recovered. Because the files had become as futile as the chains on the bicycles, the Records Room was where they would meet their end.

  Emmett had read through each of them carefully, sifting through the paperwork to pass the hours. The woman whose pocketbook was grabbed while she waited at a bus stop on Irvine Turner Boulevard listed a nickel hidden in a pillbox among the stolen items. The coin had been given to her by her grandfather. It was the first wage he ever earned. The man responsible for the assault had hit his girlfriend with the frying pan she was cooking his breakfast in. He knocked out two of her teeth. Five of the seven bicycles stolen from the area surrounding the Stella Wright Housing Projects were red, the remainder blue. The details made the day go by. Details were what Emmett had in lieu of a real crime, a poor substitute under poor circumstances.

  He waited until the end of his shift to shelve the files and took his time weaving through the stacks. All Emmett had was time, yet every second, he was running short. The case that had gotten him exiled to the Records Room would go on the top shelf in ten days, a plain manila folder indistinguishable from the other murders. He didn’t need the ticking of his windup clock to remind him that the minutes were steadily slipping by.

  “Hello? Anybody here?”

  Emmett emerged from the stacks. A young patrolman was standing at the basement door. He was a smooth-faced kid straight out of high school, his collar overstarched, his pants khaki instead of blue, the distinguishing mark of a rookie recently accepted to the force. The pin above his breast pocket said his name was Nolan. At thirty-three, Emmett wasn’t that much older than the patrolman, but the shine on the kid’s shoes and the eagerness in his eyes made Emmett feel twice his age.

  “I got orders to bring this to the Records Room,” Nolan said, fidgeting with the report. “This is it, right?”

  Emmett cast an obvious glance at the multitude of shelves. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Most officers would flop the folders onto his desktop without a word. Some wouldn’t even make eye contact. Many openly shunned him. Emmett expected as much. Filing in the Records Room was a chore normally foisted on recruits such as Nolan, though not anymore. No one had passed along the gossip about Emmett, or else the kid would have dumped the case and hurried off. The rookie would appreciate his error once his buddies had ribbed him for it.

  “Guess this is an easy racket for you,” Nolan remarked, “what with you being so tall. Five bucks says you don’t need a step stool to reach them tippy-top shelves.”

  Emmett stood a full head above the majority of cops on the force. Not a single officer in the Fourth Precinct could look down on him. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t act like they could.

  “You got lucky being in the basement, I tell ya,” Nolan went on, hungry for somebody to talk to.

  “Lucky, huh?” Emmett presumed that the kid had arrived early for the 4 p.m. shift change and been given an errand to occupy him until roll call, probably because he was blabbing his sergeant’s ear off. Now Emmett was stuck with him.

  “Yessiree. It’s an oven upstairs. Everybody’s roastin’.”

  That summer had been brutal. Mornings broke to ferocious heat and the thermometer stayed in the nineties well after sunset. The air was thinner, as if it had already been breathed. In the past day, the weather had become unbearable. A pall of humidity drifted in off Newark Bay and draped over the city. Rain refused to come. The Records Room may have been a degree or two cooler than the rest of the station, but the basement’s moisture made the papers wilt and the walls sweat.

  Nolan fanned himself with the file. “Be glad you’re not on the third floor. Makes hell seem like Point Pleasant.”

  The third floor was where Emmett formerly worked. His reassignment had nothing to do with luck and wasn’t something to be glad about. Last time he set foot in his old squad room, his desk had been moved and the other detectives had piled filing on it, a symbol of his demotion to Records and a less than subtle message for him to keep out.

  “This is my first week of probation and so far, the weather’s all there is to talk about. Between you and me,” Nolan confided, “it’s been pretty slow.”

  Emmett had come to understand the true definition of the word slow when he was forced out of Homicide. This kid didn’t know slow, he thought. This kid didn’t know much at all.

  “You were hoping for firefights and bomb threats?”

  “No, sir.” Nolan was quick to correct himself. “I just thought there’d be more to do.”

  The three-month-long probation period was a test of will as much as aptitude or ability. Patrolmen were inundated with routine tasks such as reading parking meters, checking licenses, and pumping gas to refuel radio cars. At a starting salary of $6,900 per year, it was a minor miracle any of them stuck it out for a single month let alone three. Wide-eyed as he was, Nolan might not last the weekend.

  Anyone who met the minimum entrance requirements of age, residence, education, and health was eligible to take the civil service examination for patrolmen. That amounted to anybody who could walk, talk, read, and write. About 30 percent of the applicants passed the exam, a test that reflected a tenth-grade achievement level. Out of the fourteen hundred men on Newark’s force, twelve had associate degrees from two-year colleges and ten had received bachelor’s. Emmett was one of the ten.

  Those who qualified on the entrance exam were evaluated by a staff of five detectives who conducted what was called a “character investigation” of the candidates. The investigation was supposed to consist of interviews with former employers, friends, and neighbors, as well as a check of military and credit records. What really happened was the detectives shot the breeze over beer and peanuts, debating whether or not they thought the guy was up to snuff or if he had any relatives in service, making him a shoo-in. The grounds for rejection were a criminal record, numerous outstanding debts, or a history of truancy. Given the rising crime rate and the city’s ratio of a single officer for every 250 citizens, applicants were rarely rejected, regardless of their pasts. The department was too desperate for new recruits.

  Emmett tried to recall his own probation, and for a blinding instant, he couldn’t. Buried under nine years of duty on the force, the memory had burrowed too deeply between the creases to be retrieved. He changed the subject.

  “Have you ever been in the Central Ward, Nolan?”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. Not as a cop. Not until two days ago when I started here.”

  Brick City, the nickname Newark went by when it couldn’t stand its own, was split into wards, and they were as clearly divided as the bricks in a wall. A person could step off a corner in a certain ward, cross into the next and not have to be told. The Italians lived in the North Ward, the Jews in the Weequahic section in the South. The Irish were concentrated in Vailsburg in the West and the Portuguese dominated the East, in the Ironbound and Downtown. The Fourth Precinct sat in the Central Ward, where the only white faces were the Jewish shopkeepers and the cops, most either Irish or Italian. Emmett was an anomaly. He was Polish. He had heard every joke in the book during his school days, but because his name didn’t sound Polish, having been hacked to pieces and retooled when his grandfather landed on Ellis Island, he caught no flack at the station, at least on that account. He could pass for Irish and didn’t correct people if it played to his advantage. Since everyone at the precinct knew who he was—everybody besides Nolan—Emmett didn’t have many advantages.

  “This is where all the coloreds live,” Nolan said. “I’m not scared, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “But you didn’t request the assignmen
t. Or did you?”

  The patrolman shook his head no, unsure if he should be ashamed of his answer. Nolan was too naive to comprehend what Emmett was getting at, proof that he hadn’t come to the Central Ward for the same reason most cops stayed: easy payoffs. The prevailing rationale was that if crime in the ghetto couldn’t be stopped, then the police should be compensated for their efforts. Some skimmed money off the lottery pickup men who worked the ward’s corners. Others collected dues from dealers who gladly handed over hundred-dollar bills to forgo arrest. Opportunities for personal gain were abundant in the Central Ward, and white cops were loathe to leave, particularly high-ranking officers who could take their share from the safety of their desks. Patrolman Nolan may not have been scared. That was because he didn’t know what to be scared of.

  “I bet your mother begged you to put in for a transfer when she found out where you’d be stationed,” Emmett said. “I bet she went to church and prayed for you. I bet you prayed a little too.”

  Nolan dipped his chin, stunned and embarrassed, as if Emmett had read his mind.

  “Won’t be slow forever,” he told him, plucking the case from the kid’s grasp.

  The young patrolman backpedaled, then hightailed it upstairs, leaving the door to the Records Room wide open. Emmett shut and locked it.

  His shift was over. The new file could wait until tomorrow. That would give him something to do. He snapped off the tracks of fluorescent lights, and darkness strode across the basement. He kept a single strand on to see by. The light was brightest at the uppermost shelves, obfuscating everything below. Except for that top shelf, the Records Room was organized alphabetically. The deaths were out of sequence. Maybe someone had decided they were a higher priority. Or perhaps they were intended to be harder to reach. The case that was costing him his career would soon number among the dead on the top shelf, and though Emmett could reach there with ease, he was helpless to stop it from happening. With that day drawing near, he was grateful to turn off the lights and abandon his windup clock to tick through the night alone.